Chicago History | Fall 1974

Chicago History FALL 1974

(IJ;o n ngto ttei--~ o l It sfcs t-~ ci nsch en h c

jclpu nbrn -Yerrht (lt!Jico_go

The powerful aldermen who cornered the ethnic vote: At left front, Michael (Hinky Dink) Kenna; right, John Powers. The two are leading off the famous Cook County Democracy Marching Club, about 1910.

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE 0 F THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Something akin to a political debate goes on inside this issue. John Clayton describes the high-minded crusade of the reformer, the man determined to clean up Chicago.

But John Buenker argues that political wheeling and dealing are essentials of any new group's escape from grinding poverty.

Was the fight to save men's souls also a struggle to deprive them of clout? In battling against liquor and vice, were the native-born, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants also attempting to take over the entire country at the expense of a more natural pluralism? We leave it to the reader to decide.

With this Fall issue, Chicago History becomes a quarterly. "50 Years Ago" concludes with November 1924, because you'll be seeing us again in December, when our Winter issue appears.

Membership in the Society, which includes our magazine and many other privileges, still costs only $15. It is obviously a great bargain, and we invite you to fill out the membership application enclosed in these pages.

One of the more imaginative advertising pieces, befitting the showmanship of John Au stin Hamlin.

This papier-mache elephant stands over 27 inches high and is 29 inches long.

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Socie(J'

FALL 1974 Volume 111, Number 2

Cover: An ethnic celebration, the Cannstatter Folk Festival has been held in the Chicago area by settlers from WUrttemberg, Germany, since 1877. The tower, which symbolizes the festival both here and in Germany, is decorated with harvest fruits.

Our cover is from a chromolithograph, printed about 1910. The inscriptions above the wine stand read: (left) "Drink in happiness, drink in sorrow, wine refreshes you all the time" and (right) "Are your spirit and courage weakened? Sip new strength from wine".

CONTENTS

Chicago Historical Society

by Ed Eulenberg

Isabel Grossner, Editor

CHICAGO'S ETHNICS AND THE POLITICS OF ACCOMMODATION / 92

Fred Nachman, Assistant Editor Ellen Skerrett, Editorial A ssistant

THE SCOURGE OF SINNERS: ARTHUR BURRAGE FARWELL/ 68

by John Clayton

CHICAGO'S MIRACULOUS PATENT MEDICINES/ 78

by George D. Bushnell

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY'S LINCOLN DIORAMAS/ 88

by John D. Buenker

A LITERARY EDITOR REMINISCES: HENRY BLACKMAN SELL/ 101

by Virginia Gardner

Editorial Advisory Committee

THE VIKING IN LINCOLN PARK/ 111

Paul M. Angle

by A. A. Dornfeld

Emmett Dedmon

FIFTY YEARS AGO/ 117

James R. Getz Oliver Jensen Robert \V. Johannsen Herman Kogan Will Leonard Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Robert M. Sutton Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company Chicago, Illinois Designed by Doug Lang Copyright, 197 4 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614

Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America : History and Life

BOOK REVIEWS: STUDS TERKEL AND ORAL HISTORY/ 123

by Louis M . Starr

BRIEF REPORTS/ 126 by the staff

The Scourge of Sinners: Arthur Burrage Farwell

BY JOHN CLAYTON

Crusading in good causes is no ea~ job.

It requires boundless energy) complete dedication) deep religious conviction and) above al( the urifl,agging belief that one can and must win out over sin.

IN ms LIFE and in the way he lived it, Arthur Burrage Farwell-reformer, secretary of the Hyde Park Protective Association, president of the Chicago Law and Order League, and resolute opponent of corrupt ward politicians, saloon-keepers, and houses of prostitution-reflected his ancestry. He stemmed from a lon g line of religious fanatics, dissident English Protestants and ew World Puritans.

The first of the family to come to the ew \tVorld was H enry Farwell, who arrived in Boston in 1636. Arthur Burrage Farwell was the ninth descendant in the direct line. In 1832, his parents, Charles Benjamin Farwell and Elizabeth Burrage, made the journey from Painted Post, New York, to Lighthouse Point, Illinois, twelve miles above Dixon, on the Rock River.

After a brief period of schooling at Mount Morris Academy, Charles Farwell moved his family to Chicago. By 1852, the year Arthur was born, his father was beginning a political career that was to lead him to the United States Senate.

Arthur's religious leanings were apparent in his early boyhood. He was baptized a Congregationalist and attended his Uncle John's Sunday School class in the Plymouth Congregational Church. At the age of eleven he made his profession of faith and became a member of that congregation.

When the youth finished grade school, he was sent to an Eastern preparatory school, but he chose not to go on to college and returned to

John Clayton, compiler of The Illi11ois Fact Book and Historical Almanac, will also be remembered by readers of Chicago History for his articles, "How They Tinkered with a River" and "A Lincoln Park Legend."

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Chicago History

Chicago, where he worked for his uncle's firm, V. Farwell & Company, first as a clerk and later as a salesman. He a lso became a helper at the Plymouth Mission, in which his uncle was active, and served there eleven years, from 1877 to 1888. Arthur's Christianity was the motivating force of his life.

The profundity of his father's religious faith seems more doubtful. In 1880, Arthur read an election flier which charged that Charles Farwell, then running for Congress, had been a heavy gambler in his youth, accepting payoffs in the form of chips pushed his way by the dealer. There was no proof of this charge. More serious was the allegation that Arthur's father was an associate of George Trussell, owner of a popular gambling house and husband of the keeper of a bordello. The flier quoted the Chicago Tribune, which asserted that sixty acres of Trussell's land were actually in the possession of Arthur's father, and that Charles B. Farwell had arranged to reconvey the land, but through a third party. It was further stated that Charles Farwell had originated the technique of the secret land trust, a method of concealing large profits from valuable acreage that still makes headlines in Chicago newspapers whenever it is exposed . Friends noted a distinct coolness bet ween father and son from that day on. I believe we can assume that the cause of the break was not the property, but the father 's friendship and political association with a gambler and a wellknown madam.

Arthur Burrage Farwell's own impact upon the political scene through his support of reform candidates turned into dynamite when he began his campaign against election frauds in Chicago, a campaign which resulted in the conviction of

J.

Chicago,.1 /r.:~............. ................

DE.,1.R SIR: -

In reply to you,r letter re~·arding a Petitipn,

f,o

open the question of Saloons in Hyde Park to a vote, I would say that I did "!!:!2f: ~ig~ said Petition-; neither did I authorize any one to sign it for m,e.

,7\'ame.....~

.1 , / ' ~-··-·-·. __

Street address. ? ~~/3.~dJ.. ~ .:f· ._ ?l'#n~IT'~ lPO ··········.·····~ -·--····---······-...

Chicago Historical Society

An early fight against a rigged petition was won by many hundreds of cards like the one above, collected by the Hyde Park Protective Association.

Joseph C. Mackin in 1885, for perjury and ballot-box stuffing. It was the first such case to come to trial in Cook County. Readers cognizant of present-day bungling will not be amazed to learn that, when .\Iackin and his associates stuffed the ballot box of the 18th Ward, they failed to remove the string which held together the counterfeit ballots, all for the Democratic Party candidate, which they stuffed into the box.

"Chesterfield" (as he was known) Mackin was no small fish. According to the Tribune, he was, before he was sent down to Joliet, "perhaps the greatest power in the state's Democratic Party.

He made governors and mayors." During the Cleveland- Blaine presidential campaign, Mackin was serrctary of the central committee of the state's Democratic Party.

Nor was the election in the 18th Ward an inconsequential matter. The Democrats needed only two extra seats for a majority in the state's joint assembly, which named the United States Senator from Illinois. Overturning and misreporting the Republican victory in the 18th \Vard was intended to give the Party one of these scats. 1ackin's trial was well publicized and attended (though many were turned away, Marshall Field's name appeared daily among those

seated in the courtroom) and Mackin's conviction was an important victory for the reform movement.

That same year, Arthur Burrage Farwell moved to the Village of Hyde Park and became a charter member of the Kenwood Evangelical Church. Although he himself had taken the pledge in 1873 after attending a meeting of the \Vomen's Christian Temperance Union, he still treated an occasional customer to a beer. A pparen tly his membership in that dry community further strengthened his convictions against alcohol, for in 1888 he stopped traveling as a salesman and took an "inside" job with the firm. His battle against the liquor interests was to earn him the nickname "The Anthony Comstock of Chicago": as secretary of the Hyde Park Protective Association, he succeeded in closing down the so-called "blind pigs," illegal saloons which flourished in that dry community.

The necessity for Hyde Park to protect itself against the liquor interests became evident shortly after its annexation to the city of Chicago in 1889. Eleven square miles of the village had been a prohibition district; the remainder was subject to local option. The area, larger than the city which annexed it, became an immediate Chicago History

69

Arthur B. Farwell

THE SUPREME COURT PUTS A PERMANENT QUJETUS ON THE HYDE PARK BLIND PIG.

Chicago Historical Society

In June 1901, the Record Herald helped Hyde Park and its leader, Arthur Burrage Farwell, celebrate its victories over the illegal sa loons in that Prohibition area. Th e reference is to the Illinois Supreme Court and its continuing decision that the vil lage had the right to rem ain dry.

temptation, and the Hyde Park Protective Association was formed the following year, " To defend and maintain the laws and ordinances prohibiting the sale of liquors within certain portions of the territory of the City of Chicago, formerly being part of the Village of Hyde Park , and to uphold the local option ordinance, now in force in Hyd e Park, outside the Prohibition Districts. " Early on, the Hyde Park Protective Association assisted Mayor DeWitt Clinton Cregicr in carr ying a test case to the State Supreme Court, gaining a decision forbidding the issuance of a liquor license within the distr ict. In 1892, they fought back a petition, addressed to the City Council, that sought to end prohibition in the district through a popular referendum. Mailing out cards to some r ,500 signers, the Association was able to establish that most of the signatures were forgeries. The petition was withdrawn.

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Chicago History

Their troubles began in earnest, however, with the licensing of beer bars within the grounds of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893. The Association, joined by Arthur's first cousin, John V . Farwell, Jr., a member of the Board of Directors of the fair, fought to preserve Hyde Park's dry status. They lost: the Board ,¡otcd almost unanimously for the temporary permits . The ensuing wide-open sale of beer was accompanied by the covert sale of hard liquor, and by r 894 the liquor in tcrests were launching serious attempts to break down or circumvent Hyde Park's prohibition law.

The H ydc Park Protective Association first tried to obtain evid ence that wou ld force the village police to act, but the effort nearly cost the Association's detective his life. The only avenue remaining was the courts, and Malcolm Spittal, who had three illegal bars in choice locations, was the first target. He was arrested, tried, and convicted; his con\'iction was sustained by the Illinois Supreme Court, and Spittal went to jail. Similar suits by the East End, Windsor Park, and Chelten ham Improvement associations, whose officers were members of the Hyde Park Protccti\'e Association, resulted in the closing of several saloons in their districts, also.

Later, the Association was further strengthened by the active assistance of J\1ayor Carter H. Harrison II. The report of the Association for the year r 902 tells of the granting of special licenses to the Edelweiss Gardens and the Germania Gardens, and of J\1ayor Harrison's support of the Association' s suit before the Supreme Court of Illinois. More court victories were obtained in 1904, with the City Council invariably supporting the H yde Park Protective Association.

That year, Arthur Farwell became president of the Chicago Law and Ord er League, which continued the struggle against the sa loon in a larger arena. The Leagu e described itself as "an association of representatives of churches and organizations seeking to promote the general

welfare'•' and "formed for the purpose of providing an agency through which the public may be informed regarding violations of law and through which the pressure of public opinion may be effectively employed." In other words, it was to be a watchdog organization. Farwell himself became active in the cause of national prohibition, a battle he waged almost ceaselessly until 1919, when liquor was banned throughout the nation by the I\ineteenth Amendment to the Cons ti tu tion and the passage of the Volstead Act. r 905 was a great year for the prohibitionists.

Residents of West Pullman, West Roseland, Fernwood, vVest Madison Street, the northwestern and northeastern wards, and other areas of the city varying in size from a single precinct to several wards, went dry. In all, there were now twenty-four areas where it was illegal to operate saloons.

By then, Farwell had already taken on "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and "Hinky Dink" Kenna, the famous bosses of Chicago's rst Ward, more popularly known as the Lords of the Levee. I heard most of the story later from Senator Paul Douglas, who was our alderman in r 939. I myself encountered Hinky Dink and the Bath only once, in the summer of 1926, when I returned to Chicago from Rome on a brief visit, accompanying Cardinal Bolzano, the apostolic delegate to the Eucharistic Congress. On our train was also the papal nuncio from Washington. \\'e arrived at the Michigan Central railroad station on South Michigan Avenue Thursday,July r 6th, and as the two prelates descended to the platform they were greeted by the notorious aldermen dressed in their finest array-full evening dress, frilled white shirts, purple bow ties, and high hats. They had also provided an elegant Cadillac to lead a welcoming parade, viewed by close to two hundred thousand Chicagoans, from the railroad station to the residence of George Cardinal ?\Iunclclcin on Korth Avenue and Astor Street.

The Tribune reporters who met the train took me aboard their jeep. As our procession passed

Chicago Historical Society

From the brochure, The Everleigh Club Illustrated, which advertised the amenities of the brothel and thereby shocked many solid citizens, the entrance hallway to one of the "club's" two adjoining buildings.

Chicago History

71

Arthur B. Farwell

the Stevens Hotel (now the Hilton), there was a short burst of machine-gun fire and a man fell dead at the doorway; his assailant, shielding himself with the machine gun, retreated through the Harrison Street entrance, caught only by the a lert eye of the Tribune camera. Quite a welcome for the papal legate and the nuncio.

Much has a lready been written about Bathhouse John Coughlin and Binky Dink Kenna, largely because the men were as colorful as their sobriquets. But it was their political techniques, rather than their flamboyance, that aroused Arthur Burrage Farwell. In Paul Douglas' words, which he later repeated a lm ost exactly in his Introduction to the 1967 edition of Wendt and Kogan's Bosses in Lusty Chicago, "every saloon, every gambler, every prostitute had to come across at rates that were fixed according to their ability to pay. Mike l\'IcDonald, collector for the two bosses, saw to it that this was done and that the vote was deli\'ered on election day."

In return, the Lords of the Levee furnished police protection. Minna Everleigh, owner of Chicago's most lavish house of prostitution, told Douglas that she had given Bathhouse John $3,000 to stop some threatened state legislation, and that she had paid over $ r 00,000 in cash over a period of twelve years.

"The _great annual event of the First \\'ard was the ball, where the resplendent Bath led the grand march," Douglas reported. "It was attended by all the dregs of the underworld and by thrill -seekers of the upper crust who came slumming to gaze at the despised denizens of the deep. Beer was sold at champagne prices, and only at dawn would the haggard re\'ellers stumble in to the street."

Farwell's struggle to put an end to the I st \Vard ball lasted three long years, during which the force of law and order gained cumulative support-from church leaders, e\'angelists, other law-abiding citizens, and the press. They finally succeeded, in 1910, in forcing Mayor Fred A. Busse to refuse to issue the liquor permit essential to the success of the annual occasion on 72

Chicago History

which, Farwell later recalled, "the underworld of Chicago joined in one of the worst exhib itions of debauchery the world has ever known."

In the course of the battle, the reform movement in Chicago gained force with the arrival of evangelist Gipsy Smith (he was called "Gipsy" because he was born of gypsy parents in England). Farwell attended most of Smith's revival meetings in r 909, and the British reformer told him that he had met Farwell 's Uncle John in 18t2, the year Arthur had gone to work for J. V. Farwel l & Company. Smith himself had been one of many thousands converted by Dwight L. Moody during the first revivals in London. The next morning, Smith, then twelve years old, had visited Epping Forest to ponder the miracle of his salvation. By chance Arthur's uncle was visiting the same spot for similar reasons, and he recognized the boy as one of several hundred converts of the night before. After a brief conversation he had placed his hand on the youthful head and blessed him. "Preach the Gospel," John Farwell had said. "Testify for your Savior."

In 1910, Mayor Busse also appointed a vice commission. All it achieved was a relaxation of the opposition in the Illinois Hou e to the Injunction and Abatement Bill, which provided that property being used for purposes of prostitution could be closed and the use of the premises for any purpose prohibited for one year thereafter.

Meanwhile, Farwell had been keeping after vote frauds. In r 909, in cooperation with the Board of Election Commissioners, the Chicago Law and Order League had investigated the registration lists of the r 3th Precinct of Binky Dink and Bathhouse John's tightly governed rst \\'ard. The precinct, which was a block long and half a block wide, had 668 registered voters269 of whom, it was discovered, did not reside there. In r 91 o, employing University of Chicago students, the Law and Order League made a canvass of eighty precincts in the r st, 2nd, and r 8th wards and uncovered the names of more

I

SAID 1 -.·ou!d ha\'e my fling, And do what a .young man m~)':' And I di<!tt t believe a thing .

That the parsons have ro_s.,•: .

I didn t believe in a God That ~i,·es us blood like fire, Then flings us into hell because We answtr the call of desirr·.

And I s.i,d: "Religion" r.>t, And lhe laws of the v.orld are nil; For the had man is he who is caught An,d cannot foot his bill And thert' is no place called hell; And heaven is onlv a truth, Wht:n a man h:>!. hi~ '-'3\' \\ith a m.ai,J, rn Uw fresh k•·tn lwur of youth.

I married a girl with health _And virtue and spotless fame.

I gave in exchange my wealth And a proud old family nam<·.

And I gave her the love of a heart Grown sated and sick of sin! · .Mv deal with the devil was all cleaned up, A.nd the Jasl bill handed in.

"And mon~v can huv us ~ac~, If ,t rinr~ (•n t!i~ pl~k pf the church

She was f.Oing to bn.ng me a child, And when in labor she cried, With lo,·r and f~ar I was wild ll11t now I wish she had died.

For the son she bore me was blind And crippled and weak and sore!

A.nd his mother was left a wreck.

It was so she settled mv store,

So I had my Joy of hfe: I went the pace of the town; And then I took me~ wife,

I said I must have my fling, And they knew the path I would go; n<> one told me a thing Of what I needed to know.

Folks talk too much of a soul From heavenly joys debarred And not enough of the babes unborn, B>· the sins pf their fathers scarred.

And monrr can n~n1!-.· rr.iot..e, liach ~tr.n of, :-.ir.fol smirch For I saw m,·n Hrrv,1!:err, Hotfooltnf- the roa<1 .,f vice ; And women an<1 prc·aclwr, smiled on them As long as they paid the pnc~

And started to settle down.

I had gold enouvh and to ,pru-e

For all of the ,,jn,ple joys That belon~ with s house and a home And a broo~ of g,rls and boys.

Yet

Chicago Hi storical Society

A sobering and presumably inspirational message, reprinted and distributed by the Chicago Law and Order League, wherein a prodigal son pays th e price stipulated in the Old Testament. Despite his reform, his youthiul sins are visited upon his child .

Chicago History

73

Arthur B. Farwell

a little girl six years old was found intoxicated in her school. We wrote Mayor Harrison , with the result that the saloon keeper was convicted and we had a photograph taken of six girls who were ready to be witnesses against the saloon keeper. He was convicted on the testimony of a little girl seven years [old] whose picture we have.

Chicag o Historical Society

The Chicago Historical Society did not acquire the beer schooner on the left until 1954. Its capacity helps to authenticate it as one of the mu gs used in H inky Din k's saloon, known in its last days as the Workingmen's Exchange. The glass to its right holds the conventional eight ounces.

than five thousand registered voters who could not be found at the addresses given. Their work bore fruit in October, when more than three thousand names were stricken from the voting lists of the 1st \!\Tard.

Still another target in I g Io was saloons near schools that were selling intoxicants to chiidren.

Farwell reported that: After a nurse in one of the public schools informed us that a little child of eight was found intoxicated in one of the public schools we communicated with the General Superintendent of Police; the result was a conference held at Hull-House of representatives of the Citizens' League, the Juvenile Protective Association, Municipal Court, the Police Department and the Chicago Law and Order League. Eight investigators were sen t out into a part of the 9th, 1oth, 11th and 19th wards, and working parts of four days found 130 violations of the ordinances prohibiting the sale of intoxicating liquor to minors. From this we estimated that there were about twenty thousand violations a day in Chicago [a somewhat doubtful assumption].

Later, a teacher in ano ther public school informed us 74 Chicago History

Gipsy Smith also joined Farwell's crusade against prostitution, with some success. The Everleigh Club at 2131 South Dearborn Street was closed October 24, 1g, o-to the amazement of police officials, citizens, and brothel ownersbut the Levee itself continued to flourish for two more years.

Farwell continued to crusade. In I gro, he again enlarged his arena, becoming president of the Illinois Vigilance Association, a post he held for four years. In his very first year as president, Farwell joined a group that crusaded against vice in Chicago, St. Paul, 1inneapolis, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and New Orleans -covering a total of seven thousand miles in an effort to bring their message to the many cities and towns through which they passed.

Finally, in , g, 2, came the hoped-for success.

In July of that year, the Supreme Court upheld the closing of a bawdy house at 2, 32 South Armour Avenue (now Federal Street), the result of an action brought by the Chicago Law and Order League. Chief Justice Harry Olson of the Municipal Court of Chicago then went to State's Attorney John E. \Vayman and told him, "If you don ' t close the red-light districts of Chicago, the counsel of the Chicago Law and Order League will go before the Supreme Court and ge t your license, as attorney, taken away." (Appraising the decision in an address before the Bankers' Club the following year, J usticc Olson said, "This order ... was the Appomattox of the war upon openly tolerated vice in Chicago.")

Farwell reported that \t\Tayman cried and asked for a month's grace. "The month was granted and Wayman, with a few men, closed down the red-light districts of Chicago." Prostitution had never been legal in American cities

but, according to \Valtcr Reckless' Vice in Chicago, this city was the first to act decisively against the open flouting of its anti-vice laws .

The League's concern with organized prostitution stemmed from its deep conviction that young men, nay, whole families were ruined in brothels (as Ella \ Vhecler \ \'ikox's poem, reproduced in this issue attests), but it was also concerned about the young women who were employed in the houses.

After State's Attorney \Vayman closed the red-light district at 22nd Street, the Rev. Alice.

Phillips Aldrich, who had been with the League for several years, went in to the district and gave out about five hundred of her cards, inviting any of those girls who needed a friend to call at the League's office on La Salle Street. "Many interesting incidents occurred," the League reported, but left it to its readers to imagine what they were. And, looking back in 191 7 on "Some Victories," the League reported that "\Ve felt that, as we had helped to close the segregated [vice) districts, we should also help to take care of the unfortunate women and girls, and for about three years we have had an experienced woman in the l'v:Iorals Court helping women and girls who are in trouble. Since I g Io, our ~frs.

Aldrich has come in touch with about 2,200 unfortunate women and girls."

It is interesting to note that ~Irs. \\'ilcox's poem, reprinted and distributed by both the Chicago Law and Order League and the Hyde Park Protective Association, was one of a large number of leaflets, pamphlets, and fliers distributed by the organizations. The reverse side contains quotations from noted Americans about the importance of obeying the law. By 1917, the League was able to claim that it had distributed "millions of pages" of such "helpful reading matter," as well as waging a battle against obscene material.

In 1915, the Injunction and Abatement Bill became law. Said Farwell, "Thirty-five organizations spoke for the measure and forced its passage."

Chicag o Historical Society

John E. Wayman, State's Attorney forced by the Chicago Law and Order League to fina l ly close down the Levee's red-light district in 1912-or else.

This had been a hard -fought battle. The bill was struck down over and over in the state legislature before its final passage, and toward the end the press proved an enormous he! p to the reformers. Arthur Burrage Farwell spoke to the editorial writers of seven English-language daily papers, and the editor of the Abendpost, a German paper, and all of them printed editorials. Five of the editorials were sent to every member of the House of Representatives. The expenses of the lobbying were paid by the Committee of Fifteen, an anti-vice organization which had been reorganized two years earlier and had taken a strong stand against the existence of redlight districts. Wrote the Chicago Tribune in one of the editorials forwarded to Springfield: ... the efforts of organizations like the Law and Order League and the Committee of Fifteen to restrict commercialized immorality should be aided by passage of the injunction and abatement bill. ... This measure . . . has the indorscment of the Apartment Bui ld ing Association, Chicago Church Federation Council, Ch icago Hi st ory

75

Arthur 8. Farwell

and a formidable list of organizations .... Vice conditions are giving way before intelligent attack, and it is to be hoped the legislature will do its part.

But Farwell, seasoned reformer that he was, knew that the price of victory was eternal vigilance. In 1918, the Chicago Law and Order League regretfully reported that: .<\II of the houses of ill repute did not remain closed and from that time to this it has been a constant contest by the city and by the organizations to see to it that these houses are kept closed. One of the greatest problems of life is this sex problem and to solve it wr need all the power of heaven and earth ...

Yet, most of Farwcll's energies could now be devoted to the fight to eliminate the saloons.

He labored for the Nineteenth Amendment, talking at meetings anywhere he was invited, skillfully parrying interruptions by the omnipresent hecklers, and holding his own in dozens of extemporary debates.

Along the way there were some small victories. After eight years of campaigning, "with others' help and at an expense of about$ rn,ooo," the League succeeded in closing Chicago's saloons on Sundays m 1915. "Saving to the people," Farwell succinctly reported, "at least $300,000 each Sunday." Thereafter, the League watched for and reported violations of the new law, as they had been watching for and reporting violations of the law prohibiting the opening of the saloons on primary and election days. After a while, their energetic watchfulness paid off, and they were able to find very few violations of these laws.

Finally, in 1919, li quor became illegal in the United States. Kenna distributed his famous beer mugs with a generous hand, even giving one to Farwell to use as a goldfish bowl. A hitherto suppressed fact about Hinky Dink's saloon-keeping emerged at that point: someone measured the various beakers and found they held one pint, nine nuid ounces-seven ounces short of the full quart for which his customers had been paying over the years. Kenna kept one 76

Chicago History

,

Chicago His1orical Society

Prohibition, the Injunction and Ab atement Act, police reform, and civil service-but is the fight ever won? This is the way it looked to John Mccutcheon, Chicago Tribune cartoonist, in 1928.

'

for himself, but in 1924 he gave it to Miss Anna A. Gordon, president of the Kational and International Women's Christian Temperance Union.

In ce lebration, she held a luncheon at Rest Cottage, the organization's headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, and announced proudly to the assembled ladies that every implement being used by them had come from a closed-down sa loon. She used Binky Dink's last beaker to hold the tea bags.

After the saloon had passed-for a timeArthur Burrage Farwell turned his attention to the very rewarding and important business of working with juvenile delinquents, particularly at the reformatory at St. Charles. He visited them there, he accepted a few as his charges when they were released, and he continued to work for good until shortly before his death at his home in Chicago, September 18, 1936. He was eighty-three years old.

Arthur Burrage Farwell, patriotic American, reserved a specia l love for his native city. He even admired its weather. He wrote the Chicago Evening Post, on January 23, 1920: "I noticed in the papers lately that an old lad y 103 years old is quoted as saying it was the climate of Chicago that had helped her to live to that age. I believe this is the finest climate in the country." He ad,¡isccl those who grumbled about the cold to dress more carefully, and enjoy the weather. In another letter to the Chicago Daily News that same year, he asserted that "we need the vigorous cold air and the frosts of winter."

In May, also 1920 (Farwe ll appears to have been an indefatigable writer of letters to the editor), he informed the Post that in 1888 he had been appointed chairman of the committee on alleys of the Lake Avenue Improvement Association, a post for which he had asked and which he held for ten years. He noted that there had been many improvements in the cleanliness of alleys since then, and observed that children can help. "A few days ago I saw on Randolph Street, a stick with nails in it in a very dangerous place for autos or horses," he reported to the

newspaper. "I removed it to the gutter and that is something that children and grown people can do."

Elsewhere, he wrote:"! believe here is to be not only the largest, richest, most inOucntial city in the world but even tu a ll y the most righ tcous."

He was also a firm believer in the power of love. "The greatest power in the world is the power of love," he said in a speech at the Windsor Park Baptist Chmch in 1920. "With the application of a little love all the world's difficulties can be settled .... Practice the golden rule.

If bootleggers loved their brothers as they should there would be no more wood alcohol deaths, and the county jail could be used as a museum .... we won't have any more wars ...

Love can solve every problem that any community, state or nation has to meet."

He was a believer in the power of the good act .

A major pamphlet of the Chicago Law and Order League carr ied on its cover this statement: You can ' t do a good thing in China or in any precinct in any ward in the city of Chicago without affecting the world .-Robcrt E. Speer.

Arthur Burrage Farwell operated in the classic style and with the dedicated fervor of all great reformers; but, also in classic style, he outlived his reforms. \\'hen I came to Chicago in 1 928, I lived in a high rise at Clark and Fullerton . My shortest way home afoot or by taxi was by way of Dearborn Street. In the first ten blocks north of the Chicago River were scores of houses where women sat in kimonos with curtains fully open and lights aglow and invited in the passers-by.

And in 1933, Prohibition was repealed and the country celebrated with an orgy of legal drunkenness, and Farwell lived to see this, also.

Did Arthur Burrage Farwell really fail? Not by the modest standard he put forth for himself toward the close of his career. In 1930, he wrote: "If by the grace of God I have been enabled to help save one man or woman, one boy or one girl in my 61 years work in Chicago, I consider my life a success."

Chicago History

77

Chicago's Miraculous Patent Medicines

BY GEORGE D. BUSHNELL

Consumption) malaria) catarrh) cc women) s troubles/) or wlzateveryou could cure tlzem all witlz a patent medicine-and) ifyou became an alcoholic in tlze process)your family could always slip the White Star Secret Liquor Cure into your food. before enactment of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, Chicagoans relied on a variety of patent medicines to cure their ailments. Families consulted the doctor only for serious illness or in dire emergencies: the woman of the house undertook the task of healer, relying on home medical books like The llousehold Guide published in ?\apcrvillc, Illinois, or the imposing booklet of Dr. B. J. Kendall titled The Doctor at Home, which covered diseases of"man and the horse."

It was an era of nostrums and quackery unrestrained by state or federal regulations. Chicagoans, to judge from the advertising of the patent-medicine moguls, were affiicted by a fearful array of illn esses from cancer and yellow fever to goiter and paralysis. In this less sophisticated age, ordinary people accepted the flamboyant and usually false claims by the makers of patent remedies, ,¡ainly hoping that their ills would disappear with a bottle or box of the proffered reinedy. After all, the labels promised effective, quick, and cheap cures for a hundred diseases and complaints.

The term "patent medicine" was as misleading as the curative claims. Virtually none of the nostrums were actually patented in Washington.

The term originated in the eig hteenth century, when European kings issued monopolistic royal "patents" to their favorite medicine makers, and the term came to colonial Am erica with the DURING THE HALF- CENTURY

George D. Bushnell, public information director of the Illinois Institute of Technology, is well known to readers of Chicago Hist01y. His last article fo1¡ us, "Chicago's Rowdy Firefighters," appeared in the Fall-Winter r 973 issue.

78

Chicago History

remedies. Most patent medicine-makers did register the names of their nostrums to protect themselves against their use by others, but this process did not require meeting any standard of quality.

Chicago's drug-store shelves were lined with remedies such as Townsend's l'viagic Oil, Radam's l\licrobe Killer, \ Varncr's Safe Kidney and Liver Cure, Indian Snake Root Oil, Wine of Cardui, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, Balms of Gilead, Dr. King's New Discovery for Consumption, and Hamlin's \Vizard Oil. Promising not just relief but complete cures for impressive numbers of ills, the nostrums contained, as basic ingredients, narcotics such as alcohol, laudanum, morphine, and even opium.

Labels bore portraits of distinguished-looking "doctors" like Dr. R. V. Pierce, Dr. Kilmer, Dr. S. B. Hartman, and Dr. Daniel Hostetter to reassure the public. The lone female proprietor, the motherly Lydia Pinkham of Lynn, Massachusetts, gazed reassuringly from the label of her own elixir. Duffy's Pure l\lalt advertised it was endorsed by "over 7,000 doctors and used in more than 2,000 hospitals," but at least one physician in the mid-188os observed that "The advertising quack is the black wolf, aye, the Bengal Tiger of the profession, who knows poor, weak human nature like a book."

It was a standard joke in this temperance era that several bottles of a patent medicine could take the place of a generous jolt of liquor. Remed ies popular among Chicagoans included Hood's Sarsaparilla, 18 percent alcohol; Paine's Celery Compound, 21 percent; Pe-ru-na, 28 percent; and Hostetter's Bitters, a whopping 44 percent. By 1906, the pa ten t-mcd icinc business

was big business, grossing $80 million nationally and mak in g its proprietors wealthy indeed.

As early as May 1850, the House of Delegates of the American Medical Association passed a resolution proposing that the Assoc iation oppose patent-medicine advertising in medica l journals as contrary to the AMA's code of ethics. Seventeen years later, the Association urged that their doctor members refuse to patronize druggists who manufactured their own remedies, a lthough the prohibition did not app ly to the vast ly greater number of druggists who sold patent medicines. By the mid-189os, the A\1A mcrcascd the force of its opposi ti on and, by the turn of the century, openl y condemned the nostrums, askin g state medical journals to refuse a ll pa tent-medicine advert ising. In I goo, the Chicago i\Icdical Society formed a colllmittee on public relations, whose pu rpose was to lead a campaign aga in st the cures. At the turn of the century, Ch icago's cut-rate Economica l Drug Company displayed a large sign proclaiming that if asked what a patent medicine was worth , the compan y's ca ndid answer must be "It is \ Vorthless." Customers who came to the store see king relief from sickness and pain were advised to consu lt a reputable physician. But the sign was soon removed when customers ignored the druggist's good advice and cont inued to bu y their favorite remed ies anyway.

The powerful Proprietary Medicine Manu- ¡ farturers Association in New York met all such opposition by lobbying in W ashi ngton and pouring money into promotions ranging from trade card and signs painted on buildings to advertisements in newspapers. Playing on the fears, apprehensions, and as pira ti ons of the publi c then, as now, paid off. Advertisers did not shrin k from predicting pain and even death from symptoms which often threatened no such outcome. Coughs and back pains became dread harbingers of an agonizing death. And suggestion proved powerful, as a lways: readers believed that they suffered from serious illn esses, and they became customers.

Even religion and patriotism were used to help sales along. During the Spanish-American \Var, for example, Chicagoans received a pamphlet from the maker of Pc-ru-na, showing a bottle of the remedy flanked by a so ldier a nd a sai lor. Under the head line "The Three Safeguards of Our Country," the makers assured the public that its army protects it from internal dissension, its navy protects it from foreign invasions, and Pe-ru-na protects it against catarrhal diseases. Religious controversy was put to good use: a trade card for i\1ercha nts Celebrated Gargling Oil showed a gorill a saying, with a broad grin: If I am Darwin ' s Grandpapa I t follows don't you see, That what is good for man an d beast I s doubly good for me.

Although most of the nostrums C hicagoans consumed were manufactured in New England, Chicago had its own patent-med icine magnate in J ohn Austin Hamlin , creator and supersalesman for H am lin's \,Vizard Oil. Hamlin was the son of a respected Cincinnati physician. In his late teens, Hamlin developed the formula for Wizard Oil, which he brought to Chicago in 1861. Then twenty-four, H am lin also possessed a talent for sleight-of-hand tricks and a flair for promotion .

H am lin soon organized and pioneered with a traveling musical troupe to peddle Wizard Oil from town to town. At first he travel ed with a singl e troupe, resplend ent in white tie and tails, entertained the crowds with magic tricks, and sold his remedy. Business boomed; in a few years, seventy Hamlin troupes were on the road.

Each troupe included a driver, a lecturer, and a male quartet, traveling in a covered wagon drawn by four or six horses. Packed in the wagon were a wardrobe trunk, an organ, and a supply of torches for night performances.

To encourage audience participation, the promoters of Wizard Oil distributed a booklet, Chicago History

79

Advertising cards often featured, on the front, sentimental or otherwise appealing pictures, in full color, which people liked to collect and save. The advertising sometimes appeared only on the reverse.

These, shown actual size, are from the collection of the Chicago Historical Society.

The Scott's Emulsion twins. The reverse speaks of the pride that people rich or poor, high or low take in their twins, and goes on to point out that Scott's Emulsion, a cod liver oil compound, will not only keep them healthy but is also "the best remedy in existence for Consumption, Scrofula" and other disabilities. Mirabile dictu, it is "Palatable as milk."

A sea scene from Fischer's Quick Cure for He ache and Neuralgia. "We guarantee this preparation to do what we claim," says the text on the reverse, and among the testimonials that follow is one from Chas. H. Everhart of Bloomington, Ill.: "Headache of long standing relieved at once." Chas. Fischer & Co. made the product in Peoria.

The fountain of youth? No, an advertising card from Dr. Jayne's Expectorant, presented by pharmacist Otto Hacist of Cottage Grove Ave. to his customers. The elixir is recommended for pleurisy, any acute inflammation of the lungs or throat, consumption, and whooping cough.

80

Chicago History

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Boschee's German Syrup and Green's Au gust Flower, two more potent r emedies, are advert ised on the reverse of th is arch itectura I scene.

The Augu st Flower c ures dyspepsia, palpitation of th e heart, or what have yo u; the syrup "speaks for itself," but the m ake r adds that it c ures consu mption, coughs, colds, or any diseases of the lungs, throat, or chest.

Ten reasons why Dalley ' s Ma g ical Pain Extractor works, and why no tamily in Am erica should be without it, are listed on the reverse : they include everything from curing piles, smoothin g chapped hands, an d your own dru ggist's recommendation .

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P°'.'i':I EXTRACT_ OR T'-tE GREAT

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The children on the front advertise Jayne's Tonic Vermifuge---great for dyspepsia or worms in children. The card was presented by Chas. Kotzenberg, druggi st on Halsted St.

Chicago History

81

Patent Medicines

llumorous and Sentimental Songs as Sung throughout the United States bJ• llamlin's IVi;:ard Oil Concert TroujJes in Their Open Air Advertising Concerts. On

the cover was a tent-topped wagon, a team of four horses, a musical co111plement of fiddler, cornctist, nutist, and organist, and last, but not least, a lecturer selling his wares from the tailgate to an enthusiastic throng. Ha111lin's songbook was typical of those used by patentmedicine showmen, with popular songs of the time alternating with claims for "The Great Medical \ Vonder, Hamlin's \Vizard Oil," which, "once introduced into any section of the country, never dies out." Severa l dozen songs were offered, from "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot'' to the lively "King of the Air" and "The Kicking ~Iule." \Vizard Oil, according to the booklet, could cure rheumatism in four to six days, toothache in one minute, diphtheria in twelve hours, and fever and ague in a day. And this 111iraculous remedy was a\·ailable for only "fifty cents and one dollar per bottle" "at all druggists." Claims for other Hamlin remedies, Hamlin's Cough Ba lsam (50¢) and Blood and Liver Pills used by J ohn's father, Dr. William S. Hamlin (25c), occupied the remaining space.

From the wagon, which could be quickly converted into a stage, the quartet would sing a medley of songs, decked out in silk top hats, frock coats, pinstripe trousers, and patent leather shoes with spats. While the quartet entertained, the lecturer would visit the local druggists, to place the bottles of cure on a prominent shelf. Mindful of the force of good public relations, the Hallllin quartets often agreed to sing for church services, benefits, and charity events.

Hamlin ended up, in the opinion of many, as an impor tant cultural asset to the city. By 1872, he had amassed a fortune, and he built Hamlin's Theatre, later renaming it the Grand Opera House, on what later became the site of the RKO Grand Theater. When he died in 1908 at the age of 71, the Chicago Tribune published a 82

Chicago Histo ry

colu111n-length obituary under his photograph, lauding him as "one of the best known theatrical managers in our country."

Other manufacturers helped sales along by offering free trial bottles. A lesser luminary on the Chicago patent-medicine scene, H. E. Bucklen & Co., makers of Dr. King's New Discovery for Consulll ption, proclaimed its nostru111 the "greatest discO\·cry of the 19th ccn tury" and offered free trial bottles to those who doubted that only Dr. King's was a sure cure for that dread disease.

Almanacs, particularly after the larger printing presses and cheaper pulp paper of the 1880s made mass printing possible, brought patentmedicine advertising into the homes of thousands. !Iostetter's Illustrated United States Almanac for 1869, for example, packed useful information in a111ong promotional copy and testimonials.

The inside front and back covers were a series of testimonials from people in ~fainc and Ohio, and the inside pages began with advertising for Hostetter's Stomach Bitters, prescribed by physicians "for him who is ready to perish."

Short anecdotes, monthly calendars, and lists of illncsse ranging from cholera to fevers, all curable by the remedy, recnforccd the threat implicit in the "physicians" prescription. And tucked throughout the compact little booklet were recipes for broiled kidneys, biscuits, and potato bread; sentiments and sayings; and several short stories with the humorous turn of the day.

Ayer's American Almanac for 1889, published by Dr. J. D. Ayer & Company, pictured on the yellow Co\·cr a handsome father with two daughters holding slates with the slogan "Ayer's Sarsaparilla .Makes the \Vcak Strong." Four of Dr. Aycr's remedies were advertised, including the popular Cherry Pectoral for coughs and colds and Cathartic Pills for Consumption and Indigestion. Each ailment was described in alarming language, but each such description was fo llowed by a reassuring testimonial to the curative powers of one of the nostrums.

_

Chicago Historical Society

How could Santa, whose legend is told on the reverse bring a better gift to the nation's children tha~ Ayer's Cherry Pectoral? One of a small series of "chroma lithograph Statuettes"- a cardboard piece th at stands upright.

Aged People,

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THE BEST GIFT TO A FRIEND.

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The reverse of another of Ayer's Statuettes. This one shows an elderly couple, obviously still in love, one holdin g a bottle of Ayer 's Sarsaparilla and the other, Ayer's Am eric an Almanac. The message is appropriately written.

Ch icago Historical Society

Chicago History

83

.-1

From the author's collection

Newspaper advertisin g was, however, the most powerful of all avenues of promotion.

Heavy advertisin g of patent medicines began in the r87os and reached its peak between 1890 and 1906. Chicago's newspapers were far from interested in protecting the consumer: they generally adopted the policy that it was the buyer's business to look after his own interests. ~1oreover, the patent-medicine men applied considerable pressure to perpetuate that policy, protecting themselves against critics and hostile lawmakers by devising th e "red clause" in advertising contracts. Printed in red ink, the clause specified that the contract was null and void if a state law were enacted prohibiting the manufacture or sale of proprietary medicines.

Under the circumstances, the newspapers did not exactly leap to the support of those who were warning against the remedies they so profitably sold space for.

In a one-column advertisement in the Daily News for June 8, 1900, for example, Dr. B. M. 84

Chicago History

Patent Medicines

Ross promised, in boldface type, BLOOD DISORDERS . SPEEDILY CURED. Among the diseases caused by "poisoned or impoverished blood" were acne, scrofula, eczema, and yellow skin.

Not content with his Blood Purifier copy, Dr. Ross used the balance of his ad to promote a Rheumatism Cure which improved "thousands of cases in seven days"; his Liver and Bowel Pills, "free of the irritating action of other pills which eat away the mucous lining of the bowels"; and finally, his Cold, Malaria, Chills and Fever Tablets. The latter, he optimistically predicted, "all Chicago will be using in a few months." Customers were encouraged to come to his office at 175 Clark Street.

A Chicago Tribune advertisement for January 3, 1896, said of Munyon's Remedies that these homeopathic tablets "let the user be his own doctor." The real enticement was that there were "No Big Doctor's Bills"; more, Munyon's promised "a separate cure for each disease." A month later, the company urged the newspaper's readers to come to the institution at 95 YYashington Street and meet "many who have been cured."

Chicago sufferers who found their way to Arend's Drug Store at Madison Street, Corner Fifth Avenue, could buy the store's Kumyss, and in that year, 1896, end the problem of a weak stomach which "means a weak body and a weak mind." The Royal Chemical Company of Chicago, which did not give an address, promised that its Nervitis would cure such nervous ailments as "loss of brain power, wakefulness, atrophy and excessive use of tobacco or opium or other stimu lants" for the modest sum of $ r a package.

Radam's Microbe Killer, distributed at 310 Dearborn Street, announced in a Tribune ad for December 15, 1900, that it had "Unmistakable power over Germ Diseases" and listed by name thirty-one Chicago merchants, professors, ministers, publishers, architects, and others, each of whom gave a one-sentence testimonial for the nostrum. And in a Daily News advertisement for

June 30, r goo, the Orangeine Chemical Company at 15 Michigan Avenue suggested that its Orangeine powder, dissolved in a cup of lemonade and taken before retiring, would cure a summer cold.

In a handsomely illustrated advertisement headed "Greatest Discoveries of the 19th Century," the H. E. Bucklen Company placed its familiar carton of Dr. King's New Discovery for Consumption in the center of a steamship, train, telegraph and telephone, and phonograph. The association of objects, nay, the superiority of the remedy to the other important developments pictured in the advertisement, was explained in the caption: "The Greatest of All for Saving Human Life."

Chicago's giants of merchandising, the sales catalog companies, also peddled patent medi cines. Montgomery \,Yard 's Catalogue D for 1894-1895 was a special supplement of "Patent Medicines and Proprietary Articles," which listed, for each nostrum, \ Yard's special low price and the regular retail cost. Included were Arnold's Cough Killer (75c), Hamlin's Wizard Oil (70¢ for the la rge bottle), Dr. Pierce's Golden Medical R emedy (68¢), and hundreds of others. Readers were admonished to keep a supply of medicine in the house, against need.

By 1902, Ward's had en larged Catalogue D to full catalog-page size. During those seven years, prices had risen a little: the 68¢ nostrum now cost 73¢.

Sears Roebuck's "Special Catalogue of Drugs," issued in June 1906, met \Yard 's prices and featured remedies such as \,Von11 Syrup for Children, Dr. Ross' Kidney and Bladder Cure, Orange Wine Stomach Bitters, and Dr. \,Valter's Chill Cure "for all disorders due w malarial poisoning." The White Star Secret Liquor Cure was one of \ Yard's best-selling items. It could be administered in food or liquids without making the drinker any the wiser and probably worked better than most other patent medicines: it was so laden with narcotics that it likely put the user to sleep almost as he rose from the table.

Chicago History

85

Patent Medicines

Testimonials from Chicago's ordinary folk were an effective promotional device. Surprisingly, considering the flagrantly fraudulent claims of the medicine makers, the testimonials were genuine, edited only to improve grammar and spelling. In an advertisement headed "Another Empty GraYc," l\1rs. l\1clissa \i\lhitcomb of 4824 So. Prairie Avenue announced that \Varner's Safe Cure for dropsy had brought her "health and new life" and that, but for this wonderful remedy, she would have gone to her grave. C. 0. Hanson, of 102 Bismarck Court, testified in the Chicago Tribune of January 25, 1896, that Hood's Sarsaparilla was the "best medicine ever tried." And \i\lalter Herbster, of 424 Sedgwick Street, credited Hood's with having cured his ncn¡ousness, lack of appetite, and insomnia. \\' ith its aforementioned 18 percent alcoholic content, perhaps it did help his insomnia.

Dr. Hobb's Sparagus Kidney Pills won the approval of Mrs. Thieman, of 226 Roseworth Avenue, who said she "could not praise them enough." Chicago's own \Vizard Oil was also well attested to: It was credited with saving the life of A. M. Sheriff, postmaster of London, Kansas, who had suffered for twenty years with an asthmatic affiiction; and John \V . Fairbans, of Adrian, l\1ichigan, told newspaper readers that he threw away the crutches he had used for two years, after just twenty-four hours of using \ Vizard Oil. The enterprising patent-medicine makers created a brisk market for testimonials. Pe-ru-na for example, offered to pay 25e for each written testimonial it received. But if the manufacturer couldn't line up his own testimonials, he sometimes followed the example of a Paine's Celery Compound agent. This gentleman visited the advertising manager of a Chicago newspaper and showed him a full-page advertisement for Paine's Compound, but with white space in the center, explaining that the medicine maker needed some "good, strong testimonials" to fill in the empty space. Asked whether he couldn't 86

Chicago History

supply them himself, the agent responded, "Can you? Show me four or five strong ones from local

politicians and you can get the ad."

Des pi Le all this aggressive dealing with newspapers, however, an occasional report of the deadly effects of one or another nostrum leaked out. One of the most dangerous patent medicines available to Chicagoans in the early I goos was the headache powder Orangeine. In gredients like acetanilid endangered the heart and the blood, although the label said just the opposite. In the Journal of the American Medical Association, Chicago Dr. J. L. l\1iller reported that he had examined a young lady who had been taking Orangeine for insomnia, whether or not in lemonade we do not know, and who had become alarmed by her bluish color and by fainting spells and chills. He warned her to stop taking the nostrum immediately, but she continued to rely on it. Three days later, she was found dead of acetanilid poisoning.

The end of Chicago's golden age of patent medicines was close at hand. In October 1905, readers of Collier's were jolted by the first of ten hard-hitting articles exposing the patent-medicine quacks. Titled "The Great American Fraud," the series was written by a thirty-fouryear-old free-lance journalist and l\1cClure Syndicate muckraker, Samuel Hopkins Adams, with the help of Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley, chief chem ist of the Department of Agriculture, who had been crusading for a pure foods law since 1883.

Adams' series began its documented expose of the evi l effects of the nostrums with a pagesize drawing of a hooded skull in front of a row of patent-medicine bottles. In article after article, he cited dozens of the cures by name, analyzed their contents, and described interviews with and threats from their makers. Adams was particularly angry about the powerful newspaper advertising, which used every underhanded trick from lies to terror to sell the nostrums. Almost as soon as the series ended, the American Medical Association reprinted the

articles .in a small hard-cover book and distributed half a mi llion copies.

Two months later, in his Annual Message of December I go 5, Prcsidcn t Theodore Roosevelt recommended passage of a pure food and drug act. Despite the patent-medicine lobby, the Senate passed the National Food and Drugs Act in February, the House followed suit in June, and the act became law on the first of January, 1907.

The Act, however, was only partially effective in curbing the traffic in patent medicines . They could still be bought, although the labels had to state the presence and amounts of such addictive and injurious ingredients as alcohol, morphine, opium, cocaine, chloroform, and heroin. Obviously fraudulent claims of cures were prohibited.

But even though the advertising had become more honest, the contents less deadly, and they still did not cure, the patent medicines con tinued to sell in quantity to the hopeful and the addicted. Their death knell was not finally sounded until 1938, when the Food, Drug and Cosmetics Act was passed. That law forbade the sale of dangerous drugs except by a doctor's prescription, made labeling regulations more stringent, and increased the government's power to prosecute the charlatans who still marketed harmful medicines.

Their death knell had been sounded earlier, however, by the labels required in 1907, for many Chicagoans and residents of the nearby suburbs-for certain ladies of the WCTU who had innocently imbibed gallons of Lyd ia Pinkham's, which had an alcoholic content of 20 percent (later, 13,½'%), and for the workingmen who had fervently "sworn off" but who had continued to find some small solace in Hostettcr's Bitters.

Chicago Historical Society

The cover of an advertising calendar. This one is crammed full of testimonials and ad vertisements, but every calendar page also contains infor mation about the weather to be expected, phases of t he m oon, and so forth. It so ld fo r 6¢.

~ttd by R.AKER &: CO., (11'afl, VL

Ch icago History

87

The Chicago Historical Society's Lincoln Dioramas

BY ED EULENBERG

MY SKY," said eighty-three-year-old Charles H. Kellner, browsing among the restored Lincoln Dioramas in the Chicago Historical Society's new Lincoln Gallery last year. He had paused before the one -showing Abraham Lincoln's departure from Springfield for Washington on February II, 1861.

The dioramas are fourteen of the twenty which Kellner helped construct under the auspices of the Federal Arts Project during the Depression, and which were first shown to the public on ;\ ovem ber 16, 1941. More than fifty artists and craftsmen had worked more than two years toward that opening date, skillfully, patiently, and with as much attention to historical accuracy as to artistic reality and beauty.

"Skies were my specialty," said Kellner, a portrait painter. "I painted or helped paint all of them. I also worked on backgrounds, where the painted scenery and figures had to blend in with the three-dimensional part of the dioramas -and everything had to be in proper perspective."

For the new gallery, museum preparators Edward Stashinski and Charles Carlson cleaned, repaired, and repainted the dioramas and the thousands of figures and artifacts in them. They also had worked two years by the time the new Lincoln Gallery, which gathered all the Chicago Historical Society's Lincoln material into a permanent display on the first floor of the new wing of the Society's building, was opened in April 1973.

The Federal Arts Proj ect came into being, wrote William F. McDonald in 1969, in "Federal Relief Administration and the Arts":

"THAT'S

. . . from the coincidence, fortuitous or providential, of two ideas : ( 1) That in time of need the artist, no

Ed Eulenberg, a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, covered the opening of the Lincoln Gallery for his paper and became interested enough to write this article for Chicago History.

88 Chicago History

less than the manual worker, is entitled to employment as an artist at the public expense; and (2) that the arts, no less than business, agriculture and labor, are and should be the immediate concern of the ideal commonwealth.

As a result of this concern for the artistic whitecollar worker on relief, McDonald wrote, "The United States .. . supported and subsidized an arts program that in material and cultural character was unprecedented in the history of this or any other nation."

In 1935, when the Federal Arts Project was born, of the 4,986,000 Americans on relief, r 1 percent, or 558,429, were white-collar workers.

One-quarter of them were in five cities: Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Boston.

Holger Cahill , art critic and museum advisor who took charge of the Federal Arts Project on August 1, 1935, noted in a manual of guidelines that "Through employment of creative artists it is hoped to secure for the public outstanding examples of contemporary art; to create a broader national art consciousness."

On June 30, 1939, Congress transferred the Federal Arts Project from federal to state control. Under this plan a state, county, city, town, \'illage, or township could sponsor specific projects. Some rules were that go percent of the workers be from the relief rolls; that the sponsor contribute equipment, material, and services (and some funds) to the greatest extent possible; and that the sponsor give assurance that the community wanted the project and would retain interest until its completion. The bulk of the money came from the Works Progress Administration, one of the many New Deal agencies .

The idea for the Lincoln dioramas came from L. Hubbard Shattuck, then director and secretary of the Chicago Historical Society. Dr. William H. Johnson, then Chicago superintendent of schools, helped get the Chicago Board of Education to sponsor the project as part of the Illinois Museum Extension program. As Works Progress Administration Project 30185, it was

Chicago Historical Society

Artist Charles H. Kellner renewing his acquaintance with one of the newly refurbished Lincoln dioramas a t the Chicago Historical Society. He painted the sky and some of the background for this reconstruction of Lincoln ' s boyhood home.

Chicago History

89

Lincoln Dioramas

approved March 3 1, 1939, and work was begun in June.

The diorama scenes were conceived and deve loped with the consu ltation of eminent Lincoln sc holars and the aid of the Chicago Historical Society's library and research faci lities. This was the first time that the story of Lincoln's life, from his infancy to his assassination, had been told in this fashion.

The first diorama in the new gallery shows the log cab in where Lincoln was born in Hodgenvi ll e, Kentucky . Some of those that follow capture the essence of important periods of his life, such as the Lincoln family's stay in Indiana, the ir migration to Illinois, L incoln's young manhood in New Salem, and his circuit-riding days in Illinois. Others depict specific events: Lincoln's speech in Chicago on July IO, 1858, at the Tremont House; his debate with Stephen A. Douglas on August 27, 1858, at Freeport; the political rally for Lincoln at Springfield on August 8, 1860; Lincoln's departure for \,\'ashington; his first inauguration; the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation; the Gettysburg Address; Lincoln's first meeting with Gen. U lysses S. Grant; and the scene in Ford's Theater April 4, 1865, just before the assassination.

Research for the dioramas went hand-in -hand with artistic and technical performance . The team of artists and craftsmen who built the scenes used many techniques and a variety of materials, while constantly checking to make sure every detail was as close as possible to historical reality.

Among t he a r tists besides Kellner, who was project foreman , were Emi l Strauss, chief sculptor, and Benjamin Dedek, creative department foreman. There were a lso stage and scenery designers, interior decorators, sign painters, furn itu re designers and upholsterers, carpenters, sh ip-model makers, machinists, electricians, seamstresses, taxidermists, and tooland-d ic makers. The C h icago Historica l Soc iety's fi les a lso show that an army cook, three sa ilors, amateur magicia ns, and housewives were part 90

Chicago History

of the team. Their roles? No explanation is given in the record. Perhaps they were artists by avocation only, or professiona ls whom the troubled times had diverted from their chosen calling.

As the workers created, they climbed repeatedly from their basement workshops in the Society's museum to the library above to check details of costume, scene, or weather, or the identity, number, and type of persons present on a specific occasion . i\Iajor figures were carved of wood-Lincoln's mother in the Indiana home scene and Lincoln himself in various scenes. There were also ten thousand figures cast in plaster (from a half-inch to nineteen inches high), of which six thousand were finally used, many to fill in crowd scenes: the first inauguration has more than five thousand; Lincoln's meeting with Grant, more than fifty; and the Springfield rally and Tremont House speech, hundreds.

The incidental figures were cast in batches of fifty or one hundred-men, women, childrenthen were given individua lity with painted-on beards, moustaches, facial expressions, or variations in costume, either painted on or added in the form of hats, bonnets, shawls, umbrellas, and parasols. And in scenes where full figures would not be visible, half figures were used, as in the Freeport and Gettysburg dioramas. But these were cast in varying sizes and posi tioncd to he! p carry out the illusion of perspective.

The constant problem of perspective was solved in many ways. Carefully blended into each diorama is a painted background on a curved surface, to carry the scene from the three-dimensional foreground into the receding distance. Some of these backgrounds were painted and repainted to achieve the point of perfection needed. A visitor needs to look carefully to discover where the foreground merges with the painted backdrop.

Kellner recalled "an awful time" with the background of the inauguration scene, before the unfinished Capitol. "The wings of the Capitol

were ori a curved background," he recalled.

"But we had to show them as flat extensions of the central building."

Another problem with the Capitol was to show the blue glow of the sky. J\ construction scaffold in the diorama smudged the sky with its shadow, but a concealed blue light bulb did the job.

The subtlety of perspective was achieved in other ways that can be seen by an analytic observer. In the Emancipation Proclamation scene, where Lincoln is seated at a table to sign the document which declared that "all persons held as slaves ... shall be thenceforward forever free," a wooden cabinet stands to one side of the room. It dwindles slightly away from the viewer -just a little, but just enough.

In the Grant- Lincoln meeting scene in the White House, two chandeliers which seem of equal size hang from the ceiling. But the further one is slightly smaller. In the family migration scene, the further of two covered wagons is just a mite smaller than the other. Even tiny objects, like the tree leaves that were cut from cloth with die punches and then glued to branches, are of different sizes. The smaller ones are on the trees further in the background .

Materials were used in ingenious ways. The steam and smoke streaming from a locomotive are of cotton; the chandeliers, a water glass, and street lights are made of lucite; tassels on horses are painted pipe cleaners; grass is powdered cork; prairie grass is made from worn-out brooms; bushes, from sponge rubber; the hide of horses, from old leather gloves. Tiny books were made from the thin pages of telephone books bound in boards; the tiny rugs were woven; and balsa wood was used for rocks.

Often the real thing was used: there is glass in some window panes; bits of old fur coats simulate the furs hung on a cabin wall; real gold leaf decorates the dome of the courthouse in Metamora, Woodford County, where Lincoln is shown arriving for the court session.

Research and checking were cxhauscive.

What was the weather when Lincoln left Springfield? It was cold and raining, so the diorama shows the gleam of rain on clothes and umbrellas and Lincoln wears a heavy shawl. What did people wear, in what kind of rigs did they drive to the courthouse at Metamora? Researchers consulted old magazine and newspaper illustrations and stories, and they pored over carriage catalogs. They also checked to learn what kind of people would be in the courthouse square: farmers in overalls, businessmen, lawyers, youngsters. A letter from Dr. Louis E. Warren, of the Lincoln Life Foundation in Fort Wayne, to Shattuck, the Society's director, typifies the consultan ts' fastidiousness. \Varren had spent a week in Kentucky asking questions, looking at objects, and visiting the scene of the Hodgenville cabin.

Concerning just one detail, he wrote: "If the old oak tree in the foreground could be placed to extreme left of the cabin . . . you would have a scene as accurate historically . .. as it would be possible to make."

At the first opening, thirty-two years ago, Joseph W. Cudahy, president of the Chicago Historical Society, cut a white ribbon with a pen-knife which had belonged to Lincoln. More than seventeen hundred visitors surged through the exhibits. Mrs. Cudahy gave a tea in the museum's Senate Chamber; Mrs. James \ Vard Thorne and Mrs. Potter Palmer poured at one table, while Mrs . James M. Hopkins and Mrs. William McCormick Blair poured at another.

One reporter noted that "some invited to tea by :Mrs. Cudahy had to come later to see the dioramas, so great was the crush."

Kellner, who was born in Hungary in 1890, began his art studies at the age of nine and came to the United States when he was seventeen. He served in World War I on the staff of Gen. John J. Pershing, and stayed on in Europe to study art in Paris, with Pierre Bonnard among others.

He still paints, but now, after seeing the restored dioramas, he has a "great ambition."

"I'd like to make a painting of each of them," he said.

Chica go History

91

Chicago's Ethnics and the Politics of Accommodation

BY JOHN D. BUENKER

And now) lefs hear it for the ethnics-the immigrant laborers who built Chicago into a great city) who eften wanted a beer on Sunday) who often were not ashamed ef their Old World ways and speechfor their children who occasionally made good in politics) and for the ward bosses who understood how to trade a favor for a vote.

CHICAGO IS A CITY of ethnics. It teems with the nation's largest concentration of Scandinavians, Poles, Czechs, Serbo-Croatians, and Lithuanians. It is second in the number of Germans, Greeks, Slovaks, Jews, and blacks who live here, and it has the country's third largest group of Italians. And they all have a good deal in C0ITin1on.

From the first Irishman to today's Spanishspeaking migrants, they became Chicagoans amid poverty, rejection, and discrimination, and they seized whatever means available to foster their economic well-being, to promote dignity and self-respect, and to defend their cu ltural and religious traditions.

No method has proved more popular or successful than political action. Politics, as turnof-the-century writer Henry Jones Ford sagely observed, is "probably the secret of the powerful solvent influence which American civilization exerts upon the enormous deposits of alien populations thrown upon this country by the torrent of emigration." In Chicago, as elsewhere, the "bonds of Blood, Believer and Brother as strongly define political interest and conflict as do the bonds of class or locale."

Most ethnic Americans first turned to politics for economic survival. In a world where wages were too low, public welfare programs virtually nonexistent, and private charity inadequate or

John D. Buenker teaches American history at the University of Wisconsin. His book, Urban Liberalism and Progressive Reform, is reviewed in this issue.

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demeaning, the ward leader and the precinct captain functioned as the nation's "first social welfare agency." In exchange for political support, they distributed food, clothing, fuel, rent, and medical care to the needy, they settled family disputes, and they secured pardons, scholarships, pensions, and licenses. During the severe depression of the 1890s, saloonkeepcrpoli ticians like "Hinky Dink" Mike Kenna, in his Workingmen's Exchange, fed thousands of the unemployed with free lunches. Politicians also helped save loved ones from "that awful horror of burial by the county"; Johnny Powers, notorious boss of the I 9th Ward from the 1890s to the 1920s, financed so many funerals that he was nicknamed "The Mourner." Even more crucially, politics provided tens of thousands of jobs. vVilliam Lorimer, the "Blond Boss" of the \Vest Side, secured 868 jobs for his Eastern European constituents through the Park Board in the month of November 1901 alone. Powers had over one-third of his predominantly Italian voters on the city payroll. Mayor Big Bill Thompson hired so many black "temporary employees" that his enemies sarcastically referred to City Hall as "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

"You and I know what a political machine is," a West Side committeeman once confided to a subordinate, "it's jobs and more jobs, and if you want to keep yours, you'd better come across with your precinct."

Many ward bosses lined their own pockets, but that rarely bothered those whom they helped when no one else would. Personal service, without condescension or bureaucracy, was the style of the ethnic politician. Lorimer's Eastern

Europea~ constituents "came to my house and talked over their li ttle troubles .. . I helped them a lways ." Despite her distaste for J ohnny Powers' methods and morals, J ane Addams recognized t hat he insp ired in his constituents "a sense of loyalty, a sta ndin g by the man who is good to you, who understands you, who gets you out of trouble." \i\l. T. Stead, the English reformer and author of ff Christ Came to Chicago, noted in 1895 that ward bosses stole "openly and goodnaturcdly," gave welfare benefits without red tape or em barrassrncn t, and gen er ally con-â&#x20AC;˘ ducted themselves accord in g to the "prin ciple of human service." Under their tutelage, Chicago ethnics learned the rules of urban politics: (,) hold what you've got; (2) take care of your own; (3) get more benefits. In time, ethnic politicians and voters played a major role in shifting the nation from the path of the Protestant Ethic and of /aissezjaire rugged individualism, to the concept of the welfare state. Their votes were instrumental in the adoption of such measures as ch ild and women's labor laws, factory codes, workmen's compensation, old age pensions, medic-arc, and aid to dependent child ren, "underpinning," as Edgar Litt has observed, "the concept of coll ective econom ic and social responsibility inaugurated by the policies of the Xew Deal."

Politics also provided thousands of Chicago ethnics with a career ladder. Arriving without capital or marketable ski lls, and forced to abandon education for work at a tender age, most ethnics were doomed to a life of manual labor in the mi lls, factories, or stock yards. "A shovel was thrust in to me hand," .\Ir. Dooley (Finley Peter Dunne) noted, "an I was pushed into a street cxcyvatin' as though I 'd been born here."

With professions and corporations beyond their reach, ethnics found that their on ly escape from dangerous, monotonous, and poorly compensated drudgery was in those areas which earlier arrivals disdained because of the ir questionable status and uncertain income-such as entertainment, athlet ics, gambli ng, sa loonkccping, real

Chicago Historical Society

Francis O'Neill, Irish po.lice captain in 1894. The Irish were the first immigrant group to arrive in large numbers, and the first to achieve appointive office.

estate, contracting, and politics. Of six hundred C hicago precinct captains in , 935, Sonya Forthal reported, the vast majority were "from the second generation foreign stocks found in the city, with Irish, German, J ewish, Polish, British, Sca ndin avia n, Italian, and Czech officials predominating. Seventy percent held some form of government job, illustrating the maxim that 'when a man works in politics, he ought to get paid.' " Political jobs resulted in valuable contacts which cou ld be parlayed into business opportunities. Insid e knowledge of zoning and franchise decisions made possible profits in real estate, insurance, contracting, or utilities, a practice popularly referred to as " honest graft." The income and security provided by public employment permitted higher education and a passage into the middle class for one's children .

Besides providing careers for thousands, the election or appointment of "one of our own" also constituted "a kind of group patronage."

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Ethnicity and Politics

The increased material benefits which resulted from having a friend at court were apparent enough, but of more importance were the psychological gains which "recognition politics" bestowed. To groups beset by hostility, ridicule, and discrimination, appointment to political office offered compensatory dignity and importance. The political advancement of a fellow immigrant proved to oneself and, indeed, to the world, that one's own group was as worthy as any. It helped the individual gain a vital sense of identity and integrity and avoid the anti-social behavior-alcoholism, drug addiction, violence, delinquency, divorce, and suicide-which often accompanied social uprooting. With socioeconomic and ideological differences between candidates and parties often blurred, Americans have relied to a great extent on ethnic and religious affiliations to determine their preferences. "For leadership in political discussion," the authors of Voting have concluded, "people main! y turn to others like themselves."

Blacks responded overwhelmingly to Alderman Edwin Wright's appeal in 1906 to vote "for the sake of the race which you are a part ... arouse from your slumber and realize that on your shoulder rests a responsibility as a man."

Greeks were moved by exhortations to act "as descendants of the ancient Greeks and Pericles, the original author of the democratic form of government." \!\Then \,Voodrow Wilson campaigned for Italian votes after he had stated that Chinese made more valuable citizens, editor Oscar Durante told him "go to the Chinese to get votes." Whether it was Al Smith, "the Horatio Alger of the immigrants," running for president in 1928, or John Peter Altgeld, the first foreign-born governor of Illinois in 1892, or Mayor Anton Cermak in 1931, "renowned for his fairness to every race and his recognition of all our citizens in the 111.atter of public affairs," the candidacy of an ethnic politician mobilized the political efforts of his fellows. Victory in a polyglot community meant giving proper recognition to candidates of all important ethnic 94

Chicago History

groups. It was the greater astuteness of the Democrats in this area that led to the virtual demise of the Chicago Republican Party by the mid-Thirties.

Finally, Chicago ethnics undertook political action to protect their cultura l and religious practices against pressures for conformity. The native-born Protestants who first settled Chicago often espoused a pictistic outlook which regarded most forms of physical pleasure as evil in themselves. They were disposed, James Timberlake remarked in Prohibition and the Progressive Movement, to "use the secular power of the state to transform culture so that the community of the faithful might be kept pure and the work of saving the unregenerate might be made easier."

Through the United Order of Deputies, the American League, and the Chicago Law and Order League, the old settlers periodically sought to enact prohibition, Sunday blue laws, and an ti-gambling and vice ordinances. They also sought to enforce Americanization by proscribing foreign languages in instruction, forcing attendance in public schools, and prohibiting non-Protestants from holding office .

Most Chicago ethnics, on the other hand, came from traditions which preferred to leave decisions about the use of fleshly pleasures to the Church and the individual conscience, and which permitted alcoholic beverages, Sunday recreation, and the mother tongue. To preserve these practices, ethnics voted for candidates from their own or similar backgrounds, or for understanding native Protestant Americans like Carter Harrison, William Lorimer, and "Big Bill" Thompson, who believed in the "fullest measure of personal liberty consistent with the maintenance of public order." The stage was set for the continuing struggle between what elson Algren referred to as the "Live and Let-Livers" and the "Do As I Sayers."

When state Superintendent of Public Instruction Richard Edwards tried to force the use of English in Illinois' schools in 1 890, ethnics protested that "to take my language away from me

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Chicago Historical Society

" New Immigrants, " Bohemians posing proudly in front of a neighborhood saloon in the Pilsen distr ict in the 1880s.

is to sn a tch the cradle I was born in fro m me ," The res ulta nt uproa r led to the re peal of the law, Censorship of textboo ks u sually led to conflic t betwee n what has been term ed a " Protestantca pitalist- na tivc-A mc rica n compl ex" and a "Ca tholic- la bor- fo reign co m plex. " As la te as 1923, a comm it tee of public-sc hool tea chers urged voters to cas t their ba llo ts aga inst Ca tholic D emocrat \Villia m E. D ever unl ess "you wa nt R ome to run ou r Pu bli c Sc hools." \ \"hen Congress moved to restrict im m igra ti on by the odious ~ a ti onal Ori gins Qu o ta Sys te m in 1924,

C hicago' s ethnic politicia ns were in the van g uard of the opposition: Anton Cermak form ed a joint committee of Southern and Eastern Euro peans to organize protests, J ewish \\'estSid e a ld erma n and future Democratic chairman J aco b Arvey led a d elega tion to testify before Congress; a nd , on the H ouse floor, C hicago 's " sc rap py little Adol ph Sa bath ," renowned in the greenhorn sec tions of ever y Am eri can city as the im m igra nts' Congressma n , protested 111 Bohemia n accents. ~ o is uc so a nimated the po litica l action of Chicago History

95

l

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Ethnicity and Politics

Chicago's ethnics as the liquor question. "Prohibition was the greatest ethnic issue," John Allswang has argued, "both for its precise aims and for the more general ethnic- Native American conflict which it epitomized." Under Cermak's leadership, 1,087 separate ethnic organizations merged to form the United Societies for Local Self-Government, a powerful anti-prohibition coalition of 258,224 members. Ethnic newspapers denounced prohibition with invective seldom matched in the annals of journalism.

Four times between 1919 and 1933, Chicago voters rejected prohibition in referendums. The ethnic vote made the decision overwhelming.

Although Chicago \'Oted 73 percent against prohibition in 1919, all the city's ethnic minorities except the Swedes opposed it by margins ranging up to go percent or more. Native Americans opposed it by only 58 percent, and prohibition actually carried Hyde Park, Woodlawn, Englewood, Beverly Hills, Rogers Park, and Uptown-"the higher rental areas where the native whites of native parentage live." University of Chicago political scientist Charles Merriam, a one-tin1e alderman and mayoral candidate, observed that "almost no known dry has ever been elected mayor, prosecuting attorney or sheriff of Chicago or Cook County and many campaigns have turned chiefly upon the problem of comparative wetness." \Vhen Irish Catholic and wet Mayor Edward F. Dunne was pressured to close saloons on Sunday under threat of impeachment in 1906, ethnic voters rallied behind German-American Republican Fred Busse. When Mayor Dever moved against the gangster-controlled speakeasies in 1927, "Big Bill" Thompson won a large chunk of ethnic support and the election by promising to make Chicago "as wet as the Atlantic Ocean" and to "break any cop I catch on the trail of a lonesome pint into a man's house or car."

Successive waves of Chicago ethnic groups, then, have used political action to promote prosperity and security, to carve out careers, to achieve status and self-respect, and to defend 96

Chicago History

their customs and traditions against nativist attack. Success in these areas constitutes the particulars of that most Chicago-like word, "clout." The pattern was first established by the Irish, the "pioneers on the urban frontier."

Driven by the Great Hunger of the 1840s, Celtic peasants flocked to Chicago and crowded into shanties and tenements in Kerry Patch, Canaryvillc, Back-of-the-Yards, and Bridgeport. The last was originally so barren that native Chicagoans called it "Hardscrabble." Poor, unskilled, and Yictirnized by the discrimination of "No Irish 'eccl Apply," thc-"Paddics" and "Micks" still possessed certain political advantages. They spoke English. They had been deeply involved in politics at home, where they had learned to bargain for benefits from English overlords who despised them and their religion. They had a fierce ethnic and religious pride which bound them together against the outside world and made all political contests a case of "us against them." After bargaining for favors with "outside politicians," the Irish soon captured their own wards and precincts.

Because the nativist, anti-foreign, Know.1\'othing movement of the 1850s was centered primarily in the \\'hig and Republican parties, the Irish became Democrats, even during the days of the Civil \\'ar and Reconstruction. By the 188os the party was popular! y referred to as "Mike ::\IcDonald's Democrats," after the notorious gambler and political boss. By the turn of the century, one-third of Chicago's aldermen and about two-thirds of the Democratic ward captains were Irish. Except for the two Carter Harrisons and William Randolph Hearst, party leadership was solidly in the hands of state chairman William O'Connell, boss Roger Sullivan, and Edward F. Dunne, who styled himself "a poor man but . . . the father of municipal ownership and thirteen children." Dunne became the first Irish Catholic mayor in 1906 and go\¡ernor in 1912. In 1912, in fact, the Democrats presented an entire slate of Irish candidates for state-wide offices and elected forty-three Gel-

Chicago Historical Societ'1

More "New lmmigrants"-Jews in the ghetto of the Maxwell St. area, buying wares from fellow countrymen too poor to rent shops. The year, about 1905.

tics to the state legislature. Even when Irishmen began to move to the suburbs, their political influence endured. Perhaps, unlike the Yankees before them, they were unable to withdraw to such private power bases as foundations, universities, and corporations; but it was also a result of their continuing view of the Democratic Party as a medium by which to protect their hard-won gains. For the last half-century, except between 1927 and 1933, Irish mayors have governed Chicago. As late as 1962, Irishmen still held 51 seats in the state legislature, and there were 1 2 Irish aldermen, 2 1 Irish ward leaders, and 32 Irish states attorneys-when only about 1 o pcrcen t of the city's population was Irish .

The other groups that composed the so-called Old Immigration (before 1890 and from Northwestern Europe)-thc Germans and Scandinavians-were much less politically active.

German Catholics generally became Democrats and German Protesta nts became Republicans, although cultural issue often drove German Lutherans into the Democratic camp. The Scandinavians were generally Republican, par-

ticularly the Swedes, whose religious preferences leaned toward pietism. By 1890, Chicago's political parties were fundamentally divided by a religious outlook. The Republicans were a coalition of native Americans, Scandinavians, and German Protestants; the Democrats were a comb ination of Irish and German Catholics; and the fluctuating Lutheran vote often decided the outcome of elections.

Then came the flood of ew ImmigrantsPoles, Czechs, Slovaks, Russian Jews, Lithuanians, Serbo-Croatians, Greeks, and Italians. The West Side became "a veritable babble of languages." The Newcomers were as povertystricken and despised as the Irish had been, spoke little English, and had almost no political experience, but for the next three decades they held the balance of political power in Chicago.

Since religious outlook was the deciding political factor, the New Immigrants should have become instant Democrats, for the vast majority were either Catholics or Orthodox Jews. And the native leadership of the G.O.P .-the Medills, McCormicks, and Pattersons of the Tribune, Chicago History

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Ethnicity and Politics

\·ictor Lawson of the News, Herman Kohlsaat of the Times-Herald, and Go\'crnor Charles Deneen-seemingly did its best to accomp lish that end by its stands on cultural issues. "A Republican is a man who wants you t' go t' church e,·ery Sunday," said Democratic boss Bathhouse John Coughlin in the 1890s. "A Democrat says if a man wants to have a glass of beer, he can have it." Lorimer, Thompson, and "Poor Swede" Fred Lundin, however, prevented the G.O.P. from committing political suicide.

Although despised by the reform wing, they courted the Tew Immigrant vote by bestowing material benefits, playing recognition politics, and opposing forced Americanization. ~1any Irish Democrats also aided the Republican cause by refusing to share their hardwon gains with the "Hunkies." Johnny Powers styled himself "Johnny DePow," and disdainfully boasted that he could buy all the Italian votes he needed for a glass of beer. By 1 926, despite the fact that several ~ew Immigrant groups outnumbered the Irish in the general population, 50 Democratic ward leaders and 25 of the party's 42 candidates were still Irish.

Even when the party ran German Catholic Robert Sweitzer for mayor in 1919, other ethnics derided him as "the Irish Kaiser." As an exasperated black politician put it, "You Irish don't realize you're a minority group."

Under the circumstances, most ?\cw Immigrants fluctuated between the two parties until the 1930s, supporting whichever one gave them the most benefits or recognition, capturing scattered wards and precincts in both parties, and appearing as candidates for city and state offices.

By 1903 there were 3 Poles in the state legislature. The Italians produced 2 aldermen and 5 assemblymen before 1920. The great breakthrough came in 1931 under the leadership of Anton Cermak, the canny Bohemian who was the most astute ethnic politician in the city's history. Ever since he formed the United Societies in 1906, Cermak had been plotting to wrest control of the Democratic Party from its I rish 98

Chicago History

leadership. Skillfully he built alliances with other ethnic politicians and forced their inclusion on party tickets. He even courted such dissident Irishmen as Pat Nash, Eel Kelly, and Edward Dunne, who were chafing under the heavyhanded leadership of party boss George Brennan. \\' hen Brennan died in 1928, "the Bohunk" collected his political debts and bested Brennan's designated heirs, Michael Igoe and John Dcnvir.

Finally ensconced as party leader, Cermak replaced many Irish ward bosses with ~ew Immigrants and built ethnically balanced tickets, winning election as mayor in 1931 at the head of a "U.~. ticket"-Cermak, Kand i, Brady, A1lcgrctti, and Smictanka. The fo1lowing year, Jewish Henry Horner symbolized the political arrival of the ?\ew Immigrants by his election as governor. \\"hen Cermak's opportunity to "cthnicizc"' the party was cut short by bis assassination, and his party's leadership fell back into the hands of Irishmen Kelly, Kash. and Richard J. Daley, they now had to share their power with the !'\cw Immigrants. The Depression, combined with the Republicans' ad,·ocacy of prohibition and the restriction of immigration, bad all but killed off the local G.O.P. The Democratic Party had become the sole arena in which ethnic groups could continue their struggle for clout. It was now, in John Allswang's phrase, "a house for all peoples.''

But not quite "all peoples'' yet. Chicago's blacks had arrived as Republicans and the reception they received here recnforced that loyahy.

As the New Immigrants moved inexorably toward the Democratic column, Republican "Big Bi11" Thompson saw his opportunity and frantically courted the thousands of migrants pouring into the Black Belt from the South. "I'll give your people jobs," he promised, "and if you want to shoot craps, go ahead and doit." By 1930, Thompson had 2,785 blacks on the city payroll, a close approximation of their percentage in the general population. "Big Bill" assured black veterans of the Great War that "the black finger that is good enough to pu ll a trigger in defense of the Ameri-

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historical Society Daily News Collection

Four who made it to the top of the political heap.

Upper left, Edward F. Dunne, who became Chicago's first Irish Catholic mayor in 1906 and who became governor of Illinois in 1912. Upper right, Adolph Sabath, whose election to Congress in 1906 from the Pi lsen district led to 23 terms in the House of Representatives.

Bottom left, Anton J. Cermak, Bohemian political leader who became mayor in 1931. Bottom right, Henry Horner, Illinois' first Jewish governor, elected in 1932.

can flag is good enough to mark a ballot." In his ill-fated 193 1 reelection campaign against Cermak, he warned blacks to think about the upcoming vVorld 's Fair and " re-elect your -friend Bill Thompson mayor if you want to go in the front gate, because if you elect that cracker you'll go in the back gate." Black leaders referred to

Thompson almost reverently as "the second Lincoln," and Oscar DePriest, Chicago's first black alderman and the North's first black Congressman, insisted that "you must either vote for Thompson or else die." A more balanced judgment was rendered by Ralph Bunche in 1929, when he said Thompson had given Negroes "no little patronage and favor, a significant increase in recognition and influence, and a whole lot of bad government."

The Democrats helped Thompson's cause by blatantly racist election appeals. They accused "Big Bill" of being for "Africa First." They campaigned in racially changing neighborhoods to the tune of "Bye-Bye Blackbird," and Negro leaders warned their people to "elec t Big Bill or it's going to be Bye-Bye Blackbird in Chicago."

Even though Mayor Cermak generally eschewed outright racism, he fired thousands of black "temporary employees" and cracked down on Negro gambling houses and speakeasies. "The lid went on," a black politician moaned, "five minutes after it was certain Mayor Thompson had lost."

What political progress blacks had made up until then had been almost entirely within the G.O.P. Warren Harding got 95 percent of the city's black vote and Coolidge, 91. In 1920, Edwin Wright was selected as Republican chairman of the heavily black 2nd Ward. When Oscar DePriest was elected alderman in 1915, several blacks had already served in both houses of the state legislature. By the time DePriest was elected to Congress in 1928, however, the G.O .P.'s percentage of the black presidential vote had dropped off by 15 percentage point~, and by 1936 it was down to 52 percent. Franklin Roosevelt became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the Black Belt four years later. Prominent Negro politicians Arthur Mitchell and William Dawson read the portents. They switched parties, and Mitchell defeated DePriest for Congress in 1934. By the Sixties, blacks were at least as Democratic as any other¡ ethnic group in Chicago.

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Ethnicity and Politics

Despite their eventual conversion to the Democratic Party, blacks and Spanish-speaking Chicagoans seem unable to use the techniques of ethnic politics to advance themselves as rapidly as the earlier ethnic groups. The existence of one party dilutes their ability to maneuver for benefits as the New Immigrants did. The city's Republican Party is so moribund that there seems little future in capturing it, as the Irish did the minority party after the Civil War, and the risk of leaving the party from whom all good things flow is too great. Still, the Irish and the New Immigrants reserve few important positions for blacks or Latinos. 'When Oscar DePriest was elected to Congress in 1928, less than 10 percent of Chicago's popu lation was black. Today, with better than one-third the population black, there are still only two black Representatives. Still, the black population is spreading, and there is more opportunity to capture new wards and elect new

aldermen. Yet, even though Chicago, as the last "machine city," is less committed to civil service and "good government," there arc still not nearly as many patronage jobs as there were in the heyday of the white ethnics. Moreover, the federalization and profcssionalization of welfare payments has destroyed much of the connection between politics and material benefits, placing a barrier of bureaucracy and red tape between the ward boss and his constituents.

Perhaps, in the long run, their frustrations may prove to be only as temporary as those suffered by the white ethnics. Perhaps Mayor Daley's eventual retircmcn will trigger a redistribution of political clout among ethnic groups similar to that of the early Thirties. If it does, Chicago may yet realize the ideal set forth by the Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen- "a democracy of nationalities" which will cooperatively achieve the self-realization of peoples of all origins.

A sight fa mi lia r t o Chi cagoans-Mayo r Ric hard J . Da ley addressing a loyal ethnic group . T he occasion, an e lect ion ba nqu et in 1956 at t he Prud entia l Plaza .

A Literary Editor Reminisces: Henry Blackman Sell

BY VIRGINIA GARDNER

Newspaper publishers still worry about how to make book reviews pay) but in 1916 a brash young man) a preacher) s son) showed the country that it could be done. even now are convinced that books are news and that book supplemen ts are worth the money or the space they require, so it was not surprising that the Chicago Daily News, even at the zenith of the Chicago Renaissance, had no book page worthy of the name. It had a superb staff of foreign correspondents, and its city ed itor Henry Justin Smith a lways looked over the shou lder of a new reporter between editions to see what book he was reading; if the author impressed him he might give the man better assignments. But the fact remained that a book review might land among the obituaries or be slashed to a paragraph and used as filler on the automobile page.

All of this was painful to a city staff "half daft with literary dreams," as Ben Hecht later wrote.

Nor was it changed, as has been suggested by cu ltura l historians, because the News suddenly became aware of the flood of poetry and tradition-breaking literature swirling through Chicago, challenging Boston and New York as poetry centers, and decided to take a plunge. No, it was changed overnight in 1916 by a young man, Henry B. Sell, who knew how to make money talk.

Not that Sell had any money, but he was a bright young man, full of ideas and, at the age of 21, already something of a promoter. And he was, to use his own word, "awe-struck" by creative talent. Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg were News reporters, arid it was Sell's burning desire to be taken on by the paper and become

FEW ENOUGH NEWSPAPERS

Virginia Gardner, a former reporter, is now a free lance living in New York City. She is currently writing a biography of Louise Bryant.

their colleague. Ironically, although he transformed the paper's reputation and made its book-review section internationally famous, he never got the job he wanted so badly. After he achieved the "partial compensation" of becoming the News' literary editor, he told this interviewer, "I was very much surprised to discover that it was important."

Young Sell had had some small-town experience as a reporter in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where his father was a pastor at the time. Leaving home, he landed a job on the Star in Indianapolis, but along with his assignments as reporter he had to sell advertising for the paper.

He soon quit, joining his parents, in 1913, in Chicago where his father had taken a pastorate.

There he studied at the Art Institute and drank in the rich cultural life Chicago offered. By 1916, when he was unsuccessfully trying to get inside the News' city room so he could apply for a job, he had tried his hand at several other jobs.

Sell's first job in Chicago was to act as a sort of press agent, for pennies, to the Fine Arts Building and every fascinating thing it held-the "fourth floor back" where Maurice Browne and Ellen Volkenburg Browne produced Euripides, Yeats, Strindberg, and Lord Dunsany; the main floor theater; and various restaurants and tearooms and studios, including the Little Room, presided over by Hamlin Garland and Henry Fuller. Sell was surprised to find Garland still alive, and was chiefly interested in Fuller's "beautiful long white beard." Like so many others he was drawn to Browne's pioneering Chicago Little Theatre, and he wrote a pamphlet explaining What It's All About; only recently "someone at the Library of .C ongress wrote that he had turned up two copies of it in the archives, and did I want one? So now I have it," said Sell.

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Henry B. Sell

"The thing that fascinated me most of all was the group of Abbey Players from Irel and. They were a strange people. I got to know the actors well. They had the main floor theater, and some of the actors delighted in se llin g tickets, and in escorting a customer inside the theater and saying grand ly, 'f\ow which scat do you prefer?'

They made of everything connected with the theater a personal J11attcr. Lady Gregory was there to see that all went according to her instructions. \Ve became friends and I would do anyth ing for her. She dressed with great elegance.

It was a ll exciting."

In this period, before the Daily News ,¡enturc, Sell wrote an article a month for International Studio; ass igned to intcr\'icw Frank Lloyd \ \'right, he did, and they bccarnc warm friends.

It was just after \\'ri ght had walked away from his wife and children in Oak Park for another wolllan-"a terrific thing in Chicago, so that he was a controversial figure." At the time \\'right was building the Ylidway Gardens in Chicago.

Sell had a lso clerked at '.\[arshall Field's and, while there, dc\'ised a plan for selling furniture. .'\ewly married and broke, he and :Mrs. Sell redecorated their flat on \Vaync Avenue on the North Side once a lllOnth and photographed it, tying it in with the store and writing a book about it. He also put out a brochure, "Fashions of the Hour," and helped Marcella Burns of the book department get out the store's first book catalog. It was :Marcell a Burns who urged him to figure out a way of publicizing books and thus promote their sale. Dale Kramer, in Chicago R enaissance, describes the man who launched the Daily News book pages a a "personable, somewhat brash young man naJ11ed Henry Blackman Sell, an ex-furniture promoter" -all true, especially if one understands by "personable" that he was not only good-looking but a very stylish dresser (he is still, at 84, impeccable) and by "brash" that he was also diffident with the creative artists who soon became his friends.

Failing to get his foot inside the swinging doors of the News' city room, Sell took a job in the 102

Chicago History

adve rti sing department, made whatever friends he cou ld by hanging around outside the doors, and conceived a series of feature stories. His idea was to interview leaders of the city's various ethnic groups about the aspirations of the groups and how to make a better Chicago. He asked \lolly \Iann , the woman's page editor, what she thought of it. She approved, and spoke to Charles H. Dennis, the editor, saying there was a young fellow "who wants in the worst way to get on the paper." Dennis couldn't put him on the staff-it was Henry Justin Smith's province to hire and fire in the city roolll-but he would sec him. How much money shou ld Sell ask?

Herc again, \ folly ~fann was able to provide guidance. Ben Hecht was making $38 a week and Carl Sandburg had only gotten up to $35, so she ad,¡iscd him to be conservative when he talked to Dennis.

"He liked my idea," said Sell. "The articles could run \londay, Wednesday and Friday on the editorial page. Could I do three a week? I could . I remember how he rubbed his knees and looked at the ceiling then, and asked how n1uch it would cost him. I was going to say $20, but decided to be bold. 'Twenty-five,' I saidmeaning $25 a week. Still looking at the ceilin g he figured aloud, 'Three times 25-$75 a week, yes, that's OK.' " Young Sell walked out of the office bewildered, but he was on his way.

Before the series was over, he had laid plans for his next move. By then he knew a few more people on the paper, and it seemed as if everyone was talking about books. He went to Dennis and offered to get enough ads from publishers in the East to pay for it if he could edit a Wednesday book page. He was told he could try. But there was another matter Sell broached-would the News foot the bill if he paid every man he got to review a book a free lunch? With Dennis' OK on that important item, Sell jubilantly left Chicago for Boston and ~ew York. He returned with enough space sold to support the first few Wednesday book pages, and found that books a lready had begun to arrive. H e assigned the

Chicago Hi storical Soci ety Daily Ne ws Coll ecti on

books for rev iew and began looking about for a place which served a good lun ch fo r 35 cents.

The Chicago Daily News at the time was housed in a building constructed not long after the great Ch icago fire-a four-story building on \\'ells Street, bursting at the scams, to which buildings on each side had been added and joined Lo it after a fashion . :\ext to the .i\'ews was an alley, and then a cigar store; next to the cigar store was Schlogl's saloon. After im·estigating, Sell decided it was a good enough 111ecting and eating place .

This then was the origin of Schlogl's fame. By now it is mentioned in every hi stor y of Bohem ia in America, in all the accounts of the rebel years before \\'orld \\'ar I , and in memoirs of the intellectuals of the second decade of the century, for e,·en :\cw Yorkers occasiona ll y traveled westward , and a ll stopped in Chicago and many ,·isited chlogl's. " By the end of my period-I left Chicago in Dece111bcr 1919-our Friday lun cheon at Schlogl's was qu ite an affair . But in the beginning it was just the three or four of us who got a

The city room of the Chicago Daily News.

They wouldn't let Henry Sell set foot in it.

He had to start in the advertising department.

free 111cal on Friday because we'd eac h had a review in the Wednesday book page." ln the beginning the regu lars included Ben H echt, Carl Sandburg, and Sell from the News, as well as Scll's protege, J ohnn ie \". A. \\'ea,·er, a poet who celebrated the American la nguage and was to sell to the Smart Set after H. L. ~Icn cken and George J ean ~ athan took it o,·cr; and almost always Eunice Tietjens, their only regular wo111an contributor . "Eunice was a very intellectual wo111an, a fin e poet. She was difficult to get along with if she didn't like you-but she liked me. \\'e were the best of friends. " Eunice, who had spent years in the Orient and whose Oriental dances were much in demand at parties in Chicago studios, told Sell that he was writing about tomorrow and eYeryonc else she knew was writing about today and yc_stcrday.

In a series of interv iews for Chicago History, Sell recalled th ose ha lcyon d ays . "Sandburg was Chicago Hi story

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Chicago Historical Society Daily News Col lection

then a reporter. Henry Justin Smith thought he wa~ wonderful and kept trying to find the right job for him. He was sent out of town to cover a big labor convention, spent a lot of money getting there-but he never filed a story. Finally a postcard came for Smith, saying, 'You'd never believe what's going on here.'

"Carl had a desk near a window. He could look out that window for two days running and no one dared ask him to get out some copy. He was sacred . He was a strange man. You could walk with him for twenty blocks and at one point he would say, 'No, it's not possible.' You never learned what wasn't possible. Or he might say nothing at all. I knew Carl very well. I married the woman he was engaged to some years earlier. She didn't know of another girluntil she picked up the paper one day and saw he was married. He'd just forgotten to tell her.

The Steichen family had taken Carl into the fami ly-and he found himself married to Lillian, the sister of the photographer Edward. Often I took Carl home with me, and my wife- :M aud Ann O ' Harrow, a 'Lucy Stoner' as all women were then-was always pleased to see him.

Neither one felt any constraint with the other."

For the book pages-which at times totaled ten-Ben Hecht wrote columns on writers as 104

Ch icago History

N ewsprint-even then it came in rolls- being delivered to the old Chicago Daily News Building in the Twenties .

Notice the customers on the right, reading the latest edition .

unfamiliar to Daily News readers as Verlaine, Dostoevski, Huysman, and Nietzsche, all inspired by solid reading. But he also wrote interviews with famous writers by repairing to the cigar store next door, "where he sat alone in a corner and did his interview with the subject" and it was printed as written. "Ben maintain ed he didn't have to see anyone to interview him."

In 1964, a week before he died, and long after Sell began editing Ha1per's Bazaar, Hecht wrote Sell a letter. "He said he'd been reading Harper's Bazaar and was thrilled to sec I used a crossword puzzle with every issue. He said never to stop using the puzzle-it was the only thing he ever read any 1nore."

Looking back on those days of ferment and rebellion against the puritanism of the past, when Chicago's Bohemia rivaled New York's Greenwich Village, and for a time surpassed it in poetry, Sell said, "It was a wonderful period."

Chicago's Bohemia was concentrated in the little two-story store fronts left on the edges of the old World's Fair Grounds after the glories

Henry B. Sel I

of the 1893 fair departed. Rents were cheap and talk was lofty, just as in the Greenwich Village brownstones with their fireplaces; each was a far cry from the literary world of today, when writers receive large advance payments. "Writers liYed very differently then. \\1hat was paramount was to have the freedom of personal expression. \Ve gave them that, and lots of space and by-lines. vVe were the first to run reviews emphasizing the people who wrote them-I'm quoting Alfred Knopf."

Seated around the table in Schlogl's, with the roar of the elevated overhead unnoticed, "in addition to the original regulars, might be Keith Preston-a darling, everyone's favorite: a ~orthwestcrn University professor, his chief occupation was translating poems of the old Romans and they were dirty, which he enjoyed very much; and Burton Rascoe of the Tribune; and Harry Hansen, if it was after Harry returned from the war. I broke him in to take my job when I left Chicago. Lew Starrett might be one, or Sherwood Anderson, or Edgar Lee Masters.

Lee Masters could be a little stiff with the newspaper people, but we got to be good friends and remained so. I never remember seeing Maxwell Bodenheim in Schlogl's. Gene Markey, the talented illustrator, came; he was a rich Bohemian who became richer when he married the heiress to the Calumet stables. Gene was difficult to work with, he was such a perfectionist.

Henry Justin Smith always looked in on us briefly. :Most of them were odd, poetic people."

A few men from other newspapers occasionally joined the Friday regulars at Schlogl's-cartoonist John T. McCutcheon, of the Tribune; Charlie Collins, later a drama critic for the Tribune and then a Post reporter. Even Percy Hammond, the drama critic, came around once or twice.

Margaret Anderson was too preoccupied with keeping her Little Review afloat to join the Sell table at Schlogl's, nor did he ask her to contribute to his pages. Often, however, he would pick up a column of excerpts from her maga-

zinc to shock his News readers. "And I think," he added, "I was the only person Margaret ever paid for a piece she ran in Little Review. vVish I could remember what it was about."

An unreconstructed anarchist by principle, Margaret once received a note from Upton Sinclair asking her to please stop sending him the Little Review, that he no longer understood anything in it so it failed to interest him. To this she promptly replied, "Please cease sending me your Socialist paper. I understand everything in it, therefore it no longer interests me."

At times Ben Hecht played practical jokes on unsuspecting guests at Sch logl's. Hugh Walpole, homeward bound after a lecture tour of the country, was considered pompous. He had a habit of tipping back his chair against the wall and expounding on the frailties of American culture. :Moreover, Walpole, interviewed in his hotel room, had ordered whiskey for himself and had let the reporters go away thirsty. He was inveigled into coming for a Friday luncheon at Schlogl's. As he tipped his chair back expansively, the crash came. Sell recalled that the chair's back legs "had been treated by Ben with a saw."

"Carl Sandburg, who was sitting next to the guest and knew nothing of the trick, apologized all over the place, picked Walpole up, and dusted him off. Ben just laughed and joyously acknowledged responsibility. Later a long article in Vanity Fair by Walpole told of his impressions of this country. His closing words were of his two most trenchant memories of America-Ben Hecht's rudeness and, on the same occasion, Carl Sandburg's kindncs&." Sell, the host, had remained silent.

Sell's serene self-confidence stood him in good stead when, shortly after he became literary editor of the Daily News, he was traveling on the Twentieth Century to 'ew York and the dining car steward seated him at a table opposite a man whom he recognized as Victor Lawson, the Daily News publisher. The publisher, who had never met his book editor, Chicago History

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Chicago Historical Society Daily News Coll ecti on

acknowledged his "Good evening" with a nod and a cursory "Evening." The younger man looked out the window and remarked it was a nice day. "I ordered my dinner," Sell recalled, "and 1\1r. Lawson didn't say another worduntil he ordered his dessert and inquired of me, 'Do you go to ::\'ew York often?' I said, 'Two or three times a year.' And when his dessert came I said, 'As a Illattcr of fact, ~Ir. Lawson, I'm Henry Sell, and I run the book page at the Daily News.' He said, 'Oh? \Veil , there must be some mistake . :;,._lcmbers of the Dail_y News editorial staff do not ride the Twentieth Century.' The Twentieth Century cost $25 more than the other trains. I said nothing at all, but applied myself to my figs. He said the figs were too sweet; I agreed. And as he left the car he told me where I Illight find him. I dropped by his drawing room and we talked about the Daily News-and that's the first and last time I talked to Victor Lawson in the flesh."

It was many years later that Sell learned that Lawson had in fact played a role in his career.

Before he applied to Dennis for a chance to write his series on ethnic groups, Scll's father 10 6

Chicago Histo ry

Charles H. Dennis, editor of the News, in his almost inaccessible office. He broke a time-honored newspaper tradition by offering Sell triple the salary he was really asking.

had spoken to Lawson, and the publisher had spoken to Dennis.

"Mr. Lawson liked my father as a preacher," Sell confided, "and had wanted him to be the pastor of his church, but there was a condition attached. Just as he always read all the editorials before they were published in the News, he would have to see the sermons before they were preached . But Father didn't have that idea at all. So they never got together, but remained friends."

Henry Sell's father was the Rev. Henry Thorne Sell, a preacher and editor of the Congregational Sunday School & Publishers Society of Chicago . The son remembers him as continually writing updated editions of his Bible Studies, which remained in print long after his death or, as the son said, "about as long as the Bible was read widely."

Henry B. Sell

Sell's (!Wn pages in the newspaper were not subjected to Lawson's censorship. He alone passed on book reviews-with one exception: "Mr. Lawson was thoroughly religious, as everyone knew. And he had helped in building up the evangelist, Billy Sunday. I guess the religious editor had worked hard on it when Sunday held meetings in Chicago. :--:ow Billy Sunday had written a book, in which he used, as I recall it, excerpts from his sermons-sermonettes, as he termed them. \\'e received a copy and I turned it over to Ben Hecht. In a clay or so, Ben handed me his review. He had about this time been reviewing a book by George Ade. And he wrote that Billy Sunday's humor, compared to George Ade's, was as a sewer to a sparkling brook. We published it. Mr. Lawson never mentioned it to me or to Ben. He let it run through two editions and then killed it."

Sell' s book emporium was on the third floor.

"That is," he explained, "the third floor up and clown. For with the spread to two buildings, one on either side, every noor had about three levels. On the same floor was the city room-a large room, also of several levels. Ben's desk was here [drawing on the tablecloth] and Carl's here by the window. A copy boy sat just outside and would come running at the word 'Copy!' :M y book place was on another level, a lower level, near l\1r. Dennis' office. I had a rol l- top desk with cubicles. And T. K. Hedrick, who did a column, 'A Hit or l\Iiss or Two,' had a desk like mine nearby. It had been used

by Eugene Field and Hedrick was always finding something of Field's tucked in a cubicle or way back in a drawer. There were a lot of ghosts around the News building."

Into this less than posh interior wandered a number of distinguished visitors. The poet Conrad Aiken, whom Sell had met in Boston, stopped in one day, and that night Aiken, whom Sell describes as "a sweet and lovely man, and a fine critic," and Vachel Lindsay spent long hours at Sell's house in Ravinia.

Sell often saw Aiken in Boston and he recalls

a day when they and a publisher friend were seated on a bench on the Boston Common talking of poetry. Harriet l\Ionroe had rejected every poem Conrad had sent her-not modern enough. So now Aiken said to his friends, "I could write a poem she'd take, " and fishing an envelope out of his pocket, wrote on the back of it a poem that began "Red petals in the dust. " The next time Sell saw Aiken, the poet reported, "Sure enough, Harriet sent me a check at once."

It was through Aiken that Sell learned that ~Iencken was an enthusiastic reader of his book pages. Aiken had contributed a review at Scll's request and, shortly after it appeared, a letter from l\1Icnckcn , addressed to Aiken, arrived at

Carl Sandburg as a young m an. Even in those days on the News, when he might or might not file an assigned story and wrote book reviews for a 35¢ lunch, he was considered "sacred."

Chicago H istorica l Soc iety Daily News Co ll ection

Henry B. Sell

Chicago Historical Society Daily News Collection

Victor F. Lawson, publisher of the Daily News, who did not expect to meet his employees on the swank Twentieth Century.

the Daily News. Sell long had admired the cantankerous sage of Baltimore, and just seeing the envelope was "a very emotional moment." At first "I hardly dared open it"-not from ethical considerations, it turned out, but from excitement. Open it he did, however. "This is what Mencken wrote to Conrad-who wasn't famous at all at the time except among a very small and discriminating group. " '\,Vhat are you doing writing for the only civilized book page in this Presbyterian satrapy?' (\,Vilson, a Presbyterian, was President.) I wrote Mencken and said I was honored, and Aiken wrote him that he was honored, and we arranged to meet in Baltimore, the three of us.

And I well remember not being able to sleep for a week before that meeting." In 19,10, shortly after Sell left Chicago, Mencken proclaimed it "the literary capital of the world."

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The Daily News was not the first Chicago newspaper to feature brilliant reviews. Floyd Dell had earlier edited the Literary Supplement of the Chicago Evening Post, which had won him distinction, but he left in 1912 and, by 1916, was in New York assisting Max Eastman edit the Masses. After Dell's departure, Henry F. May says in The End of American Innocence, the Post's book supplement "veered back toward conservatism, its place ... taken by the Chicago Daily News." The Post's reviews had become innocuous.

"Dell was a critic and an editor, and I ran a circus. Dell was serious, I just had fun," said Sell, who is still active as editor-at-large of Harper's Bazaar, with which he has been associated ever since he left Chicago. "Ben Hecht always referred to our group as my menagerie.

Beginning my third year, our book pages were quite well known everywhere . Our pages got very famous very fast, simply because the others were so dull. " In our interviews, Mr. Sell repeatedly made the point that he was not "a literary man," but merely an "awestruck observer." He conceded, however, that in the midst of the rich flowering of poetry and fiction in Chicago that marked the years r 9 ro-1 920, he served as an instrument of the Renaissance .

And while he passed out review copies of books to his varied and talented writer friends, he never gave them instructions. Could it be said his policy was to let everyone "do his own thing," a life style prescribed by the young in the 196os? He replied, "It was literally, actually, fundamentally, basically, totally that.

Everybody did his own thing-and I would say that in a sense we were the first crowd to adopt chat idea. \Ve gathered together, we did what interested us, we enjoyed ourselves. And as a matter of fact, that is-me. That's my life."

One of Sell's innovations was the multiple review. If the Friday luncheon discussion at Schlogl's rated a book highly, not one but several reviews would follow, each with a different

Billy Sunday. Ben Hecht's review of his book was the only one the News censored while Sell was literary editor.

by-line. Ring Lardner's You Know Me, Al was reviewed four times. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and Mencken's The American Language each scored seven reviews. "When Lytton Strachcy's Eminent Victorians came out in England there was no plan to produce it here, but we kept reviewing it until there was such a demand Putnam's brought it out in 1918. Another book we reviewed almost as many times was Frederick O'Brien's White Shadows of the South Seas. \Ale also were the first to let authors review their own works; at times this was done with great success and quite impersonally. Fannie Hurst and Edna Ferber both were successful in reviewing their own books. But without pay-and they were too distant for our free lunch-we had a review (not of their own books) from such great foreign writers as Bernard Shaw and Romaine Rolland."

But for all the emphasis on freedom and fun, Sell himself followed certain rigorous disciplines.

Every vVednesday, and occasionally twice a week if the ads from publishers justified additional review pages, he made a ritual of catching the 5 A.~l. train from Ravinia. This put him on the floor of the Daily News composing room at 6 A.M. "So long as I was standing by the stone no one could steal my space." He was accepted as a \Vednesday fixture by the printers, with whom he got on so well that he was made a member of their union; Sell believes it is the only time in history that someone from the editorial side was taken into their "chapel." In lulls between editions, he and the head of the chapel had long passionate discussions on grow. mg peonies.

Under Sell, as Hecht later wrote, the book section of the Daily News became as large and prosperous as the real-estate section. And however wistfully Sell regarded Hecht and the other reporters, when the stock market crashed in October 1929 no working reporter is known to have lost a million dollars in a day, as Henry Sell did. Over the years he has put vitamins and liver pate and a special diet on the market, '

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Henry B. Sell

had his own advertising agency for some years, and has been a Hearst editor for fifty-three years. He is the author, with Victor \Vcybright, of Bujfalo Bill of the Wild West (his grandmother's grandmother was Cody's cousin).

By the time Sell left Chicago at the end of 1919, some of the luminaries had already begun going to New York, and others followed. The Chicago Renaissance had come to an end. And in ~cw York's Bohemia, much had altered. By 1 920, the banners of politic al rcvol t raised by the intellectuals over the last decade were furled.

The remarkable outpouring of talent and political ferment that had erupted in many centers over the nation in the 191 os had shrunk to a trickle. When new talents emerged in the next few years, it would be in a different milieu: the disillusion of the postwar years.

In his day in Chicago Henry Sell knew all the famous dissenters, the movers and shakers, the rich and original talents, those who wrote reviews for him and those who didn't. He knew Clarence Darrow, Theodore Dreiser, Ring Lardner ("one of the greats"), and George Cram ("Jig") Cook, both as assistant to Floyd Dell on the Chicago Evening Post and later as ringmaster of the Provincetown Players in Greenwich Village.

Asked if he ever had regrets that he left Chicago, he replied, " I was born in \'\1isconsin on the Illinois border and it was a lovely place. I came to Chicago and the buffalo grass was good and long in Chicago-and it's still there . Then there's the lake-a wild, strong thing. The streets are a little wider in Chicago, the atmosphere a little bit more free. And the museums are superb. There is an interest in reading, an interest in writing, and it has the atmosphere of a free-thinking town. Of all the cities I ever lived in, and they are many, I'd rather be in Chicago."

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Courtesy Henry B. Sel I

Henry Blackman Sell, ca . 1922.

The "Viking" in Lincoln Park

BY A. A. DORNFELD

Reproductions ef the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria were all on hand when the Viking hove into view for the Columbian Exposition) but the slim Viking made it the hard way-via the North Atlantic passage.

TO BUILD a fishing skiff, say twelve feet long, to use on a peaceful farm pond, you'd likely buy one-inch planks for the bottom.

And that modest dimension-one inch-is also the thickness of the planking on the T'iking, which was built specificall y to cross the storm-torn Atlantic, and wh ich now stands under a pavilion north of the Historical Soc iety. The ship is a faithfu l copy, plank for plank and rib for rib, of those which carried the daring and often piratical Northmen of the Middle Ages to all parts of the known world.

As your eyes take in the slender, sweeping lines of the vessel, its low freeboard, and its lack of a deck, you wonder why it is called a ship.

Surely its modest size-the Viking measures onl y 77 feet over-all , 16 feet wide, and less than 6 feet deep-makes it seem more like the 65-foot boats carr ied on the decks of the ocean liners of today than the liners themseh-es. But if we accept as reasonable the common definition that a ship is a vessel which can take and keep the sea under all conditions, then the one in Lincoln Park must surely rate as a ship. For it carried its twelveman crew through gales and adverse winds from Korway to America back in 1893 in safety even in comfort.

Designing a reasonable replica of a vessel of bygone ages can present difficult, often baffling problems. Some people in England learned this a decade ago, when they set out to build a ship just like the Mayflower in which the Pilgrims reached New England. Unable to find any conIF YOU WANTED

A. A. Dornfeld will be remembered by readers of Chicago History for his article, "Chicago's Age of Sail," in the Spring-Summer 1973 issue.

structional details on that heroic and historic craft, they were obliged to build a vessel along the general lines of those in use in the 1600s and trust that it resembled the or iginal Mayflower at least to some degree.

A similar dilemma harrassed the backers of a plan to send copies of Columbus' ships-the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria-from Spain to the Colu mbian Exposition in Ch icago in 1893.

There was no solid information avai lab le on these vessels, either. So the backers had to be content with building ships to resemble as closely as possible the naos and the caravels sailed by Span ia rds around the year 1492.

No such difficulty plagued the men who in the closing years of the nineteenth century determ in ed to sa il a Viking ship from Norway to the Chicago fair. Some years earlier, a buri al mound near Gokstad had been opened-and such a sh ip, in a splendid state of preservation, had been brought to light. Although somewhat distorted by the pressure of the blue clay which surrounded and protected it from decay, the ship was readily disassembled and set up again in a building in Oslo. Thus the rehabilitated vessel was available as a model for a new one suitable for crossing the Atlantic.

The skeleton of a fift y-year-old man, with his weapons near at hand, lay on a bed in the excavated ship. The skeleton of a peacock, presumably the pet of this once far-rangi ng Northman, and several plates and other items of household ware were also found. Buried near the ship were the remains of dogs and horses, no doubt the property of the departed chiefta in. Several other buried ships, the tombs of important men, have been found in Norway. On some ships the signs of wear and use can still be discerned, attesting Chicago History

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The Viking

that these craft had been real seagoing ships in their time, rather than replicas put together to serve as coffins.

A determination to prove that the ships of the medieval Northmen were seaworthy and livable craft, and so to uphold the claim that Leif Ericson reached America around the year I ooo A.D . , was the object of Captain Magnus Andersen in promoting the transatlantic crossing. He hoped to squelch the scoffers who argued that Leif couldn't have done it because ancient Norse ships weren't up to the job. Andersen disclaimed any idea of making a demonstration against Columbus' discovery of America, although many people believed that that was the purpose of the Yoyage.

"It wasn't to me," Andersen stated after he reached American shores. For similar reasons, he said, the new ship was named T'iking rather than "Leif Ericson."

"The Norwegians are a modest people," he asserted. vVhi le designing the new vessel was no problem, Andersen suffered plenty of headaches, mostly financial, while pushing h is project.

When the plan was revea led to the public, the response was instant and enthusiastic-at first.

Many wealthy men pledged substantial contributions. Success seemed certain.

The enthusiasm-and the pledges-faded, however, when the Norwegian government proved cold to the idea. It held that the project was more a hare-brained sporting venture than a worthwh ile objective. Now, if the Viking ship could be safely transported across the ocean on a freighter, well, then, maybe.

Andersen a nd h is fo llowers would listen to none of this . They argued that a transatlantic voyage by the ship on its own bottom, and under its own sail, would capture the imagination of the whole world, whereas freighting the Viking ship across as so much iner t deck cargo on a steamer would constitute a sad a nti-climax .

Norwegia n newspapers took up the squabble.

Most of them ridicu led the plan, a lthough a 112

Chicago History

paper in New York offered to contribute $1,000 to it. Feeling that the voyage should be a purely Norwegian undertaking, the backers declined the ofTer. Some newspapers in Norway did back the offer, notably the Norwegian Sh1jJping Journal.

Editing this publication was Andersen's regular job ; as an avocation he had made several single-handed sea voyages in small boats. In time, most of the seafaring clement in Norway came to believe in the soundness of the transatlantic project. After all, the large boats they used in fishing ventures on the open ocean were very sim ilar to the craft to be used on that voyage. So, in the encl, when most of the men of wealth withdrew their support, th e ordinary people-fifteen thousand of them-kept the project from failing. Their small contributions, ranging from 10¢ to $200, took the place of the earlier, more splendid promises which had come to nothing. The Scandinavian \Vorld's Fair committee in Chicago also helped.

Constructed four miles from where the old ship was found, the new one was like it in even the minutest detail. Norwegian oak was used throughout-as in the original. The only exception was the keel. o oak tree large enough could be found in Norway, as it would have to be 75 feet tall to provide a 56-foot timber . So a long piece of oak from Canada was used. vVhen finished, the keel was 16 inches deep, and T-shaped with the wide part on top. To this wide part, the lowest bottom planks were attached . Finding a piece of lumber for the keclson, which was almost as large, also proved troublesome. A suitable oak tree was found in a potato patch-but the wife of the owner of the patch rebelled at having it cut down. She con sidered it a symbol of hea lth and happiness. H er husband, a retired sea captain, overcame her objection by pointing out that the ship in which the oak would be embodied would bring glory to Norway.

L ittle metal was used in the fasten ings, a lthough the planking, laid in overlapping or

--

___,..--

Chlcaoo Historical Society

The Viking, painting by Emil Bjorn, with a red-striped

mainsail and cover, and carved dragons at stem and stern, still a thrilling sight. The painting hangs in the Jefferson Park fieldhouse.

Chicago History

113

The Viking

"clinker" fashion, like the siding on a frame house, was riveted at the edges with iron nails clinched on the inside. This method of fastening, impossible with planking laid smoothly in edgeto-edge fashion, integrated the skin of the vessel into a self-strengthening whole. Few nails or treenails (wooden pegs sometimes used by shipbuilders) attached the slender ribs of the ship to the even thinner planking. In their place, spruce roots were tied across the ribs, from holes bored in ridges projecting inside the planks.

Most startling of all, the solid, stiff keel, the main strength member of the ship, was not fastened to the ribs in any way. And the cross beams which tied the sides together were placed well below the level of the gunwales, leaving those important planks unsupported by anything except their own rigidity . All these details promised to permit a frightening degree of "give" under storm conditions.

Some practical seamen shook their heads and expressed doubts that the ship would be fit to put to sea in-or even to launch. Andersen, by his own admission shared these doubts, at least in part. Later, after the Viking was launched into a hole chopped in the harbor ice and rode out its first gale unharmed, Andersen recanted . " I was ashamed of myself," he admitted later.

The flexibility of structure which had been apprehended did in fact develop, but it proved to be an element of strength rather than weakness.

The sides of the ship took the punches of the battering seas as a prize fighter does the blows of his antagonist-by rolling with the punch and so lessening the impact. During the thirty frightening hours of that first Atlantic gale, the crew watched anxiously as the bottom moved up and down as much as three-quarters of an inch and the gunwale twisted half a foot out of line as a boarding sea struck. The crew bailed and hoped. When the gale blew itself out and no leaks could be found, they grew jubilant. All their bailing, they realized, was of water which had washed over the sides of the undecked ship.

Thereafter, the off watch undressed and went 114

Ch icago History

to bed when relieved, as they would have in any other seaworthy ship. Up to then, they had dozed with all their clothes on, even their sea boots, as if half-expecting an emergency to strike. After the voyage, Andersen gave it as his view that the T¡;king was safer than half of the full-sized ships in Norway's merchant flee t, then as now a numerous lot.

Other bad weather also plagued the voyagers: days of sleet, temperatures of zero, fogs, and head winds. These had been expected along the course Andersen chose to sail-the northern route, notoriously a hard one, north of Scotland and just south of Iceland and Greenland. A route in the latitude of Spain, where the northeast trade winds prevail would have been much easier, if somewhat longer, but Andersen insisted on following in the track of the early Norse navigators.

The T'iking cleared the tiny port of farstein, near Bergen, on April 30, 1893, and reached America on May 27-excellent time for a sailing vessel. It met and outsailed se,¡eral fishing schooners, to everyone's surprise, as these craft were known to be very fast. At times the Viking reached eleven nautical miles an hour, a much higher speed than had been anticipated. Another happy surprise was the d iscovery that the oddlooking rudder mounted on the right side of the ship controlled the course perfectly, regardless of which side the wind was on and even when the right side was tilted way up by wind pressure. Such rudders, by their placement, have given the right side of a ship a name which still persists. "Starboard" equals "steer-board." One wonders a little about the degree of apprehension when one realizes that images of vessels very much like the Viking appear on the Bayeux tapestry, which deals with the invasion of England in 1066, about a century after the Gokstad ship was interred. William the Conqueror, the successful invader, was a orman, a man removed only a few generations from his orthmen ancestors.

The first American land sighted was New-

foundland. Thereafter the course was turned southward, for New York. Chicago was reached on July 12, by way of New York, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, and the Great Lakes.

Throughout the trip, the crew kept fairly comfortable, when off duty, under the shelter of a tent erected amidships. All the crew were experienced seamen, selected from among three hundred volunteers. Some had certificates of competence as masters or mates of sailing ships.

Andersen slept above the beer and wine supply, incidentally. There was hot food every day, prepared on a portable iron stove, and at the beginning of the venture there was even quite a bit of champagne, sent aboard by well-wishers.

Andersen stuck closely to the ship's prototype in details of hull and equipment. The rigging of the Viking, however, had to be patterned after details of ships depicted on engraved stones.

Most of the mast of the Gokstad ship had disappeared where it projected above the blue clay.

And he did carry a few modern devices. The medieval Korthmen, it is known, could measure with an experienced eye the angle of the Korth Star or the sun, and arrive at a fair estimate of latitude. Andersen backed this up with a sextant, a compass, and a barometer.

The sides of the Viking below the gunwale were pierced for 32 oars, just like those on the prototype, but it made its way across the ocean under sail alone. An attempt to enter Tew York harbor under oar power provided by a group of local volunteers proved unsuccessful. The inexperienced rowers tumbled over each other and created confusion instead of progress. A favorable wind saved the day and the entry was made on schedule-under sail.

Better managed was the Viking's entry into Milwaukee harbor, propelled by rowers belonging to a seaman's union. Under their experienced hands the oars rose and fell as one while crowds ashore cheered. The gunwales of the ship were decorated for the occasion with the 32 shields which were never displayed at sea. The number, incidentally, gives an idea of the probable size

,,, â&#x20AC;˘'

_.,.

Chicag o Historical Society

The bedecked Santa Maria in Jackson Park in 1893.

It made the voyage on the smoother Southern route, under convoy.

of the crew of the Gokstad ship when in fighting trim.

Once land was reached, Americans greeted the voyagers with a warmth of enthusiasm which astonished Andersen. Still, incidents did occur.

In a book written later, Andersen recounts that his crew were set upon in New York and roughed up for no apparent reason. When the brawny seamen swung into action in self-defense, they were suddenly confronted by a large force of policemen and arrested. None of the toughs were seized, but the Norwegians were jailed.

Andersen told Alfred 0. Erickson, a guard at the world's fair who later became a Chicago judge, that the whole thing was a put-up job. He reasoned that it had been framed by misguided persons who mistakenly believed that the Viking's expedition was made to belittle the achievements of Columbus.Arrived in Chicago, the Viking was met by a Chicago History

115

The Viking

flotilla of steamships, yachts, and sailing ships in the harbor, and by crowds on shore. At the world's fair ground (now Jackson Park), the head of the fair and official greeter, Thomas W. Palmer, was faced with a delicate problem.

Across the harbor from the T'iking lay the Columbus ships, which had arrived earlier.

Palmer, of course, had lauded Columbus as the first European to reach America. \Vhat should he say now?

He handled the problem neatly. While saying nice things about the Norse achievement in reaching these shores nine hundred years ago, he slid deftly around the Northmen's failure to follow up the discovery by colonization, declaring that in the year IOOO the world was not yet ready for the settling of America by white men.

Similar tact was displayed by Capta in Andersen while responding, in excellent English, to this gracious speech of welcome. He knew that among the Scandinavians present were thousands of Swedes and Danes as well as ::\Torwegians. So he consistently referred to Leif Ericson and his crew as " ~orthmen" and explained, that "When we speak of Northmen we cons ider them to be Danes and Swedes as well as Norwegians. " The Viking was inspected by thousands as it lay at a dock at the fair. \Vhen the fair closed, it went on an extended ri,·cr cruise to :M inneapolis, St. Paul, New Orleans, and many points between. Returning to Chicago, it was laid ashore, untended and almost forgotten for two decades.

It seemed slated to suffer the fate which eventually smote the Columbus ships-slow deterioration to the status of an eyesore and, ultimately, deliberate destruction.

Around the time of ·world \Var I, however, people began to talk about saYing the Viking.

Alfred 0. Erickson, (who died in 1967 at the age of 97), told about being urged by Leroy Stewart, one-time chief of police, to do something about the ship. "Why don't you Nor-

116

Chicago History

wcgians take care of your own?" Erickson quoted Stewart as saying.

So a second campaign in behalf of the Viking was launched many years after the first. Instrumenta l in its success was the Norwegian \,Vomens Federation of Chicago, who collected small and large sums for the cause. As had happened earlier, it was largely the contributions of ordinary folk which saved the vessel. Through their effort, both financial and physical, the I'iking was rehabilitated and brought to its present shelter near the Historical Society. Some interested people feel that the Viking should be moved to a site on the tip of the northern promontory of Belman t harbor, according to Austen Doc, a leader in the orwcgian-Amcrican community. They want it taken away from the clamor of hea,·y traffic in Clark Street and placed near open water, as befits so able a ship.

Landsmen and women, when they see the ship, arc still appalled at the idea that men once trusted their lives to the little craft on the Atlantic Ocean. But seamen and others with some appreciation of the shape of ships tend to think a long the lines of Professor A. W. Br0gger, an authority on ~orse history, as they study its flowing lines. Professor Br0gger wrote: "A ship is alive. It has personal will of its own to take on a fight with the elements. ~1utual confidence is formed between the sailor and his ship."

And a policeman named ~1ulcahy, with proper Irish appreciation of a well-turned phrase, tells of overhearing a man muttering to himself while looking at the ship. The man was an obviously prosperous businessman, an unimaginative-looking fellow with both feet firmly on the ground and with seemingly little time for poetry and such nonsense. Yet the man declared: "I'll bet that that ship sat on a stormy sea like a silk glove on a lady's hand."

Maybe he had been a sailor in his youth.

Fifty Years Ago

As recorded by newspapers in the collection ef the Chicago Historical Society

1924 July 1. Sunset ceases to be a barrier to the delivery of U.S. air mail as planes bound for both coasts touch down in Omaha and roar away into the night. Beams from the ground in Iowa, Illin ois, and Nebraska create air lanes to light the way.

July 3. Gambling is illega l at the 52 -d ay meet organized by the Chicago Business Men's Racing Association which opens today at the newly remodeled Hawthorne Race Track, but the well-known bookmakers from New York, Latonia, and New Orleans who pepper the crowd do well as all the favorites lose . .July 5. Work is in progress on the new Lakeside plant ofR. R. Donnelley & Sons Co., at Calumet and 21st streets. The building is expected to be the most beautiful manufacturing plant in the world.

July 7. The American Furniture ~fart, 666 Lake Shore Dri,¡c, formally dedicated today, contains more than a million and a half square feet of floor space, the largest area under one roof in the world.

July 8. ~ew speed limits are set by Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins. The top limit is 20 miles per hour in sparsely settled areas; 10 or 15 miles arc allowed in the city, less on turns.

July 1 1. Chief of Police Colli ns reprimands his captains for failing to enforce the new speed regulations and threatens to cite them for neglect of duty.

Chicago's chicken handlers, at 18 members possibly the smallest union in the countr y, strike for a wage boost of 75¢, to $2 an hour.

July 12. Scores of delegates returning from the Democratic Convention in New York, which nominatedJohn \V.Davis to run aga inst President Calvin Coolidge, register complaints against the rudeness of Chicago police. They say New York's finest are much more courteous.

July 14. Two patrolmen arc trapped in the act of accepting a $10 bribe from a speeder.

July r 5. The Women's Advertising Club of the \Vorld , meeting in London, elects Mrs. Bernice Blackwood of Chicago as its chairman.

July 20. The American team sweeps every event in the Olympic sw imming meet in Les Tourelles, France. Johnny Weissmuller and Sybil Rauer, of the Illinois A.C., set new records, and Ethel Lake, also of Chicago, wins the 100-rnetcr free-style event for women.

July 22. The stone mansion at 4515 Drexel Blvd., for many years the home of John G. Shedd, is bought by the Starrett School for Girls.

Chicago Historical Society Daily News Collection

"Mug shots" of Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, Jr., 19-year-old sons of millionaires, as they began serving life sentences for murder at the state penitentiary at Joliet. Their fight to escape the gallows began July 3 and ended Sept. 10.

Chicago History

117

Ch icago Hi ston ca t Soc iety Daily N ews Co ll ect ion

July 23. Predictions that the center of the steel industry will shift to the South Chicago- Gary area follow the Federal Trade Commission's decision to abolish the "Pittsburgh plus" system of pricing. Steel can be produced for 20 pcrccn t less in Gary.

July 23. Despite pleas of guilty by :\Ta than Leopold, Jr., and Richard Loeb, self-confessed ki llers of Robert A. Franks, State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe will present the evidence against them. Crowe, determined to send the prisoners to the ga llows, fears that defense attorney Clarence Darrow wi ll win a verdict of life imprisonment. .July 24. An apparatus for the rapid measurement of the earth's gravitation has been perfected by Prof. Albert A. Michelson of the Department of Physics of the University of Chicago.

Aug. 3. "Wi lmette's battle over apartment buildings Aares up as the Twin Oaks Croquet Club displays a large sign predicting that apartments wi ll win out. Homeowners who rush to the scene to tear down the banner retreat before the club's president, three burly bodyguards, a police dog, and several policemen and, by evening, all is quiet except the policemen who are overheard loudly arguing the finer points of the game.

Aug. 7. Chicago's So. 'Nater St. market's new 70-acre site at Ashland Ave. and 31st St. will 118

Chicago History

Senator Robert La Follette, campaigning for the presidency in Chicago under the Progressive Party banner, wasn't as big a threat as Midwest politicos feared on Sept. 2.

be the most modern in the world, with trackage for 2,140 refrigerator cars, it is announced.

The move will make possible the widening and double-decking of Wacker Drive.

Aug. 14. Chicago's physicians and dentists reveal plans for a 15-story Medical Arts Build ing on Lake Shore Drive .

Aug. 16. On its first anniversary, the 8-hour day in the steel mills is pronounced a success. A survey by Iron Age shows, however, that the 8-hour-clay men are working 7 days a week and that a large proportion arc still working 12 hours. Less than 8 percent arc working 48 hours or less a week.

"Snore and you sleep alone, " warns Commissioner of Health Herman N . Bundescn, advising Chicagoans that snoring is a disease that can be cured by the family physician.

Aug. 20. The wages of union painters rise 25¢, to $1 .50 an hour, making them among the bestpaid industrial workers in the city. Painters working for Landis Award contractors, now earning 95¢ to $1 .25, will not share in the boost.

The National ::--.regro Business League's 25th annua l meeting opens with a we lcoming

50 Years Ago

speech¡ by Mayor William E. Dever. The League was founded by Booker T. Washington "to promote the commercial and financial development of the Negro."

The grounds of the Dawes mansion in Evanston are found Ii ttercd by wallets from which the cash has been removed, at the conclusion of a large reception honoring the vice-presidential candidate. Among the billfolds discarded by pickpockets is one owned by Chicago police lieutenant Thomas J. Stapleton, detailed to guard the crowd .

Aug. 26. Postoffice Inspector William F. Fahy, consid ered the best sleuth in the government service, is arrested as the master mind behind a $2,000,000 mail robbery lastJunc at Roundou t, Ill. Aug. 28. Raiders led by the Rev. Elmer L. Williams swoop down on two gambl ing houses west of Evanston and find they first have to contend with the local law. "I'm here to play the games, not help raid them," explains one sheriff.

Aug. 30. Hundreds of armed men roar into Herrin, III. , and 6 are killed as the battle between the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the Flaming Circle is renewed in "Bloody Williamson" County. The feud dates back to J unc 1922, when 22 strikebreakers were killed by union miners.

Sept. 1. The Hawthorne meet closes and is pronounced a success as the bugle plays "Old Lang Syne" and 20,000 fans join in the chorus.

Officials are already discussing expanding the facilities.

Sept. 2. John W. Davis is greeted by admiring throngs in Chicago, but local Democrats advise him that he is running a poor third to President Coolidge and Progressive Party candidate Robert Lafollette in this part of the country.

Sept. 3. Illinois' lawsuit against Governor Len Small enters its final phase as Attorney Genera l Brundage demands that the governor account for all interest payments collected

Chicago Historical Society

The Union League Building just after its construction in 1886. It started giving way to a newer clubhouse on Oct. 1.

between 1917 and 1919, when he was state treasurer. The state contends that $2,000,000 is missing.

Sept. 7. Rabbi Solomon Milles, Chicago's oldest citizen, dies at 107. The rabbi, who has _not had a congregation for the last few years, continued until the end to dispense spiritual and marital advice to his flock from h:is home on So. Halsted St. Sept. ro. After days of reflection, Judge John R. Caverly sentences Leopold and Loeb to life imprisonment upon the grounds of their Chicago History

119

youth. His decision follows a three-day pica against capital punishment by Clarence Darrow and an almost equa ll y long rebuttal by State's Attorney Crowe.

Sept. 14. Chief of Police Collins threatens to disperse his new division of motorcycle police and return the enforcelllcn l of traffic regulations to his captains unless speeding is i111mediately curtailed.

Sept. r 5. Three planes carrying six A111ericans in the first round-thc-worl<l Right land at Maywood field today. The Army fliers, whose nagship is named Chicago, are nearing the end of their adventurous journey.

Frank LeRoy Chance dies in Los Angeles. As manager of the Chicago Cubs from 1905 to 1912, Chance brought the team 4 National League pennants and 2 \\'orld Series championships.

Sept . 16. Fred \V. Armstrong, Landis Award executive, declares that building permits arc down 50 percent because of the high cost of labor.

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Chicago Histori cal Societ y Daily N ews Co ll ecti on

The So. Water St. Market, whose new location was announced Au g . 7. Not everyone agreed, as the city learned on Oct. 2.

Sept. , 9. Police Chief Collins places his motorcycle police under the command of his district captains and warns that " u111111ary action" will follow if more speeders arc not arrested.

Sept. 22. Sc\'eral hundred ~cgro and white veterans join to commemorate the E111anci pation Proclamation in a ccrclllony at the foot of St. Gaudcns' statue of Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln Park. Thirty-two members of the Grand Army of the Republic, half of them black, salute the statue and later watch a pageant staged by the National Association of Colored \\'omen and its Chicago branch.

Sept. 25. District Attorney Olson orders an investigation into the issuance of permits for sacramental wine. Over 700,000 gallons of wine were sold last year for religious purposes, indicating either that Chicago's Jews arc the

50 Years Ago

most r-eligious in the country and that its priests conduct the hugest masses, or that fraud is involved. Mr . Olson suspects fraud.

Sept. 30. The Loyola-Sheridan Busin ess Association , alarmed at reports that the recently closed Northern Lights cabaret at 6344 Broadway will become a boarding school for Negro girls, is using "every means in its power" to stop the lease. The businessmen fear declining property valu es in the exclusive neighborhood.

Oct. 1. \i\Treckers begin work on the Un ion League Building on Jackson Blvd., which has housed the organization since r 886. I t will be replaced by a new club house.

Oct. 2. Occupants of a ramshackle structure on So. Water St., defying orders to vacate, frantically telephone their attorneys as demolition squads begin tearing off the roof and John J. Sloan, president of the board of local improvements, shouts from the street, "We'll pull the whole building out from under you if we have to."

Oct. 7. "I felt it coming," sighs Judge Joseph Sabath in divorce court as a Chicago woman brings suit on the grounds that her husband is a victim of the new fad and she has become a crossword puzzle widow. The judge restricts the husband to three puzzles a day.

Oct. 8. On Maxwell Street, where racial tension has been running high, a white lynch mob beats a Negro to death after a white girl accuses him of attempting to maltreat her. Police arrest 20 before they can disperse the crowd, then free I g as one man accepts sole responsibility.

Oct. 13. The Prince of Wales, who claims a particular interest in the packing industry, visits Chicago today, but his special train out is delayed for hours while he dances at the Saddle and Cycle Club until 3 A.M. Oct. 15. Chief of Police Collins charges that judges arc freeing hundreds of speeders and fining others only $1. Since the first of the year, 534 Chicagoans have been killed by au tomobilcs.

Oct. 18. The Universit y of Illin ois football team wins the first game played in its new Urbana stadium as Red Grange scores 5 touchdowns.

Final score: Illinois 49, Michigan 14.

Oct. 23. The makers of Cyco have "one of the sweetest booze permits in the city," declares Prohibition Director Percy Owen. The firm buys 1,660 gallons of liquor a month for its patent medicine.

Oct. 24. Commissioner of Health Bundesen will ask for new legislation designed to close down the Michigan Ave. offices of the Illinois Birth Control League. The League charges a small fee, thus obviating the need for a clinic permit.

It also does not provide printed information, such information being illegal. The proposed bill would prohibit verbal advice as well.

Nov. 3. Al Capone is reported to have won $500,000 on horse racing, in which he became interested during the Hawthorne meet.

The Prince of Wales at the Chicago Stockyards, Oct. 13, on the horse he mounted at the gates.

50 Years Ago

Nov. 4. President Coolidge and vice-presidential candidate Dawes arc elected as Illinois joins the national Republican sweep. Other Illinois victors include Governor Small, former Governor Charles S. Deneen, who ran for the Senate, and State's Attorney Crowe. Albert Bailey George, new 1\1unicipal Court judge, becomes the first ~egro to be elected to a court of record in the United States. \ Villiamson County, voting under martial law, elects all Republican candidates for county office, a result ha iled by the K lan as "a complete vindication of our policy."

Kov. 8. No, No, Nanette, with Louise Groody and a G lorious Garden of Girls, is in its 28th week.

Positively in the last two weeks arc the Duncan Sisters in Topsy and Eve and the ,?,iegfeld Follies. Other theatrical attractions on Chicago's stages include Beggar on Horseback, with Roland Young; Romeo and Juliet; the Greenwich T'illage Follies; Abie's Irish Rose; and Ruth Draper, in her original character sketches.

Helen :Mencken opens Tuesday in Seventh H eaven; H oudini performs tomorrow night.

The Iron Horse, a John Ford production, is packing in the moviegoers.

This week the Civic Opera presents Lucia, Tannlwuser, Samson and Delilah, La Boheme, R igoletto, La Giaconda, and La Tosca. Other musical offerings include concerts by John :\1cCormack, Mme. Schumann-Heink, Reginald \ Verrenrath, R oland Hayes, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with Frederick Stock d irecting and Alfred ¡wallenstein as cello soloist, and the Gordon String Quartet .

Dancing: R uth St. Den is and T ed Shawn. ~ov. 12. 32 squads of Prohibition agents descend on Cicero, breaking in saloon doors and confiscating tr uckloads of contraband . Al Capone's place, covered under the warrants issued, remains untouched.

N'ov. 14. Dion O 'Banion, Nor th Side gang leader who was gunned down by rivals, is interred in u nconsecrated ground in Mount Carmel cemeter y as over 10,000 watch.

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Chicago History

Among the abundant floral offerings is a huge wreath from the teamsters' union. ¡ov. 23. Leo Koretz, who defrauded his rich Chicago friends by selling stock in nonexistent Panamanian oil last year and rnbbcd sa lt in the wounds by sending thc111 Christmas cards, is nabbed in Halifax, Nova Scotia . Koretz, who was slated to preach a church sermon on Success in his new neighborhood, denies he is a swindler: "Why, I made fortunes for 111y friends. A lot of people insisted that I hand le their 111oney. They just forced it on me."

Chicago Historical Society

Rol and Haye s, whose appearanc e on the co nce rt sta g e w as a h ighl ight of the musica l scene in November.

Books

Studs Terkel and Ora l History

BY LOU IS M . STARR AS A BORN New Yorker who has had a lifelong love affair with Chicago (one would say I have had the best of both possible worlds), I still feel curiously unfulfilled. Something important to me is still missing from this great city.

Oral history was launched in 1948 by historian Allan Nevins at Columbia University. In another age, Nevins reflected, people with important stories to tell might have left letters or diaries or some written record behind. But now, in the era of phone, car and plane, and "contacting," the departed left few intimate records. Solution: coax leaders and others with something worth telling into confiding it all to historians, for the benefit of future generations. The taperecorded results could be neatly typed and then locked up for as long as the interviewee wanted, to encourage him to speak freely.

All the energies of the office, under Nevins' aegis, went into interviewing, transcribing, processing, and submitting oral history memoirs to the Columbia library. He didn't worry about users. They would come along in succeeding generations. In 1959 we were able to publish a 120-page catalog.

There were stirrings of interest elsewhere, from the early 1950s on, and something like a movement got underway. One project begot another, and today there are oral history projects in all 50 states, run by universities, museums, historical societies, corporations, labor unions, and presidential libraries. People are talking into tape recorders on subjects ranging from jazz to moon shots, from affairs of state to affairs of the heart. There is an Oral History Association with a membership of one thousand, its own publications, and an annual meeting with how-to do-it workshop attached. At Columbia an experimental summer course on all aspects of the work is about to be transformed into a full semester's offering

Louis M. Starr, a reporter for the Chicago Sun in the 1940s, has been director of Columbia University's Oral History Research Office since 1 956.

By Studs Terkel: Division Strut: Amtrica, 1966, $7.95; Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression in America, 1970, $8.95; Worki11,i,:: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do,

1974, $ 1o. All, Pantheon Books, lnc.

in Oral History for graduate historians, journalists, and librarians. The current edition of The Oral H istory Collection is computerized, indexed, illustrated, and runs to 500 pages; and as to users, they are legion. For the last six years in a row, they have included autho rs whose books won Pulitzers.

So why should I feel unfulfilled? I t hurts that they are into oral history in Los Angeles, Detroit, New Orleans, to say nothing of Jerusalem and Melbourne and Buenos Aires, but what of my old love? It takes some looking: there are only a couple of small, poorly financed projects in Chicago's institutions. What of the American Jewish Committee (active in our field in New York), the Chicago Public Library, the Newberry, the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Ilfinois, Chicago Circle Campus-yes, and the Chicago Historical Society?

Ch icago Histo ry

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A couple of years ago there was to be an oral history consortium formed among them, one that would tap the enormous resources of the area in one field after another to build a shared collection that would serve as a model of its kind for other great metropolitan areas. The plan called for seven institutional members to contribute a paltry $7,500 apiece, enough to make it work. Five were ready, the others were not, and the plan fell.

Meanwhile one lone Chicagoan, unattached, nonacademic, free as air, has made himself just about the foremost living protagonist of oral history in the eyes of a public that, until he came along, was hardly aware there was such a thing. Studs Terkel. Oddly, I have never met the man, just seen photographs of him, devoured his books, read about him here and there. A Chicago institution, all by himself-and a fellow who could talk your grandmother into shedding her inmost thoughts, do the same with your favorite college teacher or the cop on the corner or Richard J. Daley, or you. And with his tape recorder running the while, right alongside in plain sight.

How his subjects do reveal themselves, when Studs get to them-"the very sort of self-revelation that until recently could be heard only from the mouths of poets," as one reviewer said. The comment applies to all three of the Terkel excursions into oral history, all of which are compilations drawn from his taped interviews.

Studs is viewed askance in some academic quarters, but of course he is not addressing himself to scholars.

Each of his works has evoked enthusiasm, aye, and wonderment from reviewers in general. He is hailed as a new champion of the common man, of historyfrom-the-bottom-up.

Running through much of the critical acclaim is the implication that here we have a whole new genre, a kind of literature we have never known before. It takes nothing from Studs to make the point that this is nonsense. What we have instead is the triumphant revival of a genre that in actuality last bloomed a generation ago. The Disinhrrited Speak , testimonies collected by the Southern Tenant Farmer's Union in 1936, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1937), Benjamin Appel's The People Talk (1939), These Are Our Lives (1939), by the Federal Writers Project, and Erskine Caldwell's text for two picture books with Margaret Bourke-White, You Have Seen Their Faces ( 1937) and Say! Is This the USA? (1940) are random examples.

The fact that Studs uses a tape recorder, while these people had to rely on pad and pencil, only enhances the wonderment at his achievement. Many an interviewer has complained that the recorder puts his subject on guard , intimidates, promotes selfconsciousness or bombast, prevents rapport. These hazards are particularly acute when your subject is not a personage long accustomed to the sound of his own ¡voice but a plain Jane or Joe, suddenly asked leading questions and paralyzed by the inexorable turning of the reels.

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Candor, or " telling it like it is," is the essence of oral history. How does Studs elicit the soul-searching confessions that, time and again in all three books, have the ring of authenticity, that tell you that this person is leveling about his memories, his life, his perceptions? Photographs of Studs are suggestive.

This wizard among interviewers is a mere stub of a man, shock of grey hair, bulbous nose, seamed face evocative of urban blight, humanity, warmth. His is a highly mobile face, and the eyes are attentive/ reflective. He wears his clothes like his fame, loosely, and he's not above taking off his shoes and plopping socked feet on the coffee table. As opposed to your professorial interviewer, then (necktied, polite, precise, often a shade too formal), this is a fellow who can relax your guard, a Mr. Salt-of-the-Earth with a nickname that suits. You have, then, a man most anyone can relate to comfortably-responsive, capable of quick warmth and laughter, a listener who knows when to keep his mouth shut and when to gently prod.

Some of these attributes are shared by all effective interviewers, but Studs has others that make him rather special, as brought out in Denis Brian's interview with him, a quite revealing turning of the tables that appears in Brian's Murderers and Other Friendly People (1973). In it, there is this revealing passage: Brian: Has your technique changed dramatically over the years?

Terkel: [t's hard for me to tell. You know R. D. Laing, the Scottish psychiatrist? He's a very exciting guy, I think, quite controversial in psychiatric circles. A lot of guys don't like him. One of his points is that the psychiatrist has to be the fellow-traveler with the patient: that is, he must reveal his own being to the person. That opens up the person, and, in a sense, your own vulnerability. I'm vu lnerable, you see. I'm pretty terrible with a portable tape-recorder. [Chuckles. ] And sometimes the person, particularly if it's a noncelebrated person-an old lady in a public housing project-will see my taperecorder isn't working. She'll say: "Hey, it's not working! " And r say: "No, I goofed ." Well, you ee, my own vu lnerabi lity makes her feel more kinship.

Brian: This is almost a contradiction of one view of you, which is that you stay very much out of the picture when the interview is written, in fact.

Terkel: Right. There you have it. I think that's part of the contradiction. There's a detachment, at the same time, attachment. It's both. You know what they say of Stendhal: he was objective and subjective at the same time; he was outside and inside, both. [n a sense, if one cou ld be that-I don ' t know if I am-but that is the [chuckles] desideratum, whatever. That would be it, that's devoutly to be wished.

Brian: This is spontaneous with you, though?

Terkel: Oh, yes, I often get lost. The word they use a lot, I notice, is my enthusiasm . Perhaps I am . But always up above, way in the back , that detachment, too. It's not deliberate, it just is. There's a risk here too-to yourself as a person ; the fate of athanael West's A1iss Lonelyhearts or the efficient zombiness of the "cool" observer.

R. D. Laing, Stendhal, athanael West in the space of a few moments, coupled with these insights into the heart of the process, tell you that the man may look and sound like a cabbie, but it's time the academics stopped judging by appearances and took notice, not that Studs would let on that he cares.

"My purpose," he says when Brian asks, "is to scrounge around, scuffle around and to enjoy life and cigars and whiskey and good company and to find out. To find out about this damned human race."

The man also has his contradictions, like the rest of us. He is fervent in telling Brian how he loathes the stereotyped, the banal, despises the typical cliches of the radio or TV interview, as you'd expect he would .

Yet in the Introduction to Working, Studs indulges in one of the oral history world's hoariest bromides. He writes of the tape recorder, "It can be used to capture the voice of the celebrity, whose answers are ever ready and flow through all the expected straits. I have yet to be astonished by one. It can be used to capture the thoughts of the non-celebrated ... and ... I am constantly astonished."

It's a phoney dichotomy. His use of "celebrity" is itself pejorative. Is Sally Rand a celebrity? Read Studs' hilarious interview with her in Hard Times, and tell me he was unastonished. Scan the ones with Myrna Loy, Cesar Chavez,Jerome Zerbe, Ray Moley and other well-known persons in the same volume, and try picturing Studs sitting mute and bored by all he heard, the flow going through all the expected straits! Would he have printed them if they had?

Conversely, it is apparent from his introductions in all three books that Studs discarded a good many Joe Doakes in the sifting process, whatever his astonishment at the time.

The point is not that oral history interviews with "celebrities" are any better or any worse than " common man" interviews. We need both. How one evaluates depends on one's quest, and no generalization about their relative merit is likely to stand examination save in the light of that quest.

Wherein does Studs' work differ from oral history as practiced by others? There are major differences.

To begin with, the intent is different. Studs is out for what he can publish or broadcast. Our people are not out to get material for themselves, but for future use by others, with publication of any kind a remote prospect. (Ten years, on average, elapses between final interview and first use of the material by an author in a book, and use ranges from mere citation to extensive quotation.)

Who owns the material? At Columbia each oral author knows before he begins that he will own both tape and transcript, for we maintain they are his words just as if he had written them. We are their custodians. Since they are his, he has the say regarding use: whether, when, and by whom they may be read. Studs, like some medical and social science interviewers, solves the ownership problem by offering folding green to his interviewees. "I'm taking their life," he asserts. "Even when they are happy with how the interview turns out, I know I've stolen from them." Hence the money. One can argue that he is generous to offer a dollar; on the other hand, considering all those royalties they are helping generate for the Terkel household, some may ponder whether they settled for too little. Our own oral authors, large or small, don't get a cent. Presumably they are flattered by the thought their words will go echoing down the corridors of time in the same Pantheon with Nikita Khrushchev's, Dwight Eisenhower's, Fidel

Castro's, and (I've got to do a little Chicago namedropping here) Robert M. Hutchins' and General Robert E. Wood's.

Most of Terkel's interviews of necessity are onesession affairs. Some of ours are, too, if the thing doesn't go well, or if our subject is being interviewed for some special project, about a single phase of his life. Often, though, we go back for session after session, extracting an oral autobiography a chapter at a time . It is these longer memoirs by men and women who led fascinating lives, some celebrated, some unknown, that have proved most valuable-though I hasten to admit (as I suspect Studs' own wastebasket can testify) there are those with whom you just cannot bring it off, no matter what.

Editing makes the biggest difference of all. Studs does his own, and here is where the scholars snipe at him: the reader has no way of knowing how much editing he has done. This is a process we oral historians leave to the oral author himself, once the typographical slips have been taken out of the transcript. It goes back to him with a letter praying he edit himself with accuracy a lone in mind, rather than style, to preserve the spontaneity. There are anguished outcries-few of us speak as we would write-but eventually we get back a corrected transcript, with points rephrased and elaborated here and there, and the reader will know from the introduction that the document before him is something akin to a legal deposition. The interviewee has read it over, and stands by what he said . Know ing that makes a world of difference to the researcher who would make use of it.

Should the interviewer's questions be left in? In early years we took them out, the theory being that the final transcript should be a smoothly edited, chaptered, highly readable document that would please the oral author. We see it now as a mistake.

The user was the loser. What questions were asked?

How extensive were the corrections, and what were they? Twenty years ago we changed a ll this, let the questions stand, quit most of the editing, and let the oral author's corrections appear precisely as he made them. The scholar knows that he is dealing with the raw material of history, not a finished product, and that is precisely what he gets.

Studs is going just the other way. Division Street left in a few of his questions, Hard Times fewer, and Working fewer still. This means more editing to achieve a smoother flow, and that in turn means a further loss in authenticity from the picky scholar's point of view.

Yet as literature, each succeeding volume seems to me better than the last. This really has to do with focus . Division Street was an exciting idea that succumbed to urban sprawl. It's Chicago's fault the book falls apart, Studs implies in the Introduction, but I suspect he'd do better by her today, perhaps by focusing on Division Street itself instead of using it as metaphor alone.

Hard Times comes off much better-one era, imaginatively explored . It isn't quite what its subti tle proclaims, An Oral History of the Great Depression. Oral history-specific firsthand recollection of events and the times-is mixed in with the oral tradition, or what Chicago History

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people recall being told about the Depression itself or events they did not witness. This blurs the focus some, though the lore is itself of interest and value.

Working has none of the problems of the first two.

If there's any problem, it is that reading more than a few pages at a time leaves you drained, such is the empathy you develop for the narrators talking about the jobs that rule their lives. It also leaves you marveling that no social scientist nor writer of any breed has ever come up with anything akin to this blockbuster of a study . Lewis Mumford writes of it, "Only an interviewer of genius, exploiting the tape recorder as hardly anyone else has done, could possibly have brought it forth." One cannot lay it down, as Mumford says, without experiencing an irresistible impulse to re-examine one's own work, own day, own attitude, even one's own post-industrial society. Yet this, unlike the others, is a monograph, and the focus is relcntles ly steady and clear: here is a broad crosssection of Americans today, telling what they think about \\'hat they do. \,Veil, I don't know where Studs goes from here, but I do know what he can do for Chicago, and for oral history. If he believes, as I do, that oral history is going to become one of the major primary sources for future understanding of our time, our place, maybe he can help pull that consortium together. A man who can produce Working can shake the lethargy of cultural institutions, raise money, bring them to a common purpose. And help train their interviewers.

How they would flock to him!

Small projects at Chicago State and Roosevelt universities can't do it. It will take nothing less than a consortium of major institutions tc create a meaningful record of Chicago's cultural, economic, political and social life, working in patterned areas over the next decade and longer. Is the work worth doing?

Well, does Chicago cherish it cultural heritage in ways that go beyond brick and mortar?

So I take a deep breath and ask one final question, v\lill future generations marvel that Chicagoans had the foresight to leave them a rich legacy of oral history of our own times, or shake their heads that the community, though nurturing one of the great interviewers of his time, slumbered on while oral history burgeoned all around her?

and more, of other geniuses before he found bis vocation. And so, in most of the pictures we see of him, even the one which adorns the jacket of this fascinating biography, he is an old man with a gray beard.

Laura Wood Roper has written us a fascinat ing biography on several counts. First, she had access to the family papers (now at the Library of Congress, but she was the first to work with them); second, she has for her subject a man who took the world for his habitat and brought to his chosen field a lifetime of experience of life itself; third, she has dwelt long and interestingly on the mental development of the world's first "landscape architect" (the term originated with his work), and so ha given us the context-the personal, political , and social history-of the decades in which that great mind developed.

An Olmsted park was like no other. In whatever American city you find one, it is a place where the ordinary folk of the city can relax, in which their children can romp, with shade trees under which one can read or doze, and there is generally the refreshing presence of water. They arc easy for the city dweller to reach and , though not any longer well-maintained, relatively hard for him to damage. There are no fussy floral arrangements, no formal annual plantings, no pruned boxwood. Such color as there is is supplied by great shrubs which, having bloomed, contribute texture and flowing form through the rest of the growing season. The man was no horticu lturist, though he was many other things in other seasons of his life; he was dedicated to hi own vision, once he arrived at it, of parks for the people, parks which would restore them and, in the middle of rough-andtumble city life, create a " civilizing" influence. \,Ve owe him a tremendous debt, we who either live in cities or merely visit them. Laura Wood Roper informs us that we are also indebted to his family.

They were well-to-do, and permissive beyond our own children's wildest hopes. Nothing seemed too much for Frederick Olmsted to ask, or for his fami ly to arrange. Let presently disappointed parents take hope: the boy was also a high-school dropout.

Much of Mrs. Roper's biography is in Olmsted's own words, and he was a first-rate writer, concerned with ideas as well as with personal experiences and the world around him . The result is that most rewarding of volumes: the big, heavy book that is almost impossible to lay down. We recommend it without reservation.

Urb an Li bera l ism and Progressi ve Refo rm

by John D. Buenker

Brief Reports by the Staff

Scribner's, 1973. $8.95.

COMPLEXITIES of the Progressive Era, before World War I, have always been difficult to grapple with. Many hi torians have emphasized the role of upper and middle-class " structural" reformers, who proposed "progressive" legislation to get rid of the corruption and bossism that plagued the cities.

John D . Buenker refutes such interpretations. Dismissing "progressiveness" as an imprecise term, he uses "urban liberalism" to describe the spirit of reform in the urban areas. The real reformers, he believes, were "new stock" politicians firm ly li nked to

THE

FLO : A Biography of Frederick La w Olmsted

by Laura Wood R oper Johns Hopkins, 1974. $15. selected the site for the Columbian Exposition of 1893, he was well past retireme nt age. Even in 1871, when he made a plan for J ackson Park, he was middle-aged. He was no longer a young man in 1858, when he laid out Central Park in Manhatta n. I t took h im what has been the lifetime, WHEN FREDERICK OLMSTED

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the interests of the immigrants either through family ties or own political self-interest. To Buenker, these urban bosses were the chief authors of the legislation that marked the beginnings of the welfare sta te, the political philosophy of "one man-one vote," and governmental intervention in the economy to protect the unfortunate. In general, they pushed for legislation that would make the political system more democratic and responsive to the needs of the "new stock" working class.

Buenkcr's study rests on firm ground when it draws attention to the progressive side of urban machines and the neglected role of the urban working cla s, but the point can be overemphasized. Although Buenkcr's evidence clearly suggests the links between the urban new stock politicians and their constituents, it docs not show conclusively that the impulse for reform came from the bottom up. Buenker also raises the specter of replacing one elusive term, "progressiveness," with anothcr-"urban liberalism."

The Seven Stairs, 2d. ed.

by Stuart Brent 0' Hara, 1974. $3 .50.

of Stuart Brent's bookshops is the story of a minor miracle, a story for booklovcrs.

It would appear that Brent had nothing but liabilities, but his personal assets were enormous, and they turned him into one of the mo t famous booksellers in the country. The same assets inform his captivating book.

The second edition contains a Postscript written in 1973, bringing Brent's career about up to date, so that even readers who possess the fir t edition will want to rush right over to his Michigan Avenue shop to buy this one. Try to open it up first, though: on our own copy, the soft-cover binding was so thickly glued that we couldn't open the pages without cracking the glue. We noted cheerfully, however, that the pages are sewn and the printing job good . Maybe the reviewers got the rejects.

THE STORY

The First Century: The Chicago Bar Association 1874-1974 by llerman Kogan Rand McNally, 1974. $12 .50. pulls no punches as he chronicles both the achievements and the blind spots of the Chicago Bar Association, founded in 1873 by attorneys who sought to enhance the reputation of their profession in a city with more than its share of shysters. The need for judicial reform a nd for disciplining attorneys were concerns of the Chicago Bar Association from the outset. The process of judicia l reform is ncvercnd ing: the CBA was instrumental in the formation of the Attorney Registration and Discipline Commis~ion in 1972, which operates independently of state and county bar associations to investigate and hear complaints against Illinois lawyers. R eaders will enjoy the behind-the-scenes treatment of uch famous Chicago trial s as Haymarke t; Loeb-Leopold; the "C hicago Seven" Conspiracy; and the Black Panthers.

THE AUTHOR

Hiking Trails in the Midwest

by Jerry Sullivan and Glenda Daniel Grcatlakes Living Press, 1974. $5.95. and much-needed book with descriptions, in most cases adequate and not easily available, of hiking trails in Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, v\lisconsin , and Ontario . Although the introductory chapter on backpacking techniques and equipment is superficial, the Midwestern hiker would be well advised to buy this book.

A USEFUL

The Ebony Handbook

by The Editors of Ebony Johnson, 1 974. $20.

TII!S SECOND edition of The Ebony llandbook (first published in 1966 as The Negro Handbook) is a worthy uccc sor in tylc and format to the standard reference ,,·ork of its kind, the .\'egro Year Book and Annual Encyclopedia of the .\"egro, which was edited by the distinguished bibliographer, Monroe N. Work, and published intermittently from 1912 to 1952.

Providing a wealth of contemporary statistical data and textual information, The Ebony Handbook is an indispensable guide for libraries and offices, as well suited to the casual reader as to the meticulous researcher. The recent demographic tabular data and the 1969-1973 chronologies make the sections on Population, Education, Employment & Labor, and Politic & Government four of the most interesting and useful of the volume's twenty areas of concentration, all of which have merit.

Such articles as the one on Black Mu ic and the Ten Best Cities for Blacks are two of the many features which render the volume timely reading and which make it an important resource for those who wish to understand black life in America. It should be noted, however, that it has a worthy competitor in The Negro Almanac (2nd ed., 1971, $27.95), which is stronger on biographical and other textual material.

The Illinois Law Cou rts i n Three Centurie s

by George Fiedler Physicians' Record Company, 1973. $12.75. history, The Illinois Law Courts in Three Centuries: £673-1973 traces the evolution of Illinois courts from the French occupation to the twentieth century. Cook County Circuit Court] udge George Fiedler's straightforward account fleshes out the common law, and lawyers will find chapters 12 through 20 especially valuable as a record of ongoing judicial reforms in the Illinois courts since 1964. An index would have rendered the information more accessible, yet it remains the only complete history of the Illinois courts to date. Laymen may prefer David F. Rolew ick's booklet A Short History of the Illinois Judicial Systems ( 1968, available free from the Administrative Office of the· Illinois Courts, 30 N. Michigan Ave ., Chicago, Ill., 60602).

A DOCUMENTARY

Ch icago History

12 7

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY Clark Street at North Avenue, Ch icago, Illinois 606 14 Telephone: Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

T heodore T ieken, President Stewart S. D ixon, 1st Vice-President J ames R . Getz, 2nd Vice- President Gard ner H. Stern, Treasurer TRUSTEES

Bowen Bla ir Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon J arnes R. Getz Philip 'vV. Hummer \Villard L. K ing And rew McNally III M rs. C . Phill ip Miller

Bryan S. R eid, J r.

Tathan A. Scott, J r .

G il bert H. Scribner, J r.

Haro ld Byron Smith, J r.

Hermon Dun lap Sm ith Gardner H. Stern Theodore T ieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

MEMBERSHIP T he Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by membersh ips. Membership i open to anyo ne interested in the Soc iety's activities and objective ' . Classes of membership and dues are as follows: Annua l,$ 15 a year; Life, $250 (one payment); Govern ing Life, $500 (one payment); Govern ing Annual, $100 (o ne payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $1000 (one payment).

Members receive the Society's magazine, Chicago lfistory, invitations to all special function held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions. Members and their immed iate families are admitted free to the museum at all times.

SUBSCRIPTIONS Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are $2.25 by mai l, $2 at newsstands and bookshops. Subscriptions arc $ 1o for 4 issues.

Stuart Brent and Ben Hecht at one of Brent's highly successful autograph parties, this one in his bookstore in 1954. Brent' s book is reviewed in this issue, in which Henry B. Sell also recalls earlier times with Ben Hecht.

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