Chicago History | Summer 1983 by Chicago History Museum

SUMMER NU

IN 1917, American artist Joseph Pennell returned to the United States from Europe to sketch scenes of America's industrial war effort. His work brought him to Chicago, where he ca ptured the city's landscape and the bustle of the Un ion Stock Yards . "The lines of the pens or corra ls . .. are fascinating to draw ," he wrote in 1916 of an earlier sketch. " I have never "Coal a11d Corn. Buildmgthe Ship to Can)' the Food," 1917. by J oseph Pm111'il. Gift ojJanice been in them , don 't Âˇwant ,\Jc.\'nirTm,,fi,. to go, and have no interest in the social, financial , or sanitary conditions of them .. .. I am trying to record the Wonder of Work as I see it, that is all." And the body of Pennell 's work is indeed a historical record of the ways that the world lived and worked from 1885 to 1926. Born in Philadelphia on July 4, 1857, Pennell was a sickly child who spent much of his time alone drawing pictures. After graduating from Germantown Friends' Select School in 1876, he attended the Pennsylvania School of Industrial Art where he discovered a talent for etching. The following year he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but when the criticism of one instructor, Thomas Eakins, proved too caustic, Pennell left lo open his own studio. He received several commissions for drawings for magazines, including Scribner's Month(v and Century, and while working on one of these commissions he met Elizabeth Robins, a writer, whom he married in 1884. The Pennells sailed to London , where they met such notables in the world of arts and letters as George Bernard Shaw and James McNeill Whistler, and where Pennell first exhibited his work at the Society of Painter-Etchers in 1885. By the early 1890s he had begun to experiment with several media, including pen , pencil, wash, mezzotint, and Russian charcoal. In the following years, Pennell published several books, including a biography of Whistler that he co-authored with his wife Elizabeth . His primary goal at this time was LO bring Europe a bit closer to Americans through his book and magazine illustrations of places like Berlin , Paris , and Greece. Other projects took him to Panama to sketch the canal and across the United States to San Francisco, the Grand Canyon, Washington, and Philadelphia. His work at the turn of the century brought him a number of honors, including an award for his work at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. In 1914, he returned to England to draw war plants for the British government. He assembled many of his wartime drawings into a book,joseph P ennell's Pictures o/ the World of Work, published in 1916. In 1917, close to a breakdown as a result of working close to the fighting (he was at Verdun) , Pennell returned to the United States to record industrial war activities here. It was at this time that he visited Chicago and captured the city's industrial landscape and the bustle of the Union Stock Yards. In 1922, he was asked to join the faculty of the Art Students' League in ew York, where he served until his death in 1926. The results of his time in Chicago are a portfolio of Russian charcoal drawings that render with special fierceness the world of the city's slaughterhouses, factories, and railroads: what he meant by the "World of Work." Five are represented in this issue.

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Summer 1983 VOLUME XII, NUMBER 2

T imothy C. J acobson Editor Roberta Casey Assistant Editor Russell Lewis Assistant Editor Karen Kohn Designer

CONTENTS 2 Whose City ? Part Two by Perry Duis 24

Bread and Labor: Chicago's German Bakers Organize by J ohn B. J entz

Arthur Holitischer's Chicago: A German Traveler's View of an American City by Frederic Trau tman n

On the Air with Jack L. Cooper: The Beginnings of Black-Appeal Radio by Mark Newman

Reviews

The Society

Lisa Ginzel Design Assistant Walter W. Krutz Pa ul W. Petraitis Photography

Cover: Schedule card for 1885 for the Allan Li11e steamship comJxmy between Europe and America. 011e of ma11y lines once canying immigrants and tourists across the Atlantic, Allan & Company mai11lained its western office al l/2 LaSalle Street in Chicago. Two articles in this issue-"Bread and Labor: Chicago 's Bakers Organize," and"Arthur Holitischers Chicago" -deal with Europeans in Chicago as immigrants rmd as tourists who made that Foyage.

0272-8540

Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: Hist01y and Life

Whose City? Part Two By Perry Duis

By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago's public and semi-public places symbolized for many Chicagoans their hopes and fears about city life. Skyscrapers, department stores, and grand railway terminals opened new vistas of city space, but commercial activity always expanded faster than the streets. Solutionslike the automobile, which it once was hoped woul,d make for cleaner and safer streets-themselves became a part of the problem.

of city life before 1870 helped transform Chicago's street life, but the horsecar, gas lights, hotels, and bridges proved only the beginning. In the four decades following the Great Fire, revolutions in communications, transportation , and building technology would not only remake the downtown areas and change the manner in which Chicagoans reached the center of the city from their homes. Concerns about the treatment of the city's common spaces would also grow. The most rapid transformation of the city's public spaces came after 1880 with a flood of transportation technology. The emphasis shifted from the street as a place of commercial use to the street as a place of transit, a means of getting from one place to another as quickly as possible. With this change came the beginning of a new attitude toward who might use the city streets and for what purpose. The casual neglect of earlier years toward intrusion and alienation of public property for private business became an urgent issue by century's end. The question of "Who owns the city?" evoked a strong answer that at least "The streets belong to the people." The introduction of the cable car was probably the most significant turning point. This form of propulsion had been developed on the THE TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCES

Peny Duis is assist,ant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His most recent work is The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, The People of Chicago.

steep hills of San Francisco, where horse-drawn vehicles had great difficulty operating, especially during rainy weather. The new system was introduced there in 1873 and simply substituted a moving underground cable for a horse. The cable was contained in a deep slot located between the tracks. A "grip" reached from the bottom of the car into the slot and either held onto the cable or released it. The operator controlled the grip and applied the brakes to stop. The cables operated on a complicated network of pulleys powered by large steam engines. This new form of transit arrived in Chicago in January 1882. Its advocates saw it as an important advancement over the horsecars: it was faster, cheaper to operate, and it freed the transit companies from the problems of maintaining hundreds of horses. But it was also expensive to install-at a cost to private investors of more than $150,000 a mile. Much of the slot chamber and all of the cables and pulleys were i:ron or steel , and the installation process was slow because it had to be precise or it would not work. Ultimately, Chicago built eighty-two miles of these lines, making it the largest cable car system in the world. Yet the cable car system had many flaws. The metal strands that made up the cables often frayed or broke and became tangled in their pulleys. This either stranded thousands of commuters or left them once more behind a horse that was pressed into emergency service. Because the cable could bear only so much weight pulling on

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"ThP \\'lw/e\{//e Market ," 1917, byjD.1eph Pennell. Gift of Charles 1-1. Swift.

Whose City ?

Above: Although Chicago's new cable cars were hailed as a lechnological innovation in 1882 , lhe cable companies could nol prevent lhe cables from breaking or f 1om f reezing in lhe winier. Below: Each cable car line required a complex drum and gear assembly powered by a sleam engine to move the underground cable and to draw the cars along their route. This power station located at State and 21st .1treels propelled twenty miles of cable.

it, cars had to be spread fairly evenly through the system, a particular drawback in rush hour, when thousands of riders wanted to go in the same direction. Nor was speed flexible, and the cars were subject to jerky starts in the congested downtown districts and slowdowns in the outlying areas. Finally, cold Chicago winters meant that the cable slot had to be set much deeper in the ground than in San Francisco in order to be safely below the frost line. And yet the longer length grip gear thus made necessary was itself subject to more breakdowns. The cable system represented a private investment of millions in the public streets, but the lines were barely finished before a replacement was developed. Once more, the technology was imported from beyond Chicago, this time from Richmond, Virginia, where Frank Sprague had developed the electric streetcar in 1887. Soon 4

afterwards it went on display at a railway exposition in Chicago, and transit engineers realized its advantages. The installation costs were much smaller, and despite icing problems the wires stretched between utility poles were easier to maintain than the cable slots. Cars could be crowded together and even operated in long trains during rush hours. And the lower capital costs allowed service in outlying districts that generated too few riders for cable car service. The first Chicago electric line opened in 1890 on a stretch of Ninety-third Street on the Southeast Side, and sixteen years later the entire length of what had been the cable car system was electrified. Both the earlier horsecars, which had been operating on outlying feeder lines, and the cable cars stopped running in 1906. While the most visible of the new street corner technologies involved transit, private vehicles and even street vendors were also evolving. First, the number and variety of wagons adapted the horse-drawn vehicle to many uses. There were such exotic styles as a baker's wagon , equipped with double-paned glass to keep the contents warm; oil tankers; insulated ice wagons; pie carriers with compartments opening from the sides of the body; and furniture wagons with large doors. Citizens on the way to the mental hospital rode in an asylum van, while those bound for jail rode in the "Black Maria," or police wagon. Even the street vendor became a participant in the mechanization of public places. By the 1880s, curbside musicians were importing cheap hand organs from England and Italy, and over the next few decades those instruments became more elaborate and tuneful. A number of peanut and popcorn vendors adopted portable heating stoves to their gear and extended their trade far into the cold weather months. One entrepreneur even placed several of the new coin-operated vending machines on his cart, hoping to attract passersby to the new marvels. As the peddlers became more sophisticated, a number of stores and services once confined indoors now rolled down the street. In 1894, George Ade, a columnist for the Chicago Record, could include in his list of "Vehicles Out of the Ordinary" a portable church on the Southwest Side and a complete cobbler's shop on wheels. The bell and cry of the waffle man

Whose City? brought breakfast to the young and single residents of once elegant mansions that had been converted into rooming houses. Other lunch wagons visited construction sites as early as the 1880s. Once promoted as a temperance charity set up outside newspaper offices to lure pressmen and Teporters out of saloons, the later versions of the sandwich car served complete meals to standing diners. The mechanization of the street and its crowding with commercial vehicles and transit cars gradually forced a significant change in the public's attitude toward the economic use of public places in Chicago. The new congestion, for instance, aroused concern over safety in the streets. Speeding and reckless drivers had always been a problem; as early as 1851 the Common Council* had tried to enact a workable speed limit law. During the 1880s the Citizens' Association, a reform group, began a campaign to slow down wagons, hacks, and even fire engines. But the measurement of speed was still a crude science, and specific terms, such as "six miles per hour," were finally defined, not very helpfully, by the courts as "about as fast as a horse can trot and keep moving." Chicago's citizens were especially worried about the dangers created by new forms of public transit. Horsecars occasionally became runaways, but the cable car posed its own special problems. When the steel strand under the street became frayed, the grip could become entangled and the driver lose control of the car. Unskilled gripmen also were known to throw passengers to the floor by "grabbing" the cable too quickly. Electric cars introduced new problems. The motors allowed quick acceleration, forcing standing passengers to grab for the straps or anything else fixed to the car. Higher speeds and larger cars meant more and more serious accidents. Dozens of pedestrians were run down each year, a casualty toll only reduced by an 1890 city ordinance requiring a "safety fender" to scoop up people who wandered into the path of the car. And finally, there was a constant fear that the overhead wires might fall. A newspaper had greeted the prospect of electric cars with the headline "Death in the Air," and the city *The name of this body was changed to Chicago City Council in 1875.

Less expensive lo inslall and easier to mainlain lhan lhe cable car syslem, eleclric slreetcars first appeared in Chicago in 1890. Soon afterwards a cily ordinance required a" safely fender " on lhefronl of each car lo prolect pedeslrians. Gifl of Field Enlerprises.

council at first relegated the new form of propulsion to outlying districts. Efforts to introduce the electric trolley downtown were stymied by aldermen until 1901. The people of Chicago were also angered by the way in which individuals seemed to be taking over the streets for private economic gain and paying nothing for the privilege. The expanding city was continuously short of government revenue, and in the 1880s it began to introduce license fees for all types of stores and trades. Store owners complained that peddlers, who were often in direct competition with indoor merchants of small goods, paid little or no license fee. The itinerant sellers not only enjoyed improvements in the street surfaces and lighting, but they also contributed to the litter problem and made so much noise hawking their wares that business inside was disrupted. The 5

Whose City?

Many cable car passe11gers were injured wizen tangled cables caused drivers to lose control of the ca,; and II nskilled gri/mim were known to throw passe11gers to the floor by" grabbing" the cable loo quickly. Gift of Field Enterprise;.

street trades were also the most visible employers of children, luring them away from school where they belonged and exposing them to traffic hazards, disease, and street criminals. Others blamed the curbstone entrepreneurs for the failure of the city to maintain a public market. In 1878, architect F. M. Whitehouse drew up plans to construct a giant roof that would have covered the entire Haymarket, but city officials were not interested. The availability of some produce on Randolph Street, along with peddlers and private market halls, they argued, made an elaborate enclosed farmers' market unnecessary. Only those concerned with the poor defended the idea. One such advocate, Public Works Commissioner Joseph Medill Patterson, threatened to resign in 1905 if the city closed the South Water Street Market, a few congested blocks of wholesale houses that also sold retail goods to impoverished customers. In 19'24, another move to close South Water was delayed by the serious economic recession. Finally in 1925, a new South Water Street Market opened 6

near Fifteenth and Morgan , adjacent to the traditional peddlers' market at Maxwell Street. But even this facility was never meant to sell retail goods. The poor continued to buy from street vendors or from food shops that extended credit, while the wealthy could take advantage of the telephone to arrange home delivery. Chicago teamsters were the target of other criticisms . Some citizens complained about "call boxes" placed on street corners to receive express packages and messages. Others were upset over the way in which teaming companies had added sales duties to the job of the driver, adding hundreds more street salesmen to the crowded thoroughfares. Finally, the carriers used heavy wagons with narrow tires to reduce the amount of drag on the horses. Considerable damage to the street surfaces resulted, but the companies resisted control. Finally,just after the turn of the century, a Chicago Wide Tire Association was formed to call attention to the problem and force team owners to pay for damage to the streets. Its members darted through

\Vlwse City? traffic measuring rim widths and lobbied in the press and city council chambers for a new law. In I 903, Chicago's aldermen enacted corrective legislation, but political pressure slowed its enforcement for another two years. Only the direct orders of Mayor Edward Dunne and the determination of Public Works Commissioner Patterson finally forced compliance. The image of the hack driver also suffered during the latter decades of the century. The press carried on a continuous series of complaints about overcharging-easily done in an era that preceded accurate automobile odometers-and bad driving habits. When the concern about "w hite slavery" and prostitution became a crusade after 1900, nefarious hacks were accused of carrying innocent young women to their doom. And finally, there was a great public outcry when downtown theaters and railway stations began allowing hacks the exclusive use of curb space to pick up passengers. This practice appeared shortly after the turn of the century, at about the same time that a few Loop stores decided to rent out the sidewalk space in front of their buildings. City legislation eliminated the latter practice, but the hacks prevailed in the streets. The general question of conducting private business on the public streets was at the center of the great debates over franchises forthe new utilities and transit companies. Technological development was expensive; each innovation required a higher capital investment, while the expansion of gas, telephone, and electrical service created massive trunk lines over and under major streets. The new utilities also favored economies of scale. A large gas plant could produce more volume than several smaller ones and at a lower cost. The same was true of electricity, while transit lines could easily share generating stations and realize a new efficiency if the routes were longer. This aroused a strong demand on the part of the utilities to burst out of the narrow confines of a small section of the city and expand. More important, investors also demanded long-term operating rights to guarantee a return on their money. Technically, a cable car company was required to tear up its tracks and cable slots at the end of its franchise, and at the cost of$ l 50,000 a mile , a short-term contract would have been ruinous. Thus utilities demand-

The ue 111a11 (aboPe) and the pie man, like other street vendors and 111nclw11t.1, emily adapted horse-drawn wagons lo their special need.1. Ire wago11: gift of Field Enterprises; pie wago11: gift of Robert F. ,',/ftzln

ed exclusive rights over larger territories and for extended time periods. The public reaction created an uproar that lasted for decades. Every grant appeared to suspicious citizens to sell for a small fee the right to use public property in perpetuity. A few complaints were raised over the installation of gas service and horsecar lines at mid-century, but the later developments of cable cars, electric trolleys, and electric service focused public attention on the city council and the Illinois General Assembly as nothing had before. Charges of payoffs Lo legislators marked nearly every franchise grant; bribes were a part of the cost of doing business, which, so it was rumored, cou ld be passed on to customers. Political reform groups argued that companies r.eturned little or nothing to the people whose commonly owned 7

Whose City? space was being used; high rates, poor service, and the inconvenience of torn-up streets were the citizens' rewards. Property owners complained that cable car lines took too long to build, and when completed, the rumbling kept them awake nights. The electric trolley might provide faster service, but its wires brought new hazards to residential neighborhoods, while the posts and lines defaced property and the rush-hour crowds made principal streets less desirable for domestic life. The bulk of the criticism over franchise deals was aimed at one man, Charles Tyson Yerkes. A native of Philadelphia, he made his first fortune selling municipal bonds for that city, but questionable practices landed him in prison for seven months in 1873. After paying off his Pennsylvania creditors, Yerkes sought new opportunities further west and settled in Chicago in 1881. A Iucrative stock and bond business soon gave him funds to invest in street railways, which he had dabbled in back in Philadelphia. In 1886, he gained control over the Chicago West Division Railway Company. Over the next few years he bought out forty-six smaller, outlying companies, most of which were marginal operations built to lure home buyers to subdivisions. Yerkes angered the public, and his poor relations with the press only made him look more villainous. Service was poor, cars ran infrequently, and they were always packed with people. His famous remark-"It is the people who hang to the straps who pay you your big dividends" became the battle cry of an anti-Yerkes crusade. Citizens gradually learned that he had issued stock to himself in amounts far beyond the value of his lines and then squeezed huge dividends which he deposited in his own bank accounts. When reformers complained , he issued a stream of public relations pamphlets and even bought the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1897 to use in defense of his reputation. Opposition to Yerkes mounted steadily. Because he kept his holdings as separate companies, riders were denied the right of free transfer, even though profits went to the same hands. Various "Strap-hangers Leagues" and other citizens' protest groups tried unsuccessfully to organize boycotts and withhold fares. The climax came in 1897, when Yerkes launched a campaign to extend the franchises of his com8

panies. The so-called Humphrey Bills called for terms of forty years, with only a minimal percentage of revenues going back to city coffers in return for the use of the street. After the state senate passed the bills, it was revealed that Yerkes had planned to spend $50,000 to influence votes in the state house of representatives. Mayor Carter Harrison II , who had been elected on the cry of "The Streets Belong to the People," led civic leaders to pressure state representatives to reject the senate's action and kill the Humphrey Bills. Yerkes quickly countered with the Allen Bills, which granted the city council greater flexibility in establishing the terms of the franchise. Both houses of the assembly and the governor approved these measures, which shifted the conflict to the city council, and six more months of debate, threats, bribes, protest meetings, and exposes ensued. The solution was resolved in December 1898, when the Allen Bills were defeated. Yerkes realized that his influence in Chicago was waning, and in the following year he sold his holdings for $10 million and moved to New York. The Peril: Vertical Sprawl As the new transportation technology made it easier for more Chicagoans to get into the city, the nature of the space they occupied while there changed. The most visible sign of this change was the skyscraper. The oft-told story of the steel-frame building is familiar. Prior to William LeBaron Jenney's invention, load-bearing masonry walls represented a significant roadblock to progress. The sixteen-story Monadnock Building, built in 1889 and designed by Daniel Burham and John Wellborn Root, employed solid brick walls that carried the weight of the floors. But at that height, the exterior was six feet thick at the base in order to carry the load. This reduced the space available on the lower floors, while the small windows allowed in too little light. After Jenney experimented with steel framing-instead of the weaker iron-in his Home Insurance Building of 1885, the limitations of the old technology virtually disappeared. With the frame and not the exterior walls bearing the weight, there was almost no limit to height, while the consequent transformation of the outside surface into a "skin" allowed larger windows and a wider variety of

Whose City?

The plight of Chicago's rapid lransil passengers was highlighted in lhis carloon b)'}ohn T McCutcheon whichappearedintheTribune onJ anuary 17, 1905. Gift of Mrs.J olin T McCulcheon.

textures and designs. Meanwhile, the introduction of electric lighting and safe high-speed elevators powered by electric motors made the tall office building truly practical. The skyscraper was also the product of vertical sprawl. The new buildings occupied larger ground sites than the smaller four and five-story post-Fire structures they usuaJly replaced. Thus each floor of the new tower was commodious. More important, large firms could occupy many floors, sprawling upward instead of horizontally. Spaces within each office became more specialized. The area around the receptionist's desk became an outer receiving room, while the social status associated with private office space was now available to a middle echelon of workers as well as to the boss. The telephone too hastened this transformation upward first by allowing corporate offices to be located far from many kinds of manufacturing plants. The top of the administrative pyramid did not have to be located a few yards from the shops. Thus George Pullman could keep his car-building operations more

than a hundred blocks from downtown while moving his offices to a prestigious new ten-story building at Adams and Michigan. The McCormick Reaper Works, the Chicago and North Western Railway, and Marshall Field & Company, among others, were also able to disperse their office , manufacturing, and wholesale facilities. The enlarged office building itself came to be called a "block." That term had been used to describe much smaller structures at midcentury, but after 1870 the word took on new meanings. It was more than a matter of size; it was a matter of function as well, for the new skyscrapers were also complex semi-public places. Restaurants, saloons, barbershops, stenographic operators, and other services needed by the tenants crowded into ground floors or basements. The need to provide entrance and exit for crowds using new banks of elevators made the building lobby into a special place. Ornamentation abounded on elevator doors and staircases as owners competing for tenants realized that first appearances made lasting impressions. In the case of the Rookery Building on LaSalle Street, Burnham and Root overcame the practical problem of lighting the lobby with an elaborate glass ceiling, while William Holabird and Martin Roche employed bronze basrelief panels to tell the story of the explorer Marquette in the namesake building at Dearborn and Adams streets. The tall building stirred a mixed response. Because Chicago's real estate and corporate interests were so willing to think in terms of vertical growth, the city by the lake excelled even ew York in the construction of skyscrapers. For nearly all of the late nineteenth century, the various claimants to the title of world's tallest building were in Chicago. This, of course, became a matter of enormous pride, a booster's joy. To other Chicagoans this growth symbolized the dominance of business and the moral dangers of a civilization given over to materialism. In 1893, novelist Henry Blake Fuller centered his famous protest against business, The Cliff-Dwellers, on a fictional skyscraper named "The Clifton." To Fuller the street became a canyon, eroded by rivers of commerce, its inhabitants accordingly miniaturized in importance and power. Some reference to the upward stretching skyline can 9

Whose City? be found in most of the novels written about Chicago after 1893. With this vertical progress came a certain amount of nostalgia, as older citizens saw the passing of smaller structures built during the hopeful period of construction after the Fire. On rare occasions, that past was recognized. When Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan were completing the design for the Chicago Stock Exchange Building constructed in 1893, they included in a corner of the entrance a small bas-relief of Chicago's first brick house, which once stood on the site. Other critics saw the skyscraper as a hazard to health and safety. Elevator accidents occurred with great frequency leading to periodic crusades to license their operators, and despite the introduction of various safety devices, many Chicagoans remained unconvinced of their safety. Building owners, meanwhile, found themselves liable for accidents. The courts dismissed claims that visitors entered at their own risk , ruling that since the building was semipublic and open to general access, owners were responsible for the safety of all guests.

The greatest concern, however, was fire, which occurred with alarming frequency despite metal frames and years of experimentation with non-flammable materials. Early in the 1880s, it was the city's fire underwriters who petitioned the city council to establish a building height limit of 85 feet. After a decade of debate, the ceiling was finally placed at 13 stories or 130 feet in 1893. But architects and real estate men quickly complained, noting that taller buildings allowed cheaper costs per square foot of space. Some owners, they noted, were embarking on the catastrophic practice of adding stories to older structures. Others opposed the limitation because it would lead to dispersal from Chicago's "compact center," a single business node: That Chicago enjoys a tremendous pract.ical advantage over other cities of its class in this concentration is plain. It is the easiest great city in the world in which to meet a great number of engagements in a short time. A Chicago woman, for example, leaving home in the middle of the forenoon for downtown can shop in any one of the big stores, keep an appointment with her dentist, lunch and attend a committee meeting at her club, visit a loan collection at the Art

New building construction after 1870 produced taller, more spaciow 1/ructures that often encompassed mi enlm' city block. Large Jinns could ocrupy many floors, sprawling upward instmd of lwrizantall)\ while the onal status assooaled with pnvate offic,, sJ,ace became available lo a greater number of workers. Gift of The Barnes-Crosby Company.

Whose City? Institute, attend a symphony concert at the Auditorium or a matinee in any one of the theaters, and be back home for 5 O 'clock tea. She may walk between her different engagements downtown ... . [Chicago R ecord-H erald, August 21, 1903]

Pressure to change the law finally resulted in a new limit of260 feet in 1902, but there were also charges that political influence had caused building inspectors sometimes to look the other way. By then, the depression of the 1890s was long over, and Chicago was enjoying a mild boom. But many observers continued to predict tragedy, while smaller architectural firms complained that huge projects created a virtual monopoly for a few designers. A strict limit, they argued, would result in more buildings rather than taller ones and wider opportunities for newcomers. Those who owned land on the periphery of the downtown were obviously dismayed at vertical sprawl, which did little to enhance their investment. By 1911, the antiskyscraper sentiments prevailed with a 200-foot limit, but one of the law's provisions allowed the issuing of building permits that did not have to Lavish ornamenlalion for lobbies and elevalor doors, like these in the Columbus Memorial Building, became commonplace after the !880s. Photograph by Glenn E. Dahlby.

be executed for three years . It was not until 1914 that the ordinance had any practical impact, but by then the nation was in a serious recession, and construction began to slow down anyway. Many Chicagoans also disliked skyscrapers because of their impact on the public city below. During construction, contractors blocked streets with building materials despite laws requiring safe passageways for pedestrians. New utility and sewer connections required for the massive structures tore up streets for months at a time. "Fifth Avenue [now Wells Street] for a distance of nearly a mile looks like some of the streets of Paris that were barricaded by the communists," grumbled the Chicago Times in June 1886. The multiplying maze of wires added more confusion. Dependent upon telephone, telegraph, and electrical power, the concentration of offices filled the downtown sky with strands of brittle wire. Others worried about the shadows cast by the new buildings on their surroundings. There were many lawsuits initiated by owners of smaller buildings that were darkened and dwarfed by adjacent giants but these were seldom successful. Some public health advocates were convinced that the reduction of sunlight that reached the streets at the bottom of the "canyons" only promoted the incubation of disease germs in the horse manure and litter. Even the wind currents, deflected off soaring walls, were blamed for blowing down pedestrians. Finally, vertical sprawl fostered controversial intrusions across property lines and into the public space of the street. Because land was too expensive to leave empty, the ground floor of a new building was pushed to the very edge of the site, which meant that when architects included bay windows, they frequently projected over the edge of the sidewalk. The building owner doubly benefitted from more light and ventilation and from the increased floor space garnered at the expense of the public. There had been a few complaints about the practice in earlier years, but during the first years of the century it became a major issue . Charles S. Dineen, an ambitious state's attorney, brought a successful suit against Holabird and Roche and the owners of the new Boston Store (now Walgreen's) at State and Madison, forcing an alteration in the plans to eliminate such an intrusion. At another II

Whose City? site, contractors who attempted to install projecting bays surreptitiously during the night quickly found themselves in court. Even plans for Adler and Sullivan's magnificent Schlesinger and Mayer store (now Carson Pirie Scott & Company) were embroiled in controversy because of the projection of the rounded doorway onto the sidewalk at State and Madison. "It never occurred to the owners," complained Chicago Building Commissioner Joseph Medill Patterson, "that they were getting something for nothing. They simply realized that they were making money by having the bay windows and paying nothing for them." Eventually, the problem was solved through the development of the "Chicago window." With a fixed center pane and movable sash on either side, it was essentially a bay window pushed flat to conform with the new requirements. During his term in 1905-06, Patterson also attacked the practice of extending basements out under the sidewalks. Afterwards, he resigned from his city post and announced that he had become a socialist. The public city had lost its liveliest advocate. The Technological Dilemmas of the Public City The development of the vertical city and the creation of countless semi-public stores and amusements helped fill Chicago's already overcrowded streets with still more pedestrians and vehicles . Lunchtime, morning, and evening rush hours were confusion compounded as the thousands accommodated in the new skyscrapers flooded into narrow streets. As engineer and writer August Gatzert viewed it in 1913: . .. Consider the bank building now nearing completion upon one half block bounded by Adams, LaSalle, Quincy and Fifth Avenue [Wells Street]. I am told that occupancy of that twenty-two story structure will embrace 7,000 people. In former times, when our six- and eight-story buildings were erected with large office rooms and more hall space, it took nearly three blocks in our downtown district to house 7,000 people. What does that mean? It means the concentration of the business of other days into one-sixth of its former street area, with a slowing up of movement due to crowding. [Limitation of Buiuling Heights in the CityofChicago, 1913]

The traffic was well on its way to becoming the symbol of this new kind of city. Wagons, horses, carriages, streetcars, pushcarts, and pedestrians 12

Construction of the Lake Street rapid transit line, 1893. Overhead transit was one solution lo the growing congestion of the city"s streets. Gift of the Chicago Tram it Authority.

were scrambled together into immobile knots of inefficiency. Because of the greater variety of vehicles, these early tie-ups were even more difficult to untangle than modern ones. Some observÂˇers directed blame at an excess of individualism. In 1899, for instance, the Chicago Post grumbled about hacks: An utter disregard for the rights of others is becoming altogether too common in drivers. They delay streetcars, block crossings, and frequently involve

other vehicles in the most complicated tangles by their innate selfishness. All rights are theirs, and all parts of the street that they happen to want to occupy are Lheirs .. . . Apparently they have taken for their creed the words of the late COMMODORE VANDERBILT, "The public be d-d" and they live up to it .. . . They have no regard for anything but the upraised club of the corner policeman, and they frequently do not hesitate to swear at him.

The problem of vehicular and especially pedestrian crowding was aggravated ironically by a surplus of convenience. The letterbox, for instance, dispersed through the streets one of

the most important functions of the post office-the collection of mail. Similarly, electric alarm boxes brought instantaneous contact with police and fire departments, while corner newsstands made newspapers and magazines easily accessible. For those who did not wish to enter a saloon to slake their thirst, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and others provided drinking fountains. And at a few intersections, there were public benches to make the wait for a streetcar more tolerable. Individually, each was a convenience, but placed near each other on a 13

Whose City? f

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J. M. Hannahs's 1888 proposal for a" bridge railroad" along Clark Street between 22nd Street and Fullerton Avenue was considered by many to be a realistic response to Chicago's transportation needs.

Whose City? crowded street in an era when more people walked, they could be a collective annoyance. In the congested city even the old-fashioned parade became a significant nuisance. What was meant to be an act of celebration, pride, and unity instead became a divisive issue over the flow of traffic. There had been few open complaints in the Chicago press before 1883, but in September of that year the Tribune editorially attacked the administration of Mayor Carter Harrison for allowing Polish immigrants to march downtown. The newcomers had a right to parade and carry colorful banners, but not at the cost of blockading traffic for several hours. A growing list of similar complaints finally prompted the city council in 1886 to enact Chicago's first strict regulation over parades. It required that the police department issue a permit for any parade or for any meeting in a place that abutted the street. While the Haymarket Riot, which had taken place less than three months earlier, was undoubtedly the catalyst, the press viewed the new ordinance as a milestone in freeing the streets from unnecessary congestion. The inefficiency of moving people, vehicles, and objects through the crowded thoroughfares created a profitable opportunity for at least one type of entrepreneur. Since not all business communications could be handled by telephone or direct telegraph line-legal documents, for instance-courier services sprang up. Messengers sped on foot or bicycle around and through the traffic jams. By the turn of the century, there were reputedly more than 3,000 people involved in this trade in the Loop, and as late as 1914 there were still some 850 minors delivering telegrams downtown. Technology, which had helped create the problem of downtown congestion, also promised the most logical solution: simply create artificial layers of urban space above and under the mess on the surface. Each improvement in public transit had only meant crowding more people in the streets by making it easier and faster to bring them from distant neighborhoods. But creating elevated or underground facilities was a different matter. Some Chicagoans had begun proposing such systems as early as 1869, the same year that New York's el opened its first steam-powered elevated line. Over the next quarter-century more than seventy corpora-

tions were formed to build elevated tracks in Chicago. Some ventures were obviously fraudulent; others were proposed by those who lacked the technical knowledge of bridge-building to carry out construction. But one Chicago company had built one of the lines in New York, while the proposal of the Hannahs Railway, whose officials wanted to run a bridge railroad along Clark Street from Lincoln Park to Twenty-second Street, was realistic. But political maneuvering, lack of financing, complaints of property owners along the routes, and public fears for safety delayed such plans for more than two decades. Construction on the Chicago and South Side Rapid Transit Railroad finally began in 1889, and after numerous brushes with bankruptcy, the company completed a line to the World's Columbian Exposition grounds in time for opening day in 1893. It was steam-powered and nicknamed the "Alley El" because of its back-ofthe-lot route. Its construction, along with the tremendous real estate boom in hotels and apartment buildings to house exposition visitors, transformed a wide swath of the South Side. Buildings immediately next to the el lost value because of the noise and smoke, but those a block or two away were considered among the most desirable locations in the city. Despite the fact that the South Side line slid into bankruptcy during the depression of the mid-1890s, work began on lines to the north, west, and northwest of downtown. Even with the prodigious skill involved in their construction, the cost of purchasing land and the economic conditions made them risky ventures. The unpopularity of the elevated lines among commuters was based largely on the fact that the ride terminated blocks from the center of downtown. In 1894, however, traction baron Charles T Yerkes began construction of an extension of the Lake Street line east from Halsted toward Wabash. Through political payoffs, Yerkes overcame objections to the completion of the four sides of a "Union Loop." The new structure, completed in 1897, allowed trains from four lines to change directions without having to back up from dead-end bumper-posts. It brought rapid transit to the heart of the Loop, which took on a new meaning, and it facilitated transfer from one route to another. Riders, however, saved no money, since free transfers did not go 15

Whose City? into effect until 1913, the year that bridges were constructed to connect platforms. Finally, electric motors replaced the steam locomotives. While the new elevated loop put riders far above the chaos on the streets, many Chicagoans complained that it caused more problems than it solved. The heavy steel girders disrupted surface traffic below, while some pedestrians feared electric sparks more than smoke and soot. Some problems were unavoidable, but downtown businessmen, acting as the Loop Protective Association, did demand alteration to make the structure a better neighbor. They noted that major intersections and buildings facing the el would receive better light if waiting rooms were placed under the tracks and the tar roofs over the platforms were replaced with wire reinforced glass. Yerkes's company had also bolted ties and rails directly to the supporting structure, thus amplifying train noise. The Association felt that a crushed stone roadbed underthe tracks would reduce vibration and muffle the deafening roar of the trains; and brighter paint on the girders would reduce what the Association called the "gloom and oppression" created by dismal stations. Although the elevated and the Union Loop eliminated at least some of the transit tangle from the street level, the improvement also brought even more shoppers and workers downtown. With streets growing more crowded, inventors proposed elevated sidewalks for the exclusive use of pedestrians, something that in various incarnations would have involved using a part of the Union Loop supports with branches sprouting off at side streets. After the huge technological success of the moving sidewalk at the World's Columbian Exposition, some type of similar conveyance was a standard feature of the plans. More elaborate versions called for electric lights, heated platforms, and even plush, padded seats. Most important, passengers would be far above the mud and manure. Of these plans, only the el materialized. Chicagoans were more successful with underground solutions. During the late 1880s, the city became one of the first to order electric trunk lines buried, and by the end of the century most wires were off of the main streets in the Loop. The removal of telephone and telegraph lines, however, grew into one of the most controversial 16

projects in the city's history. The lllinois Tunnel Company was originally chartered in 1898 to build a conduit under a few downtown streets, but instead it secretly started constructing an extensive system of freight tunnels. Public exposure and lack of capital halted construction periodically, but 62 miles of tunnels handling 117 miniature electric locomotives and more than 3,000 gondolas eventually delivered merchandise and coal to stations in the sub-basements of downtown buildings. The tiny trains, only four feet wide and twelve feet long, also removed cinders and refuse from customers, many of whom were also delighted that the system slowed the growth of the teamsters union by providing a competitor for the wagons. By the late 1890s, federal postal authorities also began investigating the possibility of using the underground city. Their inspiration had been the City Press Association, a cooperative newsgathering venture sponsored by the city's newspapers. In order to speed dispatches from Press Association headquarters to the members' newsrooms, it had constructed several miles of pneumatic tubes. The contents of small cylinders were thus pushed to their destinations far beneath the crowded streets. That system worked so well that the post office copied it with a similar complex of pipes in 1902, which linked the general post office downtown with five substations and four of the city's railway depots. Small metal containers of mail sped through greased pipes at speeds of up to thirty miles per hour, but it was not flawless. Occasionally, the capsules became jammed in the tubes , thus tying up the whole system. And when the location of the trouble was not known exactly, workers had to dig up block-long sections of pipe in search of the elusive mail. Placing the Loop in layers had little long-term impact on the crowded conditions of the streets, but in the first years of the century some optimistic Chicagoans were ready to place their faith in another technological solution, the automobile. By 1905, some visionaries had begun to realize that the recreational machine might actually become a factor in the transportation pattern of the region. Several brave souls had begun commuting downtown from as far away as Evanston and Hyde Park by 1903, and there was promise of many more.

Whose City? It was easy to see the advantages of the auto as an occupant of the public city. It generated no manure, and it did not keel over and die like thousands of horses did each year (because of their high cost, cars tended not to be casually abandoned). Autos could dodge in and out of traffic, unlike the streetcar which was confined to tracks or even the horse-drawn wagon. or did they belch coal smoke like the steam locomotives that pulled commuter trains or the South Side Elevated cars from 1892 to 1897. And even the drivers seemed safer. Although exposed to the weather, they escaped the spread of what patent medicine ads called "streetcar colds" that were spread by "open-faced sneezers." Finally, automobilists added to the call of bicyclists for a better or at least smoother street. The fragile balloon tires that both used were especially vulnerable to rough pavements and streetcar tracks. Cyclists had managed to influence the city council to ban transit rails from Jackson Boulevard, one of their favorite West Side streets. They had also been a major force behind the creation of Sheridan Road, a scenic, smoothsurfaced parkway between Lincoln Park and Fort Sheridan during the 1890s. Automobilists were instrumental in the "Good Roads" movement after 1900,joining with downstate farmers to lobby for all-weather surfaces on country and suburban roads. In Chicago, those efforts included lobbying for a smooth surface on Rush Street, a major artery to the North Side. Despite the optimism, the automobile solution soon became part of the problem. Chicagoans discovered that it only made the streets more hazardous, and by 1910, the number of autorelated deaths began to catch up with those blamed on the treacherous streetcar. And because the new machines did not run on fixed routes subject to franchises, they raised jurisdictional problems over licensing. The horseless carriage was largely used for recreation in the parks, and the first licenses were issued by park commissioners. By 1903, with the machines in use all over Chicago, city government stepped into that role. When the city and the suburbs quarreled over the examination and licensing of suburban drivers, the state stepped in in 1907. By that time, letters to newspapers had begun complaining about drivers' lack of "road etiquette," and drunken driving was beginning to

be a serious problem. Finally, there was parking. Downtown streets crowded with parked autos led some enthusiasts to demand that Grant Park be converted to a giant parking lot. Fighting the Public Demons The failures of transportation and building technology to solve urban problems pushed Chicagoans to other ways of dealing with the congested city. Those who could afford it fled, some to other cities and others to more privatized lives within Chicago. Exclusive downtown clubs offered shelter from the crowded restaurants and long lines. Athletic clubs allowed comfortable mingling with a select circle of suburban acquaintances. Children attended private schools, and the family had its own pew in a church whose congregation consisted principally of people of means. Chauffeur-driven autos separated their passengers from the clasping, clawing crowds that cursed Yerkes. The rest of Chicago was not as lucky, but the passage of a number of new laws and the development of several unofficial crusades suggests that the will to improve was not wanting. Such inventions as the bicycle quickly led to rules requiring lights at night, a blast of a horn at intersections, and a speed limit of eight miles per hour. The automobile, with its speed and noise, brought further restrictions on traffic, and in 1907, a wheel tax to help defray the cost of traffic law enforcement. Automobiles and bicycles, however, were relatively easy to regulate. The regulation of personal behavior was another matter. While disorderly conduct laws had always produced the largest portion of arrests, urban congestion and crowding required redefinition of old terms, and the rise of semi-public amusements created a serious question about the power of government to regulate behavior on private property. In the latter case, the comfort and safety of the crowd prevailed. Earlier laws had banned the shouting of anything that might cause a panic, but in 1897 the city council passed an ordinance ordering women to remove their hats in theaters so as not to obstruct the view of other patrons. Another rule shortened the length of hatpins worn on the street or other public places; long, elaborate models had been responsible for scratching and maiming passersby. 17

Whose City? City officials also wrestled with the question of whether streetcars were private or public property. As early as the 1860s, horsecar passengers had begun complaining about the unruly conduct of toughs who harassed respectable people without interference from the conductors. While police did not hesitate to step in when life and limb were threatened, by 1900 police officers were beginning to arrest people who bothered other passengers by smoking. The growing concern with public health, especially the discovery that spittle spread tuberculosis germs, led to a crackdown against expectoration in public places, especially on streetcars. By 1910, the spittoon was even beginning to disappear from barrooms and banks. The question of behavior in semi-public places also led to the matter of morals. Many citizens had felt that the saloon-privately owned but of public access-had long been out of control because it was out of public view. Respectable people would not set foot inside, while police who entered probably did so to drink rather than to patrol. But as long as barrooms were kept out of respectable neighborhoods, the only thing the barkeep had to fear was a violation of the dramshop law, which made him responsible for the actions of someone who became intoxicated on the premises. By 1900, however, some other forms of semipublic amusements were becoming a matter of great concern. At the center of the issue was the fact that children had discovered commercialized leisure, and vice versa. Underaged patrons were unsupervised and subject to moral dangers. While some children had been employed for years delivering beer pails, or growlers, to factory workers and had come to frequent saloons, the rise of the dance hall triggered a new wave of concern. A cloud of suspicion had surrounded dancing since Chicago was a village, but when commercial dance halls opened their doors to minors after 1900, those fearful of rising delinquency began to demand regulation. Not only were the dances deemed immoral, especially those done with shockingly bare feet, but the confined atmosphere-lack of drinking fountains brought youngsters to secret bars in hidden rooms-was also treacherous. Exhausted girls dropped their resistance to the advances of brash young men and recruiters for 18

white slave rings as the tract From the Dance Hall to White S/,avery purported to attest. The growing concern about prostitution brought some kind of moral suspicion to a variety of leisure spots. The concern that ice cream parlors were frequented by white slavers' "cadets" led to an angry reaction from the city's Greek community, which consisted of a large number of ice cream and candy vendors. A Chicago congressman , Adolph J. Sabath, led an effort to force federal authorities to regulate Lake Michigan cruise boats and patrol them for violations of moral conduct. Even the large department stores were accused of allowing disreputable characters to prowl their waiting rooms. The rise of the movie theater aroused concerns about the dangerous physical facilities. The first nickelodeons were simply storefronts fitted with folding chairs. Since there were only a few of them until 1903, there was little concern about their safety. But the prolific expansion that followed, with their numbers topping 600 in 1913, and the growing fear about the flammability of the film led to a call for regulation. The Iroquois Theater calamity of December 30, 1903, in which 571 died, resulted in better inspections and new laws requiring fire escapes and safety lighting. Such anti-delinquency groups as Louise de Koven Bowen's juvenile Protective Association (JPA) were more concerned with the moral dangers of movies. Theaters were dark, poorly patrolled, and open to the smallest children. Moreover, the films themselves were often suggestive and tawdry, despite the police reviews and censorship enacted in 1907. A JPA study in 1909 found 32,000 children attending 446 theaters in Chicago, many of which showed objectionable films. Nudity and sexual innuendo were subject to the censors' scissors, but violence was not. The JPA noted: The pictures not only showed crÂˇime of all kinds, but scenes of brutality and revenge calculated to arouse coarse and brutal emot.ions. One set of pictures, for instance, would show Indians on the warpath. It would detail with great accuracy the torturing and burning and horrible scenes attendant upon a massacre. Another set, called "The Gypsies' Revenge," represented a band of gypsies robbing a man and then, because he resisted, binding him and hanging him by a rope over a precipice. As the picture showed

Whose City? vividly the body dangling between heaven and earth and being plucked at by vu ltures, the shudder of horror which passed over the audience was quite obvious. Another set of films was called "The School Chi ldren 's Strike. " It showed a school principal reprimanding a pupil, who, in revenge, organized all the other ch_ildren in the school into a revolt. They all went on strike, seized all the furniture in the schoolroom, piled it in the middle of the floor and set it on fire. This was continued until the building was a heap of ashes. [Five and Ten Cent Theaters: Two Investigations by the juvenile Protective Association, 1909 and 19ll, 19ll]

LOST OPPORTUNITIES OF HISTORY.

Films such as How They Treat Strangers in Chicago ( 1902) also generated disrespect for public officials. This movie showed a country bumpkin being "rolled" by a mugger. A police officer wanders by, but instead of rendering aid, he checks the pockets of the unconscious victim to be sure that the thief has not forgotten anything. The concern about the morality of youth in public and semi-public places was part of a growing anti-vice movement in Chicago and many other cities and towns. The roots of that crusade were complex. There was, first of all, a longstanding tradition of open prostitution that dated back at least to the 1850s. Mayor "Long John" Wentworth had destroyed "The Sands," a vice-infested patch of shanties on the north shore of the river in 1857. The assorted prostitutes and gamblers then moved to Wells Street, near what is now the south end of the Loop, where they operated openly. When they were squeezed further south and east by the early 1870s, Wells Street property owners led a drive to rename the thoroughfare "Fifth Avenue" to remove all reminders of its previous reputation. Meanwhile, the vices divided themselves into increasingly specialized districts. Gaming migrated gradually into "Gambler's Row," a stretch of storefronts on Clark Street between Madison and Randolph that was convenient to City Hall and contained some of the largest and most open gambling houses in America. By the late 1860s, prostitution had begun to move south into a district known as "the Levee." At first centered near Van Buren and Dearborn, this "redlight" area was gradually pushed further from the center of downtown by the expansion of commerce, by the new skyscraper office buildings bui lt on South Dearborn during the 1890s,

By Courtesy of The Chicago Daily New,.

WHAT DANTE MISSED.

The efforL1 of concerned businessmen, reform politicians, and social workers lo close "Cambler'.1 Row" and "the Levee" increased around the tum of the century and finally prevailed in 1912.

and by the new rail depots in the same area. The Levee itself subdivided into districts that ranged from the tumble-down "Biler Avenue," named from the Irish pronounciation of "boiler" and referring to the noise and smoke of nearby rail terminals, to posh places. The Levee gained national fame over the years for its open ly flaunted vice. Streetwalkers, blinking red lights, and even barkers of a sort drew customers from the sidewalks and passing streetcars, while women exposed themselves at the back windows of brothels to entice riders on the "Alley El." Anyone seeking gambling or commercialized sex knew where to find it, and Chicago's gambling halls and bordellos blossomed into specialized semi-public amusement places not unlike other entertainments. This prosperity distressed the city's business leaders, who complained loudly about the damage to Chicago's national reputation. The first step toward reform came in 1894, soon after English journalist William T. Stead published If Christ Came to Chicago. This muckraking account of the city's lowlife took the city's leaders to task for allowing 19

Whose City?

Corrupt politicians like Firs/ Ward aldermen Michael" Hinky Dink" Kenna and Âˇ' Bathhouse" john Coughlin (depicted above by cartoonist John T. ,\IcC11lcheo11 ) relied 011 the support of saloon, gambling, proslit11lio11 , and while slavel)' intere;ts to stay in power. In re/urn they offered vice lords protection for their illicit and lucrative operations.

such vice to flourish . Heated public meetings held in reaction to Stead's accusations resulted in the formation of the Civic Federation of Chicago, one of whose first tasks was to import justices of the peace from Evanston (to insure that they would be free from corruption) to serve anti-gambling warrants against the Clark Street operators. By the end of 1894, the large downtown casinos were gone. Gaming was driven into secrecy. Players gathered behind reinforced doors, with lookouts watching for police. Others played "The Numbers" in corner saloons or fed nickels into mechanical games that were little more than poorly disguised slot machines. The destruction of the Levee took longer. Thanks to the political power of "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Oink" Kenna, the two First Ward aldermen, Chicago's city government did little more than conduct a few symbolic raids, which had little effect. But reformers also battled with the widespread belief that sexual vice was an immutable flaw in hu20

man nature, and that if the Levee was shut down, prostitution would only move into residential neighborhoods. Yet during the first decade of the century, the seemingly untouchable Levee began to decline as a determined antiprostitution movement began to gain momentum . The perfection of the Wasserman test allowed a more accurate measure of venereal disease, and the citizenry was shocked at the enormity of the problem. The anti-dance hall movement and concern about lurid movies added to the common belief that something was seriously wrong with Chicago's morals. Various religious groups, social work agencies, and political reformers who had been vying for members and money finally joined a common cause with the formation of the Chicago Law and Order League in 1904. It pressured police officials, lobbied in Springfield for laws to close loopholes in local ordinances, fed stories about the evils of vice to the press, and successfully used public nuisance laws to strike back at landlords who rented to brothels. The openness of vice in the Levee also became associated with Chicagoans' growing concern about "crime in the streets." While "footpads" (muggers) and "carfriskers" (pickpockets) had been a lingering problem for decades, the fear of crime waves swept Chicago several times between 1900 and 1910. Although there was no dramatic increase in the reported incidence of crime, the press sold many newspapers with headlines so sensational that many citizens became fearful of venturing onto the street. One Daily News cartoon showed a family armed with pistols, shotguns, and an axe departing their apartment building; the caption read "Stepping out to post a letter." While the press kept daily, front-page tabulations of murder and mayhem, the exploits of spectacular desperadoes generated the most concern because they frequently struck without warning and in respectable neighborhoods. During 1903, for instance, no one kept the local lock industry busier than the "Automatic Trio," better known as the "Car Barn Bandits." A group of thugs from the Near orthwest Side, they began robbing saloons and shooting their victims that summer. On August 30, 1903, they held up the barns of the Chicago City Railway Company, murdering a clerk and a motorman.

Whose City? The press turned them into instant celebrities, while Mayor Carter Harrison made their captu re the top priority of the police. The first break in the case came with the capture of Gustave Marx on November 21, and his confession led to the capture of Harvey Van Dine and Peter Neidermeyer at their Indiana Dunes hideout six days later. A fourth member, mentally retarded Emil Roeski, also surrendered. After a spectacular trial at which the accused boasted of their past, Van Dine, Neidermeyer, and Marx were hanged on April 22, 1904, while Roeski, who had played only a minor part, was sent to prison, where he ultimately served sixty-six years for his crimes. The complaints about vice and danger on the streets gradually focused attention on the "Grey Wolves," as the city council was known. Already corrupted by Yerkes's bribes, a dishonest core of aldermen from wards near the city's center and along the slum-infested river held off a group of relatively honest representatives from the residential fringe. With the council votes in hand and re-election assured in corrupt precincts, the "statesmen" resisted the press and public opinion for more than a decade. Not even protest marches through the Levee could sway them. But when change came, ironically, it was because Coughlin, Kenna, and the other antireform aldermen anticipated events that did not take place. The first such expectation had to do with a proposal to appoint a vice commission to investigate the problem. Mayors Harrison and Edward F. Dunne had resisted the idea as a waste of money, but Fred Busse, who had been elected in 1907, agreed to support it. Late in 1910 he signed the order creating the nation's first government-financed investigation of prostitution. The mayor and the aldermen expected the Chicago Vice Commission to support the continuation of the Levee, mainly because it would supposedly keep streetwalkers out of residential areas. But when the commission's report was issued the following year, it described the horror of the vice districts, white slavery, seduction, and corruption in graphic detail and called for an immediate break-up of the Levee. By then, Mayor Busse had been eased out of office because of other types of corruption, and Carter Harrison I I was back in office with the support of

Coughlin and Kenna. Harrison tried valiantly to dodge the vice issue and delay action, but by 1912 two events had started to change his mind. One was the appearance of an illustrated brochure issued by the famous Everleigh sisters' brothel. The mayor was reportedly upset over the brazen advertising and ordered the posh resort closed. But what most convinced him that the era of redlight districts was over was the impending passage of woman's suffrage in Illinois. Decades of lobbying and campaigning had finally resulted in the election of a state legislature that favored the vote for women, and Harrison was fearful that the dramatic change in the electorate would drive pro-vice elements from office. In early October 1912, the police began raiding the resorts, and the Levee officially died. Although the suffrage bill did gain approval the following year, ironically, the voting pattern of women in aldermanic elections did not vary significantly from that of men. Harrison, considered a betrayer by "The Bath" and "Hinky Oink," served the remainder of his term and never held elected office again. Solutions That Became Problems During the closing decades of the nineteenth century, the condition of public and semi-public (privately owned but open to all) places became a symbol to many Chicagoans of what they feared and disliked about city life. To those of nativist inclinations, the peddler was a daily reminder of the immigrants' presence. In a nation and city obsessed with industrial growth and business efficiency, the traffic jam was a serious im pediment to profit. It was no coincidence that businessmen warmly supported the Citizens' Association, Civic Federation, City Club, and other civic reform groups that tried to badger city officials into upgrading services. To Chicagoans who depended on etiquette books to guide personal behavior, the city street was a sea of insult and rudeness. Moral souls found the public way a gauntlet of profanity and temptation perhaps best symbolized by the saloon's swinging doors, which allowed the sounds, sights, and smells of the barroom to pour onto the sidewalk. Chicagoans knowledgeable about the germ theory of disease, an ic;lea taking root during the 1890s, suddenly realized with terror 21

The Rose Room alcove in the Everleighsisters' brothel as shown in their 1902 promotional brochure, The Everleigh Club 1llustrated. /ts luxurious surroundings and elegant appointments were in sharp contrast to the dives more common to "the Levee."

that the sidewalk, streetcar, and amusement spot placed them in constant peril of epidemics and chronic health disorders . And finally, those Chicagoans who pined for their bucolic past and traded reminiscences of wolves spotted on the fringe of downtown found one of the world's most unrural places at State and Madison. While many wealthy Chicagoans could afford to flee the industrial giant, much of the civic energies of those who stayed were spent trying to cope with the fact that the city's population and economic activities were expanding faster than its streets. With an air of desperation masked only by booster rhetoric, Chicagoans sought four basic types of answers. Social solutions depended in part on the good will of an informed public, and the press did its part with a constant barrage of stories about pollution, traffic, and other outdoor problems. Where firmer authority was deemed necessary, a growing volume of laws regulated personal behavior in public. But jaywalkers, fast-driving "scorchers," and the thousands of misdemeanor arrests each year demonstrated that laws alone were not

enough.Moral solutions were no more successful. It was no coincidence that the strident anti-vice crusades paralleled growing com plaints about unsafe streets and incompetent officials. But crusades against streetwalkers and openly advertised vice in the Levee only drove prostitution into the privacy of the telephone, taxicab, and dispersed "buffet flat" of the middle-class neighborhood; the fight against Gamblers' Row pushed gaming behind doors. Ultimately, officials found that privatizing vice only made it more difficult to find and control. The growing fear of vice also neutralized some of the attractiveness of semi-public solutions. In the unpleasant public city outdoors, the department store, theater, restaurant, and other commercial places had offered comfortable alternatives indoors. But even the doorman, elevator operator, railway depot detective, and the price of a theater or pleasure boat ticket often failed to filter out undesirables and protect the innocent. The darkened theater, dance hall, department store waiting room , and restaurant were under suspicion of being recruiting grounds for pro-

Whose City? curers. Finally, when all else failed, Chicago also looked to technological solutions in the form of elevated railways and subterranean tubes. But these were only partial answers, and expectations of their efficiency only invited heavier use and more crowding. Moreover, since they were all privately owned, these systems aroused further anger over corporate profit-making above, on, and below the streets. Finally, technological solutions always seemed to be canceled by other engineering feats. The skyscraper, so efficient at piling people and their work higher in the air on private property, neutralized advancements in rush hour people-moving. More powerful and more numerous locomotives rendered depots, such as the North Western's Wells Street Station, obsolete long before they became old. The huge investments in horsecars and cable systems were rendered virtually valueless after only a few decades of use because of the electric streetcar and elevated. And the auto crippled mass transit. In 1909, many Chicagoans felt they had found the ultimate answer in Daniel Burnham'sPlan of Chicago, and their enthusiasm for it reveals the degree to which the bad conditions of the streets were a source of concern. The architect's scheme for the future was, above all else, a utopian vision of the public city, the inverse of reality. Statues replaced signboards, control replaced competition, joy replaced jam. The street, lined with monumental buildings, as well as the park, was a celebration of civic unity-a kind of Fourth of July celebration held every day. Most important of all, traffic moved and the unpleasantries of urban life evaporated. We all know how the story ended. Many features of the Burnham Plan were, in fact adopted, and some visions of 1909 remain on planners' drawing boards. The streets are still regarded as dangerous in many areas, unclean in others. Chicagoans still curse cabbies and express concern over high-rise safety. But many things are different. Transit no longer supports milljonajres, and the crisis of transportation is rooted in declining, rather than growing usage. The problems of filth and open vice are no longer the subject of strident citizen crusades, and the intensive use of public space that characterized the nineteenth century has largely been replaced by the distended and dispersed use of the public city in the age of the automobile.

Suggestions for Further Reading The study of attitudes toward public places is heavily dependent on hundreds of articles in contemporary newspapers, an untapped gold mine of information. Happily, there is an index to the Chicago RecordHeraU, 1904-1912. There are also the eighty-seven volumes of the Charles Ambler-Citizens' Association scrapbooks in the collections of the Chicago Historical Society. The story of transportation at the end of the century is best told in the press, but see also George Hilton, "Cable Railways of Chicago," Electric Railway Historical Society, Bulletin no. 10, 1954. A History of the Yerkes System of Street Railways in the City of Chicago

(Chicago:n.p., 1897) offers a self-serving view. The best of the many articles about the traction mogul is Sidney I. Roberts, "Portrait of a Robber Baron: Charles T. Yerkes," Business History Review 35 (Autumn 1961) 344-71. On activities above and below the street, see the A.J. Roewade scrapbook and papers in the Chicago Historical Society's collections and Chicago's Freight Tunnels (Chicago: Chicago Tunnel Termina l Corporation, n.d., reprinted by Milwaukee: Old Line Publishers, 1973). Charles U. Gordon, Reports on Pneumatic Tube Service for Chicago (Chicago: Post Office Printing Office, 1901) is also valuable. On the issue of public morals, see Perry R. Duis, The Saloon: Public Drinking in Chicago and Boston,

1880-1920 (Urbana: The University of Illinois Press, 1983), which discusses in detail how reformers tried to sort out public from private morals. See also the Clifford Barnes Papers at the Society, and the Juvenile Protective Association Papers, University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as the JPA studies in Speeches, Addresses and Letters of Louise de Koven Bowen, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor: Edwards Brothers Inc.,1937). The issues of congestion and street obstructions are well treated in the Ambler scrapbooks and the minutes of the Civic Committee in the City Club of Chicago papers held by the Chicago Historical Society. The annual reports of the Citizens' Association, the City Club BuUetin, and the annual reports of the Civic Federation all show the way in which Chicago's businessmen-reformers fretted over the deteriorating public environment of the city. Charles M. Nichols, comp., Studies onBuiUing Height Limitation in Large Cities, With Special Reference to Conditons in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Real Estate Board Library,

1923) is the most important secondary source on the tall building issue, which is also widely covered in the press and in the Inland Architect, American Architect and BuiUing News, and other trade periodicals. George E. Hooker, "Congestion and Its Causes in Chicago," Second National Conference on City Planning, Proceedings, 1902, Rochester, pp.42-57, gives an excellent summary of the attitudes of a leading social reformer. Carl Condit, The Chicago School of Architecture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964) remains the best of many books on skyscraper design. 23

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After successfully organizing mos! of Chicago's ethnic neighborhood bakeries, the predominantly German Bakers' Union Local 2 tumed lo larger bread and cracker manufactories such as C.L. Woodman & Co. around 1900.

Bread and Labor: Chicago's German Bakers Organize By John B. Jentz

Nineteen eighty-three marks the 300th anniversary of German immigration to America, a movement of people so great that by 1900, Germans comprised the second largest ethnic group in America after the English. Millions came to stay, and as individuals and as a group they vastly enriched the life of the republic. Pursuit of a better life led them into many occupations. The Germans who found themselves in the bakery trade in Gilded Age Chicago formed a union in hopes of realizing the promise of opportunity in America. LATE ON TH E EVENIN G of February 28 , 1910, Charles Cerny, a socialist and activist in Journeymen Bakers' Local 2, was fatally shot by the foreman of the Bremner Bakery on Clybourn Avenue, in the heart of Chicago's predominantly German North Side. Cerny, who had been leading a week-long strike at the bakery, was walking home from strike headquarters with another member of Local 2 when he was killed. He was also the business agent for the Polish bakers' local, which was closely affiliated with the large and heavily German Local 2. Fluent in several languages, among which were almost certainly German, English, and Polish, Cerny had been instrumental in previously disrupting the efforts of the Bremner Bakery to recruit strikebreakers . He had volunteered as a strikebreaker at the newly established master bakers' hiring hall, and , after being escorted to the bakery by the police with nineteen men, he had mounted a box and addressed them in the languages at his disposal, convincing eighteen to leave with him. Cerny was murdered at the moment when

J ohn B.j enlz L1 director of the Family and Community Hislory Cm /era/ The Newben y Libra1y. Thi. 1 arlicle is based on re.1earch ofthe Chicago Project at the American Institute al the L'niver;ity of M unich under the directorship ofDr. I /ar/11111 / Keil. The Chicago Project has been f unded by the Volkswagm Fuwulation.

Chicago's unionized bread bakers enjoyed their greatest power, a power based on strong interethnic organization and a favorable political climate. They had, in fact, controlled their industry for almost ten years, and the reaction to Cerny's murder helped them preserve their power for another ten. More than 2,500 in number, Chicago's organized bakers turned out in force for Cerny's funeral . At Sieben's Hall near Clybourn Avenue they heard a speech in German by a socialist editor. Afterwards a procession filed out of the hall to turn south on Clybourn Avenue, passing Bremner's Bakery where the crepe-draped flags of the assembled unions were lowered and all marchers took off their hats. The procession then circled the German core of the North Side, going east along Division and up Clark Street to North Avenue, then west again to Clybourn . The body was finally taken to Graceland Cemetery, where speeches were given in German and English. At the turn of the century there were high numbers of dank and dirty cellar bakeries in Chicago; they were mostly small neighborhood shops that were under considerable pressure by the city health department because of their unsanitary conditions. These shops were driven literally underground in efforts to cut costs in the face of competition from larger, newly mechanizing firms. In cooperation with middle25

German Bakers class progressives, the unions had agitated against the cellar bakeries since the 1890s, and they achieved success in 1907 with the passage of a municipal ordinance requiring them to meet certain sanitary standards. When this ordinance was declared unconstitutional, the city health department, in cooperation with Local 2, drew up another which was passed by the city council in early 1910. The angry reaction of the Master Baker Association, an organization of bakery owners, was well expressed in President Mathias Schmiedinger's call to a meeting only a week before Cerny was shot:

Remember! this is a BAKERS' MEETING and not a meeting at which Public Officials, who are always fighting the bakers, will address you. We know how to conduct our business without being told by a politician what to do .... Make it your business to come to this meeting and help us adopt a plan whereby we can protect ourselves against tyrannical politicians, arbitrary ordinances, and unreasonable demands by the Bakers' Union. The masters in fact developed a plan designed to break the union's power, and they began by organizing their own hiring hall to compete with the union's. Bremner's Bakery was probably selected for their test of strength with the union because its existence was threatened anyway and because as a cellar bakery it was a completely 26

unionized plant in the center of the North Side, the base of Local 2's power. Predominantly German in its makeup, Local 2 was the largest and strongest bakers' union in the city and one of the most powerful in the country. In 1905, Chicago became the headquarters of the international bakers' union largely in recognition of the strength of Chicago's organized bakery workers. The city's journeymen bakers successfully organized an ethnically divided work force in a traditional craft being restructured through the process of industrialization. They recognized that ethnicity was not simply a hinderance to cooperation among bakers of different nationalities; it also proved to be an indispensable source of strength in the unionization oflocal neighborhood bakeries. Mechanization, however, divided the baking industry into different sectors, only some of which could be effectively unionized in the early twentieth century. An understanding of this movement requires a knowledge of the structure of Chicago's baking industry and of the nature of its work force. The industry had three distinct sectors which maintained their basic characters over the thirty years from 1880 to 1910, despite notable changes within them. The neighborhood bakeries were numerous and small, commonly family-run enterprises in which the master's wife and children worked along with one or two journeymen and perhaps an apprentice, making and selling bread all in the same establishment. Of some 280 bakeries in Chicago in 1880, the great majority was small neighborhood shops. Significantly, there were proportionately more shops in the ethnic neighborhoods than in other areas of the city, indicating that small-scale baking was an ethnically based industry catering to specific national tastes in bread and other bakery products. Competition was intense because of the number of shops and the relative ease with which new ones could be started; in addition, the small masters had to compete with bread baked in the home. The attrition rate among the small masters was very high; an 1887 census of the international bakers union showed that onefifth of the journeymen members had formerly been master bakers. The baking industry also included wholesale bread bakeries, termed here "manufactories."

German Bakers These shops were larger and more sophisticated than the neighborhood bakeries, but neither big enough nor mechanized enough to be genuine factories (as defined here, a manufactory had from six to twenty-five employees and sold its bread wholesale) . The larger ones probably utilized the machines then available to aid in largescale bread baking, but such machines did not permit the mechanization of the entire process. In 1880, there were around twenty bread manufactories in Chicago. An example was Voltz's shop on Milwaukee Avenue, which in 1890 employed six journeymen and sold its bread through seventeen grocery stores and saloons on the North and orthwest sides. Such places were a kind of hybrid institution which pushed to the limit the possibilities for producing and marketing fresh bread in Gilded Age Chicago. After the turn of the century, new inventions permitted at least some of the manufactories to develop into genuine bread factories. Just as important as the invention of bread-baking machinery was the development of the gasolinepowered truck, which permitted the expansion of the market for fresh bread through quicker deliveries over a larger area. Beginning in the 1860s there were also largescale baking factories in Chicago producing primarily biscuits and crackers and selling them in a regional and even national market. The ease of packaging and relative non-perishability of the products permitted their marketing over a large area, and the nature of crackers and biscuits allowed for the early application of machines to their production. A promotional book for Chicago's manufacturers published in 1873 described the Drake Bakery at 24 and 26 North Clinton Street as employing 98 people and pro-

ducing 136,032 barrels of crackers annually, which were sold "from New York to Denver, and from the Gulf States to the mining territory of Lake Superior." The owners boasted a fourstory building, a forty-horsepower engine, and two "large sized McKenzie ovens." They appear in the 1880 manuscript manufacturing census as employing 175 people, including 30 women , who most likely worked as cracker packers. There were 5 such cracker factories in Chicago in 1880, which employed from 40 to 175 workers and which were located either in the Loop or in the central manufacturing district on the Near West Side. Although these were bakeries, the cracker factories were practically a separate industry from the bread bakers, as indicated by the vastly larger amount of capital invested in them. The differences between the two industries were amply clear to the baker unionists who, beginning in the 1880s, struggled unsuccessfully for almost twenty-five years to establish a strong local of cracker bakers and packers. Several developments characterized the Chicago baking industry generally between 1880 and 1910. The factories grew in size and mechanization throughout the period, as did the bread manufactories particularly after 1900. The cracker factories were continually being consolidated into larger companies, culminating in the formation of the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco) in 1898 during the great period

The i11lrod11clion of technologiral 1111wvatiom rnch a.1 the" patent tcmg 111 achi11e" and the " peerless cra cker dough mixe r" lo la rge bak erie.1 put p ress ur e on th e smaller 11righborhood bakeries lo w t cost.1to slay competitive.

German Bakers of American corporate reorganization. Nabisco had several large plants in Chicago as well as its corporate headquarters. At the same time, the increasing mechanization of the larger bread bakeries put great economic pressure on the small neighborhood bakers. Required to cut costs in order to stay competitive, the small bakers moved into low-rent cellar quarters and cut their journeymen's wages even more. By the 1920s, industrial trends were forcing the neighborhood bakeries to become more like specialty sweet shops. All these developments brought major changes to the industry's largely immigrant work force. Of more than 1,200 bakers counted in the 1880 population census of Chicago, seventy per cent were foreign-born. The Germans constituted more than forty per cent of all bakers and sixty per cent of the foreign-born ones,

Advertisement for Brernner's Bakery, a completely unionized cellar bakery which was located on the North Side, the base of Local 2'spowe1:

ASK YOUR GROCER FOR

A TRIAL WILL PLEASE

R. J. BREMNER 57-81 Clybourn Avenue Tel . North 1641

although most ethnic groups in Chicago had at least some representation in the trade. The high proportion of German bakers was not simply a reflection of Chicago's large German community, since Germans constituted only fifteen per cent of the entire population. Rather, Germans were traditionally prominent in the baking industry: reporting in 1810, the U.S. Immigration Commission found that Germans were the only immigrant group for which baking was one of the top ten occupations. Conditions in Germany at this time insured an ample if not excessive supply of German bakery workers; according to the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1879, the German industry was plagued by "tramping" journeymen who could not find work. The article attributed the problem to the masters' practice of hiring too many apprentices in order to cut costs, a problem that unionized Chicago bakers fought as well. At least up un ti! the depression of the 1890s, there appeared to be a more than adequate supply ofjourneymen bakers in Chicago. The working and living conditions of Chicago's bakers in 1880 reflected an older but disintegrating craft order. A sample of Chicago's German bakers in 1880 shows that more than half lived with their bosses, who were also German. The same boarding system probably characterized bakers of other ethnic groups since all baker unionists complained of minimal to nonexistent sleeping quarters-men often slept on the flour sacks-and of poor to abominable food. Since room and board were usually part of the wages, the journeymen considered the boarding system another example of their exploitation: it was one more means of depriving them of adequate remuneration for their work. In addition, the system meant that they were constantly on call, including for night work, one of the worst aspects of the trade. Journeymen preferred to be paid in money, not room and board, and to be free to live where they wanted-a sure sign that the traditional craft system, in which apprentices and journeymen worked their way up in the trade under the tutelage of the master, was deteriorating if not completely bankrupt. The system of boarding with the master was supplemented by boarding or lodging houses which catered to bakers and functioned as hiring halls and hangouts for unemployed bakery

German Bakers workers. They were often owned by master bakers or people familiar with the trade; one advertised in Der Deutsche-Arbeiter in 1869 was owned by Frank Henschke!, the treasurer of the Bakers' Mutual Benefit Society. The owners advertised their ability to supply both jobs and workers, aRd local masters knew where to go to find new men. The practice of using bakers' boardinghouses as hiring halls was the subject of constant union complaints because through them masters could hire non-union labor. Recognizing that these boardinghouses could not be eliminated, the unions began officially to designate acceptable ones ; the five union-approved bakers' boardinghouses published in the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung in 1887 were near the center of the city close to the larger, centrally located bakeries as well as the core of the transportation network. (One of the five was operated by Frank Henschkel.) The existence of these boardinghouses helps explain how the German union organizers in 1881 could attract, with seeming ease, half or more of the German bakers in the city to a meeting. Between advertisements in the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung and visits to the boardinghouses, it was not difficult to spread the word or to get these men to listen. Working fifteen hours a day was common, and night and Sunday work was typical . These working and living conditions, even more than low pay, aroused the bakers' early unionization efforts. There were several unsuccessful attempts to found bakers' unions in Chicago before the labor upheaval of 1886. The earlier efforts are particularly significant for what they reveal about the largely German ethnic world out of which the unions developed. Two institutions were of crucial importance to the bakers before 1886- the Bakers' Mutual Benefit Society (Backer Unterstutzungs-Vereins), founded in 1867, and the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, established in 1877, and the circle of socialists associated with it. Despite the ups and downs of union organization and radical politics, the Bakers' Mutual Benefit Society remained the center of organized life among Chicago's German bakers through the mid-1880s regularly holding its annual masked balls and picnics and providing both a refuge for union organizers and a cadre of experienced leaders. Among them was Mathias Schmiedinger, who was president of the

society throughout most of the 1880s but later became a union opponent. Schmiedinger and his compatriots were actively involved in the effort to organize a journeymen bakers' union in 1880; two years later they were prominent in the short-lived German Bakers' Local Assembly 1801 of the Knights of Labor. In the mid-1880s the benefit society simply declared itself a union and solicited new members. At this time the society would meet and conduct business, and afterwards the union would begin in the same room with the same people. This was possible because members of the society were required to join the union , which immediately caused problems since employers were members of the society. In March 1887, the union and the benefit society were formally separated. The greatest effort to organize a bakers' union in Chicago before 1886 took place in 1881

Founded in 1893, the Schulze Baking Co. rapidly g rew into Chicago's largest wholesa le baking company. In 1904 one baking plant alone produred 40,0(/0 loaves da ily.

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German Bakers

An idealized view of C.L. Woodman & Co. '.sfirst floor cracker making operation. lnl873, the bake1)' employed 85 workers and produced 800 pounds of crackers daily. Woodman's crackers were widely distributed throughout the western and so uthern states as well as Canada.

and was led by the German socialists associated with the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. The pivotal figure was Paul Grottkau, an editor of the paper and political activist who also had worked in unions in Berlin before coming to America in 1878. Notices of organizational meetings for a bakers' union began to appear in the Chicagoer ArbeiterZeitung in the early spring, along with serialized reprints of a pamphlet entitled, "The Slaves of the Bakeries," used at this time to organize New York City's bakers. Also German-led, the New York movement provided inspiration for the Chicagoans. Grottkau spoke at numerous meetings and at one point led the organized bakers from Socialist Labor party headquarters to a picnic in Ogden's Grove. Occasionally Grottkau spoke jointly with Dr. Ernst Schmidt, a Socialist Labor party candidate for mayor in 1879 and liberal emigre from the failed 1848 revolution in Germany. Schmidt spoke on the health hazards of working long hours and nights in dank and dirty bake shops. In June and July the new, overwhelmingly German union presented its demands to the master bakers. Union demands remained basically the same for the next thirty years despite 30

changes in specifics: shortening the work day to twelve hours and the work week to six days, elimination of the boarding system, hiring only through a union hiring bureau , and higher wages. At first a surprising number of masters drove up to the union hall in their buggies and signed the contract. Soon , however, the small bosses accused the union and owners of large bakeries of conspiring against them, since the bigger bakeries could more easily meet the demands. Further problems developed when the masters could not agree on a price increase for bread , and some bakeries constantly tried to undersell the others. The bosses became better organized toward the end of the summer when their resistance increased , and by the early fall the union had fallen apart. One of the reasons wh y the union was unsuccessful was that the model ew York City effort had failed when a general bakers' strike collapsed . But just as important, the arrival of fall brought an oversupply of bakery workers and the seasonal movement of journeymen back into the baking trade after holding other jobs during the warm months. Consequently, the early unionists were always anxious to get their union organized in

German Bakers the spring and their contract signed and enforced by mid-summer. The first stable journeymen bakers' unions in Chicago were organized during the eight-hour movement of 1885 and 1886. Two decades ear1ier Chicago's workers had been leaders in a strong natronal movement to reduce the legal work day to eight hours, and achieving the eight-hour day remained one of their primary goals well into the twentieth century. The founding of a German-language national bakers' paper in New York City in May 1885 aided Chicago's organizing efforts markedly, as did the founding of a national union under the impetus of the New Yorkers in January 1886. The groundswell oflocal support for the eight-hour movement also brought masses of new members into all unions in the spring of 1886, allowing a much expanded Bakers' Mutual Benefit Society to enter the national union as Local 10. The Report of the Illinois Bureau ofLabor S tatistics for 1886 listed three bakers' unions in Chicago-a German, an English, and a Bohemian, formed in that order in the first five months of the year. Founding by far the largest union, the Germans had organized seventy-five per cent of their bakery workers, the Bohemians ninety-five per cent, and the English thirty per cent. Almost immediately, however, there was a split in the German union resulting from the May 4 Haymarket Riot-seven policemen were killed when a bomb was thrown and many demonstrators were injured when police opened fire on the crowd. Because of its radical views the police shut down the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung soon afterwards, and Local 10 decided to tax each member one dollar to support the paper's reopening. A minority opposed the tax and was supported in its stance by the international union, a decision which caused the radical local majority to leave both Local 10 and the international and form Independent Local No. 1. For about a year the independents published their own local German-language bakers' paper. The remainder of No. 10 ultimately was reorganized as Local 49 of the international, and there were two rival German journeymen bakers' unions in Chicago until 1891. The independents then rejoined o. 49. and the Chicago local was again reorganized as Local 2 of the international. Most important, however, the rival unions managed

to cooperate during the strikes and largely successful labor organizing efforts. From 1888 through 1893, German bakers' unions negotiated uniform annual labor contracts with Chicago's bread industry for the majority of their members, and journeymen bakers of other nationalities followed their lead. The standard contract for German bakers in 1890 prohibited boarding with masters, required hiring through the union bureau, instituted a ten-hour day and six-day week, and set a three-dollar minimum daily wage. This union success resulted from the cooperation of the rival German unions, and also was aided by the poor judgement of the bakery bosses. In 1888, the bosses had the whole leadership of Local 49 arrested and put in jail, creating an ideal cause around which the feuding unions could unite. The bosses also failed to create a local bread "pool" to control their product's price, and thus their own unity dissolved. The victory of the German bakers in 1888 created a model contract which they and the bakers of other ethnic groups followed in their struggles through 1893. The Germans' success also instilled a sense of momentum which led to the creation of a ''Joint Executive Board" of their unions and further union activity among other ethnic bakers. By December 1890, in fact, there was a ''journeymen Bakers' Council" in which German, English-speaking, Swedish, and Bohemian bakers cooperated in organizing workers. At the height of the summer's strike activity in 1890 the bakers estimated that the two German, one Swedish, and one Bohemian union together had organized 1,200 of the 1,800 bakery workers in the city, and among the unionized workers two-thirds were German. The Germans were especially confident of further union successes, given the support they could expect for their boycotts from the North and Northwest sides. The German-based but more general union success of this period is well described by John Schudel in his history of the national union: There was hardly ever a time in Chicago without some shop strike or other in the larger bakeries, followed by boycotts which were pursued with considerable vigor. ... Some of these firms on the North Side were unionized over and over again in this manner, so that when the wonted day for the renewal of the contract came around, all Chicago master bakers of note resigned and made peace with the Union. 31

German Bakers Notably, Schudel spoke of the "larger bakeries," that is, the manufactories, as the critical places where the union had to fight continually for compliance. The fact that he was also speaking of the German-controlled bread industry is evident from the qualifications he made later. Although the Scandinavian and Bohemian bakers also achieved real success, they, along with the English-speaking bakers, had difficulty just keeping their organizations together. The Polish and Jewish bakers had just organized in 1893 and 1894 when the depression undercut them. Significantly, Schudel only spoke of the Englishspeaking bakers in relation to the factories of the American Biscuit and Manufacturing Company, a predecessor of Nabisco, where they struck in 1892 and were defeated. The difficulty of organizing the Englishspeaking bakers and the weaknesses of their unions was a constant theme of the Chicago bakers' movement. In 1890, the unions believed that most of the 600 remaining unorganized bakery workers in the city were "Americans." Part of the problem of organizing English-speaking bakers was that they worked in the larger plants like the cracker factories and the bread manufactories. During the summer strikes of 1890 the unions had difficulties with two particular plants Aldrich's, employing about thirty men, and Bremner's, seventy-five. These firms used mainly unorganized English-speaking bakery workers, and the union hoped to fight them through a new English-speaking Local 71, a hope which proved unfounded since the local never developed the requisite strength. The Englishspeaking union bakers were less successful because the larger firms were simply stronger, and in addition the workers lacked a strong neighborhood as a base of support. The English-speaking neighborhoods had neither the number of bakeries nor the cohesiveness of the foreign-born communities, and thus the English-speaking bakers could less readily follow the standard tactic that worked so well for the ethnics - organizing the neighborhood bakeries first through boycotts and union label campaigns before taking on the larger plants. With a strong neighborhood base, the ethnic bakers could engage in a fight with a few manufactories and, even if they lost, still have a foundation to build upon. 32

The great success that the bakers' unions enjoyed came to an end on Christmas Day 1893, when 150 German and 40 Scandinavian union bakers were locked out of 8 bread manufactories. There ensued a concerted and ultimately successful effort by Chicago's larger bread bakers to break the unions, taking advantage of the national depression and the unusual glut of bakery workers in Chicago attracted to the city by the recent World's Columbian Exposition. The unions fought back by organizing a strike and boycott and they were vigorously aided by the international union, which immediately recognized the broad significance of the attack on one of its strongest locals. But after six months the strike was broken . Neither the local nor the international recovered from this defeat until the turn of the century. The one new tactic used in the mid-1890s to try to regain the initiative was cooperation with progressive reformers on public issues like factory inspection and sanitary codes for bakeries. The various Chicago locals retreated to the more easily controlled neighborhood bakeries, but only the big German Local 2 with its larger membership and numerous small unionized shops weathered the depression of the 1890s with any strength. Consequently, it was Local 2 that led the union resurgence in the first decade of the twentieth century. Local 2 owed much ofits success and vitality to the character of its leaders. Of the half dozen leaders found in the 1900 manuscript population census, four were among the small core group of officers holding several different positions in 1900 and 1901. The six leaders shared other characteristics besides their foreign birthfive were from Germany and one from Denmark. They were mature men with ages ranging from twenty-six to forty-five. Their average length of stay in this country was eighteen years, indicating that they had come to America in their late teens. Thus they had been in America long enough to have participated in the very beginnings of the bakers' union movement. Their participation in the union movement also meant that they were probably socialists of varying shades since both the local and international movements were socialist-oriented at least into the early twentieth century. The proper role of socialism in the union caused considerable con-

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German Bakers troversy, however, with the more conservative leaders saying it should be subordinated to the needs of organizational unity. The international union adopted the program of the Socialist Labor party in 1891, practically turning the union into a_party agency, an action that caused so much dissention it had to be withdrawn. Their differences notwithstanding, a commitment to socialism helped the leaders of Local 2 justify and build an interethnic bakers' movement. Local 2's leaders in 1900 were, then , influenced by socialism and had resided in the country long enough to be familiar with both local German and American cultures. Although they were still relatively young men by the turn of the century, they were nevertheless experienced American workers and tested unionists. The union successes of the early twentieth century were based on Local 2's consolidating its hold on the neighborhood bakeries of the North and Northwest sides, its geographic expansion to the South Side where bakers' unions traditionally had been weak, and its considerable growth in membership, which included some ethnic diversification. In 1899, before its period of sustained growth, Local 2 controlled more than fifty bakeries, although most of the larger ones were still unorganized . Within the next few years the small maste rs of the North and Northwest sides practically became supplicants to Local 2 in labor matters, from hours and pay to hiring practices. But the neighborhood bakeries were just a foundation , as August Nuber, business agent of Local 2, wrote in 1900: "We have enough small so-called union shops. It's time that we once again win a shop where at least six men work." The challenge was to move out from the neighborhoods to the bigger and often centrally located bread manufactories where the union had been defeated in 1893. Membership growth and ethnic diversification were vital to this task. The expansion of Local 2 to include members from other ethnic groups beyond its stable German constituency ensured its position as the key bakers' union in the city. Charles Cerny was both a member of Local 2 and business agent for the Polish union. The Germans and the Poles worked closely together because they both organized bakeries on the Northwest Side. In the early twentieth century there were also ethnic

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Boycolts and label campaigns, rather than trikes, became the preferred tactic of ethnic neighborhood bakeries .

locals among the Bohemians, Scandinavians, English-speaking, and Jewish bakers . The attractiveness ofjoining Local 2 was increased by its unemployment, sickness, and death benefit funds , and its membership reached more than a thousand in 1902. These 1,000 union members already constituted a substantial proportion of the more than 2,200 first and second-generation German bakers counted in Chicago by the 1900 census, and the decade of union growth was just beginning. Moving out of its core neighborhoods on the North and Northwest sides, Local 2 developed shop organizations on the South Side where some of the biggest bread bakeries and cracker factories were located. In 1900, 33

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AKERS AND CONFECTIONERS Local Union No. 2 received its Charter December 21, 1891 and in June 1909 organized a Branch of Apprentices who for; merly were members of Auxilliary Local No. 2, bringing the total membership up to 2000. Principles of Local No. 2: To Improve the Condition of the Bakery Workers of Chicago. TONY WETH, Cor. Sec'y.

In 1905. Chicago became lhe headquarters of lhe inlernalio nal bakers' union largely in recognition of the strenglh of Chicago's organ-

' - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - • ized bakery workers .

John Hartmann, one of the local's most important leaders, lived on the South Side near Heissler and Junge's large bakery, one of the traditional targets of the union, whose owners were leaders among Chicago's baker employers. The breakthrough in the unionization of large bread bakeries came in fact at Heissler and J unge's in the spring and summer of 1902 when the bakers, organized and affiliated with Local 2, went on strike. The union won after a short fight, and shop organizations in the other large bread bakeries also affiliated with Local 2. The big bakery owners resisted in 1904, but they too capitulated after a short strike in the spring. These victories were comparatively easy, and in this sense they were similar to the first general agreement of 1888, which also began a long per34

iod of union success. The organizational strength of the union, supported by a relatively prosperous economy, underlay these victories. Beginning its work in the later 1890s with strong support from the international union, a citywide "Bakers Council," including all the different ethnic locals, helped the Chicago baker unionists sustain their successes of the early part of the century for almost twenty years. This same body was also prominent in trying to move out of the bread industry into the cracker factories. While the unions were successfully organizing the bread industry, they also organized locals of the cracker bakers and cracker packers, both English-speaking, and the second composed completely of women. Overconfident, these locals struck against Nabisco in 1903 and were

German Bakers crushed. Nabisco was too strong, the workers unskilled or semi-skilled, and the unions too inexperienced. This defeat did not diminish the general success of Chicago's bread bakers; by 1910 they had thoroughly organized their industry, practically eliminated the boarding system, establishedÂˇ a nine-hour day and six-day week, and received much higher pay than in 1890. The unionization of Chicago's bread bakers was successful first of all because the industry itself was locally based. Its small market could be controlled through label campaigns and boycotts, which were powerful weapons especially in the ethnic neighborhoods. Indeed, the boycott rather than the strike was the union's preferred tactic. Ethnicity, expressed in neighborhood support of these boycotts, was therefore a precondition for the unionists' success and not simply the divisive element that it is so commonly called in histories of American labor. Without the neighborhood base and the control of the neighborhood bread bakeries, there would have been no journeymen bakers' unions in Chicago in the Gilded Age. The weakness of the English-speaking bakers was due in large part to their lack of such a foundation . The neighborhood character of so much of the bread industry before the turn of the century also helps explain the relative lack of ethnic animosity among the baker unionists: bakers of each ethnic group had to organize their own shops, and thus were able to build a power base without fear of competition from other locals. Yet the growth of the large bread manufactories forced the unions out of neighborhoods. To gain control of this sector of the baking industry, they had to build a strong interethnic, city-wide union movement, a task aided in this period by the socialist commitments of the leadership of Local 2. Thus, ethnicity was both a source of strength for the unions and a limit that had to be overcome, or more precisely, a foundation that had to be integrated into a larger structure. This feat was accomplished in the late 1880s and then again around the turn of the century. In a larger sense, the history of the Chicago journeymen bakers' movement also helps reveal the local impact of nationwide industrialization, and particularly the pressure it put on the ethnically based unions of the Gilded Age to found interethnic institutions and use the English Ian-

guage. At the same time that the baker unionists were consolidating their neighborhood base of power, mechanization of the large bakeries was undermining this foundation by weakening the local bakeries, literally forcing them underground into cheap cellars. For the health of their own members, the unions agitated against the cellar bakeries, but this further weakened their own base. Industrialization, in other words, was forcing unions both to move out of the neighborhoods and to found interethnic and ultimately English-speaking institutions in order to organize the larger plants, even while maintaining their ethnic foundation as far as they could. Just as the Chicago bakers struggled to build strong English-speaking locals, especially in the cracker factories, so the German-dominated international union founded and financed an English-language national bakers' journal. Thus, as industrialization undermined their ethnic foundation, Chicago's baker unionists organized an American institution, a strong interethnic and city-wide union movement. Yet this American institution had relatively few Americans in it. It was the creation of foreignborn workers experiencing the industrial revolution in the United States. Suggestions for Further Reading German-American newspapers are an excellent source of information about bakers' unions and the German community in Chicago. See DeutschAmerikanische Blicker Zeitung, later renamed Bakers' Journal, Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung, Der DeutscheArbeiter, and the Illinois St.aats-Zeitung.

Readers interested in the mechanization of the baking industry should consult Ursula Batchelder Stone, "The Baking Industry with Special Reference to the Bread Baking Industry in Chicago;' (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Chicago, 1929); and S.S. Schoff, The Glory of Chicago-Her Manufactories (Chicago: Knight & Leonard, 1873). For a discussion of manufactories and their relation to other industrial forms see Bruce Laurie and Mark Schmitz, "Manufacture and Productivity: The Making of an Industrial Base, Philadelphia, 1850-1880;' in Theodore Hershberg, ed., Philadelphia: Work, Space, and Family , and Group Experience in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981).

Statistical information on German-American bakers can be found in U .S., Tenth Decennial Census: 1880, Vol. I: Statistics of Population; U.S., Twelfth Census: 1900. Occupations at the Twelfth Census; and the Fourth Biennial Report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics ofIllinois, 1886.

Arthur Holitischer's Chicago: A German Traveler's View of an American City Some Gennans came to America not to stay but to write about it. In 1910, Arthur H olitischer visited Chicago and other cities and wrote a vivid account of what he found there. His impressions of Chicago are translated here for the first time .

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wrote Arthur Holitischer in 1912 arter a brier ,·isit lo that city a year earlier. Like man)· European ,·isitors, he round Chicago abhorrent, and his description or the city is one or the most colorrul and damning e\'er \\'ritten. Holitischer's , isit ,\·as part or a long-standing European tradition of tra\'eling to America to \\'rite about the nation and its people. The account of his tour of America, A111nilw Heuli' und J'vlo1ge11: Rfiseerlebnisse (A merica Today a 11d Tomorrow: Travel Studies), is virtually unknown in the L,;nitecl States . His first tra,·el work, Holitischer's book ,ms well recei,·ed in Europe and e,·e ntually published in fourteen printings. Yet his reno\\'n ne\'er extended further because his book, like much tra,·el literature, ne,·e r was translated into languages other than German. Holitischcr was an ironic victim of the language barrier, anonymous to a coumry he was to publicize Lo hundreds of thousands or readers. Holitischer's upbringing and his commitment Lo social reform and a,·ant-garde literature brought LO his u-a,·cl books an unusual combination of' perspecti,·e and style. He was born in Budapest in 1869 LO aje,\·ish family that considered itself' part of a chosen people with a grand mission and a particular distinction in world history. His formal education , howc\'e1~ was Germanic , al a time ,rhen Germany, emerging as a global power, was building a world-class navy and teaching its children that their kullur ought to be the basis for a uni\'ersal civilization. His heritage and education thus ga\'e him many interests and a broad ,·iew of the world. At the age or twenty-one he rejected the banking career his parents had prepared him for in favor of a life as an author. Holitischer worked as a ne,rspaper reporter for the Berlin Tageblall and Vienna 's ,\ 'eue Freie Presse and was an acti\'e socialist. By the Lime of his American tour, HoliLischer already was established as a popular and critically acclaimed nO\·elisL and playwright in the Fren ch Symbolist school. Later in Berlin with politi ca l dramatist Ern·in Piscator, he founded the Proletarian Theater. But Holitischcr ,rnn his largest audience \\'ith his trm·el books in which he successfully combined his imerest in social reform with a Symbolist writing style. As the traditional narrative "CHICAGO 1s HELL,"

By Frederic Trautmann

Frederic Trautmann is assocuite professQr•of speech at Temple University. 37

H olitischer's Chicago descriptions of earlier travel literature grew unwieldy and unfashionable in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Symbolist manner of suggestion by allusion and image became especially attractive to travel book readers. This new approach to travel writing was now here more evident than in Holitischer's account of his visit to Chicago. Although written primarily for European audiences, foreigners' impressions of the United States always have held great interest for Americans themselves. Americans have asked themselves the question "who is the American ?" as often as the foreigners who traveled there to find an answer. ineteenth-century America looked to England for moral and cultural direction, and because translation was not a problem, British views of the United States generally have been the most widely read and most influential travel literature among American readers. Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners of the Americans, 1832 ; Charles Dickens's American Notes, 1842; James Bryce's The American Commonwealth, 1888; and Rudyard Kipling's American Notes, 1899, were among the most familiar to the nineteenthcentury American public. Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, 1835, was a major exception to the general preponderance of British travel literature. The general value of travel literature for historians lies in its comparative focus. What often is taken for granted and lies deeply imbedded in the national character is raised to the surface by the observant traveler who sees something unfamiliar and worth noting. At worst, foreign investigations of national character traits promote ethnocentrism, xenophobia, and jingoism; but more often they provide valuable insights into a nation and its people. Highly critical views of the United States have evoked both outrage and resentment in America. Charles Dickens was at the pinnacle of his popularity when he visited the United States in 1841, and at stops along his tour he received generous outpourings of friendship and admiration that rarely were shown to a foreign visitor. Anxious to know of his impressions, Americans were shocked and angered to find that in American Notes Dickens barely mentioned the hospitality he was shown during his visit, and that he devoted much of the book to criticisms of Amer38

ican copyright law and solitary confinement prisons. Yet most foreigners achieved a balance in their views of America ; democratic values and institutions were frequent subjects for praise, American domestic manners were not. Over the years European travelers have praised Americans ' independence, prosperity, and capacity for self-government; and they have reproached their reckless violence, tolerance for slavery, lack of culture and refinement, infatuation with the dollar, and tobacco chewing. At the same time, Europeans wondered at Americans' hurriedness (Tocqueville called it "the strange unrest") , and their penchant for speculation, rushing through meals , hotel living, and bragging, while their discovery of iced drinks, grapefruit, and rocking chairs intrigued Europeans. Holitischer's account of his visit to the United States came when the European demand for travel literature about America was nearing an end. In America Through British Eyes, Allan Nevins defined four distinct periods of travel literature about America between 1780 and 1920. The earliest accounts were reports of men who came to America seeking an opportunity to better their station in life. They came with open minds to investigate the possibilities of establishing farms and commercial ventures, and more often than not they were rewarded. These were practical men of the middle class who were not discouraged by the hardships of American life and who were little burdened over questions of manners and culture. They came to America in search of economic advantage, and they found much here to praise. The travel of most of these early visitorGwas confined to eastern seaboard cities-Boston, New York , Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond , and Charleston-although those who ventured as far as Cincinnati described it as the most notable and impressive town in the West. Published often in the form of a gazette or a guidebook, these accounts were straightforward descriptions written with information , not amusement, as their chief purpose. The promotion of immigration to America, if not stated outright, was implicit in most of this literature. Not all accounts were

H olitischer's Chicago equally encouraging. A controversy raged, for example, between advocates and opponents of immigration across the Atlantic in late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury Germany. Gottfried Duden urged Germans to immigrate to America in the 1829 repott of his travels in America, and he portrayed it, especially the farmlands of the Missouri River Valley, as an immigrant's dream. Friedrich Schmidt represented yet another kind of traveler to America, one who came to observe the experiment of democracy firsthand and to report the conduct of its citizens and the workings of the young republic's political institutions. In his 1822 study of American political conditions, Schmidt opposed emigration to America. The chaos that passed for government there, he said, could only be the product of the most daring and perverted fantasy. Between 1825 and 1845, the British view of America became more critical. One reason for this change was the beginning in the 1810s of a more vigorous Tory attack on liberal views in politics, literature, economics, and religion. An assault on America, the symbol of democracy and liberal philosophy and the haven of British political exiles, was inevitable. The rise in England of a radical democratic movement spurred the conservative Tories to defend cherished aristocratic institutions against any imitation of American democracy in Great Britain. The most profitable action was to attack America. Thus it became easy and convenient for gentlemen of Tory persuasion to visit America with denunciation their goal. Describing American republicanism as little more than mob rule, Frederick Marryat's account of his visit to America urged his countrymen not to follow in her footsteps. Yet not all who set off on this mission fulfilled the task as planned. Thomas Hamilton and barrister Godfrey T. Vigne, both confirmed Tories and outspoken opponents of a British democracy, wrote admiringly of America after their visits. Alexis de Tocquevi ll e, writing at about the same time as these English conservatives, also was sympathetic to aristocratic values and suspicious of democracy. A pessimist in outlook, Tocqueville began his investigation of democracy in America in 1831 with the view that equality (the

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meaning he gave to democralie) would become an ever greater force in democratic society and significantly lower the level of a civ ilization that embraced it. Yet the purpose of his visit was not to confirm old suspicion about the dangers of democracy, but to discover in it some assurance 39

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that individual liberties could be retained under democratic rule. Thorough and circumspect, his swdy carefully weighed the advamages and drawbacks of self-government. Against his English contemporaries' claim of mob rule, Tocqueville concluded that liberty would prevail in democratic societies like America. Tocqueville's study was published in J835 in France as De la Democratie en Amerique, and translated five years later into English as Democracy in America. It was well received in the United States and praised in Great Britain especially where both Tories and liberals used it as evidence LO support their different views of democracy. In the end it was more influential in shaping the British view of America during this period than the accounts of British travelers. British studies of American manners, however, contributed to a more successful and lasting attack on democracy. With improvements in travel-the first lransatlamic steamship crossing was in 1819-professional authors and commetllators began visiting the United Stales more frequently. Writers such as Harriet Martineau, Charles Lyell , Charles Dickens, and Frances Trollope brought new insights and vivid descriptions of American life to their accounts and in the process made the travel literature of this period not only informative but also entertaining. Primarily from upper and professional classes, these writers came LO America with clear ideas about civilization and proper behavior. Their attention to American manners was not withoutjustification, and the differences in behavior between Europeans and Americans were more striking to these travelers than they were Lo earlier \·isitors. The gemeel manners or east coast America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were not very different from those of British visitors Lo America. The crudeness of life on the transappalachian frontier in the Age of Jackson was another matter and evoked from Europeans a different response. Above : Advertisement for a German slupping agent based in Chicago. The 50,000 train and ship tickets this agent sold in three years a/lest to the populanty of travel al the /urn of the century.

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Below: In his 1891 book Frenchman in America, Paul Bloui!l depicted the American woman as wielding great power over her hus band, a position not enjoyed by women in England or France. 1/lustralion by£. W. Kembler.

H olitischer's Chicago The assault on American manners also was an attack on American democracy, for these writers believed that the spread of democracy deprived social relations of their delicacy, charm, and refinement. Mob rule, they determined, encouraged uncivilized behavior. The most vituperative of these condemnations was Mrs. Frances Trollope's study of 1832, Domestic Manners of the Americans. Cincinnati, then a rough frontier town, was the first stop of her tour and the raw, unrefined behavior she saw there served as the basis for her picture of Americans as undisciplined and uncouth. Travelers of the third period, 1840 to 1870, found much in America to admire, and thus they wrote to correct the earlier, negative image of America as a crude, unattractive republic. These writers praised America's attitude toward educating the masses, its work ethic, and especially American self-government, which they believed to be a noble exam pie ofliberal thought in action. They were most impressed by the material and economic achievements of the nation. Europeans marvelled at the average American citizen's level of prosperity and the growth of roads, bridges, canals, railways, schools, factories, and cities. Growth was acknowledged by foreign visitors with increasing frequency as America's most distinctive feature. The Far West became a regular stop for travelers by the time of the Civil War, and visits to Salt Lake City and San Francisco added a new dimension to their travel accounts. Views of Chicago also became more common, thanks largely to its central location in America's growing railway network. As more and more people came to Chicago, and as more and more passed through , Chicago became the commercial capital of the Midwest and her bustling streets and stockyards a main attraction for European visitors. By 1870, no trip west across America was thinkable without visiting Chicago along the way. The Civil War settled the issue of slavery, the most glaring contradiction to democracy in America, and after 1870 travel literature no longer debated the legitimacy of democracy as a form of government and way of life. America continued to grow and prosper, so much so that attempts to describe the nation in its entirety became unrealistic. Travel literature in the period 1870 to 1920 thus gave up traditional narrative

description of American life for either more analytical discussions that drew broader and more general observations about the United States, or for more impressionistic accounts. These accounts focused often on only a few selected themes such as race, woman's rights, or child labor. One of the more famous such treatises was Matthew Arnold 's discussion of the poor state of culture in America. In place of earlier writers' attacks on democracy, visitors from this period worried over threats to democracythreats that often came from within the nation itself. Herbert Spencer and others warned that bossism and political corruption would deprive Americans of their liberties if reform was not soon introduced. Arthur Holitischer was part of this last great period of European travel writing about America, and like some others, including H. G. Wells*, he brought to it views colored by his socialist convictions. But unlike Wells's analytical critiques of American life, Holitischer wrote impressionistic descriptions that owed much to muckrakers' works, especially Upton Sinclair's The jungle. He visited juvenile court proceedings in Denver; met with Victor Berger, the only socialist elected to the United States Congress, in Washington; and went to California, the setting for Frank Norris's novel The Octopus. It was in Chicago, however, that he learned the most about American life. Holitischer's description of Chicago, like other travel literature from this period, was selective. He leads us through streets and neighbor hoods, factories and warehouses, Hull House, city parks, and school classrooms, but he does not guide us through the city with any logic or plan. Missing from his account are discussions of colleges and universities, The Newberry Library, John Crerar Library, Chicago Historical Society, and public libraries; the Art Institute , the symphony orchestra, and Chicago's other artistic , intellectual institutions and achievements. No guidebook could do justice to the Chicago Holitischer experienced, and he himself found his own Baedecker guidebook completely useless during his visit and soon threw it away. Holitischer instead offers a collection of impressions *The Future in America: A Search After Realities, 1906. 41

H olitischer's Chicago using the smells, the sights, and the sounds of Chicago as his palette much "the way a modern painter spatters a canvas with color." The picture he painted was a mad one. Speed, movement, and endless growth ruled the streets of Chicago and turned chaos into a normal way of life, the result of the mad rush for the dollar. Chicago in particular had been marked in earlier travel accounts as a place where money was pursued with grim determination and little regard for one's fellow man. Holitischer made a point of telling his readers that Chicago was not representative of America, that it was an unfortunate anomaly, a caricature of American life. Yet it was a dangerous omen of what might happen to the rest of the nation if this city was allowed to continue on its present course. Holitischer felt that the pursuit of the almighty dollar had become selfdestructive, and the great forces of business and industry that had helped to build Chicago into a major city in the Midwest threatened to engulf her if nothing stopped them. Holitischer found brief respite from the chaos of the city in the meat packing plant and the mail order warehouse, and he was much impressed with the efficiency he found there. Yet there was still something very sinister about them. Although order and discipline could be found there, another form of madness was present as well. The regimen of the stockyards "speed boss" and the speed of the pneumatic delivery tube ensured efficiency but at no small cost to the workers whose limbs were crushed and minds dulled. It was not until he visited a city park and some school classrooms that Holitischer began to sense that Chicago might be able to save itself from a more terrible future. He did not expect to find any hope of reform in Chicago. Out of Milwaukee and other midwestern cities in Wisconsin, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Iowa, he believed progressive reform might spread, but not out of lllinois and Chicago; they only needed reform. Thus it was with great surprise and delight that Holitischer witnessed the demonstration of equality in the parks and a classroom lesson in democracy. It was a moving experience for him and it reaffirmed his faith in America and in democracy as a great civilizing force in the world. 42

Chicago: An Impression* Was I possessed by the Devil? Had I eaten something that didn't agree with me? Did I have a fe\'er? Not at all. I had arrived in Chicago, the most dreadful city on earth. I shall not try to paint a picture of the city nor detail a topography of the discomfort it produced . I shall only set clown some sounds, smells, and sights, a little of Chicago's sweat, smoke, and ceaseless tumult, the way a modern painter spatters a canvas with color. At 9:00 in the morning I step into the street and am swept blindly along by waves of people. The abrupt, jerky movements of people and automobiles in [early] films I see here for real. My seven-year-old Baedeker is worthless. I push ahead and spin through the revolving door of a stationery store. l ask the clerk, a pale youth already dead tired this early in the morning, for a guide to Chicago that will acquaint me with the sights. "There are no sights here," the tired clerk says. "There's only business." Indeed, the city gives off a dull saccadic noise, a subterranean or heavenly rumble, a pulsation like someone steadily beating a carpet. One breath of air reeks of coal smoke, another of boiling glue. This paste settles on the brain and, behold , the Chicago mentality is born. People go about their business almost desperately here. Two nuns pass me on Van Buren Street. In one door and out the other they go, collecting money. Their faces, deep in their hoods, faces that should shine with peace, are tense and distorted by the pursuit of the Almighty Dollar in the streets. As far as I can tell, this city, this fast city, "The Windy City," is more a caricature than a representation of America, developing to America's astonishment and terror. All America looks with fear at this city that hurls her threat over the country: "In a few years I'll be first on this continent; in a few more, fir tin the world." I ride streetcars on dead-straight streets and don't reach the ends of this city that swells rapidly in three dimensions. The wealth of her rich indi*Amerika heule und morgen: Reiseerlebnisse (Berlin: Fischer,

l 9 l 2). pp. 293-338. Passages of vatÂˇ)'ing length have been deleted to remove redundancy and obtain a manageable length; a few words and sentences have been re-arranged for coherence and emphasis. Words in English in the original are italicized their first time in the translation.

Holitischer's Chicago viduals grows like the latest of her skyscrapers: dizzily immense and fast. The misery and poverty of her masses spread terribly far and wide, like her poor neighborhoods of wood and filth and dotted with vacant lots deep in rubbish . Thus she has senseless splendor and mad displays of power in residential and managerial palaces, and she has the desperation of blackened souls in diabolic factories and crowded slums. She has ups and downs, overstimulation, and constant mu ltiplication of people and houses. She is a round dance of greed, extravagance, suicide, contrition, crime, compassion, fraud, the singing of psalms, killing, aesthetic ignorance, and shame. I don't hesitate to say: Chicago is hell. In the best neighborhood, early in the morning after I arrive,just 5:00 A.M., I am awakened by an explosion. I leap to the window and look out. Has someone jumped through the skylight? Two days later an identical explosion wakes me. I stay in bed. In this neighborhood, good morning is said with a bomb at the door of a competitor. On the first day of frost the newspapers tell of seven violent murders and three attempted rapes. The newspapers are full of poisonings, sudden unexplained deaths of influential people, and shootouts in the busiest streets at noon. (Chicago has the reputation that whereas murder costs two hundred dollars in other American cities, a murder can be had here for eight dollars.) In court the barons of the meat trust skirmish with the government. Mincing no words, the newspapers report in detail about city officials and members of Congress in the pay of the meat trust. For the first time on my trip I put a revolver in my back pocket every evening, against this city's pitch-dark streets that are made to order for theft and murder. ln the wheat pit in the Board of Trade building, into which the earth's golden grain pours in samples from paper sacks into wooden trays, a mob of whirling dervishes raise their hands, howl like maniacs, assign it fictional values, and send it off to a hoodwinked world. In front of the building at the end of the day the scene is like that of St. Mark's Square in Venice. Thousands of white pigeons flutter about grain spilled from sacks of samples, and it quickly disappears from the sidewalk. Many a dervish, who would like

best to snatch the last kernel from the mouth of his fellow man, puts a handful in his pocket before leaving the pit. The pigeons give their usual thanks, dropping them on his hat and coat. Sunday, holy Sunday, the day this rabid, febrile city rests from work, is nothing like a peaceful European Sunday, though on the streets are fewer people than in a big European city. Here, Sunday is an obstacle between Saturday and Monday, to be gotten over without losing speed and balance, without being overtaken by those who don't lose momentum but always maintain course and speed. God has a new name and different face every five steps. On Sunday morning along Michigan Avenue, people with seventy-five points of view enter different doors to halls filled with hundreds of seats. At 10:00 A.M. every seat is taken. In each hall a divine or a rational or a phantasmagorical service is conducted, beginning with songs and Bible readings, and ending with the passing of the plate. Between are exegesis, social and ethical imperatives, religious delusions, Indian mysticism, and more or less obvious monetary swindles and intellectual quackery-the queerest jumble of them the world has ever participated in, suffered, and observed on a ovember morning. For example, Mrs. Jane Dowie, widow of the prophet LJohn Alexander Dowie of the Christian Catholic Church], an ill-groomed woman who looks like a housewife or a fortune-teller, preaches in a shabby rented room near the Loop. Her congregation, a dozen and a half strikingly elderly men and women, tremulously sing with her the psalms that start the service. Then she preaches. She wears her husband's robe, the one he wore when he preached to 30,000 in Madison Square Garden seven years ago. Her sermon is not a collection of dos and don'ts, but a babble of Biblical passages, reminiscences of her husband, whom she calls alternately "the prophet" and "my husband," and blunt scolding of the successful widow whose nearby booth at vanity fair does an in creasingly good business. That widow is Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science. "My soul is in distress but Christ will take it from me. Not for the world would I change places with those who have gotten ahead by lying and cheating, and grown rich through 43

Holitischer's Chicago deception. I know I can trust my God but this room costs ten dollars; and if you know of a cheaper one, give me the address. Let us pray now for energy and trength. Then the plate will be passed. Remember: the room costs ten dollars; and 1, a poor, weak woman, can't pay for it. " During the closing psalm the prophet's widow keeps time with her right hand and counts with her left the money in the little basket the sexton of New Zion has put on the table beside her. ln dark crowds, excited and even hysterical Chicagoans pour out of their seventy-five churches along Michigan Avenue. They will bring home with them an uneasiness about the emptiness of their great hurry toward nothing. It is some trouble lo them not to stumble over the unemployed who loiter on this, the city's most elegant avenue, begging. Miserable and hollow-eyed they stand and beg.

Blood and Speed l don't see why a person can't order, as steaks and chops at lunch at 2:30 P.M., the cattle and pigs he saw stabbed at 10:00 A.M. Therefore I visit the Armour slaughterhouse. In the dark and foul-smelling passage, where poor pale young women pack sliced meat into cans from 7:00 A.M. to 7:00 P.M., a manicurist is enthroned for the eyes of the visitors herded past. There she sits as evidence, in refutation of The Jungle, that meat is packed by fingers cleaned daily. Her polished nails glitter in the brightness of electric light . There she sits, an object on display, bored to death , amid stench. While others work she reads a fascinating novel-The Jungle, perhaps. Otherwise everything is as it always was. Daily the squealing bleating bawling herd goes straight to its razor-sharp demise. There is the big wooden wheel. Hogs hang from it and struggle. A short, thickset fellow stands beside it with a sharp steel lance. When the wheel swings the underbelly of a hog into place, he makes the first cut, slicing down from above. The writhing victim only now realizes its fate, screams in anguish like a burned child, squirts a thin hot red stream into the butcher's face, over his body, and onto his murderous hands, and is moved by a chain to the next butche1~ He, too, makes a cut-short, systematic, elegant. A hundred paces and, in 44

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accord with every rule of the art, the beast is scalded, scraped, quartered , and put in the coole1~ All traces of its days on earth are gone. Its career as food for people has begun. The wheel that swings squealing hogs to stocky Mr. Thickset is ordered into motion by the s/Jeed boss according to the princi pies of scientific management and maximum production, and if it turns at a rate of twenty-five animals a minute today, a twist of the crank will accelerate it to thirty tomorrow. If the miserable creatures upstairs in the packing room \\'rap 15,000 cans in paper today-their hands move so rapidly fast that their fingers are almost invisible-a flash of ill-humor in the foreman and they will wrap 16,000 and 17,000 tomorrow or lose their jobs. Each of the meat cutters, from 7:00 A.M. until 7:00 P.M., has his small but important mo-

tion to contribute. He must take care that his motion is right, because the chain does not stop. Who has time to talk, to wipe sweat from his face, or blood that squirts from carcasses? He chews tobacco, his only refreshment, his salvation . Who cares where his tobacco spittle splashes or how he blows his nose? Over there , 3,700 people sit in the famous Elgin Watch Company's beautiful bright shiny plant. Each has a single tiny operation to perform. An instant's lapse, a move of the finger a millimeter too far forward, and the drill bores through the fingernail to flesh. Bread is lost in the seconds the body has mercy on its pain. In many factories, warehouses, etc., little brochures are pressed into my hand. They describe workers' teams-baseball, tennis, football-and games played in free hours after work. But I also saw "whiskey lines" near the slaughterhouses and on the city's outskirts. There the worker drinks his morning eyeopener before he goes to work, to prepare his stomach for the food he must eat to sustain him until noon. In the evening he drinks to free himself and his soul from the disgust and despair of the day's work, the Twelve Hours. Chicago therefore makes me sick. The Mail-Order House over the Train Station In a northwestern neighborhood are Sears, Roebuck & Company's five giant buildings, a city unto themselves. In their busy time, September to May, Sears employs 9,000 to 9,500 people; in slack, 7,500. ow, at the end of November, a catalogue is prepared. Its purpose is to excite the public's urge to buy, which decline after Christmas. According to the newspapers, Sears has just ordered the most postage stamps ever ordered by a private firm in this country, 5,000,000 five-cent stamps for the smaller catalogue, called a flier: Twice a year, after Christmas and in the middle ofJuly, fliers are mailed; once a year, the great Catalogue, a compendium of everything to be had , except live animals and fresh fruit and vegetables. (You can even order a one-family house. Give dimensions and the number of rooms, and the whole frame house is delivered, to the last nail , needing only to be erected.) Swatches are pasted into the catalogue. l was shown the room where, the year round, machines cut material for this purpose. These

H olitischer's Chicago cut samples cost Sears $100,000 a year. There is simplicity in the location of offices and storage areas, in the arrangement of chutes that carry goods for miles to the train station on the ground floor, and in the organization of work. The result is the greatest efficiency I have ever seen. At 9:00 A.M. an average of 35,000 orders arrive. Most are "mixed ," five to ten items, typical total value nine dollars. At 4:00 P.M. the orders are filled. Fifty to sixty freight cars, loaded to the top with well-wrapped packages and boxes, speed out of the train station to all corners of America. Work areas resound of metal. Capsules containing letters, bills, and freight tickets shoot through copper tubes over the heads of 9,000 male and female workers at clattering typewriters and office machines. The system of tubes is eighteen miles long. An army of young women in one room do nothing but mark incoming orders with colors to specify a railroad. But if that looks hard , look elsewhere! Look at the young women who stick hundreds of thousands of postage stamps to hundreds of thousands of envelopes all day long. Thin sheets of paper flutter in their hands like blades of a fan. At the machine that binds the catalogue a person commits senses, nerves, and brain to a life's work of seeing that a yellow sheet goes over a blue one, not under it.

H olitischer described the operations in the Sears mail room as the most efficient he had ever seen.

Long after I leave Sears I go around Chicago with the echo of Sears's metal ringing in my head. Above the stench of blood , over the fumes of coal smoke and Lake Michigan 's fog, this resounding metal reverberates like the music of the spheres, bleak and cold like all the modern world and its civilization, the fiercest enemy of the human race. Hull House and the Southern Parks In this city the incredible growth of a system of work has produced extreme and grotesque effects. And in this hell of a city, this hysterical city, some model institutions-irrespective of the American conscience-have developed to deal with those effects. Hull House , the worldfamous settlement house in the Chicago slums,

Sears workers sort and color code orders for distribution. This department processed an average of 35,000 orders daily.

H olitischer's Chicago exists mainly because of the towering humanity of its founder, Jane Addams. Even were she gone from Hull House, a band-aid would remain on a festering wound in today's society, a wound as serious as if inflicted by war itself. Hull House has two goals: to give intellectual and well-meaning people what they want, the chance to observe firsthand the life of the impoverished; and to give the impoverished what they want, to forget their misery for a few hours in a nice clean well-lighted place. ln the afternoon we are guests of Hull House. In the attractive theater the program consists of "Masque of the Seasons" together with cute dances, declamations, and choral music by children from the music school and the fellowships of Hull House. Greek, ltalian,Jewish, and Irish children leap and frisk about-it is a good show. Rich and benevolent men to whom the house owes its existence are in the audience. They applaud. Then we have dinner in the beautiful and artistically furnished dining room , with the house's students, intellectuals, and male and female teachers. Unfortunately for us, l\1iss Addams is in ew York. After dinner, charming ladies guide us through the wing where rooms for dance, physical training, and meetings are located. On the steps in the courtyard between the wings, while our charming guides go on ahead, my friend and I look at each other knowingly: these wings, one behind and one ahead, these wings we are touring as if they are a collection of oddities, a museum or a gallery-something is wrong about these wings. Between them a cold courtyard must be crossed, and the atmosphere of each is very differem: antagonistic. Thus Hull House swells before us and bursts like a soap bubble. Jane Addams is one of America's great women nonetheless, cut from the same bolt as Frances Willard, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Susan B. Anthony. When the friendly superintendent of parks calls for us in his car, we make the rounds of public gardens and recreation facilities on Chicago's South Side. The odors, the slums, the dark or dim and narrow alleys, the collections of wooden shacks, and the red-light districts we pass before we come to the first of the green oases--God save me from them all! But at the oasis every-

thing else is forgotten. The friendly superintendent shows us three of the smaller parks. Pergolas grace attractively the buildings' front. Behind are giant concrete swimming pools filled, in summer, with water from Lake Michigan. In the surrounding gardens are open-air playgrounds , places for women to sunbathe, grassy paths for strolling, and sandboxes for building castles. Inside are pleasantly painted and attractively decorated exercise rooms, dance halls, and libraries. On a small stage, Jewish journeymen tailors rehearse Esther, aPurimP/,ay. ext door a Lithuanian club is having a dance. In a shower room are young Greek workers to be admired cooling off after basketball and preparing to go home. Uneasy, we ask our guide: "What formalities must be observed to get in? What papers, passes, identification, tax receipts, birth certificates, union cards must be shown?" Astonished, he replies: "Why! Nothing at all!" "Surely some fee must be paid for using the library, the showers, the soap, the exercise equipment, all the facilities?" "Not a cent. Everyone is welcome, free. We One of the most enjoyable moment; of H olitischer's visit was spent with elementary school students who impressed him with their civic s/1irit and awareness. Gift. of Field Enterprises.

H olitischer:s Chicago live in a democratic country." That word, those phrases, in Chicago! Indeed, what we just saw, that glimpse of a free and open future, almost reconciles us to the terrible realities surrounding this oasis, to Chicago itself, the contemporary world's most horrible city! Âˇ A Day in Chicago's Schools At 8:00 in the morning we call at Hull House for Miss Starr Kellogg, supervisor of a municipal school district. We put our trust in her to show us public and private elementary schools and trade schools on Chicago's West Side. At the Rowland School we begin with kindergarten. The smallest children dance round dances and, with shiningly happy faces, build wigwams and buffaloes in sandpiles among trees. We go through rooms where children draw in colored chalk on blackboards delicate little copies of all sorts of practical everyday objects. In one room we see children six and seven years old analyzing an autumn landscape. One after another, boys and girls step before the teacher (a woman) and name two things--such as a tree in yellow foliage and a white cloud behind it, or a crow in a stubble field-that "give a pretty picture of autumn." In the next room, chi!-

dren bend in exercise before an open window and inhale and exhale. In another room, instruction of fifty or sixty children ten to twelve years old stops when we enter. At Miss Kellogg's request the class rises and recites in unison the ballad, "The Chicago Fire." Gestures accompany the words. The words fall from children's unspoiled lips distinct and clearly articulated, like crystal. These are foreign children-of Russian Jews, Bohemians, Serbs, Greeks, Lithuanians, Sicilians, and Germans. Only ten are born in America. Like a good conductor the teacher hears in her big orchestra the performer who mispronounces a word, who stresses the wrong syllable. Children of all distant foreign countries are taught the language of this country, the powerful English language, the tool the children will soon use in the struggle for bread and freedom. The ballad's rhythm rises and falls. A crescendo: "Fire--Fire-FIRE"

and the reflection of the burning city burns in childish excitement in little upturned faces! Miss Kellogg steps forward and says loudly to the room: "And now, children, what are we all?" They leap up as if from an electric shock, shout-

H olitischer:~ Chicago ing, cheering, exulting: "Americans!" We see the civics class at Cooper School. A little thirteen-year-old Bohemian stands and talks about recall, referendum, and initiative. The whipper-snapper ends: "We must see to it that senators are elected directly. There is nothing the people need more than direct legislation," and sits back down at his desk! I'm thunderstruck. What the Devil-are we in the Congress in Washington or an elementary school? A small elevenyear-old girl rises and recites the states in which women have the right to vote. Another child stands and speaks oflaws in Oregon, Tennessee, Wyoming. Gradually I see the connection between politics and elementary education. I come to understand how the American child, unlike the German, is prepared for the public life it will take part in when grown. I learn something this hour and am deeply moved. Miss Kellogg whispers to us that the children of this class, on their own initiative, petitioned city hall to save two trees on the playground that were going to be cut down; that they held meetings to oppose the candidacy of a notorious, hated, and criminal councilman; that they customarily write to Washington for official reports and pamphlets when Congress considers a bill that interests them-these amazing American children. Miss Kellogg gives a little speech. "Children, look around! When you see things that need improvement, when things happen that seem unjust to you, report them here! Think how you can make these things better and express it clearly hete. But first think why they are deficient and evil. Look around, children!" "All right, Miss Kellogg, we will!" The teacher and I go into the school's library. On a long table are newspapers and magazines of all political persuasions. "We read many political articles with the children," the teacher says. "When I find a political event treated more honestly and openly in a socialist paper, we, the children and I, read it aloud." Before we leave Cooper School the principal sounds the fire alarm, a triple ringing of the bell at distinct intervals. According to plan, the first person to appear is a young teacher who sits down at a piano in the hall and strikes up a brisk Sousa march. Two little boys and two bigger girls rush downstairs and take positions [as ushers] in 50

the middle of the bottom step. Columns of children, led by teachers, appear at the top of the stairs. Three abreast they march past to the time of the music. We watch the clock. In barely 3 minutes the 540 children are safe and sound in the yard. In one of Chicago's largest trade schools we are shown various shops for woodworking, metalworking, and electrical repair. Then we visit a classroom where pupils sixteen to twenty years old are discussing aspects of the American Constitution. We see them speak with the teacher and, to us, it is a beautifully free and exciting conversation. Instruction in the entire school has been interrupted. Teachers have risen from their desks. In the shops, drive belts stop. When led by Miss Kellogg and the principal, we enter the auditorium, it is packed LO the balconies. Deafening handclapping greets us. We walk among 1,500 pupils to the stage and take seats in armchairs. The principal introduces us to the assembly. Another salvo of applause. "From Berlin," he says, "the capital of the great German empire." Applause. 'Thanks," we say, "sincere thanks!" The principal beams at us with pleasure and pride. Miss Kellogg's dear sweet face glows with pleasure and pride. We take leave of the pupils, the principal, the teachers. and our charming guide. Handclappi ng accompanies us back through rows of pupils. I have spent one of my grandest American days. Few hours of my American travels have taught me as much about America as these, or have given me such deep and abiding love for this country, its people, and their spirit.

Suggestions for Further Reading The standard survey of British travelers in America, 1789- 1945, with representative excerpts, is Allan Nevins, America Through Briti:,h Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948). The best collection of Europeans' impressions of America, 1780-1939, is Oscar Handlin, This Wa,1 Amerirn (Cambridge: Har\'ard Uni\'ersit)' Press, 1949); see especially the discussion of Holitischer and the excerpt from his book, pp. 439-53. An excellem account of travel in the twentieth centu1Âˇy is Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Litermy Traveling Between the Wars ( 1ew York: Oxford University Press, 1980). For other \'iews of Chicago consult Bessie Louise Pierce, As Others See Chicago: !111pre.1sioru, of Visilors, 1673-/933 (Chicago: The Uni\'ersity of Chicago Press, 1933).

On the Air with Jack L. Cooper: The Beginnings of Black-Appeal Radio By Mark Newman

"Ma Perkins;' "Sam 'n' Henry," "Lum 'n' Abner," "Fibber McGee and Molly;' "Lights Out;' Don McNeil's "Breakfast Club"-great names from radio's golden age. During the twenties and thirties, these and other Chicago-based programs held millions of Americans close to their sets. Few people realize, however, that Chicago was al,so the first home of influential programming developed specifically for black audiences by show business veteran Jack L. Cooper.

arose in response to the discriminatory conditions prevailing in the nascent broadcast industry. The color line which had circumscribed black opportunities in white society generally extended into radio. Blacks were denied entry into managerial and technical positions, and as performers they were restricted largely to musical and comedy roles. On-the-air characterizations of blacks were overwhelmingly stereotypical and derogatory. According to J. Fred MacDonald, author of Don't Touch That Dial, a recent history of radio programming, the majority of black roles - played by both black and white actors-fell into one of three categories: the "coon," a figure who "confirmed the racist slur that black society was populated by stupid and scheming indolents"; "Toms," like the good-hearted, submissive Amos of "Amos 'n' Andy"; and "Mammies," those personifications of black womanhood exemplified by Aunt Jemima. The negative characterizations predominated because white station executives and advertisers refused to modify them or to balance them with more positive examples. Low levels of set ownership among blacks were pointed to as justification for this attitude, even though the portrayal of blacks drew much criticism from the AfroAmerican community. In 1950, summing up almost three decades of the experience of blacks in broadcasting, E. I. Robinson, president of the BLACK-APPEAL RADIO

Mark N eunnan is a free-/ance writer and editor.

Los Angeles NAACP chapter, declared, "Radio points to one side of the Negro, the worst side, most frequently." Some blacks and a few whites determined to turn the tide; black-appeal radio was the result. Looking beyond the 1930 Census figures reporting that only 14.4 per cent of black urban families, 0.3 per cent of black farm families, and 3 per cent of black rural, non-farm families owned a radio, the early pioneers of black radio identified several local markets. For example, the national statistics masked the fact that in the San Francisco-Oakland area, one-third, or 1,086, of the 3,110 resident black families owned a radio. In New York, 4 of every 10 of the more than 70,000 black families had a set, while in Chicago 42.6 per cent of the 55,177 families possessed a radio. In each of these cities, broadcasters tailored programs to the needs of Afro-American audiences, hoping to induce them to buy advertised products and services. Though tl1ere were notable exceptions, these programs featured black talent and were produced and written by blacks. Most important, the black performers at the microphone were not typecast in stereotypical roles. The key words to success in black-appeal radio were pride, respect, and balance. To produce feelings of pride in black listeners, the shows had to be respectful in tone, which, in turn, meant that a balanced picture of blacks had to be presented. If broadcasters followed these .guidelines and adopted the proven marketing strategies of 51

B/,ack-Appeal Radio commercial radio, then black consumers most likely would purchase enough of the sponsors' products to sustain the shows being aired. Before World War II , however, most blackappeal programs failed to endure. In both New York and San Francisco, dramatic shows

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After a short career as a prizefighter, Cooper entered show business and also worked as a journalist for newspapers in Indianapolis and Memphis.

appeared that presented a serious, respectful look at blacks. In 1935, WMCA in New York aired "A Harlem Family," a program with an allblack cast written and directed by blacks as part of the Adult Education Project of the New York City Board of Education. This show was short52

lived, as was a similar weekly drama produced by WJZ in the early 1930s. On the west coast, "Deacon Brown and His Peacemakers," a combination comedy, drama, and music program, first aired in 1933. It, too, failed to arouse public interest. The inability of these shows to succeed, despite the presence of considerable numbers of black radio fans on both coasts, had less to do with the ability to support such attempts than with the choice of an inadequate format. During the Depression, radio comedy shows provided Americans, white and black, with a welcome escape from their troubles. The New York City and San Francisco efforts to program black hardly exploited this popular taste. In Chicago, substantial results were achieved as the experience of one enterprising and determined man, Jack L. Cooper, clearly shows. He recognized the potential of tailoring comedy shows for blacks along the guidelines of pride, respect, and balance. His first radio program, titled appropriately "The All-Negro Hour," was a variety show with an emphasis on comedy. Debuting in 1929, it predated other attempts to air black-appeal programs, and was the first successful black broadcasting effort. Born on September 18, 1888, in Memphis, Tennessee, Jack Leroy Cooper was one of ten children. His grandfather was a white FrenchCanadian named Kupincheaux who married a black woman from Virginia. Jack's father William was a gambler who died when his son was a year old, leaving his wife LaVina to support the large family. After completing the fifth grade, Jack left school and took a job as a stable boy with a Cincinnati blacksmith. In 1901, at the age of thirteen, he won the city's newsboy boxing championship. Embarking on a career as a prizefighter that included 160 bouts, Cooper won several titles, including the Negro welterweight crown of Ohio. He soon forsook the ring for the stage, where he worked his way up as a musician, dancer, comedian, actor, and writer to become head of his own troupe, the Cooper-Lamare Musical Company. The first of his three wives, Estelle Mansfield Cooper, appeared under the name of Madam Lamare. During this period, from approximately 1905 to 1924, he also worked as a journalist for black newspapers in Indianapolis and Memphis.

B/,ack-Appeal Radio In June 1924, the Chicago Defender hired Cooper both as assistant theatrical editor and as a regular columnist. He came to the city during a period when the black community was experiencing much growth and accomplishment. Not only was the highly influential Defender located there, but the South Side had emerged as a major black cultural center. This was especially true regarding music, and jazz in particular. In addition, the black enclave acted as the proving ground for an attempt to establish a separate, independent city within the confines of Chicago. This effort was popularly known as the Black Metropolis doctrine, and it arose out of the feelings of pride and progress in black Chicago during the 1920s. In his Defender column, "Coop's Chatter," Cooper espoused this movement for betterment. "Were we to spend half the time between the pages of good books that we spend between the curbstone and the building," he counseled on November 1, 1924, "there would be less crime, more business, and better understanding." Cooper left Chicago in early 1925, having been appointed manager of the new Defender office in Washington, D.C. Upon arriving there, he noticed an inequity in the local broadcast industry that prompted his entry into radio. While listening to WCAP*, he observed that the station allowed blacks to sing, but not to speak, on the air. "To me that was like 'taxation without representation'," he later explained, "and so I made up my mind to do something about it." Cooper went to WCAP's studios in the Wardman Hotel and, drawing upon his entertainment background, easily secured an on-the-air job, but his appearances did little to provide blacks with more appealing programming. Three times a week for five dollars a broadcast, he performed a comedy routine that involved impersonating characters with many accents. Dialect humor was then in vogue, and Cooper's slot proved predictably popular. His listeners did not even know he was black. Determined to improve the plight of blacks in broadcasting, Jack L. Cooper returned to Chicago in 1926. The presence of a large, raceconscious black populace, many of whom owned radios, provided a ready and untapped mar*Some confusio n exists over the station's call letters.

ket. At the same time, the existence of a local ethnic broadcast industry supplied a likely source of air time. In 1930, one of four Chicagoans-842,051 people-was of foreign birth. Like blacks, those who spoke a foreign language were not being served by mainstream radio pro-

Between 1905 and 1924, Cooper performed as a musician, dance,; comedian, actor, and write,Âˇ before forming his own troupe, the Cooper-Lamare Musical Company.

gramming. Either they could not understand the dialogue or the news programs contained little information about their homelands. And, of course, the prevalence of derogatory dialect humor on mainstream stations further alienated European immigrants. 53

B/,ack-Appeal Radio

Contributing to the rise of ethnic programming was the emergence of a number of small, independent stations. Many broadcast only parttime and therefore had no chance of competing with such giants of the airwaves as WBBM or WGN. Foreign language shows provided these outlets with both an audience and an alternative to network offerings. In 1926, Emil Denemark founded WEDC (named after his auto agency, Emil Denemark Cadillac), which advertised itself as "the pioneer of foreign language programs." It was not the first to introduce this format, however. One year earlier, WSBC (named after the World Storage Battery Company) had aired programs in several languages for the non-English-speaking audience. Its owner, Joseph Silverstein, was committed to using his station to serve all of Chicago's ethnic groups. This commitment soon came to include blacks as Cooper convinced WSBC's owner of the efficacy of black-appeal radio. At 5:00 P .M. on Sunday, November 3, 1929, "The All -Negro Hour" featuring Jack L. Cooper premiered on WSBC. Even with little advance publicity, the sixty-minute variety show elicited a favorable reaction from a large part of 54

the black commÂľnity. The variety format allowed for a wide range of entertainment to be aired in a relatively short period of time. Everything from comedy to music to religion was jammed into the one-hour slot. In most respects, the programming strategy mirrored successful mainstream network formulas, right down to the inclusion of a regular "gang" of performers and the appearance of guest stars like blues singer Lovie Austin. Borrowing from mainstream shows was most apparent in the comedy segments, where Cooper demonstrated that the universal appeal of good humor did not necessarily imply the denigration of others. The following exchange from "The All-Negro Hour" between Cooper and his second wife Billie illustrates Cooper's style of humor. Noting that Jack's brother had been looking "tired and worn," Billie inquired about his health.

Well the poor sap isn't getting any sleep. B. Why, what seems to be wrong? J. His wife accused him of snoring in his sleep, he declares he doesn't and now he is laying awake nights to catch himself in the act.

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Left and Above : Despite its racist stereotype.,," Amos 'n' And)( starring Freeman Gosden (left) and Cha rles ). Correll, was ve1y popular among blacks. In his programs, } ack L. Cooper rombined thr .1ituation comedy format with positive characterizations of blacks. Left: gift of Field Enter/JriJes. Fa r left: Until the early 1930s, black radio entertainers were reJlricted to either singing or pnfonning instrumental music on the air. J ack L. Cooper turned his efforts lo broadening opporlimities for black, 111 radio. Photograph by Maurice Seymour.

Any comed y team , black or white, could have perform ed this skit as easily as the Coopers. If the routines and jokes were funny , they would appeal to the listening audience. Lack of racial denigration was, of course, a prerequisite, which sometimes involved reworking network models. For instance, one of Cooper's most successful features was an adaptation of the program considered most offensive by blacks, "Amos 'n' Andy." Despite its negative portrayal of blacks, it was a classic radio show. In 1928, nationwide airing of Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll's broad parody of black life produced a revolution in radio programming, precipitating a national demand for situation comedies. Though embarrassed-and sometimes outraged-by "Amos 'n' Andy," blacks were neither immune to its appeal nor were they unattracted to the situation comedy format.* Astutel y exploiting this craze for laughs, Cooper produced three serials with similar formats: "Luke and Timber," which followed the fortunes of two Memphis migrants to Chicago; "Mush and Clorinda," a chronicle of a husband

*At that time, situation comedies were considered broadcast comic strips.

and wife ; and "Horseradish and Fertilizer," which depicted the adventures of two lovers. This last serial premiered in August 1930 and was still on the air twelve years later. As with "Amos 'n' Andy," Cooper's productions offered contrasting personalities, humorous, almost absurd incidents, comedic clashes, and, as Timber put it, "de power to transgress yo languige amd ply yo debility." The difference between Gosden and Correll's show and Cooper's serials was the absence of the prevailing negative racial connotations. Cooper clearly hoped to counteract the negative image of blacks being broadcast by networks; he wanted to show white broadcasters and advertisers that the talents of black performers could transcend the boundaries that the color line had placed upon their skills. In addition, if it could be proven that blacks comprised a substantial market, that they could and would respond to advertising if the right programming was presented, then possibly the portrayal of black life on the air could be modified in a positive manner. Thus, black-appeal programming as produced by Cooper was aimed as much at whites - though for different reasons-as at blacks. 55

B/,ack-Appeal Radio By remaining on the air during the Depression's most difficult years, the early 1930s, "The All-Negro Hour" demonstrated the profitability of the black-appeal concept. Its success, however, could not be duplicated . Cooper's other early ventures failed for a variety of reasons. Unable to attract the national advertising accounts that would have supplied him with more capital and provided greater exposure, Cooper was forced to rely on small, primarily white businesses in Chicago's Black Belt for advertising revenues. Such establishments as Bill's Bootery , Bob's Radio Store, and the Southside Furniture Commission bought air time at $2.50 for a spot ad, $3 for a one-hundred-word announcement, $12 for fifteen minutes, and $35 for a thirty-minute block of time. The financial restrictions imposed by this limited sponsor base plus the competition presented by other ethnic programming confined WSBC's black-appeal schedule to late nights and weekends. The absence of prime time made it virtually impossible to secure more lucrative advertising, meaning that the capital needed to buy these valued hours was not forthcoming. This self-perpetuating dilemma was broken finally in 1937, when WSBC's entire three-hour weekday afternoon schedule opened up and was allotted to Cooper. He filled the time with several disc jockey shows, including the immensely popular "Rug Cutter's Special." The late 1930s and forties were a time of rapid growth for Jack L. Cooper and the concept he had created. During these years, Chicago emerged as the black radio capital of America, and the black-appeal format was adopted by outlets nationwide. A number of factors contributed to its rise. The end of the Depression combined with the massive migration of blacks away from southern farms, fueled by the war effort and the generally prosperous times, made station owners more aware of black consumers. Sponsor magazine, a broadcasting trade journal, reported that in 1952 blacks comprised a $15 billion market. It finally had become clear, as Bert Ferguson, owner of the Memphis black radio outlet WDIA, noted, that "what sells a white person will sell the Negro in almost every instance." By the mid-1950s, 400 stations were airing at least some black programming, and Cooper had had much to do with this expansion. "Sincejune 56

I II add1tio11 lo writing and /1roducing several comedy and variety progra 11L1, Cooper helped pioneer the disc jockey fo rmat and was the fi rs/ lo air news and sporls coiâ&#x20AC;˘erage fo r black audiences.

1 of this year," a 1946 Def ender article had stated, "radio and advertising men all over the country have focused their attention on Cooper's successful experiment in beaming a variety of programs during thirty-six hours of air time per week on two stations at a responsive audience of his own people in the greater Chicago listening area. " Broadcasting executives, it continued, were scrutinizing these programs "with a view to introducing similar shows on local stations in New York, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, and other metropolitan areas with large Negro populations." Two years later in 1948, Cooper was at the peak of his career. Programs produced under his auspices accounted for more than forty hours of air time on at least four stationsWSBC, WHFC, WEDC, and WAAF. According to Ebony magazine, he grossed a reputed $185,000 annually. The founder of black-appeal radio stood as a very visible symbol of success, not only as an example to be followed by other stations seeking to attract black listeners but as a programming innovator who guided the development of this broadcast format. In addition to helping pioneer the disc jockey format, he was

Black-Appeal Radio

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By 1948, Cooper's programming-more than forty hours a week on four Chicago radio stations-was a proven means for advertisers lo reach the black comm11nity.

Black-Appeal Radio the first to air news and sports of specific interest to blacks. Cooper also became a time broker-he purchased air time from the station and then sold it back to advertisers at a higher rate. A growing roster of accounts led him to establish the Jack L. Cooper Advertising Agency in 1937. Until this method of time brokerage was outlawed by the FCC in the early 1950s, many blackappeal programs in Chicago were financed in this manner. Most important, Cooper's community service programming allowed radio to become integrated into the black community. In addition to news and sports coverage, Jack L. Cooper Productions offered programs that provided blacks with counseling and assistance in their dealings with private companies and government agencies, including "May We Help You" and "The Community Marches On." Families and friends who had lost touch with someone were reunited with their loved ones through the "Search for Missing Persons" show. Inaugurated in 1938, this program helped locate more than 20,000 people by 1950. Cooper also broadcast events of interest to the black community, such as live coverage of the Bud Billiken parade in Chicago in the late 1940s. In 1948, Cooper initiated his most ambitious program, "Listen Chicago," a public forum that provided blacks with information on the social issues that concerned them. Serving as the show's host, Cooper brought together distinguished panels of public figures, including Chicago alderman Robert Merriam, Ralph Metcalfe, Jesse Owens, and Chicago NAACP president George Leighton, to discuss such timely topics as Negro women in business, law enforcement by citizens' committees, civil rights legislation, and voting rights. By combining service, information, and entertainment, Cooper transformed black-appeal broadcasting into a major force in the radio industry. His productions also provided employment for many of Chicago's black radio personalities of the post-World War II era. Lucky Cordell, Eddie Plicque, Mannie Mauldin, Larry Wynn, and Roy Wood, as well as Cooper's third wife Gertrude (Trudy to radio listeners) and his brothers-in-law Bob and Isaiah, all contributed to the growth of black programming under Cooper's auspices.

Black-appeal radio heightened black political consciousness following World War II. The broadcast of news items solely of interest to blacks, the employment of radio to serve the black community, the presentation of shows exclusively black in production, performance, and audience-all worked to promote and strengthen feelings of solidarity among America's black people. The concept of soul, as defined and later widely adopted by blacks, owed much to the first black voices who exalted racial pride on the air. Programming targeted for Afro-American audiences enhanced racial identification and helped bind together the disparate parts of the black community as a symbiotic relationship developed between those behind the microphone and those in front of the speakers. At the same time, the tremendous community support that black radio received helped break down race prejudice in broadcasting. During a 1948 interview, black writer Roi Ottley asked Cooper what had motivated him to enter radio. The sixty-year-old Cooper replied, in Ottley's words, that "he was motivated by an insatiable desire to pave a better road, an easier path for Negroes who came along behind; and in his personal life he was motivated by a haunting desire not to die poor." Before his death at the age of eighty-one in 1970, Cooper had achieved both personal and professional success. Through his efforts, black announcers came to speak for and to the black community. Suggestions for Further Reading The bulk of research material used in this article came from Jack L. Cooper's papers held by his widow, Gertrude Cooper, and interviews with Mrs. Cooper and her brother, Bob Roberts. Roy Bellavia, WSBC station manager, supplied photographs and other printed matter. The most valuable source on black-appeal radio is Sponsor magazine, particularly the special annual sections on black radio. Variety and the Chicago Defender also contain relevant articles on the subject. Other materials available on the subject are J. Fred MacDonald, Don't Touch Thal Dial: Radio Programming in American Life from 1920 to 1960 (Chicago: NelsonHall, 1979); Estelle Edmerson, "A Descriptive Study of the American Negro in United States Professional Radio, 1922-1953" (Unpublished master's thesis, University of California at Los Angeles, 1954); and Norman W. Spaulding, "History of Black-Oriented Radio in Chicago" (Unpublished master's thesis, University of Illnois at Chicago Circle, 1974).

Reviews Street Signs Chicago &y Char/,es Bowden and Lew Kreinberg Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1981. $12.95 cloth, $7.95

paper.

Street Signs Chicago is a provocative book about neighborhoods and power, reality, and manipulation. It challenges important assumptions about how cities work-including the very existence of viable neighborhoods-while indicting the currently fashionable "gentrification" which some see as the salvation of the old metropolises. The book is written in a style that is intentionally angry, tough, and streetsmart. Sometimes the writing is brilliant. But at other times, it becomes hostile and simplistic, needlessly weakening the already debatable points the authors are trying to make. Their basic propositions are twofold: the key to understanding Chicago is to focus on its economic functions, and the present concentration on neighborhoods is misdirected and even harmful to most of the people of the city. For the authors, Chicago is "about the Lake, the canal, the river, the railroads, the airport, mills, factories, banks. Neighborhoods have always been afterthoughts." ow the city has lost its old economic roles and a new era of limited resources has begun , for which no one is adequately prepared. The traditional solutions of growth and mobility which eased past tensions are no longer applicable. Meanwhile, the historical amnesia which grips America sustains a vision of a golden age of neighborhoods, preventing local people from identifying the true sources of their oppression and exploitation. These theses are advanced in a fascinating series of chapters which weave together history, polemics, and neighborhood vignettes. Many of the latter concern Pilsen , a classic "neighborhood" inhabited by a succession of ethnic groups-the late t being the Mexicans-and now the target of redevelopers. One of the finest sections of the book is the description of a town meeting called in Pilsen to discuss a proposed mixed-media center in an abandoned brewery. The authors deftly sketch the roles and interests of the Mexicans, the remaining Bohemians, the anists, planners, politicians, and community organizers. They also portray a local saloon, the travails of a would-be renovator, and an apprentice carpenter program for Mexicans. Other excellent chapters deal with Lawndale, where the myth of the perfect Jewish neighborhood remains a burden upon the work of cui-rent black community activists, and the now nationally infamous Tunnel and Reservoir Plan's

(TARP) deep tunnel project. Perhaps it says more about urban social history than about Street Signs Chicago that the book's historical chapters seem uncontroversial. They picture a city "exploding with energy but no social purpo e, a city dedicated to funneling flows and choking on its own dedication." That Chicago's history is about money, power, and work and that lives and neighborhoods were sacrificed to wealth and business are propositions now widely accepted. And though the authors do occasionally insist that "dream" neighborhoods like Lawndale never really existed, even they acknowledge that there was a period-especially around the years 1930 to 1945-when an enforced stability did prevail in some cohesive communities. Their analysis of the Jewish flight from Lawndale has the ring of conventional sociological wisdom-the area "did not have one of the most essential attributes of the dream neighborhood of memory-it did not combine residence and work." Such sensible opinions contrast with the book's most grievous fault-the authors' penchant for absolutes, their division of the world into Good and Bad. The analysis of Lawndale appears a hundred pages after the assertion that "All neighborhoods share one characte1Âˇistic; people will do anything to get out of them." But even worse than such an implausible generalization are the value judgements about people. Though there are really no neighborhoods, the poor people who live in them are Good, if troubled, and middle-class or white-collar types (except for community organizers) are Bad. The maliciousness of the authors' view of the "gentry," or young professionals, is perhaps revealed in their view of downtown population growth as "the movement of legions of self-sterilized adults." ln a later vignette, we meet the skilled carpenter running an apprentice program, who incidentally holds an IWW card. In the authors' telling, Dick "eats his sandwich on the stoop of the quiet, treelined street. Two miles away, maybe a Little less, Sears Tower looms, a black hulk stuffed with typewriters and computers processing orders to buy and orders to se1rÂˇ-but evidently no people, or at least none who count in the world of Street Signs Chicago. As the authors make clear, they are aware of the parochialism and technical inadequacies of the community organizer's view of the city. They do, after all, point out that one community-based alternative to TARP could easily result in the return of cholera. Nevertheless, they end their book by advancing the premise that since the era uf growth and cheap fuel is over, neighborhood people will have to struggle locally to control their lives. In their words, "We can seize the power or we can deny the new reality and endure failure." But in their shift from analysis to open exhortation, they neglect to describe whom exactly they mean by "we." The audience for their book is more likely to be found among the planners and the gentry than among the ethnic groups of Pilsen. The problem with the former seems to be that they 59

Reviews have already seized too much power. But such questions serve to underline the virtues of Street Signs Chicago. Despite its conceptual and stylistic deficiencies, it remains well worth reading and pondering. It engages us with the problems of the city and, most important, it makes us think seriously about them. FREDRIC MILLER URBAN ARCHIVES CENTER TEMPLE UNIVERSITY

Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era l,y Steven A. Riess Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980. $27.50.

BY THE END of the nineteenth century, professional baseball had largely evolved into the modern game, but not until the first years of the twentieth century and the coming of the Progressive Era did the game reach its zenith. Then it captured the nation's imagination and became the dominant sport of the time. Sparkling new ballparks appeared, top players became national heroes and the world series a national spectacle. To accompany this ascent in the nation's consciousness, baseball developed an ideology, an ethos, that became fixed in the American mind. The purpose of Stephen Riess's Touching Base is to examine the realities of the old ball game. Was it what it pretended to be? To answer this question, Riess developed a vast amount of information, bulwarked by maps and statistical data, on baseball in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, as well as a few other cities. Then in five substantive chapters he analyzed the social and economic background of the crowds at the games, baseball as a business enterprise (particularly the relationship between owners and politicians), the location of ballparks within cities, the social context of Sunday baseball, and most important of all, the role of baseball as an agent of social and economic mobility within American society. On the basis of his study, Riess concludes that professional baseball during the Progressive Era was largely what he calls "a cultural fiction." The crowds and players were thought to reflect a cross-section of American society, but in fact they were largely middle class. The game was said to offer country boys and city poor an avenue of upward mobility, but in fact the players came largely from the urban middle classes. The owners were thought to be gentlemensportsmen, but in fact they were determined businessmen often allied with urban politicians. Why did the image of baseball differ so much from the reality of the sport? For Riess, the answer lies in the tenor of the times. The Progressive Era was an

age of ferment. Cities were becoming the predominant factor in American life. Industry was supplanting agriculture as the chief occupation of Americans. The millions of "new immigrants" from southern and eastern Europe who lived in America's cities were challenging the predominance of the "old immigrants" who tended to live in the country. There was a stratified society that ostensibly believed in equality and a heterogeneous society that pretended that it was homogeneous. The new bureaucracies of business and government threatened the myth of rugged individualism . It was in this turbulent era, says Riess, that baseball came to symbolize the traditions and values of a simpler, rural past, and this image to a large degree accounted for its spectacular success as the national pastime. Touching Base is a provocative study based upon sound research. Although it confines its attention largely to three cities, two of these were the largest in the nation, and the book offers some comparative information on other baseball towns. Although Riess and others have published a number of serious studies on baseball, Touching Base adds to the growing literature on sports history in general and baseball in particular, and as such, seems likely to increase interest in the history of athletics, which, as Riess notes, has probably not received the attention that it merits. JAMES E. FELL, JR. HARVARD UNIVERSITY

City People l,y Gunther Barth New York: Oxford University Press, 1980. $24.95 cloth, $7.95 paper.

BETWEEN THE 1880s AND THE 1920s, Gunther Barth observes, America witnessed the evolution of a unique urban form. The birth of that period was marked by the wholesale arrival in the United States of eastern and southern European immigrants, which enabled our cities to grow like no other nation's had before. lts end came when the automobile began to open up suburban areas and thus destroy the downtown focus of American city life. Indeed, so rapidly did all of this happen, according to Barth, that by the time contemporaries had found a term for the phenomenon-"the modern city"-the process of suburbanization was already beginning to mark the end of its days. In City Peopl.e, Professor Barth describes the distinctive big-city culture which sprang up in metropolises like Boston, New York, and, of course, Chicago, the quintessential city of immigrants. It was this massive immigration which determined the character of big-city culture, and conversely it was the same bigcity culture that shaped the new lives of the

Reviews

Comiskey Park, 1943. Photograph by Americo Grassv.

immigrants in their adopted homeland. Other nations were also undergoing rapid urbanization in the late nineteenth century, and their factories needed more and more hands to man them. But when Germany's cities grew, it was Germans who came to live in them; in England's cities, Englishmen, and so on. Only in the United States did the cities import the bulk of their workers from abroad. This meant that only in America's "modern city" did people have to learn how LO make the transition from a rural LO an urban way oflife, while also crossing the culture gap between their native tradition and that of America. According to Barth's thesis, the vehicle for both passages was a distinctive set of new elements of city life; a new arch itecture (not the formal architecture of Sullivan's skycrapers, but the ad hoc architecture of the tenement building); a new kind of popular press; the department store; the baseball park; and the vaudeville house. Through each of these institutions the city's new inhabitants received their first lessons in the American way of life. For example, 1Âˇecent arrivals learned something about the unique American attitude towards authority when they saw baseball fans freely offering an umpire their own-usually dissenting--0pinions of his judgements, a spectacle which could not fail to impress refugees from the traditional, authoritarian societies of Europe. Indeed, my Uncle Motte! first understood America during a baseball game. Motte} came to this country from Bialystok when he was twelve, one step ahead of the czar's army con scriptors. One day some older boys took Motte! to Comiskey Park. Contrary to Barth's assertion that "exposure LO the rules of the national game educates immigrants LO become Americans," Mottel's day of the White Sox, hot dogs, and beer catalyzed his transformation into "a real Yankee." Barth develops his thesis with a fine eye for detail which is marred only by occasional lapses into the patois of academe. He is at his best when he lets his material speak for itself, and less successful when he tries LO rephrase his sources and turn them into

sociological law. Overall, this is a fine book whose author manages to bring familiar material together in ways heretofore unsuspected. For instance, sports writing as something more than simple recording of scores began in Chicago when a new breed of writers, such as P.F. Dunne, captured the game's color for their readers. Barth is probably the first to note that this style of reporting was then carried over into the newspapers' political pages, and thus transformed the way news was reported. He has dated this transformation to the day in 1896 when a Chicago editor sent a spare sports reporter, along with a general assignments reporter, to cover William J. Bryan's speech to the Democratic party's convention. The political reporter reprinted the text of Bryan's remarks, but the sports writer did a smaller article on the crowd's reaction to the speech, and his words enabled readers to feel the electricity in the hall when Bryan uttered his famous "Cross of Gold" line. Barth similarly details many other elements of his thesis from Chicago institutions, such as the department store where Marshall Field turned shopping into "an afternoon on the town." This book will be of special interest to fans of our city's history and lore, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to them. RoN GROSSMAN LAKE FOREST COLLEGE

The Ma.king of the Third Party System: Voters and Parties in Illinois, 1850-1876 lYy StephenL. Hansen Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, Studies in American History and Culture, No. 14, 1980. $44.95.

THIS 1s NOT a study of evanescent third parties such as the nativist Know-Nothings, the free soil Liberty party, or the soft-money Greenbackers. Rather it is a new interpretation of the American party system, using Illinois as a test case. The third party system to which the author refers is the development of the Republican party in the waning years of the antebellum period and the rebirth of the Democratic party during Reconstruction. Historians and political scientists generally agree that the first party system began to emerge during the last decade of the eighteenth century as an unexpected outcome of the adoption of the federal Constitution. The first system reflected the deferential spirit of that age and was controlled by gentlemen of property and standing who saw themselves as disinterested statesmen. As voter participation increased, as territory west of the Appalachians became states, and as deference to authority declined, a second party system emerged during the Age oTJackson. It was characterized by professional politicians, intense com61

Reviews petition between parties, an embryonic party infrastrncture, and large voter involvement. This second party system, historians have noted, was the precursor of our present modern party system. Th rough a detailed voter analysis of Illinois , Stephen Hansen not only documents the collapse of the second party system under the strain of the slavery issue, but he also builds a case for the emergence of a third party system that ultimately subordinated issues and personalities to machine politics. Internal improvements (public works projects), the Bank of the United States, and the tariff, all important issues of the second party system, were no longer relevant in 1850, and parties began to rely on personalities to retain voter loyalty. In the face of the slavery issuethe Dred Scott decision, the Kansas- ebraska Act, and Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas's "popu lar sovereignty"-personality was insufficient to insure pa1 ty solidarity. As the Democratic and Whig parties began to splinte1~ the Republican party emerged as the new party of principle. Illinois Democrats held together under the forceful personal leadership of Douglas, but his death in 1861 signalled the end of the old Democracy. In the period after the Civil War, Republicans consolidated their gains, combining patriotism and party loyalty by emphasizing the party's role as savior of the Union. By the time the fervor of the war years began to fade, as it had with the Jacksonians earlier, Republicans had evolved a sophisticated party structure in which discipline, regularity, and loyalty were more important than issues or personalities. That the Republican party was able in Illinois to withstand a large defection by its liberal wing in 1872 proved the strength of the party's hold on the voters. Likewise, after the Civil War the Democrats regrouped, adopting many structural innovations introduced earlier by the Republicans. Gradually they too molded a party relatively immune from divisive popular issues. The ethnic, religious, and geographic voter realignment 1Âˇeflected in the two major parties by 1876, the author concludes, remained the same for the next two decades-until populism disrupted party allegiance. In The Making of the Third Party System, Stephen Hansen has persuasively demonstrated the collapse of the second party system in Illinois and challenged ethnic loyalty as an explanation for party affiliation. He has also described the emergence of the Republican party as representative of a new third party system. He is less convincing, however, in showing a similar change in a revitalized Democratic party. His analysis is strongest for the decade before the Civil War, weakest for Reconstruction. Despite the obstacle of a difficult style, The Making of the Third Party System offers all students of Illinois and American politics in the nineteenth century a provocative argument and an excellent example of a state study with larger meaning. NICHOLAS C. BuRCKEL UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-PARKSIDE

The Society Four special activities highlight the Society's role in the intellectual community, and its own commitment to internal renewal. of the Chicago Historical Society's intellectual life frequently goes unnoticed. It is not suited for the calendar of events, or the press releases or invitations that flow continuously from the Society's offices. And yet the mark of a truly significant cultural institution is measured not only by its strictly public functions, but also by the degree to which it is integrated into a broader community and by the kind of support it provides for substantive if less glamorous activities. This can be seen in the Society's sustained contribution to Chicago's academic and intellectual communities. The staff and the Board of Trustees take seriously the responsibility that a mature institution carries in this regard. Evidence of this conviction are four significant activities occurring in 1983. A conference entitled "The Making of the Mayor: Chicago 1983" was held at the Society on May 20. A quadrennial and always timely event, it deals with a subject that all can appreciate as appropriate in Chicago. Just as important, however, is the Society's cosponsorship of the conference with five other institutions: Governors State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Illinois Issues, and the Chicago League of Women Voters. This year's conference coordinators were Paul Green of Governors State University and Melvin Holli of the University of Illinois at Chicago. At the conference, university professors, political analysts, and media commentators presented their views during six panel discussions. Such topics as "Media Magic: Fashioning Characters for the 1983 Mayoral Race," "Is Chicago Ready for Reform?" "Black Politics and Resurgence of Minority Voting," and ''The Lives of Politicians: Personality as Destiny" attempted to place the recent election in perspective and will provide the springboard for future articles, papAN IMPORTANT PART

ers, and books. The Society's particular contribution was the provision of meeting space and a reception for the participants. Its reward was found in the enhancement of its reputation as an institution which encourages and supports such discussions and in the ready availability of the sessions to its staff. A second cosponsorship is also noteworthy. From June 11 to 29, thirty junior high school teachers will meet daily at the Society, earning four quarter hours of graduate credit for participation in a class called "Junior High American History in the Chicago Context." This is a product of the Chicago Neighborhood History Project, which has its office at The Newberry Library and is coordinated by Gerald Danzer. lnterinstitutional cooperation is evident in the in-kind support of the Society, The Newberry Library, and the University of Illinois at Chicago; funding for the class is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. The project combines classes, workshops, and field trips with extensive use of several museums and libraries throughout the Chicago area, starting with the Society's own facilities. The result of this effort affects more than the thirty teachers, however, because the materials and approaches generated by it will be published by the Neighborhood History Project and distributed nationally. Two other efforts are the more direct products of the Society. onetheless they too complement the direct link between us and the academic community we serve. One of these projects is the newly established "Chicago Historical Society Urban History Seminar." The Society's staff sponsor is Timothy Jacobson, who is working with the seminar's chairmen, Professors Kathleen N. Conzen of the University of Chicago and Michael H. Ebner of Lake Forest College. The seminar is intended to bring together academic and non-academic practitioners of urban history for a monthly meeting at which papers on a broad range of topics, including Chicago, midwestern. and national, will be presented and criticized. Comparative and international topics are especially welcome. The inaugural meeting will be in September 1983. As with other activities, the benefits accrue not only to the Society, but to the broader community which uses our facilities and which ulti-

mately helps us to interpret the history of the city. The second unique activity is the Society's reconsideration of its collecting scope. Our present charge to ourself is to collect first those materials pertaining to the city of Chicago, then to collect things related to selected Illinois subjects (such as Lincoln), and finally to address major themes in American history up to 1865. Over the past several years, however, major new areas of Chicago collecting have been added to the Society: decorative arts and architecture in particular. And other collections and new exhibits reflect an increasing interest in the city. At the same time, the continuing demands on our storage space have begun to strain our resources, raising the question of how we might control, focus, or limit our collecting without damaging the past work of the curators and without prejudicing future projects that we may not now fully appreciate. Thus each curator has been asked to develop first a statement of his or her department's status quo, listing strengths and weaknesses of the collections and current practices. Following that, we have gathered at the Society a group of people from the cultural institutions who use or identify with our collections to answer the question "what should we be collecting for you?" These people include a curator, several academic historians in different specialties from contemporary material culture to photographs, and an archivist. Finally, we have weighed their opinions and our own thoughts and developed a synthesis which, while perhaps not changing our basic statement of scope, will address the unique constituencies and problems faced by each collection department. This activity is a serious intellectual exercise intended both to make us think hard about the reasons we do the things we do, and to build the foundation for practical policy in the future. It is critical to our ability to proceed with a longrange plan, a detailed study of our space needs, and ultimately the rationale for a capital campaign that will help us meet the demands placed on the Society by our study of scope. It will help us to do our work more deliberately and therefore to do it better. Ellsworth H. Brown Director 63

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

Director Ellsworth H. Brown

Trustees Bowen Blair Philip D. Block III Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon Mrs. Paul A. Florian III James R. Getz Edward Hines Philip W. Hummer

Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Brooks McCormick John T. McCutcheon,Jr. Andrew McNally III Arthur E. Osborne,Jr. Bryan S. Reid ,Jr. Harold Byron Smith,Jr. Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken

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 dues are as follows: Individual, $25; Family, $30. Members receive the Society's quartedy 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 Museum 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. The Graphics Collection is open from 9:30 to 4:30 by appointment only. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

Life Trustee

Admission Fees for Non-members

Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Adults, $1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays.

Honorary Trustee

Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are $3.00 by mail; $2.50 at newsstands, bookshops, and the Museum Store.

John E. McHugh , President, Chicago Park District

ILLUSTRATIONS INSIDE FRONT COVER: CHS, ICHi-17523 . WHOSE CITY?: 3, CHS, ICHi-17495; 4 top, CHS, ICHi-05493, from Chicago Surface Lines Album; 4 bottom, CHS, ICHi17520, from A Short Description of the Cable System ... (1888); 5, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-952; 6, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-2912; 7 top, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-58,281A; 7 bottom, CHS, JCHi-17412; 9, CHS, ICHi-17259; IO, CHS, lCHi-17414 ; II, CHS, lCHi-00978; 12-13, CHS, ICHi09450; 14, CHS, lCHi-17498, from Hannahs Railway. (1888); 18, CHS, ICHi-17500, from The Vice Bondage of a Great City (1912); 21, CHS, ICHi-14904; 22, CHS, ICHi00389, from The Everleigh Club Illustrated (1902). BREAD AND LABOR: 24, CHS, ICHi-17490, from The Western Manufacturer (August 1874); 26 & 27, CHS, ICHi-17515, from Baker's Helper (August 1888); 28, CHS, ICHi-17518, from Zurn Dreisigjiihrigen Jubilaiim des Deutschen Kriegerverein van Chicago (1904); 29, CHS, ICHi-17516, from Die Deutschen in Amerika (1908); 30, CHS, ICHi-17527, from

The Western Manufacturer Oanuary 1875); 33, CHS, ICHi17489, from List of Union Bakeries (February 1904) ; 34, CHS, lCHi-17487, from Fiinfzig-Jiihrigesjubilaiim des Chicago Backer Unterstiitzungs-Vereins (1917). HOLITISCH-

ER'S CHICAGO: 36-37, C HS , ICHi-17497; 39, CHS, l C Hi-17493; 40 top, CHS, ICHi-17521, from Erinnerungsblatter an die Ruhmreiche Fahrt nach Deutsch/and (August 1895); 40 bottom, CHS, lCHi-17511, from Frenchman in America (1891); 44-45, CHS, ICHi-17496 ; 46, CHS, ICHi17483, from Children's Winter Clothing, 1900-1901; 47 top, CHS, ICHi-17486 , and 47 bottom, CHS, ICHi-17485 , from A Visit to Sears, Roebuck and Co., Chicago (1923); 48 49, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-9514. BLACK-APPEAL RADIO: All illustrations courtesy of Mrs. Gertrude Cooper unless otherwise noted; 54, CHS, ICHi-15096 ; 55 left, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-96,595. REVIEWS: 61, CHS, ICHi-17536. INSIDE BACK COVER: CHS, ICHi-04I08.

...,

"'7,nim Coming In," 1917, byj osej1h Pennell.

Gift of Charles H. Swift.