Chicago History | Winter 2018

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor in Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen On the cover: Lake View High School athletes compete in a hurdles event at Grant Park Stadium (later renamed Soldier Field), Chicago, 1924. SDN-065072

Copyright 2018 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Photography Timothy Paton Jr.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

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The Honorable Rahm Emanuel Mayor, City of Chicago

TRUSTEES

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Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy, Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Timothy P. Moen Robert J. Moore Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Larry C. Selander Paul L. Snyder TRUSTEES EMERITUS

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The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chicago Park District on behalf of the people of Chicago.

Chicago

H I STORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Winter 2018 VOLUME XLII, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 22 44 60

Giving Wings to the Pursuit of Excellence Richard C. Lindberg

A Playground for the People Rosemary K. Adams

Nelson Algren and Polonia’s Revenge Mary Wisniewski

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

The Cook County Normal School photographed in 1870, possibly on the occasion of its formal dedication, September 22. According to a notation on the reverse, Daniel S. Wentworth, the school’s first principal, is reported to be the figure to the extreme left.

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Giving Wings to the Pursuit of Excellence The challenging formative decades of the Normal School reveal the historic strength and resilience of Chicago’s teacher training institutions.

RICHARD C. LINDBERG

orace Mann believed that in a just and equitable world access to higher education should not be a privilege entitled to those possessing the means to pay but a universal right guaranteed to all. The New England politician and lawyer became the father of the American “common school” movement, the earliest effort to professionalize teacher training through the establishment of “normal schools.”

A novice to the field of education, Mann used the École Normale Supérieure (Normal Superior School), established in Paris in 1794, as his model. He envisioned bringing together the sons and daughters of farmers, mechanics, and unskilled laborers with children of privilege in a nonsectarian public school system common to all people. He articulated his philosophy in his Common School Journal, launched in 1838, and implemented the first state-funded normal school in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1839. His efforts to build respect for the profession, lobby municipalities to properly compensate teachers, and build suitable public schools were met with firm resistance in both rural and urban areas where education of the young was subordinated to earning a livelihood.

The normal school ideal, nonetheless, pushed westward into the frontier settlements of the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes, but it would take many years before the City of Chicago recognized and fully embraced the concept of teacher training. The Illinois General Assembly carved out the boundaries of Cook County on January 15, 1831. Colonel Richard J. Hamilton became the region’s first commissioner of school lands, and he appropriated to John Watkins, the county’s first officially recognized teacher, a twelve-foot-square horse stable to serve as the first schoolhouse.

Then, in September 1833, twenty-six-year-old Eliza Emily Chappell from Geneseo, New York, opened an “infant school” for children up to age twelve in a converted log house on South Water Street, a few hundred feet from the old Fort Dearborn. The following year, after Chappell had proven her abilities to the satisfaction of

H

“My law books are for sale!” Horace Mann (above) wrote to a friend on July 2, 1837. “My office is to let! . . . I have abandoned jurisprudence and betaken myself to the larger sphere of mind and morals.”

the townspeople, her school was relocated to the First Presbyterian Church, on the west side of Clark Street between Lake and Randolph.

Historians have long disputed Watkins’s boastful claim that he had been appointed Chicago’s first teacher.

Instead, Chappell is widely recognized as the area’s first bona fide public school teacher, because her school received direct financial support from the public school fund to meet operating expenses. Significantly, Chappell’s Chicago Normal School | 5

Eliza Chappell is widely considered to be Cook County’s first public school teacher. She later married Jeremiah Porter, an early Presbyterian minister in Chicago and Green Bay, Wisconsin.

infant school also marked the first educational program in the region to provide rudimentary training for students looking to become teachers in the common schools that were just beginning operation. Twelve young ladies aspiring to the profession were awarded tuition-free education, provisions, and residence in Chappell’s home on LaSalle Street while she was away.

Inspired by Chappell’s example and the growing sense that teaching was a worthy profession, a movement to inculcate normal school training into public education took form and substance in the 1850s.1 In 1855, Superintendent of Schools John C. Dore informed the Chicago Common Council: It has been difficult of late to obtain female teachers of requisite qualifications to fill vacancies as fast as they occur in the primary and grammar schools. It is proposed to form a high school expressly to qualify young ladies to teach. The high school will thus afford to the city all the advantages of an independent normal school and avoid the necessity of relying upon the East for teachers by educating its own.

Aldermen appropriated $33,000 to erect a four-story, ten-classroom high school at 754 West Monroe Street (between Union Avenue and Halsted Street) designed 6 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

by acclaimed architect John Mills Van Osdel, who allotted one room on the third floor to serve as the “normal department.”2 After the Civil War, higher education in Chicago steadily progressed with the addition of three branch high schools in the North, West, and South Divisions.

Yet, to meet increased demand for teachers to serve in the towns and villages coalescing around railroad trunk lines across Cook County, many advocated for a free standing normal school.

The earliest stirring of interest for such a school came in 1859 with the election of John Frederick Eberhart as the first Cook County superintendent of schools.

Eberhart was dismayed by the quality of instruction dispensed by the graduates of the Chicago High School, who failed to demonstrate to his satisfaction a comprehensive knowledge of the sciences, liberal arts, the classics, or historical subject matter and whom he castigated in official reports as “incompetent and undisciplined.”

He crafted a proposal with E. J. Whitehead, the buoyant young attorney heading the Committee on Education, to introduce a resolution to the Cook County Board of Supervisors for a $2,500 appropriation to begin an experimental normal school within the county. The board took up Whitehead’s proposal in a closed-door session on September 13, 1866, when it was resolved: “That the County Superintendent be requested to investigate and report at the next meeting of the Board upon the advisability and practicality of establishing a County Normal School.” The motion, adopted with minimal opposition, created preliminary plans.3 The next step, the most critical of all, dealt with site location and the appropriation of funds. The board did not favor the expenditure of monies for a new building and looked toward a more practical and economically feasible solution, soliciting proposals from towns and villages outside the central city that would welcome the start-up of the Normal University in an existing building.

It awarded its first two-year contract to the pastoral town of Blue Island, then a whistle-stop along the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad. The Blue Island community high school and the Normal University were bundled together under one roof—not an enviable arrangement. The county guaranteed free tuition to local residents willing to sign an agreement to enter the teaching profession upon completion of their studies; nonresidents were required to pay a thirty-dollar annual fee. Overcrowding was immediately apparent, as thirty-five students registered for the Normal Department and sixty-two for the high school. Despite counterproposals and furious protest from dismayed Blue Island officials, the board reopened the bid process on August 10, 1868.

The commercially prominent community of Englewood, lying within the town of Lake, offered

advantages competing townships could not. The Rock Island and Eastern Illinois railroad lines maintained stations on the northeast end of the proposed Normal Park campus that connected to Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station and central business corridor. This consideration reflected boosters’ confident belief that Chicago would eventually annex Englewood, which occurred in 1889.

The addition of the Wentworth Avenue and Halsted Street trolley lines bolstered the case for Englewood, and local promoters enhanced the deal by putting up $25,000 and twenty acres of land. The Englewood agreement was announced to the press on March 20, 1869. To appease the resentful Blue Island backers, board members authorized $5,000 to cover the expenses of vacating the premises and relocation.

Amid sharp press criticism and divided public opinion concerning the construction of a costly building dedicated solely to teacher training, the opening sessions convened inside Englewood’s Lewis-Champlin School in 1869 while architects and builders negotiated a workable construction schedule. Builders set the cornerstone of the new Cook County Normal School at Sixty-Eighth Street and Wright (later Stewart) Avenue on September 16, 1869, and formally dedicated the completed structure a year later on September 22, 1870. The elegant, well-appointed brick

John Frederick Eberhart, Cook County’s first superintendent of schools, founded the South Side residential community Chicago Lawn and later became one of the first life members of the National Teachers’ Association.

This photograph, c. 1900, captures the corner of Halsted and Sixty-Third Streets in Englewood’s bustling business district. A. L. Straus Collection Chicago Normal School | 7

The Normal School catalogue for 1881–82 (above) also outlined the conditions of admission, including “evidence of good moral character” and an examination to demonstrate “fair proficiency” in reading, spelling, abbreviations, Roman numerals, grammar, geography, the history of the United States, and arithmetic.

edifice pleased Englewood residents. The building featured first-class accommodations, from the first steamheated plant in the area to desks supplied by one of Chicago’s finest furniture retailers.

The normal school movement represented a fundamental shift in American education. Until Horace Mann promoted his theories and John Eberhart put them into practice locally, it was common belief that anyone who could read and cipher well enough to impress farmers and factory workers was adequately prepared to teach others to do the same. The normal school championed the notion that in order to teach systemically and skillfully, professional training should be the natural prerequisite.

Superintendent Eberhart selected Daniel Sanborn Wentworth, a New England educator with a sympathetic heart and firm resolve, to advance the progressive curriculum as the school’s first principal. The five-member Committee on Education had unanimously approved Wentworth’s appointment in June 1867. Wentworth skillfully guided the Cook County Normal School through a 8 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

remarkable formative period. “The social spirit of the school was much ahead of the times,” recalled alumna Cora Lewis in her 1906 reminiscence of attending the Normal School in the 1870s. She attributed much of the credit to Wentworth: “Probably his most noticeable quality was balance and fine judgment. He helped us build up our ideals. He was never mute in making standards of worth.” Supporters praised him for never turning away a student of good character and ambition if the only obstacle was finding the means to come up with tuition money. In one of his toughest challenges, Wentworth coaxed the vacillating school board, ever attuned to taxpayers and fiscal conservatives, for a suitable outlay to construct a boarding house with dormitory space for the expanding student population, numbering 403 by March of 1873.

Over the next decade, student enrollment swelled. As the Elegant Eighties dawned, Robert Clark, the new president of the Cook County Board of Education, estimated that the cash value of the grounds and institution had

Students’ Hall (above) opened in September 1877, housing forty-six students in its first year. By 1880, the number of residents rose to 158.

Monthly room rent ranged from seventy-five cents to one dollar, and the era’s average weekly board payment was $2.12.

increased to $350,000. Even Wentworth’s most bitter opponents eventually conceded that he had proven a capable administrator and money manager, despite repeated accusations of being a spendthrift. Suffering the debilitating effects of lifelong asthma attacks, Daniel Wentworth collapsed in his Englewood home on June 6, 1882. The beloved principal had firmly succeeded, enabling this “noble educational experiment” to transform into an educational institution, despite interference from Chicago’s politicians, budgetary shortfalls, and periodic economic downturns.

The Cook County Board of Education hired renowned educator Colonel Francis Wayland Parker, superintendent of public schools in Quincy, Massachusetts, to succeed Wentworth on July 2, 1883.

The appointment ushered in a remarkable era of theoretical experimentation, enlightenment, and progressive ideals that drew international attention to the Cook County Normal School. Parker rejected the traditional, outmoded curriculum of rote instruction (mem-

orization and recital). The mission of the school, he argued, would be to promote “character development and democratic social order. Our duty is to know the child and supply conditions for his highest growth.”4 In the estimation of educator, philosopher, and psychologist John Dewey, founder of the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Parker’s dominant intelligence and personal magnetism served the profession well. He was, in Dewey’s own words, “the father of progressive education.”

Parker shared Dewey’s belief that a child’s writing should be his or her own—a natural expression linked to meaningful activities. He advocated that each child should be given his or her own writing instruments to compose freely, without censure or fear of making mistakes, and introduced music and drawing into the curriculum. His stewardship of the Cook County Normal School represented the first systemic attempt to relate all modes of expression (drawing, speech, writing, music, and gesturing) into one organic whole. Parker believed: Chicago Normal School | 9

“All expression must be genuine, must be a genuine reflex of the image aroused and united by observation.

The products of observation are carried over to the action of the imagination.”5 But even the father of progressive education confronted a firestorm of opposition from skeptical politicians, who viewed Parker’s occasionally boisterous classrooms as unrefined chaos and his liberal theories an existential threat to sacred tradition, bordering on heresy. He launched a Manual Training Department at his own expense and planted a vegetable garden behind the school that the more “prestigious academicians” found offensive to traditional learning. In the murky waters of Cook County politics, unchecked graft of the board in the lamentable 1880s further undermined Parker’s credibility. These dismal years of wanton corruption carried on behind the closed doors without Parker’s knowledge sparked a crisis that threatened to undo his achievements and sully the reputation of the entire Normal School operation.

During the Civil War, Francis Parker rose from buck private in the Fourth New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry to lieutenant colonel under the command of General William T. Sherman in his conquest of Georgia and the Carolinas.

Colonel Parker (front row at center) and the Normal School faculty and graduating class of 1897, near the end of his tenure at the school.

10 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Colonel Parker’s progressive concept of childhood learning (illustrated above) resembles some contemporary teaching methods.

Chicago Normal School | 11

The stunning misappropriations of tax monies under the direction of downtown gambler and Democratic Party political chieftain Michael Cassius McDonald came to the fore in the pages of the Chicago Daily News over a period of months in 1886 and 1887. McDonald’s handpicked cronies awarded lavish contracts to supply myriad unnecessary goods and services to the school that far exceeded the annual appropriation. The loose manner characterizing the expenditures of public money impacted not just the school but nearly all county-run agencies, from the insane asylum to the alms house, the hospital to the county jail. McDonald’s flunkies skimmed a variable percentage of the grossly escalated fees that they submitted, believing that no one would uncover the fraud or question their dubious procurement process.

The Union League Club of Chicago aligned with the Citizen’s Association and the Daily News, the only truly nonpartisan newspaper in the city at that time, investigated matters more thoroughly. Through their jointly published revelations in the early months of 1887, the Daily News introduced into Chicago parlance the treacherous term “boodling,” embezzlement elevated to an art by that generation of county board commissioners. Six were sentenced to terms of varying lengths in the Illinois State Penitentiary following full disclosure of the exchange of money and influence. The physical maintenance and alleged fiscal mismanagement of the Normal School campus was drawn into sharper focus during courtroom testimony, leaving Colonel Parker exposed to accusations that he was at least aware of the rapacious squandering of public funds.6 This man of remarkable vigor and energy withstood the unfounded charges, but even as his reputation grew nationally, he failed to silence city hall critics and Mayor Carter Henry Harrison II’s leveling accusations of antiintellectualism. The stormy history of the Normal School took a surprising new turn on December 10, 1895, when the press first reported that owing to its depleted financial coffers, the Cook County board could no longer fund teacher salaries, forcing Parker and his staff to work without compensation through the winter. The depression that gripped Chicago and much of the nation following the close of the world’s fair of 1893 had taken a severe toll on educational resources.

A committee of five, including the former board of education president Alfred S. Trude, a prominent city attorney and onetime legal advisor and confidante to Mike McDonald, considered a proposal to transfer the While most American schools stressed rote memorization and strict discipline, the Chicago Normal School method advocated for problem solving and student participation. Here, students in grade four conduct a temperature testing activity, c. 1900.

12 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Chicago Normal School | 13

The new Chicago Normal School, colloquially known as the Dome, stood at West Sixty-Eighth Street and South Stewart Avenue. Above: The building photographed during construction in 1905. Below: The title page from the program of its formal dedication in April 1906.

school to the Chicago Board of Education. The situation in Englewood was dire. If the city refused to take control of the Normal School, it would be converted into a school for dependent boys, in other words, an orphanage.

Privately, the Chicago Board of Education did not look upon the prospect of inheriting Colonel Parker and his “radical methods” with any great favor, and therefore withheld its acceptance of the “gift of the school” until Parker and his staff agreed to submit their resignations.

Rising to his defense, Marion Foster Washburne of the Chicago Women’s Club published a series of articles in the Chicago Evening Post, Chicago Herald, and other publications outlining the “educational crisis of Chicago” and the existence of a fundamental conflict between educational methods. Civic elites—including William Rainey Harper, Bertha Honoré Palmer, Jane Addams, Ellen Henrotin of the Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, William James, Woman’s Christian Temperance Union founder Frances Willard, and John Dewey—came out strongly in favor of Parker’s retention and a seamless transfer to the Board of Education.

For the moment, the fate of the Normal School hung in the balance. The proposed transfer hinged on the final vote of the Chicago Board of Education. The commissioners met in closed-door session on January 29, 1896.

Against formidable odds, the measure passed, and the county board formally ratified by the vote on February 10.

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Policy changes were immediate. The Board of Education renamed it the Chicago Normal School and moved quickly to impose objectionable but effective measures to bar non-Chicago residents from enrolling.

Mayor Harrison and his advisors endeavored to oust Parker, eliminate his hefty $5,000 per annum salary, and rid the school of his “study fads.” Tiring of the endless political wrangles and looking ahead to brighter vistas, Parker submitted his letter of resignation on May 29, 1899, to join Dewey and other educational progressives to launch the Francis W. Parker Academic School, the latest “laboratory of ideas” that is today the Francis W. Parker School located at 330 West Webster Street in Chicago’s Lincoln Park.7 The practice of barring students from outside of Illinois from enrolling in the Normal School came to an end on October 26, 1905, almost immediately upon the ascension of Dr. Ella Flagg Young, the school’s most distinguished alumna (class of 1862), as principal. The removal of admission barriers was seen as the first step toward raising the institution to the educational level of a state university. Amid pervasive criticism, construction of a building to replace the outdated 1870 structure finished in September 1905, two weeks after Young took up her duties as principal. A $500,000 financial appropriation paid for the main building, the attached Normal Practice

Ella Flagg Young (c. 1909) promoted a progressive vision of public education to meet the needs of urban children. Photograph by Jarvis Weed

As principal of the Chicago Normal School, Young oversaw the Normal Practice School (above, 1909) where prospective teachers acquired the requisite skills of the profession and taught the theories she developed while working with John Dewey.

Chicago Normal School | 15

School, and the nearby Yale Practice School. The large, functional main building accommodated more than a thousand students. Generations of finely trained, aspiring teachers dubbed it the Dome.

Young, mentored by Dewey at the University of Chicago, enjoyed universal support from the faculty and was a popular and gifted administrator during her abbreviated four-year term as Normal School principal (1905–09).8 The emotional discord of previous years had all but evaporated by 1906, and her willingness to further the cause of her students and teachers working throughout the system garnered respect and gratitude. In her many public appearances, Young advocated for continuous citywide educational reforms and campaigned with School Superintendent Edwin G. Cooley to remove teacher appointments from the hands of patronage-dispensing politicians. Institutional patronage in the form of jobs and favors cemented the political loyalties of voters to the party in power, most often the Chicago Democrats. Young made a plea to the board for greater equality, proposing to do away with gender segregation in industrial training and pushing for establishing classes for girls in the boys’ technical high schools. Although her time in Englewood was short, Young built upon the work of Colonel Parker, advancing the mission of educational experimentation and innovation.

With the sudden resignation of Superintendent Cooley in July 1909, the board of education moved quickly to replace him with Young. Her unanimous selection came

The class song printed in this 1913 commencement program described students as “[partaking] of the knowledge, kindly imparted, by teachers of worth” and then “[joining] in the ranks of the trainers of childhood.”

Throughout the 1910s, the manual arts remained a focus of the Normal School and an important part of Chicago’s public school curriculum.

Above: Normal School students tend to a garden, 1917.

16 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

after five other candidates were interviewed and found wanting. Young’s appointment marked the first time a woman occupied the post of superintendent of education in Chicago or in any comparably large US metropolis.

Entrusted with the education and well-being of some 300,000 Chicago pupils, Young, visible and high profile, navigated through the entrenched bureaucracy and murky waters of city politics. She made impressive strides before submitting her resignation on December 10, 1913.

In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Normal School served as the primary incubator for career-minded elementary school teachers. It filled the hiring pipeline of the Chicago Public Schools with qualified, highly prepared young women who entered into the profession with the clear understanding that should marriage and children interfere with the job, their resignation would be expected. The Normalite yearbook listed only three male graduates in the class of 1913; in the lower junior class of September 1912, only two out of 162 enrolled students were men.9 This absence of gender diversity underscored the prescribed roles assigned to women during that era. By the mid-1920s—a time when barriers to employment showed hopeful signs of breaking down as liberalized societal attitudes slowly changed American life in unprecedented ways—the number of male students on campus substantially

increased. By 1926, one hundred men had enrolled in the college; enough to support a viable intramural men’s athletic program.

The Chicago Normal School adapted a new course of study in 1926, dividing the academic year into four tenweek semesters, one of Young’s proposed reforms. The school, however, made no substantive change to the three-year curriculum for prospective elementary school teachers—selecting not to adopt the four-year course of study offered by State of Illinois Normal Colleges in Macomb, Charleston, DeKalb, and Carbondale, where a majority of high school teachers assigned to Chicago received college training. Dr. William Bishop Owen, who succeeded Young as principal, was unable to fulfill his higher ambition to produce qualified high school teachers. The Normal School’s unbroken mission in the 1920s and 1930s boiled down to a numbers game: delivering a reliable and steady stream of elementary school teachers to fill empty classrooms. Although enrollment climbed and six hundred students graduated in 1927, the board ignored recommendations for policy change.

The Englewood campus would not adapt a curriculum for high-school teachers until the 1950s.

By the late 1920s, many of the old normal schools were just beginning their conversion to liberal arts universities. Decades later, at a 1957 meeting of the American

By the 1920s, Englewood had become a thriving urban neighborhood. Here, pedestrians, automobiles, and streetcars crowd the intersection of Sixty-Third and Halsted Streets in 1928.

Chicago Normal School | 17

In 1938, the Board of Education approved a proposal to convert the Chicago Normal School into a four-year college. The newly renamed Chicago Teachers College (above in 1940) also included an elementary school, high school, and junior college. The Normal Park campus remained in use until November 1972.

Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, Professor Karl W. Bigelow of Columbia University predicted that “the teacher’s college is going to turn out to have been a temporary phenomenon in American higher education” to be replaced, he said, “by the state college with teacher training as one of its many functions.” This was to be the shape of the future, but for the moment, the Great Depression ushered in nothing but hardship and misery in public education circles.

The economic calamity befalling Wall Street on October 29, 1929, nearly devastated the fortunes of the Chicago Normal School as the decade turned. Student enrollment had soared throughout the Roaring Twenties.

Admissions officers and faculty were understandably proud to report that the student population climbed to 1,436, but just three months after the precipitous stock market crash, enrollment dipped by 25 percent.

Spirits sank as desperation mounted. Lewis E. Meyers, president of the Chicago Board of Education, believed closing the Chicago Normal School for one full year would be a logical first step on the road to solvency.

The proposal to shutter the doors went before a full session of the school board on December 9, 1931. “There are probably 5,000 teachers in Chicago looking for employment,” explained trustee Joseph P. Savage, a former Republican judicial candidate and a dominating presence on the 1931 board. “We have so many teachers, Normal College graduates, and university graduates, that many of them get one day’s work in two or three months.” Because of the hard times, older teachers were delaying retirement, while others who had already retired were now desperate to return to the classroom.

18 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Eileen C. Stack, president of the student council, organized 1,300 classmates and neighborhood supporters to join her in a campus protest march and mass meeting inside the assembly hall. “We will oppose any move to close the school,” principal Butler Laughlin vowed. “Seventy-five percent of the students are from parents of the laboring class. The first daughter of a family may attend school, and when she finishes she helps to support the other members of the family.” The Normalite campus newspaper published a supportive front-page editorial, “A Costly Attempt to Save Money,” in which the faculty persuasively argued that a Normal School education was not about churning out teachers to fill vacancies in city schools. There was a much bigger mission at stake—to educate productive, contributing citizens to make their mark upon society.

Through the darkest, most discouraging months of 1931 and 1932, the school remained open and campus activities continued unabated although undermined by the omnipresent threat of closure, which did not occur.

Still, payless paydays became the norm for Normal School graduates matriculating into their first teaching assignments. By November 1932, the city owed fourteen thousand teachers and four thousand other school employees $20 million in unpaid salaries (Chicago would not meet its obligations until 1933). By the fall of 1933, only 708 students had registered for classes.

The outlook for teacher education perked up by the 1935 midyear commencement exercises when 121 students graduated—three times the size from the previous year. The Depression had simply forced many families to economize by foregoing expensive out-of-

state universities or private college tuition in favor of a low-cost “commuter campus” experience on the South Side of Chicago.

May 25, 1938, marked an important turning point.

After months of deliberation and careful planning, the board of education approved a proposal to convert the Chicago Normal School into a four-year college with the authority to award the degrees of bachelor of arts and bachelor of education, commencing in the fall semester. The granting of the three-year certificate was discontinued, and the old, venerable school name scrapped in favor of Chicago Teachers College (CTC), a change consistent with national trends as normal schools across the United States gradually transitioned into state universities emphasizing a liberal arts curriculum over teacher training. 10 Four buildings—the Dome, Parker High School, Parker Elementary, and Wilson Junior College—were situated within the sprawling eighteen-acre campus at 6800 South Stewart Avenue. No longer an outpost tucked among trees, shrubbery, and scattered housing, Englewood had become a bustling residential neighborhood.11 In the post–World War II period, the city, facing enormous budget shortfalls, looked to transfer control

and operation of CTC back to the state of Illinois, an old idea hotly debated and dismissed during the Depression years that gained renewed interest. The city had taken the Cook County Normal School under its wing in the 1890s and politicized it with disappointing results, but much had changed since then, most noticeably the increase in public colleges educating teachers for classroom assignment. Board superintendent Herald Hunt called the transfer a “clear and unmistakable mandate” to relieve Chicago taxpayers from financial burden. No sooner than that, he floated another interesting proposal for the board and the Illinois legislators to ponder: the idea of merging the CTC into the University of Illinois.

For the third time in its often troubled history, CTC faced the very real possibility of extinction. This failed to pass only because University of Illinois officials were largely unenthusiastic and did not embrace a bailout as Hunt might have hoped. The scheme was shelved after university officials balked. “The teacher training field is a broad one, and I don’t think the university should get in to it,” commented Dr. Karl A. Meyer, a university trustee. “The University [of Illinois] has plenty of problems of its own!”

In June 1956, Superintendent of Schools Ben Willis unveiled a five-year expansion program for CTC North. Architects Perkins & Will created a bold, expressive design featuring a hexagonal, beehive-shaped administration building with enclosed walks leading to the bordering classrooms, auditorium, library, and gym. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing, 1962 Chicago Normal School | 19

CTC North, today’s Northeastern Illinois University, proudly opened its doors and welcomed 1,764 incoming students on September 2, 1961.

Above: Students work in the library, October 11, 1962. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing 20 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

This latest in a long line of funding crises demanded swift legislative action and financial relief—relief that did not arrive until July 1949, when the Sixty-Sixth Illinois General Assembly passed an emergency $53.2 million appropriation for the operation of the school.

Educational appropriations set an all-time record high that year. Incoming Democratic governor Adlai Stevenson II, a sympathetic ally to government-supported public education, did not stand in the way of the passage of the bill.

A three-year lobbying campaign followed, culminating in a state appropriation to reimburse the Chicago Board of Education $500,000 a year of CTC’s operating expenses beginning in 1951. A bill to double that amount passed in the April 1953 legislative session and received approval from the next governor, Republican William G. Stratton. The budgetary crisis and fiduciary stalemate had, for the moment, come to an end.

As memories of the Depression and the war receded and the 1940s closed, CTC administrators, students, and faculty braced for a future of uncertainty in the Cold War era, one filled with a unique set of trials and opportunities afforded by the arrival of the unfolding baby boom generation.12 As the birth rate skyrocketed, a growing demand for primary grade teachers assured far brighter job prospects for CTC students than those in the preceding decades. For many in this generation, CTC was the greatest hope of scaling the economic ladder for a better chance in life.

Chicago historian Richard C. Lindberg holds two degrees from Northeastern Illinois University and is the author of Northeastern Illinois University: The First 150 Years and seventeen other published volumes about Chicago history.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum. Page 4, ICHi-001461. 5, ICHi173422. 6, ICHi-173402. 7, top: ICHi-173405; bottom: ICHi093000_001. 8, left: ICHi-173412; right: ICHi-173415. 9, ICHi-173403. 10, top: ICHi-026547; bottom: ICHi-173404.

11, ICHi-173408. 12–13: ICHi-017874. 14, top: DN0002382; bottom: ICHi-173406. 15, top: ICHi-013108; bottom: DN-0054975. 16, top: ICHi-173409; bottom: DN0067959. 17, DN-0084923. 18, ICHi-173410. 19, HB-25852.

20, HB-25852-Q. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Alfred T. Andreas’s three-volume History of Chicago (1884–86; repr., New York: Arno Press, 1975) provides excellent information about the history of public education in Chicago. For a narrative history of the early founding of the Normal School, see Chester C. Dodge, Reminiscences of a School Master (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour Co., 1941). Several of Francis Wayland Parker’s published volumes are still in print and available for purchase on Amazon. Additionally, the Chicago History Museum’s collection contains a wealth of material—photograph, manuscript, and published—related to his life and career.

For more on the “Boodle Case” of 1885–87 with a discussion of the Normal School, see Richard C. Lindberg, The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009).

ENDNOTES 1. Alfred T. Andreas, History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time, vol.

1 (New York: Arno Press, 1975).

2. Dale Allen Guyre, The Chicago Schoolhouse: High School Architecture and Educational Reform, 1856–2006 (Chicago: Center For American Places, 2011). Also “Chicago High School,” Chicago Tribune, February 22, 1856.

Chicago (New York and London: D. Appleton Century Company, 1936).

5. Edmund W. Kearney, 100: Chicago State College, a Centennial Retrospective (Chicago: Chicago State College, 1969).

6. Richard C. Lindberg, The Gambler King of Clark Street: Michael C. McDonald and the Rise of Chicago’s Democratic Machine (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University

3. “Board of Supervisors—the Normal School,” Chicago Tribune, September 14, 1866.

9. Chicago Normal School Emblem (yearbook), (Chicago: Chicago Normal School, 1913).

10. David F. Labarbee, “An Uneasy Relationship: The History of Teacher Education in the University,” in The Handbook of Research on Teacher Education: Enduring Issues in Changing Contexts, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: Association of Teacher Educators, 2008).

Press, 2009).

7. Mary Agnes Riley, “A History of the

11. “Vote to Convert Normal College to Four Years,” Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1938.

Chicago Normal School, 1856–1906” 4. Francis W. Parker, Talks on Teaching at the Martha’s Vineyard Summer Institute, July 17–August 19, 1882 (New York: E. L. Kellogg & Company, 1885). Also Katherine Camp Mayhew and Anna Camp Edwards, The Dewey School: The Laboratory School of the University of

(unpublished graduate thesis, University of Chicago, 1914).

8. John T. McManis, Ella Flagg Young and a

12. “Teachers College Seeks to Fill Growing Needs,” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1952.

“Why Student Prefers Teacher’s College,” Chicago Tribune, May 6, 1954.

Half-Century of the Chicago Public Schools (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2008).

Chicago Normal School | 21

A Playground for the People ROSEMARY K. ADAMS

M

ost Chicagoans consider Soldier Field as the home of the Chicago Bears. The Monsters of the Midway, however, have called the stadium theirs for only forty-six years. Between 1924 and 1971, millions of Chicagoans regularly attended events at Soldier Field: high school, college, and professional sports competitions, religious gatherings, patriotic rallies, and civic and political demonstrations. Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey infamously boxed each other there in 1927. The 1933–34 A Century of Progress International Exposition held its opening ceremonies at Soldier Field. American icons such as Charles Lindbergh, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took to its stage. The Chicago Cardinals (the city’s “other” football team) played there, as did the Bears occasionally when they were not at their then-home base of Wrigley Field. Interestingly, perhaps more than other single event, Soldier Field hosted dozens of recreations of the most iconic event in the city’s history: the Great Chicago Fire.

The building may no longer be listed as a national historic landmark, but as a venue and gathering place for diverse Chicagoans for nearly one hundred years, it remains central to the city’s identity.

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In 1920, at the request of the South Park Commission, Chicago architectural firm Holabird & Roche presented its design for a municipal stadium on the city’s lakefront.

In 1909, Daniel Burnham’s Plan of Chicago had called for a stadium at the approximate location of Soldier Field. ICHi-174027

Views of Municipal Grant Park Stadium, renamed Soldier Field in 1926, looking south (above) and west (right) during construction on July 12, 1924. Chicago voters approved a $2.5 million bond issue for the project in the early 1920s, but costs greatly exceeded expectations.

The city eventually spent $8.5 million to complete the venue. DN-0077235, DN-0077234

Soldier Field | 23

Above: The stadium had several official opening ceremonies. On November 27, 1926, it was officially named Soldier Field to honor American veterans of World War I. The big attraction of that day was the Annual Army–Navy football game, which was typically held on the East Coast and which city officials had rallied hard to host. More than 100,000 fans attended the game, which ended in a 21–21 tie. ICHi-024692 Below: West Point cadets stand at attention during the event. DN-0082462

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Above: Lake View High School hurdlers Norma Zilk, Margaret Sheffield, and Elizabeth Sheffield competing in a track and field meet at Municipal Grant Park Stadium, 1924. Many high schools held track and field events at the stadium. The Field Museum of Natural History looms to the north of the stadium. SDN-065072 Below: From its earliest years, Soldier Field brought winter sports, including ski jumping, to the lakefront and to all Chicagoans. View of Soldier Field from the top of a ski jump (note the ski jumper in mid-flight), c. 1930. ICHi-035692

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Opposite: One of the most highly attended events at Soldier Field was the 1926 International Eucharistic Congress, which attracted a crowd of more than 200,000. Worshippers stand and kneel before a domed altar during a mass performed inside the stadium. DN-0081736

Above: Charles A. Lindbergh became a celebrated American hero when he completed the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight in May 1927.

Lindbergh spoke that year before an adoring crowd of Chicagoans at Soldier Field. DN-0083855

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Opposite: Program for the world’s heavyweight championship fight between reigning champion Gene Tunney and challenger Jack Dempsey. The fight, a rematch of the championship that took place in September 1926 in Philadelphia, attracted widespread attention.

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Top and left: Tunney, in white trunks, dominated the fight before a crowd of 104,943 for the first six rounds. In round seven, Dempsey, in black trunks, unleased a fusillade of punches that knocked Tunney to the floor. Referee Dave Barry waited until Dempsey returned to his corner before he began counting, giving Tunney time to recover. Tunney won the fight by decision and retained his title, but the match remains controversial and is known as the Long Count Fight. ICHi-030494, ICHi-035629 Soldier Field | 29

Above: Soldier Field hosted many rodeos over the years. Silent-film star Tom Mix brought his popular show to the stadium in 1929, where he taught rope skills and tricks to aspiring cowboys. DN-0085658 Right: A policeman makes a daring motorcycle jump during a police meet at Soldier Field, 1929, one of the many displays of skill and heroics Chicagoans found in the stadium’s offerings. For several decades, police and firemen held meets at Soldier Field to demonstrate their athleticism and raise money for charity. DN-0089272

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Above: Soldier Field hosted many college football games over the decades, including the rivalry between Wisconsin and Notre Dame.

Playing before a capacity crowd on October 19, 1929, Notre Dame trounced Wisconsin 19–0.

SDN-069362 Right: Max Bendix, director of the World’s Fair 1933 Band, with his players in Soldier Field, 1933.

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Soldier Field | 31

Above: Opening ceremonies for Chicago’s A Century of Progress International Exposition, which took place in Soldier Field on May 27, 1933, lasted for more than four hours and featured elected officials, cavalry, airplanes, blimps, and bands. Although visitors thronged the fairgrounds, expected crowds never materialized in the stadium.

DN-0010965 Right: Swiss-born scientist and inventor Auguste Piccard made a number of record-breaking balloon flights to study the atmosphere and cosmic rays. As part of the 1933 world’s fair, Piccard and his team launched the hydrogen-filled stratosphere balloon, christened A Century of Progress, from Soldier Field on August 5 in an attempt to break the altitude record. The balloon took to the air soon after 3:00 A.M., but collapsed just moments later in an industrial area a few miles away (no one was injured). DN-0011013 32 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Soldier Field architects Holabird & Root (previously Holabird & Roche) commissioned Chicago-based architectural photographer Hedrich-Blessing to document their work in this striking 1940 interior view. HB-05894-D Soldier Field | 33

This aerial view shows Soldier Field’s position as a lakefront amenity for the city, nestled near cultural attractions, the Field Museum and Shedd Aquarium, and a short distance south of Grant Park. HB-05894-B 34 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Holabird & Roche’s neoclassical design featured distinctive Doric columns rising over the east and west entrances to the stadium. HBTR-37825-U

Aerial view of the Field Museum looking south toward Soldier Field, c. 1960.

Soldier Field coincided with the rise of automobile traffic in Chicago. Parking to the east of the stadium increasingly became a necessity, but it also became controversial for taking up too much lakefront property. HBSN-00890-B

Soldier Field | 35

As a sports venue, Soldier Field was unparalleled. Amateur track and field events, like the one shown here (c. 1960), were sponsored by Chicago newspapers as well as the city’s public and Catholic schools, often with large crowds in attendance. ICHi-036151

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Soldier Field | 37

Advertisement for the Prep Bowl, c. 1940. One of the most anticipated and popular football matches held in Soldier Field was the annual Prep Bowl, which pitted a public school against a Catholic school to determine the city champion.

Chicago mayors, including Edward J. Kelly, promoted the game as a way to support charitable organizations and earn political capital. ICHi-037977a

As one of the largest public venues in the city, Soldier Field was ideal to host political rallies and speeches. President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke in Chicago in 1944 during his run for an unprecedented fourth term. Because of his poor health, Roosevelt delivered his speech seated in his car. From the archives of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum, REF#61-329 38 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

This compelling view of Soldier Field at night by architectural photographers Hedrich-Blessing captures the grandeur and timelessness of the classical architecture that inspired the stadium. HB-166880-A

Soldier Field | 39

Above: Fans enjoy a midget race held in 1947.

In addition to stock car races and demolition derbies, Soldier Field featured racing for adults and children in quarter midget cars. Beginning in 1935, midget racers spun around on a cinder track, which was replaced with an oval clay track in 1941. A wooden banked track was built in the stadium for the 1939 World Champion Midget Automobile Races. ICHi-051174 Right: Souvenir program for car racing at Soldier Field, 1959. Described as Soldier Field’s “real family sport,” auto racing drew large crowds to the stadium from the mid-1930s through the 1960s. Midget cars, stock cars, and hot rods were all popular, as well as motorcycle and stunt shows. ICHi-174024 40 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. first spoke in Soldier Field in June 1964 during the Illinois Rally for Civil Rights, an event organized to celebrate the imminent passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. One of two main speakers for the event, King spoke before a crowd estimated between 50,000 and 75,000, and it was considered the second largest civil rights rally after the 1963 March on Washington. On Freedom Sunday, July 10, 1966, King spoke again at Soldier Field as part of the Chicago Freedom Movement and his efforts to make Chicago “a just and open city.� More than 30,000 people braved an intensely hot summer day to hear King speak. Afterward, he led a group to city hall where he taped his demands on the doors of the building. ICHi-068214, ICHi-034768

On June 17, 1962, evangelist Billy Graham spoke before an audience of more than 116,000 at Soldier Field, capping nineteen days of revival meetings all over the city, most of which were held at McCormick Place. ICHi-174025 Soldier Field | 41

Above: Fire! In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire, horse-drawn steam pumper fire engines were featured as part of the August 1971 Police Fire and Thrill Show, which had been a mainstay at Soldier Field since 1938. ICHi-0639557 Right: A Chicago Bear sprints toward the end zone as a crowd of more than 48,000 fans watch the Chicago Cardinals lose to the Bears 31–7 on November 29, 1959. Although the Bears played periodically at Soldier Field for decades, the team did not call it home until 1971, when it relocated from Wrigley Field.

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Nelson Algren and Polonia’s Revenge In response to Never Come Morning, Chicago’s Polish American residents launched a war against Algren that colored his views of the city for the rest of his life.

M A RY W I S N I E W S K I Editor’s note: Nelson Algren, an iconic, problematic figure in Chicago’s literary past, is best known for his raw, gritty depictions of the city and its occupants. This excerpt from Algren: A Life, a recent biography by Mary Wisniewski, explores Algren’s process of writing his second novel and the reactions upon its publication. elson Algren spent the best part of his writing life in the Polish American section of Chicago’s Northwest Side, known among mapmakers as Wicker Park and West Town but to the residents at the time as Polonia, or simply the neighborhood. Chicago had the largest Polish urban population outside of Warsaw, and about half lived in the insular enclave centered around the six-corner intersection of Division Street and Milwaukee and Ashland Avenues. The Poles had crowded out the Germans who had previously lived there, and many fine old stone mansions had been hacked into flats. It was more than just an ethnic neighborhood; it was a world—a dense community of ornate Roman Catholic cathedrals, funeral parlors, barber shops, sausage factories, tailors, restaurants, bakeries, delis, produce packers, banks, music stores, fraternal organizations, choral groups, theatrical companies, and orchestras, with four daily newspapers to cover it all.

There was the apteka selling old-world herbal concoctions as well as modern medicine for when you got sick, the adwokat, for legal advice when your son got into trouble, and ksiegarnia for buying books in your own language, often printed in the same neighborhood. The parishes of St. John Cantius, St. Stanislaus Kostka, St. Mary of the Angels, and Holy Trinity were miniature cities, offering elementary and high schools, day care, benevolence societies, and performance halls. A shopper could buy pickles out of barrels at the corner deli, choose from dozens of varieties of sausages hung on white strings from a rack over the counter, or get massive

N

“When I burn please bury me deep Somewhere on West Division Street,” wrote Nelson Algren in Never Come Morning. This portrait, c. 1949, became the cover art for Algren’s The Neon Wilderness when it was reissued in the 1980s and 1990s. Photograph by Universal History Archive/Getty Images

Algren in Chicago | 45

Chicago’s ethnic Polish population—numbering 400,000 by 1930—was concentrated on the city’s Near Northwest Side. Above: The intersection of Milwaukee, North, and Robey (later Damen Avenue) in 1929. Below: A street market near the Polish Triangle at Milwaukee, Division, and Ashland, c. 1955. Photograph by Stephen Deutch

sandwiches that were Polish versions of the po’boys Nelson ate during his time in New Orleans. Housewives wearing flowered babushkas could get duck’s blood for soup at a storefront butcher, who would slit the top off the bird’s head in front of them to assure freshness. The neighborhood developed its own musical styles—the honky and “push” polkas—quick-beat mixes of jazz and folk melodies, with the number of musicians kept tight by the narrow tavern stages. In the days before air conditioning, the sounds of accordions and clarinets, backed

by Ludwig drums from the Damen Avenue factory, would spill out from behind every gospoda’s open door.

The air was thick with the smells of rye bread, sausages, and burning coal from the factories along the Chicago River. . . .

Though he was a German Swedish Jew whose only Polish connection was his estranged wife, Algren loved the neighborhood. It was familiar because his mother’s family had lived there long ago, but it was also like going 46 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

In the spring of 1940, Algren was living alone near the Polish Triangle at 1907 West Evergreen Avenue.

to a foreign country without ever leaving home.

Polish Downtown had the energy he had known in New Orleans, and it stimulated his creativity. Dave Peltz, a friend, thought Algren “had a tremendous feeling for the underclass Pole” and used the Polish ghetto as a surrogate for the Jewish ghetto he had rejected.1 It was a ghetto, but it was not a slum, as outsiders writing about Nelson’s novels would often assume. It was into this community that Algren inserted himself, and he turned his notes about East St. Louis brothel life into a novel about the criminal underground in the neighborhood around him, with a Polish boxer, Bruno “Lefty” Bicek, as his hero. He never imagined that the neighborhood might object.

Works Progress Administration (WPA) work started to wind down in the early 1940s, as the United States was entering the Second World War. Nelson’s repeated attempts to get a Guggenheim grant for a second novel were not successful, so to make enough money to live on, he and Jack Conroy found work on what they called

the Syph Patrol for the city’s Board of Health. The job was to track down people suspected of having venereal disease and direct them to public facilities for treatment.

Workers would take notes on what the subjects said and whether they would go. This job led Nelson into all his favorite places—to taverns, suspected brothels, and back porches—to talk to hookers, housewives, factory workers, mechanics, and cab drivers. He likely rode his bicycle to some of his assignments, a slim young man with a quiet manner who inspired confidences on his “one-man campaign” to fight venereal disease.2 Several subjects complained about how they had neither time to spare from work and family nor the streetcar fare to visit Algren in Chicago | 47

_________

In March 1940, Richard Wright inscribed a copy of Native Son for Algren: “My old Friend Nelson Who I believe is still the best writer of good prose in the U.S.A.” Above: Wright in his study, May 1943.

Photograph by Gordon Parks

the clinic. The shots for the disease in the days before penicillin were painful and useless—a combination of arsenic and mercury. People rightly hated them and distrusted the nurses and doctors who dispensed them.

Jack did not care for the work—he had a gentle nature and troubles of his own, and did not like taking “poor, trembling, young black whores” to the health office at 56 West Hubbard, particularly when one of their knifewielding pimps objected.3 In 1943, he took a safe desk job with an encyclopedia publisher. But Nelson mined the health department work for material, and he wrote up the complaints as matchbook-sized dramas on a rented typewriter back at his flat at 1907 West Evergreen Avenue. What he heard on the street on the Syph Patrol and with the WPA oral history projects was echoed in his fiction—in Chickadee’s knock against the public health nurse in Never Come Morning, or Violet’s complaints about Stash, the old husband in The Man with the Golden Arm. They sound like Algren characters, which is a backward way of saying that Algren’s characters sound like life. Nelson said later that he did not consciously try to write poetic prose. “But so many people say things poetically, they say it for you in a way you never could.”4 48 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

In working on what became his second novel, Nelson found he was having his usual trouble with plot. He was able to construct powerful scenes, dialogue, and characters—sometimes doing rough, crayon drawings of his fictional people to better imagine them. But he had difficulty stringing them together into the story he initially called “Harlots and Hunted.” Richard Wright, who read a 263-page draft in the late summer of 1940, cordially praised the writing but advised, “I think some plot would not hurt at all” and gave several suggestions on how to tie things together.5 Drafts show that Nelson seemed to follow the advice of both Dick Wright and his eventual editor, Edward Aswell, and the novel evolved from loosely connected sketches about hoodlums and prostitutes to a story about Bruno “Lefty” Bicek’s short, hopeless life.

On Dick’s advice, Nelson sent the manuscript to Harper & Brothers’ Edward Aswell, a courtly Tennessee native who had a degree from Harvard but had also once sold shoes in Chicago. Aswell sent him a contract plus $100 for the first payment of the advance in October of 1940. Aswell was an encouraging and wise editor, and his letters are filled with both praise and tactful criticism.

While he assured Nelson that the book had power and “great integrity,” he suggested toning down some of the language—replacing “rump” for “ass,” for example, and trimming a long scene in police court.6 Considering the controversial subject, he warned Nelson repeatedly against using any real names, and he suggested changing a hooker’s reference to the stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, which could be dangerous, to Queen Marie of Romania, since Marie was safely dead. But Edward missed a spot—he let Nelson call Bruno’s girlfriend Steffi Rostenkowski; this was the last name of a prominent Polish Chicago politician, and it would later figure in local controversy over the book. Aswell also advised him to take out a section that was still set in East St. Louis and set it all in Chicago. Editor and author went back and forth on the title: Algren proposed White Hope, and then favored The Lost and the Lonely, but Aswell thought that was too sentimental. Aswell then hunted through the text for something better and suggested Never Come Morning, from Steffi’s dream that the “night would be forever, the lamps would never fade, the taverns never close, morning would never come again.” 7 _________ After The Man with the Golden Arm, Never Come Morning is the greatest of Algren’s novels, both poetic and terrifying. Bruno and Steffi are kids, just seventeen years old, growing up in brutal circumstances—Bruno’s mother doesn’t visit him in prison, and Steffi’s mother doesn’t try to find her when she disappears. Their story is a tragedy not because Bruno kills, or because Steffi

Wright, who had advised Nelson on the book’s structure and recommended him to Aswell, now wrote a soaring introduction to the novel, which came out in the spring of 1942. He said most twentieth-century Americans are:

Learning that Algren was working on a new book, Wright recommended his friend to his editor, Edward Aswell (above) at Harper.

“If they take your stuff, they will push it,” said Wright. “You can be assured of that.”

becomes a prostitute, but because together they find love, the only thing that could redeem their lives, and Bruno destroys it because he cares more about his standing in his gang. The book creates an atmosphere of perpetual twilight, full of daydreams and nightmares. It is difficult at first to sympathize with Bruno, who seems to have no coherent inner life. He is a vicious, overgrown boy, writing naive letters to a boxing magazine from his prison cell, imagining winning fights, imagining he can rise in his gang. He doesn’t seem to feel anything about his murder of the Greek.8 Only his love for Steffi, and his guilt over his betrayal, makes him comprehensibly human. Steffi starts as a cipher, a pale-faced, passive girl who avoids doing any work for fear she’ll be asked to do more. But she becomes the book’s most subtle character.

She’s the prophet who sees in a dream what she and Bruno and everyone else under boxing manager Bonifacy “the Barber” Konstantine and the police really are. They are the hunted, being pursued through the alleys, hiding and “forever in some degrading posture.”9 She knows that Bruno has “no guts” and threw her into the gutter, but she chooses him anyway at the end because she loves him and because she has no better choice.10 The minor characters in the book are raw and clear, particularly brothel operator Mama Tomek, her softheaded Jewish dogsbody Snipes, and the other hookers.

In a long monologue to Snipes, partly adapted from a WPA oral history of a prostitute, Tomek speaks for the other characters about the inevitability of her choices.

“It’s just like if you try t’ walk straight down a crooked alley—you’ll bump your puss on a barn or fall over somethin’ for sure. That’s how ever’thin’ is, Snipey— ever’thin’s crooked so you got to walk crooked.”11 The book is more painful than Somebody in Boots, both because the writing is better and because the people matter more.

reluctant to admit the tragically low quality of experience of the broad American masses; feverish radio programs, super advertisements, streamlined skyscrapers, million-dollar movies, and mass production have somehow created the illusion in us that we are “rich” in our emotional lives. To the greater understanding of our time, Never Come Morning shows what actually exists in the nerve, brain, and blood of our boys on the street, be they black, white, native, foreign-born. . . . The reality of the depths of our lives is being depicted.12 The reviews for Never Come Morning were strong, and the book went to second and third editions, though Nelson wished that sales could have been better. The New York Times’ John Chamberlain compared him to James Farrell but said he was no imitator. “Algren has his own acute ear for the language of pool room and police court, and his eye is as far-seeing as an eagle’s—or, since he is often dealing with human carrion, a buzzard’s.” He called the book “a bold scribbling on the wall for comfortable Americans to ponder and digest.”13 Benjamin Appel in the Saturday Review of Literature called the book a “knockout. Like a flare of light, it illumines one of our big industries—the crime racket. But the illumination is in human terms, the method of Richard Wright, and not of W. R. Burnett or James Cain.”14 Even the much-reviled Farrell praised the book as “powerful and important,” telling Aswell that Algren wrote about the bottom of society with humanity and “genuine sympathy.” He concluded that Never Come Morning was “not merely one of the finest works of American literature that I have read in recent years: it is also a challenge, a true, and a telling social indictment.”15 For Nelson, the sweetest reactions to the book may have come from Ernest and Martha Gellhorn Hemingway, who had been corresponding with him. Ernest was spreading the book around Cuba and told his editor Maxwell Perkins that he believed the novel to be “as fine and good stuff to come out of Chicago as James W. [sic] Farrell is flat, repetitious and worthless.”16 Martha wrote that the book “hasn’t a dull or useless sentence in it. . . . He has found his own wild and terrible country and he tells about it in his own amazing way.”17 The blows against the book would come not from literary giants or New York critics, but from Nelson’s neighbors. _________ In mid-May 1942, the Honorable Mayor Edward J. Kelly received a three-page letter bristling with agitation, not about traffic, or garbage pickup, or Kelly’s lax attitude toward organized crime, but about a book.

Algren in Chicago | 49

50 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Algren’s second novel was his first set in Chicago. It garnered significant attention from the general public due to its controversial content. Above: A facsimile dustjacket from the first printing of Never Come Morning, 1942

Algren in Chicago | 51

Algren speaks at a literary luncheon at the Blackstone Hotel, Chicago, January 1950.

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Ernest Hemingway was Algren’s hero among American writers.

Hemingway and his third wife, journalist Martha Gellhorn, pictured in 1941, became powerful advocates of Algren’s work.

Photograph by Hulton Archive/Getty Images

For some weeks now the book market has been retailing a very distasteful and insulting, both, to the Polish-Americans and old-stock citizens of Chicago, book entitled “Never Come Morning.” . . . Its filth, unsavory description, and open insinuation at graft, corruption, assault, battery, burglary, prostitution, blasphemy, bribery, gambling, obscenity and drunkeness are offered by the author (one Nelson Algren) as portraying the manner of Polish life in the neighborhood of some of Chicago’s finest churches, parishes, museums, organizations, and newspapers.18 The letter was from the Polish Roman Catholic Union of America, and it was the opening salvo in a war against Nelson Algren from an outraged Polish American gentry that would color his views of the city for the rest of his life. The union demanded that the book be kept out of the Chicago Public Library. The outcry was echoed by other Chicago Polonia institutions. At a packed May 25, 1942, meeting at the Holy Trinity parish cafeteria on West Division, delegates of the Polish American Council passed a resolution with even stronger terms: they condemned the book as a “most vicious attack, baseless and unwarranted, upon loyal American citizens of Polish birth or extraction, calculated to tear off from all of them every last stitch of respectability.” 19 The resolution went on to refer to the war and Poland’s place among the Allied nations, and said that Algren’s novel represented “insidious, fifth-column propaganda of the pro-Axis type.” Copies of the resolution, signed by President Leon

T. Walkowicz, were sent to Harper & Brothers, the Chicago Public Library Board, Mayor Kelly, and the US Department of Justice. Hoover personally acknowledged receipt in a letter to Walkowicz and added the resolution to the bureau’s growing Algren file.

Bernice Eichler, the society editor of the Dziennik Chicagoski newspaper also sent a letter to Carl Roden, head of the Chicago Public Library, asking that the “filthy book” Never Come Morning not be made available at any library, and mentioned that it had been withheld from general circulation.20 “The book has solely the intentions of demoralizing the younger generations with the ugliest sexual details,” wrote Eichler.21 A. J. Lucaszewski, a North Side resident, wrote to Harper that Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s fiendish propaganda chief, could not have devised a worse book to degrade the Polish people. The letter further notes that Algren’s quote from Whitman at the front of the book about being “one of them” was an admission of Algren’s own guilt.22 Lucaszewski even insults the dedication, “ For Bernice,” who he sneeringly assumes is a female, but not a lady.23 Polish American groups and individuals lodged at least twenty complaints to the library, demanding the book be banned. As Aswell put it, the Poles were after Algren’s scalp.

Edward Aswell wrote mollifying letters. He told John J. Olejniczak, president of the Polish Roman Catholic Union, that he had “misjudged the intention of the book. Mr. Algren did not mean to malign or insult the Polish community in Chicago.”24 Aswell protested that the book could have been written about the Boston Irish or the Jews or Italians in New York. He also tried to pacify Nelson, telling him that the Poles had obviously misread the novel and taken it personally. “On that

Journalist Mike Royko was a friend of Algren’s as was Studs Terkel.

The trio frequented the Old Town Ale House. Photograph by Robert Mosher, 1972 Algren in Chicago | 53

It is not surprising that Algren featured St. John Cantius (above, c.

1910) in Never Come Morning, given the church’s prominence in Chicago’s Polish community. Below: The church’s baroque interior (pictured in 1935) evokes the art and architecture of eighteenthcentury Kraków.

54 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

score, the worst you can say of their reaction is that it isn’t very intelligent, but that in human terms it is understandable enough.”25 Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga said the reaction was not at all surprising from societies representing the Polish middle and upper class—they had a chip on their shoulders from years of negative stereotypes and had already felt insulted by The Jack-Roller and works analyzing Polish American juvenile crime from the University of Chicago.26 “There was the sense that we can’t allow this kind of bad publicity. Polonia has to be protected,” said Pacyga. “Algren was insulting them.”27 Newspaper columnist and Algren friend Mike Royko, of PolishUkrainian extraction, wrote later that Polonia community leaders would have “preferred that he write a novel about a Polish dentist who changed his name and moved from the old neighborhood to a suburb as soon as he made enough money.”28 The fact that Algren was not Polish likely contributed to the controversy—Saul Bellow, writing later about lower-class Jews in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood in The Adventures of Augie March, was at least one of their own. On the other hand, some African Americans had been dismayed by Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas.

There also was the problem that in focusing only on desperate prostitutes and criminals, Nelson presented an exceedingly narrow view of Polish American life—a view that seemed to shut out any kind of light and goodness. Sitting in St. John Cantius, Steffi is so focused on her sorrow that she is unable to look around her and see the building, which is one of the most beautiful churches in a city rich with them. Even poor Cass McKay could see the lilac in his dusty yard. This claustrophobia was the effect Nelson wanted—but it is so complete it can seem like a distortion. “[Algren] depicted an entire Polish American neighborhood as devoid of culture and education and values,” said Thomas Napierkowski, a Chicago-born literature professor who has written about the controversy. “The entire community was depicted in such a negative way, it seemed to belie his claims that he was there to lift up the downtrodden.” 29 Literary depictions of Polish Americans were almost nonexistent in the 1940s, and someone who did not know anything else about the culture who read Never Come Morning or, later, A Streetcar Named Desire, might think all Poles were brutes, Napierkowski said. The Polish protesters were wrong to try to ban a book, but they had their reasons.

Algren was horrified by the negative response and talked about it for decades as an example of Chicago provincialism. He claimed that the library had banned the book. It certainly did not buy it in 1942. The library was spending cautiously in the years after the Depression and bought only about 20 percent of new fiction.

Algren with Fanny Butcher, literary critic for the Chicago Tribune, on May 21, 1956, the release of A Walk on the Wild Side. Algren himself was a prolific book critic, writing more than two hundred reviews and occasionally using the reviewer’s pulpit to take on his own critics.

“Roden’s philosophy tended to be that not all fiction was worth buying and that only fiction that would endure, or warrant the spending of public funds, should be purchased,” said Morag Walsh, the library’s senior archival specialist. She said it is not clear from library records if Roden or the library held off on buying the book for moral or political grounds or if it was not considered worthy yet. Among the books considered more worthy of purchase in 1942 were a trio of Hopalong Cassidy stories and many now-forgotten romances and historical novels.

Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road, about southern tenant farmers during the Great Depression, made the cut in 1942, ten years after it was published. Richard Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children also was purchased in 1942, four years after it was published. The library did buy Never Come Morning in 1943, though Walsh said it could have been available only on request because of sexual content.

The library bought Algren’s other books in the years in which they were published.30

Algren also had supporters in the Polish community—Dr. Eugene Jasinski of the Polish Trade Union Council, for example, came out strongly for the novel.

Library union workers hosted a public forum for the book in June 1942. But Algren never stopped being furious at the Polonia babbitskis, scoffing that in the eyes of the Polish Daily Zgoda, Shakespeare engaged in slander when he wrote in Hamlet, “He smote the sledded Polacks on the ice.”31 Algren noted that the hostility died down when he was awarded a thousand dollars by the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1947 in belated recognition of his work. As the Chicago saying goes, “If you’ve got the bread you walk.”32 The reaction certainly did not scare Algren into changing his style; if anything, it hardened his convictions. In an essay called “Do It the Hard Way” published in the Writer magazine in March of 1943, Nelson advises aspiring writers to carry a camera to accurately record images and to listen carefully to the way ordinary people Algren in Chicago | 55

Stuart Brent, owner of the legendary bookstore The Seven Stairs (above left), was an ardent fan of The Neon Wilderness (1947, above right). For months, he made promoting it his career, hosting occasional bookselling events, including one on Algren’s birthday (below).

Pictured from left: Studs Terkel, Robert Parrish, Stephen Spender, Brent, Jack Conroy, and Algren

56 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

really talk. “It is necessary only that you do not stop your ears with smugness or indifference or indolence,” he advises.33 He promises that if you listen long enough, the patter of the ballpark and the dance hall, or the drugstore and the corner newsstand, will start to “ring like poetry.” As an example, he recounts hearing a girl confide her small troubles to the counter worker at a hamburger stand. “I hate t’ see the Spring ’n Summer come so bad,” she told him. “I just don’t seem so good as other people anymore.” It is a speech he gives later to the narrator of “Is Your Name Joe?” in The Neon Wilderness.

Algren urges young writers not to stick with only safe subjects and says that he believes that publishers will take books about any level of society as long as they’re honest and written with conviction. It is the hard way, he warns, because this type of writing doesn’t focus on plot

contrivances like what the killer did with the body, but with one’s own deepest feelings. He also expresses great faith in the average American reader, who is “a knowing sort of cuss, and he knows when a book is false or true.”

It was a wildly optimistic essay—and a prophetic one for himself. Nelson kept doing it the hard way for his best writing, until the effort wore him out.

The Polonia controversy also failed to drive Nelson out of the neighborhood—he stayed at his apartment at 1907 West Evergreen, writing book reviews for newspapers and planning a book of short stories. He had the excitement of being robbed one day while on the South Side; this gave him a pass to see police lineups, providing him material for future stories like “The Captain is a Card” and the opening of The Man with the Golden Arm. He used the wrinkled, pasted-up, eventually unreadable pass for seven

The neighborhood’s negative reaction to Never Come Morning didn’t drive Algren out of West Town. He stayed until he was drafted and retuned after his discharge. Above: The southwest corner of Wood Street and Milwaukee Avenue in June 1966. Photograph by Sigmund J. Osty Algren in Chicago | 57

While reluctantly serving in the military, Nelson legally changed his last name from Abraham to Algren. Upon his return to Chicago in December 1945, his identity as a writer was complete, and he would do no other type of work for the rest of his life. Above: Algren in Chicago, c. 1968. Photograph by Stephen Deutch

years, telling suspicious cops that he was still looking for that guy who took his fourteen bucks. To watch the lineups, he traveled a few blocks south of the Loop to the grim, brick police headquarters at Eleventh and State, which rose like a devouring, thirteen-story giant above a cluster of flophouses. The recently arrested would be taken out of holding cells and paraded before a courtroom full of cops and victims. This show is still running in Chicago—every day at Twenty-Sixth and California.

Nelson took notes on the exchanges: “How did you get on stuff in the first place?” a judge asks a girl.

“There was so many little troubles floatin’ around,” the girl responded. “I figured why not roll them all up into one trouble?”

“What do you do all day?” the judge asks a boy.

“I just lean,” the boy answers. “Just lean ’n dream.”34 58 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Mary Wisniewski is a reporter and columnist at the Chicago Tribune. She has won numerous journalism awards and is an active participant in the Nelson Algren Committee.

Reprinted with permission from Algren: A Life by Mary Wisniewski, published by Chicago Review Press. © 2016 Chicago Review Press. All rights reserved.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. Pages 44–45, Universal History Archive/Contributor, Getty Images, editorial #629436815. 46, top: DN-0087479; bottom: ICHi076155. 47, ICHi-174036. 48, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USW3-030278-D. 49, courtesy of Robert Aswell. 50–51, courtesy of Rosemary K. Adams. 52, ICHi-009395. 53, top: Hulton Archive/Stringer, Getty Images, editorial #3239869; bottom: ICHi-065223 (detail). 54, courtesy of St. John Cantius Church. 55, used with the permission of the Newberry Library, call number: Midwest MS Butcher, series 6, box 41, folder 1637. 56, top left and bottom: courtesy of the Estate of Stuart Brent; top right: ICHi-174034. 57, ICHi061970. 58, ICHi-068774 (cropped).

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on Polish immigration, see William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: A Classic Work in Immigration History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996) and Dominic A. Pacyga, Polish Immigrants and Industrial Chicago: Workers on the

South Side, 1880–1922 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1991). Art Shay’s photographs in Chicago's Nelson Algren (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2007) and Nelson Algren’s Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988) immerse readers in Algren’s West Side world.

ENDNOTES 1. David Peltz, interview by author, 2005.

2. This is Nelson Algren’s description at the beginning of his notes on the Syph Patrol, from the Rare Books and Manuscripts Library of the Ohio State University Libraries (hereafter OSU libraries). The quotes from his research come from these notes.

3. Douglas C. Wixson, Worker-writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 448.

4. Nelson Algren interview, Fling, January 1963.

5. Richard Wright to Nelson Algren, September 7, 1940, OSU libraries.

6. Edward Aswell to Nelson Algren, November 26, 1941, OSU libraries.

7. Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996), 223.

8. In one of the most hideous scenes in American fiction, Catfoot, one of Bruno’s fellow gang members, insists that Bruno should let them all rape Steffi. Bruno makes a weak protest that they should leave her alone, but Catfoot knows Bruno isn’t really tough, and he makes threats about Bruno’s status in the gang.

Bruno slinks up a set of rickety wooden stairs, leaving Steffi to be assaulted by a long line of punks until she’s so traumatized she starts calling out, “Next!”

Bruno objects only when he sees a Greek who’s not in their gang get into the line, and he releases all his anger at his situation by breaking the Greek’s neck.

9. Algren, Never Come Morning (1996), 223.

10. Ibid., 246.

11. Ibid., 181.

12. Richard Wright, introduction to the first edition of Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning (New York: Harper & Bros., 1942), x.

13. John Chamberlain, review of Never Come Morning, New York Times, undated clip, OSU libraries.

14. Benjamin Appel, review of Never Come Morning, Saturday Review of Literature, April 18, 1942.

15. James T. Farrell to Edward Aswell, quoted by Aswell in a letter to Nelson Algren, May 12, 1942, OSU libraries.

16. Ernest Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, July 8, 1942, quoted in Bettina Drew, Nelson Algren: A Life on the Wide Side (New York: G.P. Putnam Sons, 1989), 143.

17. Martha Gellhorn Hemingway to Nelson Algren, July 11, 1942, OSU libraries.

18. Polish Roman Catholic Union of American to Mayor Edward J. Kelly, May 12, 1942, Chicago Public Library archives.

19. Resolution dated May 29, 1942, by the Polish American Council, signed by President Leon T. Walkowicz, Secretary Joseph F. Manka, and Treasurer Frank J. Tomczak, from Algren FBI file, National Archives.

20. Bernice Eichler to Carl B. Roden, July 22, 1942, Chicago Public Library archives.

21. Ibid.

22. A. J. Lucaszewski to Harper, May 29, 1942. OSU libraries.

23. Algren dedicated Never Come Morning to his deceased sister Bernice, who succumbed to cancer at age thirty-eight, leaving two small children. Bernice was Algren’s idol. She had encouraged him to read and to write, to attend college and to travel.

27. Dominic Pacyga, interview by author, 2015.

28. Mike Royko, “Algren’s Golden Pen,” Chicago Sun-Times, May 13, 1981, reprinted in Mike Royko and Lois Wille, One More Time: The Best of Mike Royko (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 148.

29. Thomas Napierkowski, professor English literature at the University of Colorado– Colorado Springs, interview by author, 2015.

30. Morag Walsh, senior archival specialist, Special Collections and Preservation Division, Chicago Public Library, e-mail message to author. Information about the library’s purchasing policy comes from Walsh and from an exhibition about the library from 1995, which included an informational label that the library received at least twenty requests to withhold the book from circulation. The label said that the library did not buy the book immediately since it was not judged to be of sufficient interest or significance. The fact that the library bought Never Come Morning in 1943, as well as subsequent Algren books in the years in which they were published, in recorded in the library’s Book Bulletin periodical.

31. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 1, scene 1, quoted in the preface to Nelson Algren, Never Come Morning (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996). In this edition, Algren’s preface is dated November 1962.

32. Ibid., xiv.

25. Edward Aswell to Nelson Algren, June 4, 1942, OSU libraries.

33. The following quotations are from Nelson Algren, “Do It the Hard Way,” in Nelson Algren, Brooke Horvath, and Daniel Simon, Entrapment and Other Writings (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2009), 69–72.

26. Clifford R. Shaw, The Jack-Roller: A Delinquent Boy’s Own Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930).

34. Nelson Algren and Daniel Simon, Nonconformity: Writing on Writing (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1996), 55–56.

24. Edward Aswell to John Olejniczak, June 3, 1942, OSU libraries.

Algren in Chicago | 59

M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

Chicago’s Global Entrepreneurs: Making History Interviews with John A. Canning Jr. and Ronald J. Gidwitz T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

hicago business leaders and political officials have long touted their metropolis as a global city.1 The city’s historic and complicated legacy as an international economic center is embodied in the professional careers and civic contributions of John A. Canning Jr. and Ronald J. Gidwitz.

From 1979 to 1998, Ron Gidwitz served as president or chief executive officer of the manufacturing and consumer products company Helene Curtis Industries, an economic fixture in Chicago for much of the twentieth century.

Gidwitz transformed Helene Curtis into a Fortune 500 corporation and global enterprise, selling products in more than eighty countries and conducting approximately 40 percent of its business overseas by the final decade of the twentieth century.2 In 1992, John Canning, after more than two decades working at First National Bank of Chicago, cofounded the private equity firm Madison Dearborn Partners. In less than two decades, Canning helped redefine banking in the city, as the firm eventually acquired more than $20 billion in assets under its management. By 2013, Madison Dearborn was the largest private equity firm in Chicago.3 Gidwitz was born in 1946, one of four children of Jane and Gerald S. Gidwitz, cofounder of the toiletries and hair salon products firm Helene Curtis Industries Inc.4 “I have positive childhood memories, but I actually didn’t grow up in Chicago,” Gidwitz explains. “I was born at Michael Reese Hospital but spent the first six years of my life in Glencoe.”

The Gidwitz family first resided at 635 Sheridan Road before moving to 970 Sheridan Road in Highland Park when Ron was six. “I went to the Ravinia Elementary School from grades one through five, Edgewood Middle School from six through eight, and two years of Highland Park High School. Then I went away to the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut,” he summarizes. “In a word, I had a great childhood.”5

C

60 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

John A. Canning Jr. (left) received the 2015 Marshall Field Making History Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation. Ronald J. Gidwitz (right) accepted the 2014 Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership.

Gidwitz (identified in the back row) poses with his fifth-grade classmates on picture day, Ravinia Elementary School, Highland Park, Illinois, 1956.

Canning was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1944 to Dr. John Canning Sr. and Elizabeth Miles Canning. “My father was an officer and doctor in the Air Force,” explains Canning, “so I only lived there for six months.” The family of three then moved to his mother’s hometown of Bayport, New York, on the south shore of Long Island. “I went to a small high school,” Canning adds.

“There were seventy-seven kids in my graduating class.”

Both of Canning’s parents emphasized the importance of education and hard work. He spent his summers as the vegetable boy at the Seaview grocery store on Fire Island. “I started there as a freshman in high school, and I worked there right through senior year in law school,” Canning explains.

“That’s how I put myself through both college and law school.”6 Canning attended Denison University in Ohio, where he played catcher on the baseball team and majored in economics.7 His passion for baseball has never waned, even after an unsuccessful tryout with the Milwaukee Braves. Today, he owns six minor league teams as well as a minority stake in the Milwaukee Brewers. In 2009, he almost became a coowner of the Chicago Cubs, only to be outbid by the Ricketts family.8 Canning planned on attending business school, but after doing well on the law school admission test, he had his pick of law schools.

Upon graduating from Denison in 1966, he matriculated to Duke University Law School and earned his JD in 1969.9 Gidwitz graduated with a bachelor of arts in economics from Brown University in 1967. He recalls, “I couldn’t wait to move into the city once I graduated from college.” Gidwitz briefly worked as an assistant to the vice president at Walter E. Heller and Co., a national financial services company headquartered in Chicago, before joining his father’s company in 1968.

Gidwitz states that he and his father were “very close.” In fact, he admits, “I idolized my father.”

As a young man, Canning was a strong defensive catcher. He stands here, second from right, with the 1961 “Home Run Kings” of Long Island’s Bayport High School.

Making History | 61

Gidwitz, who always assumed he would join his father’s business, embraces his role as the “shampoo man” of Helene Curtis.

Under his leadership, the company became a global enterprise.

As early as high school, Gidwitz expected that he would join Helene Curtis: “I always assumed that was what I was going to be doing, and I just couldn’t wait to get out of school.”10 Helene Curtis’s origins date to 1927 when Gerald Gidwitz and his partner Louis Stein assumed control of the National Mineral Company.

Ron Gidwitz explains that when his father took over the company, it was bankrupt: “The guy who owned it was a customer of my grandfather,” he says. “Since my father was the number two son, my uncle, the eldest son, went into the family business, which was corrugated box manufacturing.”

Gidwitz’s grandfather assumed a financial stake in the bankrupt National Mineral Company, then referred to as “a mud pack company” because of its facial products. “My father went to work for it and was trained by the guy who was running it,” according to Gidwitz.11 The National Mineral Company survived the Great Depression of the 1930s by shifting its emphasis to haircare products. After World War II, the firm was renamed Helene Curtis after the first names of Stein’s wife and son.

62 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Products such as Lanolin Creme Shampoo and Suave Hairdressing, both newly available for purchase in drugstores, and the aerosol Spray Net made Helene Curtis an American household name. The first spray-on deodorant Stopette, which Helene Curtis acquired in the late 1950s, was for a time the best-selling deodorant in the United States. By then, Helene Curtis was manufacturing and selling hair and skin care products and antiperspirants in twenty-five countries. In 1956, the company went public after twenty-nine years of private ownership, although the Gidwitz family retained most of the voting shares.12 Gidwitz has fond childhood memories of Helene Curtis. He regularly visited his father at the company’s headquarters and main manufacturing plant at 4401 West North Avenue, at the corner of Kostner Avenue in Chicago. “I loved going to the office, loved his secretary Lorraine Novak, who ultimately ended up being my secretary,” reminisces Gidwitz. “I can remember sitting in her lap cutting paper dolls out of colored paper at the office. It was great fun.”13 After graduating from Duke, Canning joined the law department at First National Bank of Chicago, then one of the ten largest banks in the United States. “I only applied to law departments in commercial enterprises, because I wanted to have an escape route,” Canning explains. He never planned on working for a large firm, which distinguished him from his law school peers.

“That’s probably the only thing that actually worked, where my planning actually came to fruition,” he admits, “because I ended up at the First National Bank of Chicago.”

Canning quickly realized that he not only enjoyed the deal-making side of banking law but thrived in that environment. His timing was perfect. Federal legislation passed in 1969 allowed banks organized as holding companies to engage in previously prohibited activities, including private equity work. “If you went to a cocktail party in 1980 and said, ‘I’m in the private equity business,’ they’d say, ‘Gee, that’s too bad. I hope you can find something,’” laughs Canning. “No one knew what a leveraged buyout was, no one knew what private equity was. People only knew about venture capital.” Private equity, Canning summarizes, “wasn’t even a word back then.”14

“Suave leaves hair a-twinkle,” asserted this 1950 advertisement (above). The company’s headquarters (below in 1953) proclaimed Helene Curtis to be the “foremost name in hair beauty.”

Making History | 63

After graduating from Duke, Canning joined the law department at First National Bank of Chicago. This view shows the bank’s headquarters at 10 South Dearborn Street, c. 1969. The building was renamed Chase Tower in 2005. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing 64 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

The 1970s were a dismal time for American banking. High inflation, the recession of 1973–74, and large real-estate losses weakened the domestic earnings of many financial institutions in the United States.

Banks like First Chicago remained competitive primarily because they expanded into foreign markets and developed new financial instruments like private equity.15 From 1969 to 1980, Canning was immersed in this changing financial landscape, performing most of the Securities and Exchange Commission and legal work for First Chicago Venture Capital, the equity arm of First National.16 Canning’s big break came in 1980. Stanley Golder, president of First Chicago Venture Capital, left to form the private equity group GTCR, LLC (the R of which stands for current Illinois governor Bruce Rauner).17 Golder was a pioneer in venture capitalism and highly respected among equity financiers. In 1974, he started a fund of $250,000 at First Chicago. By the time he left the bank six years later, the fund was $65 million.

Those sums may seem paltry today, but “that was the second largest fund ever raised,” remarks Canning. “It was an unheard of amount of money.”18 While Canning was apprenticing in the art of private equity, Helene Curtis Industries was slowly expanding. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the company’s growth rested on the popularity of the Suave brand and the introduction of shampoos, creme rinses, and wave sets. In 1961, the firm was finally listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Annual sales then exceeded $50 million, and the manufacturer employed approximately one thousand people in Chicago. Helene Curtis even began to challenge Avon in door-to-door cosmetics sales. When Ron Gidwitz formally joined the company in 1968, Helene Curtis products were sold in eighty-one countries.19

John and Rita Canning married in 1990 (above). They have six children and eleven grandchildren. Below: The Canning family celebrates the wedding of Rita and John’s son John F. Podjasek III to Laura Sargent, Charleston, South Carolina, 2016.

Making History | 65

But Gidwitz did not immediately assume an executive position. “I started there as a trainee and went through a variety of different departments,” he recalls. “I did some work in the sales department. I was an assistant foreman and actually a foreman for a relatively short period of time mixing chemicals.”

Gidwitz even ran a beauty supply operation on the West Coast for a number of years, with responsibility for facilities in Los Angeles, San Diego, and Houston. During his first decade at Helene Curtis, Gidwitz acquired experience on the shop floor, sales activities, and international operations. He even developed some familiarity with the firm’s board practices. Gidwitz became executive vice president in 1974 and took over as president in 1979, as Helene Curtis was doing about $120 million in sales. He assumed the role of chief executive officer in 1985.20 Despite the firm’s success, Gidwitz was worried. “My father was not terribly interested in manufacturing processes,” he explains. “As a consequence, from 1927 until 1967, forty years, the business didn’t grow very much,” Gidwitz points out. “It would make some money one year and lose some money the next year, and maybe the third year it would break even.” He admits in retrospect that Helene Curtis “was a small business from the 1960s, ’70s, and even into the ’80s, until we were able to successfully introduce a couple of consumer products.”21 Gidwitz transformed Helene Curtis. During his tenure, revenues increased sevenfold to more than $1.2 billion in 1996.22 Gidwitz points out that the firm’s expansion originated “from internal growth, not acquisitions.” In the 1970s and 1980s, the company capitalized on the popularity and success of the Suave brand by introducing the Finesse and Salon Selectives lines. “The turning point was the introduction of a product called Finesse conditioner,” 66 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Ron and Christina Gidwitz married in 1975. The couple is pictured at the Palace of Versailles in 1999 (left) and at the Making History Awards in 2014 (right, Dan Rest Photography).

remembers Gidwitz. “This was the first very successful, premium-priced hair care product that we were able to sell. We followed it shortly thereafter, within a year, with a shampoo, and ultimately with a whole line of products.

It was, for quite some time, a very successful market leader.”23 From 1981 to 1989, Helene Curtis more than tripled its sales and increased its stock price by 61 percent. The company thrived despite competing in a market with no fewer than 1,262 varieties of shampoo, many of them sold by large packaged-goods conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble, Unilever, and Colgate-Palmolive.24 By 1989, the three lines were among the top ten national shampoo brands. In 1990, Helene Curtis introduced Degree antiperspirant, which was immediately popular with consumers and achieved the company’s market share goal in only eight months. In 1992, Helene Curtis surpassed the billion-dollar mark with total sales of $1.02 billion.25 What distinguished Helene Curtis during this time was that the company’s growth originated by developing and improving its own products, unusual in an industry where growth and increased market share typically occurred through the acquisition of brand names.26 Gidwitz explains that Helene Curtis’s success rested on knowing its customers from every part of the supply chain: “Let’s learn everything we can about consumer preferences, what drives consumers. Let’s learn everything about the manufacturing process. Let’s learn everything about the packaging we can possibly learn.

Let’s get assistance from people who make the packaging. Let’s get very close to our customers, the retailers, and the wholesalers with whom we did business so that we could develop the very best and most consumer-acceptable product that we could.”27 Gidwitz also believes Helene Curtis succeeded because they were small.

Unilever and Proctor & Gamble, for example, suffered from high rates of turnover. “They’re so big, and there’s a certain amount of movement in the company, and people expect to move up,” explains Gidwitz. “It’s a tradition, and so they’re moving around, getting more experience so they can ultimately move up. People just don’t stay in the same job for extended periods of time.”

Gidwitz points out that Helene Curtis enjoyed a much different corporate culture: “Our people stayed, and they knew far more about the particular brands that we were managing than most of the competition’s staff did.”28 By the mid-1990s, however, Gidwitz recognized that global forces were too strong to sustain that corporate culture and business model. Simply put, Helene Curtis was too small to continue competing with larger rivals like Unilever and Procter & Gamble. Record sales, the expansion of physical facilities, and an advertising budget of $80 million was simply not enough. In an ever-increasing globalized market, Helene Curtis lacked the necessary resources to compete on an international scale. Consequently, in February 1996, Chicago lost another major corporation when Helene Curtis Industries Inc. was acquired by the BritishDutch conglomerate Unilever for approximately $915 million.29 The decision by the Gidwitz family to sell Helene Curtis Industries came as a shock to the Chicago business community. “Chicago had its fair share of founding families in the nineteenth century, but in the twentieth there have been few so intimately identified

In 2015, after purchasing 12 percent of the Milwaukee Brewers, Canning (left) celebrated with Bud Selig, commissioner of baseball.

Making History | 67

with the city as the Gidwitzes,” stated former Illinois governor James Thompson at the time of the sale. “They are right up there with people like the Pritzkers and the Crowns.”30 When Stanley Golder left First Chicago Venture Capital in 1980, First National’s chief executive officer Richard Thomas immediately asked John Canning to replace him. Canning was reluctant and even sought out Golder for advice: “He said, ‘Do it,’” Canning remembers. “You know how to do it.

It’s a chance in a lifetime. You’ve been drafting these agreements forever. You know a lot more than you think you know. Don’t say no to this—do it.”

Canning looks back at that conversation as one of the transformative moments in his life. “If Stan Golder hadn’t told me that, I would have said no,” he now admits. “I’d be retired, and I would have spent my life drafting loan agreements at First Chicago.” Canning served as assistant general counsel to the president and chief executive officer of First Chicago Venture Capital from 1980 to 1992. During that time, the group increased their portfolio from less than $100 million to approximately $750 million.31 In 1992, Canning and thirteen associates left First Chicago to found Madison Dearborn Partners, named after the intersection in Chicago’s Loop where the enterprise was headquartered. Canning served as the partnership’s chief executive officer for the next fifteen years before becoming chairman in 2007.32 “We had a year to raise the money,” remembers Canning. “We didn’t even know what our track record was. We thought we had done pretty well, but we hadn’t kept records that way,” he recounts. “We had to hire a firm to audit our track record.” Canning and his partners were both happy and relieved upon learning that their earlier ventures at First Chicago Venture Capital had generated a 37 percent return on investment.33

68 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Canning (standing at center) and the cofounders of Madison Dearborn Partners photographed in 1992. The private equity firm soon developed a reputation for integrity and success.

In 2006, Gidwitz made a run in the Republican primary for Illinois governor.

Here, he shares his campaign materials with Arnold Schwarzenegger, governor of California (2003–11).

That record of success quickly attracted two important clients: the Virginia Retirement Fund and Yale University. Once Yale was interested—“It still has the best reputation in the world,” according to Canning—others soon followed. “In our first fund, we must have had, of the top twenty school endowments, probably eighteen of them. That became our niche.”

During the ensuing two decades, Madison Dearborn Partners raised $18 billion from investors, achieving a compounded annual return of 20 percent.

The firm’s most noteworthy acquisitions were CDW and Nuveen, but at various times, Madison Dearborn also owned Yankee Candle, Ruth’s Chris restaurants, Univision Communications, Boise Cascade, the baseball card company Topps, and the retailer Tuesday Morning. By 2013, Madison Dearborn was not only the largest private equity firm in Chicago, it was the largest “between the coasts.” In Canning’s words, “I am proud of our good reputation for integrity.”34 After the sale of Helene Curtis to Unilever, Gidwitz served as president and chief executive officer of the Unilever HPC Helene Curtis Business Unit from 1996 to 1998. He then left and founded GCG Partners, a strategic consulting and equity firm.35 The firm was named after Gidwitz and his partners, Charles Cooper and Michael Goldman, all former executives at Helene Curtis. But Gidwitz was distracted. “I was doing other stuff at the same time, frankly,” he admits. “I was chairman of the City Colleges of Chicago, chairman of the Illinois State Board of Education, and involved in a variety of political activities.” Consequently, GCG Partners was not a priority for Gidwitz: “I never went into it to be a full-time activity for me.”36 Gidwitz became more politically active. He lived in the fashionable Gold Coast neighborhood and served as Republican committeeman of the FortyThird Ward from 1984 to 1992. But political activism was hardly new for Gidwitz. “I rang doorbells for Rhode Island governor John Chafee in 1966. I was Bill Rentschler’s administrative assistant when he was the state chairman for Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign in 1968. I worked on several campaigns in the special election for Congress in 1969. I worked on Nixon’s camMaking History | 69

paign and ran the city of Chicago for Nixon in 1972. I helped [US Representative] Henry Hyde in 1974.” In 1996, Gidwitz was a candidate for the US House in the Fifth Congressional District of Illinois. In 2006, he was a candidate for governor of Illinois. He also became one of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s closest associates in the business community, even though Daley was Democrat. Gidwitz’s activism made him a leading figure in local and state Republican Party politics and a prominent member of numerous civic, cultural, and educational boards.37 Gidwitz also had more time to devote to his wide range of philanthropic interests. He chaired the Field Museum of Natural History Board of Trustees, the Illinois State Board of Education, and the Economic Development Commission of the City of Chicago. He also served on the governing boards of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, the Museum of Science and Industry, the City Colleges of Chicago, and the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce.38 His most significant contribution, however, may be as the governor, national chairman, and secretary of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America (BGCA). He is also the longest-serving member of the board.39 “In the case of the Boys & Girls Clubs, my father-in-law started the Midwest region as they were trying to decentralize from the East Coast,” explains Gidwitz. “He asked me if I’d join,” Gidwitz remembers. “I said, ‘Sure, I’ll join,’ figuring I’d do it until I was married and then I could slither off.” Gidwitz chuckles, “That was forty years ago, and I’m still at it.”40 In 2006, the BGCA honored Gidwitz with the Herbert Hoover Humanitarian Award for his extraordinary service to the organization and the nation’s youth.41 Similarly, Canning expanded his philanthropic endeavors upon relinquishing his management position at Madison Dearborn in 2007.42 Since the turn of the millennium, Canning has chaired the boards of trustees or directors of Northwestern Memorial Hospital, the Chicago Community Trust, 70 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Gidwitz is known for his longstanding commitment to the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. In 2015, he (left) helped accept a set of ceremonial plates from the White House Historical Association. The plates honored Herbert Hoover, who was elected chairman of the Boys Clubs of America in 1936.

the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, the Field Museum of Natural History, and the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI).43 He is the first person to serve as chairman of the board for both the Field Museum and the MSI.44 Canning and his wife Rita are best known for their passionate support of institutions addressing inner-city education and abused women. Rita Canning was responsible for the founding of WINGS (Women in Need Growing Stronger) Safe House, the first domestic violence shelter in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. By 2013, WINGS provided more than 40,000 nights of shelter, transitional housing, and other comprehensive services to abused and homeless women and their children. The Cannings also led a campaign that raised more than $10 million to support WINGS.45 The couple is also among the most active Chicago philanthropists in inner-city education. Their initial involvement came in the wake of the murder of five-year-old Eric Morse who was thrown from the fourteenth floor of the Ida B. Wells Homes in Bronzeville by two older boys when he refused to steal

On April 10, 2008, the Big Shoulders Fund honored Rita and John Canning with the Joseph Cardinal Bernardin Humanitarian Award. Above: The Cannings at the ceremony with Francis Cardinal George.

Canning has served as chairman of the board of both the Field Museum (pictured at left, 2009–12) and the Museum of Science and Industry (2013–16).

Making History | 71

candy.46 The Cannings began working with nearby Holy Angels Catholic School.

In short time, they were providing more than one hundred scholarships a year to inner-city students. Then, at the invitation of former Exelon chief executive James O’Connor, Canning joined the Big Shoulders Fund, an organization established to support Catholic schools in Chicago’s low-income neighborhoods. In 2004, Canning was named co-chairman of the organization.

Since then, he has helped raise more than $250 million for the more than ninety schools in the Archdiocese’s Catholic parochial school system, which serves nearly 25,000 students with 80 percent coming from minority households and 62 percent living at or below poverty level.47

Inner-city education is a philanthropic priority for John and Rita Canning. Here, he meets with Northwestern University recipients of the Canning scholarships.

As chairman of the Economic Club of Chicago, Canning interviewed General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in 2012.

72 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Even though Canning is not a Roman Catholic, he became an instrumental figure for Big Shoulders and developed a strong bond with Francis Cardinal George. “We had a great relationship,” Canning remembers. “I got along better with him than half the Catholics did at Big Shoulders. He actually had a sense of humor and an infectious laugh.” By way of illustration, Canning adds, “the Cardinal jokingly used to call me the heathen.”

John and Rita Canning are also personally involved with their scholarship students. In addition to overseeing their program, the Cannings reach out to scholarship recipients. “They all come here,” states Canning, speaking in his office. “We meet with them once a year. After the scholarships, usually I’ll go to the school or I’ll take them to a Bulls game. We have a suite at the United Center. We stay in touch.”

Canning believes Chicago philanthropy is witnessing a transformational moment. “Corporations are changing the way they support philanthropies now,” he argues. “It’s not just because the chairman is on the symphony orchestra board. It’s not an automatic million bucks from that chairman’s company anymore. It goes more now to the service and needs side, like Big Shoulders and the Greater Chicago Food Depository, than it does to cultural institutions.”

He also sees a new generation of philanthropists emerging. “We have this gigantic entrepreneurial community of successful younger people who may not have grown up here, who don’t have any affinity for a museum or some of the cultural institutions because they didn’t go there as a six year old.”

More so than in the past, “They like to get actively involved. They like to see outcomes,” concludes Canning. “In the old days, philanthropic organizations didn’t have to worry about documenting outcomes. Now you have to do it.

And you have to have good outcomes.”48

On May 3, 2014, Governor Pat Quinn (center) presented Canning (right) with the Order of Lincoln Award. Established in 1964, the award honors individuals whose “achievements have brought honor to the state” and whose dedication to “public service inspire all Illinoisans to respond to what Lincoln called ‘the better angels of our nature.’”

Making History | 73

Gidwitz and Canning share a distinctive Midwestern modesty and faith in the future. Canning points out that his equity firm was not named after the founding partners—Canning, Finnegan, and Mencoff—like KKR’s Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts—but rather a Chicago street corner: “We named it Madison Dearborn, because I wanted it to be an institution that endured forever,” Canning explains, “and not be reliant on specific people.”49 Gidwitz similarly remains confident about Chicago. “I am optimistic because we are a great country, we have great people, and we’ve got lots of problems that need to be solved,” he explains. “But I am ultimately optimistic that we will solve them.”50 Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (2006).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Pages 60–62, courtesy of the awardees. 63 top, BH0472 – Ad*Access Digital Collection, John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University. 63 bottom, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-173423. 64, Chicago History Museum, HB-32821-E2. 65–66 left, courtesy of the awardees. 66 right, Chicago History Museum event photography. 67–69, courtesy of the awardees. 70, reprinted with the permission of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. 71–73, courtesy of the awardees. 74, Chicago History Museum event photography.

F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | John Canning and Ron Gidwitz await their biographers.

Useful articles on Helene Curtis are Eben Shapiro, “Helene Curtis’s Secrets: Innovation and Timing,” New York Times, September 14, 1989; Barnaby J. Feder, “A Prominent Chicago Family Changes Course,” New York Times, February 15, 1996; William Gruber, “Helene Curtis Sale Won’t Break Gidwitz’s Stride,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1996; Glenn Collins, “Unilever Agrees to Buy Helene Curtis,” New York 74 | Chicago History | Winter 2018

Left: Renée Crown presents Ron Gidwitz with his Making History Award, June 4, 2014. Right: John Canning (left) accepts his Making History Award from James J. O’Connor, June 3, 2015.

Dan Rest Photography

Times, February 15, 1996; and Judith Crown, “New Crimp at Helene Curtis: Unilever Eyes Sale of Sagging Salon Unit,” Crain’s Chicago Business, April 27, 1996. The company is also included in James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). 927.

For articles on John Canning, see Shia Kapos, “John Canning Jr. on why baseball is all,” Crain’s Chicago Business, March 30, 2013; “100 Most Powerful Chicagoans: 38.

John Canning,” Chicago Magazine, February 14, 2012; Jeff Bailey, “Q&A: Madison Dearborn Partners chairman John A. Canning, Jr.,” Chicago Magazine, April 12, 2010.

Useful articles on Madison Dearborn Partners are Lynne Marek of Crain’s Chicago Business, “Canning, Madison Dearborn go back to debt in deals,” May 22, 2010, and “Who really runs Madison Dearborn?” February 2, 2013.

ENDNOTES 1. Charles Madigan, ed., Global Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004).

6. Canning, interview; “John Canning,” Horatio Alger Association, 2013, accessed April 2, 2015, https://www.horatioalger.org/ members_info.cfm?memberid=CAN13.

7. Ibid.

2. Ronald J. Gidwitz, oral history interview

by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 27, 2014, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Gidwitz, interview); “Ronald J. Gidwitz,” Bloomberg, accessed August 2, 2017, https://bloom.bg/2zjLGN9.

3. John A. Canning Jr., oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 27, 2015, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter

8. Canning, interview; Shia Kapos, “John Canning Jr. on why baseball is all,” Crain’s Chicago Business, March 30, 2013, accessed April 4, 2015, http://bit.ly/1ftFT7c; Bailey, “Q&A: Madison Dearborn Partners chairman John A. Canning, Jr.” 9. “John Canning, Jr,” Wikipedia, last modified July 1, 2017, accessed October 30, 2017, http://bit.ly/2gML730.

Partners chairman John A. Canning, Jr.,”

10. Gidwitz, interview; “Ronald J. Gidwitz,” Wikipedia, last modified January 27, 2013, accessed August 1, 2017, http://bit.ly/2zjYcvP.

Chicago Magazine, April 12, 2010,

11. Gidwitz, interview.

Canning, interview). By 2010, Madison Dearborn had raised $18 billion. See Jeff Bailey, “Q&A: Madison Dearborn

accessed April 1, 2015, http://chi.mg/2hnWjng. Madison Dearborn’s seven funds totaled $23 billion in 2016. See “Madison Dearborn Partners,” Wikipedia, last modified August 4, 2017, accessed August 4, 2017, http://bit.ly/2ho5S5R. 4. “Helene Curtis Industries Inc.,” in James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and

12. “Helene Curtis Industries Inc.,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; “Helene Curtis Industries,” Wikipedia, last modified February 25, 2017, accessed August 1, 2017, http://bit.ly/2xzWQJ4; James Bennett, “Stopette,” Cosmetics and Skin, 2017, accessed November 15, 2017, http://bit.ly/2zPdLfN. 13. Gidwitz, interview.

Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago

14. Canning, interview.

Press, 2004), 927; “Gerald Gidwitz, 99,

15. Michael Moffitt, The World’s Money: International Banking from Bretton Woods to the Brink of Insolvency (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984), 51.

Helene Curtis Founder, Dies,” New York Times, July 14, 2006, accessed November 13, 2017, http://nyti.ms/2AkThuH. 5. Gidwitz, interview.

16. Canning, interview.

Making History | 75

17. “Stanley Golder,” Wikipedia, last modified May 9, 2017, accessed August 3, 2017, http://bit.ly/2hp5xQb. 18. Canning, interview.

19. “Helene Curtis Industries Inc.,” Encyclopedia of Chicago; “Helene Curtis Industries,” Wikipedia.

20. Gidwitz, interview; “Ronald J. Gidwitz,” Bloomberg; “Helene Curtis Industries,” Wikipedia.

21. Gidwitz, interview.

22. Nancy Millman, “Unilever to Buy Helene Curtis for $915 Million: Firm Too Small For World Competition, Says CEO,” Chicago Tribune, February 15, 1996, http://trib.in/2z6cIq8; Judith Crown, “New Crimp at Helene Curtis; Unilever Eyes Sale of Sagging Salon Unit,” Crain’s Chicago Business, April 27, 1996, accessed August 4, 2017, http://bit.ly/2yXOgro.

32. “Company News; Fund Venture Begun in Chicago,” New York Times, January 7, 1992, accessed August 4, 2017, http://nyti.ms/2yfaRQt; “Rita J. Canning and John A. Canning, Jr.—Distinguished Philanthropists, 2013,” Association of Fundraising Professionals Chicago Chapter, accessed April 2, 2014, http://bit.ly/2xBSTTY. 33. Canning, interview.

34. “Canning, interview; “John Canning,” Horatio Alger Association.

35. “Ronald J. Gidwitz, Wikipedia; “Profile: Ronald J. Gidwitz,” Forbes, 2014, accessed April 1, 2014, http://www.forbes.com/profile/ronaldgidwitz/.

36. Gidwitz, interview.

37. Gidwitz, interview; Barnaby J. Feder, “A Prominent Chicago Family Changes

46. The murder of Eric Morse received extensive coverage in the Chicago media. See these Chicago Tribune articles: “Police question 4 boys in death at CHA complex” and “2 boys, ages 10 and 11, charged in deadly plunge of a 5-yearold,” October 14, 1994. Susan Kuczka and Flynn McRoberts, “5-year-old was killed over candy,” October 15, 1994, and “Boy held in fatal fall had record” and “A search for answers in Eric’s fatal fall,” October 16, 1994. Andrew Backover, “Mourners say goodbye to Eric, start on road to healing,” October 20, 1994. Flynn McRoberts, “Despite headlines, CHA safer for kids,” January 7, 1995. Gary Marx and Janan Hanna, “Boy called unfit for murder trial,” January 18, 1995.

47. Canning, interview; “Rita J. Canning and John A. Canning, Jr.,” Association of Fundraising Professionals; “Philanthropy with impact: John ’69 and Rita Canning,” Duke Law News, May 2, 2017, accessed April 2, 2015, http://bit.ly/2xGeKtH.

23. Gidwitz, interview; “Helene Curtis Industries,” Wikipedia.

Course”; William Gruber, “Helene Curtis

24. Eben Shapiro, “Helene Curtis’s Secrets: Innovation and Timing,” New York Times, September 14, 1989, http://nyti.ms/2lvfzDI.

http://trib.in/2ltyNtB. 38. “Ronald J. Gidwitz,” Bloomberg.

48. Canning, interview.

39. Ibid.

49. Ibid.

25. “Helene Curtis Industries,” Wikipedia; Crown, “New Crimp at Helene Curtis.”

40. Gidwitz, interview.

50. Gidwitz, interview.

Sale Won’t Break Gidwtiz’s Stride,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1996,

41. “Ronald J. Gidwitz, National Chairman, 26. Eben Shapiro, “Helene Curtis’s Secrets.”

27. Gidwitz, interview.

Boys & Girls Clubs of America,” U.S. News STEM Solutions, June 17–19, 2013, accessed April 1, 2014,

28. Ibid.

29. The sale price of Helene Curtis differs among sources, because Unilever paid $70 per share, or $770 million in cash, and assumed $145 million of Helene Curtis debt, bringing the total value of the deal to $915 million. See Glenn Collins, “Unilever Agrees to Buy Helene Curtis,” New York Times, 15 February 15, 1996, accessed August 6, 2017, http://nyti.ms/2ygTRJS. 30. Barnaby J. Feder, “A Prominent Chicago Family Changes Course,” New York Times, February 15, 1996, http://nyti.ms/2zi03kM. 31. “Canning, interview; “John Canning,” Horatio Alger Association.

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http://bit.ly/2lD13Kz. 42. Lynne Marek, “Canning, Madison Dearborn go back to debt in deals,” Crain’s Chicago Business, May 22, 2010, accessed April 2, 2015, http://bit.ly/2zlQod5; “What John Canning Jr. has seen in his 30-plus years at the top,” Chicago SunTimes, April 15, 2013; “100 Most Powerful Chicagoans: 38. John Canning,” Chicago Magazine, February 14, 2012, accessed April 2, 2015, http://chi.mg/2yiNWnA. 43. “John Canning, Jr,” Wikipedia.

44. Canning, interview.

45. “Rita J. Canning and John A. Canning, Jr.,” Association of Fundraising Professionals.