Chicago History | Summer 1981 by Chicago History Museum

Chicago History SUMMER 1981

$2.50

Exhibit Portraits of Chicago of some thirty watercolors and oils by Chicago artist Ri chard A. Chase (1891- ) will be on view at the Chicago Historical Society from July IO through September 30. The works on display have been selected from a collection of more than a hundred paintings by Chase, donated to the Society by the artist. Chase produced numerous paintings of Chicago city scenes during the decade from 1925 to J935. Among the most striking is a series depicting men at work on bridge construction, including the oil, Wabash Avenue Viaduct, shown below. Others are cityscapes in the mode of A1ichigan Avenue Loohing North, also shown here . AN EXHIBIT

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Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Summer 1981

Fannia Weingartner Editor

VOLUME X, NUMBER 2

CONTENTS 66

Arthur Siegel: A Life in Photography, 1913-1978 by Larry A. Viskochil

R oberta Casey Editorial Assistant

Investigating the Eastland Accident by Ann D. Gordon

Karen Kohn Designn

Chicago and the Bungalow Boom of the 1920s by Daniel J. Prosser

Remember the Nurses: Michael Reese Hospital School of Nursing, 1890-1981 by Elizabeth Jachimowicz

"Big Red in Bronzeville": Mayor Ed Kelly Reels in the Black Vote by Roger Biles

Gail Farr Casterline Associate Editor

Walter \V. Krutz Paul \V . Pctraitis Pltotog111 jJliy

112

Looking Backward: Off to Mackinac! by Carl A. 1orberg

120

The Society: An Inside-Outside View

122

Book Reviews

127

Notes

Cover: Chicago's skyline in 1962 looking south from Lincoln Park, photographed by Arthur Siegel whose work is on exhibit at the Society. CHS, gift of Irene Siegel. See page 66.

Articles appearing in this journal arc abstracted and indexed in Historical Ab tracts and A 111e1 irn: Hi to, y and Life

Arthur Siegel: A Life in Photography, 1913-1978 By Larry A. Viskochil

"Photographs are made through work) thought) and technique) and the secrets are in the head and heart) not in the technical data. n Arthur Siegel

ARTHUR s. SIEGEL is well known as an important figure in the history of photography in Chicago. His reputation should widen considerably, however, as scholars, photographers, and all those interested in photography take advantage of a new exhibit and research collection at the Chicago Historical Society. Both are made possible by Irene Siegel's generous donation o( thousands of prints and negatives created by her husband from the J930s through the late 1970s. While it will take many years for a collection of this size and importance to be studied in detail, a representative sampling has been selected for exhibition at the Society from July 10 through September 30. Siegel's career as a photographer began in Detroit, his birthplace, when he won a box camera in a newspaper selling contest in 1927. Over the next half century his involvement with photography would take him into almost every branch of the profession. , ,vhile he was formally educated as a sociologist at the University of Michigan and at ,vayne State University, his lifelong career as a photographer seemed almost preordained from the start. His employment by the Visual Education Department of the Detroit school system allowed him to expand his skills with the camera and eventually to support himseH by it. During the J930s Siegel worked in Detroit as a free-lance photographer and photojournalist making excellent documentary images. At the same time he began creating experimental images. It was this promise of versatility in Siegel's work that prompted Laszlo MoholyNagy to offer Siegel a scholarship at the New

Larry A. Viskochil is Curator of Graphics at the Chicago Historical Society.

Bauhaus School which he had established in Chicago. Siegel, in turn, recognized that Ioholy was engaged in the kind of openminded search for the new that would always impress him, and accepted the invitation in 1937. Although the school closed for lack of financial support after only one year, Siegel's time there proved pivotal for his development as a photographer and teacher. Despite Siegel's return to Detroit the next year, this involvement with Moholy, the ew Bauhaus, and its successors-the School of Design, the Institute of Design , and the Illinois Institute of Technology- would continue for the rest of his life. Siegel eagerly carried the gospel of the New Bauhaus back to Detroit, spreading it among fellow members of the Detroit Photography Club, the leadership of which he shared with Harry Callahan. He also tried to apply the principles of the 1 ew Bauhaus to his profession ,,Âˇhen he returned to free-lance work in photojournali m for newspapers and magazines (both in Detroit and as a stringer for the New Yori< Times and other publications), as well as to industrial, commercial, and wedding photography. Certainly his most published image of this period was Th e Right nf Assembly, which he made in 1941 while documenting a meeting of auto workers during a Chrysler strike. His training as a sociologi t made him especially perceptive as a photo-clocumentarian, and toward the end of the Farm Security Administration's photographic survey he was hired by Roy Stryker as a free-lance. During the early 1940s Siegel worked under Stryker documenting the home front's industrial contributions to the war effort for the Office of "\Var Information. Later he enlisted in the Signal Corps and served as a photogra-

Arthur Siegel on assignment photographing an American Cyanimid Company industrial site. CHS, ICHi-15770, gift of Irene Siegel.

pher at Chanute Field in Rantoul, Illinois. While there he had published in U.S. Cam era a series of photographs showing camp life, entitled Barracks 130, We Call It Hom e. His work already showed a breadth of interest and versatility, including army documentary projects, technical assignments, "girlie" photos for the base newspaper, and experimental work. After the war, in 1946, i\Ioholy again invited Siegel to come to Chicago, this time to organize a photography program for the Institute of Design. The I.D., as it would soon be known, was the successor to the failed New Bauhaus School where, Siegel had studied nine years earlier. It was now housed in the old quarters of the Chicago Historical Society at Dearborn and Ontario streets, a building which i\foholy had recently purchased. i\Ioholy would die ,everal month Âˇ later. The school would be absorbed by the Illinois Institute of Technology in 19'19. The photography course of study which

Siegel designed with help from Harry Callahan would become the model for many new programs at other schools. It incorporated Moholy's principles for the examination of, and experimentation with, the basic elements of color, light, form, tone, texture, and motion. It was hoped that graduatesâ&#x20AC;˘ of the program would be able to create products that were both practical and aesthetically pleasing by achieving that blend of art and technology which was the foundation of the Bauhaus tradition. That first year Siegel organized a photography workshop series at I.D. which would serve as a pattern for sim ilar workshops across the nation. The list of visiting photographers included Berenice Abbott, Irwin Blumenfeld, Gordon Coster, Beaumont Newhall, Paul Strand, Roy Stryker, and Weegee. Siegel rightly considered his contributions to photographic education to be his greatest achievement. Although he left the I.D.'s photography department in the l 950s to do com67

Arthur Siegel mercial work, he returned occasionally in the early I 960s to teach various subjects. In 1967 he was rehired on a full-time basis by Aaron Siskind, and became chairman of the photography department in 1971. Until the end of his life in 1978 he devoted his major energy to teaching photography, photographic history, and film making. While Siegel always had the respect of his students, he was not afraid to risk unpopularity by setting uncompromisingly high standards for them. The excellence that he demanded of his students he also asked of himself, assigning himself the same problems and experiments and applying the solutions to both his commercial and personal photography. Throughout his career he investigated the full range of possibilities inherent in the basic materials of photography, experimenting with photograms, combination printing, negative prints, solarizations, and other techniques achieved both in the darkroom and with the camera. His use of 35mm color film in these experiments was especially innovative. While too abstract to be recognized by a wide audience, this work was added to the permanent collections of the Museum of ]\[odern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, George Eastman House in Rochester, the Library of Congress, and The Art Institute of Chicago, among others. He was given oneman shows at the Detroit Institute of Art, Toledo Art Museum, Walker Art Center, George Eastman House, and The Art Institute of Chicago, and his work appeared in numerous group shows across the country. Many of his images appeared in the photographic press and in magazine articles by and about Siegel. The portion of his work that has been seen most often by the general public was the result of thousands of assignments for major magazines and newspapers. His journalistic experience started with the New York Times-Wide World Photo Service in the late thirties. From then through the 1950s he was given major free-lance assignments in Chicago by Life, Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated, and many other publications. The contacts he made as a result of these assignments brought him many other lucrative commercial projects in the area of advertising, portrait, and annual report pho68

tography. His commercial success can be attributed to the fact that he displayed the same kind of care in his professional work as he did in his personal artistic endeavors. He was highly sought after for his understanding of the history of the medium, his appreciation of his clients' needs, and his dependability and versatility. In Chicago, Siegel also gained much public recognition for his editorship of Chicago's Famous Buildings, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1965. This standard pocket guide to architecture in Chicago is now in its third edition. Of the photographs in the book, sixty are by Siegel; the rest are, for the most part, the work of his students at I.D. Siegel's understanding of architectural history illustrates the breadth of his knowledge on a wide variety of subjects. His respect for the uses of history-whether it be the history of architecture, the history of photography, or history in its broadest sense-is only partly attributable to his training in the social sciences and in photography as a documentary medium. Siegel was acutely aware that an artist could not be innovative unless he knew what had gone before and was conscious of his own place in history. From that day in 1946 when he arrived in Chicago and photographed the new home of the Institute of Design on Dearborn to the encl of his life, Arthur Siegel followed the I.D. tradition of combining art and technology to create the beautiful and the useful. Examples of Siegel's personal and commercial work available in the exhibition and in the research collection include photographs of teachers and students at the New Bauhaus and the Institute of Design; photograms and other experimental photographs; documentary photographs of steel mills, shipyards, and other industrial sites; a series of photographs depicting nightlife in the orth Clark Street tenderloin district in the mid-1940s; color photographs of State Street scenes in the l 950s; examples of photographs taken for annual reports; picture essays and portraits of businessmen, artists, actors, musicians, architects, writers, and other prominent personalities for major magazines; and architectural photographs of famous Chicago buildings. They stand as testimony to an exceptionally productive career.

Arthur Siegel

Laszlo Moholy-Nagy lecturing at the Institute of Design in the late 1940s. CHS, ICHi-15839, gift of Irene Siegel.

Shipyards near Baltimore, Maryland, photographed by Siegel for the Office of War Information under Roy Stryker in 1943. CHS. ICHi-15846, gift of Irene Siegel.

Arthur Siegel

After Siegel enlisted in the Air Corps during World War II he was assigned to Chanute Field in Rantoul , Illinois. There he photographed his fellow soldiers relaxing in a barracks as part of a series of forty-six photographs of life on a military base. CHS, ICHi-15866, gift of Irene Siegel.

The Right of Assembly (facing page) was part of a series of photographs taken by Arthur Siegel during a Detroit auto workers ' strike in 1941. It is a fine example of a documentary image made more powerful by skillful presentation as an almost abstract design. CHS, ICHi-15877, gift of Irene Siegel.

Arthur Siegel

Above: This photo is one of a series on street , tavern , and nightclub life on North Clark Street in the late 1940s, which Siegel apparently planned to publish under the title "The Rialto of the Half World." CHS, ICHi-15845, gift of Irene Siegel. Above left : Siegel experimented with making photograms (camera-less images made on photo-sensitive paper in a darkroom) throughout his career. Much of his success as an artist can be attributed to the favorable critical reception accorded such imaginative designs as this one. CHS, ICHi-15870, gift of Irene Siegel. Left: This photo shows architect Mies van der Rohe, designer of many buildings on the Illinois Institute of Technology campus, including Crown Hall , which has housed the Institute of Design since 1956. CHS, ICHi-15865, gift of Irene Siegel.

Arthur Siege l

Marina City, 1964, taken by Siegel for Chicago 's Famous Buildings , a photographic guide to the city's architectural landmarks. CHS, ICHi-15812, gift of Irene Siegel.

Investigating the Eastland Accident By Ann D. Gordon

"The Eastland was all ready to pull out) when suddenly she went over on her side) and then there were horrible things happening. I heard women screaming and shrieking and children crying out and everybody seemed mad. It seemed to take the big boat only a few seconds to turn over on its side.)) Survivor Mildred Anderson as quoted in the Chicago Daily News, July 25, 7975

"On account of unseemly effort of labor and vessel interests to make capital out of Eastland catastrophe) this Department subjected to gross misrepresentation.)) Telegram to President Woodrow Wilson from Assistant Secretary of Commerce Edwin F. Sweet, July 26, 7975

steamship Eastland capsized in Chicago in 1915 leaving a death toll of 812, an outraged public blamed not only the owners of the boat but also the federal SteamboatInspection Service. Since this agency was responsible for enforcing the government's safety regulations, it is not surprising that questions should have been raised about its effectiveness in carrying out its task. Shock and anguish fueled hopes of reforming the Inspection Service, and pressure mounted to ensure that investigations of the accident achieved that result. For a few days it seemed that the effort might succeed, that President Woodrow \!\Tilson might appoint a special commission of investigation. Instead he decided to back up his Secretary of Commerce, who intended to contain the protest in Chicago. \Vithin a year emotions had subsided, and all avenues for responding to the tragedy with reform had been blocked. Western Electric Company workers and their families arrived at the Chicago River early on WHEN THE

Ann D. Gordon is a historian liv ing in Madison, Wisconsin. This article is based on research begun as assistant editor of The Papers of ·woodrow Wilson. Gordon is currently researching women's organizations in Chicago, 1860-1900.

July 24 to board excursion boats for their annual outing. The Eastland loaded first. She was a steel vessel, 265 feet long, narrow in the beam, a nd tall, built for fuel-efficiency and speed as a lake freighter. In the summer months she carried only passengers-as many as her decks would hold. Sailors considered her a cranky ship with a greater tendency to list than other ships, but to this clay some navigators claim she ·was seaworthy when handled properly. \\Then she listed sharply toward the clock with only half of her load of Western Electric workers, the chief engineer simply trimmed her up by leLti ng water in to the ballast tanks,• and passengers continued to stream on board. With 2,500 passengers counted, gang planks were drawn up, lines thrown to a tugboat, and the order given to start engines. The Eastland suddenly tilted toward the river and, after a brief •Ballast weights a hip 's hull for stability. R ather than carqing ballast of a fixed weight, th e Eastland relied on tanks of water which the crew adjusted at the capta in 's discretion. Lowering the water level in the tanks would raise the ship higher in the water-to cross a sandbar, for instance. Critics charged th at the system invited risks because it allowed ships to sail short distances without any ballast. Furthermore, the weight of water shi fti11g inside half-filled tanks while the crew changed the water level could throw the ship on its side.

For the entire week following the disaster, hundreds of rescue workers searched the ship and surrounding waters for the bodies of the victims. CHS, ICHi-02033.

pause at a precarious angle, rolled over until her starboard side hit the river bottom. Bodies were thrown from the upper decks into the river where bystanders rescued many, though not before the current and the panic took hundreds of lives. Below deck, more passengers died as water rushed into the hull and as the downward slide of people and objects crushed them. At a distance of sixty-five years it is difficult to recapture the ,horror that this accident evoked among Chicagoan . Tewspapers announced it under banner headlines ancl remarkable photographs; sightseers gathered on the bridges and river banks to see the fallen queen of lake traffic and the heroes of rescue work. But the impact was greatest on \Vestern Electric employees and the section of Cicero where most of them lived. The Red Cross counted twenty-eight nationali-

ties among the victims, with Germans, Bohemians, and Poles the most heavily affi icted . Seventy percent of those killed wei,e between the ages of fifteen and thirty, and twenty-four of the victims were chi ldren under five. A journalist found, on one block in Hawthorne, that every household had lost someone and one house stood empty because all of its inhabitants had drowned. Twenty-two families were wiped out, and 660 families lost at least one member. Relief and rescue work involved hundreds of people during the following week, including police, firefighters, and sailors. Survivors wandered through emergency morgues scattered in empty warehouses around the Loop until central facilities opened at the Second Regiment ,\rmory. A nursery there kept children while their parents looked for the bodies of family 75

Eastland Investigation members and friends. Office staff from ·western Electric operated a registry at the dock to find out who and how many were missing, and the Red Cross opened relief offices at the Hawthorne plant to be near those who would make claims. Philanthropist Julius Rosenwald headed a mayor's committee to raise money for relief. Settlement house workers and clubwomen fed rescue workers from a tugboat in the river, and doctors gave free inoculations against typhoid to anyone touched by the filthy Chicago River. Clergymen and choirs from all parts of the city volunteered their services for funerals. Mayor Thompson joined 1,000 people in a funeral procession for a seven-year-old boy whose body had lain unclaimed at the morgue because there were no survivors in his family. As Graham Taylor of the Chicago Commons settlement house mused, if federal inspection of steamboats had been as efficient as Chicago's

management of rescue and relief work, the accident would have been prevented. Steamboats were regulated by a patchwork, clecentralizecl agency within the Department of Commerce, known as the Steamboat-Inspection Service. The Service divided the nation into regions, each with its own supervising inspector appointed with presidential approval, and hired two local inspectors by civil service examination for each port-one to inspect hulls and the other to inspect boilers. In addition, local inspectors counted and tested life-sav ing equipment, licensed captains and engineers, and determined the number of passengers a ship might carry. ,vhen an accident occurred involving a boat regulated by the Service, local inspectors routinely held the only legally constituted inquiry. They could revoke whatever certificates and licenses they had issued and impose fines if faulty equipment or incompe-

Rescue efforts began only seconds after the Eastland overturned but many lives were lost to panic and the current. The fortunate found footing atop the ship's port side. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-B4,446, gift of Field Enterprises.

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Eastland Investigation tent sailing had contributed to the accident. Within hours of the Eastland accident this investigative procedure came under attack from the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). The CFL had questioned the quality of federal inspection, particularly on excursion boats, one year earlier in .a heated exchange of letters with officials of the Department of Commerce, and as soon as the Eastland went over, CFL Secretary Edward Nockels sent a telegram of protest to Woodrow vVilson refeuing him to those letters. The CFL had the advantage of the prophet, for it had warned in 1914 that the excursions leaving Chicago were so overcrowded that inevitably one would turn over before it left the dock. With the prophecy fulfilled, the CFL asked whether the nation could afford to let the inspectors investigate themselves. In a second telegram to \'\Tilson on the same day, Nockels accused the inspectors of acting "more

like shipping agents than public officials" and called for outside investigators. Other labor organizations took the same stand. The Women's Trade Union League of Chicago prepared a message to vVilson, charging the federal government with criminal negligence and blaming the Inspection Service for "the dangerous overcrowding of excursion steamers." Over the next ten days, firemen, teamsters, garment workers, musicians, sailors, and American Federation of Labor President Samuel Gompers joined in urging \.!\Tilson to take action. The Inspection Service was vulnerable to attack. Its inspectors worked independently and often without adequate directives. Precise guidelines governed their decisions with regard to ships' boilers, for instance, but the Service depended on the discretion of each inspector in such sensitive decisions as the limit on the number of passengers to be carried. Over the years

Divers searched the ship's hull , where many passengers had been trapped by rushing water and the downward slide of people and objects. CHS, ICHi-15794, gift of L. L. Atwell.

Eastland Investigation

Rescuers carried the dead to several emergency sites until a central morgue was set up at the Second Regiment Armory on Washington Boulevard. CHS, ICHi-15795, gift of L. L. Atwell.

the Eastland had been accorded very uneven treatment. An aggressive inspector in Cleveland had once lowered her passenger limit because he thought the existing figure too high for a ship dependent on water ballast. No regulations directed him to evaluate stability in ships, and his colleagues thought his action somewhat willful. The ship did lose money for her owners subsequently, though the reasons for that were more numerous than just the limit on ticket sales. Inspector Robert Reid had examined the Eastland in 1915 for new owners in Michigan and had raised the limit simply by counting the number of life jackets. Âˇwhen the owners telephoned him to say that they had placed even more life jackets on board, he increased the limit again without visiting the ship. Where the rules of inspection were clear, Reid had a reputation for toughness. No regulations prohibited what he had clone for the Eastland's owners. There were reasons to question whether the 78

routine inquiry of the Inspection Service was adequate to investigate an accident of such magnitude. Though used on occasion to rid the Service of incompetent inspectors, the inquiry needed first to guarantee and protect agency operations. It was not a means to reform federal regulations. If it were true, as critics charged, that the Eastland turned over because she carried too many passengers, and yet the number of passengers on board matched the limit allowed by local inspectors, an investigation by the Service could only conclude that no one was at fault. But critics pointed out that unless investigators were free to step outside the bureaucratic circuit, their conclusions might only compound weaknesses in federal inspection standards. The attack on inspectors following the accident was further compounded by a long and bitter conflict over sailors' safety. It had pitted the Lake Seamen's Union against the Lake Carriers' Association, a powerful group of ship-

Eastland Investigation

As news of the disaster spread, sightseers and reporters hurried to the bridge at Clark and South Water streets (in the background) to watch the rescue effort. CHS, ICHi-02039, photo by Jun Fujita, gift of Mrs. Jun Fujita.

owners, and caught the federal regulators in between. Sailors had sought federal legislation which would raise the minimum safety standards on all ships using American ports and guarantee employment of certified able seamen. Specifications about the number of lifeboats and the number of able seamen needed to man those lifeboats were included in the Seamen's (LaFollette) Act, which had finally passed early in 1915. Nockels of the CFL had served as labor's chief lobbyist in the House of Representatives during the last intense campaign for the bill in l 914 and another local labor leader, Victor Olander, vice-president of the Lake Seamen's Union, had lobbied in the Senate. Sailors had gained support for the safety legislation from social reformers nationally and locally through organizations like the ational Consumers' League. The Lake Carriers' Association had warred against the Lake Seamen's Union since at least 1908 when it blacklisted all union sailors in an

effort to break the union. It had delayed passage of the Seamen's Act and fought to exempt inland shipping from its requirements. Provisions of the act were not yet in force on the Great Lakes in the summer of 1915, and the Association was using that respite t@ agitate for _!:epeal. The Eastland's owners, the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company, had complained to Secretary of Commerce "W illiam Redfield as recently as June 30, 1915. The company's vicepresident insisted he could not make a profit if he were required to place lifeboats and life rafts on valuable deck space. The new law would require that he provide boats for only half of his passenger load during the summer season of lake excursions. The Inspection Service, at its top levels, had lost credibility as an impartial regulator of the industry during the fight. Career men in the agency had taken positions which jeopardized the bill in its last stages, and union men were in no mood to trust them. Labor leaders were

Eastland Investigation confident, however, that the Inspection Service was an exception in the federal government. Their appeals to President Wilson showed consistent faith that government could be neutral in a conflict between profits and safety. Because President "Wilson had supported passage of the Seamen's Act against strong opposition, people counted on him to lay a heavy hand on the shipping interests if public welfare required it. Labor's demand that the President intercede spread to other sectors of Chicago. The national magazine of social reformers, The Survey, featured reports of the accident and investigations to stir interest outside Chicago. Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the Women's Trade Union League, spoke for many reformers as well as labor when she suggested to President Wilson that he appoint a commission "on which labor and [the] travelling public are properly represented." The same message went to the President from the Chicago Common Council, some women's clubs, and Polish-

American organizations. At the Department of Commerce, the outcry against inspectors investigating themselves prompted an improvisational approach to the accident. Secretary Redfield, who was on vacation, and his acting secretary, Edwin Sweet, wanted to distinguish the inquiry "as far as practicable under the law from a purely departmental proceeding," as Redfield explained to President Âˇwilson. He sent the acting Supervising Inspector General to take charge in Chicago on Sunday, July 25; when criticism of the Inspection Service continued to mount, the departmental Solicitor and Redfield himself took trains to Chicago on Monday; and on Wednesday, Redfield announced the appointment of extra , unofficial members to the board of inquiry. Nonetheless, when Redfield arrived in Chicago on July 27, he damned critics who drew conclusions before hearing the case, dared Victor Olander to make good his charges under oath, and taunted the city for reacting too

Lines of anxious relatives waited outside the Second Regiment Armory to identify the more than 800 who had perished. CHS, ICHi-02050, photo by Jun Fujita, gift of Mrs. Jun Fujita.

Eastland Investigation strongly. According to the Evening Post, he failed to "invite public confidence" in the inquiry and concerned himself too much with finding "justification for his department and its officials." The Daily News said that he made an "unpleasant spectacle of himself" and took "a mild technical view of the situation." Redfield maintained that his principal problem was to determine whether there were facts injurious to any government service. He was well aware of damage done to the Inspection Service after an accident in 1904 which killed 1,000 people in New York Harbor. After a presidential commission investigated that disaster, local inspectors and the supervising inspector lost their jobs. But in 1915 even the agency's critics detected weakness in that "solution," recognizing that it placed too much blame on inspectors without addressing questions about the quality of regulation. International Seamen's Union president, Andrew Furuseth, warned against a repetition of the 1904 response in I 915 and recommended instead that the Service be reformed. Eliminate "mere discretion" from the inspectors' work and tell them how to calculate a safe load of passengers, he urged. Figure out how to make safety the owner's self-interest and how to regulate an insurance industry that put "a premium on taking risks" with ships and lives. Redfield wanted no part of such extensive investigations. Carl Sandburg, then a journalist for the Socialist Day Book, pursued Furuseth's point in a conversation with Redfield and then publ ished his notes of what was said. Sandburg reported that when he asked whether the Secretary had located the report on the Eastland by the American Bureau of Shipping, the insurance group which tested the ship's stability, Redfield replied: "That bureau does not enter into [the] affair. It is a private concern operated, I believe, by insurance companies." Sandburg persisted: "But the local inspector of hulls ... told newspaper men ... that all standards and tests with regard to stability of hulls are fixed by the American Bureau of Shipping." At that point Redfield laughed heartily and broke off the conversation. Redfield and Edwin Sweet had defined the issues for head-on collision with the people who perceived the accident as the culmination of

years of business risks and federal collusion. Even Redfield's appointments to the board of inquiry further showed his refusal to take seriously the terms of conflict that his critics had defined. Besides two experts in naval technology, whose impartiality no one doubted, Redfield chose businessmen: banker Harry A. Wheeler and merchant Marvin B. Pool from Chicago, and, from St. Louis, Philip B. Fouke, a man clearly identified with the campaign to repeal the Seamen's Act. Fouke was chairman of a Chamber of Commerce committee studying how to make the Steamboat-Inspection Service more responsive to shipowners' needs. No labor representative received an invitation. None was available who had not "expressed [his] views publicly in advance of the hearing," Redfield explained to "Wilson. When Illinois LieutenantGovernor Barrett O'Hara complained about this decision, Redfield appointed him to the board. O'Hara did succeed in pushing Redfield to consider questions which were a little broader than the most recent inspection of the Eastland. Once Redfield's hearings opened, his handling of sensitive questions brought more criticism upon him. His cross-examination of hull inspector Robert Reid became notorious. Journalists had discovered that Reid's decision to increase the Eastland's passenger limit coincided with the company's decision to hire Reid's sonin-law as the ship's chief engineer. Redfield questioned Reid on the first clay of hearings. Q.: Captain Reid, I understand from the vigilant safeguard and vigilant watchman [sic] of the press that you have been guilty of a dime which I myself have committed, in fact [m]any of us have, namely, that of having a son-in-law. A.: I have .... Q.: Is that son-in-law the chief engineer of the steamer Eastland? A.: One o[ them, l\lr. James Erickson .... Q.: Did you make that arrangement for him to become your son-in-law? A.: No, sir. Q.: Was that a matter you fixed up? A.: No, sir. Q.: Did you prepare a scheme whereby he should become your son-in-law and then get that job on that boat so that you might increase the rating of the passengers in that boat? A.: No, sir. Redfield may have thought only to protect 81

Eastland Investigation

U.S. Secretary of Commerce William Redfield (center) came to Chicago to investigate whether his department's inspection standards were to blame for the accident. Here he checks life jackets. CHS, ICHi-15793, gift of Judge Robert L. Marrs.

t~e men in his department from what he called the "unequalled carnival mendacity" in Chicago, but in effect he sneered at local efforts to answer all questions associated with the accident. The Journal, Chicago's only pro-Wilson paper, reminded Redfield that this was "a poor time for cheap sarcasm." With his "tone of sneering superiority," Redfield insulted the dead and cast an "unfair reflection on President Wilson." Among the many letters which Âˇwilson received regarding the incident, one counseled, "You would drive a Bull out of a chinashop, Well get Redfield out of Chicago." President Wilson, on vacation in ew Hampshire, began to take the suggestion seriously, especially when his secretary, Joseph Tumulty, urged it. Tumulty had learned from sources in Chicago that even conservatives thought that Redfield was mishandling the investigation. At Wilson's direction, Tumulty met with a few Cabinet members in Âˇwashington, and the group agreed that a presidential commission should be appointed but only after Redfield had requested it. Redfield refused to cooperate. The issue before Wilson was no longer on the merits of the case but on the authority of his Secretary of Commerce. On the one hand, Wil82

son agreed with his Secretary of the Navy who thought Redfield was misguided in championing subordinates who might yet face serious criminal charges. On the other hand, he told his Attorney General, he deplored the intensity and tone of the attacks on Redfield. On August 1, Wilson abandoned plans for a separate investigation, saying simply that Redfield had gone "too far to ju tify me in insisting upon a substitute course of action which might seem to discredit him." Local officials had launched investigations into the accident without waiting to hear Wilson's response. The coroner's jury, the police, the Common Council, and state and federal grand juries, all sought to locate and fix responsibility for the accident. The state grand jury examined the ship's officers in order to master the technical information they would need, though Redfield doubted that lay people could "deal very intelligently with this accident, which is after all a problem in physics applied disasterously." They listened to angry people and examined immediate and long range causes. Victor Olander had no specific knowledge of the Eastland accident but he testified about his experience with shipping

Eastland Investigation

Victor Olander, vice-president of the Lake Seamen's Union, testified before a state grand jury investigating the tragedy. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-68,863, gift of Field Enterprises.

and safety inspection. Redfield believed that all of this activity amounted to a partisan attack on Woodrow Wilson and that is how he reported events to the President. Factions within the Democratic party were trying to discredit him, Redfield wrote, and he advised Wilson to take more care in dispensing patronage in Chicago. In his last letter from Chicago, he summed up his experience with a heroic metaphor: "You are the object at which they aim. I am the anvil on which the blows are struck. I am glad to be pounded in so good a cause, and yet I confess the blows have hurt." One day later, Redfield closed his hearings because Federal District Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis prohibited all witnesses scheduled to appear before the federal grand jury from testifying before any other body. Although Redfield interpreted the order as yet another hostile act, he was content with the results he had obtained so far. He reassured Wilson "that nothing that reflects discredit upon the service or any man in it has yet been discovered." In the long run Redfield took advantage of the excuse to halt his inquiry. Though he promised to resume as soon as the grand jury

issued its indictments, he never reopened the Eastland investigation and the board of inquiry's interim report of August 5 became, in effect, its fined word. The report deferred a statement on the accident and a decision on responsibility because the inquiry was incomplete, but it did recommend reform in the Inspection Service. The board suggested that by immediate departmental order inspectors be required to visit ships before changing passenger load limits and be empowered to order inclining tests if they had any doubts about a ship's stability. The report addressed two of the most casual practices to have come to public notice after the accident, but its proposals perpetuated the agency's reliance on the discretion of inspectors. The report also proposed more substantial changes for efficient administration of the Service to be effected by legislation, two of which won departmental support and lumbered through Congress to become laws in 1918 and 1919. First, local inspectors were required to submit to their supervising inspector any change in a ship's passenger load limit-a practice which might have prevented the erratic inspection of the Eastland. Second, a new procedure allowed "any person directly interested in or affected by" a decision of local inspectors to appeal it through the departmental chain of command. Both laws made inspectors more accountable to their superiors. But when the board of inquiry's report crossed the line between bureaucratic efficiency and structural change, Redfield ignored its recommendations. The board concluded that naval architects in the Department of Commerce should oversee ship production and test vessels for seaworthiness. Even without an accompanying report to explain how they reasoned from the facts of the Eastland accident to this recommendation, the implication is clear that they thought that the ship's design contributed to the accident. Redfield believed that himself. He later told a congressional committee that in his opinion the ship's lack of stability explained the accident. Nonetheless, these recommendations vanished like smoke. Not a single reform accepted by Redfield spoke to the issues of safety in the shipping business. Instead the federal investigation resulted in making the Inspection Service less vulnerable to the embar83

Eastland Investigation

President Woodrow Wilson, shown here shortly before the 1912 election, was alarmed both by Secretary of Commerce Redfield's handling of the investigation and by the intensity of the attacks on the Secretary. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-58,393, gilt of Field Enterprises.

rassment it suffered from the accident. No one need repeat the discomfort of defending a Robert Reid whose routine and unnoticed decision had put an entire federal agency on the line. The state grand jury issued a report that explained what had happened on July 24. When the chief engineer tried to trim ship, he succeeded at first in correcting the list, but the system of cocks and valves and his lack of experience with the ship proved inadequate to the job. His tanks were then partially filled so that the "water could surge with every movement of the boat and produce a condition more dangerous than if the tanks had been empty." The grand jury also concluded that the Eastland's past record of successful operation under similar or identical conditions of load and ballast did not excuse owners, opera tors, and inspectors for the risks they had taken. The state grand jury returned indictments for "criminal carelessness or incompetence" against the 84

four top officers of the St. Joseph-Chicago Steamship Company and the ship's captain and chief engineer on August IO. On August 27 the jury added an indictment for manslaughter against the president of the Indiana Transportation Company which had chartered the boat to ,vestern Electric. Federal indictments followed on September 22. In addition to those already indicted under state law, the federal jurors included the inspectors at Grand Haven, Michigan. The indictments met a strange end in a Michigan courtroom early in 1916. Federal prosecutors had filed a petition for the defendants' removal from Michigan to stand trial in Illinois, and Federal District Judge Charles Sessions denied their motion. He argued in his opinion that the accident occurred outside federal waters since the ship "was securely tied to a dock in the Chicago River at least one-half mile from Lake Michigan," and therefore beyond the reach of the federal statute

Eastland Investigation governing punishment for ship accidents. This bit of reasoning prompted one congressman to ask his colleagues why the federal government threw away money every year to keep the Chicago River navigable, but it also in effect denied the Inspection Service any jurisdiction over the accident, because the same statute authorized its investigation. Judge Sessions inflicted more damage on the prosecution by declaring that the only actions which could be considered as contributing to the accident were those that occurred on July 24 in the Chicago River. Even Redfield had not made such a strong defense of inspectors. By the logic of the decision, no inspector could ever be accountable under the statute unless the accident occurred as an immediate consequence of his inspection. Finally Sessions dismissed the charge of a conspiracy to be "criminally negligent" because it was unimaginable, "unbelievable, and unthinkable." \Vithout offering any explanation of what had occurred in the accident, Sessions thus cleared all the defendants. \,Vithout defendants the cases in Chicago fell apart. The effort to locate responsibility for the accident had ended. Ambivalence crept into the minds of some reformers such as Graham Taylor, who wondered whether the Eastland's stockholders deserved to suffer after all. Redfield applauded the judge's decision and sent it on to Congress with a covering letter explaining that he had reinstated the Eastland's inspectors and restored their back pay because the decision "exonerated" them of any wrongdoing. The impetus to secure reform in response to the accident had withered without a forum to keep the issue alive. \!\Tilson read the report of August 5 but he left it to Redfield to decide what action to take and never questioned his refusal to impose any new regulations on shippers. By the time Redfield had reinstated the inspectors, Wilson felt no political pressure to champion this particular reform. The dozens of identical telegrams from all of the labor organizations in Chicago were no longer arriving. Congressman A. J. Sabath of Chicago led a limited debate on the floor of the House of Representatives in March 1916 on whether the Inspection Service should be cut from the federal budget, but no one took his motion more

seriously than courtesy required. The American Federation of Labor sent strong resolutions to President Wilson about the need for significant controls on shipowners' greed in December 1915, but let the matter drop when the Federation reconvened one year later. On the anniversary of the accident in 1916 hundreds of residents of Cicero filled the churches for memorial services. More than 700 damage suits were on file in state and federal courts, awaiting determination of responsibility. Edith Wyatt retold the story in the Tribune, a Ione voice reviving the spirit of indignation and outrage. She compared the accident to the war in Europe which the United States had not yet joined. The accident had "destroyed more than seven times as many American lives as all the foreign sea attacks together have taken since August, 1914," she emphasized. Wilson had promised to pursue a just investigation, she recalled, and then became preoccupied with the war. In her mind he had made an indefensible choice. The investigation raised issues of "quality" in civil government, of whether government "connives in the betrayal" of victims of the accident. War addressed only the nation 's "fortunes." It was not an argument likely to convert President Wilson as he prepared to enter the war. Selected Sources Chicago Daily News, Chicago Tribune, l\'ew York Times. Francis, David vV. "The Eastland Navigation Company, 1907-1914." Inland Seas 34 (Summer and Fall 1978). Shon, Lloyd Milton . Steamboat-h~spection Service: Its History, Activities and Organization. New York, 1922. Taylor, Graham. "The Eastland Disaster." Survey 34 (August 7, 1915) . U.S. American National Red Cross. Eastland Disaster R elief, American Reel Cross, 1915-1918. Chicago: Chicago Chapter, 1918. .S., Department of Commerce. Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 1915. Âˇwashington, 1915. - - . Report of the Secretary of Commerce, 1916. Washington , 1916. U.S., Congress. Decision of Justice Sessions in Case of Steamship " Eastland." 64th Cong., 1st Sess., House Doc. 814. - - . investigation of Accident to the Steamer "Eastland," Chicago, lll. July 24 to August 5, 1915 . . 64 th Cong., 1st Sess. \Veintraub, Hyman. Andrew Funtseth: Emancipator of the Sea111e11. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1959. Woodrow Wilson Papers, Library of Congress. (Principally, Series 4, case file 2458.) NEWSPAPERS:

Chicago and the Bungalow Boom of the 1920s By Daniel J. Prosser

((The bungalow age is here . ... In every case its appearance bespeaks a blithesome geniality and an iriformal hospitality. There is nothing formal about it) and this very restfulness of appearance refreshes the city tired dweller who is the slave of conventionalities.)) From Radford's Artistic Bungalows, 1908

between Halsted and Ashland on the Far South Side or in the outlying sections of Jefferson Park, the bungalow is as familiar as an old green and white CT A car. Even suburbanites who travel through the Northwest Side on the Milwaukee Road can hardly fail to notice the small, hip-roofed brick houses which line block after block of the area. For good reason, more than one observer has referred to the "bungalow belt" bordering long stretches of the city limits. These clusters of single-family houses were one of the primary results of Chicago's great building boom of the 1920s. Constructed on land made accessible by the extension of streetcar lines and by an increase in automobile ownership, they were direct descendants of the nineteenth-century workers' cottages so prevalent in older parts of the city. They enabled the solid working class to fulfill its dream of a free-standing house on a privately owned plot of land. At the same time, the bungalow brought to mass housing many innovations in design and household convenience: the latest in wiring and plumbing, the newest in bathroom and kitchen equipment, and improved interior arrangements. A few bungalow builders even attempted to adopt the innovative exterior design of architect Frank Lloyd Wright and FOR THOSE WHO GREW UP

other members o( the Prairie School.

Daniel ]. Prosser is on the staff of the Planning Division of the Department of Development in Columbus, Ohio. He did research into the bungalow boom while teaching at Northwestern University from 1978 to 1980.

Like many Midwestern c1ues, Chicago contains a large proportion of detached, singlefamily houses, including many which were designed specifically for the workingman's pocketbook. As early as the 1850s, many of the city's streets were lined with long, narrow onestory frame cottages built specifically to house workers. Early versions featured spare and elegant Greek Revival detailing, while later examples were decorated with heavy Victorian bracketing and scrollwork, but underneath these surface variations the basic character of the cottage remained untouched. It might be raised to allow for a full-height basement at grade, it might be divided into apartments, or it might be moved to the rear of the lot so that another cottage or two-flat could be placed in front. The cottage was infinitely flexible. With the rapid growth of the city in the late I 800s, new cottages were built in outlying areas-including suburbs and villages which were later annexed to the city-while older ones in the close-in neighborhoods served as housing for the most recently arrived immigrant groups. Even today many of these workers' cottages can still be found and they continue to provide adequate, if somewhat spartan, housing for a large segment of the city's working class. This tradition of single-family house construction on the outskirts reached new heights during the prosperous 1920s. Homer Hoyt, in

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A row of bungalows built during the late 1920s at 9198-9100 S. Colfax Avenue. Such clusters were one outcome of Chicago's great building boom of the 1920s. CHS, ICHi-01341 , photo by Ralph Tower, gift of the photographer.

Bungalow Boom

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The bungalow was a direct descendant of the nineteenth-century worker's cottage. This 1883 broadside shows a floor plan typical of those used in constructing cottages throughout the Chicago area. CHS, ICHi-06577.

Bungalow Boom One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago ( 1933), placed the total construction of bungalows throughout Cook County during the decade at 100,000. Within the city limits, construction of single-family houses, most of which were bungalows, reached 2,058 in 1920, 7,852 in 1923, peaked at 9,371 in 1925, and declined to 2,931 in 1929. By this time "bungalow" had come to replace the term "cottage." Originally, the word had been used specifically for small houses in California, but by the second decade of the twentieth century it was commonly applied to any cottage of single-story plan and simple design. Thus the bungalow boom of the 1920s was simply another wave of cottage building. The bungalows may have looked different, but they were hardly unprecedented. The boom was a result of several things. The lack of private construction during the war produced a pent-up demand, and when building resumed in earnest in the early 1920s, entire blocks of bungalows went up at once. This trend continued well into the decade as Chicago attracted a growing number of new residents (census figures show a 25 percent increase in population from 1920 to 1930) and enjoyed the fruits of postwar prosperity. Prospective buyers who had accumulated some wartime savings often turned to local

building and loan associations, which played an important role in channeling funds into housing. On both the Northwest and Southwest sides, for example, savings banks serving Polish immigrants and their descendants were deeply involved in home financing. In his study of Polish-Americans, Julius Ozog attributed the growth of home ownership in Chicago directly to the more than a hundred Polish building and loan associations whose combined assets totaled nearly $336,720,000 by 1928. Even more important was the availability of land. It was, in fact, precisely the opening of large subdivisions which made bungalow construction economically feasible. The older neighborhoods had developed as new transportation facilities brought previously isolated land within convenient reach of the Loop, and the same pattern was repeated in the 1920s. The electric trolley system had reached its point of maturity just before the war, serving virtually all sections within the city and often connecting with the systems of nearby suburbs. The elevated railways had been extended to new areas of the West Side along the Douglas Park line, which was initially projected to run all the way to Westchester. Interurban electric railways like the Aurora and Elgin and the South Shore augmented the older and equally important steam commuter railroads which

Unidentified Chicago neighborhood, c. 1900. Such cottages housed large numbers of the city's workers throughout the nineteenth century. CHS, ICHi-00855, gift of United Charities.

Bungalow Boom served nearby towns and villages. There was even some motorbus service on the orth and Far South sides for areas which were not included in the regular trolley routes. Finally, and in the long run most significantly, the automobile made accessible Janel between fixed transportation routes. Within the city limits alone, passenger car registration increased from 89,973 in 1920 to 222,557 in I 923, and to 408,260 by 1929. By the mid-twenties, the influence of the automobile was readily apparent in newspaper advertisements for bungalow developments: many contained detailed instructions for potential buyers who wished to visit the site by car-and announced that a garage was included with every house. This expansion of transportation into previously undeveloped areas made real estate subdivision a popular business. According to the Tax Assessor's Office, Chicago had more than half a million vacant lots in 1921, and even after the boom had passed its high point in I 928 an estimated 30 percent of the total lots in the city were still vacant. As a consequence, the price of land remained low, keeping the cost of bungalows competitive with rent. In 1926 the average price was $5,500 and the larger developers provided financing. While bungalow construction took place in virtually every part of the city in which there was vacant land, certain areas of the South, Southwest, "\Vest, and Northwest sides were particularly well populated with these homes. This bungalow belt ran generally from south of 87th Street on the South Side to west of Western Avenue on the Southwest Side, out to the suburbs on the "\Vest Side, and west of Crawford (now Pulaski) Avenue on the Northwest Side. Four districts contained particularly high concentrations: the areas bounded by Halsted, Ashland, 87th, and 99th streets on the South Side; Western, Keclzie, 51st, and 63rd streets on the Southwest Side; Central, Ridgeland, Roosevelt, and 26th Street in the western suburb of Cicero; and Crawford, Cicero, North, and Diversey on the Northwest Side. Bungalow construction was carried out in several ways. Some owners preferred to buy their lots and choose an independent contractor to build a house patterned after one of the contractor's plans. Or, if they wished, clients 90

could present their contractors with plans purchased from one of many companies which sold prepared working drawings. A prospective homeowner need only scan the classified pages of his favorite newspaper to find a contractor to match his needs. And a number of national companies-including Sears, Roebuck-sold pre-cut houses in a variety of bungalow designs for assembly on the owner's lot. Sears even devised a mortgage plan which allowed customers to use a lot instead of a down payment as collateral for purchasing a house on credit. Many contractors specialized in serving particular parts of the city. Grauer Brothers of 6006 vV. North Avenue constructed bungalows for the orthwest Side, while the Stanton Construction Company, located on Western Avenue near 63rd Street, did a lively business on the South and Southwest sides. Often these firms offered convenient financing arrangements. In 1925, for example, the Lake Cement Construction Company, with headquarters in the 5700 block of S. Robie Avenue, promised to build a five-room brick bungalow on the owner's lot for $4,950, complete and ready for occupancy for $1,000 down and a balance comparable to rent. Customers who lacked the time or inclination to deal with a contractor directly could go to one of the many real estate developers who offered to construct a house selected from one of several stock plans. Here, too, the classified pages of the newspapers attest to the popularity of such schemes throughout the city and suburbs. vV. D. McIntosh, one of the largest developers, promised easy financing for a bungalow in Oak Park to any customer who bought a lot for $350 (a typical price for a narrow lot in the I 920s). John Bain and Company of the 6200 block of S. Ashland A venue proposed the same arrangement on the Southwest Side. H. H. Barbour, operating on the Northwest Side, offered to build wooden bungalows for $6,500 if the customer purchased one of his lots in a subdivision along Lawrence near Milwaukee Avenue. Frank DeLugach, located on the Far South Side near I 03rd Street and Princeton Avenue, preferred to advertise locally, exhorting steelworkers from the surrounding mills to examine his new brick bungalows and take

Bungalow Boom

"The ANITA"

5 Room• and Bath

22 Ft. Wide x 46 Ft. 5 In. Deep

§D[ PLE in line. possessing a warm and colorful surface the "Anita" presents a homelike appearance. It is of a popular style and justifiably so ior it is a style that has been tried and proven. In:,;idc the same horniness prevails. Spacious, well-arranged rooms insure living comfo rt. A sound buy to be sure.

•

FACE BRICK AND ASPHALT SHINGLES JS A DVRABLE COMBINATION FOR Sl1Al.L HOUSE CONSTRl 1CTION.

PLANS GIVE All DETAILS.

SIZES: Extreme Width .......... . .... , ...............••.• . ..• . . . •..... 27' O" Extreme Depth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ......... . ..•.• •. . . •.... 56'

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Two (2) Complete Seta Blue-Print Worldn1 PIUUI for abo:ve De·• ia•n... .. One ( I ) ClaaaJfird GuiN ( 16 Paaea) for liaUna all Material ltem•-·One ( 1) S.t of SpecificatloDa a.nd Two (2} Blad COlltrac.t Form• Secure pl---. etc. tr.- your local Lumber or BuOdbts M,aterial Dealer.

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Advertisement for " The Anita ," which embodied many elements typical of Chicago bungalows and their floor plans. Note the long, narrow dimensions-22 by 46 feet-which were scaled to the requirements of a narrow city lot. From Home Builders Catalog , 1926. CHS , ICHi-15887.

Bungalow Boom advantage of the "most liberal offer ever made to workingmen!" John R. Robertson and Company made an even more direct appeal to South and West siders who had sufficient manual dexterity to build bungalows from do-it-yourself assembly kits. Finally, one could buy a finished bungalow from a small-scale developer. This had been a common pattern of housing construction and marketing in the nineteenth century, and was responsible for the typical bungalow neighborhood in the city: a group of identical houses stretching perhaps as far as a block and differing only in trim or color of face brick, if at all. One of the more active builders was the Loeb-Hammel firm, which worked on the Northwest Side. At one point, it had two clusters (one of eight and one of fifteen) under construction at the same time. But more typical was the smaller entrepreneur who would undertake the building of two or three bungalows, sell them, and use the profit to construct a few more. Although the average bungalow builder was a relatively small-scale investor, a handful of businessmen specialized in large tracts designed for mass production and high-volume sale. Some of these tracts included as many as a hundred or more units built to a standard plan but featuring a limited variety of facades. Thus, instead of a block of identical bungalows, the customer would find several blocks of dwellings, all basically the same but distinguished from one another by different exteriors. The best example of this was the Westwood project, built by the Mills and Sons Company in Elmwood Park, adjacent to the city 's Northwest Side. The initial complex, opened in 1927, consisted of sixty small brick bungalows with four basic floor plans and ten different facades. By April of that year, Mills opened a similar complex lying just west of the first and advertised an attractive financing package for the basic $8,750 price. By September Mills was calling Westwood "The World's Largest Bungalow Development," and by the spring of 1929 the advertisement proclaimed that more than one thousand families had settled in the area. In addition to introducing a range of styles and floor plans, Mills departed from the customary grid arrangement by experimenting with curvilinear streets and grassy open spaces. 92

â&#x20AC;˘ UNIVER.SAL â&#x20AC;˘

No room was more drastically altered by modernization than the kitchen. This advertisement shows floor-toceiling cabinetry which expanded the amount of storage space. From Universal Design Book No . 25, Guaranteed Steves Products, Dubuque, Iowa, 1927. CHS. ICHi-15890.

Just off Grand Boulevard, where the development began, Mills placed a large circular park from which the residential streets radiated in a pattern which resembled one-quarter of a wagon wheel, with the park as the hub and the streets as slightly arched spokes. His goal was to convince businesses to cluster around this park and thereby form a village at the entrance to Westwood.

The bungalow has not been treated gently by architectural critics. One defined it as a "house that looks as if it had been built for less money than it actually costs." Yet for the blue-collar worker with a steady income or the young independent businessman just getting started, it afforded a degree of comfort and style which was well within reach of his modest resources. It was a "cottage with class." To be sure, the bungalow's layout was shaped by the same long, narrow city lot which had originally given rise to the old worker's cottage. The classic cottage layout had remained generally unchanged throughout the nineteenth century-the parlor and a small bedroom at the front, the kitchen directly behind the parlor, and a second bedroom behind the first. Larger versions included a dining room between the

Bungalow Boom â&#x20AC;˘UN IV ER.SALÂˇ

Advertisement for bathroom woodwork , 1927. Note the emphasis on elegance in what, for many families, had previously been utilitarian rooms. From Universal Design Book No. 25. Guaranteed Steves Products, Dubuque, Iowa, 1927. CHS, ICHi-15889.

parlor and kitchen and a third bedroom between the other two. These layouts were subsequently used in the construction of many Chicago-area bungalows. There were, however, some distinct improvements. Perhaps the most notable was the more prominent role assigned to the living room. Up through World War I, many families still regarded the front room as a space to be reserved for special occasions, and family living centered around the dining room and kitchen. In the bungalow plans of the 1920s, however, the front room is clearly labeled "living room" and is made distinctly larger than the dining room. Often, this was accomplished by moving the front bedroom back to allow the living room to stretch almost the entire width of the house. Another improvement was the addition of a central hallway. The nineteenth-century cottage dispensed with this luxury, and simply allowed bedrooms to Âˇ open directly into the kitchen, dining room, or parlor. As bathrooms became common toward the end of the 1800s, builders merely boxed off a corner of the kitchen and installed conveniences there. But the bungalows of the 1920s featured circulation spaces which allowed the residents to pass directly from the bedrooms to the bathroom. This gesture toward privacy may seem small, but it was quite a con-

cession from contractors obsessed with wringing every square inch of space from their product. Perhaps most appealing to the potential homeowner was the emphasis on mechanization and convenience. Advertisements stressed that the builders had incorporated the latest innovations in plumbing and wiring, not to mention such features as sparkling ceramic tile bathrooms, built-in cupboard space, and closets for every bedroom. What had been perceived as luxuries by the previous generation now became available to the stable working class of the 1920s. Outside stood the Model T; inside there was an electric chandelier in the dining room and a porcelain lavatory in the bathroom. No room was more drastically altered by the emergence of new household devices than the kitchen. Most obvious, of course, was the electric refrigerator, introduced in the 1920s as a welcome alternative to the messy icebox. Other innovations included the improvement of sink traps, gas ranges, and a variety of electrical devices such as toasters, which transformed the kitchen from a place of drudgery to what the commentators of the day liked to call a "cooking laboratory." As bungalows were specifically designed for servantless families, their promoters made much of these advancements. There were other improvements over the cottage as well. The common building material was brick, rather than wood. Moreover, the walls were often solid masonry rather than brick veneer, as became common in post-World War II construction. Central heating-hot air, hot water, or steam-was standa,rd. And many of the larger developments, such as Westwood, came complete with streets, sidewalks, and utilities already installed. Yet it was in exterior design that the bungalow differed most from the cottage. The nineteen th-century cottage had been built in whatever style was fashionable at the time, from Greek Revival to High Victorian Italianate. In the early twentieth century it was built in a style adapted from Chicago's own Prairie School of architecture, an adaptation which required a radical change in appearance. It was this change which made the shift in name from "cottage" to "bungalow" so significant. Instead of being just another cottage built in the 1920s, the bungalow acquired a distinctive appearance. 93

Bungalow Boom

' "The ARMOREL"

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less attractive becau~e of it. 'Certain details, such as ihc stone trimming and big bays disting-uish it from oth • ers of this type. It is inside that you get the full effect of the bav!-' and apprec:iate how they add to lhe rooms. There are far too many handy conveniences tQ enumerate. Studv the Aoor plan ,arefnlly and see l\w{n all. FACE BRICK, CUT STONE TRHlll!fW;S. ASPHALT ROO#,' SHINGu;s, STl 'CCO ANn CONCRETE ARE ALL JNCll.fJ£D IN THI-; CONSTRUCTION OF THIS HO'dE.

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"The Armorel" with its bays and leaded-glass windows was representative of larger bungalows built in the 1920s. From Home Builders Catalog , Chicago, 1926. CHS, ICHi-15886.

CATALOG

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Many bungalows were constructed from stock plans purchased from mail-order firms. This design appeared in the catalog issued by Sears, Roebuck & Co.'s "Modern Homes" department in 1916. CHS, ICHi-15888.

Bungalow Boom The basic characteristics of the Prairie style of Frank Lloyd Wright and his followers are familiar: long horizontal lines, low-pitched roofs, deep overhangs, broad windows which mirrored the contours of the Midwestern terrain, and a distinctive mode of ornamentation in which piers and moldings were used to divide the facade into a set of complementary horizontal and vertical elements. This new style was developed by Wright and his disciples during the first years of the twentieth century and is best exemplified in commissions for large suburban houses set in open surroundings. Yet several other architects also attempted to adapt the Prairie style to smaller dwellings. The firm of Tallmadge and Watson, for instance, constructed several houses which served as influential models of the bungalow style. Writing in 1911, architectural critic Henry Saylor identified a distinct "Chicago School" bungalow and concluded that it was "almost a new style in the architectural types of the world." Compared to the typical cottage or bungalow, however, these were relatively extended structures on large lots. During the decade prior to World War I, bits and pieces of the Prairie style began to appear on mass-produced dwellings. By 1920, stock plan companies which sold working drawings to contractors, such as the Home Builders Catalog Companyâ&#x20AC;˘ of Chicago, advertised designs with hipped roofs, deep overhangs, wide front openings of grouped windows, piers supporting porches and imbedded in walls as pilasters, and belt courses to emphasize the horizontal dimension. At the same time, there were some interesting variations in detailing. For example, one might find a full-arched porch entrance breaking with the right-angled regularity of the facade, or a segmental-arched basement window, complete with keystone, poking up at the foundation level. In fact, it was not unusual for the entire facade to bow out in a half-octagon bay. Builders were well aware of the difficulties of achieving architectural purity on a budget and frequently took liberties in modifying the style for a mass market. or could the attempt to trans[orm the bungalow into a Prairie style house disguise the fact that it remained in essence a nineteenth-century cottage. The long, low lines and earth-hugging quality of the Prairie house simply could not be

transplanted to a 35-foot wide lot. The bungalow required a high, narrow facade with an elevated basement and a high attic with a dormer window. These had become standard with the old cottage as devices for providing additional space, and the public would hardly sacrifice this space for the sake of aesthetics. Thus even the purest of the bungalow designs was an awkward cousin twice removed from the great Prairie houses. The peak of bungalow construction was reached in 1926-27. At a time when the market was becoming saturated because those who could afford it had already made the transition to home ownership, it took easy credit terms to attract a second level of purchasers in order to maintain construction levels. In retrospect, it can be seen that some of these purchasers were not really in a position to invest in housing, since the relatively high rates and short payback periods of mortgages in those pre-Federal Housing Administration days obligated marginal buyers to terms they would have had difficulty meeting during the best of times. vVith the onset of the Depression at the end of the decade, default and forfeiture became endemic and many lost their homes. Nonetheless, the bungalow boom had had a beneficial effect on the city and its inhabitants. It provided Chicago with a stock of solid housing in the single-family mode which allowed families to attain their ideal of owning their own home. It also provided them with the electrical and mechanical devices of the 1920s which made housekeeping less of a chore. And it enabled them to become' owners of part of Chicago's unique architectural heritage.

Selected Sources Chicago Daily News . Real estate section , 1920-1930. Home Builders Catalog: 1926 Edition. Chicago: Home Builders Catalog Company, 1926. Hoyt, Homer. One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933 . Ozog, Julius John. "A Study of Polish Home Ownership in Chicago." Master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1942. Radford's Artistic Bungalows. Chicago: Radford Architectural Company, 1908. Saylor, Henry H . Bungalows: Their Design, Construction, and Furnishing. New York: McBride, \Vinston, and Company, I 91 I.

Remember the Nurses: Michael Reese Hospital School of Nursing, 1890-1981 By Elizabeth Jachimowicz

To improve furthermore the comforts of the suffering and . .. open a new avenue of industry to intelligent and conscientious young ladies.'' ÂŤ

From the second Annual Report of the United Hebrew Charities of Chicago, 1889-90

1981, the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center School of Nursing closed. It is a tribute to both the alumnae and the nursing school staff that they were able to preserve a rich variety of materials recording the history of the school during the past ninety years. With the closing of the school, the Michael Reese Hospital Nurses Alumnae Association has presented its comprehensive collection to the Chicago Historical Society. The collection includes examples of Nursing School uniforms from the 1890s to the present, photographs of the nursing students from the first class on, yearbooks, newsletters, bulletins, and a miscellany of other papers and documents. Taken together these materials tell the fascinating story which has inspired the exhibit, REMEMBER THE NURSES, on view at the Society from June 25 through September 20. Michael Reese Hospital was founded as the result of an initial grant of $50,000 to the Hebrew Relief Association through the beneficiaries of Michael Reese, a German Jewish immigrant who had left a substantial fortune for distribution to charities. The grant was to be used to replace the Jewish Hospital in the Loop which had been destroyed by the Great Fire of 1871. The founders specified that "sufferers, no matter of what religion or nationality, if found worthy and there be room, be admitted." Michael Reese Hospital opened in 1881 at 29th Street and Groveland Avenue with 70 beds. Before long it became clear that this IN JUNE

Elizabeth ]achimowicz is Curator of Costumes at the Chicago Historical Society.

facility was inadequate and the United Hebrew Chari ties raised money for a larger building. The new, 240-bed building was ready by 1907. Currently the Michael Reese Hospital complex comprises 27 buildings offering 1,000 beds. In 1890, to ensure itself of a ready supply of well-trained staff, Michael Reese Hospital founded a school of nursing. Miss Anne E. ourse, a graduate of St. Luke's Hospital of Nursing in Chicago, was appointed superintendent. The two-year program set high standards Katherine Devine, class of 1907, In an outdoor uniform cape of brown broadcloth with veil. CHS.

This photograph was inscribed to Dr. Lester E. Frankenthal, a physician at Michael Reese Hospital , by nurses of the classes of 1894 and 1895. Some years later, in 1899, Dr. Frankenthal married Anne E. Nourse, the first director of the nursing school. CHS .

Michael Reese Hospital on the corner of Ellis Avenue at 29th Street as it appeared in the early 1890s. The hospital, located near the fashionable South Side residential district, overlooked Lake Michigan . CHS.

l\f ichael Reese Nurses

for the "intelligent and conscientious young ladies" it set out to attract. Superintendent ourse had full authority to determine the fitness of applicants to the program. Those who succeeded in passing her scrutiny could enter the program for a onemonth probationary period at any time during the year. Students spent their first year assisting in the wards. By the second year they were expected to perform any duty assigned them by the superintendent. Much of the instruction was carried on by hospital physicians at bedside. Students learned how to dress wounds and how to treat contagious diseases. But there were also classes in anatomy, physiology, and medicine. In 1895, the curriculum was expanded and training extended to a three-year course. Nursing students were on duty 12 hours a clay, which was not unusual given the hours of work that prevailed in most occupations at the time. They received one afternoon off per week and two weeks' vacation each year. Their stipend was $8.00 per month during their first year of training, $12.00 their second year. In addition they received free board and lodging at the nurses' residence, constructed in 1892. The first class of nine students graduated in October of that year, receiving diplomas from the examining committee and the board of managers. Over the next two decades various improvemen ts and adjustments were made in the curriculum and practical training programs. By 1920 the probationary period had been extended to three months and the three-year course of study clearly divided into distinct levels of instruction. The twelve-hour day had been reduced to an eight-hour clay although emergency duty could easily lengthen that. Days off were expanded to one half day during the week plus Sunday and nurses in training were allowed a total of three months' vacation in the course of their three-year training. In I 924, a new nurses' residence with accommodations for 300 was completed. In addition to dormitories, the residence had educational facilities including lecture rooms and laboratories. The dining and living rooms were supplemented by a gymnasium, pool, and roof garden. The Michael Reese Hospital Nursing School graduates had no difficulty _in finding positions 98

in hospitals or as private care nurses. At a time when professional opportunities for single women were few and far between, nursing offered a respectable means of earning a livelihood.

Over recent years, as both the medical and nursing professions have become more complex, growing numbers of nursing students have been turning to university-based programs for their training. This trend influenced the decision to close the Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center nursing program. Between its opening in 1890 and the graduation of its final class, however, that program graduated 4,160 students. The collection of uniforms and materials given to the Society will keep alive for future generations the rich record of this important Chicago institution. Among the most striking i terns in the collection are the nurses' uniforms which reflect changmg styles over close to a century. The earliest uniform shown belonged to Nettie Wolf, who graduated in 1899. This dress is of blue cotton woven with a pattern of the Star of David. An early history of the nursing school indicates that the fabric was commissioned in France. The photographs of the early nurses show subtle variations in the uniforms and a large degree of individuality expressed in the choice of the brooches nurses wore at their throats. By 1913 formal regulations for the uniform were in print with specific instructions as to the location of closings, pockets, and the length of skirt. There were also specific regulations about how the uniforms were to be made, the kind of fabric to be u eel (blue, but no longer with the Star of David woven in the fabric), and where the fabric for the cap was to be purchased. With regard to jewelry only the following was permissible: "a plain two inch gold bar at the neck, small cuff buttons, an inconspicuous watch chain and the class pin." The yearbooks, bulletins, newsletters, and other documents in the collection yield many such insights into the life anc:! times of generations of l\fichael Reese Hospital students and nurses. So does the recently published book, All Our Lives: A Centennial History of Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, edited by Sarah Gordon.

"Big Red in Bronzeville": Mayor Ed Kelly Reels in the Black Vote By Roger Biles

As long as I am mayor of the city of Chicago I intend to be mayor of all the people and not any particular group ofpeople) and I expect to see to it that each and every person and every group ofpeople have an equal opportunity. )) a

Mayor Edward

Kelly

FOR FOURTEEN YEARS, the longest tenure of any Chicago mayor prior to the rule of Richard J. Daley, Edward J. Kelly served as chief executive of the nation's second city. With Pat Nash, he ran the most powerful-and probably the most infamous-political machine in the nation. Along with his contemporaries, men like Jersey City's Frank Hague, Kansas City's Tom Pendergast, Boston's James Michael Curley, Memphis's Ed Crump, and the Bronx's Ed Flynn, Kelly represented the last of a vanishing breed-the autocratic big city boss who controlled not only the affairs of his city, but to a considerable degree those of his state and the nation as well. A household name throughout America in his clay, Ed Kelly has been largely forgotten in the aftermath of the Daley years. Known chiefly as the first of the Bridgeport mayors, Kelly has been dismissed as no more than a custodian for the political machine assembled by Anton Cermak and perfected by Daley. But this fails to acknowledge Kelly's role in attracting to the local Democratic machine the substantial black vote which had traditionally gone to the Republican party. A popular . saying of the early twentieth century-"The Republican party is the ship, all else the sea"-accurately de cribed the pas-

Roger Biles recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. This article is taken from his dissertation, "Mayor Edward ]. Kelly of Chicago: Big City Boss in Depression and War." His "Jacob M. Arvey, Kingmaker: The Nomination of Adlai E. Stevenson in 1952" appeared in Chicago History, Fall 1979.

sionate commitment of the nation's blacks to the party of Lincoln. As one of the first politicians to actively court the black vote, Chicago Mayor William Hale ("Big Bill'') Thompson, a Republican, amassed huge majorities in the city's Bronzeville. In the bitterly contested campaign of 1919, Thompson's narrow victory was attributed to his support by black voters, and in I 927 he received an amazing 93 percent of the black vote. Even when he lost to Democrat Anton Cermak in 1931, receiving only 42 percent of the popular vote, Thompson still garnered a formidable 84 percent of the Bronzeville vote. Although the Democrats had wrenched the mayoralty away from the Republicans, they had failed to disengage the G.O.P.'s stranglehold on the black electorate. Aware of the party's ineffectiveness on the black South Side, Cermak itnmediately went to work to alter the political balance of power there. The day he took office, the new mayor fired 2,260 temporary employees, many of whom were black. At the same time he served notice that gambling, prostitution, and other illegal activities, formerly ignored by the Thompson administration, would cease in Bronzeville. The Chicago Defender, the city's most influential and widely read black newspaper, observed that the city "closed up like a drum . The lid went on five minutes after it was certain that former 1\Iayor Thompson had lost his fight for a fourth term as Chicago mayor." Cermak transferred Police Captain John Stege to the South \Vabash station, located in 99

Mayor Ed Kelly

In 1931 Mayor Anton Cermak (third from left) met with black leaders who called upon him to protest police brutality. CHS, ICHi-09766.

the midst of the black community, telling him to "raise all the hell you can with the policy gang." Stege's men arrested some two hundred a day, cramming them into jail cells so tightly that no one could sit down. They randomly stopped automobiles to search for evidence of gambling and raided private homes to break up games of whist and bingo. Police arrest records for 1931 showed that 87 percent of the locations raided that year fell within the black belt; the number of blacks arrested that year tripled. The Defender called the South Side raids "political persecution" and Cermak's police "Cossacks." The mayor clearly indicated that such actions would cease if blacks switched their allegiance to the Democratic party. In addition to these heavy-handed tactics, Cermak also began the task of constructing a black Democratic political organization on the South Side. The mayor served notice of his intentions by installing Michael Sneed, a precinct captain in the Thomas Nash organization, as the first black Democratic committeeman of the Third Ward. Joe Tittinger, the white committeeman of the heavily black Second Ward, also received instructions from City Hall to organize a black Democratic 100

contingent in his domain. Cermak's death after only two years in office cut short his plan and left to his successor, Edward J. Kelly, the bulk of the task yet undone. Ed Kelly, a second-generation Irishman from the South Side, had come late to Chicago politics. For most of his adult life he worked for the Chicago Sanitary District, rising from an unskilled laborer to the post of chief engineer. He also served on the South Park Board, eventually becoming its president. It was during his presidency that Chicago's Grant Park was landscaped and Soldier Field, the Shedd Aquarium, and the Adler Planetarium added to the lakefront. When Mayor Anton Cermak fell victim to an assassin's bullet in 1933 after only two years in office, Cook County Democratic Chairman Pat Nash shepherded legislation through the Illinois General Assembly permitting the City Council to go outside of the city government to choose an interim mayor. He chose Kelly, an old friend and business associate who had never held an elective office. In seeking to attract black votes to the Democratic machine, Kelly took a very different tack from that followed by his predecessor. He quickly repudiated the coercive methods em-

Mayor Ed Kelly

Mayor Kelly talks to the press in Washington, D.C. after conferring with WPA Administrator Harry Hopkins (with hat). For Chicago's hard-hit black community the WPA jobs and federal relief, dispensed ostentatiously by the Democratic Party, were a godsend. CHS , ICHi-15879.

ployed by Cermak's police and returned the official policy to one of benign neglect toward gambling and vice on the South Side. Despite his repeated and vehement protests to the contrary, Mayor Kelly's police allowed the black vice lords a free hand. Originally a nickle and clime operation, the policy game had become a multi-million dollar operation by the 1930s and the chief source of capital within Bronzeville. As a result, some of the richest and most powerful men in the area were policy kings, operating on sufferance of the local authorities. Just as it had achieved a comfortable working relationship with the previous Republican administration, so the black underworld now reached a rapprochement with its Democratic successor. The Jones brothers, the South Side's most powerful gambling kings, actively participated in the operation of the Third Ward Democratic Organization and soon became precinct captains as well. Illy Kelly, noted policy chieftain and the son-in-law of former Republican alderman, Louis B. Anderson, ran unsuccessfully for Second Âˇw ard Democratic Committeeman in 1934. And as the leaders of black syndicates offered their allegiance to the Democratic machine, they brought with them consi-

derable sources of manpower. As University of Chicago sociologist Harold F. Gosnell reported, one gambling operation dispatched 1,500 policy writers to the South Side streets to canvass for the Democratic ticket at election time. With their considerable financial and human resources, the black underworld bosses exerted a significant influence on political participation in Chicago's Bronzeville. At the same time that he cultivated the seedier elements of the South Side, Kelly accelerated the process of con\tructing a black Democratic organization. Spurning threats and intimidation, Kelly sought to attract blacks by demonstrating that as the party in power, the Democrats had much to offer those who cooperated. He did this by making available more patronage jobs than the number previously offered by the much beloved Big Bill Thompson. The subsequent advent of New Dealcreated federal jobs would increase the patronage Kelly could offer black Chicagoans, but even before the vVP A boom, blacks received city jobs in unprecedented numbers under the Kelly regime. In addition to increasing the quantity of jobs available to blacks, Kelly also improved their 101

Mayor Ed Kelly

Mayor Kelly welcomes heavyweight boxing champion Joe Louis to Chicago. Kelly attended the civic and social functions in the black community as faithfully as he did those of other ethnic groups. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-78,179, gift of Field Enterprises.

102

Mayor Ed Kelly quality, elevating blacks to high pos1t10ns in city government and appointing them to prestigious committees and panels. Some of the important appointive positions held by blacks under Kelly included those of Civil Service Commissioner, Assistant Corporation Counsel, Assistant City Prosecutor, Deputy Coroner, Assistant Traction Attorney, Assistant Attorney General, Assistant State's Attorney, Chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority, member of the School Board, and Judge of the Municipal Court. He also broke down the barriers to advancement within the police department, paving the way for blacks to rise to the rank of captain. And the mayor appointed Robert S. Abbott, editor of the Chicago Defender, to several important positions, including the Board of Commissioners of the Chicago World's Fair, the Committee on the Chicago Exposition, and the Chicago Jubilee Committee. Kelly worked assiduously to present a good image to black voters and succeeded in establishing a reputation as a friend of "the Race." The mayor prohibited the showing of the film Birth of a Nation in Chicago because of its explicit racism. He honored successful black Americans for their achievements (making Joe Louis "mayor for ten minutes" in an elaborate city hall ceremony, for example) and made numerous personal appearances at South Side functions. "Big Red," as blacks affectionately called the mayor, attended the annual Tuskegee-Wilberforce football games at Soldier Field and endorsed Governor Henry Horner's refusal to extradite a fugitive black man to an almost certain lynching in Arkansas. He espoused his belief in integration and pledged to expedite the process: I am afraid that the colored people have segregated themselves too much and have not taken advantage of the opportunities offered them to mingle freely in different public places of amusement that would contribute to their culture and refinement and general betterment. ... As long as I am mayor of the city of Chicago I intend to be mayor of all the people, and I expect to see to it that each and every person and every group of people have an equal opportunity, as far as I am able in my capacity as executive of the city.

At the dedication of the new Wendell Phillips High School, Mayor Kelly affirmed his commitment "that the public school system in

Chicago, so long as he is mayor, shall be conducted in accordance with law and order applicable alike to all nationalities." He concluded by pledging his administration to the quest for racial justice, saying "the time is not far away when we shall forget the color of a man's skin and see him only in the light of intelligence of his mind and soul." In the second year of Kelly's mayoralty, events on Chicago's South Side tested his ambitious rhetoric. In October 1934 Kelly met with a grievance committee of Morgan Park blacks to discuss the de facto segregation of the local high school, a supposedly integrated facility. The black parentsâ&#x20AC;˘ protested to the mayor that two branch schools set up near the high school, ostensibly to relieve crowded conditions, actually were being used to separate black and white students. (White freshmen went to Clissold, while their black counterparts attended Shoop.) At the same time, they complained, school officials had brought hundreds of white pupils into the Morgan Park district, while neighborhood black students could not attend the local school. Amidst howls of protest from whites, Kelly rescinded the Board of Education's edict commanding black students to attend Shoop and ordered them readmitted to Morgan Park High School. On the Monday following Kelly's action, more than 2,000 white students, a majority of Morgan Park High School's enrollment, walked out in protest. When an estimated 200 aggrieved white parents stormed the mayor's office demanding segregation, Kelly dispatched them and refused to reconsider. Following his threat of police action against the strikers, the protest died out and the recalcitrant white students returned to school. The Defender praised Kelly for his courageous stand: "In this answer the Mayor of Chicago vindicated his right to the respect and confidence of every citizen of every color and creed whose mind is not blinded by hate, prejudice, and bigotry." In 1945 white students struck at Englewood and Calumet high schools in opposition to integration, and again Kdly stood firm in his commitment to open schools. Kelly's soaring popularity in the black community manifested itself in the political realm. The first indication came in 1934 when the 103

1Hayor Ed Kelly Democrats selected a black candidate, Arthur W. Mitchell, to contest Oscar DePriest's congressional seat from Illinois's First District. The popular DePriest, a three-term incumbent and nationally renowned as the first black Republican to sit in Congress since I 90 I, had the endorsement of the black press, including the influential Defender. But with the aid of the Kelly-Nash machine, Mitchell won a narrow victory, becoming the first black to serve as a Democrat in the House of Representatives. On the heels of this electoral triumph came the 1935 mayoral election, the outcome of which substantiated Kelly's tremendous popularity among black voters. The mayor received the enthusiastic endorsement of the Defender which observed, "Black people believe in Kelly and in fact say that the only difference between him and Bill Thompson in respect to them is the name." He not only enjoyed the support of Bronzeville Democrats but of many black Republicans as well. Both William L. Dawson, alderman of the Second Ward, and Robert Jackson, alderman of the Third Ward, ran for re-election that year as Republicans but publicly backed the incumbent mayor. Berthold Cronson, Republican alderman of the Fourth Ward, came out for Kelly as well. The mayor, in turn, endorsed the black Republican aldermen of the three South Side wards. The margin of victory for the incumbent far exceeded even the Democrats' expectations; Kelly received 80.5 percent of the vote in the black Second, Third, and Fourth wards. The dramatic change in the voting of Chicago blacks from 1931 to 1935 reflected not only a burgeoning attachment to Ed Kelly but also a realistic assessment of political realities in the city. The blacks' desertion of the Republican party in I 935 represented only part of a larger, city-wide defection as Republicans and independents alike forsook the hapless G.O.P. candidate Emil Wetten. Recognizing the certainty of the outcome, South Side blacks jumped on the victorious Kelly bandwagon well in advance of the post-election reckoning time. As the Defender reminded its readers: If you leave it to the West, North, and far South Side to elect the mayor then don't be surprised when those things you are likely to want are left to them. Politics is a business; there is no sentiment 104

involved; support is given for support. In the 1936 gubernatorial primary, black voters demonstrated their fealty to the KellyNash machine by supporting the organization candidate, Dr. Herman Bundesen. In the predominantly black Second and Third wards, Bundesen's plurality exceeded 8,300 votes; in nearby wards in which blacks comprised a minority of the population, the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth, Horner defeated the challenger by more than 4,000 votes. The Defender explained, "Members of the Race who voted in the Democratic primaries had nothing personally against Governor Horner, they were following the leadership of Mayor Edward Kelly, who had proven himself their friend." In the general election later that year, South Side blacks followed the lead of other Chicago Democrats and supported Horner against his Republican opponent. In 1939 black support for Kelly failed to equal the standard set four years earlier, but the South Side vote remained substantially Democratic. Kelly's appointments of Wendell Green to the Civil Service Commission and Robert Taylor to the Chicago Housing Authority solicited praise from the black community. Again the Defender gave Kelly its hearty endorsement, saying that "Mayor Kelly has faced all issues fairly and squarely when the rights of our race are involved." Republican mayoral candidate Dwight Green argued that little progress had been made in combatting the school board's segregationist policies, but Kelly's stand for open schools, most notably in the Morgan Park incident, negated the attack. Kelly received 59.5 percent of the black vote, as compared to 56.l percent of the total city vote. In a reasonably close, hard-fought contest, Kelly's success in Bronzeville exceeded his citywide performance. Kelly's critics groused that his following among black voters resulted primarily from the popularity of the national Democratic party and Franklin D . Roosevelt in particular. Certainly blacks throughout the nation found much to their liking in Roosevelt's New Deal. Hard hit by the Great Depression, urban blacks found the work and relief programs sponsored by the federal government a godsend. A popular blues song of the time illustrated black

Mayor Ed Kelly

Eleanor Roosevelt was one of several New Dealers who made the Democratic Party more attractive to black voters. Here she is shown with (I. to r.) New York City Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia and prominent blacks-labor leader A. Philip Randolph and educator Mary McLeod Bethune. CHS, ICHi-15883, gift of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

dependence upon such programs: Please, Mr. President, listen to what I've got to say: You can take away all of the alphabet, but please leave that WPA. Now I went to the poll and voted, I know I voted the right waySo I'm asking you, Mr. President, don't take away that WP Al

The exhortation of one black preacher"Let Jesus lead you and Roosevelt feed youl"-typified the high regard in which Roosevelt came to be held by black Americans in the thirties. Indeed, by 1940 the previouslyRepublican Defender had become a staunch supporter of the Democratic party, repenting its earlier "blind, child-like faith" in the G.O.P. and lauding Roosevelt as the "greatest champion of rhe cause of the common people." As one political analyst wrote, "Harry Hopkins (Roosevelt's chief relief administrator) really turned Lincoln's picture to the wall." But to assume that Roosevelt's popularityand Kelly's, in turn-depended solely upon federal welfare programs would be to oversimplify and distort a complex phenomenon. In the J932 presidential election Roosevelt and

his vice-presidential running mate, Southerner John Nance Garner, received only 23 percent of Chicago's black vote. In 1936 that percentage more than doubled to 48.9 percent and rose again to 52 percent in 1940. While the popularity of relief programs undoubtedly accounted for much of the increase, that was only one of a number of factors which coalesced during this decade to .attract blacks to the Democratic party. As Harold F. Gosnell and Elmer W. Henderson have detailed, other considerations were vitally important. The urbanization of blacks in the preceding decades engendered psychological changes which broke down stereotyped, traditional allegiances. Blacks became dissatisfied with the Republicans who took their support for granted. Increased exposure to labor movements and radical ideology encouraged a growing class consciousness among blacks. The more enlightened Democratic party of Roosevelt benefited from the reputations of such noted "race liberals" as Eleanor Roosevelt, Aubrey Williams, and Harold Ickes. Roosevelt, like Kelly, broke new ground by appointing blacks in ever-increasing 105

Mayor Ed Kelly

R-3publican Oscar DePriest, a leading black politician, 1917, posting bond prior to an election. This was required of candidates to insure that they would fulfill the duties of public office if elected. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-67,731, gift of Field Enterprises.

numbers to prestigious federal pos1t1ons. And finally, the successful wooing of black votes by local Democratic leaders aided the quest of the national party. This last point underscores the fact that Kelly's support in Chicago's South Side was not simply a microcosm of Roosevelt's national following. While the vote totals for the president rose steadily, Chicago blacks never supported the national Democratic ticket as completely as they did Kelly. The Chicago Democratic machine's attempts to recruit blacks predated the Roosevelt administration's similar actions. Clearly, efforts by both local and national Democrats complemented each other, and each benefited from the successes of its counterpart. Kelly brazenly claimed the virtues of the Roosevelt administration as his own and never ceased to emphasize the importance of federal relief to depression-stricken blacks. But stressing the Roosevelt connection constituted but one firearm in the mayor's arsenal; his sustained success with black voters rested upon 106

the construction of a robust organization in the South Side subservient to, and patterned after, the larger city Democratic machine. The man who ultimately came to rule the black Democratic sub-machine was William L. Dawson. Kelly initially chose Dawson for one very specific purpose, to take control of one troublesome ward. In the words of a politician close to Dawson: Kelly did not build Dawson by pre-arranged plan into the South Side boss; he made him head of the second ward, and after that Dawson just grew. In each showdown, Dawson was seen to be the better man and was supported.

Born in Georgia, William Levi Dawson attended Fisk University and Northwestern Law School, served with distinction in the army during World War I, and settled in Chicago where he became a lawyer. He entered politics as a Republican and became a precinct captain. He was elected alderman of the Second Ward with the backing of Congressman Oscar DePriest in 1933. In the City Council Dawson

Mayor Ed Kelly

Under Kelly's auspices, Republican Alderman William L. Dawson switched parties in 1939 and went on to become "the South Side boss." Vivian G. Harsh Collection of the Chicago Public Library.

acquired the reputation of a maverick who frequently voted against his fellow Republicans. Dawson and the Democratic mayor became good friends, and the Second Ward alderman became known as "Kelly's man" in the council. Along with several other Republicans, Dawson openly supported Kelly-Nash candidates in municipal elections. Many disgruntled South Siders charged that Dawson was a Republican in name only. Events within the Republican party on the South Side served to obstruct Dawson's ambitions. vVilliam E. King, the Second Ward committeeman, feared that Dawson intended to assume complete control of the ward and therefore disavowed any connection with the alderman. Âˇwith the control of patronage for the ward and the support of Congressman DePriest, King staved off Dawson's challenge in 1936 and kept the office of committeeman. The year after his successful re-election as alderman in 1937, Dawson hiftecl his sights to the congressional seat taken away from DePriest by Arthur Mit-

chell. In the Republican primary, Dawson bested Louis B. Anderson and Oscar DePriest, thanks in part to the aid of First Ward Republican Commiaeeman Daniel Serritella, who operated under the orders of Democratic County Chairman Pat Nash. In the general election, however, he lost to the popular Mitchell by a 30,207 to 26,396 vote . With avenues for advancement blocked within the G.0.P., an inability to assume control of the Second Ward organization, and a healthy relationship with the powerful Kelly-Nash machine, Dawson, by the encl of the 1930s, began to look to the Democratic party for the fulfillment of his aspirations as a political leader. Fortunately for Dawson, an upheaval in the Democratic Second Ward Organization created an opening for someone of his ambitions. For several years blacks had been complaining about the dictatorial, insensitive leadership of the white committeeman, Joseph Tittinger, who distributed almost all of his patronage jobs to the few whites living on the eastern edge of the ward and even imported whites from neighboring wards to supervise employment assignments. He had a black precinct captain removed from a patronage job to make way for his own son, kept segregated office hours at party headq uarters for what he referred to as "colored" constituents, and moved his personal residence to an area governed by a restrictive covenant. Impervious to complaints by his black constituents, Tittinger pledged to remain as committeeman as long as there was "a single white vote in the ward." In June 1939, 53 precinct laptains from the Second Ward presented Kelly and Nash with a petition of grievances requesting the removal of Ti ttinger as committeeman. The Defender warned that if the Democrats failed to take action, "The belief is current that the Republican forces will come back into power in the next election." Tittinger responded to the criticism by firing the precinct captains from their patronage jobs. Many of these then banded together to form an independent organization to oppose him in the upcoming 1940 election. Faced with a disintegrating ward organization and the threat of a black Democratic faction hostile to the Kelly-Nash regime, the mayor resolved to oust Tittinger and re107

Mayor Ed Kelly place him with a black politician. Speculation about the new boss of the Second Ward revolved around three men: Christopher Wimbish, Bryant Hammond, and William Dawson. Wimbish, a former Republican assitant state's attorney, had joined the Democrats in the mid-thirties as a member of State's Attorney Thomas Courtney's anti-Kelly faction and had been instrumental in challenging Tittinger's control of the ward. Hammond, a Democrat of longer standing, supported Cermak in the 1931 mayoral election and ran a strong race against William E. King for state senator in 1934. Unlike Wimbish, Hammond had long been a staunch Kelly loyalist and an outspoken critic of Courtney in the 1939 primary. But as Kelly's champion in the City Council, Dawson held the inside track, the only drawback being his party affiliation. He was, after all, still a Republican-at least until 1939. In the February aldermanic elections that year, Dawson finished third behind Democrat Earl B. Dickerson and Republican William E. King. When the closeness of the contest necessitated a runoff between the top two finishers, Dawson threw his support to Dickerson who subsequently won the election. Dawson met with Kelly, informing him of his decision to switch to the Democratic party. Kelly, who had been advised to choose Dawson as Tittinger's replacement by several influential black citizens, solicited Dickerson's approval and announced the change in late November. Not everyone among the Democrats welcomed Dawson with open arms, the chief obstructionist being County Chairman Pat Nash. Always a stalwart party man, Nash did not trust anyone who would switch parties for what he suspected to be personal gain . He remembered Dawson as an enemy in the bitter struggle for control of the Second Ward and while it was permissible to help a friend from the City Council in a Republican primary, it seemed quite another matter to aid the same individual against lifelong, proven Democrats. Therefore, Nash stood by Tittinger and promised him continued control of the ward's county patronage. Kelly stuck with Dawson, granting the new Democrat access to state and local patronage. Kelly finally won the Cook County Central Committee over to his side and by December JOS

1939 Dawson had officially received the blessing of the Democratic machine. His biggest problem now lay in consolidating his power within the Second Ward. Initially Dawson faced two complex problems-how to convince his former Republican supporters to follow him into the rival camp and how to assuage the fears of Second Ward Democrats that they would be supplanted by a wave of renegade Republicans. By his own account, the first problem proved the more difficult of the two. For years Dawson had been preaching partisan loyalty to black Republicans and denigrating Democrats. Now he had to explain his dramatic reversal and encourage others to make the same move. He pointed to bankrupt Republican promises, the Democratic record as the party o( the downtrodden, the friendly Kelly administration, and the great progress en joyed by blacks during Roosevelt's two terms. Many followed Dawson into the Democratic ranks, a situation that gave pause to established Democrats in the ward. Dawson reassured them that they would lose neither their high standing in the party hierarchy nor their job ; they had, in fact, few jobs to lose, and after the dictatorial reign of Tiuinger, Dawson readily won over the fearful. In a short period of time, the new ward chief proved himself an able and energetic administrator. He instiLUted strict discipline into what had always been a loosely structured ward organilation, formed women's and young people's Democratic clubs, and kept his office open at all times to all residents of the ward. Recognizing the great number of women working as precinct captains, he appointed three black women to senatorial committeemanships. He appointed rival Christopher ,vimbish president of the Âˇward organization. And to appease the few white residents of the ward, Dawson slated Tittinger for state representative. The newcomer was securing his hold on the Second v\Tard, but his control would remain incomplete because of the uneasy alliance with Alderman Dickerson. Trouble between the two men commenced even before Dawson's official acceptance by the Cook County Central Committee. Mayor Kelly named Dawson and Dickerson to co-chair a fundraising drive for his annual Christmas

Mayor Ed Kelly

Arthur W. Mitchell (standing) addresses a meeting of the Second Ward Organization. Kelly's endorsement of Mitchell in the Illinois First Congressional District race signaled the local machine's decision to appeal to the city's black voters. CHS , ICH i-15832, gift of Arthur W. Mitchell.

charity . Dawson's workers sponsored a benefit which raised $500 to buy clothes for distribution at Christmas. Dickerson claimed credit for work which Dawson felt had been done by his staff a lone. The incident, in which both men strove Lo impress the mayor, indicated the tension between the rivals for control of the ward. Dawson's refusal to endorse Dickerson in his bid for the 1940 Democratic nomination for co ngressman further exacerbated their uneasy relation -hip. Dawson had earlier promised that support in exchange for the alderman's backing against Tittinger, but in J940 he stood behind the incumbent, Arthur Mitchell. Meanwhile Dawson worked to isolate Dickerson from the center of power in the Second Ward; he "forgot " to invite the alderman to meetings and regularly called him to the pod ium to speak at political rallies with only a few minutes left on the program. Frustrated by his commiueeman's machina-

Lions against him, Dickerson also found himself increasingly alienated from city hall. Feeling betrayed by Dawson in 1940, Di ckerson refused to campa ign for Mitchell-a decision very unpopular with Kelly and Nash,, who demanded complete support of the ticket by all Democrats. Kelly also disapproved of Dickerson's incipient radicalism: the alderman became an outspoken proponent of organized labor, a more militant spokesman for black rights, president of the Chicago Urban League, and worst of all, along with Paul Douglas and John Boyle, a persistent crit ic of the Kelly administration in the City Council. Particularly galling to the mayor was Dickerson's opposition to a traction ordinance favored by Kelly, on the grounds that it allowed unions lo discriminate on the basis of color. Dawson observed, "he was always raising the race issue and antagonizing people. . . . Me, I never raise the race issue, even in Congress, and I certainly didn't in the Council. ... " 109

Mayor Ed Kelly

Mayor Kelly (center) confers with Democratic leaders before a radio broadcast. Clockwise from lower left are: Cook County Democratic Chairman Pat Nash, U.S. Congressman Adolph Sabath, Cook County Sheriff Tom O'Brien, and 24th Ward Alderman Jacob Arvey. CHS, ICHi-15881.

The events of 1942 sealed Dickerson's fate as a pariah. Congressman Arthur W. Mitchell decided not to run for re-election that year (although he gave his wife's failing health as the reason many believed that his decision reflected a surrender to the expanding Dawson machine) and the Democratic organization chose Dawson to replace him. Dickerson resolved to run as an independent in the primary, finally severing the cord that bound him to the Kelly-Nash machine. He campaigned ardently as a New Dealer and criticized Dawson for replacing Democratic jobholders with his former Republican cronies. Defending his radicalism, Dickerson predicted that Dawson "can at best be another weak-kneed Mitchell owing allegiance to a machine rather than the people." But despite a valiant campaign, Dickerson lost to Dawson by an overwhelming margin, 14,638 to 4,521. Dawson's subsequent victory over the Republican candidate William E. King ele110

vatecl him to a new pinnacle in the South Side political arena. In 1943 Dickerson lost his City Council seat LO Dawson's cohon, William H. Harvey, assuring Dawson complete control of the Second Ward. That same year Benjamin Grant, elected as the first black Democratic alderman from the Third Ward in 1939, lost to Republican Oscar DePriest; this signaled the death knell for Michael Sneed's decaying Third Ward Organization. It also paved the way for Dawson whose subordinate, Christopher Wimbish, succeeded Sneed as ward committeeman. Secure in his own bailiwick, Dawson added the neighboring ward to his expanding fiefdom. In the following years Dawson would repeat this pattern of infiltration, so that by the midfifties his domain would span five wards on the predominantly black South Side. Into the Twentieth Ward he installed Kenneth Campbell as committeeman; into the Fourth, Claude

Mayor Ed Kelly Holman; into the Sixth, Robert Miller; and later, when Wimbish faltered, Ralph Metcalfe into the Third. As blacks moved into these previously white wards, Dawson's men, political organizers and canvassers, came in as well, laying the groundwork for the take-over. When the white bosses lost an election, Dawson approached the city Democratic leadership-Ed Kelly, Pat Nash, and later Jacob Arvey and Joe Gill-and pleaded to try his hand. In each case his superior organization produced healthy vote totals for the machine and vindicated his claims. Dawson built a sub-machine within the larger Chicago Democratic machine, whereby he controlled the votes of an estimated quarter of a million people by 1950. This can only be explained as a by-product, and not the design, of Ed Kelly's decision to install the former Republican into the seat of power in the Second Ward. Dawson's ability to produce for the machine, the electoral success in each of the wards he controlled, guaranteed his continued support from city hall. As political scientist James Q. Wilson noted, "Had a weaker or less effective man than Dawson set out to be the Negro leader, it is possible that in a series of challenges others would have triumphed and no single Negro machine would have emerged." Despite the fact that Kelly had not foreseen the direction in which Dawson's leadership would take the South Side, his strategy must be viewed as successful. Dawson, an organizational genius, brought discipline and order to a traditional trouble spot, so that Kelly and countless other Democrats benefited on election day. In short, Ed Kelly's successful cultivation of the black vote proved a great boon to Chicago's Democratic machine. Unlike Cermak, who chose the stick rather than the carrot, Kelly astutely proselytized blacks by offering them unprecedented recognition and increased patronage. He .used the availability of federal jobs and the popularity of Franklin D. Roosevelt to add to the luster of the local machine. And while some machine critics questioned his sincerity-Dickerson maintained that Kelly really "was never a friend of the Negro people"-and skeptics called the mayor's commitment to blacks solely political, his administration struck a positively progressive chord in

the realm of race relations. His sustained advocacy of integrated schools and defense of open housing, reaffirmed in the post-World War II years, rankled much of his predominantly white constituency in Chicago. While Democratic politicians coveted the black vote, Kelly's "liberalism" on the race question often exceeded the bounds of political expediency. Clearly, the black community, as well as the Democratic organization, benefited from the alliance forged by Kelly.

Selected Sources Irene McCoy Gaines Papers, Arthur w. Mitchell Papers. CHS. INTERVIEWS: Author's interviews with John Leonard East, Edison Love, John Dreiske; James Q. Wilson's interview with William Dawson (1958), typescript in possession of author. NEWSPAPERS: Chicago Defender, Chicago Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Chicago Times. Allswang, John M. A House for All Peoples: Ethnic Politics in Chicago, 1890-1936. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1971. - - . "The Chicago Negro Voter and the Democratic Consensus: A Case Study, 1918-1936." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 60 (Summer 1967). Biles, Roger. "Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago: Big City .Boss in Depression and War." Unpublished Ph .D. dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, 1981. Branham, Charles. "The Transformation of Black Political Leadership in Chicago, 1865-1942." Ph.D . dissertation in progress, University of Chicago. Drake, St. Clair and Cayton, Horace R. Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City . New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1945. Duis, Perry R. "Arthur W. Mitchell, New Deal Negro in Congress." Unpublished master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1966. Gordon, Rita W. "The Change inâ&#x20AC;˘ the Political Alignment of Chicago's Negroes during the New Deal." Journal of American History 56 (December 1969). Gosnell, Harold F. Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, I 935. Henderson, Elmer W. "A Study of the Basic Factors Involved in the Change in the Party Alignment of Negroes in Chicago, 1932-1938." Unpublished master's thesis, University of Chicago, 1939. Jones, Gene Delon. "The Local Political Significance of New Deal Relief Legislation in Chicago, 1933-1940." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Northwestern University, 1970. Sulli\'an, Lawrence. "The Negro Vote." Atlantic Monthly 166 (October I 940). "Wilson, James Q. "Negro Leaders in Chicago." Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1959. - - . Negro Politics: The Search for Leadership. Glencoe, II.: Free Press, l 960. MANUSCRIPTS:

111

Looking Backward Off to Mackinac! By Carl A. Norberg

Every year on a Saturday late in July a fleet ofyachts fills Chicago's Monroe Street Harbor waiting to start in the world's longest freshwater boating contestthe race from Chicago to Mackinac Island. It all began in 1898.

to Mackinac was a rather informal affair involving five cruising sailboats. Customarily, their owners, all of whom were friends, had spent their summers on Georgian Bay near Mackinac Island, sailing the 333 miles north each July and returning in late August. Back at the Chicago Yacht Club, these sailors would spin their tales of raging gales or vexing calms, each boasting of miraculously speedy trips to his destination. In 1898 a group of yachtsmen decided to put their boats to the test by converting their annual trip north into a race. The Tribun e reported that the sailors had decided to dispense with a handicapping system because "varying winds will make up for any advantage" held by one yacht over another. The first place finisher would win $250, while the second and third finishers would receive $150 and $100 respectively-prizes considered "well worth racing for." Five yachts, the Vanenna, the Siren, the Hawthorne, the Toxteth, and the Nomad, set out from Belmont Harbor on August 6 "under a cloud of white canvas." A Tribune reporter later wrote that the weather "to the northwest last evening prophesied ... that the racers may have some lively experiences before they even reach the Manitou Islands." But the promise of a possible squall did not dampen the enthusiasm of these skippers. Vanenna, a two-year-old sloop owned by Wm. F. Cameron, caught the THE FIRST RACE

Carl A. Norberg, a retired businessman now living in St . Petersburg Beach, Florida, has been sailing for 60 years. His articles on sailing have appeared in such magazines as Inland Seas and Motorboating and Sailing. ]12

best winds off the Michigan shore and finished the race in 51 hours. Siren, also a two-year-old sloop, finished in second place an hour later, while Hawthorn e, a four-year-old schooner, finished third, seventeen minutes behind Siren. Nomad arrived in Mackinac three days later, and Toxteth did not finish . Captain E. P. Warner, skipper of the Hawthorn e, hoped that the race would become a more frequent event, noting that this had been "essentially a cruising race, arranged with a view of determining the respective worth of the yachts and the possibilities of speed combined with safety and comfort." Since it had "proved a grand success ... it will do much to encourage the love of sport among Chicago yachtsmen." Captain Âˇw arner was overly optimistic. Not until I 904 did Chicago yachtsmen organize another race to Mackinac as the Chicago Int erOcean reported in March of that year: At the meeting of the Yacht Owners Association of the Chicago Yacht Club, Thursday evening, it was decided to make the cruising race from Chicago to l\Iackinac, August 3, the event of the season-and to make the event an open one and invite all the Yacht Clubs on the Great Lakes to compete. Handsome cups will be hung up for the schooner and sloop classes, and also a time prize.

Frank S. Howell, chairman of the Regatta Committee, concluded the announcement of the conditions for this first official Mackinac Cup race with the following designation of prizes: There will be four valuable cups and cash prizes of I 00, S50, and 25 given for schooners, sloops and

Beginning in 1898 as an informal contest between friends, the Ch icago-Mackinac Race became a regular sporting event in 1904. The victor in that first race was the sloop Vanenna (right) , shown here a year later. The irregularities in the photo are the result of damage to the glass negative from wh ich this was reproduced . CHS , Chicago Daily News photo, SDN-4708, gift of Field Enterprises.

11 3

Mackinac Race yawls, a cup for time prize and a club pennant for first boat to cross the finish line. The finish line will be between two buoys placed opposite the Grand Hotel at Mackinac Island.

The Association also provided for a handicapping system based on the rules of the Lake Michigan Yachting Association. Ten yachts started the First Mackinac Cup Race from the Van Buren Street Gap, including veterans of the 1898 race, Vanenna, Hawthorne, and Siren, and a sloop named Vencedor, onetime winner of the Canada's cup. The race became a tense rivalry between Vanenna and Vencedor, the latter winning in 37 hours 46 minutes, and the former arriving only five minutes later. (Vencedor would win the Mackinac race again in 1907 .) In 1906 a committee was formed to raise money for a permanent trophy in the form of a cup for the race. The cup would stay in the Chicago Yacht Club house and after each race the winning yacht's name would be engraved on its base. With $1500 raised from yacht club members and Mac Island residents, the committee bought a 24"-high silver trophy fashioned after an ornate Indian war canoe. In 19 l l, in one of the most remarkable races in the history of the event, high winds forced four of the eleven starters out of the race. These same winds brought the schooner Amorita over the finish line in an elapsed (actual) time of 31 hours and 14 minutes, a record unequaled to this clay. Because of the complicated handicapping system, however, Amorita lost to the sloop M avourneen whose corrected time was 28 hours and 31 minutes. One of the boats incapacitated by the winds was the previous Mac winner Vencedor, which threatened to break up near Fisherman's Island, in the vicinity of Charlevoix, Michigan, after the winds pushed her aground between two boulders. Crew member John Brady later wrote this dramatic account: The sky was black and the clouds hung low. There was nothing in sight but the weary waste of water, and it was rapidly getting dark. The wind was not only unfaceable but it was as cold as ice and the spray it tossed stung like sleet. ... It seemed impossible she [Vencedor] could last one-half hour the way she was pounding in the terrific sea. There was none on board the yacht but believed his time had come. 114

Luckily a power boat skippered by a Captain Davis "arrived just in the nick of time" and carried the ten-man crew to safety. Some twenty-six years later, in 1937, Mackinac racers faced similar dangers when a Sunday afternoon squall worked up to an unexpected nor'west storm with winds which reached 70 mph and stayed at 40 mph for twenty hours, driving about eighty-five percent of the fleet out of the race. One boat, Revenge, had to put into port to drop off a crewman who had broken his wrist during the storm. After the injury was treated, Revenge picked him up and went on to finish first in the racing division, despite the lost time. In 1939 and 1966 the fleet encountered winds of 72 mph and wild thunderstorms. And in 1970 more than half of the 170-boat fleet did not finish the race because of thunderstorms. A survey taken after this race revealed that seasickness and lack of experience with bad weather were the chief causes for these dropouts . Because of the hazards involved, the ChicagoMackinac Race was known in its early years as "a man's race in a man's sport." Nevertheless, women have sailed in the Mac race almost since its inception. In l 905 a small sloop named Lady Eileen entered the race crewed by two women, Miss Evelyn C. vVright and her cousin Sara Carey. The press reflected general skepticism about the Lady Eileen's chances, noting: All of the boats are good weather crafts and expected to complete the trip unless the Lady Eileen finds the hardships too great. Both women insisted on starting, although some of the other contestants besought them to tackle easier game.

The women were confident of their sailing ability but Lady Eileen broke down outside of South Haven, Michigan, and had to be towed into port. After being baled out, Lady Eileen re-entered the race. In time women became more frequent crew members in the Mac race. In 194 I I served as navigator on a heavy cruising ketch named Breeze. Mrs. S. W. D. Scott, wife of the owner, was one of the crew. Throughout the trip she prayed for winning weather, and at the finish line Breeze won in her division. I was first exposed to "Mackinac Fever" as a

1Uackinac R ace

The 100-ft. schooner Amorita, owned by Dr. W. L. Baum, placed second in both the 1909 and 1911 ChicagoMackinac races . She st i ll holds the record for the race 's fastest elapsed time . From Donald Fry Prather's There Will Always Be A Mackinac Race , D. F. Keller & Co., 1925. CHS, ICHi-15874 .

Chi cago Mayor William Hale Tho mpson (l eft) captained his schooner Va/more to three consecut ive Mac race victo ries in 1908-1910. In this 1915 photo he is at the wh eel of the Kabaka. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DN-64,639, gift of Field Enterprises.

11 5

Mackinac Race

In 1906 Chicago Yacht Club members and Mac Island residents bought a permanent trophy cup for the race. Each year the winning boat's name was engraved on the base of the cup , which stayed in the CYC clubhouse. From Donald Fry Prather's There Will Always Be A Mackinac Race, D. F. Keller & Co., 1925. CHS, ICHi-15871.

The destination: Mackinac Island , shown here in 1925. Originally a military and fur trading post, the island turned to tourism for its livelihood after both the fur trade and the commercial fishing industry died out. CHS , ICHi-15884, photo by J. Sherwin Murphy, gift of the photograph er.

116

JUachinac Race

SOME IMPRESSIONS OF THE CHICAGO TO MACKINAC YACHT RACE.

l\tE." STAR.T WArJ0Y0US

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Tribune cartoonist John McCutcheon's account of the Polaris's 1911 race. Humorist George Ade, who was along , wrote his own account in the ship's log: "It was blowing great guns before the mainsail was taken in .. . . we clung to the rail and had all of the delirious sensations of trying to ride a sub-marine bronco ." From Donald Fry Prather's There Will Always Be A Mackinac Race , D. F. Keller & Co., 1925. CHS , ICHi-15872.

II 7

j\Jack i11ac Race

young boy in 1923. I would sit enthralled in the clubhouse listening to yacht club members recall their heroic feats in previous Mackinac races. Their talk was peppered with magic names like Skilligalee, Point Betsie, Beaver Island, and Waugoshance and accounts of skippers waiting hours for even a small breeze to propel them closer to l\fackinac, only to be overtaken by sudden gales o[ 70 mph which threatened their very lives. But there were also the storybook races when the winds were with the fleet all the way as it sped on in the finest weather. And then there were the arguments about which course yielded the best results. Some claimed that the most favorable winds were along the east-the Michigan-shore o[ the lake, and many of the race's winners have taken that course. Others liked the west side, along the V1Tisconsin shore; still others argued strongly in favor o( the "rhumb" line-the straight line from Chicago to Mackinac up the middle of the lake-which is the shortest in distance if the winds are favorable. I spent my first Mackinac race as a crew member under Captain Skip Ort on the schooner Nokomis, an entry in the 1926 contest. Unfortunately Nokomis was disabled during a squall on the first night out and we had to bring her back to Chicago for repairs. In l 929 I tried again, this time in command of my own sloop, the 39-foot Vict01y, built in Boston by the George Lawley shipyard. Late on our first night out I found that the binnacle light which lit the face of the compass in the cockpit floor was apparently not working. 'When one of the crew removed the companionway stairs to get at the battery, he discovered a stowaway-17-year-old Katherine Ort, who had crewed with me on her father's boat in 1926. (I don't think there have been many stowaways since then, because the new yacht designs have phased out the unused space like the one in Vict01y where Katherine hid.) At the end o( the race, we received a lot of razzing about our "cargo" as well as about the poor time we made in the race-we were almost last to finish. There were other years, though, when we placed much higher. During the 1930s I raced Victory to l\Iackinac eight times, and in 1933 we came in third with a corrected time of 70 118

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Of 11

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Prizewinner Minota's course in 1905. The dotted line denotes her return course. From Donald Fry Prather's There Will Always Be A Mackinac Race, D. F. Keller & Co., 1925. CHS, ICHi-15873. Right: Yachts leave Monroe Street Harbor in the 1979 Chicago-Mackinac Race. Photo by Carol Singer.

hours and 48 minutes, 9½ hours behind the winner, Chimon. I have raced on eight other boats, including a ketch, several schooners, and a few loops, but I've never gone to Mackinac in one of the newer fiberglass models. Even though I've raced to Mackinac quite a [ew times, there are others in the yacht club who have participated in many more races than I have. Every year they come back to Chicago to try again for the Mac cup. In 1946 three race veterans decided to start a club for sailors who have participated in twenty-five or more races. They called it the Island Goats Sailing Society, because "some of the contestants were accused of looking and smelling like goats after three

Nfachinac Race

or four clays at sea, and someone pointed out that goats often lived on islands" like Mackinac. The Goats like to get together and exchange stories about past trips to the island. Senior Goat is Eel Schnabel, a co-founder with 54 trips to his credit. The first Nanny Goat was inducted in 1979 when ~nnie Juell joined their ranks. These men and women, along with hundreds of others, return to the Monroe Street Harbor each summer in preparation for this important sailing event. To them it has become more than just a race against other sailors to Mackinac Island; it is a contest against whatever unexpected conditions fickle Lake ,[ichigan throws their way. Charles H. Burras, a member of the

I 910 winning crew on William Hale Thompson's Valmore, once summed up the philosophy which impels people to participate in the race: It makes a better man of you in every way, more able to contest the other trials of skill and resourcefulness of your life, and it means a whole lot more than just having your name and the name of your ship engraved on the i\fackinac ... strength, selfreliance, courage, cool-headedness, preparedness and skill are the real trophies after all, and these are worth striving for and worth attaining.

The enduring popularity of the Chicago1\Iackinac Race is the best testimony one could have that there are many who continue to share his view. 119

The Society An Inside-Outside View From April 25 to May 1, the Society's director-to-be was here to participate in a history conference and to join in the celebration which marked the beginning of our 125th year. These are his comments on the visit.

CHS President Theodore Tieken (right) dedicates the Society's new Fort Dearborn exhibit at its opening on April 25, 1981. Photo by Photo Ideas.

26-I have visited the Society three times, once for a week; I will visit it again within another week. And I assume my position as director a month later. Privy to reports, discussions, and advice and yet tied to my present institution for a while longer, I am writing

MAY

120

from a strange perspective which will have vanished by the time this is in print. I want to share with you some of the thoughts mixing within, the kind of report perhaps best done verbally by Heywood Hale Broun. I want to tell you, too, that although the view from my

perspective is unusual, not outside and not yet within, it is still good. The occasion for my week-long visit at the end of April was an excellent seminar by the American Association for State and Local History. The subject was fitting, the motive for my application to the gathering: urban history, specifically the new urban history, that quantifiable and controversial approach which gathers and digests via computer the masses of raw data that can provide insights so far unknown and still unacceptable to some. The experience was helpful. Participants from historical agencies and historians from academe, and sometimes staff members who were also consumers or practitioners such as the Society's Gail Farr Casterline, explored every cranny of the new history's attempt to unravel the reasons why cities have worked as they have. I was able to place the concepts within my own broader knowledge of American history and to add to a working frame of reference which will quickly expand as I begin the task of understanding Chicago. I was particularly pleased that the Society hosted the seminar. This was fitting because most of the historians had used the Society's collections for research and some had become intimately familiar with its holdings. It was clear that the .Society has offered these historians much support, and the additional role of host simply continued this tradition. Moreover, it was good to see various of the Society's staff members sitting in on sessions of particular interest and approaching scholars during breaks to discuss publications, sources, and ideas. The truth, of course, is that if the seminar was the occasion for my visit, other motives drew me northward too. ot the least of these was the desire to participate in the celebration of the Society's I 25th birthday. A festive occasion it was, full of hourly activities. Perhaps it was because aclmission charges were suspended for the day, but I found myself unable to "read" the crowd which had gathered. The variety of people was amazing, not necessarily typical of any single group one might expect to find its way into a museum. I was particularly impressed by the number of children drawn, I'm sure, by the superb puppet show, PUPPETS: ART

an exploration of the history of puppetry. These same children could also be seen in the other galleries, however, and at the cake cutting (and eating), the singing, and listening to Mrs. O'Leary's monologue. If the diversity of the visitors was exceptional, so too was the program. It is significant that in a single day an organization could entertain children and adults; open FORT DEARBORN & FRONTIER CHICAGO, a major exhibit of the icons and objects of early Chicago history; dedicate new facilities for the handicapped; and celebrate its 125th birthday. The cutting of the birthday cake by Board Chairman Theodore Tieken was unquestionably the symbolic highlight of the clay. It impressed upon me the longevity of the Society and the tradition of service and scholarship which it has fostered. It emphasized the significance of my directorship and the attendant responsibility that I will have to continue these things to maintain the integrity of the organization. The faces of the observers-the celebrants both staff and public-showed that there is a widespread appreciation of this tradition . It is a fact of minor note that in I 858, two years after its founding, the Chicago Historical Society sent several appropriate objects to the Tennessee Historical Society for its collection. I must admit that my coming in July hardly signifies a thread of continuity between the two institutions. Yet again, the impact of a continuing role is impressed upon me. The cries of children pulling their parents from one gallery, one case, to another, and evert the tentativeness with which they approach the cab of the Pioneer locomotive, are eloquent witness to the wisdom of it all. There was one other benefit from the visit. Amidst the arranged meetings were times of informality-receptions, lunches, a tour, quick and impromptu conferences-which helped me immeasurably in my first steps into the Society. I must say that I like what I have learned about the staff, about their friendliness, attitudes, projects, and energy. "Are you excited about going to Chicago?" I am asked. Of course I am, and since my visit I have even more reason to respond in the affirmative. Ellsworth H. Brown

AND ENTERTAINMENT,

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Reviews Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-37 by William Harris Urbana: Uni\'ersity of Illinois Press, 1977. $12.50.

in recent publishing history must be Keeping the Faith by William Harris. Even Chicago's two dailies failed to review this most comprehensive study to date of the turbulent rise of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. The BSCP was the first AFL-chartered black labor union and would soon become A. Philip Randolph's platform for launching the American civil rights movement. Harris's work eclipses Brailsford Brazeal's The Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Port ers with a broader treatment of the porters as pioneers in black working-class society and a crafted introduction on the "uncertain tradition" between black workers and American organized labor. Thus, Harris's book also goes deeper than Jervis Anderson 's A . Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait in its treatment of the period. Keeping the Faith is based upon copious study of primary sources, especially the correspondence between Randolph and the BSCP's leader in Chicago, l\Iilton P. Webster, which is now in the collections of the Chicago Historical Society. The Chicago-based Pullman Company, then the largest employer of blacks in America, en joyed several strategic advantages against the BSCP. It held a monopoly on sleeping car work and exploited a discriminatory labor market which made portering a top-notch job for blacks and provided the company with many overqualified applicants. Since breaking Eugene Debs's American Railway Union in the 1894 Pullman Strike, the company had crushed or co-opted every attempt of its workers to organize and had established a set of company unions. One of Pullman's anti-union tactics, the use of blacks as strikebreakers, was not an uncommon device of employers and had served to create race hatred in the labor movement and to propagate the myth that blacks could not organize. From the porters, Pullman required 300 to 400 hours of rigidly obedient service a month for $67.50, a vote for the company union, and membership in a quasi-religious death benefit association whose assets (along with Pullman advertising contracts) would be used to influence the black press and clergy. For their living, the porters depended heavily upon tips from passengers. This, then, was the dilemma of a small group of porters who had grown frustrated from their atONE OF THE BEST-KEPT SECRETS

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tempts to make the company union or benefit association act as a bona fide union. They knew they would be fired if they formed an independent organization. They had to recruit someone outside the company's reach. They chose A. Philip Randolph of New York City, the learned Socialist editor of a magazine called the M essenger and also a dynamic orator. The company's reaction to Randolph's "scientific propaganda" was swift and vigorous. Randolph was branded an outside Bolshevik agitator and the company's welfare workers traveled around the country to denounce him , as did various political and religious figures from the black community. Some even attended a mysterious conference that purportedly denounced the union. Indeed, black newspapers, including the Chicago Defender which had earlier advocated the unionizing of porters, now editorialized against the BSCP. One Brotherhood organizer was severely beaten, another nearly lynched. Hundreds of union members were fired . When the union threatened to strike in 1928, the company lined up hundreds of potential strikebreakers and convinced the National l\Iediation Board there was no emergency. Randolph called the strike off. The ensuing turmoil almost tore the Brotherhood apart. Then came the Great Depression, which forced layoffs and a drastic loss of membership. But, as Harris chronicles, Randolph had now emerged as the New Negro, a race leader free of the white corporate influence which he so zestfully counterattacked. His Brotherhood's integrity and perseverance won the respect of AFL president 'W illiam Green and federal charters for many BSCP locals in 1929. Randolph also curried the support of the NAACP and the 1ational Urban League. But despite this broad popular support, the porters' union was hamstrung by the 1926 Railway Labor Act, which did not protect sleeping car porters or dining car waiters. Not until the New Deal reforms had taken effect did porters win inclusion in an amended act which effectively banned company unionism . The Brotherhood forced a representation election, prevailing by a 4-to-l margin over the Pullman union. Randolph fended off a last-minute attempt by the Pullman conductors to claim jurisdiction over the porters, and AFL President Green came to Chicago's Du Sable High School to present the BSCP with its charter. In addition to its highly detailed treatment of Randolph's coalition-building, Keeping the Faith is also notable as the first work to give more than passing mention to Chicagoan Milton Webster, who emerged from the turmoil after the aborted strike as the union's undisputed number two man . Harris shows how the differing visions of the two men led to friction. Randolph was anxious to build a broad constituency including many people outside the craft and so was quick to forgive the union 's vanquished enemies. Webster held grudges

and was more narrowly concerned with keeping the porters' loyalty to force a showdown with the company. The working peace they achieved kept the union's two largest locals united. Indeed, for the first time, Harris distinguishes Randolph the charismatic leader from Webster the labor leader. Keeping the Faith may be criticized, however, for focusing so closely upon the union's top leadership; only three live sources were interviewed. Two surviving International Field Organizers and the rank and file were passed up. One would also like to have seen at least some mention of the clerical figures who supported the Brotherhood, most notably the Reverend William Lloyd Imes and the Reverend A. C. Powell of New York, and Dr. W. D . Cook and the Reverend Charles Wesley Burton of Chicago. Despite these omissions, its breadth of scholarship insures that Keeping the Faith will become a standard reference work for students of labor history, black history, and the civil rights movement. GREG LEROY

The Paradox of Progressive Education: The Gary Plan and Urban Schooling, 1900-1940 by Ronald D. Cohen and Raymond A. Mohl Port ,-vashington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, 1979. 15.00.

THE QUESTION of whether progressives were really advocates of rugged individualism or social conformity is a haunting one for historians. This book focuses on the life of progressive educator William Wirt, who introduced a model work-study-play system of education as superintendent of schools in Gary, Indiana, soon after that community was established by officials of U.S. Steel. \,Virt is characterized as a country boy at heart, with conservative political and social persuasions. Born in 1874 near Markle, Indiana, Wirt studied at DePauw University, from which he graduated in 1898 with an l\LA. in political science. After teaching less than a year, he became school superintendent of Bluffton, Indiana, where he remained until he was called to Gary in 1907 In Gary, Wirt formulated a plan for dividing the students in each school into two groups or platoons. While one platoon studied traditional academic subjects, the other engaged in a number of specialized activities including field trips, gymnastics, and manual training classes. By alternating groups of classes, Wirt hoped that the students would be exposed to a wider range of experiences and develop a variety of skills which would prepare them for adult life. The platoon approach was also economical, increasing enrollment capacity while decreasing the teacher workload. According to the authors, the program was an expression of Wirt's belief that education could

"promote American capitalism and individualism, within the framework of the corporate-technological society." J\feanwhile the Gary system began to attract attention from re~ormers who believed that the plan could be redirected and used to achieve a radical social reconstruction in the United States. Among these supporters was Alice Barrows, a 1900 graduate of Vassar College who had studied briefly under John Dewey at Columbia before going to work as a social investigator in New York's sweatshop district . During these years, Barrows became deeply committed to urban reform and came to regard schools as a means of social salvation. Several of her early reform efforts were in the area of vocational education which, in turn, exposed her to Wirt's work in Gary. Following the election of New York's reform mayor John Purroy Mitchel in 1913, Wirt was asked to reorganize the city's schools along the lines of the Gary plan. With active help and encouragement from Mitchel and Barrows (who served as Wirt's secretary and publicist), the Indiana educator spent four years trying to implement the platoon system. Unfortunately, the victory of Tammany's John Hylan put an encl to the experiment in 1917. However, Gary kept the platoon structure until Wirt's death in 1938. By this time Wirt was forced to confront the issue of teachers' rights and unionization. This was one development that Wirt had tried to squelch in his last remaining years as superintendent. Compared to the political and social liberalism of Alice Barrows, Wirt's views were those of an "unreconstructed old progressive" whose faith in the individual made him fearful of increasing government control. From then on, "no matter what he personally believed," the authors continue, "he was a hero to those on the right, and a clown to those in the center and on the left." The strength of this study lies in the wealth of information it contains about these educational developments in general and the Gary experiment in particular. Although some readers may question the authors' assessments of Wirt and Barrows and their place in the progressive period, Cohen and l\Iohl have provided useful biographical sketches as well as much informative background material on the ethnic and black communities in Gary. JOAN K. SMITH

The Chicago Board of T rade 1859- 1905: The Dynamics of Self-Regulation by Jonathan Lurie Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. $12.50.

THIS 1s NOT a history of the Board of Trade but a study of its growth and development as a nongovernmental regulatory agency. The book covers a

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Reviews period of enormous growth, influence, and internal struggle for the Board which was then, as now, the world's largest commodity futures exchange. In its early years the Board had to overcome popular views that regarded speculation in commodities as just another form of gambling. At the same time, the exchange had to curb the very real opportunities for abuse, and these efforts, many of them launched by Board members and officers, are the focus of Lurie's research. Gambling was outlawed by statute, and courts in Illinois and other states tussled for several years over the legality of various types of grain futures trading. By the 1880s the courts had accepted several methods of fulfilling futures contracts without actual delivery of the grain, ruling that the intent to make or accept delivery legitimized the contracts. And this decision reflected an awareness that it was both necessary and desirable for investors to be encouraged to take risks in the interests of market expansion. Options trading, although possibly beneficial to professional traders, was essentially gambling on price differences. After much contention, the Board eliminated this practice, although it has been occasionally revived and may make yet another comeback. The "bucketing" of buy and sell orders was another controversial issue. A bucket shop was a place where the proprietor accepted bets from the public on prices of stocks and commodities. When members of the Board of Trade performed this "service," they were said to be "bucketing" customers' orders-accepting them but not executing them in the trading pits. For many years dealers who bucketed orders resisted efforts at reform, but eventually the reformist spirit of the late 1800s engulfed even these recalcitrants. Even more resistant were the bucket shops that sprang up all over the country, in small rural towns as well as in big cities. Lurie traces the legal judgments in this controversy and goes on to discuss the numerous anti-futures bills introduced in Congress, particularly the Hatch Bill of 1892. On the other hand, this reader is puzzled by the author's failure to discuss the many attempts, some successful, to corner the market during this eventful period. Some of these attempted corners, such as E. L. Harper's near-corner of wheat in 1887, were broken by the Board's leadership and would have supported Lurie's thesis of the potency of administrative Jaw as enforced by the agency. The Board is no longer alone in policing its activities and Lurie's final chapter describes the Capper-Tincher Act of the 1920s which took the first timid steps to regulate commodity exchanges. The author contends that this act had "surprisingly few sections dealing with internal regulations," a lack he attributes to the "heavily involved selfregulation" of these agencies. Yet the original federal regulations have been greatly extended, which has "conceivably lent credence to the claims that 124

organized exchanges have not successfully met the need for effective policing of either the market or the membership." The book contains several interesting line drawings of the trading pits and the exchange in the nineteenth century. The bibliography is extensive and impressive, and the author's brief preface to these sources is helpful and illuminating. While the subject matter mostly makes for heavy reading, the book is one which historians of business and individuals involved in the grain trade would want to have in their libraries. WILLIAM G. FERRIS

Merchant Princes: An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores by Leon Harris New York: Harper & Row, 1979. 12.95.

1,-; Merchant Princes, a delightful collage of anecdotes, digressions, personal impressions, and biography, Leon Harris-a third-generation descendant of a Dallas department store family-presents the histories of an impressive array of Jewish mercantile dynasties, including the families Straus, Gimbel, Kaufman, Rich , Meier, Frank, Gump, J\fagnin, Rosenwald, and Lazarus. These merchants played a key role in democratizing luxury in the United States and in bringing new fashions to a wide cross-section of Americans. fost of America's Jewish store builders migrated to the United States from Germany, Russia , Poland , and Hungary during the mid-nineteenth century. \Vhile some were attracted simply by a yearning for adventure, all had suffered oppression in their homelands. Indeed, most "preferred peddling in the coldest coumy in New England or ... even the risk of being scalped in Arizona, to serving as a private in the Prussian army or as a victim of Cossack amusement." Virtually all of these merchants did in fact begin as pack peddlers, providing customers in more sparsely settled areas with news, necessities, and fashions. Those who worked hard acquired a horse and wagon-and then , with luck, a store. By the turn of the century Jewish merchants operated a high proportion of the nation's many small retail outlets; and they were among the relatively few who survived the years from 1900 to 1920, when urban retail markets increasingly came under the domination of a few large department stores. The Jewish merchants who emerged during this period shared with their Gentile counterparts an ability and a willingness to work long hours, year after year, taking care of the endless details involved in transforming a small store into a larger one. All recognized the importance of building

Reviews good will by ensuring the quality o[ their merchandise and maintaining a stock of all sizes and colors of whatever products their customers might demand. The most successful were also bold, willing to introduce untried lines of merchandise, or relocate in new areas or larger quarters in anticipation of expanding sales. Usually, they demonstrated a Oair for showmanship by developing a special service that would attract attention to their establishments . Filene's in Boston, for example, became widely known for its automatic bargain basement, J\facy's in New York for its low prices, Rich's of Atlanta for satisfying customers (no matter how unreasonable or provocative their complaints), and Nieman-i\Tarcus in Dallas for luxury items suitable for an oil millionaire to give to his wife or mistress. In addition, Harris discusses how these "merchant princes" contributed to their local communities and the nation through philanthropic encouragement of the arts and education, to a greater degree than their wealth and numbers would imply. While such support could serve as a means of social climbing, it often reflected a genuine interest by the merchants and their families in music and the theater. Because they revered learning, they often aided in the founding of symphony orchestras, libraries, museums, and colleges. Few members of Harris's assemblage of merchant princes had more successful and distinguished careers than Chicago's Juli us Rosenwald, the former owner of a retail store and men's clothing factory who acquired an interest in Sears, Roebuck and Company in I 895. Richard Sears's genius as a mail-order marketer had not carried over to the development of an organization capable of processing orders that by 1906 were numbering close to 20,000 a day. Inaccurate catalog descriptions and shipping errors were causing enormous losses, and Rosenwald approached these problems as "the greatest challenge of his life." His first step was to cut clown on returns by insisting on accurate catalog descriptions. In order to insure the quality of the merchandise shipped, Rosenwald established a laboratory in Chicago to set standards and test the company's products. He also developed a highly efficient system for processing orders, usually within a clay after they were received. Thus, when Sears left the company in 1908, Rosenwald was the obvious choice as president. As builder of the " world's largest store," Rosenwald gave approximately $63 million to civic causes prior to his death in 1932. Although strongly antiZionist, he gave generously to various Jewish causes, especially for the relief of thousands of individuals displaced before and during World War I. His contributions to the Chicago community included 100,000 to Hull-House, 3 million to the i\[useum of Science and Industry, and 4 million to the University o[ Chicago. Rosenwald's principal beneficiaries, however, were black Americans. In addition to subsidizing the construction of recrea-

tional and residential centers for blacks in some 25 Northern communities, he contributed almost S3 million to Howard, Fisk, and Dillard universities and to a confederation of black colleges in Atlanta. Although Julius Rosenwald had built his early reputation as a highly successful merchandiser, it was his role as a champion of minority advancement that would prove most enduring. As David A. Brown, publisher of The American H ebrew , noted at the time of Rosenwald's death in 1932, "The head of one of the largest merchandising organizations, [he] will be remembered not so much as an industrial genius but as a humanitarian who reached the mountain tops in human endeavor." HAROLD F. WILLIAMSON

The Game is Never Over: An Appreciative History of the Chicago Cubs, 1948-1980 by Jim Langford South Bend, Indiana: Icarus Press, 1980. Available for $11.95 by writing Icarus Press, P.O. Box 1225, South Bend, IN 46624.

LANGFORD'S NOSTALGIC IIISTORY of the Chicago Cubs is a welcome addition to the growing literature on baseball history. Using a chronological approach, Langford, the director of the University of Notre Dame Press and author of a biography of Galileo, presents a rich anecdotal and statistical account of the development of the Cubs. At the outset of the book, Langford includes a revealing memo to his sons Jeremy and Joshua explaining why he likes baseball in general and loves the Cubs in particular. He ends Chapter 1 by including several amusing letters he wrote to P. K. and William Wrigley, owners of the Chicago club, between September 1948 and ~[arch 1980. These provide an interesting commentary on the problems facing the Cubs since 1948 ~nd contain Langford's suggestions for improving the team. After briefly describing Wrigley Field, the author goes on to trace the fascinating history of the Chicago club from 1871, when charter teams from nine cities met to form the National Association oE Professional Baseball Players, to 1948, when the Cubs finished the season in last place. The Cubs have a rich, glorious tradition, having won numerous pennants under managers Cap Anson, Frank Chance, and Charlie Grimm. Later chapters provide a detailed, year-by-year analysis of the fortunes-and too often the disappointments-of the Cubs between 1948 and 1979. Despite continual attempts to improve the team through a Five-Year Plan, youth movements, trades, and managerial changes, the Cubs are the only non-expansion National League team to not win a pennant since 1945. During the 1950s, the

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Reviews Cubs often started seasons well, only to finish in the second division. Although Hank Sauer and Ernie Banks provided Cub fans with fine individual performances, the team continued to languish during the early 1960s. Under veteran manager Leo Durocher, the Cubs became pennant contenders from 1967 to 1972, but the I 970s were largely a replay of the 1950s, with promising starts which fizzled into disappointing finishes. And despite outstanding plays by Bill Madlock, Rick Reuschel, and particularly Bruce Sutter in the latter 1970s, the Cubs still could not win a pennant. Cubs fans, like Langford, conclude that the game is never over and look with anticipation to each new spring and the prospects that the team will once again be in the thick of the pennant race. The book includes several fine photographs, a Norman Rockwell painting on the cover, a fine concluding chapter on 16 Cub games to remember, and very informative charts. On the other hand, it also contains a few spelling errors and is often too repetitious and statistical in its season-by-season reiteration of Cub performance since 1948. Despite these minor flaws, baseball fans and Cub enthusiasts particularly will thoroughly en joy this fine, witty, well-written book. DAVID L. PORTER

Halas by Halas: The Autobiography of George Halas by George Halas ew York: McGraw-Hill, 1979. 12.95.

The Chicago Bears: An Illustrated History by Richard Whittingham Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979. $14.95 .

make an interesting pair. On the one hand, we have an account by a leading Chicago sports figure, George Halas; and on the other, a survey written by long-time Chicago Bear fan and journalist Richard Whittingham. As might be expected, the episodes that are emphasized are almost identical. New material could come only from an insider such as Halas, and Halas probably has been asked as many questions about the Bears' 73-0 defeat of the Washington Redskins in 1940 as Eisenhower was asked about D-Day. The Bears began in Decatur in 1920 as an industrial team representing the Staley Manufacturing Company. That same year, several such teams banded together to form what would become the National Football League. After one season, A. E. Staley recognized that the population of Decatur was too small to provide the ticket-sales revenue TOGETHER THESE TWO BOOKS

126

necessary to meet the team's expenses-and since the Decatur Staleys had drawn well when they played in Chicago, Staley helped team captain George Halas and his partner, Edward "Dutch" Sternaman, move the team to the Windy City. In those pre-radio and television days, publicity depended on the newspapers which then, as now, gave preference to the events which were most popular with their readers. College football had a large following which, as both authors relate, was openly hostile to the new professional teams. The turning point came in 1925 when the Bears took a cross-country tour with the newly-signed Red Grange, whom many considered to be the greatest college football player of the day. Grange, incidentally, has written the foreword to Whittingham's book. Four years later, the Depression hit. Halas and Sternaman ended their partnership in 1934 following a year of serious monetary losses. Halas purchased Sternaman's interest with funds gathered from a variety of sources, including his mother and the mother of one of his players. The greatest difference in interpretation between the two books concerns the partnership years; Whittingham relies extensively on the Sternaman family, while Halas presents his own side. In producing his "illustrated history," Whittingham was handicapped by a lack of documentation since many of the team's early records were destroyed in a 1961 fire. Many materials which would be of interest to historians have been irretrievably lost, but Whittingham has helped to reassemble the photographic evidence, including some 250 images which accompany his text. While most of these are photographs of games or players, there are several interesting documents such as the Bears' 1922 statement of incorporation, a listing of salaries and expenses from a trip to Green Bay in 1930, and the standard player's contract from I 931. Statistical records are included in the appendix. Halas's autobiography, "as told to Gwen Morgan and Arthur Veysey," is pure entrepreneurial history of a type not ordinarily found in popular sports literature. Since I was first old enough to be a Bears fan, Halas has had the popular image of an all-American Jack Armstrong who succeeded in everything he turned to. Just as the Halas legend lives on in this book, so does the man. He has been successful and is not ashamed to say so. He has had some disappointments, both professionally and personally. But one thing is clear: as far as George Halas is concerned, the Bears are "my Bears." The illustrations in Whittingham's book arouse pleasureful, painful, and frustrating memories, but his commentary is not as powerful as Halas's in rekindling those emotions. One can only wonder what might have happened if all the talented people involved in producing these two excellent books had joined forces on a single project. LOUIS P. CAIN

Notes Index to Chicago History Readers who have inquired about indices to Chicago History will be pleased to know that an index for volumes 3 through 7 (1974-79) is now available. Compiled by Carol Spielman Lezak, former CHS Technical Services Librarian, the index includes author, title, and subject entries patterned after the card catalog to the Society's printed collections. Copies of the 52-page publication may be obtained for $6.50 (or S7.65 by mail in Illinois) by contacting the Society's Museum Store, Clark Street at North Avenue, Chicago, IL 60614. The indices for volumes 1 and 2 were published in the Fall-Winter 1971 and 1973 issues, which are available for $5.00 and $2.50, respectively.

Guide to Architectural Records

George Halas with Chicago Bear Sid Luckman , 1947. From the Society 's new publication , the 1982 Chicago Sports Album appointment calendar, available at the Museum Store. CHS , Chicago Daily News photo, DNAlpha, gift of Field Enterprises.

Correction: Circle Campus Revisited Several readers have pointed out an error in the caption on page 229 of Chicago History, Winter 1980--81. The building with the balcony was not the original Charles Hull mansion. The mansion and the dining hall were located at the back of the court between the two buildings on the right a nd are not shown in the photograph.

The Reviewers -Louis P. Cain teaches economics at Loyola University of Chicago. -William G. Ferris covered the Chicago Board of Trade for severa l years as financial editor for the Associated Press. Several of his articles on the Board have appeared in the Journal of the Illin ois State Historical Society. -Greg LeRoy , a former sleeping car porter, is writing a history of the Pullman porters. -David L. Porter teaches courses in American historyincluding one in sports history-at William Penn College, Oskaloosa, Iowa. -Joan K. Smith is Assistant Professor of Eciucation at Illinois State University and editor of Educational Studies. She is the author of Ella Flagg Young: Portrait of a Leader, a biography of the first woman superintendent of the Chicago public schoo ls. - Harold F. Williamson is Professor Emeritus of Economics at orlhwestern University.

The Burnham Library of The Art Institute of Chicago has recently published an excellent 91-page guide to Architectural Records in Chicago prepared by Kathleen Roy Cummings. Beginning with an illustrated user's guide to property records, the volume contains an extensive list of several hundred repositories in Cook County and vicinity along with descriptions of their holdings, admission policies, and the names of individuals to contact for additional information. The inclusion of such varied repositories as historical societies, photographic firms, map libraries, corporate and denominational archives, and municipal agencies makes this an especially valuable research tool. Copies of the book are available for $12.95 (add $1.25 for postage) from the l\I use um Store, The Art Institute of Chicago, Iichigan Avenue at Adams Street, Chicago, IL 60603.

Music in Chicago The Society is planning a majqr exhibit and publication on the history of music in Chicago from the 1830s to the present. Scheduled to open in 1984, the exhibit will embrace all forms of serious and popular music from symphonic and choral to gospel. blues, and jazz, as well as music publishing, instrument manufacture, and the music of Chicago 's ethnic groups. As part of the project, the Society wants to obtain a full range of materials on music in Chicago for the research collections, including complete files of programs, newsletters, and brochures from musical organizations based in Chicago, posters, photographs, sheet music published in Chicago, significant musical instruments made in Chicago or associated with important performers here, scrapbooks, and correspondence of Chicago musicians and organizations. Please call Robert L. Brubaker, Project Director of the l\f usic in Chicago Exhibition, at 642-4600, ext. 24, if you have any of these materials. 127

The Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: 312-642-4600 Officers Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, 1st Vice-President Philip W. Hummer, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary

Director Ellsworth H. Brown

Trustees Bowen Blair Mrs. Frank D. ]\fayer Philip D. Block III Mrs. Brooks McCormick John T. McCutcheon, Jr. Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Andrew McNally III Stewart S. Dixon Arthur E. Osborne, Jr. Mrs . Paul A. Florian III Bryan S. Reid, Jr. James R. Getz Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Philip W. Hummer Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken

Life Trustees Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith

The Chicago Historical Society is a privately endowed institution devoted to collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look to its members and friends for continuing financial support. Contributions to the Society are tax-deductible and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the director's office to discuss the Society's needs.

Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of annual membership and clues are as follows: lncliviclual, $25; Family, $30. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events listing Society programs; invitations to special programs; free admission to the building at all times; reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the l\Iuseum Store.

Hours Exhibition galleries are open daily from 9:30 to 4:30; Sunday from 12:00 to 5:00. Research collections are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:30 except for July and August when they are open Monday through Friday. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

Education and Public Programs Honorary Trustees Jane Byrne, Mayor, City of Chicago Raymond F. Simon , President, Chicago Park District

offers guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special programs for all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen.

Admission Fees for Non-members Adults, $1; Children (6-17), 50Â˘; Senior Citizens, 25Â˘. Admission is free on Mondays. Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are 3.00 by mail; 2.50 at newsstands, bookshops, and the Museum Store.

Exhibit Champions of American Sport 7, 1981 through January 31, 1982, the Chicago Historical Society will present a traveling exhibit, CHAMPIONS OF AMERICAN SPORT, organized by the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Spanning more than a century, the exhibit includes portraits, photographs, and memorabilia of 100 outstanding sports figures in sixteen areas, ranging from baseball and football to hockey, auto racing, and even rodeo and bicycling. Chicagoans represented in the exhibit include, among others, Jack Johnson, George Halas, and Johnny Weissmuller. Some of the items in the exhibit (like the photo on the right) are on loan from the Society's collections. The two photos below are among the more than fifty illustrations appearing in Chicago Sports Album, an appointment calendar for 1982 compiled from the Society's Graphics Collection by Teresa and Walter Krutz and published by the Society in conjunction with the exhibit. The calendar is available in the Museum Store.

Jack Johnson, probably 1912. Photo by Samuel A. Marrs. CHS, ICHi-14218.

Amelia Barke, 1907. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, DNS-53,249, gift of Field Enterprises.

Ty Cobb and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, probably 1921. CHS, Chicago Daily News photo, SDN-59,678b, gift of Field Enterprises.

FROM NOVEMBER