Chicago History | Fall 1970

Chicago History FALL 1970

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society FALL 1970 Volume I, Number 2, New Series

Editorial Advisory Committee

Paul M. Angle, Chairman Emmett Dedmon James R . Getz Oliver Jensen Robert W. Johannsen Herman Kogan

CONTENTS Tl N KER TO EVERS TO CHANCE / 69

by T1 'ill Leonard NORTH AVENUE AND CLARK STREET ; 80

by Paul M. Angle

Will Leonard Clement M. Si lvestro R obert M. Sutton

CAMP DOUGLAS : "A HELLISH DEN " ? / 83

by E. B. Long

D avid Lasswell, Editor

BEFORE THE SUNSET FADES / 96

by James Brown IV THE FIRST YEAR OF HULL-HOUSE, 1889- 1890, IN LETTERS BY JANE ADDAMS AND ELLEN GATES STARR / 101

by Mary Lynn McCree

The cover, in keeping with the spirit of Will Leonard ' s piece on old-time Chicago baseball, is taken from a poster in the Chicago Historical Society's collection. The poster, drawn by Frank King, advertised a 1917 benefit game played by newspaper artists.

THE DUNLEITH-DUBUQUE BRIDGE AND ANDREW CARNEGIE / 115 FIFTY YEARS AGO / 116 A CHICAGO BOOK- AND TWO ON ILLINOIS / 123 R eviewed by Paul M. Angle and the Editor

Opposite: Confederate prisoners of war at Ch icago's Camp Douglas in about 1863. The tattered clothing they wear is identified as what they wore when captured, but, according to E.B. Long's article on Camp Douglas in th is issue, it was also, in too many cases, what they would wear until they died at the camp or were releas ed .

Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company, Chicago, Illinois Designed by Doug Lang Copy r ight, 1970 by the Chicago Histo ri cal Society N o rth Avenue an d Clark Street Chicago, Ill inois 60614

Chicago History

67

Midway through a double play. Tinker has just fired the ball to Evers at second, who prepares a throw to Chance at first. West Side Park, 1908.

TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE

by Will Leonard

These three Chicago Cubs became baseball's most famous double-play combination.

Was it only because of that much quoted verse?

The e are the saddest of possible words: " Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Trio of bear Cubs and fleeter than birds, "Tinker to Evers to Chance."

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Giant hit into a doubleWords that are weighty with nothing but trouble: "Tinker to Evers to Chance." printed in the New York Evening Mail in 1908 under the title of " Baseball's Sad Lexicon," arc not the finest literature that ever came from the facile pen of Franklin P. Adams, but they probably are his most quoted work, and they very possibly helped put three men into baseball's Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York.

On an April day in 1946, it was announced at Cooper town that a special six-man committee, appointed by the late Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to select deserving old-timers for the baseball shrine, had named Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance for the roll of honor, along with several other former players.

How good were Tinker and Evers and Chance, actually? Do they deserve inclusion on a roster alongside Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth and Christy Mathewson and Stan Musial and \\'alter Johnson' Or did the fame that came to the three THESE EIGHT LINES OF DOGGEREL,

Will Leonardi the well-known Chicago drama critic and columnist. His long- tanding interest in the history of old-time baseball may surprise some of his readers.

Chicago Cubs infielders because of Adams's catchy jingle have a great deal to do with their names being enrolled at the museum in the lovely little town on the shores of Lake Otsego?

Tinker was the Cubs' short top, Evers the second baseman, and Chance the first baseman, from r 902 through 19 r 1, and the team won the National League championship in four of those years-1906, 1907, 1908, and 1910. Certainly the trio, comprising three-quarters of one of the best infields of its day, was influential in bringing those pennants to the old \Vest Side ball park at Polk and Lincoln (now \\'olcott).

But there were other fine players on those title-winning teams, too-men like Jimmy heckard in left field, Jimmy Slagle and "Circus Solly" Hofman in center field, Frank "Wildfire" Schulte in right, Johnny Kling succeeded by Jimmy Archer as catcher, and the all but forgotten member of the Tinkcr-to-Evcrs-toChance infield, Harry Steinfeldt at third base.

And there were redoubtable pitchers like Mordecai "Three-Fingered" Brown and Orvie Overall and Ed Reulbach and Jack Pfiester.

Other than Brown, no member of the pre\ Vorld \Var I champions has joined the "trio of bear Cubs" at Cooperstown.

Chicago History

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Cubs iri pre-game warmup at the West Side Park, 1908.

Contrary to general belief, Tinker and Evers and Chance never set any double play records, and the Cubs of the high-riding 1906- 191 o years never ranked higher than third in double plays for any of those seasons.

Reminiscing in 194 7, the year before his death, Joe Tinker wrote in a paper that he read at Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida: "Chance, Evers, and I played together for eleven years as a double-play combination. That's a record.

During those eleven years we set a mark for double plays that never has been equalled. I don't know the exact number, however."

His memory was playing him tricks. The National League did not even keep official records of double plays made by individual combinations of men until 1919, settling instead for the number of double plays made during the season by the team as a whole. To compile definite statistics on Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance double killings would necessitate exhaustiYe research through more than a thousand old box scores.

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Some eager historian with time on his hands may undertake the project one clay, but it will not be this writer.

The late Lee Allen, official historian at Cooperstown for many years, put the case well for Chicago's three infielders, when he wrote in his 100 Years of Baseball: In the first place, teams which make the most double plays are not good ball clubs. The Boston Reel Sox made more double plays in 1945 than any aggregation in major league history up to that time, 198, and finished seventh. In the National League the mark of 194 is held by the Reels, who did it twice: in 1928, while fini bing fifth, and in 1931 while snoozing in the league basement.

Furthermore, the era in which Messrs. Tinker, Evers and Chance flourished was not one which tended to make numerous double plays possible. Infields played in, teams sacrificed frequently, runners were apt to steal; it was an age that did not lend itself to records for the double play at all. ...

Despite their undeserved reputation for double play supremacy, Tinker, Evers, and Chance were among the best players in history at their position s, and their place in the Cooperstown shrine, which they entered as a unit, is certainly deserved.

Tinker to Evers to Chance

Frank Chance covering first, 1908.

Chicago Histori cal Society

There was one great baseball man, however, who waxed furious in his contempt for the Cubs' infield threesome. That was John McGraw, for thirty-one years manager of the New York Giants and for every one of those years an avowed enemy of the C h icago Cubs. McGraw never forgave the Cubs for taking away from his Giants, largely because of the astuteness of Johnny Evers, a ball game they had vvon and thereby beating them out of the , 908 pennant.

This was the game, of course, that made the trio's names, at least for the Giants, "the saddest of possible words," but more of that anon.

In his later years, if the subject came up, the wrathful manager of the New Yorkers wou ld snarl: You newspapermen have done very well by Tinker, Evers, and Chance. I n fact, you have built up a fake.

Yes, a plain fake .

Why, the old Baltimore Orioles had a better double-play combination when I wa with them in the Nineties. And we were not as good as Hobe Ferris, Fred Parent, and George LaChance of the early Red Sox. No other double-play machine ever got the publicity those Cubs received from Ring Lardner [for several years a Chicago Tribune baseball writer) and that Adams poem.

How about Honus \,Vagner, Dots Miller, and Bill Abstein of the Pirates? What was wrong with Jack Barry, Eddie Collins, and tuffy Mcinnis of the Athletics?"

McGraw may have had a point. o one ever wrote a poem about Ferris to Parent to LaChance, or \,Yagner to Miller to Abstein, but the Ath letics' inner cordon, with Frank "Home Run" Baker as its third baseman, got plenty of publicity as "The $100,000 Infield," in an era before college baseball players were given $100,000 just for igning their contract.

Times and the game may have changed as much as the value of the dollar, but though the record books show no double play marks by Tinker, Evers, and Chance, they do show that the Cubs won four pennant ¡ in five years, and that is what counted. Evers and Chance, incidentally, are nowhere to be found among the Chica go History

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Tinker to Evers to Chance

record holders in any category, and Tinker is there for a couple of inconsequential featsmost games played at shortstop in a season with 157 in 1908, and most years leading the league in fielding at short stop, with five years.

Fielding records are deceptive. They show that the Cubs led the ational League in errors in every one of the four seasons in which they won the championship. Tinker, Evers, and Chance must have committed their share of those misplays, but the man who is more agile and eager, who tries harder, is more likely to make an error than the tanglefooted slow man who cannot get near the ball.

The records show that Rudy York holds the American League record for a first baseman participating in double plays in a season, with 163 in 1944. Yet Rudy, an excellent hitter who was tried all over the field until they finally put him on first base because they believed he could do the club the least harm there, was nothing but a target for the throws from his shortstop or second baseman.

And the record books show that Zeke Bonura, of the White Sox, once led the league in fielding at first base, although the customers used to laugh aloud as the snail-like "Banana Nose ' merely waved harmlessly at ground balls as they skittered by out of his slow reach.

The thing that made the Tinker-Evers-Chance combination great was that they seemed able to make the double play when it was needed. There was nothing mentally slow about Frank Chance, who was not called the "Peerless Leader" for nothing when he managed the club. But Tinker and Evers had an uncanny knack for anticipating a play, for working together although they hated one another's guts. Perhaps, each of the two men around second base was trying just a little harder because of the rivalry between them.

They worked out a system of private signals for almost every move, but they played so smoothly together that eventually the moves became instinctive and the signals could be largely neglected.

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Robert Smith, in Baseball, described the infield's teamwork: John Evers, for instance, playing second base, and usually eligible to cover second with a runner on first and a left-handed baller at the plate, might detect the hit-and-run signal-or just feel that it was due.

Then, with a silent grimace, perhaps a mere showing of his teeth behind his glove, he might signal to Joe Tinker at shortstop that this time Joe should cover the base, while Evers tayed in position to field the ball.

And then, indeed, they would make the batsman "hit into a double." For, instead of a hole in the infield as ordinarily there would have been, there would be loose-boned, lantern-jawed Johnny Evers, ready to gobble the ground ball to his big glove and "hang" it in the air over second with a quick and perfectly timed toss, so swift that Tinker could move in, snatch it in one hand (with his foot on the base) for the putout, then continue across the base and whip the ball down to Frank Chance at first, to put the hitter back on the bench.

A is so often the case in great partnerships, Tinker, E,¡ers, and Chance were three men of wildly disparate personalities.Joe was a cheerful fellow, filled with humor, given to quick and easy laughter. Evers was nicknamed "the Crab," and he was rough, tough, brawling on the ball field, and a gen tic man off it. Chance was a serious man, a better hitter than the other two, a graceful fielder, and a manager who liked to let his men use their own initiative, unlike McGraw who was a martinet calling every play.

Frank Chance was the oldest of the trio, and the first to join the Chicago ball club. Born in 1877 in Fresno, California, he was one of those exceedingly rare professional baseball players who never played in the minor leagues. He starred with the Fresno high school team in 1893 and 1894. In 1897 be was catching for a Fresno nine in a statewide tournament of amateur teams when Bill Lange, who was a Chicago outfielder at the time, but was umpiring in his home state, admired Chance's work and recommended to Jim Hart, president of the Chicago club, that he offer Chance a contract.

The Chicago Tribune of April 30, 1898, reported

For the opening game of the 1908 season , Cap Anson pitches the first ball. Anson managed the Chicago National League club from 1879 through 1898. Note the rooftop bleachers across the road on Polk Street.

Tinker to Evers to Chance

about the precedingday·s game: '·Manager Tom Burns of the Chicago team wanted the fans to have a look at Frank Chance, hi vvonder player from the Pacific coast. So he put him in to catch the last two innings in place of Tim Donahue.

The young catcher was OYerly anxious and he let a foul drop to the ground, losing hi only chance.''

Frank later declared that the Chicago pitcher, Clark Griffith, had called to him to drop the ball on purpose, because the game was safely \\·on and he wished a run to score. Griff, according to Chance, thought it was unlucky to win by a shutout. But it was an unusual debut.

During his first five seasons with the Cubs Chance did not take the catcher's job away from Donahue, and he played as many games in the outfield and first base as he did behind the bat.

It was not until 1902 that the other members of the infield triumvirate joined him on the club.

Joe T inker, born in 1880 at Muscotah, Kansa, broke in with several clubs in a coupie of minor leagues in 1900, and in 1901 was with Portland of the Pacific Northwest League, before joining the Cubs in the spring of 1902. Barry McCormick, the Chicago shortstop, had jumped to the new American League, so Tinker was installed at the post and held it for the next eleven years.

Johnny Evers, born in Troy, New York in 1881, started his career with his home town team in the New York State League in 1902. When Bobby Lowe, the Cubs' veteran second baseman, was injured late in the season, Selee asked a scout to find him an emergency replacement. Evers cost the club only a few hundred dollars, played the last two weeks of the summer at the position, and the next year took it over.

He was a scrappy little stripling of 1 15 pounds, so small the older players hazed him unmercifully, ridiculing his size and even refusing to let him ride with them in the team bus, making him perch on the roof instead. But he wa a doughty battler as well as a canny one, hi lantern jaw thrust out in an attitude of con istently fierce determination. The following year the second 74

Chicago Hi story

base position was his, and he played 1 10 games there while Lowe got into only 22.

This was the season-1903-in which the Tinker-Evers-Chance combination at last fell into place. Sclee had been experimenting with his husky catcher (Chance's nickname of"Husk" derived, incidentally, from his size and strength) as a first baseman and outfielder, and finally decided the infield position was where Chance belonged. Frank fought it at the outset, but gave in reluctantly and developed from a fair catcher into an excellent first baseman .

Frank Selcc had won five championships with the Boston Nationals before coming to Chicago in 1902, and he was putting together another winner on the \'\'est Side. His charges finished fifth, third, and second, in the three full seasons he managed, and were running fourth when failing health forced him to retire in 1905.

But Selcc, in effect, had chosen his own suecc sor as manager. He had asked the players themselves to elect a team captain to replace Bobby Lowe, and the athletes voted overwhelmingly for Frank Chance. When Sclcc dropped out, midway in the 1905 season, Chance was a natural choice to succeed him, and the club moved up to third place before the year ended.

The following season, the team Frank Selee had assembled won its first pennant under his successor. The Cubs of 1906 swept through the National League, winning a record 116 games and finishing 20 game ahead of the hated New York Giants of John McGraw, the champions of 1905.

Then they encountered Chicago's other team, the \Vhite Sox of the upstart American League, in the World Series. The Sox, under Fielder Jones, had won their pennant with ninety-three victories, but they were known as "the Hitless \Vonders," because they managed to win lowscore battles with little sign of batting strength.

The \'\'hite Sox upset the powerful Cubs, four games to two, in a series that was the only one ever played between two Chicago teams.

Undaunted, the Cubs came back in 1907 to

The celebrated trio of dudes at the train station in 1913. Chance wears the pork-pie, Tinker is on the right and Evers on the left.

Chicago Historical Soc iety

Tinker to Evers to Chance

win a second successive pennant, with another awesome total of 107 games won, and I7 games ahead of the econd-place Pittsburgh Pirates, to face in the World Series the Detroit Tigers with their twenty-year old star, Ty Cobb.

The 1908 season brought a third consecutive championship to the \\'est Side, the team racking up ninety-nine victories, which was just one more than achieved by the Giant . It also brought Johnny Evers's moment of greatest glory, and John McGraw's most bitter hour. For one of those ninety-nine games had been lost to the Gian ts, until Evers pulled it out of the fire after it was over.

The Cubs were playing the Giant at the old Polo Grounds in New York on September 23, 1908, with only t\,·o weeks of the season remaining, and the score was tied I to I in the last half of the ninth inning. \\'ith one out, Art Dedin singled for the Giants. Moose McCormick hit a grounder to Evers, who relayed it to Tinker in time to get Devlin at second, but too late for the double play that would have retired the side.

Up to bat, with two out and McCormick on first, came a nineteen-year old rookie, first baseman Fred Merkle. He singled and McCormick went to third. Al Bridwell was the next batsman, and he drove the ball into center field, McCormick romping over the plate while the customers yelled their elation at the Giants' 2 to I triumph.

But wait a minute!

"That's where the fun began," Johnny Evers told John P . Carmichael of the Chicago Daily News, thirty-five years later. "Artie Hofman threw the ball in from center field as McCormick went home and Merkle jogged halfway to second, I had my eye on him, saw him stop, glance around at the fans pouring out of their seats, and start for the clubhouse, out beyond right field."

The quick-thinking Evers realized that if he could get that ball and step on second, Merkle was forced at the base and the run did not count.

Hofman's throw had gone over Joe Tinker's head.

He and Johnny raced for the ball. Joe McGinni ty of the Giants beat them to it. The double 76

Ch icago Histo ry

play boys co-operated well, wrestling McGinnity for several minutes, before he could get his hand loose and throw the ball into the crowd.

The way Tinker and Evers told it in later years, Harry Steinfeldt and Floyd Kroh of the Cubs captured the fan who had caught the ball, and, when he \,·ould not relinquish it, were forced to rough him up until he dropped it. Kroh fired the ball to Tinker, who tossed it to Evers, standing on second base and waving his arms wildly.

The way John McGraw and the Giants told it, the Cubs never did regain the ball that had been in play. They claimed Kroh got a different ball, from the team's ball bag, and threw that one to Evers. All was confusion.

The umpire, Hank O'Day, had his eye on Evers, who had tried the same coup in a game at Pittsburgh several weeks earlier. On that occasion O'Day had told Johnny he was wrong, but had time to change his mind. This time he declared: "The run does not count," and walked off, making no attempt to continue the game, as the happy crQ\•vcl milled around on the grass, assuming that the Giants had won.

McGraw nearly had apoplexy. And to make matters wor e for him, the season ended with the Cubs in a tie for first place, al 98 games won apiece. They played off the tied game ofMerkle's embarrassment on October 8, the clay after the regular season closed, and the Cubs beat Christy Mathewson and the Giants, 4 to 2.

John McGraw never forgave O'Day or the National League front office for supporting Evers's contention. In fact, he had medals struck off for his players, bearing the inscription, "The Real Champions, 1908."

The world series was anti-climactic, the Cubs again brushing aside the Tigers. In 1909, they piled up the impressive total 104 games won, better than they had clone in 1 908, but the Pittsbur~h Pirates won 110 and the Cubs' tenure as champions was halted temporarily.

In 191 o they won the fourth and final pennant of the Tinker-Evers-Chance era, again winning , 04 games and finishing I 3 games ahead of the

Johnny Evers lopes across home plate on a base hit. The Giants' left-hand pitcher, "Hooks" Wiltse, covers the throw. West Side Park, 1908.

Tinker to Evers to Chance

Joe Tinker in 1914 when he played for the short-lived Chicago Federals.

Giants. This time the Philadelphia Athletics under Connie Mack were their series foes, and bested the Chicagoans 4 games to 1.

No one knew it, but the glory clays were over.

In 191 r, Frank Chance played only twenty-nine games at first base, because of an ankle injury.

Vic Saier was his replacement. Evers, who was ill most of the year, got into only thirty-three at second. Tinker was at short, but Steinfeldt, who went to the Boston team, had been replaced at third by young Jim Doyle, who died the following February. The Cubs finished second. In 191 2 they slipped to third. At the encl of the season, Chance departed under unpleasant circumstances. The Cubs were winning the city series with the \,Vhite Sox, three games to one, with only one more game needed for them to claim the town's championship. They lost the next four in a row, the last one by the disgraceful score of 16 to o. Disgusted, Chance walked off the bench before the fiasco was over, and never came back. It was the encl of an era.

Charles Murphy, the Cubs owner, promoted Evers to the managership. Tinker, never fond of Johnny, did not wish to play under him, and asked to be traded. So the Cubs traded him to Cincinnati. Johnny lasted in the driver's seat only through the first year of his five-year contract, and went to Boston in 1914 where he helped spark the Braves to a pennant that saw them rise from last place on July 4 to the top.

The lives of the men were not happy in the years after their baseball careers had closed.

Chance was to manage the White Sox in 1924, with Evers as his first lieutenant, butjust before he was to leave his California home for training camp in Florida, he caught flu and had such difficulty in breathing that he was sent to a sanitarium. The man who once had been known as Husk weighed about I oo pound ¡ when he died the following eptember.

Johnny Evers made about two hundred thousand dollars in baseball but lost most of it in investments and in a sporting goods store he owned in Albany. He vvas appointed superintendent of a city-owned athletic stadium in Albany in 1942, but the following year suffered a stroke which confined the once peppery infielder to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

He was a familiar sight at the Albany ball park, stationed near the foul line.

He and Tinker, enemies for so many years, came to a happy reconciliation about 1940 when they were brought together on a Chicago radio program. The pair of tough old campaigners surprised themselves when their eyes filled with tears, and they shook hands, smiling with relief and joy. Johnny died in 1948 at Albany.

After his stint in Cincinnati as manager for the 191 3 season, Tinker returned to Chicago to manage the local team in the outlaw Federal league during its two seasons of 191 4 and 191 5, winning the pennant the second year. In 191 6 he stayed on to manage the Cubs for a season, the team having moved from the old West Side ball park to the Fecleral's new one on the North Side.

Tinker became a man of wealth in Orlando, Florida, but his first and second wives died there, and he lost his fortune when the Florida land boom burst. He accepted a job as a beer salesman. In 1947 a spreading infection caused the amputation of his left leg, and the following year he died in an Orlando hospital of respiratory trouble.

Three plaques on the walls of the baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown bear the names of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance.

It was not just Franklin P. Adams's doggerel that put them there, but the battles they won on the fields of the ~ational League, sixty-odd years ago.

Chicago History

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NORTH AVENUE AND CLARK STREET

The first of a series of short articles on the changing Chicago neighborhood of which the Chicago Historical Society is a part.

in 1 945 the neighborhood which centered at the corner of North Avenue and Clark Street had changed little in the last twenty-five or thirty years. The Plaza Hotel, impressive in its red brick bulk, stood at the southeast corner of the intersection, as it had since 1892. The hotel had seen better times, but it still harbored a number of widows whose names appeared year after year in the Social Register. The average age of the permanent residents, I should guess, was seventy-five. The stores and shops which occupied the first floor on the Clark Street side reflected the decline of the hotel's grandeur. There was a restaurant in the building itself, as well as one on the corner, but no one seemed to be able to make a go of it for more than a few months. A bar did better, but never lasted very long. A Western Union office, a dry cleaner and laundry, and a lingerie shop seemed to have longer leases on life, but in the end they too closed their doors.

Only Peter Simon continued in busine s as long as he wanted to. His establishment was simply a desk in the corner of a large room, more often vacant than not. He was tall, gray haired, possessed of great dignity, and as fine a watchmaker as could be found anywhere. Moreover, he did not consider it beneath him to restring beads for the girls or put a new clip on an earring. He gave up his shop only a few years ago, not for lack of business or uncertain hands, but because he could afford to retire and no longer wanted to work at his exacting trade.

Of all the small tradesmen of the neighborhood who, for one reason or another have given up, Peter Simon has been missed most.

The west side of Clark Street south of North Avenue has changed less than the east side.

WHEN I CAME TO CHICAGO

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Several busines es remain: the drug store on the corner, the movie theater, and the Germania Inn, all much improved over what they were twenty-five years ago. New shops have taken root. In this short block the greatest loss, from my point of view, came from Henry Wiener's decision to close his Plaza Men's Shop, a convenient place to buy shirts and socks and underwear from a genial and accommodating proprietor. (If Henry didn't have what you wanted he'd get it for you, and fast.) The Red Star Inn, in its old glory, still holds the corner of Clark Street and Germania Place and continues to serve the same hearty German food for which it has been famous for seventy ycars. 1 And around the corner the Germania Club perseveres although its future, in this location, appears to be uncertain.

North Avenue west of Clark Street bears almost no resemblance to what it was a quartercentury ago. Some years ago the handsome building of the orth Federal Savings and Loan Association supplanted a rambling two-story structure that housed a cafeteria, a cigar store, and a barber shop, with doctors and dentists occupying the second floor. The cigar store fascinated me. \\'hen a stranger entered to buy a package of cigarettes from the slender stock he met a cold eye and was ea ed out as fast as possible. It was obvious that the real business of the establishment-bookmaking-went on in the rear behind a green curtain. I would drop in now and then just to bedevil the girl at the cigar counter: was I a detective or a reporter? The former posed no threat unless the owner was 1This

was written in the fall of 1969. The Red Star Inn went out of business in February, 1970. I have let the statement stand because it illustrates the fact that the neighborhood continues to change with dismaying rapidity.

The Plaza Hotel in 1912, at its palmiest. For seventy-four years (1893-1967) the dignified old pile gave a special tone to the North Avenue and Clark Street neighborhood and epitomized the Chicago custom of residential hotel living. The new Latin School building opened on its site last year, and the intersection will be further transformed when the new wing of the Chicago Historical Society goes up in the park across the street.

behind with his protection money; the latter might be a nuisance. Before long I decided that my pastime might be slightly dangerous, so I stopped playing my little game.

Horse parlors abounded in the neighborhood.

Another cigar store stood on Clark Street just south of the Red Star Inn, and if this place sold a bundle of Wheeling stogies once a month the sale must have set a record. The several saloons on the south side of orth Avenue all took bets.

Fifteen or twenty years ago it was said that seven bookmakers operated on orth Avenue between Clark and Wells. Now there is only one, and I am not going to reveal his location. I do not bet on the horses, but I have no desire to spoil other people's fun. Besides, the bookie doesn't look very prosperous, and I should not want to have a hand in destroying his meager business.

West of La Salle Street the old orth Avenue is gone, in part literally. All bui ldings on the north side have been demolished in pursuance of an urban renewal project which calls for widening the street and erecting apartments, supposedly for low-income tenants. (This is a pitch which I always take with a high degree of skepticism .) Frederico Comacho succeeded in relocating his Azteca Restaurant across the street but D. Recher & Sons, fine wine merchants, had to move to another part of the city.

Two or three years before the demolition Merschel's bar and package store locked its doors and steel shutters for the last time. For many years it had been the gathering place for the neighborhood old-timers who found Arthur Stoffel's v\'ieland Cafe somewhat too respectable for their tastes.

The sou th side of the street yielded to a force as irresistible as the wrecker's clam shell: high rents occasioned by the hippies and curiosity seekers of \\'ells treet. The live poultry shop and the bait store closed and the building was razed, to be replaced by a pseudo French chateau offering fancy hamburgers and hot dogs.

At least the corner smells better than it former-

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ly did. Other old neighborhood institutions like Moll's meat market simply folded up, although the Chinese hand laundry still operates at the old stand.

Some of the changes described here represent progress. The North Federal Savings and Loan gives its corner architectural distinction and provides some banking services that neighborhood patrons find very convenient. The Latin School of Chicago is a great improvement over the Plaza Hotel in its declining years. I suppose an ice cream shop is preferable to a disreputable saloon and horse parlor. But progress is attained only at a price. The price includes the loss of color, unless one is satisfied, as I am not, with the kind of color that prevails on Wells Street. And it also includes the loss of establishments that made life around North and Clark easier and pleasanter than it is now: Peter Simon's watch repair shop, Henry v\'iener's haberdashery, the vVieland Cafe.

I hope that progress goes no further. If it should threaten the Walgreen store, the Germania Inn (a little gem of a restaurant), and Arthur Blome's flower shop, I cast my vote for re trogrcssion.

PAUL

M.

ANGLE

Chicago History

81

A relic of Camp Douglas. The cover of a manuscript song sheet in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society drawn by a confederate prisoner at Camp Douglas. Its subject is the prisoner's nostalgia for his home, the ladies, and military glory. One of the verses is quoted opposite.

CAMP DOUGLAS: "A HELLISH DEN"?

by E. B. Long

Neither Union nor Confederate prisoner ef war camps have records for humane treatment efprisoners, but some prisons were worse than others, and better than some. Chicago's Camp Douglas is a case in point.

That dear old home I've left sister I've obeyed my country's call To defend the land we so love And win our freedom or fall Though not a joyous lot is mine And dark with clouds is my sky: And within a prison's close embrace The hours pass sad ly by.

- Verse from a song written by Joseph M. Dunauan, Confederate prisoner at Camp Douglas.

of today, the near South Side with its housing developments, slums, factories, and warehouses, holds no visible remembrances of that urban problem of the 1860s -Camp Douglas. Union army recruiting depot and unwilling "home" of as many as thirty thousand soldiers of the Confederate States of America, Camp Douglas existed from September, r 861, to the end of the Civil \ Var in the spring of 1865.

The wooden slab barracks buildings, the hospitals, the fourteen-foot high wooden fence, the observation and watch towers are gone. Few of the residents of the area arc even aware that thousands were once in careera ted there. Occasionally some student or historian burrows into the records, a newspaper feature writer recounts the superficial outlines of the story for the observance of some anniversary. Occasionally there arc those who recall that far south of Camp Douglas in the quiet of Oak \\'oods Cemetery

IN THE SPRAWLING CHICAGO

E. B. Long, formerly of Oak Park, Illinoi s, is Associate Profe,sor of American Studies at the University of Wyoming.

lie the bodies of 4,454 Confederates, most of whom died within the confines of the prison.

"A hellish den of iniquity," where "fiends incarnate in the shape of men," had charge of the prisoners, is the bitter, purple-toned description of the prison by one Confederate veteran.

"The Sccesh ha,路c got a better opinion of the North-than they used to have. They expected to be laughed at and made fun of but instead they have as good to cat as we do and are as well taken care of," was the opinion of a Yankee guard in March, 1 862.

The subject of Civil \\"ar prison camps is replete with contro,路ersy and contradiction. It is obscured by inaccuracies in accounts and burdened with unresoh路able contrasts. These conflicts of evidence and the lack of authoritative figures make qualitative or quantitative analysis quite impossible. The serious scholar is forced to hack through a shado\\路y forest of historical misinformation, exaggeration, and distortion, and to weigh with scrupulous care what facts he does find.

One name dominates the public view of Civil \ \'ar prisons-Andersonville. There has developed from the brief time of its existence what amounts to almost an "Andersonville complex" or syndrome, which has carried on to the present. At times it seems as if there had been no other prison pen! In lurid articles, pamphlets, photographs, and drawings the notorious camp in south Georgia received the opprobrium of all at the North during the later days of the conflict. After the war che torrent of accounts detailing the exce scs of Andersonville continued and steadily mounted. It is sometimes forgotten that the camp endured onfy from late February, 1864, until the end of the war.

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Those defending the Confederate position claimed that prisoners there fared as well as their Southern guards, and that the apparent neglect was caused by a lack of prisoner exchange by the North, and by the extreme shortages of food and medical supplies general in the South.

There is no question that Andersonville held horrors aplenty for those confined there. The harsh facts penetrate any attempted whitewash.

They should be explored as objectively as possible by historians who, at the same time, must keep in mind the many other prisons on both sides.

The amount of lineage given Confederate Andersonville, and even Libby Prison and Belle Isle in Richmond, is immense compared to that accorded Northern camps: Johnson's Island in Lake Erie off Sandusky, Ohio; Elmira, ew York; Fort Delaware, Delaware; Point Lookout, Maryland; Camp Chase at Columbus, Ohio; Camp Morton, Indianapoli ; Rock Island, Illinois, among others, including Camp Douglas at Chicago.

Those interested in balance in history must delve into the question and atternpt to arrive at a fair opinion: was Camp Douglas, as one prisoner termed it, "the darkest leaf in the legends of all tyranny?" Or was it as well run and humanely operated as was po sible for a prison camp?

Just how does the record of Camp Douglas stand in comparison with other Northern prisons and with tho e in the Confederacy?

Camp Douglas had its beginnings as a mobilization and rendezvous camp for the Northern Military District of Illinois in the late summer of 1861. Chicago, already a great and thriving railroad center, was an obvious gathering point for troops, for their training, and for forwarding them to the fighting fronts. In four years the camp served three purposes: as a depot for recruitment and rudimentary training, as a camp for Yankee soldiers, paroled by the South, and, most importantly, as a prison for captured Confederates.

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It occupied a portion of the estate of the late Senator Stephen A. Douglas (for whom it was named) near the old University of Chicago. Although changes were made in the boundaries from time to time, and there arc variations in the accounts of its extent, the camp wa located primarily between present-day Thirty-first and Thirty-third streets, and from Cottage Grove Avenue on the east to Martin Luther King Drive (the old South Parkway) on the west. At time additional land was used Lo the east toward the lake, on the west at the old fairgrounds, and to the south. The main entrance was a castle-like portal on Cottage Grove.

No one at the camp was prepared to cope with the influx of prisoners captured by Ulysses S. Grant in the strategically important victory at Fort Donelson, Tennessee February 16, 1862.

Chicago's Mayor Julian S. Rumsey had reason to complain to the departmental commander, Major General Henry \V. Halleck: "There is not even a fence about the barracks." He called the city "entirely destitute" of arms except for approximately one thousand weapons at the camp. The populace was fearful that the prisoners would break forth from their light guard and rnmpage through the city. Halleck replied peremptorily that the mayor should use what men he had and raise a special police force. "I have taken these Confederates in arms behind their intrenchments; it is a great pity if Chicago cannot guard them unarmed for a few days,¡' he added arrogantly, apparently forgetting he had been in Saint Louis during the siege of Fort Donelson, while Grant and his men did the job.

From such a haphazard beginning grew one of the principal and longe t-lived prison camps of the Civil \t\'ar. There probably was no more confusion at Camp Douglas than at any other prison. It was simply the oft-repeated American way of being not quite ready for a situation when the need arose. Fighting armies had been fielded and victories won, but what to do with some of the vanquished of these victories had not been sufficiently considered.

Chicago Historical Society

An 1864 painting of Camp Douglas by Pennsylvania

In early March, 1862, guard FrankW. Tupper wrote his parents that the camp was now enclosed and guarded and that the "Secesh are a motley looking crowd no two looking a like the most of them are draped in grey and copper colored Kentucky jeans, but some have coats of Indian blankets. Their clothes are not all cut in the same style any that was ever herd of can be found among them. A good share of them wont want to war again if they get home once."

However, "some are stubborn and say [they] will fight again the fir t opportunity."

Tupper felt the prisoners were well cared for.

A few days later he told his parents they "had better bring sister Ida along when you come up here it will be sight for her that she will always remember a great many ladies visit the camp every clay."

Feminist and leader in countle s worthy cau e Mary A. Livermore wrote of the Confederates being" given accommoda lions" at Camp Douglas.

She stated that they were quartered in the ame barracks and furnished with the ame rations, both in quantity and quality, as were the Fed-

infantryman, Albert Moyer. The view is from the tower of the Cottage Grove Hotel, opposite the camp entrance. The original is in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society.

era! troops. She claimed it was "amusing, as well as pathetic to listen to their openly expressed satisfaction. 'You-uns got better grub than weuns down South; better barracks, too.' "According to Mrs. Livermore mo t of the prisoners had no uniforms and were hivering in their tatters.

They "seemed a poorly nourished and uncaredfor company of men, and their hopeless and indescribable ignorance intensified their general forlornness. Despite good medical attendance in camp and hospital, and notwith tanding the sick lack for nothing in the matter of nursing and sick-diet- o well managed was the hospital, and so constant the ministrations of the women of Chicago-more than five hundred of them died at Camp Douglas before they were exchanged." Mrs. Livermore went on to tell of the constant death : " It was pitiful to see how easily Chicago History

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they gave up all truggle for life, and how readily they adjusted themselves to the inevitable."

One may wonder at Mrs. Livermore's saccharine, perhaps ironic, description of the dying Confederates. While she undoubtedly exaggerated the excellence of the care, there is evidence from the prisoners' side that things were not too bad, at least al first. Howe\'cr, the shock of finding themselves pri oner of war in a strange and hostile clime obviously affected the Southerners.

Lieutenant James Taswell Mackey of the Forty-eighth Tennessee Infantry, captured at Fort Donelson, wrote of having eleven inches of snow on the ground in late March, but, cold as it wa, "it has been a day of merriment among our fellow-prisoners who have kept up an unceasing warfare of snowballs during the clay."

However, by May, Mackey could write of prisoners carrying a long board lashed to their backs on which were inscribed the words: "Escaped prisoners recaptured." He claimed that the guard who captured eight would-be escapees had been promoted. Almost every clay he recorded the death of a member of his own company.

A flood of new prisoners arrived in Camp Dougla shortly after the bloody and ferocious battle of Shiloh in early April, 1862. Among them was a twenty-one year old \\Telsh-born Confederate, who, maltreated by his family and a victim of the harshness of industrial-age Britain, had come to New Orlean . He had been informally adopted by a merchant upon whose death in 1861 the young man enlisted in the Dixie Grays. Many years later, after having gained fame for his continent-opening explorations in Africa and for finding the supposedly lost missionary David Livingstone, Sir Henry Morton Stanley wrote of his capture at Shiloh and his arrival at Camp Douglas. "Our prison-pen was a square and spacious enclosure, like a bleak cattle-yard, walled high with planking, on the top of which, at every sixty yards or so, were sentry86

Ch ica go History

boxes. About fifty feet from the base, and running parallel with it, was a line of lime-wash.

That was the deadline, and any prisoner who crossed it was liable lo be shot." The appearance of the other prisoners long remained with Stanley: "The Sou thcrners' uniforms were n ever pretty, but when rollen and ragged, and swarming with vermin, they heightened the di reputability of the wearers; and, if anything was needed to increase our dejection after taking sweeping glances of the arid mud-soil of the great yard, the butternut and grey clothes, the sight of ash-coloured faces, of the sickly and emaciated condition of our unhappy friends were well calculated to do so.''

As time went on, Stanley recorded , " \\Te found it to be a dreary task to endure the unchanging variety of misery surrounding us." \\'riting of sick, bilious, filthy, "unutterably ugly" prisoners, Stanley said, "In our trea trnent, I think there was a purpose, If so, it may have been from a belief that we should the sooner recover our senses by experiencing as much misery, pain, privation, and sorrow as could be contained within a prison; and, therefore, the authorities rigidly excluded every medical, pious, :nusical, or literary charity that might have alle\'iatecl our sufferings . . . . Left to ourselves, with absolutely nothing to do but lo brood O\'er our po itions, bewail our lots, catch the taint of disease from each other, and passively abide in our prison-pen, we were soon in a fair state of rotting while yet ali\路c. 路路 Day after clay Stanley's company "steadily diminished; and every morning . .. [he] had to sec them carried in their blankets to the hospital, whence none ever returned."

He wrote of the dysentery, and typhu路, and of the Yictims of disease in the throes of their pain. Others were "sunk in gloomy introspection, staring blankly, with heads between knees, at nothing; weighted down by a surfeit of misery, internal pains furrowing their faces, breathing in a fine cloud of human scurf, and dust of offensive hay, dead to everything but the flitting

Chicago Historical Society

A woodcut from Harper's Weekly of 1862 showing the interior of one of the prison barracks.

fancies of Lhe hopeless.'' Every morning grim wagons came to the hospital and the dead house to take away the bodies.

Taking the oath of allegiance to the Union and accepting enrollment in the Federal army after Lwo months at Camp Douglas, Stanley became ill and was discharged. After a short trip back Lo Britain he returned to America and joined Lhc Federal Navy. After Lhe war he became a journalist and explorer.

As might be expected, Camp Douglas and the city outside were rife with rumors and distortions about what had happened behind those wooden fences, what was about to happen, or what might happen. According to a citizen, "The Rebel horde that was confined at Camp Douglas was a source of mixed ensations to the people of Lhe ciLy. To Lhe timid iL was an C\'er present menace; and during its continuance, real estate in its neighborhood wa. little in demand for permanent improvement. ... " However, young people would spend Sundays taking horse cars out Lo the camp. If one could get a pa s to enter the gates, one could actually see the prisoners close up. If not, there was an observation tower

where it cost a dime to climb and stand on a platform overlooking the pen, as if peering at animals in a zoo.

It was rumored in July, 1862, that fifteen or twenty prisoners had stormed the fence with considerable fighting. According to a guard all that really happened was that three or four "Seccsh" had obtained some whiskey and had been sent to the "\Vhite Oak," the infamous dungeon. The guard did have to be turned out, a few shots may have been fired, and three escaping rebels were captured. Yet these were fairly constant incidents, often blown up to presage in rumor gigantic, imaginary conspiracies and mass outbreaks.

The lack of any experience by the administrators in the planning, building, supplying, laying out of such an establishment, or in handling of prisoners, along with the fact that the army had other things to do, re ulted in a random and mismanaged growth. The unwillingness to spend seven thou and dollars for a proper sewer in I 861 undoubtedly was responsible for a portion of the disease that wracked the population.

Rough buildings had to be erected hastily, often Chicago History

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from raw lumber. State and federal authorities appear from the record to have been extremely penurious when it came to spending money, even modest amounts. \\'hen the bulk of the Confederate prisoners first arrived, Colonel James A. Mulligan, a Chicago war hero, was in command. It was Mulligan and his Irish Brigade who had been besieged and forced to surrender in September, 1861, at Lexington, Mis ouri. As a prison commander he seems to have done worse than in the field. The Commissary General of Pri oners, Colonel W. Hoffman, found that there "has been the greatest carelessness and willful neglect in the management of the affairs of the camp, and everything was left by Colonel Mulligan in a shameful state of confusion." Hardly any records existed as to what prisoners had been at the camp, were at the camp, or what had happened to them.

Lax or inexpert and constantly changing administration was to plague the prison to the encl, in varying degrees. Though one or two of the commanders were to prove more capable than Mulligan they were all restricted by economyminded superiors. Mulligan was replaced in June by Colonel Joseph H. Tucker, who had been the original commander; he held on until the encl of 1862 .

Henry W. Bellows, president of the Sanitary Commission, a civilian agency engaged in caring for soldiers, wrote Colonel Hoffman in late June that "the place i as de perately circumstanced as any camp ever was, and that nothing but a special providence or some peculiar efficacy of the Jake winds can prevent it from becoming a source of pestilence before another month has gone over our heads." He wrote of standing water, unpoliced grounds, fou l sinks, unventilated and crowded barracks, general disorder, "soil reeking with miasmatic accretions, of rotten bones and the emptyings of camp kettles is enough to drive a sanitarian to despair." Bellows felt the camp should be abandoned and that nothing but fire could cleanse 88

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the barracks. On the same June 30 the Post Surgeon complained, "The surface of the ground is becoming saturated with the filth and slop from the privies, kitchens, and quarters and must produce serious results to health as soon as the hot weather sets in." The number of sick was increasing; there was a need for more Northern doctors, for the Confederate one that had been helping out had been discharged.

Colonel Hoffman dutifully inspected the camp and informed Quartermaster General Montgomery C. Meig that, due to the low, swampy ground, there was no possibility of good drainage. He agreed that the camp was in a foul condition and that a proper sewer and water supply must be constructed. This would cost five to eight thousand dollars. Circumstances made it impossible, he wrote, to move the camp, though that might be best.

Meigs replied, rather ruthlessly, that he could not approve the expenditure and that ten thousand men should be able to keep the camp clean. '' . . . the United States has other uses for its money than to build water-works to save them the labor neccs ary to their health," he wrote.

So authorities had to do what they could, with prisoners for labor. There were increased efforts to improve the prison although at times those efforts seemed callously misdirected and piteously ineffective.

A detailed history of the administration of Camp Douglas is a dreary tale, replete with problems of sanitation, sometimes poor food and inadequate clothing, appalling housing conditions, lack of funds, inept and inaccurate keeping of records, confused leadership and ofttimes cruel discipline. Moreover, this sorry story seemed generally to be the rule for all the major Northern prison camps, as far as published records show. If similar records had been kept for outhern prisons, it is clear from what few do remain, the picture there would be even bleaker.

Any modern, enlightened director of a similar institution would be aghast at the conditions that prevailed.

¡- ~- -

A general v iew of prisoners and barracks at the western end of the camp.

The bui lding on the r ight is identified as the sutler's shop.

By July escapes were increasing and martial law was declared inside the camp and for a hundred feet outside, a move which caused some caustic criticism. Attempts to burrow out, some successful, became so prevalent that those engaged in it were known as "gophers."

If the accounts can be credited, life became steadily worse at Camp Douglas. Scurvy was present in August of 1 862; authorities kept saying they could do little about the anitary and water conditions. Confederate T. D. Henry, captured with General John Hunt Morgan on rhe raid into Indiana and Ohio, stated that "prison life from September, 1863, until the 12th of April 1864, was comparatively such as a man who, according to the fates of war, had been captured might expect, especially when a captive of a boasted Christian Nation. Rations were of very good quality and quantity, the only thing unplea ant was the various and severe punishments which the commandant of the camp saw fit lo inflict." If a guard was bribed or some other means used to escape, a prisoner would be tied up by the thumbs o his toes would just reach the ground. Henry wrote of men getting deathly sick from this treatment. If this failed to obtain the name of those who aided in the escape there was the iron clad dungeon about

ten by ten feet with a single ten inch window.

Other punishments included wearing a sixtyfour pound ball and chain upon the leg. The chain was so short that the prisoner had to carry the ball or get someone to pull it in a little wagon. Henry claimed some balls were worn more than six months.

All the usual and some unusual means to escape were tried, including tunnelling, bribery, hiding, direct breakout, and disguise. Reminiscences and florid contemporary accounts may exaggerate, but there were numerous escape attempts-how many no one will ever know. Most of the escapees did not get very far, usually being picked up near the camp or in the city.

Henry tells of one attempt to find out who dug an escape tunnel. The Eighth Kentucky Cavalry was formed in column of eight deep and guards were ordered to shoot the first man who sat down. According to Henry, a man just back from the smallpox hospital fell. The guard fired, one man was killed and two wounded, one of whom lost an arm. Henry goe on to say, "This hooting was carried to such an extent that if a man in going from his barracks to the privy should stop at night he was shot at." Whispering at night or a light in the¡ barracks might well bring rifle fire.

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A very frequent punishment was to build a huge saw horse with legs about seventeen feet long, according to one description, and with a narrow half-inch board on top. This was called the "Morgan." Supposedly for slight offences prisoners were forced to sit on this contraption for hours with their feet hanging in air or occasionally with buckets of sand tied to each foot.

Severe weather did not deter the punishments.

It is today impossible to a certain just how severe, how frequent, or how unjust such punishments were, but there is too much eYidence from diverse sources to deny that disciplinary action was often extreme and excessive. Some of the more brutal guards or inspectors earned nicknames such as "Prairie Bull" and "Billie Hell."

Violent in his denunciation of Camp Douglas's condition was M. J. Bradley of Palmyra, Marion County, Missouri. \Vritin g two years after the war, Bradley averred, " I t was in the hearts of those who were intrusted with the prisoners to kill them with every available means of cruelties, and in many ca es the shaft told but too well."

Bradley did admit that at first the rations were not to be complained of, and friends of the prisoners were allowed to furnish them with clothing and other items. But as the prison became crowded, rations were reclucccl "and our condition was subsequently rendered intoierable." But Bradley claims that clue to short rations of food and exposure to the orthern winter "thousands of my fellow prisoners died of privations-or, in other words-starved to death!" Like many others, he gives a full and lurid catalogue of the modes of punishment, the deadline, shootings, and other mistreatment.

Prisoner T. D. Henry said, and others give the same impression, that from the time when Colonel B. J. Sweet and other new officers took over, "the darkest leaf in the legends of all tyranny could not possibly contain a greater number of punishments." Henry claimed that "starvation was carried on quite systematically."

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Breakfast rations consisted of five ounces of bread and six ounces of fresh beef. The rations were boiled to shreds in a sixty gallon kettle. For dinner he claims they received a pint of bean soup and five ounces of bread. Even this was cut down at times as a disciplinary action.

It cemcd more than ironic lo the prisoners to be so treated within the sound of the church bells and the bustling, comfortable life of the city of Chicago. There were also the often succe sfu l efforts to convince the prisoners to take the oath to the Union and join the Federal army. One cannot blame them, perhaps, for some exaggeration and extreme bitterness. They had, after a ll, clone no wrong, committed no crime. They had fought for their country, and now they were a long way from home. But one must balance against these numerous Southern accounts the experiences of the citizens and of those acting as guards.

In the fall of 1862 some paroled Federal soldiers who had been captured at Harper's Ferry as part of the Antietam Campaign were incarcerated at Camp Douglas. Infuriated at their seemingly unfair imprisonment, they set fire to their barracks and some attempted to escape.

These parolees continued to protest until their release in April of 1863.

In early March, 1863, inspector Captain H. W. Freedley made a lengthy report to \Vashington in which he found conditions much improved, barracks repaired, not too crowded and comfortably heated. He noted that the camp was "in good police," with the drainage sy tern improved. Rations were "good, wholesome and of the first quality," although reduced according to orders. Sick prisoners were well cared for, but there was still much illness. The inspector laid this in part to the condition in which the prisoners arrived at Camp Douglas.

The mortality rate was "quite large" and there was an outbreak of smallpox. The prisoners "appear cheerful and contented. Their treatment is much better than they had been led to expect and many say better than they re-

Chicago Historical Society

A group of Confederate officers at Camp Douglas in 1864. They seem to be faring better than the other prisoners- at least their dignity gives that impression.

ceived in the Southern Army." However, in view of other witnesses, the captain's report seems unduly favorable. That same March of 1863 Major General A. E. Burnside wrote General in Chief Halleck that the medical director had protested very strongly about conditions and had suggested that the camp be removed to Des Plaines, Illinois, twenty-one miles to the northwest.

There was a continued effort on the part of authorities to obtain better sewage and water systems. Hoffman told Secretary of \,Var Edwin M. Stanton on May 2 1, 1863, that he had ordered immediate steps to be taken to improve the condition of Camp Douglas with a sewer system, but when "there arc such frequent changes of commanders and medical officers a there have been at Camp Douglas it is almost impossible to have instructions properly carried OU t. "

One unusual aspect of prison life was the " prisoners fund." Set up in mid-July 1862, this fund was raised by withholding from the rations amounts of food that could be spared "without inconvenience" and selling this surplu to the commissary, which held the fund s for the purchase of articles for the prisoners, including furniture, cooking utensils, bcdticks, straw, tobacco, vegetables, and even clothing and fuel.

By October, 1863, o,¡crcrowding was serious, with many prisoners housed in outbuildings and kiichens. That same October, Surgeon A.M. Clark, acting medical inspector, reported that

the water supply and drainage ,,¡ere still dangerously deficient, there being only three water hydrants in the whole camp. Policing of the camp was neglected, di ciplinc was very lax, no work was required of prisoners, barracks were cold and much in need of repair. There was apparently no management at all of the filthy toilet facilities. Rations were pronounced "abundant and good," though cooking, which was done in the barracks, received no attention from authorities.

Guards and the sick were clean, but prisoners were filthy and often without bedding. The general condition of the men was pronounced " bad." The dungeon was unfit for its purpose.

The hospital, happily, received a better report.

The sewer was being laid and ten more hydrants installed. But this report, hardly complimentary, shows in comparison with similar reports on other prisons that Camp Douglas was worse than a few and better than some.

Hoffman ordered Colonel Charles\'. DeLand, the current commander, to remedy the deficiencies at once. Late in October DcLand defended him elf by writing, "the camp has hereto-fore been a mere rookery ; its barracks, fences, guard hou es, all a mere .shell of refuse pine board. ; a nest of hiding places, instead of a safe and compact prison, and my guard has never Chicago History

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yet numbered over goo effective men." DeLand contradicted much of Surgeon Clark's report, saying lack of funds, manpower and time had caused some of the conditions, but that much was being done to eradicate the evils. When questioned about food, he wrote, "as to the quality of rations furnished to the troops & Prisoners under my command I have to say that I have always regarded them as of good quality & am positive no good cau e of complaint can exist."

In the fall of 1863 Colonel Hoffman, whose actions at times seem arbitrary, but were perhaps necessary, ordered all trade with su tiers by prisoners prohibited at all prisons. There is evidence that the sutlers had long been the source of smuggling in of clothing, tools, and other contraband for would-be escapees.

In early December Brigadier General William W. Orme reported to the secretary of war that the prisoners at Camp Douglas were well supplied with a sufficient quantity of food, although there was wastage due to inadequate cooking methods. For once the sanitary condition was pronounced "very good." A little later Orme, now commanding at the camp, said all prisoners were in barracks with coal stoves, an adequate supply of rations, sufficient clothing, generally, and that they were receiving "every" medical attention. He then appended twenty-four statements by Confederate sergeants in command of squads. As might be expected, these statements belie the testimony of other Confederates.

A number of the sergeants did feel the beef was of poor quality, and there were a few other complaints, but for the most part they indicated that prisoners were reasonably well treated.

In general, the reports by various officers reflect some improvement, though not in all particulars. To prevent tunneling during the winter of r 863 and 1864, floors had to be removed in the barracks, which were often said to be in "disgusting state and swarming with vermin."

During 1864 many of the same problems that 92

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had plagued the camp continued. Colonel B.J. Sweet assumed command in May, and had occasion to report several shootings during attempts to escape.

The prisoners continued in much the same activity-or lack of it. Yet at one time a faro bank was in operation among them and the banker was said to have taken in a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in Confederate currency.

A group of thirsty Kentuckians managed to get a woman peddler to bring in whiskey in her milk can, although the spout was filled with milk to fool the guards. Most of the time packages from the outside were allowed to be received by the prisoners and letter writing was permitted, although limited to one a month and heavily censored. But during a few periods letter writing was curtailed, though apparently not for long.

A prisoner who was a clerk in the hospital wrote that ten Confederate prisoners who were doctors protested the lack of drugs in the fall of 1863. "Throughout that summer there were no drugs remedial to bowel disorders accessible to the prison surgeons; consequently simple diarrhea, in the reduced stamina of the prisoners, ran quickly into dysentery, flux, and death."

The prisoner continued, "To the helpless agony of this situation smallpox added its own horror."

In contrast, a writer who visited the camp late in its life could write in a magazine for young people, "All of the prisoners at Camp Douglas are well fed, well clothed, and well cared for in every way .... I was among them for three days, mixed freely with them, and lived on their rations, and I know whereof I affirm. No better food than theirs was ever tasted, and with the best intentions, I could not for the life of me, eat more than three fourths of the quantity that is served out to the meanest prisoners."

In May, 1864, the rations were reduced upon pressure from Washington. The hominy ration was halted as it was said to be wasted. Issuance of candles was cut off "as the main use made of them is to tunnel out at night." In the fall of 1864 death and illness increased, perhaps made

more prevalent by the want of antiscorbutic fresh vegetables.

Colonel Sweet, however, had even more serious problems. The late summer of 1864 saw the Democratic party holding its convention in Chicago, and along with it went the rumors, reports, and plottings that became known as the Chicago Conspiracy. The idea was that Confederate agents were going to free the prisoners at Camp Douglas and other points and that there would be a new "Northwest Confederacy" set up. In November a number of alleged conspirators were arrested in the city, and the prisoners at Camp Douglas were not freed. Then and now it is impossible, and beyond the scope of this article, to make a determination as to the conspiracy, how strong it was, who were involved, the real facts, and who helped in foiling it. Suffice it to say there was a plot, it failed, and its extent has probably been exaggerated.

By the beginning of 1865 there were nearly twelve thousand prisoners in the camp. Naturally the population fluctuated widely from a few hundred to well over ten thousand. Captured men of John Bell Hood ' s defeated Army of Tennessee arrived in pitiable condition. \Vith the coming of peace in the spring of 1865 the release of prisoners began. Before that there had been a distinct increase in tho e willing to take the oath of allegiance to the Union. By August, 1865, all but two hundred of the very ill had left.

Union regiments used the camp a a demobiliza-

A contemporary lithograph of Camp Douglas apparently made at a later date than the Moyer painting since there is considerable variation. The two group photographs of prisoners in this article seem to have been taken in the compound at the far end of the camp.

tion center for a while. Late in 1865 government property was sold, including the 1 58 buildings, barracks were torn down, and the lumber carted away.

How much better or worse was Camp Douglas than its Southern counterparts? Objective comparison is impossible. There are so many unequal factors-climate, the economic wherewithall of the two countries, the condition of prisoners upon arrival. _A Confederate veteran posed it: "How much better off were the prisoners at Rock Island, Camp Douglas, Elmira, and other places than Andersonville? If the word of a multitude of our men who were prisoners is to be accepted, they, in a land of plenty, where food and clothing were abundant, suffered the pangs of a hunger which welcomed a diet of rats and dogs instead of moldy bread, wormy beans, and rancid bacon furnished in small doses, endured the severities of a rigorous climate in scant summer clothing, suffered the cruelties of cowardly guards, who shot down many of them in cold blood."

Though undoubtedly defensive and at times enlarged upon, the thousands of statements about Northern camps, including Camp Douglas, cannot be completely discredited. At the Chicago History

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same time, the lack of food, clothing, medical care, shelter, and the mistreatment received

by Yankees in the South cannot be excused, even in view of the economic and social strain on the Confederacy, fighting for its life. Studies seem to indicate that prisons in the ou th could have had more in the way of humane guards and other improvements in treatment and accommodations, although the food \\'Oulcl always have been scanty. Studies would seem to indicate that the niggardly, inept administration of Northern camps was unnecessary. There were no food or clothing shortages at the North.

Certain ly the prisoners at Camp Douglas and elsewhere could have received more of the necessities of life. Better sanitation could and should have been provided. In most cases medical care could have been improved. The most capable men were not assigned to prison administration, and it would not have been natural or even expedient to do so. The capable were needed elsewhere on both sides. However, administration both orth and South eems to have been, with rare exceptions, bungled, experimental, often cruel, and generally inefficient beyond reason.

While it was not a settled national policy of either ide to mistreat prisoners, there was a distinct feeling that they should not be pampered.

There are indications, too, that the reports of the way Yankees were treated in Southern prisons influenced some of the administrative decisions as to Northern prisons.

How did Camp Douglas compare with the other Northern prisons? Comparison is difficult, as conditions varied and facts are elusive with, as we have seen, rnuch conflict of evidence.

However, even though the analytic literature by historians is limited, it would seem that the prison camp at Elmira, New York headed the list of major camps in its iniquities. One historian has written: "Elmira Prison Camp had an infamous record unmatched by any other Northern compound and unequaled by few prisons in the Confederacy." There were few escapes from 94

Chicago History

Elmira, but it led all others in deaths for six of its twelve months of existence. It had an appalling sick Ii t, and in March, 1865, an average of sixteen Confederates a clay died. Out of the total of 12,123 soldiers imprisoned at Elmira, death claimed 2,063, nearly one out of six.

Fort Delaware, Delaware and Point Lookout, Maryland, are other candidates for despised places of mistreatment, discomfort, and death.

Then too, there are those who have far from praise for Camp Morton at Indianapolis; Camp Chase at Columbus, Ohio; Johnson's Island in Lake Eric near Sandusky, Ohio; or Rock Island, Illinois. Rock Island is credited with r ,960 deaths out of 12,500 prisoners, or about one out of six.Johnson's Island, mainly for Confederate officers, ,ms often listed quite high in the ranks of the odious clue to its climate and the general conditions of all prisons. Yet, surprisingly, the death ratio was quite low. In total Johnson's Island probably housed 12,000 Confederates with only 206 deaths. Actually, a prisoner was probably a good deal better off at Johnson's Island than at Camp Douglas, at least in his chances of survival.

According to the figures available there were 54,724 prisoner at Point Lookout from July, 1863, on, and there were 2,950 deaths. Fort Delaware from early 1862 on had 32,304 prisoners with 2,460 recorded deaths.

At Camp Dougla , as has been stated, the total number of prisoner was up toward 30,000.

The probably incomplete official returns give a total of 26,320. The monthly returns give deaths at 3,131, while another authoritative source gives 4,454, and other sometimes as high as 6,000. Using the official returns, there was roughly one death for every eight inmates. Thus, Camp Douglas has an unenviable record of fatalities in compari on with those prisons rated as the Union's most unpleasant.

A fairly responsible Northern official report stated that a total of 26,436 out of 220,000 Confederate prisoners in the North died. The best

The monument that stands today in Oak Woods Cemetery, near Cottage Grove Avenue and Seventy-first Street, to the Confederate soldiers who died at Camp Douglas. It was dedicated in 1895 by various Confederate veterans' organizations.

J. Sherwin Murphy, Chica~o Historical Soci ety

the general debilitation, the ignominious-or worse-treatment. No, Camp Douglas on Chicago's South Side was not as cruel an abode as Elmira, New York, but it certainly was not the best of places to be if you were a Southern boy on your first, unwilling "trip" north of the Ohio.

Figures, masses of witnesses pro and con, the best of the historian's methods and analyses yield little in the long run. It mattered not too much, except perhaps occasionally in degree, where you were-Andersonville; Cahaba, Alabama; Belle Isle or Libby Prison in Richmond; Elmira; Fort Delaware; Point Lookout; Rock Island ; Camp Douglas or a host of other places lost in the records of history. A prisoner of war camp is far from a pleasure palace, no matter where you are. One may be sure that the scars of that life on the dreary shores of Lake Michigan were indelibly etched in the minds and often on the bodies of those who lived through it.

Soon the city swirled its way far out beyond the unhappy soil that had been Camp Douglas.

Today one must go through crowded streets to the noble, somewhat lonely monument in Oak ¡w oods Cemetery with its enrolled names to find a memory of those who once lived "within a prison's close embrace."

possible estimate gives a total for Union prisoners in the South as 30,218 deaths out of 211,411.

However, contemporary claims by Southern leaders dispute these figure . They claimed a total of 270,000 Yankees in Southern camps, thus saying that twelve per cent died m Northern prisons and under nine per cent in Southern prisons.

Death figures are not all there is to being a prisoner of war. There i the shock, the mental and emotional strain, the illncs es contracted,

The manuscript of this article with the author's footnotes and detailed, critical bibliography is in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society. The author's indispensable primary source for this study of Civil War prison was War of the Rebellion, Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies, Series II, and the periodical, Confederate Veteran. Al o important in his re earch were the voluminous manuscript sources on Camp Douglas at the Chicago Hi torical Society, most valuable of which were the Camp Douglas Collection, and the letters of Nini an \IV. Edwards and Milo Adams McClelland.

Chicago History 95

BEFORE THE SUNSET FADES

by James Brown IV

YEARS AGO, Daphne Fielding, then Marchioness of Bath, wrote a small book Before the Sunset Fades. It is an account of life below stairs in a large English country house, Longleat in Wiltshire. The hierarchy of servants, their duties, what they ate, what they wore and their social life are all described. The Marchioness said that she wrote it " .. . to recall the days of elegance at Longleat before the sunset fades, before the moths of war and depression devour the last threads of a domestic tapestry which can never be replaced ."

Reading this book prompts the suggestion that someone should write an account of how some of the large houses in Chicago were staffed while a few people are left who can recall how it was. At present I know of only one household where old-fashioned standards of domestic service are still maintained, and the secretary responsible for employing the servants in this Lake Forest household says she is about ready to throw in the sponge.

Recording this chapter in social history will not rank in importance with the scholarly studies that have been made of Chicago tenements, but it could make interesting reading for the young and the unborn generations about a way of life that they will never know. As a start on such a project I would like to record Lhe following facts about a Chicago household which carried on in the old grand style until the owner's death in 1962.

It was the summer residence of a bachelor member of one of the packing house families.

The house itself was unpretentious and comparatively small-four bedrooms plus a guest cottage with two bedrooms. It reflected the owner's tastes which were essentially simple except where service to him and his guests was

SEVERAL

James Brown IV, an alumnus of Haverford College and the University of Chicago, holds among other Chicago foundation posts, the directorship of the Chicago Community Trust.

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concerned. One guest described it as "the kind of utter simplicity that only the really rich can afford." She was right that one had to be rich-the payroll for indoor and outdoor help ran around fifty-six thousand dollars a year during the latter years, a figure which would be close to a hundred thousand dollars now if the jobs could be filled.

There were eighteen to twenty employes during the summer when the house was going full blast. Responsibility for the employment and supervision of this staff was shared by a male secretary and the housekeeper. The secretary did not live in, but the long-time housekeeper, a somewhat prim woman with inflexible standards, occupied a suite on the third floor of the house. The rest of the inside help was housed in servants' quarters ingeniously arranged to make it difficult for there to be any improper fraternizing at night-the men's quarter, although in the same wing, were walled olT from the women's and had a separate outside entrance.

The inside staff consisted of a butler (often a second man in August when the house was full), the cook, the kitchen maid, a waitress, the parlor maid, and the chamber maid, plus a boy or young man assigned to the cook to fetch vegetables and fruit from the garden. There was also a laundress who did not live in but worked full time washing and ironing the exquisite table linen for which the house was noted.

The butler's domain was the pantry. In this house it was a long "L" shaped room lined with cupboards and counters and with its own separate sink and refrigerator. China and crystal were kept on shelves behind gla s doors above the counters, and this made a pretty sight. There were dozens of place settings for breakfast trays to go up to the rooms and for lunch and dinner, all arranged colorfully on the shelves. One of the most unusual was a set of crystal used only in late May when the tulip poplars were in bloom-goblets, fruit plates and finger bowls each with the orange and green flower of the tulip poplars incised on them. An

t

l

agile gardener would be assigned the task of climbing one of the trees (which are tall and bear their blossoms high) to cut a few blooms for the table when this set was used.

The butler's pantry was where drinks were mixed, where the plate warmer kept plates hot before they were brought to the table, and where the fine china and glassware was wa heel after it came back from the table-a duty shared by the butler and the waitress.

Between the butler's pantry and the glassed -in dining room which overlooked Lake Michigan was a seldom used "winter dining room," which had along one wall a specially constructed floor-to-ceiling cabinet for table linens- tiers of drawers with a complete set of lunch or dinner linen in each of the trays and an index on the door to list the dozens of changes which could be rung.

Just behind the butler in potential for making trouble below tairs was the cook. If she walked out or became miffed, everyone suffered. The cook in this household was well aware of the

Mr. Brown's memoir describes the staffing of this country house, that stands about fifty miles from Chicago. It belonged to a Chicagoan who maintained there until a few years ago a style of personal service for himself and his guests that deserves recording- if for no other reason than that such standards of living have nearly ceased to exist.

power she wielded over the owner, the housekeeper, and the guests, and she was treated like a prirna donna. She was assisted by a kitchen maid who prepared vegetables, washed fruit, and cleaned up after the cook had dinner ready to turn over to the butler for delivery to the table. The kitchen maid also waited on the other help when they sat clown to their meals in the ervants' dining room.

The waitress or a econd man (or both when there were more than eight at the table) assisted the butler. The butler presented the entree and poured the wine. The waitress and second man passed vegetables and sauces and cleared the table before the des ert course.

The duties of the parlor maid in this house were to keep the first floor rooms tidied upChicago History

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Before the Sunset

The inside staff gathered around the seated housekeeper. Standing from left to right are the parlor maid, chauffeur, kitchen maid, butler, chamber maid, and the cook. The butler's second man apparently took the picture.

Chicago Hi storlcal Sociely

sitting room, library, and a large glassed-in terrace. In addition to daily dusting and vacuuming she had other responsibilities. It was her job to make certain that after guests had gone in to lunch or dinner the rooms where they had been sitting were back in pristine condition before the meal was over-ash trays emptied, pillows plumped up, bridge tables cleared of debris, and any disarranged furniture put back into place.

In the latter years there was more turnover in chambermaids than in any other department, and the secretary and housekeeper often became desperate in April when they tried to engage someone for the summer months. The duties were to keep six bedrooms and baths in good order-beds made, fresh linen in the bathrooms, ice water in the carafes on the bedside tables, and at the end of the day beds turned down ready for guests to turn in. In addition, she was delegated to unpack arriving lady guests and pack for them on their departure.

The chambermaid's base of operations was a linen room on the second floor where bedroom and bathroom linen was stored in super abundance. Across from the linen room there was a walk-in closet known by regular gue ts a the "drug store," where there was everything from bath soap to barbiturates all neatly arranged along the shelves. There was literally everything that a guest might want from a tooth brush or razor to a hot water bottle. There was a supply of shaving creams, tooth pastes, sleeping pills, every known brand of antacid, and even flasks of Florida Water-an old fashioned variant of Bay Rum that has all but disappeared.

If you wanted anything you either pres ed a bell or picked up the house telephone. There were pushbuttons in the living room, library, and dining room which rang in the pantry and registered on an indicator which showed whence the summons came. In each bedroom there was a telephone with eight buttons on it by which you could call the pantry, the guest cottage, the garage, or any of the bedrooms.

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The outside staff assembled in front of the greenhouse.

They are, from left to right, the dairy man, the superintendent, greenhouse man, two summer helpers, the pheasant and ornamental water bird keeper, and a gardener. The other gardener took the picture.

Although the staff all wore uniform , they were comfortable ones designed for midwest summer heat rather than Newport. The butler and second man wore linen jackets with green braid around the cuffs, black lightweight trousers and white shirts with narrow black neckties. The maids wore crisp white uniforms with short aprons but no caps.

Before turning to the outside staff, mention should be made of two rooms in the house which bespeak the cotton wool comfort in which guests were wrapped. One was the flower room. This was a small room in the basement where flowers from the garden and greenhouse were delivered every morning. There was a sink, a work counter, and large containers in which flowers could be hardened off before being displayed around the house. On shelves along the walls were vases to hold everything from a small sprig for a breakfast tray to urns to hold large arrangements. This room was under the i urisdiction of the housekeeper.

The other room was undesignated and not actually a room but a walk-in closet off the entrance hall. Here were kept items that a dropin visitor or a hou e guest might need. If you came without swimming equipment there were trunks and bathing dresses in assorted sizes. If you came without tennis equipment there were brand new sneakers, again in assorted sizes, as well as racquets and unopened cans of tennis balls. On an upper shelf was an assortment of sun hats for both sexes and below was a stock of shawls and scarve for women guests who came unprepared for the vagaries of Lake Michigan weather.

The outside staff was under the direction of a superin tcndent who had charge of the gardens and farm. He had a house on the grounds as did the men who were employed year round. The latter consisted of a dairyman who looked after a small herd of Jersey cattle, maintained a tile-

lined dairy in spic and span hape, and kept a supply of milk and cream flowing to the kitchen .

Another man was assigned to the greenhouse and a third man divided his time between a pond where ornamental water birds were kept and the pheasant house where pens of exotic pheasants were raised. A fourth man supervi eel a special project which supplied thousands of "snuffle free" rabbits to the University of Chicago Medical School for research purposes.

During the spring and summer month extra help was employed-as many as six or eight-to mow lawn , transplant, cultivate and weed in the flower and vegetable gardens and make themselves generally useful. These were usually local high school students wanting summer employment. A special task assigned to one of them was to keep the humming bird feeders on the place full of red tinted syrup. Since there were dozens of these feeders scattered around the grounds and the little mites are voracious eaters, this was almost a full time job.

There was, finally, a man who was not an employe in any usual sense of the word, who took charge of the tennis court, the beach and the bridge tables (bridge was the ho t's one vice and there were morning, afternoon, and evening sessions) . For more than twenty years this universally beloved figure, who had been a fine athlete and a clas mate of the owner's at the University of Chicago, came back from California every summer to supervise the sports and games department of his old friend's country retreat. In the morning he was out early on the tennis court to coach neophytes and arrange matches. In the afternoon he had the Lake Michigan beach neatly raked and tidied up; and, when guests came out from dinner, had bridge game arranged and was ready to recite the rules when a controversy arose.

It was a way of life which will probably ne,¡er be lived again.

Chicago Hi sto ry

99

Jane Addams in a portrait of about 1889, the year she and Ellen Gates Starr, both twenty-nine years old, conceived their settlement house "scheme."

Hull-House

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Chicago History

THE FIRST YEAR OF HULL-HOUSE, 1889-1890, IN LETTERS BY JANE ADDAMS AND ELLEN GATES STARR

by Mary Lynn Mccree

The idea was to get idle society girls to go settle zn the slums of Chicago and show poor immigrants how to better themselves and their neighborhoodwithin a year this audacious "scheml) was in operation.

Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan were putting the final touches on their unique and elegant Auditorium Theater, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were preparing another building, not quite so elegant but every bit as unusual, to receive citizens of Chicago. These two young women had a dream. They came to Chicago in 1889 with the hope that their dream-or " scheme" as they called it-might become a reality. What they initiated in a dilapidated old house in the center of a large immigrant slum on Chicago' s West Side became the most famous social settlement in the world, HullHouse.

Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr had met at Rockford Female Seminary in Rockford, Illinois. Though Jane remained to graduate in 1881 and Ellen left after one year to teach school in Mount Carroll, Illinois, and then in Chicago, they maintained a fast friendship. In 1888, while they were on a trip through Europe together, Jane Addams visited Toynbee Hall, an unusual "lay mission" in the Whitechapel district of London. Started in 1883, this institution was a social settlement of university undergraduates amidst the poverty, shame, and q ualor of the London slums. Here well-educated young men came to share the benefits of their WHILE

Mary Lynn McCree (Mrs. Ralph G . Newman) is Curator of Jane Addams's Hull-House, University of Illinois at Chicago. She is co-editor with Allen F. Davis of Eighty Years at Hull-House, which is reviewed in this issue.

education with the members of the working class. They attempted to learn about the bitterness and frustration of the slum dwellers' existence by living among them. With this practical experience they hoped to employ their education better by resolving the problems that caused such misery. The participants in this experiment to promote social welfare felt that from the shared experiences and dialogue between the two classes would come understanding and mutual respect leading to a classless society. Guided by Canon Samuel A. Barnett, Toynbee Hall became an active social center. There were workingmen's clubs for the free discussion of all political ideas, a gymnasium, a library, university-level evening classes, art and music appreciation lectures, and committees for investigating social and environmental conditions of the district.

Impressed with the idea and accomplishments of this institution, Jane Addams began thinking in terms of college women "settling" in the slums of Chicago to establish a program like that at Toynbee Hall. She felt there must be educated women who were bored and frustrated by their lack of usefulness and who would be willing to support this "scheme" and "learn of life from life itself." She was convinced that the idea of sharing the life of the downtrodden, of uplifting them rather than just dispensing charity in a righteous, uninvolved manner, would appeal to her contemporaries. With this venture in mind she and Ellen Gates Starr returned to the United States in June, 1888. By the beginning of February, 1889, they had taken rooms Chicago History

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at 4 Washington Place in Chicago and had begun to campaign on behalf of their settlement experiment.

Though every moment was filled with activity, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr found time to write long chatty letters to various members of their families. Often these letters carried a postscript urging the recipient to pass the letter on to another member of the family in order to save time and yet keep everyone informed of their activi tics. It is evident that neitherJaneAddams's nor Ellen Starr's family quite understood or approved of their "scheme." The letters were obviously an attempt on the part of the two young women to convince their families of the propriety and success of their ven turc. Ellen Starr with an I -told -you-so hidden between the lines, informed her parents in a letter of November 3, 1889, a few weeks after Hull-House had opened, that: I believe we have no broken windows this week, so, even though you thirst for the fray you will be obliged to curb your appetite for the present. Perhaps there may be some later . ...

And when E llen Starr's mother finally visited Hull-House in June, r 890, Jane Addams wrote the following to her step-mother on June third, almost daring her to make a visit: Mi s Starr's mother is visiting us this week. he is so delighted with the home and our enjoyment of it, that I am sure if you came you would have something of the same fee ling.

We were so amused this morning by her wistful sighs that she did wish this beautiful old house was in a better ne ighborhood, without reflecting that if it were we would not be in it ....

E llen Starr and Jane Addams were not naive.

From the first they realized that they had to obtain the support of the Chicago social, religious, and civic leaders if they were to succeed.

Quickly Miss Starr and Miss Addams managed introductions to the two leading religious figures of the city, Professor D avid Swing, fou n der of the Central Church of Chicago, and D r . Frank \ ,V. Gunsaulus, pastor of Plym102

Ch icago History

outh Church. Before these two men the young women pleaded their cause successfully. They also became involved in the work of several missions, among them the Armour Mission and the Clybourn Avenue Mission, and taught classe at the Moody Bible Institute and the Indu tria l Arts Association School.

While they searched for a suitable location in which to establish their settlement, J anc Addams and Ellen Starr courted society women in Chicago who could lend powerful support to their project by declaring it socially acceptable.

It was from the ranks of well-educated Chicago elite that Miss Addams and Miss Starr hoped to draw financial support and attract young women to live at their settlement. Luckily, Ellen Starr had been teaching art in Chicago for several years and had made some exceedingly good contacts among prominent families. These proved useful.

In a letter to her sister, Mary Linn, written on February 19, 1889,Janc Addams described a visit she had just had from Mrs. J.D. Harvey, a leading member of the influential \Voman's C lub. At the end of half an hour Mrs. Harvey asked Miss Addams if she wanted to join the club. Miss Addams replied: I told her I should be very glad indeed if it were possible to be elected. She said that they had 360 members, too many & that they were trying to restrict it to the election of one new member a year. "I came to see you about that. I shouldn't wonder if you would be the one woman." I said that struck me as rather impossible as I was almost a stranger in Chicago. She said "that doc n't make any difference if I want you.

I am a pretty important member of that club." .. .

Both Miss Addams and Miss Starr were elected members.

In a letter of May 9, 1889, to her stepmother, Anna Haldeman Addams, Jane Addams mentioned another social contact: Mrs. [Charles] Henrotin who has a very pretty home on this side, gave a reception to about thirty young ladies Tuesday afternoon and I indoctrinated them in regard to the scheme. They evinced a good

one-room furnished apartment near Hull-House, about 1905. These were conditions that the founders of Hull-House hoped to change .

A

deal of enthusiasm and a Wellesley girl and a Smith graduate Miss Perry may "take up residence" next winter with us. It has become something of a fashionable "fad" and of course we realize that the ardor may all disappear before next winter but hope a few will be persistent . ...

The following three letters are typical of those Jane Addams and Ellen Starr wrote home recounting their experiences. The first was addressed by Miss Starr to her sister: 4 Washington Place Feb. 23rd [1889] Dear Mary [Blaisdell]The thermometer is 7 degrees below zero and we have decided to stay indoors this morning. I will take part of the time to begin an account of" the scheme."

Jane intends to take a house or flat in some district which we shall determine upon with the aid of various wise persons. We are going on Wed. with Dr. Gunaulus lo look at one.

We should like to have it in a neighborhood where there are a good many Germans & French immigrants so as to utilize the French & German which girls learn in school & have little or no opportunity to practice. There are thousands of Italians in the city who have no mis ions, & " o Nothin" to raise them out of their degradation & Jane leans decidedly to them; but she seems to think that Chicago is swimming in girls who speak Italian fluently, which

I happen to know is not the case: whereas there are a great many girls who speak French & German.

Jane also thirsts very much for the Anarchists. She is going to hunt up their Sunday Schools (Perhaps you don't know that there are a good many anarchist Sunday Schools) & get a chance to teach in one if she can. Bien! "We" take a house i. e. Jane takes it & furnishes it prettily. She has a good deal of furniture & she intends to spend several hundred dollars on some more & of course we put all our pictures and "stuff" into it. .. . Jane can afford after furnishing the house to expend $100.00 a month & we think by economy we can run the house on that. We shall need one large room in which to have classes, lectures or whatever we may wish & receive people. Our friends from civilization who may think us worth travelling the distance to see and our friends from the surrounding neighborhood. \Ve shall make this as pretty as we can. Then besides our own bedroom we shall have several others with little ingle beds: and we desire and hope that certain young ladies will from time to time wish to come and abide with us for a season longer or shorter as they feel disposed ....

I pity girls so! Especialfy rich girls who have nothing in the world to do. People get up in church & in mi sionary meeting & tell them about the suffering Chicago History

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in the world & the need of relieving it, all of which they knew & it ends in their giving some money, which isn't theirs as they never earned it & all their emotion over it & their restlessness to do something, has to end in that-Nobody ever shows them a place & says "Here do this" I know that girls want to do.

I have talked with enough of them, poor little things!

They are sick & tired of society, simply because "Its a man's recreation, but its a womans business."

If ever the ordinary girl expresses any wish to do anything fo, her less fortunate sisters her mother throws cold water on it [and] probably says "Oh, my dear, I dont think it is laid upon you to put the world to rights." And then she shrivels up & feels that she is of no use whatever, & that it was of course very foolish & presuming in her to think she could do anything ....

Jane's idea which she puts very much to the front & on no account will give up is that it is more for the benefit of the people who do it, than for the other class. She has worked that out of her own experience & ill health. She discovered, when recovering from her spinal trouble, that she could take care of children actual ly lift them & not feel worse, but better for being with them: while an effort to see people & be "up to things" used her up completely.

Then she made the discove1¡y a second time in Baltimore among the old colored people. After a lecture or social evening she would be quite exhausted & have to stay in bed, but after a morning with the colored people in the Johns Hopkins home, she was actual ly physically better than if she had stayed in bed & been rubbed ....

Of course the thing spreads. Its an influence. We don't wish the girls who come to us to feel that they are doing anything queer & extraordinary; turning themselves into sisters giving up the world or society or cutting themselves off from the things of the flesh or any such sentimental nonsense. \'Ve don't intend to. Of course it will be inconvenient on account of d istances & wi ll take a good deal of carriage hire, but it will certainly be worth that sacrifice, if we at all do what we wish. We shall go to our freinds & expect them to come to us. Even the novelty will attract them, I think & I don't mind banking on that a little: anything to get them & their interest.

We have a splendid background already. Dr. Gunsaulus is the most popular minister in the city with the exception of Prof Swing, & he is fast rivaling him & Dr. G. is unqualified & enthusiastic in his adherence. We had a charming conver ation with him in h is study. He is a brill iant man & he simply pointed out one bright thing after another. He was very clever in the way he went to work to find out what our idea 104

Chicago History

was & not help us to one, or give hi color to it. For instance he said " Then your idea would be perhaps to have a little training school where young ladies could be instructed how to deal with the poor" & he said it as if he thought nothing would be nicer than such a little training school. When we quite repudiated it & said we would have naught of a training school or any "institution" whatever: that we were tired of in titutions: that Miss Addam & Miss Starr simply intended to live there & get acquainted with the people & ask their friends of both cla ses to visit them he was "tickled to death." He said "good! the kingdom of heaven isn't an organization or an institution." He was very amusing. He remarked that there were two classes to be avoided. "One is made up of aintly drivellers, who go out harpooning for souls, to lug in as many as possible. For my part if I saw a man riding around lassooing for my soul I should say 'see here: I'm looking out for this business.

Be so good as to take yourself off!!' Then the other class was composed of good gentlemen who buttoned up their coats & formed a committee & met & wrote out by laws, & organized, & got money & spent a great deal of it on the organization &c &c .... " Dr. G. said another funny thing "This is delightful!

I never saw anybody before who wanted to do it. Like Artemus Ward I've often been ready to put down the rebellion by sending all my brothers-in-law to the front."

He expressed his pleasant surprise that we weren't "in the air." He expected that. He said "You ladies have done a deal of solid thinking." Of course I know who has done the thinking although she resents my putting myself out of it in any way. Still I am unwilling to let people suppose that I would ever have worked it out. I believe in it now & can chatter about it. Pray heaven I may be able to do something about it. Of course my strong point i my influence over girls. Here I positively make an end. With much love Ellen.

The second letter was written by Jane Addams to her sister Mary: 4 Washington Place Chicago Feb 26, 1889 My dear Mary ...

Friday morning we had an appointment with Mr. [C.F.] Goss minister of Moody's Church. He is young and eager altho forty years old perhaps. I think he is younger and rasher in spirit than either of us. He has a dream of a "working man's church" beside which our plan must seem paltry to him, but his sympathy never fai led and he made all sorts of rash promises.

He is a brother of Mrs. Stryker, and in the evening

Hull-House

The dining room at Hull-House. Early pictures of the building itself are rare, however this one shows furniture that was in the dining room when Hull-House opened in 1889. Miss Addams's letter of September 13, 1889 describes the "elegant old side-board" on the right, and mentions a set of "heavy leather covered chairs." The bentwood chairs do not seem heavy, but they are leather covered and show some years of use.

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we met Mr. and Mrs. Stryker at a dinner at Mrs. Trowbridge's. Mr. Stryker you know is pastor of the 4th Prs. Church. He agreed to the plan in all respects but the girls themselves. He declared that we could not get them to do it. He said he had a perfect horror of the "modern fashionable young lady" that they were the most hard hearted creatures in existence.

Ellen championed them valiantly and finally declared that it was time someone did something for them if their very pastors talked about them like that.

He was anxious that we hould locate on the north side but we insisted that Dr. Gun aulus had promised marvellous things for the south side. It quite put the reverend gentleman on his mettle and we took rather a wicked enjoyment in the fact.

On Saturday afternoon Ellen had invited a few ladies to our rooms who "all took stock every one of them my dear." Sunday morning we heard Mr. Goss and in the afternoon I talked for half an hour to the Boys of Mrs. Stryker's Miss[ion) Band. They were the McCormick boys, Farwell's etc. but altho' I said almost the same things I had told the boys at Norwood [Park Industrial Training School for Boys], the latter seemed to me the brighter boys and the more attractive. Mason Trowbridge told his mother when he went home that it wa "awful interesting but Miss A. didn't know nothing of Chicago mickey's." Monday afternoon I talked to the training school for Home and Foreign Missionaries to about sixty embryo missionaries on East London and did not mention the scheme. I told Ellen that it was a great relief to my mind to find that I could ignore the scheme when I choose ....

Several ,vecks later Mary received another letter from her sister.

4 'Na hington Place April 1st '89 My dear Mary ...

Dr. Gunsaulus recommended a neighborhood last Sat. and when we objected to the high rents he said "Oh that doesn't make any difference, we'll see to the rent for you." Two wealthy men have offered to become "associates on the paying bills question" and a Mr. Hogg, (an Englishman at the head of St. Andrews Guild who has friends in Toynbee Hall) thinks we will have to have an association to manage the financial part of it. \Ve are not inclined to "organize" until we know our ground and people better, but if the promises are half fulfilled we will have no trouble on the money side. The Smith College movement in New York is languishing for lack of volunteers, they raised the sum of money they asked for within the first two weeks. When we are once started and need 106

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money, I think that there will be no difficulty, at present of course we have no u e for it nor authority to collect it. ...

Our reception on Saturday was much dampered by the storm, it was blowing and raging as hard as possible at eight o'clock. Almost no one came from the south side, about twenty out of fifty put in an appearance, and we were quite sure that they were interested. More than half of them were men so that our whilom fear of founding a "Home for Single \I\Tomen & Widows" is being allayed. Mr. Salter who is at the head of the Ethical Culture Society, and Mr. Fi cher who is prominent in the Charity Organization Society were two very interested and interesting people. They both talked as well and gave unqualified support. Mrs. [John H.] McConnell's was decorated very handsomely with flowers and she had also provided a Swedish singer-a tenor lo entertain the guests, so that it was quite a festive affair. Dr. McPherson did not put in an appearance.

Miss Alice Miller a Smith graduate of '83 who is very pretty and very popular is one of our strongest supports. She did go to service on Saturday evening.

We have seen Prof. Swing who has promised us "money or moral support" as we needed it-whatever that may mean. I have been devoting all my spare time lately lo seeing different neighborhoods. The result would make rather a doleful theme for a journalistic letter. You asked about laking Mrs. Stryker's boys down to the Bohemians. It was very successful.

The boys took games with them, jack straw , etc. and they talked and played together in the most social way. They have since started a " Boys' Union" here to meet in the basement of the 4th Church. The larger portion of the membership is ''little mickies who steal our marbles" I have been told.

I was waited upon rather formally by a committee of the \V.C.T. . last week who asked me to undertake ome social work at the Anchorage on Third Ave. [Plymouth Court]. South 3d Ave. & outh Clark are probably the two most disreputable streets in the city and they were anxious to get hold of young girls, school girls and others who would not come to Sunday School nor "meetings." I promised to undertake to meet a club once a week if they would collect the girls. 'Ne organized la t Sat. "A Girls' Social Club." A Miss Dodge of the south side who is a very ready musician promi es to come and help every Sat. afternoon, and we hope to get other young ladies interested. The material is rather unpromising but I am very glad for the experience .... Always your loving Sister Jane Addams

Before J anc Addams left Chicago to spend the summer in her home at Cedarville, Illinois, she and Ellen Starr had decided that they wanted to establish their experiment for the benefit of the neighborhoods surrounding the intersection of Blue Island Avenue, and Halsted and Harrison Streets. H ere, Italians, Irish, French-Canadians, German , and Polish and Russian Jews existed jammed together in one of the worst slums in the city. Houses meant for one family contained several; there was no heat in the winter, no ventilation in the summer, no sanitation facilities a nd no running water. Garbage was piled high in unpaved streets that were dust bowls in the summer and mud holes the rest of the year.

Many of the houses in the area that they had selected were owned by Helen Culver, a prominent Chicago real estate woman. On May 9, 1889, Jane Addams wrote to her stepmother, Mrs. Anna Haldeman Addams: We have been in a great deal of uncertainty about our house for next winter, depending on the sublease.

We may be obliged to take something else for a few months after all and there arc certain advantages in beginning in a si mple "flat." Miss Culver who owns most of the houses in our immediate neighborhood is very much inclined to give us the choice of what she controls. Dr. McPherson remarked the other day that we were not so unworldly as we looked .. ..

The house they finally decided upon had originally been built in 1856 by Charles]. Hull, Miss Culver's cousin and the man from whom she had inherited it a long with four million dollars and a real e tale business. It had been constructed in the manner of a gracious country home when !\fr. Hull hoped that the wealthy of Chicago would se ttle we t of the Chicago R iver.

He was disappointed, howc,¡cr, for Chicago's new poor, the immigrants, began to gather there, and as real estate values in the area plu mmeted the house became variously a home for the aged run by the Little Sisters of the Poor, a factory, a secondhand furn iture store, a tenement, and saloon. \\1 hcn J ane Addams and

Hull-House

A youthful portrait of Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder with Jane Addams of Hull-House.

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Hull House

a good object lesson for us. She embodies the best of the Missionary spirit I think. S. [Alessandro] Valerio sends me papers and pamphlets ad infinitum ....

Hull-House

Small visitors to Hull-House, perhaps assembling for some afternoon activity. Jane Addams stands behind them to the left.

Ellen Starr finally obtained a lease from Miss Culver for the second floor and the large north drawing room on the ground floor the house was wedged between an undertaking parlor and a saloon. For the first six months the young women shared their quarters with the Sherwood Desk Company that used the small parlors on the south side of the ground floor for storage and office space.

Throughout the summer J ane Addams and Ellen Starr tried to recruit women who might come into " residence" with them. In a letter from Cedarville, June 4, 1889, Jane Addams wrote to Ellen Starr: I consider Miss McAvoy a great thing both for the nursing and the fact that if she "resides" she may help on running expenses. I am quite impatient for the next letter and hope you secure her. Dear Miss Lyon is exactly the right kind of an ally not too enthusiastic to have her words judicious and of weight ....

I am glad you are liking Miss Porter so well. If she would "come into residence" for a little while, it would have much weight witb church people and be 108

Chicago History

August, 1889, found Miss Addams and Miss Starr in Chicago directing remodeling and moving operations in that "fine old house," described by Jane Addams in Twenty Years at Hull-House, as "standing well back from the street, surrounded on three sides by a broad piazza which was supported by wooden pillars of exceptionall y pure Corinthian design and proportion." Carpenters and painters worked to repair and brighten the dingy dirty rooms. They polished the marble mantles, painted the halls and gingerbread woodwork in an "ivory and gold motif" -some said to copy Adler and Sullivan's Auditorium.

The two young women began with walnut and mahogany furniture, most of which belonged to Jane Addams. They hung the walls with prints and paintings and filled the corners with statuary they had purchased in Europe.

On September 13, just five days before the settlement officially opened, Jane Addams described the dining room in a letter to her sister Alice Haldeman: Our dining room is one of the prettie t things I ever saw. So many people of good taste have said so that it cannot be bias. The wall is a strong terracotta, the frieze & ceiling a soft terra cotta, the edges of the floor are painted the same with a handsome Wilton rug in the middle. Madame [Roswell B.] Mason gave us one elegant old oak side-board ....

We indulged in a set of ... heavy leather covered chairs and a 16 11 • • • oak table. An ... oak bookcase and my writing desk completes it. I haven't time to describe the other rooms now. They arc all just as distinguished looking and artistic as can be, by jar the prettiest house I have ever lived in. People have been so good co us. I received a check for$ 100.00 last night from a lady whom I had never seen. If we don't succeed after all this help we will de erve to fail.

Ellen arrived on Tuesday and gave me the birthday check. I will put it into the Hawthorne set as we had planned, and bless you for them. The plain good looking silver pleased everybody mightily. There were five or six people in the room when I unpacked it.

Dear old Col. Mason came down himself yesterday afternoon , we felt very much complimented ....

Jane Adda ms and Ellen Gates Starr's" scheme'' became reality when the first two residents and their housekeeper, Mary Keyser, opened the doors of their home at 335 South Hal ted Street to their friends and neighbors on September 18, r 889. From the beginning the institution which they founded was called Hull-House, chiefly because among the neighborhood people it was known as Mr. Hull's House. Less than a year later the name was made official in honor of the memory of Charles Hu ll when Helen Cu lver generously leased the house and property to the settlement rent free.

The first task the new residents faced was to become acqua inted with their neighbors. aturally, the people of the district were suspicious. v\'hy would these two wealthy, well-educated young women want to live among them? \\'hat were they up to? and why? The natural curiosity of the neighbors soon overcame their initial suspicion.

The obvious kindness and concern, the actual involvement of Miss Addams and Miss Starr in

the everyday life and problems of their neighborhood, gradually became apparent. Both women minded children, listened to problems, cooked and washed, acted as midwives, and helped prepare the dead for burial. o task was too great or too small. Little by little the neighbors began to think of Hull-House as an extension of their homes and a safe haven from the realities of their grim existence. Jane Addams and her HullHouse associates became more than just neighbor . They became symbols, awe-inspiring and revered, of another, better life, and hope for a way out of the dreadful squalor of the slums.

Jane Addams and Ellen Starr, unlike the residents of Toynbee Hall, who attempted to become frie nds of their neighborhood through its men, tried to reach their neigh bors through the children and their mothers. One of the first organized group activities was the kindergarten

A bac h elors ' boardin g fla t not far from Hull-House, about 1910. It was not uncommon for a m an and wife t o orga ni ze a "fa m i ly " of unm arr ied imm igrants and act as " bosses" of th e g roup . Th e two m en stand ing ap p ear to b e socia l workers .

Hull House

started by Jennie Dow, the twenty-two year old daughter of one of the leaders of the Chicago Woman's Club. Soon there were clubs for children of all ages and art classes taught by Enclla Benedict, an instructor at Chicago·s Art Ins ti tu te.

In a letter Jane Addams wrote to her sister, Alice Haldeman, on October 8, three \\·eeks after the settlement opened, she described some of the first activities at the settlement: ... \Ive have taken Saturday afternoon and evening for our reception day, and we are trying to disseminate the fact as rapidly as possible. Until it is well known we seem obliged to receive every afternoon ....

Ellen and I live here alone with one servant. Miss Dow comes every morning at eight and opens the kindergarten at nine. We have twenty-four little people, about half of them Italians and the others poor children whose mothers "work out" most of the day. We have a list of at least seventy more, mothers who have applied and begged for their children. Miss Dow takes lunch with us each day, and some times her two assistants come up. She i o young and taking, every one is charming with her. She gives her services of course as well as all the material used. Our piano was sent us with the rent paid for a year and an intimation that if the in titution was thriving at the end of that time it would be given us.

Miss Trowbridge come every night and stays until Sat. morning. She has a club of little girls. Miss Forstall has undertaken a "Home Library Association" every Monday aft. The book are kept at the house of one of the children, with ten books and ten children in a circle. I t is a Boston Plan we are trying here. We have two boys clubs every Tues. eve. Miss Starr has hers clown stair and mine are in the dining room. I have twenty they are about 16 work at Fields and Walker's as errand boy and wrapping parcels most of them. I have one telegraph boy & two who are in machine shops. They are all so anxious to come and very respectful. The little ragamuffins downstairs are harder to manage. Miss Starr had help for tonight. Mr. Greeley comes with his violin. There are so many applicants that we have started two overflow clubs for Thursday nights, mine on Thur night are all Italians. Every Wed. Mr. Sammons has a drawing class of twelve. Mrs. [Mary H.] \Vilmarth pays him a regular price (a good one I imagine for he teaches at the Art Institute) for coming. We have only taken those children who knew something about drawing, some who had left the Public schools & one or t,,·o 110 Chicago History

boys who were trying to keep on alone. One Italian Frank Nacdi had had lessons in Italy and his great disappointment in America was that drawing lessons cost so much .... We found him through our good friend the Italian ed itor Signor Valerio. He has been of so much help to us. On Friday evening we have older girls and on Sat. we are starting a social science club for men. Mr. [Allen] Pond, Mr. Merritt Starr and some rather clever men have taken hold of it so we are sure it will ·ucceed-we ourselves have little to do with that. \Ve have various othn things started and swimming of which I will write later. Of course we arc undertaking more than we ourselves can do, that is part of the idea. Miss Culver has been very much interested and is taking steps now towards a furnace ....

From the first Miss Addams and her associa tcs had almo t as many visitors from Chicago soc iety a they did from their neighborhood. The social elite could not seem to resist the attraction of this strange experiment in the house on Halsted Street. At a time when Jane Addams and Ellen Starr were shunning publicity which invariably described their operation as charity and accorded no dignity to their neighbors, all sorts of Chicagoans wanted to announce in the newspapers that they had been to Hull-House and were associated with it. It was just "wicked" enough to be popular. In a letter to her parents of November 3, 1889, Ellen tarr described the reactions of two Chicagoans: Last night we had a very peaceful & successful reception evening. The previous Sat. Evening was characterized by the prevalence of the elite & con ·picuous for the absence of invited neighbors as I think I related in due order. A young Mr. Day whom Harriet brought on that occasion said he didn't know wheth<:r he approved of the scheme or not, but he knew he had had the mo t delightful evening he had enjoyed in Chicago, & that it was a charming place to go ....

In the afternoon Mr. Dr. [Ralph .] I sham and Mrs. (Joseph] Medill called. I would rather talk with any neighbor than with Mrs. Medill. I've " no use" for Mr . M. or any of her tribe. I can say she thought she was conferring a great honor. She asked if we wanted it put in the Tribune, & I declined with thanks ....

In the same letter Miss Starr also reported on

Cooking class at Hull-House. The ladies' straw sailors date the class at about 1910.

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Hull House

the progress Hull-House was making toward gaining neighborhood acceptance: We are getting on well with the " Neighboring."

Two young men have called voluntarily, a woman has presented us with a bottle of calsup, & another has requested to leave her baby with us one morning while he moved her household effects. Miss Blaisdell took care of the Creche, as we called baby Marcus.

He was very good. One of the young men was very droll. He is a Hebrew German by descent & Russian by birth & re idence. He speaks English in the mot formal manner. "In fact I have not in my experience met people so kind as, etc. etc." He informed us that he always made it a study to be as much of a gentleman as he could. He succeeds to a certain degree, & we signified our willingness in polite terms, to give him any assistance in our power. ...

At Thanksgiving time Jane Addams sent a report of Hull-House activities to her stepbrother George Haldeman in a letter of ovember 24, 1889: Vl/e have some very interesting experiences. Last Saturday evening we had an Italian dinner cooked by an Italian woman and served to Sig. Valerio, Prof. Snyder, Miss Dow, and ourselves. Prof. Snyder is a very dear man and went into the derivation and spread of macaroni with much vigor.

Every Monday evening we have a German "klatch" for the women which Fraulein Neuschaffer has charge of. She is sympathetic and simple, at the same time very capable so that that is a great success and judging by the gratitude of the poor German women very much needed.

We have regular help on our boys club and are getting much interested in the shop girls near us, so that our various plans are being carried out. This winter of course will be more or less experimental, so that by next year when we have all of the house, we will be ready to do things more extensively. We are constantly surprised by the number of good people who express interest and give us help . ...

By the middle of December the women of Hull-House were deep in plans for Christmas celebrations. Just before Christmas on December 22, 1889, Jane Addams described the activities they p lanned in a letter to her sister A lice Haldeman: We have been very busy but very happy in it as everything is going on so smoothly and well. We have 112 Chicago History

no kindergarten this week and the wild thought has come to me that perhaps you and Marcet might go home this way. Miss Laringan is here for the week and we enjoy her very much. Yesterday afternoon Mrs. Sedgewick gave us a paper on Brook Farm. It was delightful and received with much enthusia m. \,Ve had the kindergarten Xmas tree on Friday morning, the Kenwood [Kindergarten] sent two presents for each child, and Miss Dow was back for the first time. We will have an entertainment next week for each of the Clubs, people have been very generous with talent and money, and we have had enough candy to share with the two nearest S[unday] Schools ....

The candy they so proud ly presented lo the neighborhood children as a special gift became a nightmare. Jane Addams and the Hull-House women quickly discovered that most of the children were dismayed and sickened by the sight of it. Many of them worked sixteen hours a day for pennies in a candy factory.

By March, 1890, the Sherwood Desk Company had vacated its portion of the house, leaving it for the settlement. Jane Addams et to work immediately to effect repairs and find the people to pay for them. Unabashedly she made demands on her supporters. An example of her straightforward approach on beha lf of HullHouse is a letter she wrote on March 7, 1890, to her landlady Helen Culver in response to a check for $100.00 that Miss Culver presented to the settlement. It is obvious that Miss Addams had other rather definite ideas about what Miss Cu lver should provide. This was no "saintly, gentle Jane'': I am somewhat embarrassed by the receipt of the check you sent the other day. I asked for the bathrooms as a contribution to our work, but hoped you would repair the piazza and cellar in your capacity as landlord. \1/e have appealed to Mrs. Field for the bathrooms but you doubtless understand how impossible it is to ask other people to repair property which does not belong to them.

Our friends are extremely generous to us in regard to the money we use for the pleasure and benefit of our neighbors, but we found when we asked them to put in the furnace, how differently they felt. Even

those who gave liberally insisted that they were playing the part of landlord and not of philanthropist.

I know how futile it would be to ask any for heavy house repairs; it simply results in many questions in regard to the lease etc. and a business like refusal.

Of course I am very sorry that I cannot do it myself.

I put a thousand dollars on the house last fall and feel that $500 must be my limit this spring.

We shall probably put the money you sent on the work in the cellar, and probably have the piazza torn clown as the cheapest method of dealing with it, al tho that will of course sacrifice the new roof which was put on last fall as well as much of the character of the house. I am very sorry indeed to trouble you further and I am very sincerely your Jane Addams

By the fall of r 890, a year after J anc Addams and Ellen Gates Starr began their settlement, they had a full program of activities. Monday afternoons the Italian women and children came to the settlement, the women to sew and be read to in their own language, the children to play games and do art work. Tuesday afternoon was devoted to a school-boys' club while the working boys' evening class met Tuesday evening. Some of the boys from the evening class started a Shakespeare class which grew into a club that met at the settlement for more than twenty years. All working people were invited to hear speakers present their views and then lead discussions with such titles as "The Eight Hour Strike Movement," "Rights of Children," "Profit-sharing," and "Domestic Labor." Thursday was devoted to talks to neighbor women on physiology and hygiene, and Friday evening was reserved for the Working Girls' Club. Besides these activities, cooking classes were held three times a week in the kitchen. The most popular event were the social receptions held three nights a week, one each for the French, Germans, and Italians. The language of the ethnic group of the evening was poken and entertainment provided that each group would enjoy.

Many became friends of Hull-House through these affairs.

By June of r 890 the ladies of Hull-House had brought into existence college extension courses

modeled after those at Toynbee Hall. These courses consisted of ten weeks of classes in such subjects as history, languages, political econ omy, mathematics, physiology, and physics. The first Latin class was attended by twelve school teachers. All courses were taught by college graduates and a fee of one dollar was charged for the term.

By the end of the year the two extra bathrooms that Miss Addams had thought Miss Culver might provide had been added. Neighbors were encouraged to take advantage of them and kindergarteners much to their dismay were subject to frequent "tubbings." Interest in fostering cleanliness and sanitation led Jane Addams and Hull-House to spearhead the fight for the first public bathing facilities in the city. At the same time the women of Hull-House were becoming familiar through experience with other environmental problems of their neighborhood. One of the most pressing problems of the day was housing. In a letter to her sister Mary Blaisdell written May 22, I 890, Ellen Starr related her concern with the problem: I went to S. Clark St. this morning to show tenement houses there to a youth of wealth who is inspired by the Holy Ghost to build tenement houses. I don't mean that he professes his inspiration, but the source is undoubtedly no less. He is a callow youth in some respect, being, I should judge, not more than twentythree or four years old, but a very serious & sensible one. Mr. Pond says his father is rich, & that he himself commands money. He had been to London to investigate the model ones, but has evidently seen little of the worst ones; he was very much shocked by their conditions. We inspected water closets (so called) together, discussed them & disreputable parts of the city with freedom . People aren't as coy as they used to be. Many seem to be coming to the conclusion that if things aren't fit to be spoken of when necessary they aren't fit to exist. This young man, Mr. Springer, [George Ward Springer of Wilmette?] is going to consult some capitalists about forming a company for the erection of model tenements, keeping the average rent what it is now & giving good quarters & the conveniences of civilization for it. 'It has been found that these tenements yield a reasonable income, three four & five percent. Mr. Springer's idea in first enthusiasm Chicago History

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was to give quarter free of rent, but he very reasonably concluded that it was better for people to pay a right & reasonable rent for their lodgings. As thing stand now the people who own these wretched tenements get 14 & , 5 percent on their money. If he (Mr. S.) can't get any capitalists to go into this novel philanthropy consisting of simple justice, he will at least put up a tenement himself. \,Vhen one considers that he is young, & already thus illuminated his future career seems very promising ....

At Hull-House this is already a start-there are unselfish workers-Miss Addams, Mr. Butler and other largeminded, largehearted ones ready to spend and be spent and wanting not one jot of credit for themselves but only to make the world happier and better. A look at Hull-House accounts is interestingshowing a great mingling of economy and lavi h expenditure.

Over $3000 mainly Miss Addams's money was spent in repairing and fitting up the house. She spent over $1800 wholly of her own money in furniture. The cost of runnin~ the house including all food and all service was about $960! They must have paid mechanic enormou prices for repairs. And how they ever managed to run the house on less than a thousand dollars a year it is hard to see ....

There is no doubt that hy the end of 1890 Hull-House had become more than a social experiment. Jane Addams and Ellen Starr had found adequate financial support and sufficient volunteer workers for their project. Definite programs based on needs had been firmly established. The neighbors had also begun to enjoy the settlement and to appreciate and trust its residents. More than fifty thou and people came through the doors of Hull-House that first year.

Helen Culver, who presented Jane Addams with a four year rent free lease for Hull-House in March, 1890, described the success of the settlement in these terms in a letter to her cousin Nell y on January 19, 189 1:

By 191 o Hull- House was a complex of thirteen buildings covering a city block. Its wide variety of programs and investigations offered help and hope to many thousands of people, from its immediate neighborhood to countries throughout the world. All because two twenty-nine year old women had the perseverance and determination to make a dream-or "scheme"-become a reality.

The above account is based almost entirely on letter written by the founders of Hull-House. These letters, all except one, published here for the first time, have been faithfully reproduced with some excisions.

Obviou spelling errors have been corrected. Jane Addam5's letters of September , 3, and October 8, 1889 are located in the Sarah Alice Haldeman Manuscripts, the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. The Jane Addams Memorial Collection at the Jane Addams' Hull-House, University of Illinois at Chicago, is the repository for the Jane Addams letters of May 9, November 24, and December 22, of 1889, and the one of June 3, 1890, as well

as the Helen Culver letter of January 19, 1891. Ellen Gates Starr's letters of February 23 (1889] and May 22 ( 1890 ], along with the Jane Addams letter of June 4, 1889, are in the Ellen Gates Starr Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. The Jane Addams Papers, Peace Collection. Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, contain Jane Addams's letters of February r 9 and 26, April I of 1889, March 7, 1890, and Ellen Gates Starr's letter of November 3, (1889]. The Jane Addams Memorial Collection at the University of Illinois at Chicago contains copies of these letters that are located in other libraries.

114 Chicago History

THE DUNLEITH-DUBUQUE BRIDGE AND ANDREW CARNEGIE

SHORTLY AFTER

the appearance of the Spring issue of Chicago History, with its fine photograph of the Dunleith-Dubuqu e bridge, Mr. Hermon Dunlap Smith, one of the Society's Trustees, called our attention to the following excerpt from the Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie:

cast-iron lamp-post so opportunely smashed gave us one of our most profitable contracts, and, what is more, obtained for us the reputation of having taken the Dubuque bridge against all competi tors. It also laid the foundation for me of a lifelong, unbroken friendship with one of America's best and most valuable public men, Senator Allison.

I gave a great deal of personal attention for some years to the affairs of the Keystone Bridge Works, and when important contracts were involved often went myself to meet the parties. On one such occasion in 1868, I visited Dubuque, Iowa, with our engi neer, Walter Katte. We were competing for the building of the most important railway bridge that had been built up to that time, a bridge across the wide Mississippi at Dubuque, to span which was considered a great undertaking. We found the river frozen and crossed it upon a sleigh drawn by four horses.

That visit proved how much success turns upon trifles. We found we were not the lowest bidder. Our chief rival was a bridge-building concern in Chicago to which the board had decided to award the contract.

I lingered and talked with some of the directors. They were delightfully ignorant of the merits of cast- and wrought-iron. We had always made the upper cord of the bridge of the latter, while our rivals' was made of cast-iron. This furnished my text. I pictured the result of a steamer striking against the one and against the other. In the case of the wrought-iron cord it would probably only bend; in the ca e of the castiron it would certainly break and clown would come the bridge. One of the directors, the well-known Perry Smith, was fortunately able to enforce my argument, by stating to the board that what I said wa undoubtedly the case about cast-iron. The other night he had run his buggy in the dark against a lamp-post which was of cast-iron and the lamp-post had broken to piece . Am I to be censured if I had little difficulty here in recognizing something akin to the hand of Providence, with Perry Smith the manifest agent? " Ah , gentlemen," I said, " there is the point. A little more money and you could have had the indestructible wrought-iron and your bridge would rand again L any steamboat. \'\le never have built and we never will build a cheap bridge. Ours don't fall."

There was a pause, then the president of the bridge company, Mr. Allison, the great enaror, asked if I would excuse them for a few moment . I retired. Soon they recalled me and offered the contract, provided we took the lower price, which was only a few thousand dollars less. I agreed to the concession. That

Perry Smith, the man in the buggy, Hermon Dunlap Smith reminded us with justifiable pride, was his grandfather.

The identification, however, puzzled us a little. Perry Smith, we knew, had been closely connected all his active business life with the Chicago & North Western Railway. But the Dunleith-Dubuque bridge was being built for the Illinois Central. Was it likely that a high official of the North Western, which had extensive trackage in Iowa, would be engaged in an enterprise that would be of great benefit to a competing railroad?

For enlightenment we turned to Carlton J. Corliss's Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central. There we learned that the bridge company director whose mishap with a cast iron lamp post won the bridge contract for Carnegie was not Perry Smith, but an Iowa lawyer and railroad promoter named Platt Smith.

The explanation is simple. When Carnegie came to write his autobiography fifty years after the event in question his memory tricked him into confusing the two Smiths. This kind of thing has happened before and will happen again.

FIFTY YEARS AGO

As recorded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society.

r, 19:20. For the third consecutive year Chicago holds the lowest death rate from typhoid fever among the ten large t cities of the country.

Sir Oliver Lodge, speaking at Orchestra Hall, predicts: "\Ve may well fear future wars if the terrible secret of how to utilize the energy contained in the atom falls into the hands of an uncivilized power. Tot only human life but the whole planet could be destroyed."

MAR. 2. Joseph M. Cudahy, former president of the Cudahy Packing Company, is elected president of the Sinclair Refining Company.

MAR. 6. Two thousand employees of the American Express Company go on strike for a stiff increase in wages. The strike jeopardizes the city's supply of perishable foods.

MAR. g. The executive council of the Chicago Medical Society votes a heavy increase in fees. Office calls, now $3.00 to $5.00, will cost from $5.00 to $10.00. The charge for an appendectomy, now $ 150.00, will range from $200.00 to $250.00.

MAR. IO. The University of Chicago boosts tuition $10.00 a quarter. The new average for all schools and colleges will be $60.00 a quarter.

MAR. 17. A gas workers' strike is averted at the last minute when the Peoples Gas Light & Coke Company meets the workers' demand for a ten percent increase in pay, retroactive to December 1, rgrg.

MAR. r 8. The city council raises the building height limit from 200 to 260 feet. Proponents claim that the new ordinance will result in a building boom.

505050505050 505050505050 505050SOS0S0 5050S0S050SO

MAR.

116

Chicago History

Postal workers open a drive for "living wages" at an overflow meeting at the Cort Theater. Addressing them, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis declares: "There is no employer in America who has so low a wage scale as the United tates Government."

MAR. 22. Five hundred city team ters and truck drivers trike for a $2.00 a day increase, thus stopping collection of garbage and ashes.

Seven hundred policemen threaten to resign unless they receive more money by April r.

MAR. 24. The city council raises the pay of 18,000 employees ten per cent, thus staving off temporarily a wave of strikes.

MAR. 26. Furniture and piano movers, numbering 1,400, strike for a flat increase of $ 1o.oo a week.

MAR. 28. A tornado smashes through Chicago and many uburbs, killing twenty-nine and injuring hundreds.

MAR. 29. I early 1 ,ooo clerks, stenographers, and bookkeepers walk off jobs at the city hall. The city council cannot find funds for the raises it voted on March 24.

MAR. 21.

31. Two thousand city employees spurn the ten per cent increase voted by the city council. Five hundred firemen, one-fifth of the department, threaten to quit.

APR. 1. City hall employees, promised arbitration, return to work, but the list of firemen threatening to quit has grown to 1,100.

APR. 3. Reviewing F. Scott Fitzgerald's first novel, This Side of Paradise, in the Chicago Tribune, Burton Rascoe says that the book will earn its twenty-three-year-old author membership "in that small squad of contemporary American fictionists who are producing literature."

One-fourth of the city's firemen hand in their resignations, effective April IO. APR. 6. The firemen withdraw their resignations when promised that their demand for a salary increase will be submitted to arbitration.

APR. 13. In the presidential primary Gov. Frank 0. Lowden wins the Illinois vote by 80,000. His principal rival, Gen. Leonard Wood, carries Cook County by 27,500.

J. Ogden Armour gives the Armour Institute $71,000 for faculty salary increa es. He promises a similar donation annually.

APR. 14. Roger Sullivan, boss of the Democratic party in Illinois, dies at his residence, 342 Wellington Street. He was fifty-nine.

In the opening games of the baseball season the Cubs lose at Cincinnati, 7 to 3. The White Sox, at home, defeat the Detroit Tigers, 3 to 2, in eleven innings.

APR. 1 5. School engineers strike for higher pay, closing all public schools.

APR. 18. In a lead editorial the Chicago Tribune says: "The postal situation in Chicago, and no doubt in other cities throughout the country, is assuming the proportions of a national scandal . . . . Because of overcrowding, insufficient salaries and incfncient help, the service ha reached the point of actual disintcgra tion."

MAR.

Chicago H istorical Society

Governor Frank 0. Lowden strikes an oratorical pose for the press. On May 10 he won the Illinois Republican presidential primary, but lost o.ut to Harding on June 12 at the national convention in Chicago.

Chicago History

117

Fifty Years Ago

The Wrigley Building, first to reach the new 260 foot height limit of March 18, is shown here just completed (except for the hands of its famous clock) and before the addition of its northern half. The Michigan Avenue bridge opened May 14, and the old Rush Street span was closed to await demolition.

Chicago Historical Society

The Cubs win their first home game of the season, defeating the C incinnati R eds 4 to 3 in eleven innings.

APR. 23. Ten thousand Chicago Poles give a rousing welcome to r ,552 Polish soldier fro m the United States, returning home after three years' service in Europe. The contingent includes r 93 men from Chicago.

APR. 24. The strike of the school engineers is settled. The pubiic schools will open tomorrow.

MAY r. Eleven hundred ,vaitcrs and cooks strike at all the big hotels and prominent clubs.

Tracy Drake, head of the Drake Hotel Company, waits table at the Blackstone.

APR. 22.

In Springfield Gov. Frank 0. Lowden wins the endorsement of the Illinois Republican Convention in his campaign for the presidential nomination. His victory is a severe defeat for the opposing forces of \ \"illiam Hale Thompson.

MAY 10.

r r . "Big Jim" Colosimo, underworld leader, is murdered by a gunman in his cafe, 2 r 26 South Wabash Avenue.

MAY

William vVrigley, Jr., member of the Lincoln Park Board, volunteers to buy a hippopotamus for the zoo. The animal will cost about $4,000.

MAY 14. The Michigan Avenue bridge is opened for traffic.

MAY 22. The L eague of Cook County \\¡omen's Clubs passes a resolution approving a proposed city ordinance prohibiting "omen smoking in public.

MAY 24. Police in disgui e raid Cubs' park bleachers and arrest forty-seven men making and taking bets. The raid is made at the request of the Cub management.

MAY 26. Mrs. George A. Carpenter, chairman of the women 's committee of the Chicago Historical Society, announces that $50,000 has been raised for the purchase of the Charles F. Gunther collection of Am ericana . This is one-third of the sum needed .

MAY 12.

118

Chicago History

Georges Carpentier, European light-heavyweight champion, relaxes at the side of the pool at the Illinois Athletic Club, where he boxed three exhibition rounds on May 28.

States Attorney Maclay Hoyne, speaking in Decatur, calls the Chicago police rotten and demoralized, and says the city needs a mayor who will make the streets safe.

MAY 28. The Glen View Golf Club burns to the ground. The loss is placed at $125,000.

Georges Carpentier, French boxing champion and war hero, boxes three rounds at the Illinois Athletic Club.

MAY 30. Veterans of three war give color to Chicago's greatest Memorial Day parade.

Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, recently married, stop over in Chicago between trains. Mary's skirt is ankle-length because her husband doesn't like the newly fashionable short skirt. ational Convention JUNE 8. The Republican opens at the Coliseum. Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts makes the keynote address.

JUNE 1 1. The convention ballots four times for a presidential nominee. On the fourth ballot the three leaders are Leonard Wood, 314,½'; Frank 0. Lowden, 289; and Hiram Johnson, 140,½'.

JUNE 12. On the tenth ballot the convention nominates Sen. Warren G. Harding of Ohio and Gov. Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts.

Harding makes a characteristic comment: "Filled up on a pair of eights."

Census returns give Chicago a population of 2,701,212, a gain of 515,929 over 1910.

JUNE 1 5. Northwestern University trustees agree to buy a nine-acre tract at Chicago Avenue and Lake Shore Drive for $1,500,000. The schools of law, medicine, dentistry, and commerce will be located there.

JUNE 16. James A. Patten resigns as president and member of the board of trustees of Northwestern. His gifls to the university total $1,500,000.

In federal court Judge K. M. Landis enjoins the Sanitary District from withdrawing more than 250,000 cubic feet of water a minute from Lake Michigan. The decision, if

JUNE 19.

Fifty Years Ago

The Republica n National Convention of 1920 opens at the Coliseum on June 8 . Loud speakers are used for the first time at the convention, however the large white acoustic baffle is retained for orators who prefer their natural voices .

upheld on appeal, means that the district must build sewage treatment facilities costing between $ r 50,000,000 and $200,000,000.

The Public Utilities Commission authorize an increase in street car fares from 6¢ to 8¢ effectiveJuly r.

JUNE 24. The elevated lines apply for a 10¢ fare, giving higher labor costs as the reason for the increase.

JUNE 28. In Springfield, Governor Lowden announces that he will not be a candidate for re-election.

JULY 4. Health Commissioner John Dill Robertson opens a one-man campaign for the consumption of more goats' milk.

The Fourth brings one death and several injuries to Chicagoans.

JULY 5. In San Francisco, the Democrats, on the forty-fourth ballot, nominate James M. Cox of Ohio as their pres id en tial can cl id ate.

JULY 6. The Democrats pick Franklin D. Roose-

velt e>f New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, for vice president.

JULY 7. Dr. Lynn Harold Hough resigns as president of Northwestern University, alleging ill health as the reason for his decision.

JULY r 5. All cars on the surface lines are halted by a sudden strike of 300 electrical workers at substation power houses.

The first commercial wireless and wire telephone call in the world is made between William Wrigley, Jr. in Chicago and J. H. Patrick on Santa Catalina Island.

JULY 18. The electrical workers capitulate, and

normal surface line traffic is restored.

JULY 24. The States Attorney's office sues Mayor Thompson for delinquent personal taxes in the amount of $246.50 for 1915 and 1916.

The estate of"BigJim" Colosimo, killed on May Ir, is valued at $81,945.

J LY 28. Governor Lowden dismisses all seven members of the \Ve t Park Board. He charge that they were using their patronage in behalf of Mayor Thompson's organization.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks pause in Chicago on their honeymoon trip to France, May 30.

JULY 29. Chicago, with half of 1ew York's pop-

ulation, leads that city in deaths by automobiles, 273 to 272, for the first seven months of the year.

JULY 31. Cash fares on the elev a tee! lines are raised from 8¢ to 10¢; tickets will be sold 4 for 35¢.

\\'illiam Bross Lloyd and nineteen other radicals are found guilty of sedition. All are sentenced to imprisonment for terms ranging from one to five years.

AUG. 7. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks visit Chicago after a honeymoon in Europe.

Mary is scandalized by the "sunburnt knees" of Parisian women.

AUG. 2.

Chicago History

121

Fifty Years Ago

One hundred thirty-five veteran post office employees are retired because of age.

They will have to live on pensions of $60.00 a month.

AUG. 25. The names of 127,783 new voters are added to the poll books, bringing the total to 923,045, a record high.

SEPT. 1. Eleven Chicago officers of the Postal Clerks' union are dismissed by Postmaster General Burleson. Their offense: agitating for higher wages.

SEPT. 5. Fifteen hundred dissatisfied postal workers meet in the Second Regiment armory.

They ask a minimum wage of $2,400 a year.

SEPT. 8. The Sanitary District begins the actual work of filling in Bubbly Creek, long an open sewer on the southwest side.

SEPT. 14. Jack John on, former heavyweight champion, is sentenced in federal court to pay a fine of $ 1 ,ooo and to serve a year and a clay in the penitentiary for violating the Mann Act. SEPT. 15. In a primary election Big Bill Thompson's city hall machine (Republican) nominates all except one of its cancliclatcs.

SEPT. 17. The Chicago Golf Club at Wheaton plans extensive improvements in its golf course. The cost, $170,000, will be met by assessing each mem.ber $1 ,ooo.

AUG. 20.

122

Chicago History

The Corporation Counsel, at Mayor Thompson's orders, sues the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Daily News for libeling the city. The s11it asks damages of $10,000,000 from each paper.

SEPT. 18. Persistent rumors that the White Sox threw a game to the Cincinnati Reels in the 1919 \\'oriel Series surface again.

SEPT. 22. Facts about the 1919 World Series begin to come out in the course of a grand jury investigation. The Assistant States Attorney in charge states flatly that from five to even White Sox players were in league with gamblers.

SEPT. 27. In Philadelphia, Bill Maharg, well known sporting figure, confesses that he and Bill Burns, former big league player, were instigators of the conspiracy to "fix" last year's \\'oriel Series. Maharg claim that the first, second, and final games vvere thrown to the Reels. The corrupted Sox players were promised $100 , 000 but received only $10,000.

SEPT. 28. The grand jury votes to indict eight White Sox players for conspiracy. TwoEddie Cicotte, pitcher, and Joe Jackson, outfielcler-aclmit their guilt.

EPT. 29. Dr. \'\.alter Dill Scott, head of the departmcn t of psychology since 1905, i clcctccl president of Northwestern University.

A CHICAGO BOOK-AND TWO ON ILLINOIS

became governor of Illinoi s in January, 1933. At that time the state stood on the brink of bankruptcy, business was stagnant, the farmers were broke, and hundreds of thousands were jobless. Horner pushed through a sales tax, cul governmental expenses, and cooperated fully with lhe federal government in relief measures.

Before the end of his first term Horner broke with the Kelly-Nash machine, but won re-nomination, and subsequently re-election , in 1936. Two years later he went to battle again, this time to nominate and elect his candidate for the United States Senate. The effort, coming after six years of overwork, broke his health. Thereafter he was at besl a semi-invalid.

Let me say at once that I think Thomas B. Littlewood, for nine years chief of the Springfield bureau of the Chicago Sun-Times and now on the staff of the SunTimes Washington bureau, has done a fine job in Horner of Illinois.* He has caught the flavor of Illinois politics, which is not too hard to do, since it is often noticeably rancid, and he has drawn a penetrating portrait of a complex man, a man both naive and shrewd, tender and tough, and passionately devoted to the state in which he had lived his entire life.

I think I have some right to express my opinion of the merit of this book. I knew Henry Horner for a dozen years, well but not intimately. As I recall, we were brought together by a mutual friend, Oliver R. Barrett, lawyer and Lincoln collector. At the time I lived in Springfield but made frequent trips to Chicago. Several times Horner, knowing that I was in the city, asked me to stop in at the probate court, over which he then presided. When I appeared he would signal his bailiff to bring me to the bench, where he seated me beside him. Two experiences impressed me particularly. Once I watched a line of lawyers presenting documents for his signature. After the briefest explanation he signed his name. When court adjourned I asked him: "How do you know that some of these men are not slipping over a fast one and misrepre en ting the order they're asking you to sign?"

He smiled and replied: "I don't think there are more than half a dozen members of the Chicago bar who would try it, and I know every one of them.

HENRY HORNER

*Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1969. $8.95

Every order one of these shysters give me I read word for word."

On another occasion two lawyers presented an agreement for the settlement of a personal injury case.

The subject, a boy perhaps ten years old, had suITered a serious leg injury. When Horner found that the lad was in court he called him to the bench. " Let me ee you walk across the courtroom," he directed.

The boy complied, without a limp. ''Do you know how to hop, skip, and jump?" the judge asked him. Only after he had complied, again without faltering, was the agreement approved.

After almost forty years few Illinoisans can remember the bitterness of the campaign of 1932. In 1968, when the Democrats ran a Jew, Samuel Shapiro, for governor, anti-Semitism played almo t no part in the campaign. Exactly the opposite was true in 1932.

Republicans made much of the fact that Horner had been born Henry Levy. Farmers were warned that the price of pork would skid -it was already as low as it could go-if he were elected. I remember being stopped in a hall of the state house toward the encl of the campaign by a high Republican official and asked: "Diel you hear about the accident in Chicago yesterday? Three Jews killed while they were trying to learn how to ride motorcycles!" The point will be lost on those who do not remember that in 1932 the Illinois slate police were all political appointees, and all mounted on cycles.

Mr. Littlewood relates one of my experiences with Horner when he took me to task for implying that the morals of many politicians left something to be desired. ''You talk as if all politicians were crooks," he snapped, whereupon I tried to explain that I hadn't meant this at all, although it was exactly what I had meant.

After five minutes of uncomfortable silence he resumed: "And you're damned near right." It was, of course, the discovery that men whom he had trusted had betrayed his trust that impelled the governor to immerse himself in all kinds of detail that should have been delegated to others, and finally brought his physique to the breaking point.

Horner had a curious speculative mind which he often turned to his own vagaries. I was talking with him one day after he returned_to Springfield from his convalescence in 1939. "You know," he said, "down in Florida I became convinced that I was goi ng to die. But I rather welcomed the prospect because I Chicago History

123

Book Reviews

thought it would give me an opportunity to fill an important gap in human knowledge. No one has ever known what happens to a man after death. I made up my mind that I would make a careful note of everything that took place and then report it and clear up the my tery.-\'\lell," he asked, " how crazy can you get?"

I can offer my personal testimony to the depth of Homer's hatred for John Stelle, his lieutenant governor, a matter which Mr. Littlewood touches upon at some length. (I always liked Stelle. He was a political spoilsman in the long-standing tradition of southern Illinois, but he never pretended to be anything else.)

"A lot of people think I'm going to die, " Horner told me, "but I'm not, at least until my term is out. As far as I'm concerned that son-of-a-bitch Stelle is never going to get a chance to rape this wonderful tate !"

Horner almost made it, dying at Winnetka on October 6, 1940, leaving Stelle only ninety-nine clays in which to "rape" the state. And I say, in all candor and honesty, that this was something the new governor never attempted. To be sure, Stelle lopped hundreds of Homer's loyal supporters from the payroll, appointed his own cronies to their positions, and spent the state's money with a freedom that exceeded discretion, and sometimes the Jaw, but, as he once said in his own defense: "All you can truly say about John Stelle is that he changed a hell of a lot of positions and put his friends in." Mr. Littlewood adds a note that I find delightfully ironic. In one of his first moves Stelle¡ appointed George Edward Day, a Springfield paint dealer and friend of mine, state purchasing agent. In Littlewood's words, "purchasing agent Day bought vast quantities of yellow paint [for marking highways] from paint dealer Day, and years later when the price of paint skyrocketed during World War II Illinois was fortunate enough still to have some of that yellow paint on hand ."

Coming back from Stelle to Horner, I like the onesentence paragraph with which Mr. Littlewood concludes this fine biography: "If the message of this story is the effect of stress in high office upon a man with 'thoroughgoing integrity,' perhaps we should also devote a moment of reflection to the wonder of a system which could give Illinois at its moment of greatest civil peril a one-time precinct worker for Hinky Dink Kenna who a few eventful years later would be universally regarded as 'the Real Goods.' " PAUL M. Al'."GLE 124

Ch icago Histo ry

THE EDITORS OF Eighty Years at Hull-House, Allen F. Davis and Mary Lynn McCree, * have elected to tell the story of this most famous of Chicago settlements in the words of fifty-seven men and women who lived there or observed it closely. Appropriately, the selections start with Jane Addams's account of the founding in 1889, followed by descriptions of the early years

by Ellen Gates Starr, co-founder, by Florence Kelley, and others whose devoted work built a firm foundation for the institution.

While admiring the motives of these early residents I find the accounts of some of their activities, lovingly related, somewhat ridiculous. What could public readings of George Eliot's Romola have meant in the immigrant-packed tenements of South Hal ted Street?

Or lectures on Florentine artists, the Medici, and Savonarola? Or classes in Dante, Shakespeare, and beginning Latin? Of course such exerci es were not the main thrust of the settlement, but why the residents indulged in them at all I have difficulty in seeing.

That is why, I suppose, I like best the off-beat pieces the editors have included. One of these, "The Social Value of the Saloon," was written by Ernest C. Moore, then a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago and later president of the University of California at Los Angeles. While most of the Hull-House residents inveighed against the evils of liquor, Moore came up with a different verdict. He saw the saloon as a working-man's club, warm in winter, cool in summer, brightly lighted at night, and clean. Only the saloon-keeper kept open house in the ward . He was the neighborhood dispenser of news; he lent his patrons money in time of need. At the saloon a man could get as much as he wanted to eat or drink at a notoriously low price. "In the absence of higher forms of social stimulus and larger social life," Moore

*Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1969. S 10.00

concluded, "the saloon will continue to function in society, and for that great part of humanity which does not possess a more adequate form of social expression the words of Esdra will remain true: It is wine that 'maketh the mind of the king and of the fatherless child to be all one, of the bondsman and of the freeman, of the poor and of the rich. It turneth every thought into jollity and mirth, so that a man remembereth neither sorrow nor debt; and it maketh every heart glad.'" For South Halsted Street, better he had said beer.

Moore's piece ties in with an article, "A Decade of Prohibition," that Jane Addams wrote in 1929. Like her associates, she had been an ardent prohibitionist.

But she was a wise and observant woman. In the twenties, in the immediate vicinity of Hull-House, she watched bootleggers, illicit distillers, and hi-jackers at work; she also knew that corrupt politicians made these activities possible. Although her faith in reform had waned, she still hoped that the "noble experiment" would work.

Although most visitors to Hull-House came to praise, there were occasional skeptics. One of these was Walter Lippman, who recorded his opinion in 1913. Hull-House, he wrote, was "a little Athens in a vast barbarism-you wonder how much of Chicago Hull-House can civilize. As you walk those grim streets and look into the stifling hou es, or picture the relentless stockyards, the conviction that vice and its misery cannot be transmuted by policemen and l\1orals Commissions, the feeling that spying and inspecting and prosecuting will not drain the marsh becomes a certainty .... Hull-House cannot remake Chicago. A few hundred lives can be changed, and for the rest it is a guide for the imagination. Like all utopias, it cannot succeed, but it may point the way to success."

Much of the book is, if not a source book for Chicago history, at least an index to source which the historian cannot afford to neglect. A case in point is an excerpt from Edmund vVilson's The American Earthquake, in which the eminent critic wrote a description of poverty in Chicago at the depth of the depre sion which I have rarely if ever een equalled. vVilson was not content with generalities. He wrote of an old man, a Pole, dying of cancer in an unheated house on a cold day. His granddaughter, married and wearing well-fitting American clothes, had ju t returned from a relief station with a small allowance of coal. In a

three-room basement apartment \V ilson found a family of five, the father drunk in mid-morning, the mother, with her dirty children, huddled around the stove. In another basement apartment he found a young husband and wife with two children-the husband out of a job and all pale and thin from undernourishment because they were too proud to apply for relief. Single men had been driven to flophousesfifty thousand of them in one year. Others resorted to the shelters run by the Salvation Army and the citymanaged not badly either, but offering no hope of escape or betterment. Thousands resorted to garbage dump¡, devouring a ll the pulp left on the rinds of can taloupe and watermelon, even picking up spoiled meat to boil it and neutralize the taste and smell with soda.

Another example. Criticize the Chicago police as you will-and in my opinion they have been criticized more severely than they deserve-you will find in the pages of this book more than sufficient evidence to show that before the turn of the century, and for some years afterward, a large part of the force was depraved and venal. Note the testimony of Dr. Alice Hamilton, professor at the Women's Medical College of Northwestern University and resident of HullHouse. In 1898 she saw a Polish policeman order two Italian workmen, eating their lunch on top of a big garbage box, to move on. \,Vhen they refused he shot them both , and one died from his wound. The officer was never even suspended. Doctor Hamilton continued: " In our mass meetings the sight of an officer in uniform, instead of bringing a sense of security, would fill us with dread of some violent deed, not on the part of the audience, but of the police." In labor disputes, in which the Hull-House workers often joined picket lines, the police could always be counted upon to rough up the trikers.

The editors of Eighty Years at Hull-House have not shirked the confu ion and lack of direction that marked the course of the settlement after the death of Jane Addams in 1 935. In their words: "Two head residents, each bringing rapid shifts in emphasis to settlement problems and goals, struggled constantly with the Hull-House board of trustees over policy and power. De pre sion and war complicated the situation, money was difficult to raise, and the settlement movement on the national level had lost some of its early initiative and influence. In this most difficult of time , Hull-House lacked a strong, unified leaderChicago History

125

Book Reviews

ship. It had little sense of purpo e, and its very existence as a social settlement seemed in doubt. Yet it survived."

Survived, yes, but only to face, in the 1960s, the greatest challenge in its history. For several years the University of Illinois had been hunting for a site for its new four-year campus in Chicago. The choice finally fell on the Harrison-Halsted area in spite of the fact that the residents of the neighborhood, with the support of the city admini tration, had been engaged for several years in a program of rehabilitation.

They fought-but without the support of Hull-House -and they lost. (One of the high points of this book is Studs Terkel's interview with Florence Scala, who led the losing battle against city hall, the University of Illinois, and Hull-House.)

With the award of the area to the University of Illinois the trustees of Hull-House decided to decentralize the settlement's operations. Today it manages eight centers, all with special programs, in different parts of the city. The original nucleus, the house of Charles Hull, now restored, stands as a museum and memorial on the edge of the Circle Campus.

What, after eighty years, has it all added up to?

This is another question the editors do not dodge .

Although partly destroyed by the University of Illinois and truncated by expressways, the Hull-House neighborhood still comprises many Italians, Mexicans, Negroes, and Puerto Ricans. It still suffers, according to Gerald D. Suttles in The Social Order of the Slum, from many of the same ills found there in the 1890s: "a high rate of crime and juvenile delinquency, poor housing, inadequate schools and recreational facilities, and racial and ethnic tensions that occasionally flare into violence and gang war."

The editors make their own assessment: "Here live people surrounded by the signs of American affluence, cut off, anonymous, and afraid. They live almost in a subculture of America .... The settlement obviously has not solved the problem of isolation, nor has it alleviated that of poverty .... Except where campus or expressway or urban renewal projects have destroyed the old tenements, the houses that remain do not appear significantly better than those discovered by the settlement residents in the 1890s."

The reader who infers that I am not entranced by the accomplishments of Hull-House will be correct. But that is simply the prejudiced opinion of an old curmudgeon, and by no means the compelling 126

Chica go Histo ry

import of this anthology. The book is balanced, informative, and deserving of many readers.

PAUL M. ANGLE THE GREATEST VIRTUE of the Illinois Guide and Gazetteer* is that it has been wrillen. Not since 1939, when the remarkable, but now outdated Illinois Guide came from the Federal \Vriters' Project of the \Vorks Progress Administration, has lllinois had anything imilar in the way of a state tourist guide; and not since the mid-nineteenth century has Tllinois had the distinction of its own stale gazetteer. \Ve are indebted to Hal Foust, the late Percy \Vood, and john Clayton, who under the direction of Paul M. Angle, compiled the present guide for the Illinois Sesquicentennial Commission. This work meets a long felt and obvious need and will supply the considerable demand for easily accessible information on the state that comes from what we think i an awakening of popular interest in the history of the Midwest.

The midwestern past is Jes celebrated than that of any other section of the nation. The Colonial Ea t, the Old South, and the Far \Vest are alive in the minds of most American , but who makes movies and television programs about the "Old Midwest"?

Beyond vague associations with the orthwest Territory, the region is a historical blank in the popular con ciou ness. We suspect that the rea on for this is that the Midwest has never seen the end of an era, the end of a period suitable for myth making. There were few people here at the Revolution, there were no gold rushes, the frontier passed in an orderly fashion, and even the Indian wars were hardly exciting. The heartland has simply been too busy lo look back and has had very little to regret of the past.

The few features of our past that do stand outLincoln, life on the great rivers, the Chicago Fire, the buffalo herds, do not seem enough. The Illinois Guide and Gazetteer will help focu attention on an unglorified (not unglorious) past.

None of the neighboring states has, so far as we can tell, updated their WPA guides of three decades ago. When they do, the Illinois Guide and Gazetteer will serve them as an excellent model. It is organized to combine gracefully the background history, the

*Rand McNally & Company, 1 969. $ 12.50

gazetteer material, and list of tours, all of which are thoroughly indexed, a feature often dispensed with when a book is organized alphabetically as is the Guide' s gazetteer section, which is a major part of the 7 18-page book.

John Clayton wrote the extensive introduction, entitled "The Setting," which is an admirable outline of Illinois history, architecture, and economic geography. The gazetteer, called "Cities & Towns," was compiled by Hal Foust (the large Chicago entry is Percy Wood's contribution). It provides amiable and informative sketches of the existing towns and cities of Illinois. Mr. Foust also pieced together the interesting and practical tours that cover most of the state, and he has happily added brief descriptions of towns that are included on the tours rather than refer the reader to his gazetteer entrie . The maps are excellent, especially the plans of smaller cities, which are ufficiently detailed for the stranger who leaves the bypass highway. Adequate motor maps of such places as Decatur, Nauvoo, Alton, or Cairo seem to be unobtainable except in this book.

The tours are thoroughly mapped, measured in miles from point to point, and introduced with explanatory ummaries. They make good reading even if one has no intention of following them. The Lincoln Heritage Trail tours are especially well covered, and they provide good reason for traversing what some consider the less ' ¡scenic" prairie portions of the state. Although the tours listed stick pretty much to well-traveled primary roads, a venture onto county and section-line roads can provide uncrowded and somewhat sporty driving. (But Saturday can be a little too spor ty when the farmer boys head flatout for town.) A stranger's arrival for lunch or coffee

at the cafe in an off-the-main-road town is always a bit of an event. Life is still isolated, sometimes more than in the nineteenth century, in these hamlets. Just the thing for city people who imagine "cultural shock" and "alienation" to be creeping up on them.

At first glance an Illinoisian might consider a state guide someth ing that only an out-of-state tourist would need, but what is the usual Chicagoan other than an out-of-state tourist when he leaves Cook County? If he should head out to the older parts of the state he will find much of Chicago's heritage.

Chicago, more than any other American metropolis, is rooted in the countryside; the roots are commercial, but commerce is the soul of Chicago. There is no scenic grandeur, but the cultivated prairie has its charm, if a somewhat subtle one, and there are variations in the terrain at opposite ends of the state. vVi th a little attention the traveler can perceive where the New England-settled upper half of the state gives way to the southern-settled lower half, it is a question of minor differences in architecture, as well as accent and custom.

The entries in the gazetteer, even while providing the nece sary facts, are always interesting. However occasional deference leads to some soft-pedalling of well-known municipal reputations, and in the case of East Saint Louis, leads to an inadvertent impression that the nonwhite population of the city has dwindled. vVhile the peculiar native pronunciation of Cairo is mo t neatly illustrated, a slip-really no more a sin than miscalling that town-occurs in the gazetteer where lower Illinois is called Little Egypt instead of Egypt, as it is known by the inhabitants, but these are the locali ms that make the old state interesting.

DA VlD LASSWELL

Chicago History

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THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY North Avenue and Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

Andrew McNally m , President Theodore Tieken, 1st Vice-President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Paul M. Angle, Secreta,y Clement M. Silvestro, Director TRUSTEES

Bowen Blair John Jay Borland Emmett Dedmon James R. Getz Philip \V. Hummer \\'illard L. King Andrew McNally m Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Alfred Shaw Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

MEMBERSHIP The Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by member hips. Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and due are as follows: Annual , $15 a year; Life $250 (one payment); Governing Life, $500 (one payment); Governing Annual, $roo (one payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $IOoo (one payment).

Members receive the Society's magazine, Chicago History, invitations to all special functions held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions.

Single issues of Chicago History $2.25 a copy by mail.

Library subscription are $15 a year.

Longhorn steers at the end of a long trip to the Chicago stockyards in 1893 after traveling from the farthest reaches of Chicago's commercial empire.

They were bred in south Texas, driven to the plains to be grazed, then shipped by rail to Chicago. A few of them show the rancher's brand - the fourth from the bottom center has a dollar sign mid-ribs, his neighbor on the right carries a T-brand. The large meat packing companies have now left the stockyards, but iust in time to make way for a mid-city industrial park.