Chicago History | Spring 2009

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Emily H. Nordstrom Amanda B. Stenlund Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Publications Intern Laurie Stein

Copyright 2009 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago History Museum’s Publications Office.

On the cover: Thomas A. O’Shaughnessy, official lithograph for the 28th International Eucharistic Congress showing the four symbols of the Evangelists above the Chicago skyline. Gift of Ellen Skerrett.

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TRUSTEES

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Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Spring 2009 VOLUME XXXVI, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 20

The Unknown Life of Ellen Gates Starr Suellen Hoy

Here Comes Everybody: The 28th International Eucharistic Congress Jill Thomas Grannan

46

The Ramblers and Blue Demons Raymond Schmidt

The Unknown Life of Ellen Gates Starr In her later years, the cofounder of Hull-House led a private but purposeful life filled with social activism, friendship, and faith.

S U E L L E N H OY

I

t is a well-known and frequently cited fact of Chicago history that in 1889 Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, college friends aged twenty-nine and thirty, opened the Hull-House Settlement on Halsted Street on the city’s West Side. In carrying out what they referred to as their scheme, they sought to extend a warm and helping hand to their immigrant neighbors and, at the same time, alter the course of their own lives. They succeeded at both. They made history through their groundbreaking settlement work and led interesting public lives, ones they probably had never dreamed of while classmates at Rockford Female Seminary (later renamed Rockford College).

The lifelong friendship between Addams (left, c. 1892) and Starr (right, undated) began as college girls at Rockford Female Seminary in 1877. In spite of the ebbs and flows of this relationship, it lasted for more than fifty years.

In 1889, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Star founded Hull-House (pictured above c. 1900).

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Addams, recognized for her pioneering work as a social reformer and her Progressive politics, became an admired and renowned national figure. In 1931, as a result of her strong commitment to pacifism, she was the first American woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. When she died four years later, she was mourned worldwide, and thousands passed through Bowen Hall at Hull-House where her body lay in state. Since then Addams has been honored in ways both big and small. Schools, parks, and a highway have been named for her. In and around Chicago, Addams’s spirit often seems very much alive and among us.

The same cannot be said of her partner in the settlement-house venture. Far less famous than Addams, Starr is remembered almost exclusively by readers of Chicago history. Perhaps it is partly her own doing, since from the beginning, Starr chose to step back while letting Addams take the lead. Yet Hull-House

Starr (left) and her beloved niece Josephine Starr, c. 1913. Jo was a social worker who had studied at the University of Chicago.

She spent time with her aunt in Chicago and also in Chicopee, Massachusetts, in the summers.

Ellen Gates Starr | 5

Ellen and her mother, Susan Gates Childs Starr, rest in the shade outside their home in Durand, Illinois, where the family moved in 1877.

The Starrs had previously lived on a farm they named “Spring Park,” located a short distance away in Laona, where Ellen was born on March 19, 1859. This spring marks the 150th anniversary of her birth.

succeeded because of their partnership. Not only was Starr devoted to Addams, she provided a good balance, too. Historian Allen Davis succinctly observed that Starr was “more artistic and religious, more emotional, and more committed to causes than Jane, who was inclined to be calm and business-like.” In the end, Starr led a more private life, although she lived it no less intensely or purposefully.

It was no secret that Starr was influenced by the writings of English critics and craftsmen John Ruskin and William Morris or that her soul delighted in the poetry of Dante, the plays of Shakespeare, and the paintings of Fra Angelico and Botticelli. Uniquely aware of beautiful objects and settings, she was never indifferent to her surroundings. Dingy, artless rooms and dirty streets caused her visible discomfort and often prompted comment or rebuke.

For many years, Starr taught popular classes in art history at Hull-House, and in 1894, she served as the first president of the Chicago Public School Art Society.

Around this time, Starr decided “it would be a great deal better to make something.” She wanted to learn a craft and demonstrate the importance of fashioning exquisite, high-quality products in an age of rising industrialism.

6 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

Whatever she made, she was determined that it would be the most “beautiful of its kind.”

Because she loved books, Starr chose to become a bookbinder. In 1897, she moved to London to work with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson, believing that he created “the most beautiful bookbinding in the world.” Starr studied with him for fifteen months and, upon returning to Chicago, opened a bindery at Hull-House. She became respected as a bookbinder, earning a good part of her living by binding and ornamenting books as well as teaching her new skill to a select group of students. She also continued to introduce art to the public through programs at Hull-House and in local schools.

Starr remained at Hull-House until 1929, when she had the misfortune of becoming seriously ill. When she died in 1940, five years after Addams, Starr was buried in a Catholic convent cemetery in Suffern, New York.

Starr’s quiet death and unlikely final resting place prompt an array of questions that have not been correctly answered: Was she a Catholic? Did she become a nun?

Were her interests altered? Did she ever reconnect with her friends from the settlement? In short, those who recall her partnership with Addams have sometimes wondered, whatever happened to Ellen Gates Starr?

years. Thus, having leaned towards Catholicism for a long time, her conversion in 1920, at sixty-one years of age, was hardly a surprise to relatives and friends. But, what they may have not known was how seriously Starr allowed her religious beliefs to fuel her activism.

Starr, who considered herself a Christian socialist, was inspired and motivated by a Christian ethic, expressed most clearly for her in the teachings of St. Benedict.

Accounts of Starr’s benevolence toward those who had fallen on hard times were legend. She was kind and generous, despite her lack of financial resources and the limited living space at Hull-House.

Over the years, Starr grew more intense and more demanding of herself. In 1909, at age fifty, recognizing that her life was about “two-thirds gone,” she resolved to spend less time working out her “personal religion” and more time involved in activities with a broader purpose.

She confessed to a friend that, although her interest in socialism had waned over the years, she felt “a thriving crop coming up.” With that realization, she threw herself into many of Chicago’s labor struggles and aggressively protested unjust practices against working women.

In 1910, the year after Starr had resolved to increase her involvement in causes of consequence, she again traveled to Italy. There she visited famous medieval Starr’s love of art and literature and her interest in Catholicism resulted from the influence of her father’s sister Eliza Allen Starr (above).

Starr had been an observant Episcopalian since 1883, yet all the while possessing strong Catholic convictions; she was an extremely devout participant in the liturgy.

While touring Italy with Addams in 1888, Starr chose to attend Anglican services in Rome, but ones that her friend thought “might almost as well be Catholic.” She also visited Monte Cassino (the home of the Benedictine order) and, as she later recalled, fell “under the spell of St. Benedict.” A familiar tenet of his ancient Rule instructed that everyone be welcomed, “be received as Christ.”

Early on, Starr also came under the influence of Father James O. S. Huntington, a charismatic AngloCatholic leader of the Episcopal Church in New York.

Indeed, she credited her “first conversion” to him. It was a natural progression since Huntington, who founded the Order of the Holy Cross, was committed to combining monasticism (like St. Benedict’s) with activism. When Starr first heard Huntington speak in 1889, during a dock strike in London, she was moved by his social justice message in support of workers. She soon became a friend and follower.

Much later, recalling the influence of her aunt Eliza Allen Starr, a prominent Chicagoan and Catholic convert, Ellen admitted to having been a Catholic “at heart” for

The Abbey of St. Benedict in Monte Cassino, Italy, (pictured c.

1999) looks much the same as when Starr saw it in 1888. During her first visit, Starr became fascinated with the Benedictines and their tradition of orare et laborare (seeing work as prayer).

cathedrals and shrines. This trip, which bore more marks of a retreat than a vacation, affected her deeply. In Assisi, at the Basilica of St. Francis, she wept and confessed to a monk kneeling next to her that she felt guilty “having come here at great cost instead of staying with the poor at home and honoring the Poverello [St. Francis] by imitation.” Once back in Chicago, she took to heart her new understanding of the life of St. Francis.

Ellen Gates Starr | 7

Starr was an ardent activist for the rights of working women. In November 1910, she led picket lines during a garment workers’ strike and protested the behavior of Chicago’s police. The Chicago Daily Tribune published this photograph with its coverage of the event.

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Above: Starr (left) and Mary H. Wilmarth were devoted, lifelong friends. Wilmarth helped furnish Starr’s living quarters at Hull-House and financed her trip to London to study bookbinding in 1897. Below: With the smallest of chances at victory, Starr ran as the Socialist candidate for alderman in the city’s Nineteenth Ward in 1916.

That fall, Starr began the most intense and extended period of her labor activism. She became a militant participant in the garment workers’ strike against Hart, Schaffner, and Marx. She recorded doing “a little of everything” on behalf of the poorly paid workers. Starr helped raise money for relief, led picket lines in front of a hostile police force, and housed and fed strikers in her small Hull-House apartment. She wrote to a friend several months later that her recent trip to Italy “seemed so far away; and yet I think the wonderful months there made it possible for me to do this.”

In 1914, Starr again appeared on the front lines during a waitresses’ strike against Henrici’s Restaurant on Randolph Street. This time, her aggressiveness attracted citywide attention when she was arrested for disorderly conduct. Despite complaints about police violence, she was booked and jailed until a wealthy friend, Mary H. Wilmarth, posted bail. Wilmarth’s sonin-law Harold Ickes, who served as legal counsel for the Women’s Trade Union League, argued Starr’s case. After eight hours of deliberation, she was acquitted to the thrill of the waitresses. (On her eightieth birthday, Starr received a note from one of them, reminding her of her Ellen Gates Starr | 9

efforts during those troubled times: “I can see you now, walking up and down on picket duty. You were such [a] fine picket and [during] the trile [sic] how they tr[ied] to send you over the ‘Top’ but fail[ed].”) A year later, in 1915, Starr agreed to be in charge of picketing during a long strike to win union recognition for Chicago’s garment workers. Arrested more than once, she refused to be intimidated and spoke forcefully at public gatherings on the rights of labor.

An outspoken socialist, Starr ran in 1916 for alderman of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward on the Socialist Party ticket. Her campaign statement, “Why I Am a Socialist,” explained her motives and highlighted the influence of her Christian beliefs. Starr openly admitted that she ran solely for educational purposes, to make a public statement about the failure of religion. She believed that institutional Christianity had failed the working poor and become “a sorry spectacle of unbrotherliness,” so she turned to socialism to bring about fundamental social change. In her eyes, it was the only way to “put down the mighty from their seats and to exalt the humble and meek . . . ” As predicted, Starr did not win. Years later, she remarked that had she been expected to win, she would “never have thought of doing it.”

During World War I, the focus of progressives shifted from domestic to international matters. Addams and a number of other reformers became pacifists, as did many socialists. Starr did not. In March 1917, she explained why she had little to say about the war. She told a friend that it was “not that I am unwilling to say what I think, but that I don’t know what I think.” Although she was a pacifist in principle, Starr said that her “natural impulse [was] belligerent and pro-allies, [her] reason—bewildered.” During the war, she had cause to retreat from her energetic labor activism, too. The issues to which she had devoted herself were largely removed (or at least suspended) with the creation of the National War Labor Board, which recognized workers’ rights to fair hours, decent wages, and collective bargaining.

Wartime actions of the Catholic Church gave Starr an additional reason to consider conversion. She had become increasingly dissatisfied with the Episcopal Church. In 1919, she concluded that it had become too “Protestant.”

At the same time, she approved of the establishment of the National Catholic War Council and its program for the country’s social and economic reconstruction. The council’s advocacy of a just and adequate family wage encouraged her to believe that the Catholic Church was genuinely concerned about “the social and industrial

In her bookbindery at Hull-House (left), Starr taught a small number of pupils, including Mary Kelly (right), a young Irish woman from the neighborhood. Starr and Kelly worked together from 1902 until Kelly’s marriage in 1923. When Kelly’s husband died tragically in 1935, Starr paid for her to come to Suffern, New York, for a rest.

10 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

The friendship between Starr and Frances Crane Lillie was forged during Chicago’s labor strikes and strengthened by their conversion to Catholicism. Lillie, an early contributor to Hull-House, was the daughter of a wealthy plumbing manufacturer and wife of a University of Chicago science professor. Above: Starr (left) and Lillie, c. 1915.

welfare of the people.” In fact, Starr insisted that it was “the most advanced program adopted by any church” and that the Anglican Church had “nothing to touch it.”

She began taking religious instruction from Father John Marks Handly, a Paulist priest in Chicago. The following year, on March 3, 1920, Starr was received into the Catholic Church at St. Joseph Abbey in St. Benedict, Louisiana, near New Orleans. She chose this abbey in honor of her longtime devotion to St. Benedict.

As Starr grew less comfortable in the Episcopal Church, she also felt increasingly isolated at Hull-House.

Her radical politics and devout religious practices separated her from old friends in a place, she wistfully noted, “where I have lived almost half my life.”(Her friend and colleague Alice Hamilton once commented, “Miss Starr is so difficult when she is striking.”) Yet Starr did not leave the settlement and seems never to have considered it. She kept her Hull-House apartment but relinquished some space on an upper floor, which gave her fewer stairs to climb. In her sixties, Starr began to tire more

easily, even though she remained relatively healthy and physically trim. Still she thought often about the ordeal of aging and the prospect of dying. Having never been financially well-off, she worried about her savings. At one point, she figured she had “about half enough to live on in what the Oregon minimum wage law phrases as ‘frugal decency.’”

During the 1920s, Starr, a newly converted Catholic, entered a quieter phase of life. She cultivated a few new interests and traveled more during the summer months but much remained the same. As was her custom she lived life to the fullest, albeit at a slower pace. On most days, she worked in the bindery, by herself or with an assistant (Mary Kelly was her favorite student and stayed with her until she married in 1923). Starr also continued to enjoy the companionship of Frances Crane Lillie, a steady friend and ally who had followed Starr into the Catholic Church in 1920. The daughter of Richard T. Crane, founder of Crane Manufacturing Company, Lillie was the wife of a zoology professor at the University of Ellen Gates Starr | 11

Chicago and the mother of seven children. While she had never lived at Hull-House, she was a longtime contributor, and she and Starr shared a keen interest in religion and politics.

No longer picketing on the streets, Starr exchanged her placards for a pen and wrote nearly a dozen articles for Catholic journals. Most of them dealt with some aspect of worship. Mirroring the beliefs of her aunt Eliza Allen Starr, she joined the cause of Catholic liturgists seeking reform and attempting to make practicing Catholics more appreciative of their spiritual and aesthetic heritage. She also wrote about her conversion, which was published in two parts in the Catholic World in 1924. Although an avid reader and a teacher of literature, she did not aspire to become a serious writer.

(Unlike Addams, who authored ten books, Starr did not write any.)

As a convert, Starr incorporated more Catholic practices into her daily life. She attended Mass “oftener than twice in the week” and participated fully in religious serIn the 1920s, Starr began attending Lillie’s parish church, St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park (below c. 1924). Lillie introduced Starr to the pastor, Father Thomas V. Shannon (above in 1921), who became a close friend and would speak at Starr’s Chicago memorial service in 1940.

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vices surrounding the major Christian holy days. Lillie frequently accompanied her and introduced her to Father Thomas V. Shannon, pastor of St. Thomas the Apostle in Hyde Park, where Lillie lived and worshipped.

Starr became a close friend of his and an acquaintance of Barry Byrne, architect of the parish’s new church. Starr and Lillie got involved in the building project and helped bring in the Italian sculptor Alfeo Faggi to create the church’s unusual bronze Stations of the Cross.

During the summer months, Starr left Hull-House and Chicago’s oppressive heat for what she called “the usual round” of visiting on the East Coast. She often shipped a large trunk to the home of her sister and brother-in-law in Chicopee, Massachusetts, which served as a base during visits with many of her friends: Alice Hamilton in Hadlyme, Connecticut; Louise and Carl Lindin (and Alfeo Faggi and his family) in Woodstock, New York; and the Lillies at Woods Hole on Cape Cod. In the late 1920s, on two occasions, she also visited a newer and younger friend, Eleanor Grace Clark, in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

Clark was a student of another of Starr’s treasured friends and pen pals Charles H. A. Wager, who taught for thirtyfive years in the English Department at Oberlin College.

After Starr fell ill, Eleanor Grace Clark (pictured above as a graduate of Oberlin College in 1918) helped her find a safe place to live.

Starr was instrumental in bringing sculptor Alfeo Faggi to design the fourteen Stations of the Cross (the thirteenth is pictured above) for the new St. Thomas the Apostle, which opened in 1924.

In the summer of 1924, Starr returned to Italy, at Lillie’s expense, for the final time. She again visited Monte Cassino, but now as a Catholic. During this visit, she found the abbey stairs much more difficult to climb: “Glorious mountain retreats,” she wrote to Lillie, were “not physically adapted to elderly people.”

Although Starr’s stamina was on the wane, her interest in politics and matters of social justice was not.

In March 1924, she attended a conference organized by Mary McDowell, Chicago’s commissioner of public welfare, in an attempt to end a garment workers’ strike. The conference failed because the dress manufacturers refused to attend or discuss union demands. In the winter of 1925, when two striking coal miners from West Virginia, hungry and nearly frozen, appeared at Hull-House, Starr housed them in her apartment overnight. The next day, she fed and clothed them, had Dr. Victor Yarros (also a settlement resident) dress the one’s bad arm, and asked a friend to help get them jobs in a nearby freight yard.

Two years later, while in Chicopee during the summer, Starr made what she considered a “feeble effort” to support the appeals of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, who were jailed and waiting execution for the 1920 murder of a shoe factory paymaster in Braintree, Massachusetts. Like many Americans, Starr believed they were innocent and put herself on record in an August Ellen Gates Starr | 13

From 1889 until she became seriously ill in 1929, Starr lived in an apartment at Hull-House. Even then, she and others hoped for her return.

The United States Federal Census of 1930 listed Starr as a resident (above), but when it became clear that she could not live alone in her apartment, it was closed.

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In the later years of her life, Starr rekindled her friendships with Hull-House colleagues Jane Addams (left, pictured in 1924) and Alice Hamilton (right). Addams visited Starr and provided financial support for her care. Hamilton, a physician, invited Starr to her home to recuperate after surgery in 1929.

1927 letter to the Springfield Republican. About the same time, another of her letters—now in support of the Democratic presidential candidate Alfred E. Smith—was published in The Outlook, a monthly magazine on contemporary issues, published in New York from the 1890s to the 1930s. In the letter, Starr questioned the editors’ motives in printing a critical analysis of the candidate written by a Catholic southerner.

Despite a fairly full calendar of engagements and travel, Starr frequently suffered from colds, usually during the winter months. In January 1928, she became ill with “a good siege” of bronchitis and left Chicago for a three-month stay at St. Vincent’s Sanitorium in Santa Fe. She fully recovered and traveled to the East Coast that summer. While in Chicopee, she discovered a lump in her neck. She promptly had it removed at Boston’s Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, where she remained for ten days. Lillie helped with the hospital bills, and Alice Hamilton nursed Starr back to health at her home in Hadlyme. By August, Starr’s health had improved, and she judged herself to be “on the up curve.” And so she appeared to family and friends.

By the end of 1929, however, Starr’s health had deteriorated considerably. She expressed a hope to stay “afoot to Christmas,” and she did. But four days later, according to her niece Josephine, Starr’s spinal problems “fell upon her like a bolt from the blue.” She entered Billings Hospital in Hyde Park with back pains and a high fever. Following surgery to remove a tubercular abscess on her spine, Starr was left paralyzed from the waist down. Two vertebrae, also excised, were not replaced because of her heart condition. Unable to manage on her own, she left Hull-House.

Ellen Gates Starr | 15

Starr lived the last decade of her life at the Academy of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York, (above) where the Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus befriended and cared for her. She became close friends with Sister Francis Hasson (left in 1955), who attended to her daily.

Although seventy, Starr was a vibrant woman of sound mind and boundless curiosity. Yet, in 1930, she faced a future that she had probably never imagined as a young woman. When she and Addams founded Hull-House, they enthusiastically took up residence among the working poor and chose to forego marriage and families of their own. It is unlikely that they considered how this choice might affect them later on.

What happened to Starr in the final decade of her life is almost completely unrecorded. Other than her letters, she left no account of how she dealt with her disability. But from them and material found in the archives of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in Rosemont, Pennsylvania, it is 16 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

possible to understand a good deal about how her life unfolded in the years prior to her death.

The aging process, while never easy, is more burdensome on those who are poor or unhealthy. Until the creation of the national Social Security System in the 1930s, elderly Americans could not rely upon government assistance, even though few families were able to invest in health care or old-age annuity plans. Without financial reserves or a government pension, Starr’s position was no better than that of most Americans. Her paralyzed condition mirrored in many respects the state of a depressed nation—anxious and confused about the future.

As a result of the surgery on her back, Starr suffered permanent damage and extreme pain, yet her doctors encouraged her to believe that she might walk again. After four months and with the help of her niece, who lived in New York City, Starr left Billings Hospital and traveled by train to Ossining, New York, to Bethany House, a rest home operated by the Maryknoll Sisters. It gradually became apparent that the facility could not accommodate someone as ill and dependent as Starr. Thus, in July 1930, she entered the New York Orthopaedic Hospital in New York City. Because of her age and heart condition, doctors ruled out more surgery and instead fitted her with a brace.

At summer’s end, Starr succinctly described her condition: “no more severe pain, though plenty of discomfort from the brace and stiffness and lameness in legs and back.”

By then, it was certain that she would not walk again, but neither could she remain hospitalized indefinitely.

Starr’s hospital stay lasted nearly a year. Her most frequent visitors were Josephine and her friend Grace Clark. Both were single, some thirty years younger than Starr, and devoted to her. They were also professional women with busy careers—Jo, a social worker, who willingly took charge of her aunt’s care; and Grace, a literature teacher at Hunter College in New York City. Equally concerned about Starr and securing care for her future were Lillie, Addams, and Hamilton, who had also visited her in the hospital. As the problem of Starr’s placement grew more pressing, all of them, together and apart, sought a long-term solution. Until one was found, Starr resided for a short time in Clark’s apartment in New York. It was she who knew the Holy Child Sisters and suggested Starr move to their academy.

Although the suggestion did not appeal to Starr, she had few options. She would have preferred to remain in New York City in a furnished apartment with a nurse.

Unfortunately, this was not possible, because she could do so little on her own and round-the-clock care was expensive. Even private homes for elderly women offered

When Ellen became seriously ill, Jo Starr (above in 1943) was single, thirty-seven, and working in New York City. She assumed primary responsibility for her aunt’s care, moved her to the East Coast, and remained her most constant visitor until the end.

Starr’s ever-faithful friend Frances Crane Lillie provided her with emotional and financial support throughout most of her adult life.

Above: A 1934 Christmas telegram from Starr to Lillie and Lillie’s handwritten response.

Ellen Gates Starr | 17

Above: In 1932, Starr was seventy-three and found mobility difficult. On the back of this snapshot, taken at Suffern by a gardener, she wrote: “I might have stood up a little straighter.” Below: Starr died on February 10, 1940. As a Benedictine oblate, she had the privilege of being buried in religious dress. Unfortunately, this photograph has caused many to falsely conclude that Starr had joined a religious order.

18 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

little promise. There were not many of them (only about one thousand nationwide in 1930), and most required residents to take care of themselves and their rooms. But Catholic sisters who operated boarding schools and academies sometimes welcomed elderly women of moderate means. The women provided an additional source of income for the convents and, in return, received a safe home. The Sisters of the Holy Child Jesus, a highly regarded community of teaching nuns with schools in and around New York City, often accepted “lady boarders.” On June 15, 1931, Starr became one, and except for three brief periods, she would live at the Academy of the Holy Child in Suffern, New York, until she died.

During those years, Starr made peace with her circumstances. The beauty of her surroundings delighted her and inspired her to paint. She appreciated the gardens and liked looking at them through five “pentagonally arranged” windows that wrapped around her room. She especially enjoyed the care and company of Sister Francis Hasson, a forty-two-year-old lay sister, who was responsible for household chores and also served as “infirmarian.” She had “particular charge” of Starr, who also retained a nurse. Starr paid a monthly fee of $130 to the convent, a rate that did not include medications, personal items, or the nurse. But all of Starr’s expenses were covered through contributions from several old friends: Lillie; Mary and Gerard Swope, president of General Electric; Matilda and Frederic A. Delano, a former railroad executive and city planner; and a Hull-House pension created by Addams especially for Starr.

Although Starr and Addams had drifted apart during the course of their active lives, an attachment remained. As they became older and their health more precarious, each demonstrated genuine concern for the other’s well-being. On visits to Hamilton’s home on the Connecticut River, Addams and Mary Rozet Smith scheduled stopovers in Suffern until Addams’ death in 1935. Starr enjoyed seeing them and others and particularly looked forward to visits from Lillie. As Starr’s memory began to fail, she delighted in Lillie’s presence and counted on her “for keeping connections.” Not long before Starr died, she promised to love Lillie “as long as anything is left.”

Starr did not fear death. In fact, she anticipated it, believing that she was in “as good a place to die as [she] could have.” On her better days, she was wheeled into the chapel for Mass; at other times, she received Holy Communion in her room. As her health declined, her spiritual life provided the solace that she had hoped it would.

In 1935, she became a lay Benedictine oblate, a commitment she had previously considered but chose to make only as she began what she referred to as her “last lap.”

She did not take vows and thus did not become a nun;

On May 8, 1940, former Hull-House residents, staff, and friends commemorated the life and work of Ellen Gates Starr.

she simply sought to integrate more elements of the Benedictine Rule into her daily life. If she wished, she could also be buried as a Benedictine.

Early on the morning of February 10, 1940, the feast of St. Scholastica (St. Benedict’s sister), Starr died. She caught a cold, developed pneumonia, and passed away because, as Josephine noted, she had “no strength left to carry her through.” Two days later, following a simple Requiem Mass in the convent chapel, she was buried— wearing the Benedictine habit—in the convent cemetery on a spring-like day.

The following May, when spring arrived in Chicago, Starr’s contributions to its renowned settlement and the city that had become her home were remembered at a small memorial service. It was part of a month-long series of events celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of Hull-House. Starr’s friends and former colleagues recalled the settlement’s cofounder for her love of beauty, independent spirit, and forthright commitment to justice. The reflections of those who knew her well likely centered on the energy and enthusiasm that infused Starr’s long life, fortified as it was by her living faith and her cherished circle of friends.

Suellen Hoy is guest professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. Her forthcoming Ellen Gates Starr: Her Later Years (Chicago History Museum, 2009) presents a full account of the last decades of Starr’s life. A collection of Hoy’s essays, Good Hearts: Catholic Sisters in Chicago’s Past, was published in 2006 (University of Illinois Press).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the CHM collection unless otherwise noted. 4 lower left, ICHi-01547; 4 middle, ICHi-09378; 4 right, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, photograph by H. Rocher and Company, State Street, Chicago; 5–6, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 7 top, ICHi-39060; 7 center, used with permission of the archivist at the Abbey of St. Benedict, Monte Cassino, Italy; 8, Chicago Tribune photo. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 9 top, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 9 bottom, courtesy of Suellen Hoy; 10 left, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 10 right, JAMC 0000 0264 1095, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library; 11, DN-0065382; 12–13 bottom, courtesy of the Sinsinawa Dominican Archives, Sinsinawa, Wisconsin; 13 top, Oberlin College Archives, Oberlin, Ohio; 14–15, from the Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930; 15 left, detail of JAMC 0000 009 1585, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library; 15 right, JAMC 0000 0258 0399, Special Collections & University Archives, University of Illinois at Chicago Library; 16, courtesy of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, American Province Archives, Rosemont, Pennsylvania; 17 top, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, photograph by Clara E. [Sippul?]; 17 bottom, ICHi-39067; 18 top, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, photograph by Seamans; 18 bottom, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 19, courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times.

Reprinted with permission.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | There is no complete biography of Starr, but there are several biographical essays, including Jennifer L. Bosch in Women Building Chicago, 1790–1990: A Biographical Dictionary, eds. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 838–42; Allen F. Davis in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, eds.

Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James, and Paul Boyer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), vol. 3, pp.

351–53; and The Selected Papers of Jane Addams, volume 1: Preparing to Lead, 1860–81, eds. Mary Lynn McCree Bryan, Barbara Bair, and Maree de Angury (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 544–61. On the early years of the Starr-Addams partnership, see two recent biographies of Addams: Victoria Bissell Brown, The Education of Jane Addams (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004) and Louise W. Knight, Citizen: Jane Addams and the Struggle for Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). On Starr as a labor activist and as a bookbinder, see two essays: Jennifer L. Bosch, “Ellen Gates Starr: Hull House Labor Activist,” in Culture, Gender, Race, and U.S. Labor History, eds. Ronald C. Kent, Sara Markham, David R. Roediger, and Herbert Shapiro (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993) and Sherri Berger, “Bookbinding and the Progressive Vision,” Chicago History, XXXIV (fall 2005). A useful collection of Starr’s writings is On Art, Labor, and Religion: Ellen Gates Starr, eds. Mary Jo Deegan and Ana-Maria Wahl (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003).

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“HERE COMES EVERYBODY” The 28th International Eucharistic Congress JILL THOMAS GRANNAN

In June 1926, Chicago shined as its people played host to one of the largest Catholic celebrations the nation—and the world—had ever seen: the twentyeighth International Eucharistic Congress. More than a million Catholics and religious leaders from around the world attended sacred events and conferences from June 20 to 24 in Chicago and Mundelein, Illinois.

As the pilgrims descended upon Chicago, the words of James Joyce just a few years earlier would aptly describe the moment,“here comes everybody.”

The Chicago Tribune, which once reviled Catholics, was swept up in the festivities of June 1926. Staff cartoonist John McCutcheon rendered Chicago’s welcoming spirit in “Expecting Company.”

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The International Eucharistic Congress began in France in 1881. It was a novel way to encourage public adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the most holy embodiment of Jesus Christ. It also provided time for renewal of faith and Catholics of all backgrounds to assemble. Montreal was selected for the first North American Congress in 1910. During the heady years of the 1920s, Chicago became the first city to host the Congress in the United States.

In 1926, Chicago was one of the largest Catholic American cities with a population of more than one million faithful. Since the city’s first bishop arrived in 1846, its church leaders encouraged decades of growth of cultural and ethnic parishes across the widening urban landscape. Archbishop Patrick Feehan alone established more than 140 parishes during his term from 1880 to 1902. Feehan supported Catholic participation in Chicago’s landmark event of 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition. Catholics represented their faith during the groundbreaking World’s Parliament of Religions and convened in the fair’s Art Hall for the World’s Columbian Catholic Congress and the fourth Black Catholic Congress.

They demonstrated religious and cultural pride using Chicago’s fair setting as a platform. They also set a precedent of open religious celebration and contributed to Chicago’s appeal to host America’s first international Congress.

When Archbishop George Mundelein (1872–1939) arrived from New York in 1916, he envisioned big plans for Chicago. The archdiocese was inefficient and unorganized, qualities he would not tolerate.

Parishes competed for resources and many operated independently of archdiocesan authority. The quality of Catholic education was inconsistent—Chicago needed well-trained priests and teaching nuns. Chicago was on the cusp of Prohibition and an era of organized crime born of racism, poverty, corruption, and poor housing. Alcohol production, consumption, and trafficking were illegal, the local political machine was well oiled, and gangsters (many Catholic) held sway.

Despite their high numbers, Catholics were not a popular group in Chicago. Many were first- or second-generation immigrants, and locals viewed them as poor, uneducated masses pouring into Chicago from foreign lands. Since the mid-nineteenth

Archbishop George Mundelein photographed by the Chicago Daily News in Lincoln Park near his residence after his elevation to cardinal by the Vatican, May 12, 1924.

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century there were considered dangerous, unwholesome, and un-American, an opinion often expressed by the Chicago Tribune. Because of their perceived loyalty to the Pope over their country, Catholics were among the Ku Klux Klan’s most frequent targets.

Though the scene before Mundelein was chaotic by his standards, he regarded Chicago as a youthful city capable of greatness. Mundelein surrounded himself with seminarians and young priests who could help implement his vision. In 1924, he became Chicago’s first cardinal—and the first one west of the Alleghenies. Not only did he build more parishes, he standardized the school system by teaching English to immigrant students. He organized Catholic Charities.

He revitalized the defunct University of St. Mary of the Lake and established an eponymous state-of-the-art

seminary forty miles north of the city, which would become a jewel of the Eucharistic Congress.

Mundelein laid the foundation for Chicago’s selection as the first American site for the Congress.

His streamlining of the Catholic Church’s financial, charitable, and educational systems earned him and the city respect from the Vatican as well as local and national governments. His high-ranking membership in the the Vatican’s College of Cardinals provided Chicago more weight as a contender for the event.

He was single-minded in his lobbying, and it seemed as if the whole country was waiting too. The decision was announced a year in advance at the International Eucharistic Congress in Amsterdam. Time magazine, which took regular interest in Mundelein’s affairs, selected him as the cover story for an article

The Daily News covered the crowd gathered outside Holy Name Cathedral on 735 North State Street to celebrate Mundelein’s elevation to cardinal.

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Dion O’Banion’s monument at Mount Carmel Cemetery.The Irish Catholic gangster ran his North Side operations at Schofield’s Flower Shop across from Holy Name Cathedral, his parish.

published three weeks prior to the event. Time quoted Mundelein’s earlier plea to Pope Pius XI,“Holy Father, permit the celebration of the next Eucharistic Congress to take place in Chicago and I promise you a million communions as a spiritual bouquet to your august presence.”

The choice was a Catholic privilege and civic honor, and the event itself a triumph for workers and planners who constructed massive temporary altars and handled logistics ranging from transportation to food and lodging. Catholics were asked to open their doors to visitors and cooperate in any way possible.

The prestige and economic profitability accompanying the Congress likened it to a Catholic World’s Fair or a spiritual version of the Olympics. Pope Pius XI was not able to witness Mundelein’s dream become reality. In his place he sent Giovanni Cardinal Bonzano, an expert diplomat who spoke English, to serve as Papal Legate.

Mundelein intended to make Chicago’s mark on an American map, one that highlighted local religious accomplishments and service rather than crime sites.

His pastoral letter called Catholics to Chicago declaring, How fortunate we are . . . to be chosen among the cities of this country, to be the official host of the Son of God for the first time in our history . . .The name of Chicago is today on the lips of millions and millions of the world’s inhabitants in the most distant corners of the earth, not as a center of industry and commerce, not because of the lawlessness which we ourselves have been the first to broadcast and exaggerate before the world, but rather as a great Catholic stronghold, as a dwelling-place of many thousands of God’s faithful children and decent law-abiding people.

Mundelein was intent on attracting the press by accentuating the positive.

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The peace and sobriety anticipated for the Congress was set against the backdrop of record-setting violence.

The shocking murder of assistant states attorney William McSwiggin occurred just two months before the Congress and the arrival of the Papal Legate. The funeral (above) was at St. Thomas Aquinas Roman Catholic Church.

He did not accomplish this alone. Catholic leaders such as future archbishop Reverend Bernard J. Sheil and Mayor William E. Dever lent great support for the Congress. Sheil, one of Mundelein’s closest staff members, was secretary of the Congress—he went on to establish the Catholic Youth Organization. Dever, a Catholic and reform politician known as the “mayor who cleaned up Chicago,” embraced the good news.

The wholesome happening would do much to counteract the beer runners and revenge killings.

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The celebration occurred in many public and private spaces. It began in Rome and continued at New York’s St. Patrick Cathedral as attendees arrived by boat. Custom-made Pullman cars painted cardinal red crossed the country to Chicago. In addition to an assembly at the Coliseum and meetings at Municipal Pier and parish halls, much time was devoted to outdoor events, including a parade on Michigan Avenue and a procession into Holy Name Cathedral for the opening Mass. Souvenirs were sold in the parks, with

Artist Thomas O’Shaughnessy, designer of St. Patrick’s neo-Celtic church, posed for the Daily News in 1914.

He took first prize of $700 in the competition for the Congress’s official poster (below). His Celtic monstrance, a cross-shaped vessel containing the Blessed Sacrament, became the primary graphic reproduced on parade floats and decorative buntings.

special exhibits staged at Grant Park and the pier.

Tour maps marking locations of Catholic churches were distributed for those interested in visiting Chicago’s plentiful sacred architecture. The Publicity Committee sponsored a poster competition juried by the Art Institute to choose the Congress’s official artwork. The Catholic Extension Church Society displayed its beloved chapel train car in Grant Park.

Each location was awe-inspiring. Perhaps most impressive were the Masses at the new Grant Park Stadium (now called Soldier Field), which was transformed into an outdoor cathedral. Catholic school marching bands and a 60,000-child choir put everyone in celebratory spirits despite the heat and wind.

On the final day, attendees embarked north on a pilgrimage to Mundelein Seminary’s colonialinspired campus and idyllic grounds. Pilgrims journeyed the forty miles by car, train, and foot.

Travel during the Congress represented the largest mass transportation effort in American history.

As for the refreshments, a record-setting ten tons of hot dogs were consumed by participants.

Photographers and the press documented the Congress and its crowds extensively—nearly every detail made front-page news. Perhaps utilizing his Hollywood connections, Cardinal Mundelein commissioned the Fox Film Studio (reportedly for no compensation) to capture every day from Rome to Chicago. Fox edited some 35,000 feet of reels into a popular feature-length film.

The Eucharistic Congress took the world by storm and affected international perceptions of Chicago and its Catholics. By most accounts, visitors and residents alike were overcome by the grand proceedings, the capability of mass transit, and the environment of good fellowship. During those days of June 1926, crime took a backseat to religious celebration and identity, when Holy Name became host to a unique global event rather than an infamous murder. The Congress became a model for planning future civic and religious celebrations.

The great gathering Mundelein orchestrated at Soldier Field remains the quintessential image of the Congress. The memories and images it produced would not be equaled until Pope John Paul II celebrated Mass in Grant Park in 1979.

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Papal Legate Giovanni Cardinal Bonzano (center) arrived via a special cardinal-red Pullman car from New York.

He stands with Mayor William E. Dever (right). Bonzano performed the High Pontifical Mass in Soldier Field.

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The Coliseum hosted English-speaking assemblies and the official welcoming on behalf of Chicago and Illinois politicians.

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Above: Spectators watched dignitaries arrive on Michigan Avenue near Grant Park.

Right: As celebrants arrived at Holy Name Cathedral, the width of State Street narrowed to a tight path.

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During the Congress, Holy Name (left) represented religious celebration, not revenge killings or crimerelated funerals. As celebrants filed into the cathedral, they proceeded past Schofield’s Flower Shop, the site of the O’Banion murder in November 1924, directly across the street. People watched from the shop’s second-floor windows (above). The procession took place steps from where gangster Hymie Weiss would be shot months later on October 11. Taking a stand against the glorification of criminals in death, Mundelein denied Weiss a church funeral.

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For an outdoor Mass, a line formed from the Field Museum toward the Vatican-inspired high altar inside Soldier Field. More than 600 police officers provided security and crowd control during sacred and public events.

Right: One of several panoramas by Kaufmann and Fabry that captured the standing-room-only attendance and breathtaking atmosphere of the Eucharistic Congress.

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A girl separated from her family climbed over the barrier fence, assisted by a police officer.

The marching band from Lisle’s St. Procopius College. The Congress hosted many Chicago-area schools and students through performances and art exhibits.

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One of the most memorable moments of the Congress was the “world’s largest choir,” comprising 60,000 children who sang the “Mass of the Angels” at Soldier Field. Future Mundelein College president and religious sister Ann Ida Gannon, BVM, was among many local students in the choir.

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The celebrants of Mass were dwarfed by the monumental stairs and columns of the temporary altar against the backdrop of the Field Museum and American flag.

A Daily News photographer caught Cardinal Bonzano’s perspective on the massive congregation during High Pontifical Mass.

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Photographers are seen to the right of those who knelt in prayer closest to the altar.

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The scene of people overcome by the extreme heat and sun was typical during the Congress.

Nine Catholic hospitals provided medical care between Chicago and Mundelein.

On to Mundelein. Trains started running every two minutes before dawn to accommodate the pilgrimage rush via the “L.”

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A view of the grand stair to St. Mary’s Lake before the pilgrims arrived from Chicago.

Almost there! The path to Mundelein was filled as never before with people making the forty-mile journey from the city to the serene woods. The Congress served as the debut of Mundelein, the largest Catholic seminary in the United States.

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The procession of religious women represented a more orderly line despite the heat and rain. Schoolchildren are visible along the sidewalk in the distance.

Women relax on the campus grass near Mundelein Chapel. Ten tons of hot dogs were distributed during the Congress. The front page of the Daily News on June 24, 1926, proclaimed that during the Congress,“The great American ‘hot dog’ was king.”

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An aerial view captures the multitude at Mundelein that took shape on the central pathway connecting the chapel to the lake. The Daily News prided itself on printing images within two hours of taking the shots. Photographers were flown between Chicago and Mundelein for the final days.

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The Blessed Sacrament was displayed in a monstrance and carried under a canopy on the grounds as pilgrims knelt in adoration. Mundelein Chapel is visible at the left.

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A religious sister smiled under her makeshift umbrella during the pilgrimage to Mundelein. Her expression spoke volumes on the pride and happiness felt by Chicago hosts and guests who bore witness to history in the making.

No matter the weather, the Eucharistic Congress was an extraordinary celebration and a Chicago success story.

Jill Thomas Grannan is a curator at the Chicago History Museum. She developed the exhibition Catholic Chicago (2008).

Illustrations All images are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum. 20, ICHi-59552; 21, DN-0077027; 22, DN-0077022; 23, DN-0079103; 24, DN-0080903; 25, top DN-0062780, bottom 2007.126.1; 26, DN-0081688; 27, DN-0081840; 28, DN-0082802; 29, DN-0081857; 30, ICHi-59584; 31, top ICHi-59585, bottom DN-0082640; 32, DN-0081914; 33, ICHi-37049; 34, top DN-0081881, bottom DN-0081901; 35, DN-0081776; 36, top DN-0081735, bottom DN-0081826; 37, DN-0081736; 38, top DN-0081886, bottom DN-0081290; 39, top DN-0081732, bottom DN-0081905; 40, DN-0081896; 41, DN-0081898; 42-43, DN-0081721; 44, DN-0081912; 45, DN-0081897 For Further Reading C. F. Donovan, The Story of the Twenty-Eighth International Eucharistic Congress: Held at Chicago, Illinois, United States of America, from June 20 to 24, 1926 (The Eucharistic Congress Committee, 1927); David Craine,“The Klan Moves North,” Chicago History Magazine, Fall 2006; Edward Kantowicz, Corporation Sole: Cardinal Mundelein and Chicago Catholicism (University of Notre Dame Press, 1983); Steven M. Avella, Edward Kantowicz and Ellen Skerrett, Catholicism, Chicago-Style (Wild Onion, 1994); Edward Kantowicz, The Archdiocese of Chicago: A Journey of Faith (Booklink and Archdiocese of Chicago, 2006).

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This 1930 game capped the series between intracity Catholic football foes DePaul and Loyola. DePaul proved the overall victor, 5–2–1, in a thirty-year rivalry marked by mysterious gaps in action.

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The Ramblers and Blue Demons Loyola and DePaul universities briefly vied for glory during the college football boom of the 1920s.

R AY M O N D S C H M I D T

N

ovember 2, 1930, was a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon in Chicago, and along the lakefront at Soldier Field a crowd of more than 25,000 fans gathered to watch the football teams from DePaul and Loyola universities square off in a game to benefit the Rosary College building fund.

The eighth meeting between the two schools since their gridiron rivalry began in 1901, this affair was to decide ownership of the “Brown Barrel” trophy—a prize offered in emulation of the Little Brown Jug played for annually by the big-time teams from the universities of Michigan and Minnesota— which unfortunately had gone missing as the big showdown approached. The game itself proved to be much like earlier contests between DePaul and Loyola, a hard-hitting, low-scoring defensive battle that saw DePaul pull out a narrow 6–0 victory.

As the players and fans filed out of the gigantic arena, no one suspected that just one month later the president of one of the schools would summarily drop the popular sport, signaling the eventual end of major Catholic college football in Chicago.

Today Chicago continues as home to DePaul and Loyola, both located on the city’s North Side. In the world of intercollegiate sports both schools support a wide range of men’s and women’s varsity teams, with basketball unquestionably king at each. Yet back in the Roaring Twenties both schools were fielding football

teams that were definitely the big news on campus. With the sport of college football booming around the country, DePaul and Loyola each sought a share of the growing acclaim and prestige pursued by many Catholic universities around the country in undisguised admiration of the success already encountered by Notre Dame and its legendary coach, Knute Rockne.

In the early twentieth century, Chicago was considered the most Catholic city in America. Catholics spanning multiple ethnic groups composed more than one-third of its population by the late 1920s. Church leaders such as George Cardinal Mundelein looked to colleges both to provide educational opportunities for these Catholics and to lead the way toward their assimilation into mainstream American culture. DePaul and Loyola viewed a successful football program primarily as a vehicle for expanding their enrollments and physical facilities. But the gridiron fortunes of the schools also helped to unify their fans, largely the city’s Catholic ethnic factions, by creating a shared pride in the accomplishments of “their” football squads.

In the thirty-plus years that both schools supported varsity football, DePaul and Loyola went to great lengths to join the ranks of major gridiron programs.

Ultimately they both would fail, victims of financial difficulties and changing views toward football by university administrators and students. And although primed for a classic crosstown rivalry, DePaul and Loyola’s teams met sporadically over the decades, for reasons still uncertain to this day.

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A year after its founding in 1870, St. Ignatius College’s main building and Holy Family Church next door survived the Great Chicago Fire, which began just a few blocks away.

The first of the two schools, Loyola was founded in 1870 as Saint Ignatius College by Father Arnold Damen of the Jesuit Order of priests. The school was originally located at 1076 West Twelfth Street (now Roosevelt Road), just southwest of the downtown area. During much of the latter half of the nineteenth century Catholic education in Chicago consisted primarily of parish-based schools, usually with relatively small enrollments. This began to change after 1890 as more immigrant families settled in the city, pushing the Catholic church to open more schools that soon produced more students interested in a college education. Thus, with a view of increasing access to higher education for Chicago’s burgeoning Catholic population, at the end of the nineteenth century Archbishop Patrick Feehan sought to establish Catholic colleges on all sides of the city. At his request, Saint Vincent’s College (now DePaul University) was established on the North Side by the 48 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

Vincentian order of priests. On June 30, 1898, St. Vincent’s thus joined De La Salle on the South Side (St. Cyril’s with a college department would also be opened in 1900 on the South Side) and St. Ignatius of the West Side as colleges available to educate the Catholic young men of the city. The new Vincentian college was first located at Webster and Osgood (now Kenmore) avenues—then 244 East Webster Avenue—in a building that had served as a church and parochial school between 1876 and 1896. Classes began at St. Vincent in September 1898, with a faculty of ten and an enrollment of seventy-two.

Little more than twenty years old by the early 1890s, the sport of American football was growing in popularity, with colleges and high schools across the country looking to form teams. The first evidence of either St. Ignatius or St. Vincent fielding a football squad appears in 1892, with a 10–0 loss by St. Ignatius to the Jesuit

From its first season, St. Vincent’s football team was involved in the wider Catholic community through charity work. This 1901 thank-you note to Father Byrne presages benefit games that DePaul would play at Soldier Field in the 1920s and 1930s.

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DePaul Field (above) saw the height of its glory in the early 1900s, when it hosted college teams such as Notre Dame and was home to the Chicago Whales of baseball’s Federal League before their move to Wrigley Field. Below: The 1901 St. Vincent team.

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Marquette College from Milwaukee. That same year St. Ignatius lost to the De La Salle collegians at Washington Park in a game that the Chicago Tribune described as being for the “championship of the Catholic colleges in the city.” In their earliest known victory, the Loyolans traveled to Milwaukee on November 22, 1894, where they posted an 11–8 win over Marquette. Opponents during the 1890s and into the early 1900s for St. Ignatius included primarily Chicago high schools, along with college teams from St. Viator, Marquette, Lewis Institute, and the University of Detroit.

St. Vincent first entered the gridiron ranks nearly a decade later, playing a full schedule in 1901 that was made up mostly of games against area high schools such as West Division, Lake View, and Elgin. What was called the “first regular game” at St. Vincent was played on October 1, 1901, and the North Siders notched a 27–0 victory over Medill High School with an end named Griffen leading the way with two touchdowns. The athletic grounds at St. Vincent—called the “College Campus”—had been laid out on the southwest corner of what is now Belden and Sheffield avenues, extending south along Sheffield with Webster Street’s St. Vincent de Paul Church backing up to the south end zone. These grounds eventually included a large grandstand for spectators constructed along one sideline, with the entire area enclosed in 1905 by a high composition-stone wall.

It was on this North Side athletic field that the football teams of St. Vincent and St. Ignatius first met on Thanksgiving Day, November 28, in 1901. The Chicago Tribune once again described the game as “the Catholic championship of the city.” St. Vincent held the upper hand right from the opening kickoff, and when the game ended they had defeated St. Ignatius by a score of 5–0. Though this close contest appeared to hold promise for an annual face-off, the first decade of the twentieth century saw no further games between the pair of potential city rivals. The newspaper accounts of St. Vincent’s victory made no mention of any trouble between students from the two schools, presenting no obvious explanation for this first break in the gridiron relations.

Proceeding their separate ways, both St. Ignatius and St. Vincent posted impressive single-season records in the years following their 1901 meeting. In 1902 the St. Ignatius team—averaging 170 pounds per athlete and under the direction of Coach J. F. Byrnes, a former Wisconsin player— won seven of its first eight games, including a 0–0 tie with Lewis Institute, while shutting out all of their opponents. All that remained between St. Ignatius and its first unbeaten season was a game against Marquette at the American League baseball park located at Thirty-ninth Street and Wentworth Avenue. Before a boisterous crowd the two teams fought to a 6–6 tie that allowed the West Side school to finish with a record of 7–0–2.

DePaul’s building at State Street and Jackson Boulevard, 1930. The school first offered classes downtown in 1914, in part a reaction to Loyola’s move to the North Side.

It was in 1903 that St. Vincent tallied up the victories, finishing with a notable 11–1–0 mark, although most of their opponents were high school and club teams. The most controversial game of the season, however, came against a collegiate adversary. Late in its 1903 campaign St. Vincent was playing host to St. Viator from Kankakee when a major dispute broke out soon after the secondhalf kickoff. Despite holding a 5–0 lead, the Kankakee team had been angered when their team captain suffered a dislocated arm in a “hot scrimmage” at the end of the first half, intensifying the visitors’ feeling that they were being given a considerable number of bad calls by the game officials. Unwilling to contend with the referee’s decisions any longer, the players from St. Viator walked off the field and refused to continue the game. The referee then awarded the victory to St. Vincent and decided the score would be 11–0.

St. Vincent College had been expanding its physical facilities and educational curriculum throughout the early years of the 1900s, and on December 24, 1907— with an enrollment of nearly two hundred—the school was formally rechartered as DePaul University.

Meanwhile, in 1906 St. Ignatius officials had quietly purchased a large plot of land located between Sheridan Road and the waters of Lake Michigan on the city’s far The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 51

North Side—a section known as Rogers Park—to prepare for an expansion of its own. In 1909 a portion of this property became the site of the newly founded high school for boys, Loyola Academy. The same year, St. Ignatius College officially changed its name and was rechartered as Loyola University. By 1912 the long process of relocating Loyola’s primary educational center from the West Side to the new North Side facility along Sheridan Road would begin.

The decision to move Loyola to the North Side created tension among Chicago’s Catholic parishes and may provide a clue to one of the enduring mysteries about the football rivalry between DePaul and Loyola: the three major breaks in the schools’ gridiron relations that occurred between 1901 and 1927. Originally founded at the behest of Archbishop Feehan to have Catholic colleges available on all sides of Chicago, St. Vincent felt it held the collegiate territorial rights to the North Side— the South and West Sides already having been spoken for. This “invasion” of territory might very well have created hard feelings between the administrations of the two schools, leading to the severing of their football relations in 1913. When Loyola’s gradual move to Rogers Park was finally completed in 1922, with no apparent harm to DePaul’s own institutional growth, the theoretical political dispute may have been finally set aside for the game that same year. The gap in the matchup between 1923 and 1927 is more puzzling. A comment in the Chicago Herald-Examiner before the 1930 game about a “rivalry grown so bitter at times that relations were broken off,” provides the only other hint of trouble between DePaul and Loyola that affected their athletic relations. Otherwise, the three breaks remain an unsolved mystery.

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Above: DePaul coach Frank Haggerty, 1907. Below: Haggerty’s 1907 team took on iconic Catholic college football power Notre Dame, surprising the Irish with a tough fight before succumbing 21–12.

In 1908, DePaul posted one of its two undefeated seasons, climbing to a record of 6–0–1. Among their triumphs was this 18–11 victory over a then-unbeaten Lake Forest squad on November 7.

As the two schools began to remake themselves as major Catholic universities, the DePaul and Loyola football programs also set off toward elevating their intercollegiate visibility and reputations. Along with the formal rechartering, 1907 brought a definite upgrade to DePaul’s football program as the schedules each season began to include more college opponents—starting with a 1907 meeting on Thanksgiving Day with the Notre Dame varsity from South Bend, Indiana. Notre Dame was then six years away from making its big splash in the college football world with a stunning upset over Army, but in 1907 it still represented a big step up in competition for the little Chicago Catholic school team under the direction of Coach Frank Haggerty. The Notre Dame team was enticed by a trip to the big city, and DePaul converted an early turnover into a touchdown and played Notre Dame to a 6–6 deadlock through the first half.

After receiving a tongue-lashing from Coach Thomas Barry at halftime, Notre Dame quickly took the lead on the third play of the second half with an eighty-five-

yard touchdown run. A short time later, DePaul scooped up a fumble and dashed seventy yards to a touchdown that briefly gave the Chicagoans a narrow 12–11 lead. Notre Dame then began to use its much heavier line to wear down the smaller DePaul team, which eventually paid off in a pair of scores that led to a hard-fought 21–12 win for the South Bend visitors.

That evening after the game the two teams sat down together for a banquet at DePaul and later attended a party at the College Theatre.

In the 1920s DePaul’s varsity football team would play a few games against Notre Dame’s freshmen and reserve teams, but this 1907 meeting would be the only matchup in history between the varsity teams of the two schools. Nevertheless, games against Notre Dame’s minor teams would always be treated like major football events by the DePaul community. This was a reflection of the place the South Bend school held in the hearts of most Catholics for years, especially in nearby Chicago.

Its football teams were the idols of Catholic America— especially the ethnic groups that sent so many of their The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 53

sons to play for the school—and often eclipsed loyalties to the local Catholic college teams. The many gridiron successes of Notre Dame through the years imbued struggling Catholics everywhere with pride and a feeling of shared achievement often difficult to realize outside the world of athletics. DePaul and Loyola would seek to capitalize on this spirit by hiring former Notre Dame men as coaches.

At Loyola, the enthusiasm created among the students by the expansion and upcoming move of the campus soon spilled over into the school’s sporting realm. In late 1910 the St. Ignatius Collegian took note of the fact that “the directors are doing all in their power to put athletics of every kind on a good footing and depend upon the members of the collegiate, law and medical departments to lend a helping hand. From the outset all the students have taken an active interest in the work.”

Unfortunately, under Coach Scheid, who had played at Holy Cross, this enthusiasm got a little ahead of the football talent available. During the 1911 season Loyola made the mistake of venturing up in class to test itself against Notre Dame, a visit to South Bend that ended in a disastrous 80–0 defeat for the Chicagoans. The highlight of the season was the matchup between Loyola and DePaul on November 4, when one of the largest spectator turnouts in the history of DePaul Field jammed the small stadium along Sheffield Avenue. One reporter noted that Loyola had turned out a big crowd of rooters “and a tin horn band which sounded like a Turkish caravan in the distance.” Most of the so-called band music consisted of the banging of a large drum. The football teams had not met since 1901, and the New World correspondent described this latest game as “one of those blood-thirsty battles which is seen perhaps only once in a lifetime. It was full of thrills upon thrills.” The two evenly matched teams struggled through a defensive battle until DePaul finally pulled out a 5–3 win over a dejected Loyola squad.

Yet the Loyola community remained optimistic about the progress of its football program. The student magazine declared, “We rejoice at the decided stride forward Loyola has taken in athletics. The football schedule was heavy, the heaviest in years. The team consisted of football players in the real sense of the word.”

The 1912 season saw Loyola playing its home games for the first time on the new North Shore campus. Called “Loyola Field,” the grass-covered gridiron was laid out in a north-south direction, located just east of the eventual 1920s site of Alumni Gymnasium. The big game of the season was another matchup between Loyola and DePaul. This showdown for the city’s Catholic football bragging rights took place at DePaul Field on October 26, 1912, where the two teams battled to a 13–13 tie.

Caught up in the fervor, the Inter Ocean reporter 54 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

This “evenly-matched” 1911 game consisted of a Loyola field goal and a DePaul touchdown with a missed point after. It took place the year before touchdowns were raised to six points.

described the game as “the hardest fought and most spectacular game ever played at the North Side field.”

Loyola officials considered it their team’s best outing of the season, and the school magazine noted that “it is generally conceded by those who saw the game that Loyola outclassed the DePaul aggregation.” Showing the schools’ shared a sense of conviviality as well as rivalry, the night of the game the two teams sat down together for a banquet and then attended a show at DePaul’s College Theatre.

The football fortunes of the two schools proceeded along their separate ways through the balance of the decade with no further showdowns between the two.

Football schedules for both in the years surrounding America’s involvement in World War I saw relatively abbreviated slates of games. DePaul did not field varsity teams during the seasons of 1918–19, while Loyola did not play football during the 1920–21 seasons.

At last, in 1922, DePaul and Loyola again met on the gridiron after a break of ten years in their rivalry. The matchup took place on October 14 at DePaul Field where grandstands had recently been added to raise the seating capacity to about ten thousand. A light rain fell for much of the afternoon as the teams squared off, and the DePaul team—now nicknamed “the Blue”—walked off with a 12–6 victory when the final gun sounded.

By the fall of 1922 Loyola University had completed its move to the beautiful campus along the North Shore, and school officials looked to stimulate the growth of their university through the publicity that could be generated by good football teams. They looked around and came up with former Notre Dame player Roger Kiley whom they hoped would lead the Maroon and Gold toward a share of college football’s riches.

Kiley had played end for Notre Dame during the outstanding football seasons of 1919–21 under Knute Rockne, twice receiving first-team All-America recognition. A well-rounded athlete, he also had lettered in baseball and basketball and was captain of the cage squad. While finishing his law degree at Notre Dame, Kiley had served as an assistant football coach for Rockne during the 1922 season.

As a dismal football season was winding down for Loyola in November 1922 under Coach Vincent Shackelton, the Faculty Athletic Board met and decided to offer Kiley a three-year contract at a salary of $5,000 annually, the deal was to include the potential for a faculty position and additional pay when “he shall have proved himself qualified.” The former Notre Dame AllAmerican accepted the offer, and after completing his law studies in the spring of 1923 he arrived in Chicago to take over the Loyola football program.

The Illinois National Guard took this aerial photo of Loyola’s Lake Shore campus in 1936. Loyola Stadium, with its grandstand and light towers, can be seen left of center The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 55

Both Loyola (seen here) and DePaul played before massive crowds at big stadiums such as Soldier Field in the 1920s and 1930s. Rental costs at these locales, however, often exceeded profits.

With Coach Roger Kiley’s success in the mid-1920s, Loyola’s football team captured the city’s interest, including that of Mayor William Dever (below) in 1926.

Kiley didn’t waste any time convincing school officials that good players made winning teams possible, and in early June the Athletic Committee agreed to begin subsidizing athletes. A memorandum from Father P. J. Mahan, chairman of the committee, detailed that “in order to have athletic teams worthy of a University we deem it necessary to offer the legitimate inducements customary in all schools.” Mahan specified that the minimum inducement for an athlete would be a “free scholarship” and that out-of-town students would also receive free “board, lodging and books.” He closed by noting that “the Alumni Association will supply funds 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

for the above inducements.” Without caused shortfalls in the athletics budget, question, such assistance awarded while at the same time alumni donations strictly for athletic skills—which at the were declining. Under pressure to contime was called “subsidizing” or “prosetinue the same level of play, Coach Kiley lytizing”—was very much in violation of began covering the team’s campus National Collegiate Athletic Association housing costs in 1925, a situation that (NCAA) rules. Originally formed in could not last long. Despite the tight conresponse to the brutal nature of football trol on expenses, the Ramblers—an and the many abuses of “amateur ideals” increasingly popular nickname for the within intercollegiate sport, by the early Loyola football team—made trips to 1920s the NCAA had few investigative or Kansas City, St. Louis, New Orleans, and enforcement capabilities. Loyola athletic Jackson, Mississippi, for games in 1926 officials were correct in thinking that and 1927. most of the serious football-playing Loyola coach Roger Kiley Meanwhile DePaul had experienced a schools were violating the rules on the mixed bag of results during 1923 and subsidization of players, including many of the larger 1924, and so before the next football season the school’s Catholic colleges. athletic officials also hired a former Notre Dame football Loyola now had a good football coach, and the player as their new head coach. The man chosen with Maroon and Gold wrapped up the 1923 season with a the hope of bringing some of the South Bend magic was record of 6–2–0. This success surpassed Eddie Anderson, who had played end for all expectations, and the Loyolan noted Rockne, both on offense and defense, that “Kiley cannot be given too much during the great seasons of 1918–21. In credit for rounding out a team such as 1921 Anderson had served as team caphe did from the green material of the tain and, like Kiley, received All-America early autumn.” At the post-season banrecognition. After graduation he moved to quet the team was thrilled when Knute Columbia College (now Loras) in Rockne showed up as the guest of honor Dubuque, Iowa, as coach of all sports— for the evening. including football.

Kiley fielded his best team in 1925 as Ultimately, Anderson wanted to his charges faced a tough schedule and become a medical doctor, and he initially came away with a 7–2–0 record. The viewed coaching as a vehicle to earn season’s highlight was the final game money to attend medical school. In an when Loyola took on the exciting Haskell incredible display of perseverance and Indian School team from Kansas at DePaul coach Eddie Anderson scheduling, Anderson supplemented his Soldier Field. A short touchdown run by income by playing professional football Marty Griffen produced the only points as Loyola finon Sundays, primarily for the Chicago Cardinals from ished with a surprising 6–0 victory. This win ranks as the 1922 to 1926. He coached at Columbia College from best in Loyola’s football history since the following 1922 to 1924, and then on July 25, 1925, joined DePaul season, with basically the same cast of players, the as its new football coach. That fall he would begin Haskell Indians were considered one of attending classes at Loyola Medical the top teams in the country.

School, while also continuing to play proDespite this success, by 1926 Loyola’s fessional football. athletic administration decided to mainBy the time Eddie Anderson arrived at tain its gridiron program at a minor level DePaul the school was a member of a and pad the schedules with small midsmall college athletic circuit called the western college foes—all of this to be Western Interstate Conference. Other done as cheaply as possible. Home games schools included St. Viator, Lombard, with the more significant opponents Columbia, Valparaiso, and LaCrosse would now be played at either Wrigley Normal. In each of his first two seasons Field or Soldier Field, venues that proas head football coach, the Blue vided larger seating capacities and potenDemons—as the school’s team was now tially bigger paydays than Loyola Field. nicknamed according to the yearbook— Yet, in practice, renting larger stadiums garnered a share of the conference title. and the occasional out-of-town trips Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne Though the 1927 season was less sucThe Ramblers and Blue Demons | 57

cessful—DePaul’s record dropped to 1–5–1—the lone win brought DePaul a title of sorts. For the first time in five years the gridiron rivalry between the Blue Demons and Loyola was resumed, no doubt helped along by the friendship between Anderson and Kiley that dated back to their playing days at Notre Dame.

This 1927 matchup served as the Homecoming Game for both schools and was played at Wrigley Field. The DePaul student newspaper—apparently forgetting that neither team was having a particularly good season—got carried away in contemplating the approaching matchup, describing it as “the game which has been waited for and dreamed of for many years.” The writer proceeded to call it the “Battle of the Ages,” and added that the Harvard-Yale game would be “insignificant” in comparison. A bit more subdued was the New World, which noted that the game “promises to be one of the greatest battles of the local football season” and added that Cubs Park “should be able to accommodate the partisans who accompany both teams as well as the fans who come out for a good football game.” The consensus of opinion among the newspapers was that a crowd of about 7,500 turned up at Wrigley Field for the game, although the Chicago Tribune thought there were 15,000 fans on hand. Everyone was treated to a hard-fought struggle that saw the Blue Demons prevail by a score of 12–6.

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This 1935 program refers to “De Paul the Blue and Red,” an allusion to a time when the university and academy shared colors.

After they split, the university adopted the “Blue,” and a local sports columnist supplied the rest, hailing DePaul as the “D-men” (an alphabetical rather than demonic origin).

The financial realities of competing at anything close to the boundaries of major college football had set in for Loyola’s administration, and at the same time Kiley had grown unhappy about his salary status with the school. His contract stipulated that pay raises would be forthcoming when he had proven himself, yet despite the successes of his first four years he had not received any additional compensation and his contract was coming up for renewal in early 1927.

Kiley—by then working part-time as an attorney with a firm downtown—had decided that practicing law was to be his lifetime career, but he was interested in continuing as a coach if the money was right. After a few meetings with Loyola officials, it became clear to Kiley that he would make the same salary if he signed a new deal, and soon he began to hear rumors that the school’s administration was negotiating with two other coaches as possible replacements for his position and at lower salaries.

In January, Kiley wrote a letter to his mentor, Knute Rockne, asking if the Notre Dame coach knew of any school looking for a new coach and “that you think would pay me more than I am getting now.” Rockne, unaware of any openings, quickly replied to Kiley, telling the younger man that he should “not leave the law practice if I were you under any consideration . . . this coaching game isn’t what its cracked up to be.” With no other prospects in coaching circles, Kiley reluctantly signed a new contract with Loyola in April 1927.

Loyola’s struggles through a so-so football season in 1927 did nothing to cheer Kiley, and in May 1928 the other shoe fell for the discontented coach. A brief item in the Chicago Herald and Examiner carried the title, “Loyola Coach Linked With Street Brawl.” According to Chicago police, on May 13 Kiley had been one of five participants in a street brawl in front of a place called the Samovar Cafe, and when arrested for disorderly conduct and intoxicated driving, Kiley had supposedly attempted to use the name “Joseph Burke.” This was not the kind of publicity that the Jesuits at Loyola looked upon favorably.

After the initial shock had passed, Kiley wrote a letter to Father Robert Kelley, the school president, and declared, “I am very glad to say that I am entirely innocent of any participation” in the brawl reported by the newspaper. Kiley went on to explain that he had loaned his car to a cousin named Vernon Kiley, the party involved in the skirmish, and the coach speculated that his own name had come up and been attached to the affair when the license plate of the impounded car was checked by the police. Kiley added, “Believe me Father I was not unmindful of my duty to the school, and I know now I should have explained before.” In his reply Father Kelley expressed relief over Kiley’s explanation and then added, “I wish you would be very much on your guard so that absolutely nothing of similar nature will appear against you, while you are connected with Loyola.”

The reply was ominous indeed.

This 1926 game against St. Thomas was one of few that Loyola played on its own campus in the mid-1920s. Before the school built Loyola Stadium in 1929, local media dubbed the itinerant football team the “Ramblers,” a nickname that stuck.

The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 59

The fraternity Alpha Rho Gamma took out this ad in the October 31, 1929, edition of the DePaulia.

Whether or not the Loyola administration believed Kiley’s story, his days on the North Side campus were numbered. In the second week of the 1928 football season Loyola played the Northwestern “B” team at Dyche Stadium and came up with a 13–6 win. Two days later, despite the victory, Father Kelley issued a statement announcing that Kiley had decided to resign his position as an athletic coach at Loyola in order to practice law full-time, effective immediately. Kelley would only say further that “the move was unexpected and that none of the parties concerned were in disagreement,” adding that Daniel Lamont—a former Loyola football player and assistant coach—would take over as the new head coach. Still, there were plenty of rumors that Kiley’s departure had not been voluntary.

The Ramblers’ 1928 football season continued on toward an undistinguished 4–4–0 final record, yet the campaign became famous in school history when Loyola succeeded in notching its first-ever gridiron victory over DePaul in the last game of the season. For the first time the teams met at gigantic Soldier Field, in a contest the Herald and Examiner described as the “sectional Catholic college championship.” Again the newspapers could not agree on the fan turnout as the two teams squared off on a chilly afternoon—the Tribune declared about 7,000 to be in attendance while the Herald and Examiner pegged the gate at 20,000 fans. The matchup was a defensive 60 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

slugfest most of the way, except for Les Molloy of the Ramblers throwing a thirty-five-yard touchdown pass to halfback Emmett Burke, followed by Tony Lawless—who years later became a legendary football coach at Fenwick High School in Oak Park—kicking the extra point. This was enough to give Loyola the victory by a 7–0 count in the sixth renewal of the series.

The 1929 season proved to be one of the most notable in Loyola’s football history when the school fielded its best team ever, compiling a 6–2–1 record against a tough schedule made up of mostly major college foes such as Oklahoma City, Duquesne, St. Louis, Loyola of New Orleans, South Dakota State, and North Dakota. Adding to the excitement of the season was the dedication of a renovated Loyola Stadium that featured a large concrete grandstand along the west sideline, which, along with temporary bleachers, gave the multi-use stadium a total seating capacity of approximately 13,000 for football. The construction, which was still in progress when the formal dedication took place in October 1929, had been financed primarily through an alumni fund-raising campaign. In an incredible piece of misinformation, the Herald and Examiner reported that the construction would probably not be completed until 1930, at which time the stadium would “accommodate 40,000” fans—a figure that never entered the minds of the Loyola administration. The first game in the new arena was the 1929 season opener, which produced a 12–0 victory over Oklahoma City University.

All that prevented an unbeaten season for Loyola in 1929 were narrow losses to Duquesne (7–6) and North Dakota (7–0). The highlight of the season came when the Ramblers dominated the action and pounded DePaul for a 13–0 victory in a showdown played at Soldier Field, a performance that inspired a Chicago Herald and Examiner reporter to note that “Loyola University’s warriors rushed, ran and passed hither and yon over the hallowed football turf.” The game was a benefit affair, with proceeds given to the Sisters of Mercy and their St. Xavier girls’ college on the South Side. Benefit games were not a frequent occurrence in college football at this time, even amongst Catholic schools, although Loyola and DePaul did play at least three before the effects of the Depression set in. One newspaper reported that the Sisters of Mercy “sponsored” this 1929 game and that the “entire proceeds” would go toward their building fund, which suggests that the Sisters likely underwrote the stadium rental cost. Pregame reporting had anticipated a large crowd, and, to the satisfaction of everyone and with the newspapers agreeing on the turnout for a change, nearly 50,000 fans showed up on November 3 for the Sunday game.

The next year, however, would bring considerable disappointment for Loyola football. The effects of the stock market crash of late 1929 were already being felt on the campus in early 1930. At the same time, the fallout from

the notorious Carnegie Report of October 1929 cast a pall over the athletic program. Commissioned by reformers within the college world, a team from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching had spent more than three years studying the athletic practices of schools across the country. In their highly publicized report, a substantial number of colleges were identified as participating in the over-emphasis, commercialization, and professionalism of sport, football in particular. While Loyola was not specifically mentioned in the report, Father Kelley grew deeply concerned over the implications of building a new stadium, adding greater competition and more travel to the football schedules, and the subsidizing of athletes with scholarship assistance. Soon after the release of the Carnegie Report, Kelley stated in a letter, “I believe we have to look forward to a change of policy in the conduct of Intercollegiate Athletics.”

When the 1930 season was underway with new head coach Edwin J. Norton, it soon became clear that the onfield talent for Loyola was not up to the tougher schedule, resulting in a disappointing record of 2–6–1. What would prove to be the last varsity football victory ever for Loyola came on November 7, when Tom Howland broke away on an eighty-two-yard touchdown run that gave the Ramblers a 7–6 win at St. Louis University. In the last game of the season, played on November 21 at Loyola Stadium before a crowd of about 5,000 fans, the Ramblers battled to a 7–7 tie with South Dakota State as Howland scored the final touchdown in school history and Frank Lutzenkirchen kicked the last extra point.

The end for Loyola football came suddenly on December 4, 1930, when Father Kelley announced that the university was dropping the intercollegiate sport, effective immediately. His statement read, in part, It is only after mature consideration that Loyola University has adopted this policy. We believe that football as it is now administered at Loyola, and also quite generally in other colleges and universities, does not serve the chief purpose for which athletics should be fostered in schools, namely, for the sound health and physical development of the entire student body. . . . It is our belief that the interest and appeal of these spectacular games are getting away from the colleges and universities and their students, and are being centered on the public. The university has no hostility to football as a sport but considers that it has been overemphasized to the detriment of both the game and the school.

Father Robert Kelley’s (left) decision to drop varsity football caused controversy on campus.

This was all talk straight from the pages of the Carnegie Report. A short time later Loyola would discontinue all scholarship assistance based strictly on athletic participation.

Kelley’s decision stunned and angered Loyola students, who held large gatherings the night of the The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 61

A record crowd of 44,000 perused this game program during DePaul’s 13–0 upset over Niagara in 1928.

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announcement at various halls and dormitories around the campus. While plans were made to petition the school to reconsider the move, angrier students talked of staging classroom strikes. Yet less than a week later the Loyola student newspaper’s story on dropping football was straightforward in reporting Kelley’s action and statements, taking no editorial position on the issue.

Some Chicago newspaper commentary wondered at the timing of Kelley’s action, given that the school had just played two seasons of ambitious football schedules against major foes, had built a new concrete stadium with lights, was promoting college football on Friday nights, and had more than doubled its home game attendance and gate receipts during the past season. While the Depression would force many universities to cut back on their intercollegiate athletic programs during the 1930s, no other major football-playing school would drop the sport as a result of the Carnegie Report. In a letter to another priest just two days after his announcment, Father Kelley wrote: “I began to realize more vividly that I had done a rather brave deed in going counter to prevailing views in athletic matters.” College and university leaders around the region all cautiously said that this was an individual decision for Loyola that none of them saw any need to contemplate for their own schools.

After one full school year without football, Kelley was able to announce that for the first time in school history, “by reason of discontinuing football,” Loyola had managed to balance its athletic budget. He pointed out that with football in place the university had been incurring average losses of $25,000 over each of the previous five years and that the savings “surpassed our fondest expectations.” Later Father Kelley would sum up the affair by saying that football at Loyola had been dropped for “financial, educational and moral reasons.” And so the game at Loyola was gone.

After the dismal season of 1927, DePaul continued to play schedules that bordered on the fringes of major college football. In the late 1920s the school’s athletic administration decided that old DePaul Field was no longer suitable for attracting the number of fans needed to make the football program profitable, and so the Blue Demons began playing most home games at off-campus locations around the city. In 1928 DePaul hosted Niagara University at Soldier Field, the proceeds going toward building an addition onto the John B. Murphy Memorial Hospital that was operated by the Sisters of Mercy. That day the Blue Demons, behind the dazzling ball carrying and forward passing of halfback Skeet Byers, rolled to a 13–0 win before a turnout of approximately 44,000 fans—the largest football crowd in school history to that point.

After DePaul climbed to four wins in 1930, including the series-capping 6–0 victory over Loyola, the 1931 season produced the second-best football team in school history. A highlight of the season came in the annual homecoming game on a Friday night at Mills Stadium which was located at Lake Street and Kilpatrick Avenue on Chicago’s West Side. With a reported crowd of nearly 15,000 fans looking on, halfback Matty Steffen—a nephew of former University of Chicago great Walter Steffen—ran wild and scored three touchdowns, leading the Blue Demons to a 34–20 win over South Dakota State that extended DePaul’s record to 6–1–0. Four days later a traveling party of thirty-five, including twentyeight players, left by train for a two-game road trip west that unfortunately brought defeats at the hands of the universities of Arizona and San Francisco, with a few days in Los Angeles to rest and practice between games.

The 1931 trip to the West brought to a close the reign of Eddie Anderson at DePaul. In the spring of 1932 he resigned as the head football coach so that he

Matty Steffen, who starred for the Blue Demons in the early 1930s, ran for DePaul’s sole score in this 1931 loss to San Francisco.

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Intent on the action, DePaul’s coaching staff (including head coach Jim Kelly, second from right, and line coach Ben Connor, center) watches a 1936 game from the sideline. Right: A cartoon from the October 31, 1935, issue of the DePaulia.

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could complete his medical internship at St. Joseph’s Hospital in Chicago. In seven seasons at the head of the Blue Demons, Anderson had compiled a total record of 24–24–4. After one year away from football while finishing up his medical studies, Anderson signed on as head football coach at Holy Cross College, not far from Boston.

Jim Kelly, DePaul’s athletic director and basketball coach, took the reigns as the new football coach for 1932. While the Blue Demons compiled winning records over the next few seasons—including a 6–0–1 mark in 1933—the quality of the opposition tailed off a good deal after Anderson’s departure. The 1935 schedule represented a definite improvement with teams such as Dayton, Texas Tech, St. Louis, Catholic University, and Northwestern appearing on the slate, and the 5–2–1 record compiled by the Blue Demons impressed a lot of football followers around Chicago. Yet playing home football games at various off-campus locations, combined with effects of the Great Depression, took its toll on DePaul’s attendance figures. An attractive major opponent, Texas Tech drew only two thousand fans to Soldier Field. An article in a university publication in 1935 noted that “DePaul has vanquished the opposition and has finally won over the public press, but the biggest task of all . . . is the rousing of DePaul’s own student body and alumni.”

For the 1936 season the prestigious Illustrated Football Annual magazine mentioned the DePaul team for the first time ever in its preseason issue, predicting that the Blue Demons would be “slightly stronger than last year’s tough outfit” but calling the rugged schedule a major obstacle.

What actually unfolded in 1936 was the best football team in school history. After losing a 9–6 decision to the University of Illinois in the season opener, DePaul bounced back with a 6–0 win the next week at St. Louis as Bill Phillips scored the only touchdown. After posting a

A preview of DePaul’s football prospects appeared in the Illustrated Football Annual for the first time in 1936.

DePaul head coach Ben Connor and his staff reviewed game film from a 31–7 victory over Wichita State in the 1937 season.

7–0 win at Dayton, another tough loss came for the Blue Demons when they headed to Washington, D.C., to tangle with the strong team from Catholic University that had won the Orange Bowl the previous season. It was an exciting struggle with all the scoring coming off forward passes, but DePaul fell short with a 12–7 defeat. The Blue Demons then rattled off five straight victories, including a season-ending 13–6 win at Texas Tech, to finish with a record of 7–2–0.

After another good season in 1937 under new head coach Ben Connor, there was plenty of optimism over the Blue Demons’ chances for the 1938 season.

However, trouble loomed on the horizon for the football program, as the dismal attendance figures for home games over the past several seasons had produced a significant deficit for the school’s athletics budget. DePaul opened the 1938 season by romping past Ripon College, but then the roof fell in on the Blue Demons as they lost four straight outings. Then came the important homecoming game at Wrigley Field against Catholic University. A pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns by the visiting Cardinals produced a disappointing 14–13 loss for the Blue Demons, but far more significant was the attendance of fewer than 1,000 fans. The Chicago Tribune kindly called it a “small” crowd.

There were three more dates left on the 1938 schedule, but the die had been cast for DePaul football.

The following Saturday the Blue Demons notched what would be the final victory of their gridiron history. In their last “home” game ever, which ironically took place at Loyola Stadium, they defeated St. Louis University 20–9 on November 12. Halfback Ed Norris turned in a brilliant performance that included a forty-four-yard touchdown gallop. The last two games were played on the road, with the season—and the football program— coming to a close at Wichita University where DePaul was handed a 31–13 defeat on November 24. Halfback Tom O’Brien—holder of the Illinois State amateur The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 65

middleweight boxing championship—and Frank Jenks scored the last two touchdowns in DePaul history on runs; Jenks, a guard, registered the final six-pointer with a lateral at the end of a wild sixty-five-yard scoring play for the Blue Demons.

The final knell sounded for the DePaul football program on December 12, 1938, when the president of the university, Reverend Michael J. O’Connell, released a statement declaring that the North Side school was dropping intercollegiate football. Father O’Connell stated, “The reason for the discontinuance is a lack of sufficient student interest to justify the cost of the football program.

A greatly expanded program of intramural athletics, designed to draw the majority of students into healthful recreation, will take the place of football.” Father Howard James Ahern, the school’s athletic director, also told reporters that DePaul had been considering the abolishment of football for the past few years because of financial woes, pointing to the lack of an adequate on-campus stadium as the primary cause of the problems.

A short time later a further statement by Father O’Connell in the DePaulia noted that attendance for home football games had exceeded 30 percent of the school’s enrollment figure on only one occasion in the past five seasons, and that this tangible evidence of a lack of student support had been one of the primary reasons for dropping the sport. After mentioning the dismal turnout for the 1938 homecoming game, O’Connell added, “To play teams of the same calibre as ours necessitates traveling long distances and relatively large guarantees. To justify the expense of the program there must needs [sic] be vital action on the part of the student body. That interest has been lacking.”

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Returning only three regulars, the 1938 DePaul football squad faced a tough season. With their record dropping to 2–7 and student interest on the wane, DePaul President Michael J. O’Connell (below) decided this team would be the university’s last.

And so the efforts of Chicago’s two major Catholic universities to gather their share of the Notre Dame football experience came to an inglorious close. In late 1939 the University of Chicago would also discontinue intercollegiate football, echoing Loyola’s concerns about overemphasis of the sport. Suddenly Chicago’s college football fans were left with only Northwestern as a convenient source of entertainment at the major level.

After dropping football in 1938, DePaul quickly became widely regarded as a basketball school, a situation that would escalate from the hiring of Ray Meyer, another ex-Notre Dame player, as the head coach of the Blue Demon cage program in 1942. With Meyer’s considerable success in national tournaments in the mid1940s, including the National Invitation Tournament championship in 1945 with all-time great George Mikan at center, the university’s athletic reputation as a basketball school was sealed and the thought of resurrecting football as an intercollegiate sport never crossed anyone’s mind. As the years went on DePaul continued to invest more athletic capital in basketball, building a sparkling new arena called Alumni Hall in 1955–56 over the former site of DePaul Field where the football Red and Blue had long ago romped.

At Loyola there remained evidence of the football program for a few decades after the sport was dropped, as the concrete grandstand of old Loyola Stadium stood until well into the 1950s (the author remembers standing in the grandstand on a wintry day in the mid1950s with a cousin who lived nearby). It was used as the home field of Loyola Academy until the high school moved to suburban Wilmette in 1957. After the grandstand was finally razed the majority of the old football field remained in place with a running track around it, for use by physical education classes and intramurals, and in fact can still be seen in the center of campus although few recall its original purpose. With the demise of the football program, Loyola University evolved into a basketball school, cemented beyond doubt by capturing the 1963 NCAA men’s championship. Loyola very briefly considered the idea of returning to intercollegiate football and fielded a club team in the seasons of 1970 and 1971 but discontinued the gridiron experiment the following year.

Although DePaul followed in Loyola’s footsteps, the two schools dropped football for different reasons. DePaul cited finances and student disinterest, while Loyola’s administration bemoaned an overemphasis on football as entertainment.

The Ramblers and Blue Demons | 67

In its first season under the lights, Loyola scheduled night games for its entire home slate in 1930. Little did Loyola fans know that just the next year it would be lights out for their football program.

With college football at DePaul and Loyola at an end, the city’s Catholic football fans began to turn their loyalties and enthusiasm to the teams of their neighborhood Catholic high schools. Encouraged by the chance to test themselves against the best public school teams in the city’s increasingly popular Prep Bowl game, Chicago’s Catholic League teams soon developed into one of the premier prep football conferences in the state—a source of great and shared pride for its fans.

Yet never to be forgotten is the substantial part that the sport of college football at DePaul and Loyola played in helping to realize the church’s stated goal of fully assimilating Catholics of Chicago into the larger fabric of American society. Plenty of exciting football through the years, played by skilled athletes who sought to represent their universities with dignity, sportsmanship, and maturity, ensured the teams of DePaul and Loyola a lasting place in Chicago’s sporting history and the lore of Catholic college football.

Raymond Schmidt is the author of four books on sport histor y topics and is the executive director of the College Football Historical Society.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection unless otherwise noted. 46–47, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 48, ICHi-30445; 49–50, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 51, HB-00233; 52, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 53, SDN-054672; 54, The Inter Ocean, 5 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2009

November 1911; 55, ICHi-32311; 56, top and center, courtesy of Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections, bottom, DN-0082786; 57, top, Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections, center, LD1598.D4, bottom, SDN-67097; 58, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 59, Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections; 60, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 61, Chicago Evening Post, 5 December 1930, inset, Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections; 62–65, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 65, bottom, GV940.13; 66, courtesy of DePaul University, Special Collections and Archives Department, Chicago, Illinois; 67, Chicago Daily News, 12 December 1938; 68, Loyola University Chicago Archives and Special Collections.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on football as played by America’s Catholic colleges, see James Whalen, Gridiron Greats Now Gone: The Heyday of 19 Former Consensus Top-20 College Football Programs (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, 1991) and Raymond Schmidt, Shaping College Football: The Transformation of an American Sport, 1919–1930 (Syracuse University Press, 2007). A discussion of the relationship of University of Notre Dame football to other Catholic schools and American Catholicism can be found in Murray Sperber, Shake Down the Thunder: The Creation of Notre Dame Football (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1993). The evolution and significance of Chicago’s high school city championship football game is discussed thoroughly in Gerald R. Gems, “The Prep Bowl: Football and Religious Acculturation in Chicago, 1927–1963,” Journal of Sport History, Vol. 23, No. 3 (North American Society for Sport History, 1996): 284–302.