Chicago History | Summer 1997

Summer 1997

$3.50

CHICAGO HISTORY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

Summer 1997

EDITOR RO SE\ IARY

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Volume XXVI, Number 2

ASSISTANT EDITORS LE SLEY

A. M AR 1'1:-J

CONTENTS

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From the Editor

Chicago Historical Society OFFI C ER S Sharon Gist Gilliam , Tream rer R. Ed e n Martin , Chair Po lt e r Palm e r , Vice Chair J ose ph H . Levy Jr. , Secretary Ch a rl e s T. Brumb ac k , Vice Ch.air Philip W . Humm e r , Immediate Past Chair Dou g las G ree nb e r g, Pre.1 ident and Director TR U ST E ES La ur a Ba rn e tt Le ron e Be nn e tt Jr .

Philip D . Bloc k III La u re n ce Boo th C h a rl e s T. Brumb ac k Mr s. Ann Miclclle Lo n Bu c kley Ro be rt N. Burt Mi ch e lle L. Co llin s Mr s. Ga ry C. Co m er J o hn\\' . C r og h a n Ste\\'a rt S . Dixo n

Mich ae l H . Ebn e r Sh a ron G ist G illi a m M . I Jill H a mmo ck H a n-y H owe ll Philip W. Humm er Ri c h a rd M . .Ja ffee Ed ga r D. J a nn o u a Ba rb ar a Levy Kipp e r \\" . Pa ul Kr a u ss Fr e d A Kr e hbi e l J ose ph I-I. Le, 1· Jr .

Mr s.J o hnJ. L o ui s Jr .

R. Ed e n Martin Way n e A McCoy Ro be rt M ee r s Po tt e r Palm e r Ma r ga rit a Pe rez Go rd o n I. Sega l Edward Byron S mith Jr .

Ma tth ew H . Stea rn s J a m es R. T h o mp son Da ni e l H . Wh ee le r

Ll F E TR USTE ES Bowe n Bla ir Philip E. Ke lley Mr s. Fr a nk D. Maye r .Jo hn i\lcC ut ch eo n An d rew i\fcNa lly 111 i\[rs. ::'\1 e,rLOn N . Min o,, Brya n S. Re id J r.

De m psey J . Trcl\'i s H( )J'-:() R,,\R) ' T R L'Sl 'EES Rich ard M . Da le;, ,\ Joyor, City o/C/11((1[!_0 J o h n \ \'. Roge r s J r .. Pn1 ,ide11/,C/n((l[!_O Park Di.1tncl The Chicago H istorical Smiety i, a prl\atch endm,cd. independent imtitution de,otcd to Lollcning, interpreting . and pre~enting the r ich multicultural hi,ton of Chicago and Illin ois, as 1,t'II a, ,e lected a 1t'a, of ,\ merican h i~torv. 10 the pub lic throug h exhibit ions, prng1·ams. re~eanlt colleu iom, and publiLation,. It mmt loo k to ih member, and friends for continuing financial ,upporl. Conti ibution, to the I l isto1 ica l Sm 1e11 a 1e taxdeductible, and appropriate recognition is atcorded major gifts.

The C h icago H istorical Societ\' gratefulh the 1-focorical Sociel\ \ acti, ities.

,llkn01,ledge;

the Chirngo Park Di,trin\

genern11s support of all of

Memb ership Benefit, include free admi,,ion to the 1-li,trn 1cal 'iociet1 ·. i111 ·itatio11s 10 ,peLial e1·ents, c:/11rngo History maga1i11e, P/111Ti1111'1. and di,counh on all special program, ,md :--lu,eum Store pu1Lh<1,e,. hunih Dual $.)0; Student Senior Famih $--L): l ndi,iclu,il 40. ~tudent.'.'-i<:nior l ndi,iclual 35.

Hour s The ~l useum is open claih from ~l:'.lO 1. 11. to --1::\0 1'.11.; '.'-iuncla, frnm l'.!:00 '\OO'\ 10 .i:00 1'.11. Th e Li bran and the .\nhi, ·e, and :--L1nu,Lrip1,,Collect1011 are open I ue,da) th 1o ugh ~a turda) from 9:30 .1.11. to 4:30 l'.\t. The Prints and Photog1 ·aphs Co llection is open from I :00 to 4:30 I'.\!. Tuesday th roug h T hu rsd ay and on Saturday . .-\JI other re,earch collectiom arc open b) appointment. T he C H S i, clo,ed on T ha nh gil'ing, Christma,, and :\e, · Year·, da1·,.

Sugges ted Adm iss ion Fees for No nmember s Adult,, S5; Students ( 13-22) and Senim · C iti1em (6;j a nd older), 3; Children (6-12 ), I. Admission i, free on :--londa\'s.

We b si te: http: "'''' .chicagohs.org Chi cago Historical Society Clark Stree t at No rth Avenu e

Chi cago , Illinois 60614-6099

312-642-4600

From the Editor Letter-writing, they say, is a dying art form . With the advent of e-mail, the days of sending and receiving handwritten personal letters are becoming history. As a teenager, exchanging letters with my best friend, Vicki, who had moved to California, was a weekly ritual. I have saved Vicki's letters, for they are important records of our teenage selves, and they attest to the importance of letter-writing in our lives. Some were written at school, the paper hastily ripped out of a spiral notebook. Others appear on specially selected stationery in colorcoordinated ink. As adults, we've discontinued our letter-writing ritual and rely on the phone to stay in touch. In a way, this is a more personal form of communication and certainly a more interactive one, but it does not leave a permanent record of our conversations.

Fifty years from now, we'll have to rely on our memories rather than written documents to discover what we discussed in 1997.

Like many other people, I have enthusiastically embraced e-mail communication, so much so that when the office network goes down on occasion, it takes me a while to get my bearings. The speed and ease of e-mail allows me to quickly and efficiently send messages .

The historian in me, however, worries about the medium's ephemeral nature . Letters are important historical documents, for they record personal history that illuminates social customs and more prominent events in a way "official" documents never can. The Chicago Historical Society displays a copy of what is possibly the first letter sent from Chicago, which Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, wrote in 1683 to friends at Fort St. Louis, near presentday Utica, Illinois. In the Fall 1996 issue of ChicagoHistory, we reprinted letters written by survivors of the Great Fire of 1871, including one that was illustrated by its young writer.

And in the Spring 1997 edition, a young schoolteacher's life in Chicago was re-created through her letters. All of these letters give us personal perspectives on the city's history. In addition to their content, howeve1~ the physical artifacts themselves are important. The writer 's penmanship, the number of pieces of paper used, further emphasize the personality of the correspondent.Jane Austen, like many of her contemporaries, for example, wrote in the margins of her letters, squeezing as much space as possible out of each piece of paper, for posting letters could be expensive. This habit reveals that while Austen was an enthusiastic letter write1~she al o had to be careful with her money.

Love Letters:An Anthologyof Pas ion i a lusciou ode to letters and their ability to make history come alive. The author, Michelle Lovric, includes facsimiles of original letters as well as transcripts. Readers can thus clearly read the contents of the letters, such as the one Beatles fan Mary L. mailed to Ringo Starr : "My darling, dear, delightful Ringo, could you please send me something of yours? Anything, a lock of hair ... a piece of old toast. . . . I would treasure it forever." More important, the facsimiles allow one to experience what it was like, for example, for Fanny Brawne to break the seal and unfold a letter sent by John Keats in 1820. The book preserves the ritual of letter writing, one that is missing in our brave new world of e-mail.

Of course, I can save my e-mail both on computer and in paper format, but it is just not the same. The printed messages look identical and therefore impersonal. Gone is the identifying stationery and individual penmanship. What will these typewritten missives reveal about their authors one hundred year from now? Will the Chicago Historical Society's future visitors look upon e-mail messages from 1997 with the same sort of curiosity and ense of awe with which we view historic handwritten letters today?

RRA

This undated photographfrom the Chicago Daily News shows a smiling and relaxedAl Capone with his advisors.

Chicago's Public Enemy The mainstreamand ''pulp" media of the 1920s and 1930s both glamorizedand condemnedthe gangster lifestyleexemplifiedbyAl Capone.

David E. Ruth Editor's Note: Public Enemy. This phrase has been a part of America's vocabulary since April 1930 when the ChicagoCrime Commissionreleaseda list of twenty-eight "public enemies." The press soon labeled Chicago'sAl CaponePublic Enemy Number One. Hollywood, too, was quick to adopt the termin 1931, Warner Brothers released The Public Enemy withJames Cagney,unforgettably,in the title role.In Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Cu lture, 1918-1934, David Ruth examines how the gangster of the 1920s and 193 Os,with the help of movies,newspapers,and pulp magazines, captured the public imagination to become a central cultural figure. The following excer/Jtrevealshow the mediaseizedupon Al Capone as the personification of thisphenomenon.

The next stage of cultura l invention personalized the generic gangster by giving him a particular name, city, and career. In the late twenties and early thirties a colorful array of individualized criminal was paraded before the public: Dutch Schultz, Jack "Legs " Diamond, and, with the most fanfare , Al Capone . In Capone's own argot, the mass media had "the goods on him. " Fascination with Capone produced the most vivid and widely disseminated portrait of the gangster in twentieth-century American culture.

Starting in the middle of the twenties a national audience received fragmentary glimpses of a violent, audacious young crime boss. After the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 Capone became among the most highly publicized of Americans. A smiling celebrity-like portrait , polished down to the rose in his lapel, graced the cover of Time magazine in March 1930 on the occasion of his release from a hon prison term he apparently ought to prote ct himself from Re/n-inted with penm:s.1io11 from Invem ing the Publi c Enemy: The Gang~ter in American Culture, 1918- 1934 by David ÂŁ. Ruth (Chicago: University of ChicagoPre.1 .1,1996)

dangerous enemies. Americans marveled at Capone's wealth and power, built on an empire of prostitution, gambling, racketeering, and bootlegging. His career came to an abrupt end in October 1931 when he was convicted of fai lure to report income and pay taxes-the irony was not lost on contemporary observersand was sentenced to eleven years' imprisonment. Perhaps because of this dramatically unsatisfacto1y downfall, fascination with Capone temporarily waned after 1931. Unti l then, however, Americans were transfixed by the boss of the Chicago unde1world.

Though Al Capone lived in the realm of flesh and blood, for most Americans he existed only as a cultural invention. Foremost among the inventors was Capone himself. By all accounts, he was a man who welcomed the limelight and worked constantly to manipulate public perceptions. This was the concern that lay behind his famous formulation of contradictory labels for him and his most notorious activity-racketeer or businessman, bootlegging or hospitality. In press conferences, interviews with reporters, and a highly theatrical social life, Capone worked as hard as any movie star to create a favorab le public image. Nevertheless, tl1e same producers of mass culture who had created the generic gangster ultimately presented Al Capone to the American public. He was the subject of popular books, numerous pulp publications, movies, and feature articles in newspapers and magazines ranging from Master Detective to Collier's and The Outlook. The most important group in the production of this material was big-city newspaper reporters, who not only churned out daily stories but wrote most of the more substantial accounts. ew men or former newsmen wrote all in a succession of highselling Capone books that appeared from 1929 to 1931. Though the pulps-cheap, brief picture books sold on newsstands-were published either anonymously or under the name of a 5

Chicago History, Summer 1997

prominent po lice officer, much of their structure and even language came from the fulllength books. Former Chicago Daily News columnist Ben Hecht wrote the screenplay for Sca·,face, Hollywood's most unabashed venture into Chicago gang land. In all these media,journalists took a leading role in inventing Al Capone: sifting known facts, conjuring up others, and, perhaps most important , choosing the defining metaphors.

In inventing Al Capone, newsmen were capitalizing on their essential skill of explaining the big city to a fascinated public. Americans seized on his story because it offered important lessons to people struggling to live in and with the modern city . As Capone himself recognized, his cultural role ironically mirrored those of other exemplary urban success stories, Alger heroes included. Fred Pasley understood the connection when he subtitled his successful Capone book The Biographyof a Self Made Man. Like the stories of Benjamin Franklin, Ragged Dick, and Andrew Carnegie, the Capone legend was a uniquely An1erican success story that instructed in the possibilities and perils of

Al ClPO~E

life in the big city. Both softening and reinforcing the hortatory spirit of those earlier tales wa the promise of int imate understanding so persuasive in the new age of the mass media celebrity. Close-up photographs and inventive journalism set up "Al" as a knowable personality, mass culture's equivalent of a peculiar neighbor or distant relative periodically the focus of others' attention. That the Capone legend simultaneously performed the cultural work of another venerable genre-the expose of urban corruption-testifies not only to continuing ambivalence about the city but to many Americans' discomfiting perception of the hopeless intertwining of good and evil. At once attractive and repulsive , Capone illuminated the lives of urban Americans.

In addition to providing the gangster genre with its archetype , the Capone legend consolidated the position of Chicago at the geographic center of the underworld. Since the late nineteenth century Americans had used Chicago lawles ness to ymbolize urban disorder. In 1916 Henry Barrett Chamberlin, soon to be a founder of the Chicago Crime

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Chicago'sPublic Enemy Commission, wrote of gunmen's "Crimes of Violence That Have Made Chicago (In)famous." "Chicago's 'Wildest' Crime Orgy," screamed a 1919 headline in the usually sedate New York Times. Yet the imagery of chaos was already giving way to the new Chicago Crime Commission's antithetical portrayal of regularized, businesslike criminality . The Commission's public statements received considerable attention in the national media and contributed significantly to the city's criminal reputation. This ironic role of civic leaders in building the city's bad reputation culminated in 1926, when the local Better Government Association petitioned the United States Senate for a federal investigation of the link between criminals and corrupt city politicians. Americans outside the city offered little help, but they could not have failed to see Chicago as a crime capital, a reputation that soon became international. As R. L. Duffus wrote in 1930, "In all the seven seas and the lands bordering thereon there is probably no name which more quickly calls up thoughts of crime, violence and wickedness than does that of Chicago."

Chicago's reputation owed more to Americans' social and moral concerns than to actual levels of criminality. As observers often acknowledged, crime rates there were no higher than in many other large cities. But as the nation's most dynamic city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chicago was at the center of widespread American concern about urbanism. In its excessiveness, one writer explained, Chicago "is like other American cities-only more so. " With its huge and polyglot population Chicago had long epitomized urban diversity. At least as important for the inventors of the gangster was the city's reputation as a center of aggressive capitalism. Chicago 's spectacular emergence in the mid-nineteenth century and its resurrection after the great fire Worldwide interest in Chicago's crime world is evident in thesepublicationsfrom the 1930s. Lefllo right:The Life of Al Capone in Pin-ures! and Chicago 's Gang Wars; Al Capone on the Spot; "Gangsterland" , a Dutch /mblicalion;and Chicago: Ville du Crime, a Frenchtransl.ationof Edward Sullivan's Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime.

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Chicago History, Summer 1997

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Rejectingthe glorificationof cmne prevalent in many of the tabloids, John McCutcheon's cartoon (c. 1931) shows "Chicago" dreaming of riddingitself of gangsters througha numherof legalmaneuvers,includingthe charges of income t.a:xevasionthat wou!,deventuallytoppleAl Capone.

of 1871 made it-and its stockyards, railroads, and skyscrapers -th e reification of American energy and resourcefulness. "With Chicago," a commentator on crime observed, "all things are episodes in one prodigious epic of speed 8

and size. " The city's violent labor dispute pointed lo the darker sides of American acquisitiveness. Its extremes of wealth and poverty, philanthropy and greed, construction and destruction, had for decades entranced Americans who sought to understand their modern industrial society. Symbo lically even more than geographically, Chicago seemed to lie at the very heart of American capitalism.

With their deep concerns about the meanings of competition and success in modern society,

Chicago'sPublic Enemy the inventors of the gangster almost inevitably fastened on Chicago.

That the underworld's geographic location helped to throw light on aggressive capitalism was evident in the common linkage of Chicago's lawlessness with its commercial greatness. Edward Dean Sullivan, who connected national lawlessness with "American progress, possessions, methods, and habits of life ," noted that this "world capital of crime ... grows great apace, and to many representative minds has world leadership as its destiny." Chicago's predominance in crime reportedly owed much to the competitive vitality that had fueled its unparalleled commercial growth. In an article in the New York TirnesMagazine Raymond Moley implied that crime and industrial greatness sprang from the same sources. The city's "a lmost miraculous contrasts" between abject poverty and unbelievable wealth, he suggested, created the perfect environment for the entrepreneurial spirit. Chicago, Moley explained, was "a city of amazing material achievement. Miracles happen." With his fellow townspeople, the Chicago gangster thrived on the prevailing "spirit of quick action and easy money ."

For many observers Chicago represented a laboratory whose criminal products provided a pure distillation of elemental American material values. R. L. Duffus was typical. In a 1930 report on racketeering, he affirmed the three-way relationship between Chicago, crime, and rapacious capitalist values. This "fiercely energetic, rapidly growing" "city of extremes," he wrote, "sinks more deeply into the mud and climbs more desperately toward the stars" than other cities. Chicagoans could simultaneously exalt Jane Addams and larcenous traction barons, and the ordinary businessmen among them often had the ethics of racketeers . "Because the city retained it pioneer traditions and because those traditions emphasized material achievement," Duffus explained, "the tendency has been to measure uccess by quantity rather than by quality.

Here was an American weakness exaggerated." The criminal breathed the same exhilarating and dangerous air of opportunity as did hi legitimate counterpart : "T he Chicago gangster or racketeer has taken to him elf the

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This cartoonfrom the A/Jril 20, 1929 , Collier's shows the "J Will" spirit of Chicago battered by a prohibitionengendered crime wave. Some attributed the success of Chicago'sgangstersto a criminalaltitudethat mirroredthe "! Will" spirit of the city'sentrejneneurs.

civic motto: 'I will."' The gangster, that "lurid example of enterprise and thoroughne ," found his true home in Chicago, a city that represented the perfect stage for a heroic drama about competition and succe 111 modern America.

Capone's was a success story appropriate to this setting in which strife, grand achievements, and spectacular failures were the stuff of daily life. The primary components of this extraordinarily violent legend were episodes of innergang succession or intergang conflict in which Capone and hi allies triumphed over lesser men. Violence was omnipresent but not arbitrary; machine-guns and other tools of death merely con ummated the ineYitable victory of the superior competitor, the weaknesses of one highlighting the strengths of another. Discrete episodes merged into a coherent whole.

"Though not more than a half dozen of the city's gang murders have been solved," an Associated Press feature put it early in 1929, "there 9

Chicago History, Summer 1997

The War of ChicagoThat's Al's Story!

W

Lee are in the choolbooks. Why not Al? HO'S that big healthy-looking fellow with the grin and the blue He has ducked more bullets than Grant eyes and th chubby cheek and heard at Vick burg . They 've been hootthe thick lips and th scar running down ing at Al for ten y ars !

There'· · no wolf at Al' door. He's boss to the left jawbone? of the rackets in Chi and the rackets pay That's Th Big Shot! That' Scarface $300,000,000 a year. A guy with a "big Al Capone. Yea, bo, that large boy with rod"--a Tommy gun hooting from 100 to the quick-moving eye · and the grizzled 1,500 hot .45 i;lugs a minute--doesn't have dark hair, in the nifty tailored suit and the tan-and-white sport shoe is The Big to worry about wolve . the kind with fur Fellow! on or just plain human wolves. Al maThat's Al, who's way, way up in the chine-gunned the wolf away a long time bucks. He made a lot of dough and he ago. Al can call for a dozen or two "big carved a place in history for himself when rod.," anytime.

It takes a strong guy to sell all the beer he was making it. Sure! General Grant and George Washington and Robert E. . and boo;i:e in Chicago. Al' a strong guy.

10

Chicago'sPublic Enemy is an accepted lore which draws a thread of continuity through the hostilities, with few breaks." This lore condemned and thrilled, but it also offered insights into the paths to success, both in the underworld and in the legitimate society it modeled.

The centra l theme of the Capone narrative was an individual's escape from obscurity to wealth, power, and fame. The narrative began in standard fashion, with the arriva l of the young hero in the city where he was to make his name. Born of immigrant parents in a Brooklyn slum, the hero had dropped out of school in the fourth grade to help his family in an assortment of difficult, unremunerative jobs on both sides of the law. He arrived in Chicago with little more than an ugly scar, variously attributed to combat in Europe or a barroom brawl precipitated by his offensive remarks about a young woman. He had come to the city in 1920 to help protect Big Jim Colosimo, leader of a corrupt labor union and proprietor of opium dens, houses of prostitution, gambling resorts, and a popular cabaret. Troub led by the extortion attempts of Black Hanel kidnappers, Co losimo had earl ier imported Capone's eventual mentor, John Tonio, from the Brooklyn Five Points gang to serve as his bodyguard. Torrio possessed unusual management skills and soon oversaw Colosimo's operations. After a particularly threatening Black Hanel demand Torrio recruited the young strong-arm from his old Brooklyn gang.

Despite these precautions Colosimo was shot to death in his cabaret in May 1920. The murder merited little attention outside Chicago when it happened, but grew to near-epic proportions in the next ten years. By then the killing at the dawn of the decade seemed to illuminate an inevitable transition from quaint old ways to a new order.

Serving as a milestone against which the development of the twenties could be measured, Colo imo's story bowed the transformative effect of the infusion of modern business values into the underworld and invited its mass culture audience to con icier the changes wrought by new corporate values on the society a a whole. In the fading world of Big.Jim , succe - depended less upon grand visions, extraordinary intelligence , or careful

CHICAGO GREATEST ADVERTISED CITY I THE WORLD 'OT 11IE WICKEDEST a,

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Opposite: The image of a smiling Al Capone heads the opening page in this tabloid, which asks, "Who's that big healthy-lookingfellow with the grin and the blue eyes?"

Above: Some argued that Chicago was no more crimeridden than other cities-Chicago simply tooted its own horn louder, whether the subject was commerce, art museums,or crime.

organization than upon modest, attainab le goals and hard work, and achievement occurred within the tight confines of a local community. For these reasons the story of Colosimo became an important counterpoint to the rise of Al Capone.

The quaint tale of Jim Colosimo's rise, steeped in nostalgia, marked as ludicrously outof-date the Alger-like model of success it paralleled. After arriving as a ten-year-old immigrant boy he old newspapers, hinecl shoes, and learned the trade of the pickpocket.

De pite his efforts he "o ften didn't have the price ofa Oop.'' Opportunity came in the forms 11

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1997

Above: Big Jim Colosimoin 1914, beforethe /1rohibitiongang war.1 began, with hi.1al/orney Charil'sErbstein. Below: On l\lay 11, 1920,Jim Colosimowm shot down in his restaumnt. Thefollowing day, the Chicago Tribune prmted a diagram reconstructing!he assau/1,for which 110arresl was ewr made.

12

Chicago'sPublic Enemy 71iemurder of the recentlymarriedColosimoled in the Tribune.

Inset:A jJostcarddej1ictsthe eleganllyaj1pointedrestaurantat 2126 South WabashAvenue th.atwould be the sceneof Colosimo's murder.

of job as a railroad crew water-boy and, later, as a street sweeper. One writer noted incredulously that "it was five years before he could rise from the distinction of a city street cleaner." Yet through dint of hard work and luck this immigrant youth parlayed "the exalted position of whitewing" into the foundation of his eventual wealth. His was a gradual but sure and steady rise. "More cunning than intelligent ... and, above all, peculiarly talented in the art of making friends," Colosimo eventually became recognized as a leader of the whitewings and the larger local Italian community. The two "picturesque" aldermen or the old levee vice district, Hinky-Dink Kenna and Bath-house John Coughlin, patronized him "because they saw in him a future political power, mall but nevertheless in0uential." In exchange for the block of votes he controlled, Kenna and Coughlin helped Colo imo attain a considerable but highly localited success. His career was built on traditional crimes, limited to a longstanding old vice di trict, rooted in a village-

--

---

like community, and supported by patrons reminiscent of a colorful but fading past.

Colosimo's demise showed that mere pluck and good fortune, however, were no longer sufficient for success. For nothing in this background prepared him for leadership of the modern corporate gang. "Big.Jim Colosimo, though he had built up the machine for which he was famous, didn't know how to handle it on a fast u-ack," one pulp book explained. Compounding hi lack of up-to-date skills, Colosimo lacked the passion for continual expansion that drove the modern businessman-gangster. Unaware that the only alternative to enu-epreneurial growth was stagnation, he was content to relax and enjoy his modest pro perity. Big Jim's advancing age, girth, and indolence marked his difference from younger, leaner, and more aggressive counterparts. '¡Colosimo, fat and prosperous and nearing forty," Pasley wrote, "wa smugly content with things as they were, satisfied to operate within the Twenty-second Street district." "He 13

Chicago History, Summer 1997

took things easy," according to another account, and "spent most of his days just sitting in his huge ornate cafe dreaming contentedly." "Play took the place of work in the life of Big Jim Colosimo," who enu<.1stedhis daily operations to the care ofTorrio and Capone. When he failed Lorespond to assaults by vice crusaders on his operations, and when he proved reluctant to exploit the opportunities presented by new prohibition laws, Colosimo became "a nuisance to his lieutenants" and a hindrance Lo"progress."

His murder validated the judgment that "a slowthinking, slow moving man such as Colosimo had no place" in the modern underworld. Nor did such a dinosaur have a place, the Capone legend implied, in the corporate order the underworld so closely paralleled.

In John Torrio, Colosirno 's antipodal successor, audiences received a respectful lesson in the capabilities of the efficient, up-to-date businessman. Torrio embodied the relentless drive that Colosimo fatally lacked, and the story of his gang celebrated the replacement of small , local enterprises by diversified, far-ranging, and highly organized corporations in the larger economy. "Within a brief time after his arrival," Edward Dean Sullivan wrote, "the bawdy houses of Chicago were organized a never before, new prices and standards were established and the foul business had become a 'syndicate .' It wa a bu ine sin every detail except in reliance on court or police protection."

Many, of course, would dispute the exception.

This publicizing of the advantages of replacing small gangs with a single organization constituted a primer on the corporate order's economies of scale. Realizing the opportunities presented by prohibition, Torrio bought idle breweries, organized a distribution system, and arranged for political protection. "He simply saw another busine s opportunity" that would complement his "multiplicity of intere ts."

Unlike the complacent Colosimo, Torrio "looked far beyond the confine of the First Ward to the latent opportunities throughout metropolitan Chicago." So completely did he transcend Colosimo's localism that when crusading mayor William Dever attempted to clean up Chicago in 1923 Torrio simply moved the center of his operations to neighboring Cicero. Even his use of violence illuminated a 14

Jim Colosi1110 was helped lo sua ess by the injiwwusly rnrru/JIalderman "Balh-hou e"john Coughlin, /Jicturedheff in /933.

business executive's calculations. ,vhen the need arose "he issued an order to his gunmen as lo so many counter-jumping clerks." The mayhem he directed "wasn't personal. It was a system. It was efficient; he was proud of it."

Accounts of the skills and values Torrio brought to the management of thi criminal enterprise represented a simultaneously appreciative and critical assessment of the make-up of the leading executive. Ctwas because "the ca h register \\¡as all that counted with him," as Waller Noble Burns wrote, that Torrio ucceeded so magnificently . cruples presented no obstacle to profit . Within a brothel where women were de poiled around the clock, Burns wrote, Ton-io sat in an upholstered oflice, as neat as a pin , at a mahogany desk . . .. A calm, poised , efficient business man was TotTio. No bluster , no lost motion, no wasted word . \'\'eighing his busines chances, figuring his margin of prnfit. Shrewd, far-seeing, unscrupulous, of relenLless energy. Square-that was his reputation-his word as good as his bond.

Chicago'sPublic Enemy These, Burns concluded, were "a ll the qualities of a great financier and a great business man ."

As the description of Torrio's office indicates, the Chicago mythologists suggested that business success depended almost as much on a particular personal style as on the use of modern corporate methods. Failure seemed inevitable for Big Jim Colosimo because, a the nickname indicates, he never developed the essential cosmopolitan outlook and in tead remained tethered to his working-class , ethnic origins. In Howard Hawks 's classic film Scarface, filmed in 1930 and released in 1932, the Colosimo character is dark complected, disheveled, and unlike his successors speaks with a thick Italian accent. Pasley wrote that he attired himself and decorated his home "without taste or refinement but on a scale of barbaric magnificence." This egregious bad taste seemed to testify to innate limitations that belied any attempts at improvement. Survival depended on assimilation to the dominant, non-ethnic culture.

By contrast, Torrio's lifestyle was that of a refined middle-class American. Success came to the dignified, ,vell-mannered executive who dressed with understated good taste, kissed his wife goodbye in the morning, detested profanity, and er~oyed nothing more than a quiet

,!bove:JohnnyTorrio, 1931. Thesca 1faroundhis11eck hidesthe scarsfrom the shotgun allack that drove himfrom the bootlegging business in 1925. Below: A Cicero speakeasy,the Hawthorne Cabareton the corner of Cicero and Ogden Avenues, is pictured here in 1925. Johnny Torrio moved his headquarters to Cicero in 1923 when Mayor WilliamDever crackeddown on crimein Chicago.

15

Chicago's Public Enemy

evening at home in his favorite easy chair .

Aside from his love for Italian opera, few traces of ethnicity marked him as distinct from what many Americans took to be an undifferentiated non-ethnic norm. His speech was soft but commanding and "without trace of foreign accent." In contrast to Colosimo's first wife, an immigrant brothel-keeper, Torrio's wife was a respectable Kentucky woman "with generations of American ancestry back of her." In every respect except for a few details of his occupation, here was a model of American middle-class respectability.

Nevertheless, Torrio did not long reign atop the Chicago underworld, and his downfall, like the murder of Colosimo, provided a text for important lessons about success and failure in a competitive society. He stepped down after a nearly successful attempt on his life in January 1925. Driving in the city with his wife, Torrio was intercepted and pursued by enemy gunmen. He made it to the curb in front of his South Side house but while scrambling to get inside received a shotgun blast to the jaw and was left for dead . "Utterly terrified" after his release from a guarded hospital room-Torrio insisted on one far from windows and fire escapes-he welcomed sentencing on a prohibition conviction and thereby acquired the security of a bulletproof cell. While in prison he fretted about his safety, and upon his release ten month later he fled the city and, according to some accounts, the country . In recounting this transfer of leadership from Torrio to Capone writers showed the limitations of efficiency. In the social mirror that was the underworld, the struggle for success required notjust brains but guts-boldness, courage, a willingness to fight. Torrio was a scared "rabbit," "a coward . .. at heart," "the Big Boy who wasn't quite big enough." "One close call was enough for him," the Literary Digest explained. "As they say of a fighter, 'he can dish it out, but he can't take it." ' The unmanly man would inevitably fail a a leader.

In recounting Capone's replacement of Torrio, their chronicler endor ed a vi ion of business competition that rewarded aggressive Opposite: Al Capone consults with his allom ey m 1929.

masculinity. For in temperament and physique Capone personified the raw virility that Torrio so obviously lacked. " erveless fearlessnes ," as one writer put it, set him above his predecessor. Despite his eventual refinement, Capone could be "crude, tough, profane, bellicose, domineering , a swashbuckler and a bully," Burns wrote. "Physically he was impressive-lithe, muscular, with good shoulders and hard fists: a husky roughneck; a typical gangster as of old the public pictured gangsters."

Pasley concurred that he was "stout-muscled [and] hard knuckled," attributes appropriate to his early work as a bouncer and all-around thug. Writers went to great lengths to reconcile Capone's putative physical prowess with hi undeniable girth. Pasley conceded that Capone was "ponderous of movement till engaged in action, [but] then as agile as a panther." The "great hulk of his is not all fat," Enright agreed; "great bulges of muscle ... enable him at times to move with the speed and power of a tiger. " This "burly" thug presented a stark contrast to "Little Johnny Torrio." A "face of strength," with "lines of bulldog determination" completed the profile.

Enright summarized the effect: You can imagine this man facing an enemy and shooting it out with him in armed conflict. You can imagine his tubby hands throttling a traitor in his ranks or smashing into the mouth as fists to halt a denunciation or a threat. You might even imagine him striking down a pistol arm and countering with the thrust of a long knife.

At least in the underworld, the fighting virtues reigned supreme.

Capone's inventors proclaimed that aggressive masculinity and modern business organization could coexist, for they linked this toughness with business acumen exceeding even that ofTorrio. "Not the ordinary gangster," according to Does Crime Pay? , Capone was "a shrewd, brainy, quick thinking, cool tempered man." "No desperado of the old school is 'Scarface Al,' plundering or murdering for the savage joy of crime," Tim e concurred ; "He is, in his own phrase, 'a business man ' who wears clean linen, rides in a Lincoln car, leaves acts of violence to his hirelings."

He became "the John D. Rockefeller " of the 17

Chicago History, Summer 1997

underworld because he understood the imperative of the modern economy: organize or perish. According to Pasley , "Capone was to revolutionize crime and corruption by putting both on an efficiency basis , and to instill into a reorganized gangland firm business methods of procedure."

These writers accepted Capone's own description of his affairs: "Everybody calls me a racketeer. I call myself a businessman. When I sell liquor , it's bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on the Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality."

The equation of success and executive sagacity resulted in a remarkable interview and related editorial in an October 1931 issue of Liberty magazine . In "Two Mighty Men-H. G. Wells and Al Capone," the editor asserted that Capone was "a true philosopher" whose "clear, constructive reasoning" about contemporary problems invited comparison to that of the celebrated author, a contributor to the issue . The interview fit in a standard mold : that of commentary on national concerns from a respected leader. "How Al Capone Would Run This Country" served as a forum for a successful executive to put forth his vague solutions for the Depression and, yes, lawlessness that plagued the nation. This businessman-savant 's interviewer was none other than celebrity journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jr., presumably by birth a competent judge of such authorities. Like countless other executives, Capone fretted that "Bolshevism is knocking at our gates" and fulminated that the worker needed protection "fro m red literature, red ruses; we must see that his mind remains healthy. " Like Richard Washburn Child and other conservative businessmen he believed that the disintegration of the traditional home had corrupted American society. His predictable solution was that important men needed to work together to solve contemporary problem . The performance of Herbert Hoover, the engineer-businessman made president, had fallen far short of expectations. "Isn't it a peculiar thing that with one of the world's greatest organizers as our chief executive we lack organization more now than ever in our history?" he asked. "An American Mussolini" Capone opined, offered the best hope. Al Capone, master criminal 18

and paragon of success, was an executive worthy of con ultation, and his vacuous proclamations perfectly echoed those of many of his legitimate counterparts.

Capone's far-flung organization, described in the jargon of the corporation, provided the invented underworld 's most intense illumination of the capabilities of modern business methods. In Michigan Avenue headquarters, large accounting and clerical staffs facilitated the operation of "a supertrust .. . with the efficiency of a great corporation.'¡ But the activities of this wonderfully efficient business meant that descriptions of it constituted not ju t an appreciation of corporate methods . For Capone's organization showed a disturbing proximity between ordinary amoral business objectivesthe pursuit of corporate profits-and those that generated terribly immoral and destructive acts. It was an ordinary board of directors that oversaw the firm's wide-ranging interests in bootlegging, vice, narcotics, and diverse forms of racketeering. Hijackings, bombing , and murders were among "t he dry-as-dust affairs discussed in the matter-of-fact routine" of their typical meeting. "As far as appearances were concerned, it wa like a board meeting of some big wholesale hou e or La Salle Street financial firm," Burns wrote. "Fashionably garbed, immaculately groomed, a 0ower in a buttonhole here and there, the directors puffed at their cigars unconcernedly, yawned now and then, and sometimes nodded. Their daily board meeting were something of a bore.

They sat through them from a sense of business duty ." Always exening commanding influence wa the Big Boss, Al Capone, whose "genius for organization and ... profound bu iness ense" insured the uccess of the enterprises. During Capone's heyday-years of haky national pro perity followed by years of contraction-Americans continued their long struggle to come to terms with the power of the corporation. The new ways of understanding crime suggested, of course, new ways of understanding business.

The Capone legend offered Americans a subOpposite:The covergives an emphatically negativeanswer to this 1930s tabloid's question"Doescrimepay?" The allitude within its pages, however, is one offascination with the underworldratherthan of warning.

Chicago'sPublic Enemy

as

Shown by the

UNCENSORED Photos in this Book_

Iff>i 10R.Â¥ Of

AL (AeOMl ..J 19

I

HICAGO HISTOR.Ct-.L SOCIETY G32 I 'O!HH m :;.r=s oRN STi:EET

?heCostorCrime in Chica no bl/ E, Henry Barrett Chamberlin

Operating Director,

.Chicago

C1¡ime Commission

VERY motorist knows that the cost of his automobile includes the purchase price, the cost of mainteâ&#x20AC;˘ nance and repairs, insurance, taxes and a multitude of small expenditures which, in the aggregate, represent the actual cost that he pays for the privilege of possessing and running a car.

The cost of crime in the United States is not represented merely by the price paid for the maintenance of police and other guardians of law, the operation of the courts, the maintenance of prisons and other penal institutions; but is truly repre sented by all of these items plus the multitude of incidental penalties paid by the people because crime exists.

The most recent public estimate of the total cost of crime in the United States, as figured in these terms, is quoted by the Literary Digest at $10,000,000,000 a year. President William B. Joyce of the National Surety Company estimates the direct financial loss due to crime in the United States-losses paid by individuals, firms and corporations-at $3,000,000,000 annually.

Some notion of the intrinsic value represented by these figures may be had by comparison . The nations' annual crime los s, including both direct and indirect penaltie s paid for crime, is two and onehalf times the total ordinary receipts of the Government in 1923, three times the National budget for the same year, more than three times the Custom and mternal Revenue receipts and at least twelve time s the annual cost of the Anny and Navy. These figures have been assembled

by Edward H. Smith and appeared recently in Business, a magazine published in Detroit. They were gathered over a perio d of several years from authoritative sources.

Th e cost of crime so far exceeds the cost of education in the United States as to make comparisons invidious.

If this ten billion dollar estimate truly represents the total cost of crime for a nation of 120,000,000, and if, for the purpose of analysis, we consider Chicago as a city of 3,000,000 population, the annual actual cost of crime to this city is $279,000,000. The direct financial loss to the people of Chicago exceeds $90,000,000 per year.

20

Colond .Ji enry Ba"ett

E. L. Rickards, Manager of the Automobile Protective and Information Bureau, using the arbitrary figure of $650 per car for 2,631 cars stolen in Chicago in 1923, shows a total value of $1,447,050.

During the same period there were recovered 1,727 motor cars, valued at $604,450. The net financial loss due to the theft of motor car s in Chicago during 1923 wa s $842,600. There were 2,017 motor car s stolen in Chicago from Jan-

Chamberlin

uary 1 to July 16, 1924. On the same basis they are valued at $1,109,350. During the same period 1,397 motor cars valued at $488,960 were recovered, leaving a loss for that period of $620,400 on stolen motor cars in Chicago.

The irretrievable loss of stolen motor cars in Chicago during the past eighteen months therefore approximates $1,463,¡ 000. When it is remembered that many cars are stolen, not for their intrinsic

Chicago'sPublic Enemy

Opposite:Even serious,Jacl-filled articles,such as this one wrillen in 1924 by Hemy Barrett Chamberlin,head of the Chicago CrimeCommission,servedlo confirm Chicago'sreputationas a centerof gangs and crime.Above:Bugs Moran, seen here in court in 1930 (leather coal, secondji-om left,).The St. Valentine's Day Massacreeliminated seven members of Moran's gang.

versive set of metaphors for rethinking their business society.

Along with the story of Capone's rise in his own organization, conflicts with rival gang leaders formed a key element of his legend.

Popular accounts lavished great detail upon his struggles against a series of capable foes, especially the succe ive leaders of the rogue orth iders , Dion O'Banion , Hymie Weiss, and Bugs Moran. Central to each narrative episode wa a careful weighing of the strengths and weaknesses each enemy brought to the fight. In tracing Capone's victory-for he invariably possessed the advantage-his chroniclers offered parables about the path to success in modern society. The fundamental metaphorical le on was that busine s competition was a series of violent co nflicts , war waged by any available mea ns and ending only with total victory and mort al d e feat. Counterbalancing this bleak, potentially subversive lesson was a powerfully con ¡ervative message that succes came to thos e who des erved it. Merit alone und e rla y Capone ' supremacy in gang war that reportedly brought the death ¡ of five hundr ed le er men .

Gangland, and the society it modeled, inevitably rewarded the strongest competitor.

Here the underworld served a metaphorical function very similar to Darwinian biology in the late nineteenth century. Survival of the fittest , whether due to natural selection or machine guns, alternately justified celebrating the victors and damning the system.

The first of these conflicts, which pitted Capone and Torrio against Dion O'Banion , highlighted the necessity of rational, carefully moderated behavior in the new world of business. O 'Banion had risen to prominence on the strength of opportunism coupled with a "quick brain [and] iron nerve. " His first specialty was safe-blowing, for which he used "very little care and plenty of explosion." Early on he recognized the opportunities opened up by prohibition and made a name for himself hijacking the trucks of illegal beer and liquor distributors who had no recourse to the law: "\Vhat O'Banion lacked in care or comprehensive planning ," Sullivan wrote , "he made up in tark courage and the faculty of instantly seizing a chance." These were valuable attributes, essen21

Chicago History, Summer 1997

Big Shots' Death Dates in Gang War Jim Colosimo .. .... .

Dean O'Banion . .

Eddie Tancl. ..

Angelo Genna .. .. . . .

Michael Genna .

Anthony Genna .. ..

Samoots Amatuna ..

William H. McSwiggin) James Doherty 1 Thomas Duffy , Hymie Weiss} Pat Murray

. . . . . .. . May 11, .. .... November 19, . November 23, . .......

May 26, . .... June 23, . ... July 8, . . . November 13,

···

Schemer Drucci ... .. . .

Diamond Joe Esposito ..

Big Tim Murphy .

Tony Lombardo l Tony Ferrara / · Pasqualina Lolordo .

~;!;rk g~::~:::: ~ Al Weinshank

1920 1924 1924 1925 1925 1925 1925

April 17. 1925 . ... . October 11, 1926 .. . .... April 4, 1927 . . . . ... March 21, 1928 . . .. June 26, 1928 .. September 7, 1923 . ... . January 29. 1929

.. .. St. V a lentine 's Day John May ·· February 14, 1929 Adam Heyer Reinhardt Schwimmer James Clark John Scalise Albert Anselmi 1 . . . May 8, 1929 John Guinta l Joe Bertsche } Sam Pellar .. . ... May 30, 1930 Michael Quirk Jake Lingle ..... . . . . .. . . . .. . . . .. .. June 9. 1930 Jack Zuta.. .. .. .. . .. .. .. . .. ...... August 2. 1930 Joe Aiello . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . October 23, 1930

l

Jim Colosimo's name leads the list of "Big Shots· Death Dates, " which includes thi,tyfour gangland murders over the course of ten years.

tial to gangland success , and Capone and Torrio, who believed O'Banion "was capable of going far und er the direction of a cool, wise leader ," offered him an alliance and prepared to enjoy the fruits of ever-larger organization.

O'Banion accepted the offer but defects of temperament precluded long-term succe s, for he never could learn the value of controlling his temper or of weighing short-term expediency against long-term interests. In one wellpublicized incident, he shot a rival whom he happened to see standing nearby outside a crowded theater lobby. In another, he planned to murder policemen who detained a beer truck when they were not paid a small bribe. Torrio prevailed and paid the bribe. 'That was the difference between Torrio and O'Banion," Burns wrote. "A cool head made Torrio all powerful; a lack of it left O'Banion even at his best a supe rior sort of ruffian." "Where Dion was spontaneous and ruthless, " a pulp explained, "Capone

22

was deliberate and machinelike. " While Capone and Torrio built alliances , O 'Banion and his gang remained hijackers at heart, and the trucks of allies were no safer than those of enemies. "Torrio was a business man first and a gangster second ," another pulp exp lained .

"O 'Banion was a gangster. " It was the inability to cooperate, Capone 's chroniclers taught , that brought about O 'Banion 's death on 19 November 1924 . His fatal error, most accounts contended , was the sale of the Sieben Brewery to Torrio and Capone after O 'Banion learned that it was about to be raided by federal prohibition agents. Torrio and Capone realized that they had been double crossed and arranged a brilliant execution.

Audacity, bravery, and opportunism were not sufficient for success. Indeed, these qualities needed at times to be held in check in the highly organized modern society. As Sullivan summarized, "In a business requiring cold courage he was perhaps too coldly courageous." He failed to recognize that in the new economy immediate individual desires must frequently be suppressed in favor of the needs of larger groups. "Civilized existence, with its restraints and taboos , oppressed him ." Restraint , structure , and regularity were es ential.

Account& of O 'Banion ' successor as head of the North Side gang expanded on the perils of indiscipline . Louis "Two-Gun" Alterie was run out of town b)' more sensible peer after he publicly challenged O 'Banion 's killers to a gunfight at high noon on the bus y downtown corner of State and Madison. The incident urprisecl few aware of Alterie's previous claim to notoriety: "executing " the horse that had killed partner ails Morton in a riding accident. Such was not the stuff of greatness.

O'Banion protege Hymie Wei suffered from similar shortcomings. "H)'mie's chief fault," according to Does Crime Pay ?, "was that he was too fiery and spontaneous and a a result was always getting himself into hot water." Overly loyal to the memory of his slain leader and friend , Weiss "devoted less time to business than to revenge . .. [and] went to lengths of sheer bravado never before approached, " Sullivan wrote. "His relentlessness, " Burns wrote, wa untouched by motives of business expediency ." The ensuing conflict between

Chicago'sPublic Enemy

U111is1/tem rom1dlswith ll'illia111Scoll Stewo1/ in 19 32. Alterie was run out of town byfellow gang membersafter challenging Dion O'Bonio11 'skillen to a shoot-outal the comer of Stale and Marfoon /reels.

23

Chicago History, Summer 1997

Cook

County

(Chlca10)

Morgue

THE GANGSTER'S FINAL RESTING PLACE

The Morgue, one of the moregruesometabloidjJUblicalions, ajJjJea red i11 19 33 and featur{'(/jJhotograplzs of deadgangland victims and desaiptions of their 111urde1:~ .

24

Chicago's Public Enemy

Capone's gang and the orth Siders seemed to be one between two systems, the former mercenary and businesslike, the latter based on "friendship, loyalty and affection." Scoffing at calls for a truce, Weiss led a daylight raid of a dozen automobiles that swept down the main street of Cicero and riddled the Capone headquarters with weapons fire. In the same month he ambushed Torrio. According to The Morgue: The Gangster's Final Resting Place, a uniquely gruesome pulp, Weiss's "forays were not well planned, but were led purely by instinct, and were brutal and reckless in the extreme." He was "totally lacking in judgment, diplomacy, and finesse. " Torrio lived and the Cicero bombardment irtjured no one except an innocent woman walking on the street. Though courageous, intelligent, and charismatic, Weiss succumbed to passion that reduced his actions to mere blustering. The message of this ineffectiveness was clear, according to Does Crime Pay? "Hymie's failure to get Al proved he was not the man to rule the gangs in Chicago." Chance played no role in the determination of underworld leadership; order prevailed through the apparent chaos of gangland conflicts and merit inevitably triumphed.

In this instance, the validation of business methods came from the muzzles of machine guns, "Chicago typewriters " in aptly commercial slang. The Capone gang set up gun nests in the windows of a boarding house across the street from Weiss 's headquarters-the ame flower shop in which O'Banion had met his death. Accounts reveled in the Capone gang's efficiency.

They sat all day by the windows, smoking cigarette , their guns in their laps, waiting patiently, like jungle beasts watching a trail. Weiss had been tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

His executioners were ready. No more chance for life was left him than to the condemned murderer who stands on the trapdoor of a gallows with the rope around his neck. The tragedy was now only a question o[ time and opportunity.

Weis 's 11 October 1926 death in the inevitable hail of bullet -and hi admission into the pages of The Mo,gue-was the final resolution of an utterly fair competition.

Invented in 1918 by Coloneljolm Thom/Json, the submachinegun was originallyintendedfor use in trenchwarfare.Instead, it becamethe wea/Jonof choicein gang wa,fare, earning a numberof colo,ful nicknames,including "the Chicagotypewriter."

Chicago History, Summer 1997

lld1ll.ll6 of ¥J:.l.tu. •,ms." Welaa, Ck.Ul&a4'• m.o• t pert.ct -••:11tlon.

(1) "LltU• ~•" u Ile •n"'"4 W'lleD • DloD O' .. JW>L (I) LoOllilll' •onll OD ai.i.

• trff\, with wllir..

• llowiltl' 1.IJI• of ,..•ohm• .,._ 11N from rooJDi.nl' llOllH whioll •w.« "L1tll • ~ ""4 Illa ouaJreur &11 U..7 ..,.4 tb.l'ff other men "1.ll'bi.4 from aa ••to•obUe aa4 • -4 ....uru,,,.

Wei •• '• b.-quartor • ID. th• Wlll.am :r. llchoA •l4 Flower tlbop (3). IPb.~ph Ill n. low•r i.tt cona..- (4) allow • U.. oona..- trto ... of tb.• Bol;r •&m•C.th~..,.1 &f141rh -• i.i~ b;r • om • of th• bu.Jlet • wllich ala • .« ..,...._ (6) L.tr of Ul• lclJ.1...._ Tu

11.D••

un.,..,..,., of U..

w-.

(11]

As they waxed lyrical about especially well planned slayings, gangland's chroniclers offered a reconciliation of the values of efficiency and indiv idualism that might otherwise seem at odds. For the aesthetic of violence with which they evaluated the performance of various killers celebrated both efficiency and the expression of individual creativity. Marvelously precise, the Weiss killing was a "gala drama of murder." Masterful technique seemed to promise individual fulfillment as well as profe sional success. O'Banion and Weis , according to one pulp book, were "picturesque," but "it is quite plain that nothing either of them ever achieved in Gangland history possessed finish and perfection in the same degree as did the deft and artistic method by which they were eliminated and laid away." Faced with Weiss's blundering challenges, Capone was "the master killer," practicing "the fine art of murder."

Perhaps it was the terrible combination of audacity, efficiency, and creativity expressed in

26

This diagram from X Marks the Spot 1/fuslrate .1 the thorough stakeou/ of Hymil' ll'ein '.1 headquarters by CajJ011e' .1gang.

the St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 that so captured Americans' fa cinated attention.

According to one enthusiastic pulp, it "was without a doubt the most perfectly planned and executed deed ever heard oC" Several men in police unirorms entered a beer garage on Chicago's orth Clark Street and ordered the seven men in ide to line up with their hand against the wall. Under the impres ion that thi was a routine shakedown, the seven complied.

Then two men carrying machine guns entered the garage and killed them with several sweeps of fire. The killers left the garage impersonating police officers and suspects in custody and drove away in a car with police markings.

Their employer, Al Capone, wa far from the scene-as one pulp put it, "in his white pants at Miami." Like many another businessman, he

Chicago'sPublic Enemy from afar directed other men's use of powerful technology. The North Side gang was decimated. The crime, Pasley gushed, "was precision engineering. The five assassins might have been robots, wound up and synchronized, every movement clicking concurrently and reciprocally." According to Al Capone on the Spot, "the exquisite planning and execution of the master mind were again in evidence." A cascade of metaphors suggested that business and art need not be distinct. The killings were "murder dramatized and staged in the perfect production." They were "gang murder raised to one of the arts. This is execution under efficiency engineers. This is the handiwork of the master mind of murder."

The audacity behind acts like the St. Valentine's Day killings constituted a major source of fascination with the Chicago gangster. For all their attention to the self-control of careful businessmen like Torrio and Capone, writers gloried in the exploits of men who seemed willing to try anything, no matter how daring, and almost always ucceeded. Dion O'Banion's robbery or the Sibley warehouse, during which he substituted water for 1,750 barrels of bonded Kentucky whisky, was recounted with folkloric enthusiasm. Torrio and Capone's sweeping takeover or Cicero, including its

polling places, was de cribed, though somewhat more grimly, with a similar tone of awestruck appreciation. Central to the Capone legend was that when he embarked upon a mission, whether the corruption or a town or the murder of a rival, he never failed. Al Capone seemed marvelously capable of Routing law and authority, overcoming any obstacle, and imposing his will on a resistant world. As much as the invented underworld bulwarked the values of personal responsibility, it was the focus on particular criminal celebrities that ensured the individual would not be lost in "gangsterism," yet another impersonal social phenomenon. Perhaps this explains why so much of the recounting of Capone's exploits glistened with awestruck appreciation barely dulled by a coating or moralistic censure.

Living in an age of complexity and restraints, Americans were grateful to this exemplar or the individual triumphant.

In its portrayal of the ascendant individual the legend of Al Capone bore striking resemblance to that of another paragon of success: Charles Lindbergh. On the surface the public images of the two men could hardly have been His hat over hisfc1ce,Earl "Hymie" Weisslies dead on the sidewalkon October11, 1926.

27

Chicago History, Summer 1997

28

Chicago'sPublic Enemy more different. Indeed, the media reacted with bitter incredulity as their public paths crossed in 1932 when the imprisoned Capone offered to aid in the search for the hero's kidnapped infant son. Yet the two figures, each a product of the media, represented many of the same concerns. Like Capone, Lindbergh seemed a holdover of that endangered species, the self-sufficient man. His solo Right across the Atlantic in May 1927 was the act of a courageous "pioneer " who succeeded where more advantaged teams of lesser men had failed. Yet, as John W. Ward argues in his classic article on "The Meaning of Lindbergh's Flight," the public not only worshiped the self-sufficient "Lone Eagle" but also gloried in the technology and corporate productivity that made his feat possible. Al Capone performed equally wondrous, if less universally celebrated, acts of individual will and creativity while immersed in a corporate world whose bureaucratic organization and multilayered re traints on behavior might seem antithetical to individual autonomy. Both men proclaimed that the individualism of the traditional success mythology could be reconciled with the impersonal institutions of mass society. The individual and the organization need not be at odds .

For all it emphasis on violent episodes of gangland succession and competition, the Capone story was not limited to these events.

Americans were also fascinated with the personal life of Al Capone . ot only was he the bos of the Chicago underworld and mastermind of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre; he was also renowned as a devoted family man , an affable host, a connoisseur of urban nightlife, and tl1e owner of an Edenic Miami estate. These other roles were fundamental to Capone's status as a compelling cultural symbol. For in lifestyle as in business, he instructively negotiated difficult social terrain traversed by millions of urban Americans. Here too it was Capone's ironic adherence to accepted tandarcls of conduct, rather than his transgressions, that most captivated his public audience .

Pallbearers carry the flower-Laden casket of Hymie Weiss.

Chicago staged its first elaborate ganglandfun eral for Big Jim Colosimo in 1920. By the time of Weiss' death in 1926, it had become a well-established ritual.

29

Chicago History, Summer 1997

A large portion of the Capone story concerned his identity as a voracious consumer-as one writer put it, "perhaps the greatest spender in gangland history." He was celebrated as the owner of hundreds of fine suits, a thirtythousand-dollar limousine, and an eleven-carat diamond ring . Widely reproduced photographs showed the half-million-dollar Florida estate and an appropriately relaxed, ilk-robed Capone fishing from the deck of his yacht.

Capone personified the pleasure, excitement, and self-transformation that the consumer society promised. His inventors at once offered an eager audience vicarious thrills and an invitation to consider the meanings of consumption in their own lives.

Among the central messages of the Capone story was that consumption could bring remarkable individual transformations. In his progression from tasteless hoodlum to fashion template, Capone spanned the stylistic gap earlier defined by Colosimo and Torrio. Accounts of the hero's impoverished early lire, unlike those in conventional success stories, did not focus on how hardship had forged an unyielding character. Instead, the salient reature of Capone's background was its lack of refined consumption. His nickname upon arrival in Chicago, according to one writer, was "Boxcar Tony," the first part a reference either to his mode of travel or to the large, elated, yellow-buttoned shoes he wore, and the second a denigrating rhyme upon the un-Americanized version of his surname, Caponi. In his "loud clothes, red neckties, gaudy shirts, and much flashy jewelry," wrote Burns, the young Capone "might have been mistaken for a prosperou race-track tout or tin-horn gambler." The Capone who made "a lowly debut into the Chicago underworld ... wa ostensibly just one of the bourgeoisie; loud of dress, free of profanity; ... a vulgar per on." But people changed with their clothes, and soon Capone had landed in the aristocracy of consumption.

As hinted by Pasley's odd use ofHbourgeoisie," social categories were remarkably fluid.

Capone's rise confirmed that modern commerThe gory St. Valentine'sDay Massacrein 1929 was widely believedlo be the work of the Ca/Jonegang, though Capone himselfwas in Floridaat the lime of the shootings.

30

Chicago'sPublic Enemy

31

Chicago Hi story, Summ er 1997

¡old Al Capone

Plot

Lindbergh

ROM the baffling hodge-podge of clues, accusations, incriminations and wild guesses that has characterized the Lindbergh mystery for two and a half years, recently emerged a story which caused Federal investigators to turn to still another possibility in their relentless search for the kidnapers.

This new and amazing accusation was made by John Pawelczyek , Illinois convict serving a fourteen-year term for manslaughter , who informed Warden Frank Whipp that Al Capone, former overlord of Chicago 's underworld, and Frank Nash, outlaw killed in the Kansas City Union Station massacre in 1933, plannedthe kidnaping. The object of the plot, according to Pawelczyek , was to gain sympathy and perhap s freedom for Capone , then under sentence for income tax evasion.

It will be recalled that during the early days of the Lindbergh investigation , Capone offered to use his influence in gangdom to locate and return Baby Lindbergh to the grief- stricken parents . Following thi s line, the Tllinois convi~tâ&#x20AC;˘s statement has it that Capone actually aided in arranging the kidnap plot in ocder to give himself an opportunity to aid in the child's return on the chance that such "service " would help his fight again st the tenyear Federal prison term he then faced and is now serving.

Pawelczvek 's story to Warden Whip p furth er stated that Nash : with whom he became acquainted while serving a term in Leavenworth following the Lindbergh snatching, was one of the actual kidnapers and confided in him some of the details of the plot by means of a secret code including symbols found on the Lindb erg h ran som notes.

And ace sleuths of the Department of Ju stice, overlooking no possibility in their effort s to solve the outstanding mystery of the century , ar e runnin g down the convict's stor y in the hope that it may prove the key to the baffling crime riddle .

FRANK NASH

Kldnaplng?

F

AL CAPONE

Above: Both Capone and aviator Charles Lindbe1gh were larger-than-lifefigures during this era. In 193 2, Caponeoffered to help fin d the kidnajJped Lindbe1gh baby; this October 1934 article in Startli ng Detective Adve n tures suggests that Caponemight have beeninvolved in the crimeitself.Below:Caponerelaxeswith friends in ChicagoHeightsin 1929.

32

Chicago'sPublic Enemy cial society awarded to the worthy the chance to remake themselves. Any person, even from the lowest stratum, had the opportunity to earn the purchasable pleasures that marked success in modern ociety.

Moreover, Capone's inventors taught that it was high living, perhaps even more than audacious deeds or unparalleled skills, that brought recognition. The yacht and Miami estate were impressive stages for the display of power and achievement. Confirmation of Capone's exalted status came from the reported reactions of ordinary men and women who encountered him during his rituals of consumption. Chicagoans craned their necks to see his limousine pass by on warm summer evenings. Theatergoers devoted their attention to him when he appeared in all his glory in their midst. Baseball fans noted with pleasure his attendance in a frontrow seat at Wrigley Field. His appearance at a heavyweight championship fight in Miami overshadowed a sizable contingent of movie stars and other entertainers. Socialites clamored for invitations to his parties. Extravagant consumption, Capone demonstrated, attracted the public attention that constituted greatness. The spender was the individual singled out from, and by, the crowd.

Writers often offered a fundamentally conservative view that individual identit y and fulfillment could be achieved through adherence to the dictate of stylish consumption embraced

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0 HO, HUM! A RICH MAN RELAXES FROM CARE 0

"The Big Shot" relaxes on his yacht, smoking a cigar whiledeep-seafishing.

by the dominant American culture. The Big Shot was a conformist. Among his closetful of fine suits, according to Enright, "not one of them is of conspicuous weave or of a cut that would attract attention except for its exce llence. " His appearance had become "for the most part ... that of the perfectly groomed business man. " Similarly, Capone developed the smooth behavior that conventionally accompanied stylish consumption. No longer a vulgar boor, he exuded the suavity appropriate to his new status. He mastered the fine art of "personality. " According to Pasley, he became "a reverent handshaker, with an agreeable, well-nigh ingratiating smile, baring a gleaming expanse of dental ivory ; a facile conversationalist; fluent as to topics of the turf , the ring, the stage, the gridiron, and the baseball field." In an oddly conservative fashion, writers upheld a Babbitt-like gangster as a model of fulfillment in the culture of consumption.

Nevertheless, the Capone legend expressed considerable unease with the realm of super33

ChicagoHistmy, Summer 1997 ficial images that modern society had created.

Style allowed the successful person to present a front dangerously at odds with his or her true nature. Such potential disingenuousness was the point of Pasley's recounting of Capone's introduction to polished manners at the hands of John Torrio. When he arrived in Chicago Capone's nature was evident in his tasteless clothes, rough manners, and vulgar speech.

But "the urbane Torrio" "instructed him in the social graces and in the art of dissembling to conceal one's thoughts. He taught him the commercial value of the bland smile and the ready handshake. " Several writers, grappling with these distortion , contended that they had difficulty imagining the personable Capone as a cold-hearted killer. The incongruity of image and essence was clear in a pulp's list of highlights in Capone's life. Ranging from "Has a palatial estate at Palm Island, Miami Beach Florida" and ''Is famed as a host " to "Employs gangland's most skilled machine-gunners " and "Won a ten-year war of gangs that cost 500 lives," the list te tified to Capone's frighteningly convincing facade. So did two facing pages of photographs in another pulp , Does CrimePay? One page featured him as a man of leisure with a silk robe and a large cigar, fishing from the deck of his yacht. On the next page , two grisly pictures showed some of his murdered enemies. Symbolized by the expensivelooking "radio" in Capone's apartment that detectives discovered to be a hollow storage space for handguns, the veneer of style seemed to cover the u-uth.

Many of the non-business aspects of Capone's life that received greatest attention clustered around the theme of morality. Americans were fascinated with the soul of the racketeer. The Chicago mythologists relished biographical details that might seem irrelevant to the stories of violent criminal enu-epreneurs: acts of charity, home life, small manifestations of basic human decency. Here, as in so many other aspects of their lives, Capone and his peers defied expectations. Perhaps it was the audience's involvement in the "revolution in This Chicago Daily NewsplwlograjJhfrom 1931 shows Al Caponeenjoyinga White Sox game at ComiskeyPark, along with hundredsof ordinmy Chicagoans.

34

manners and morals " discerned by Frederick Lewis Allen and millions of other Capone contemporaries that made the gangster's erratic moral compass so compelling. The underworld dramatized a generalized moral inconsistency.

The putative generosity of the Chicago gangster received regular examination for the surprising revelations it offered about his moral nature. Though some writers discounted good deeds as self-serving public relations stunts, most accepted them as genuine. "Having known adversity," O'Banion supported widows, kept old people out of the poorhouse, and funded a crippled child's trip to the Mayo Clinic, Burns

Chicago'sPublic Enemy reported. He "relieved distress wherever he found it" and could often be seen "dropping in at tenements and hovels to make poor people happy with his gifts." Capone received considerable good press for similar philanthropic acts, among them paying the medical bills of a woman injured in an attack on him. In some accounts he came across as a candidate for beatification. His "heart is as big as all outdoors, " Pasley wrote; his "way through life has been strewn with deeds of kindness for the sick and needy. " During the early years of the Depression, his soup kitchens and gifts of coal, clothing, and groceries won appreciative attention. "His

generosity," wrote Burns, "was princely, and his heart warmed and his purse opened to anyone in disU"ess,white or black,Jew or Gentile."

Discussions of these acts of generosity carried important messages. Like attention to the gangster's conventional spending habits and business techniques, they worked to compress the distance between the lawbreaker and the upstanding citizen, the "deviant" and the "normal." A] Capone and his peers were not freaks in whom few observers could ee anything of themselves. Instead, the Chicago gang ter was an ambiguous figure, riven with contradictions. In his fundamental make-up

35

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1997 he mirrored his audience, as no less an authority on normal psychology than Dale Carnegie understood when he used Capone as one of many exemplars of basic human nature. Like Washington, Lincoln , and the Rooseve lts, the mobster was al once a greal and representative man. That this exemplary bad man mixed his violence with acts of charity encouraged his audience to confront the inseparability of good and evil. For if Al Capone had such a capacity for good, surely his audience shared at leasl some of his capacity for evil.

It was in the reported domestic lives of the Ch icago gangsters that their ambiguous moral tatus was most striking. Some earned reputations for debauchery and the corruption of innocent women. But most of the gang chiefs reportedly chose to live quiet home lives arranged along the lines of conventional propriety. Killers and panderers on the job, at

home they headed the harmonious families popularly believed to be the embattled bulwarks of traditional morality. One consequence was to bring the gang leaders closer to audience members whose lives more or less conformed to conventional standards. Another was to encourage audiences to ponder the fracturing of ident ity that characterized urban social life. The violent, home-loving gangster epitomized Lhe century-long differentiation of distinct spheres of work, recreation, and home life. He showed how a person cou ld conslrucL extraordinarily different lives in the various worlds he or he inhabited.

The first example in the Chicago narrative of surprising domestic mora lity was Jim Colosimo. His businesses as pimp and drug This ad for a series in the London Sunday Chronicle i11 1931 calls Capone "the 1110s/ amazing 111a11in the world" and {/.\ks, '>l111nicaStr111d sj or This- lflould Britain'.?"

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Chicago'sPublic Enemy seller, among others, might have been taken as evidence of utter ruin. So too his first marriage-to a brothel-keeper . But the underworld chroniclers presented Colosimo's love affair with Dale Winter, a singer in his cabaret, as evidence of latent decency. Winter, who came to the city hoping to sing in musical theater, was a model of feminine purity. "She neither drank nor smoked," Burns wrote; "No indelicate word ever passed her lips. No whisper of scandal touched her." She ignored a multitude of debauched suitors and after singing-garbed "in simple, shimmering white, a red rose across her bosom"-went home every night to her mother. Somehow "this Mona Lisa of the Red Lights" fell in love with her employer and they married. "Colosimo was in love with her and, for the first time in his life, decent impulses began to stir in his curious and contradictory nature," a pulp explained; "she seemed to renovate Colosimo himself. More and more absorbed did Colosimo become in his love for the tiny flower ofa woman." "Rooted in bottom slime as he was," Burns mused, Colosimo nevertheless "had many kindly human qualitiescharily, open-handed generosity to those in distress and poverty, a capacity for loyal friendships .... Deep within him a tiny spark of fine manhood survived." "Every decent trait in this heretofore vicious and unsentimental underworld leader was brought to the fore," Sullivan wrote . Criminal though he was, he retained the moral ense lo respond to a virtuous woman.

Fiuingly, Colosimo's up-to-date successors more fully arranged their lives along the modern pattern of distinct spheres. Their fickle morality allowed them to construct radically fragmented lives. Torrio's love for quiet evenings at home received regular notice. As a child Dion O'Banion had served as an altar boy and sung in the choir at Holy ame Cathedral, and he remained a devout Catholic. He was also a cold-hearted killer and was eventually shot down in his 0ower shop across the street from Holy Name. A pulp reveled in the contra ts: "Ue loved flowers. He loved killing. He would have nothing to do with traffic in women and would not touch alcohol in any form."

Widely reproduced wedding photographs presented the gangster as a beaming model of clome~tic bliss. "Ilis domestic life with his wife

Holy Name Cathedral, where gangster Dion O'Banion erved as an altar boy and sang in the choir. Years later, he was gunned down in the shadow of the cathedral, across the street in the flower shop that served as his headquarters.

was the life of a perfect middle-class florist," a Literary Digest article commented after his death. Tinkering with the family radio and player-piano were his favorite pastimes. His grieving widow presented him as "not a man to run around nights." "It i strange the peculiar twists that can find lodgment in a character," Sullivan mused; "O'Banion, vengeful, unfeeling and desperate in the dangerous field in which he moved, was a genuine home lover when not active in his outlawed affairs."

It was Al Capone who best exemplified the multiplicity of lives one might lead in modern society. Photograph of the modest two-flat where he lived with his wife, son, mother, sister, and two brothers appeared regularly in pulps and drew attention to his devotion to family life. Fred Pa ley, like others, played up the considerable irony: He who i editorialized as "by common repute and common police knowledge head of a murderous gang," selected for his domestic fireside a locality

37

Chicago Histmy , Swmner 1997

in Chicago,Caponelived at 7244 South Prairie Avenue (seenhere in 1930). This modes/luâ&#x20AC;˘o-flatof the ty/11'inhabitedb)' thousandsof Chicagoanscontrastedsharplywith his palatial Floridaestate.

38

Chicago'sPublic Enemy securely remote from the scene of his professional activities. No gang shootings occur hereabouts. No aliens infest iL.There are no alky-cookers, no gamblingjoints, no blind pigs. Life is tranquil, orderly, reposeful. It is a nine o'clock neighborhood-a refuge to which the tired business man may repair, certain of soothing easement from all . . . care.

The Capones were good neighbors, and Al enjoyed nothing more than "puttering about in carpet slippers," fiddling with the radio, and playing with his son, whom he professed to "idolize." Capone reportedly came home every evening for dinner and spent most of his evenings in a favorite easy chair with a cigar.

Sentimental music brought tears to bis eyes. So far did this benign domesticity extend that, according to Ti11te,the Big Shot was wearing a pink apron and carrying a pan of spaghetti when he greeted reporters at his home. Most accounts included Capone's fervent wish that he could retire from the rackets; only the certainty that enemies would kill him kept him from a life of relaxation. Otherwise he "would be the happiest man in the world," free to devote himself to the family that he loved.

From such a villain even the most sanctimonious readers might have had a difficult time distinguishing themselves.

That Americans were intrigued by this chasm between domestic and professional identities explains the regular inclusion of an otherwise irrelevant episode in the life story of the nation's greatest criminal. A couple who rented out their Florida estate while they went on a Egyptian tour discovered that the Capone family, using a front, had become the tenants, and they stee led themselves for the wreckage they would discover upon their return. But once again the mobster and his family defied expectations. Not only was the house in perfect order; Capone had left as a gift the many settings of silverware and china he had purchased to augment the owners' supply. When the couple received a large telephone bill for calls to Chicago, they thought it a sma ll price to pay for the sale return of their home. That afternoon, however, Capone's wife Mae-"a quiet liule woman in the simplest of clothe "appeared at their front door with a thousand dollar bill to cover the charges. The master-

Alphonse ("Scarface Al") Capone Rules Chicago's underworld.

Is 34 years old, a husband and father.

Is a multimillionaire.

Has a gang of 500, allied with thousands.

Controls sale of beer and liquor in Chicago.

Has direct tie-ups with other big city gangs .

Has been called "Chicago's most influential man ."

Employs gangland's most skilled machine-gunne,s.

Won a ten-year war of gangs that cost 500 lives.

Was "broke" ten years ago.

Was a product of New York gangs.

Dominates the $300,000,000-a-year liquor, vice, gambling traffic in Chicago.

Is called The Big Fellow by gangland.

Has an armor-plated, bullet-proof -glassed automobile.

Is under heavy bodyguard, day and night.

Has a palatial estate at Palm Island, Miami Beach, Florida.

Is famed as a host.

The /1ublic's simultaneous attraction and repulsion to Capone is evident in this list from The Life of Al Capone in Pictures, which jumps from his role as liusband and father to his employment of "gangland's most skilled machine-gunners ."

mind of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre was a perfectly responsible, well-mannered tenant.

A 1929 New York Times feature, "Chicago in ew War Against Gang Rule," ended with a discussion of the victims of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which, though it had occurred only ten days earl ier, had already come to symbolize the depredations of Chicago gang land .

Unlike most writers, who elaborated upon the brilliance of the killers, reporter R. L. Duffus wrote about the seven dead men. "The identi ties of the men killed," he wrote, "throw a glaring light on what a gang is like." By omitting the names of the victims he suggested that each was representative of a broad type. Three were longtime professional criminals with records. 'They lived in sporting hotels and led a fast life." Another "was, or seemed to be, a respectable married man with a family who had probably been drawn into the circle" to perform a specific task that required an innocentlooking outsider. The fifth victim, probably "a fashionable bootlegger," was "the son of a respectable widowed mother." Another was a mechanic, "uneducated and obscure." The final victim was an optometrist, "a young hanger-on" from a good family. "Except the first three," Duffu wrote, "the group had noth in g in common but the money-mak ing enterprise in which they were jointly engaged. They came from widely different homes, moved in widely different grades and kinds of society and cou ld 39

Chicago History, Summer 1997

not have been in any sense companions." Complex in background, they were probably also complex in character. "There are all kinds of gangsters, and Chicago knows them all," Duffus wrote; "Yet it is hard to find the human wolf of criminal fiction-at least, it is hard to find a gunman who acts the part twenty-four hours a day." The only sure conclusion to be drawn from "this assortment of humanity" was that "the amazing contradictions of human nature" defied easy explanations.

The article typified Americans' use of Al Capone and his peers. Ultimately, the underworld demanded attention not so much for its uniqueness as for its representativeness. The gangster's trappings of difference served not to set him apart but to focus attention on him as an outstanding member of the urban crowd. In Duffus's account, the violent deaths of seven formerly obscure men told of the bewildering fragmentation of identity possible in the modern city. For others, Capone and his dead enemies in the Clark Street garage highlighted the promises and perils of a competitive, highly organized, urban consumer society. In all these accounts, the true subject of the inventors of the gangster was human behavior in a new urban environment.

ILLUSTRATIONS 4, CHS, ICHi-17619; 6 left, from 77ieLife of Al Capone in Pictures! and Chicago's Gang Wars ( 1931 ), CHS Library; 6 right, from Al Capone on the Spot: Inside Story of the Master Criminal (1931 ), CHS Library; 7 left, from "Gangster/and:" Het Leven Van Al Ca/Jone (n.d.), CHS Library; 7 right, from Chicago: Ville du Crime (1931), CHS Library; 8, CHS Prints and Photograph Collection; 9, from Collier's, April 20, 1929, in Scrapbook of Clippings, Letters, and Reports of Chicago Crime Associations and Committees (n.d.), CHS Library; I 0, from The Life of Al Capone in Pictures . .. (1931), CHS Library; 11, from Chicago: Greatest Advertised City in the World Not the Wickedest

( 1929), CHS Library; 12 top, CHS, D -63234; 12 bottom and 13 top, from Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1920, CHS Library; 13 inset, courtesy Lake County (IL) Museum, Curt Teich Postcard Archives, A42386; 14, CHS, D -A-1060; 15 top, CHS, ICHi24112; 15 bottom, CHS, ICHi-03075; 16, CHS, ICHi-14414; 19, from Does Grinie Pay? No.1 (c. 1931), CHS Library; 20, from The Cost of Crime in Chicago 40

(1924), CHS Library; 21, CHS, D -093634; 22, from 771eLife of Al Ca/Jonein Pictures ... ( 1931 ), CHS Library; 23, CHS, D 1-098133; 24, from The Morgue: The Gangster's Final Resting Place (1933), CHS Library; 25, Thompson submachine gun, comtesy of the American Police Cemer and Museum, Chicago, IL; 26, from X Marks the Spot ( I 930), CHS Library; 27, CHS, ICHi-03087; 28-29, CHS, DN-082103; 30---31,CHS, ICHi-14406, 32 top, from Crime Stories of Chicago Collected from Detective Magazines

Chicago'sPublic Enemy

, (und ated scrapboo k), CHS Lib ra ry; 32 bo ttom , CHS, ICHi-22850; 33 top, from The Life of Al Capone in Pictures. .. (193 1), CJIS Libi-ary; 33 bottom, from The Trial of Al Capone ( 1933), CHS Libra ry; 34-35, CHS, DN-097346; 36, from London Sunday Chronicle ad reprin ted in the ChicagoDaily Times, Febll..lary 16, 1931, Chicago Public Library; 37, CHS, lCHi- 19 192; 38, CH , DN-09 1355; 39, from The Life of Al Capone in Pictures ... ( 193 1), CII S Libra 11¡; 40-41, CHS, D -87707

Policeremovethe bodiesfrom the Clark Street garage that held the St. Valentine'sDay J\lassacre.This event exemjJlified both the most murderousand most businesslikeaspects of gangland crimeduring jJrohibition .

41

In 1994, when the Maxwell Street Market closed and was relocated, many Chicagoans mourned the end of a great street market, a city tradition reaching back over a century.

The market originated as a necessity, a place where residents of the Near West Side neighborhood shopped for their food and clothing. By the 1950s, when the photographs on the following pages were taken, it had also become a tourist attraction, which one Chicago reporter claimed was at the top of every visitor's list of things to do in the city.

The market began small, but quickly mushroomed in size and importance to the neighborhood. As the population of the Near West Side neighborhood soared, especially with the influx of Jewish immigrants between 1880 and 1900, peddlers responded by selling goods from two-wheeled pushcarts on Jefferson Street .

That street became so congested that the peddlers spilled over onto Maxwell Street, and, in 1912, the city of Chicago passed an ordinance officially recognizing the Maxwell Street Market.

The market was an integral part of life for the neighborhood's residents . As Irving Cutler notes in The Jews of Chicago : "The great outdoor 42

market was filled with people from dawn till past dark.

Jewish merchants matched wits not only with other Jews but also with Poles, Lithuanians, Galicians, Russians, Bohemians, and others who felt much more at ease in the familiar ghetto market than in department stores ."

As residents moved to other locations in the city and suburbs, the market changed to serve new residents. By the early 1950s, many people lamented that Maxwell Street was not what it used to be.

According to a 1954 Chicago magazine article, Maxwell

Street at this time was a combination of the old and the new . Stores continued to rely on "pullers," employees who had often physically forced customers into stores . Now, however, this employee was called an "outside solicitor" and "his manner and method [were] more discreet ." Sam Kogan, one of this new breed, recognized the need to adapt: "You've got to have a gentle technique now, with no grabbing of people."

Tourism continued to gain importance. Morris Gabel, head of the Maxwell Street Merchants Association in the

early 1950s, commented that tourists expected "old-time" atmosphere but "there is less bombast today than there used to be ." Improving the street to attract more tourists was a great concern . The association, for example, lobbied to install street lights similar to those on State Street. In addition, parking-or the lack of it-was the number-one concern of both merchants and shoppers during the 1950s.

On Sundays, as many as seventy thousand shoppers poured into the market, and, according to the Chicago magazine article, "Maxwell

Street never disappoints them . ... Nobody is ever really a stranger on the street ." Not everyone, however, was entirely happy with the Maxwell Street of the 1950s. According to Lloyd Wendt, many people felt that "Maxwell St. has lost its zest by growing too respectable."

Fascinated by the lively street market and its people, Jerome Joseph, a student at the Illinois Institute of Technology, visited the Maxwell Street Market several times in 1950-51 to capture its distinctive atmosphere on film. He recorded the street crowds as well as the faces of

the individuals who worked and shopped at the market.

Joseph later graduated from the University of California in Los Angeles and went on to a distinguished career in documentary motion picture production. In 1995, the Chicago Historical Society purchased his collection of Maxwell Street photographs, some of which appear on the following pages. The Jerome Joseph Collection preserves for future generations of Chicagoans an era in the long history of one of the city's-and the country's -most well-known street markets.

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Memory's Landscape Statues and memorials built in Chicago in the wake of the Civil War helped to heal animosity between returning veterans and the rapidly changing city.

Theodore

J. Karamanski

On August 28, 1968, antiwar demonstrators in Chicago, in an effort to discredit the Democratic National Convention and emban¡a the city's political establishment, climbed atop the bronze equestrian statue of John A. Logan at the south end of Grant Park. They had selected their perch due to convenience-Logan's statue happened to be located across the street from the convention headquarters hotel-but they scarcely could have chosen a more ironic venue from which to wave the orth Vietnamese Aag and shout their resistance to military service. Logan was known to his generation as the Great Volunteer, and he was seen as emblematic of the potent military power of America's civilian masses. The sculptor of the statue, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, hoped it would represent the "very incarnation of the warlike spirit."

While the Logan statue may have been reduced to serving as a mere prop in the Vietnam War 's turbulent homefront, it had played an important role reconciling an earlier generation of Chicagoans to the legacy of another divisive war. The statues and memorials built in the wake of the Civil War were pan of a process of private mourning as well as elements in elaborate civic rituals. They helped to reunite homefront and battlefield, to heal divisions between North and South, to validate Chicago 's frantic urban growth, and to confirm the city's place in American history.

"Every war," historian Gerald Linderman has noted, "begins as one war and becomes two." The soldier and the society that he represents begin the conflict sharing the same values and experiences, but once a war has begun, the Theodorej. Karamanski is j1rofessorof hist01yat Loyola UniversityChicago.

54

homefront and the soldier rapidly grow apart.

Chicago during the Civil v\lar became a teeming, crime-ridden, industrial city, tripling in population and factories during the 1860s.

Likewise, returning soldiers were not the same bright-eyed lads who marched off in 1861 and 1862. Victorian notions or honorable death, manly combat, and Christian oldiering were blasted by the realities of industrial warfare and the horrors of nineteenth-centur y field hospitals. Man y volunteer soldiers, away from their homes for years, had grown biller and resentful of contemporaries who had avoided ervice .

They had little patience for the heroic platitudes offered by stay-at-home politicians. The fact that they were honored with a parade in Washington , D.C., and had been victoriou in battle did not shield returning Civil \Var soldiers from feeling alienated when they returned home. It took the remaining years of the nineteenth century for the worlds of the homefront and the battlefield to slowly come together once more.

Soldiers felt most alienated in the immediate aftermath of the war. "There was always plenty of work and wages at the rear," one Chicago veteran remarked, "a nd plenty of room at the front. " At the ame time, some members of the bu iness community believed that many soldiers had spent the bulk of the war loafing about camp. Under such circumstances, minor incidents could trigger Yiolent outbreaks. In the summer of 1865, police officers ordered a regiment of returning troops off the sidewalk and into the muddy street.

The insulted soldiers got their revenge a few nights later when they crashed a North Side beer garden, causing patrons to Aee in panic.

"It was fun to see them run from those bayonets, " a soldier noted with satisfaction. When

De111011s/rali11g i11Jim1/ of the DemocraticNalio11alC01wentionhotel in 1968, an rmliwarJ1rotesler struggleswith police as he lne.1 lo di111b a ,tatue built in honor o{Civil War herojoh11A. Logan.

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Chicago History, Summer 1997 In a monument sculptedbyfamed artistAugustus Saint-Gaudensin 1897 and dedicatedin Grant Park, Generaljohn A. Logan rallieshis troopsto defend theflag . Undated photographby W. T. Barnum.

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the mayor, John Rice, protested against such behavior to General Joseph Hooker , the senior military man in the city, "Fighting Joe " warned Chicago authorities to back off before the soldiers "burn down your city."

For soldiers from all parts of Illinois, Chicago symbolized both copperheadism (a Republican label for those who opposed Lincoln's war goals) and wartime profiteering . A central Illinois infantryman described Chicago as "a city that has grown rich while our families and every interest clear has been suffering."

The 1864 Democratic Convention, in which George McClellen was nominated to run

Memory'sLandscaj1e against Lincoln, had led to Chicago being branded as a hotbed of copperheadism.

Returning soldiers also hated Wilbur Storey, the outspoken editor of the ChicagoTimes and a prominent Lincoln critic. On one occasion three veterans tried to ambush the editor in his own composing room. "Brimming over with lofty patriotism and poor whiskey," a Chicago Timesreporter later recounted, they demanded to see the editor. Storey, however, swept in behind the men. He threw the ringleader out a closed window, and the other two fled.

The anger and bitterness of Civil War soldiers did not extend to their families and friends, and this softened the veterans ' reintegration into society. The fact that they were victorious allowed each veteran to assume a heroic pose; however, many were not willing to do so in the immediate aftermath of the war. "They sought their homes with joyful hearts and tuneful voices," John A. Logan later recalled.

"There were no tears of mourning over the cast-off trappings and habiliments of strife. The hand grown cunning in the use of arms applied itself to the axe, the hammer, the loom and spade." Some veterans were so eager to put their army experience behind them that they did not even wear their uniforms home from the front.

The first efforts to memorialize the war in Chicago reflected the veterans ' desire to remember fallen comrades and to put the war behind them. The first Decoration Day in 1867 simply consisted of army officers and families of fallen soldiers visiting cemeteries and placing flowers on the graves, a private remembrance rather than a public ceremony.

Decoration Day began to take on a more public function in 1870 when a memorial was dedicated to the city's war dead in Ro ehill Cemetery. Leonard Volk , one of the city's leading sculptors, designed the General Military Monument to the dead of Chicago and Cook County , which dominates the entrance to Rosehill Cemetery . A second monument to a volunteer artillery company was also dedicated that Decoration Day at the cemetery . The dedication ceremonies were strikingly apolitical.

Although five thousand people crowded into the cemetery for the occasion , no politicians participated in either ceremon y. The fact that

john A. Logan in 1865. An Illinois congressman who resigned his seal lojoin the Union army, Logan was one of the slate's most imJJOrl anl Civil Warfigures.

the monuments were built in a cemetery, not on public space, also reflects the private nature of the memorial process. Even the funds for the monuments were raised privately, with the Board of Trade donating the most money.

The muted, somber style of the monuments indicates the mood of Chicago veterans after the war. The monument to the artillery company, Bridges Battery, is the more intricate of the two. It consists of an elaborately decorated base inscribed with the names of the slain and the battles in which the unit participated , topped by an allegorical tatue representing Hope. The General Military Monument is an octagonal column forty feet high with a statue of a standard-bearer on its top. Each of the monuments follows classical lines and represents no departure from prewar mortuary sculpture. While Leonard Yolk's realistic statue of the standard-bearer suggests a certain glori57

Chicago History, Summer 1997

'

fication of the warrior , the soldier stands with weapons sheathed and flag furled. The general sentiment emerging from both monuments is one of loss and mourning.

A sense of unreconciled grief pervades the Civil War monuments built in Chicago throughout the 1870s. Guilt, regret, and sorrow still dominated the memory of the war for veterans and for families of the four thousand Cook County men killed . The monument to Battery A of the First Illinois Light Artillery , erected in Rosehill Cemetery in 1874 , is the most impressive of the immediate postwar period. Upon a dais with the names of the unit 's dead stands a cannon draped in mourning with the American Aag. The image is both haunting and ambiguous. It reflects the sentiments of men with deep emotions about the meaning of the war, an experience past but not forgotten.

Early attempts to organize veterans into political and social blocs were not particularly successful. The Cook County Republican ticket for 1867 won easily with nearly half of the slate Union veterans, but those candidates did not advocate a more patriotic or radical line than other Republicans, nor did they go out of their way to flaunt their veteran status .

By 1866, Chicago had two chapters of the Grand Army of the Republic, a veterans' organization founded in central Illinois. Within two years, however, both chapters were nearly defunct as dues went unpaid and attendance at meetings languished.

Rather than dwelling on the past, Chicagoans returning from the Civil War looked to the future with the expectation of bettering themselves. After years of sacrifice, they wanted a share of the good life. Many privates enrolled in commercial colleges in an effort to enter the ranks of downtown business clerks. Other veterans, particularly officers, entered the rapidly growing field of insurance.

The growth of heavy manufacturing had necessitated new measures to protect capital investment. By 1870, the number of insurance agents Somber guardian of the dead, a standard-b earer by Leonard Volk keeps watch from the top of the General Military Monum ent in Rosehill Cemetery. Photograph by David Wendell, 1993.

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Memory's Landscape

Above: Gurdon Hubbard (in an undated photograph by Alexander Hesler) enlisted at age sixty-two. Below: The rnonurnent to Chicago's BatteryA, erected in 1874.

in Chicago had doubled, and the number of companies had grown almost fourfold since the beginning of the war.

"Our boys ," recalled a volunteer from Battery A, "took up the new struggle of life, for fame and for fortune, each in his own sphere."

Yet success in war did not necessarily lead to success in the economy. During the 1870 , many veterans came to realize that economic aspirations deferred in their you th might never be realized in the new economy. "I was through the war," an Irish veteran told a group of striking workers in 1877. "I fought for the big bugs-the capitalists-and many of you have done the same . And what is our reward now? What have the capitalists done for us?" The nationalizing and industria lizing force of the Civil War had brought a new elite to the fore of the Chicago business community.

The leaders of postwar Chicago were not veterans of the war. Men such as Philip Danforth Armour, Marshall Field, Richard Crane, George Pullman , and Potter Palmer had stayed home and established their fortunes,

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Rising industrialistsGeo1gePullman (abovelefl, in an undateddaguerreotype)and Poller Palmer (below, in an 1868 photograph byJohn Garbutt)stayed on the homefront in Chicagoduring the war to make theirfortunes. In contrast, many members of established families, such as WilliamDe Wolf (aboveright),joined the Union army and died in ballle.

even though they were of military age . Their self-interest had been in marked contrast to the actions of the prewar elite of Chicago.

Gurdon S. Hubbard, who had come to Fort Dearborn as a fur trader and stayed to develop the packing and grain distribution industries, enli ted at age sixty-two. In his unit were the son of three Chicago mayors , one of whom died at Chickamauga. Joseph Medill and William Bross of the Tribune both lost brothers in battle . The sons of some of Chicago's most influential prewar families perished in the conflict , including John H. Kinzie, William De Wolf, Lucius S. Larrabee, and Richard Skinner. As the war veteran and later Chicago historian , Joseph Kirkland , bitterl y observed in 1892 , "the stay-at-home givers grew rich and the absent fighters and their families grew poor, and o, to this day, the respective classes have, on an average, remained. " The Great Fire of 1871 had an important impact on the legacy of the Civil War in the city.

On one hand the fire demonstrated Chicago 's continued need for the veterans' discipline and experience with trauma. Former Civil War sol60

Memory'sLandscape diers played an important role in the aftermath of the blaze, restoring order and organizing relief. But the long-term impact of the fire was to eclipse the Civil War in Chicago history. Literally, the fire did this by destroying thousands of public and private letters, diaries, and artifacts of the war years. Figuratively, the fire marked a new birth for Chicago. An almost millennial myth of Chicago was born in the wake of the fire that a new and better city would rise from the ashes. The rhetoric of this powerful myth confused the image of the survivor with that of the hero, and laid out a narrative in which the new elites of postwar Chicago could even lay claim to the status of founding fathers of the new Chicago. Spurred by this marginalization of their status, Civil War veterans in Chicago began to organize socially and politically to reestablish their cenu-ality to the life of the city.

During the 1880s, Decoration Day emerged as a major public holiday, featuring parades , marching bands, and pontificating politicos.

Reflecting the ethnic and class diversity of Chicago , the day was divided into a series of

discrete ceremonies. For the Irish community , that meant making the long journey from the South and West Sides to Calvary Cemeter y in Evanston. Peter Finley Dunne 's fictional creation , Mister Dooley, recalled: "I've made it a rule niver to go out on Dec'ration Day. It turns the hear-rt in me gra y fr to see th' women marchin ' to Calv 'ry with their veils over their heads an' thim little pots iv gyraniums in their hands." In 1885, a twenty-five-foot-high Celtic cross was erected at Calvary (it stands at the west entrance to the cemetery) in the memory of Colonel James A. Mulligan, the leader of the Illinois Irish Brigade. Mortally wounded at the Battle of Kernstown, Mulligan was reported to have told his men, "Lay me down , and save the flag!" The Illinois General Assembly decided to pay for the Mulligan monument , a remarkable indication of the growing importance of the Irish community in politics and of the significance of war commemoration in Chicago. A state-funded monument on consecrated Catholic ground would have been unthinkable in 1861 or even 1870.

The entrance to Calvary Cemele1y in an undated photograph. Chicago'sIrish community dedicated the Celtic cross, visible lo the right of the entrance, to the memo1yof Irish Civil War heroJ amesA. Mulligan.

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ColonelJarnes A. Mulligan.,in theforeground (with his staff in the background)of an undated j)hotmnontage.Mulligan led the Illinois Irish Brigade until his death in the Baille of Kemstown in 1864.

Two years later, German American veterans dedicated what they claimed was the first monument to their war dead in the United States at St. Boniface Cemetery. The St. Boniface Soldiers and Sailors Monument is represented by an almost generic sculpture: a slightly larger-thanlife private soldier standing at parade rest with his rifle. This design was inu-oduced by sculptor Randolph Rogers for an Ohio Union army cemetery in 1863. By the 1870s, the figure of the somber sentinel was copied by hundreds of northern communities to commemorate war dead. The image of the figure, with his head slightly bowed and tl1e quiet attitude of the body, is that of a guardian of the dead. The ubiquitous presence of these monuments in cemeteries and courthouse squares across the country indicates that by the 1880s the memorialization of the Civil War had become a thriving industry.

The political strength of Civil War veterans in Chicago was expressed through the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), which rebounded 62

from its shaky beginnings to become a large and efficiently mobilized lobby. ationally, the GAR jumped from a mere 30 ,000 members in 1878 to 320,000 in 1887. Chicago was a GAR stronghold, boasting the single largest post in the United States. The GAR used its strength to force the government to give veterans preference for public sector jobs and to expand pension benefits for veterans and their widows and children. But there was also a countercultural side to the GAR that was fed by the alienation many veterans felt from the crass materialism of the Gilded Age. If success in America was to be defined by the Palmers and Pullmans, then most veterans were failures. But if America was defined as standing for something more than materialism, tl1e veteran could assume a moral centrality in the life of the city and the nation.

As veterans tried to articulate how prewar values of individualism, patriotism, honesty, and compassion could be adapted to industrial Chicago, a town that had by now adopted the

Memory'sLandscape GermanAmericans memorializedtheir war dead with the Soldiers and SailorsMonument in St. Boniface Cemetery. This woodcut appearedin an 1889 history of Chicago's German Catholics.

sentiment "v\That's in it for me? " as its unofficial motto , it was natural that they latched on to the image of Abraham Lincoln. The values of the martyred president were the older ways of rural America, the great lesson of his life was the value of the Civil War in preserving American liberty.

On a blustery October day in 1887, Chicago dedicated the first of its numerous Lincoln monuments . At the south entrance to Lincoln Park , Augustus Saint-Gaudens erected a gigantic bronze statue of the president rising from the symbolic chair of state. (Today, the Chicago Historical Society stands just west of the statue.) Those who had known Linco ln exclaimed that the artist had captured his very soul in bronze. Orators at the unveiling noted that the ranks of the war generation were growing thinner each yea r. "The hatreds and griefs of the great conflict are subsiding," one said, but "this statue will stimulate the young men of future generations to unselfish exertion in behalf of the human race and remind all of the great struggle for National existence and personal liberty which owed success in large part to the man called in a remarkable manner to act as the leader."

The emerging cult of Lincoln in postwar America served to elevate all veterans of the war. Central to the Lincoln legend was the belief that before the war he was an ordinary man, "a type of thousands of his contemporaries ... without selfish ambition ." Like Lincoln, it was the way the soldiers responded to the extraordinary challenges of the war that made them great. While the significance of their postwar lives might pale in comparison to the deeds of their youth , they could be confi dent : "T he steady light of histor y will render brighter as the years move on, the names of the really great men of that period, and above all and brighter than all, will ever be the name of Abraham Lincoln. " Lincoln memorials multiplied.

Statues to the martyred president were later erected in Grant Park and in Logan Square. The meeting room of the Grand Army of the Republic in Chicago included a giant bronze of the young Lincoln , sitting as if a member of the 63

ChicagoHistory, Summer 1997 lodge. The burial lot of Lincoln Post No. 91 of the GAR in Oak Woods Cemetery is overshadowed by a larger-than -life bronze of the Emancipator. Executed by Charles Mulligan and named "Lincoln the Orator," the statue seems to be interceding with heaven for the souls of the veterans.

Saint-Gaudens's gigantic bronze of Lincoln inaugurated the final formative phase of Chicago's Civil War memorial landscape. The monuments erected a quarter-century after the war were meant to honor not just young men tragically killed by war in the prime of life but aging heroes who had lived full postwar lives. The memorials and monuments of the period between 1887 and 1897 also reflect the triumph of Victorian society's view of war as a glorious and heroic enterprise over the veterans' fading memories of "bowels torn out by a solid shot" (as one veteran had described the death of a friend) and lives wasted in unsanitary camps. The thinning ranks of the GAR unreservedly embraced the heroic image of war as a way to cement their historical legacy and to critique an industrial society that had known a generation of peace.

Monuments of this period were larger-thanlife depictions of triumphant heroes. The somber, funereal tone of the 1870s was forgotten in a flourish of Beaux Arts splendor.

The Bohemian Soldiers and Sailors Monument, erected in 1893 in Bohemian National Cemetery, is a splendid example of the emergence of the new martial spirit. Like most of the earlier monuments done in a realistic vein, the monument depicts an enlisted man. But unlike the St. Boniface or Rosehill soldiers of the 1870s and 1880s, the Bohemian monument shows the soldier in an aggressive, animated posture. His gun is bayoneted and he seems to be striding forward to the attack, not standing guard over the dead.

The heroic statues of Ulysses S. Grant and John A. Logan in Chicago's lakefront parks convey the same sense of spirited action and larger -than-life grandeur.

Saint-Gaudens's Logan monument in Grant Park shows the Great Volunteer rallying the public to defend the flag just as he had rallied his troops during the Battle of Atlanta. The Grant monument in Lincoln Park by sculptor Louis Rebisso depicts a much 64

Above: UndatedjJhotographof Abraham Lincoln statue in the GAR meetingroomin the ChicagoPublic1.ibrary.Below: Bohemian Soldiersand SailorsMonument,froma bookpublished by the Bohemian National CemeteryAssociationin 1927. Opposite:Saint-Gaud,ens'sstatue of Lincoln in LincolnPark. PhotographfryKaufmannand Fabry, 1927.

Chicago History, Summer 1997

less frantic horse and rider. Grant's heroism was not at the head of the attack but in his dogged, determination. The press called him "the imperturbable," and so the artist depicted him.

The power of the Civil War over Chicago 's imagination can be seen in the public response to the unveiling of these monuments. At the dedication of the Logan monument in 1897, a crowd estimated at more than two hundred thousand crowded into the park and along Michigan Avenue. The Grant unveiling in 1891 saw a crowd of a quarter of a million people (close to one in every four Chicagoans).

Inevitably, promoters tried to capitalize on the renewed interest in the Civil War , and a veritable Civil War memorial industry was born in Chicago. In 1883, the French artist Paul Philippoteaux, renowned in Europe for his panoramic paintings of the world's great battles, unveiled in Chicago his first great depiction of the Civil War. The Gettysburg Cyclorama was a sixty-foot-high and fourhundred-foot-wide depiction of the defeat of Pickett's charge. The mammoth canvas was displayed in a special building that facilitated inthe-round viewing. The attraction was a huge hit, both locally and nationally. Eventually four copies of the Gettysburg painting were made, one of which is currently on view at Gettysburg National Military Park.

Philippoteaux's coup in Chicago inspired his French rivals to try and duplicate his success. In 1885, Theophile Poilpot and a team of a dozen Parisian artists created the Shiloh Cyclorama.

Displayed in a specially constructed building on Michigan Avenue near Madison Street , the instant sensation depicted the cmcial struggle for the "Hornet's est." Because twenty-eight of the sixty-five Union regiments engaged in the battle were from Illinois, the cyclorama was an attraction of enduring popularity. A tl1ird great cyclorama, the Battle of Missionary Ridge, was also briefly located in Chicago. The great panoramas were especially popular with veterans who enjoyed putting the professional tour guides on the spot by testing their knowledge of the battles.

Part of the am-action of the great cycloramas was their high level of accuracy. This included a suggestion of the chaos and carnage of battle.

The popularity of the cycloramas, however , inspired works with a much more romanticized 66

Above: This statue of Ulysses S. Grant, by Louis Rebisso, stands in Lincoln Park. Less animated than the Logan monument, the statue evokes Grant's dogged determination as leader of the Union army.

OjJpo site: At the peak of interest in commemoratingthe Civil War, an estimated two hundred thousand Chicagoans attended the 1897 unveiling of thejohn A. Logan nwnument in Grant Park. Photographby Geo1ge E. Mellen.

image of the war. Louis Kurz, an Austrian-born painter in Chicago , was so impressed by the business enjoyed by the Shiloh and Gettysburg paintings tl1at he inaugurated, with his partner Alexander Allison, a chromolithographic series of Civil War battles. These artificially staged and gaudily hued illustrations, meant for the home or office, lacked any sense of a real battle.

Candy magnate Charles F. Gunther also helped to encourage a fanciful view of the war.

In 1889 , he opened the Libby Civil War Pri on Museum on South Wabash Avenue. It featured a marvelous collection of Civil War artifacts, housed in the red-brick building that had served as the notorious prison for captured nion troops in Richmond, Virginia .

Gunther brought the structure to Chicago and urrounded it with a rusticated stone wall topped with romantic crenellated watchtowers. Later, part of the museum was incorporated into the Chicago Coliseum, while much of the collection was purchased by the Chicago Historical Society.

Memo1y'sLand cape The ranks of the GAR thinned as veterans died, and their surviving comrades became more and more anxious about their place in history. To preserve that past for the future, Chicago veterans fought to have a "hall of monumental splendor" built in downtown Chicago. The hall would serve as a central meeting place for all of the city's numerous GAR posts. But more importantly, it was to be, according to Judge Kirk Hawes, a "repository for the flags, relics and valuable mementos of the great war .. . that shall commemorate and bear witness to your patriotism and your valor thousands of years after you have gone." In 1893, after thirteen years of battling Congress, the state legislature, and the Chicago Public Library, the GAR laid the cornerstone for the new library at Washington Street and Michigan Avenue that would house their ornate memorial hall. (The building is currently home to the Chicago Cultural Center. The GAR collection remains part of the Chicago Public Library

Special Collections Department, while the Memorial Hall at the Cultural Center, shorn of its artifacts, now serves as a space for corporate and civic receptions.)

By the 1890s, Chicago veterans had moved far beyond their original reticence to engage the public about the war, and they actively strove for its eternal enshrinement. Yet, as they built larger and grander monuments to the war and its heroes, the veterans had to ublimate their own genuine memories of combat. Time and public honors made it easier to abandon images of death and destruction. At memorial dedications, veterans retained the right to attack the "greed and selfishness" of commercial society, yet such rhetoric was seldom pointed at individuals. Indeed, men who had avoided the draft by purchasing substitutes, such as George Pullman, occupied places of honor at events such as the unveilings of the Grant and Logan statues. At the 1891 reunion of the Army of the Tennessee, George Pullman

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Chicago History, Summer 1997

The Libby Civil War Museum in 1891. The actual prison building, a former warehouse, can be seen behind the crenellated stone wall added by owner Charles F. Gunther. Photogra/Jhby Ka.ujinannand Fab1y.

was honored at the head table. One of the veterans concluded an after-dinner speech by complaining that "twenty-five years after the war we put cowards on the same footing as the heroes of the war."

Pullman and his fellow elites accepted the sting of such rhetoric as the price for the veterans' conservative defense of traditional value . Monuments to the past were, after all, a confirmation of the justice and security of the current order. Civil War memorials in bronze and stone presented an image of permanence. This was a message embraced by the new elite of Chicago, who were made uneasy by the great economic and social upheavals of a growing industrial society.

Chicago's phenomenal growth had taught that a new order could be created very quickly, but the story of the Great Fire held

68

the caution that material wealth could be swept away in a single evening. To men well aware of how precarious their own climb Lo the top had been, social anchors were a welcome sight.

As per onal memory was disciplined, so too did the political and social meaning of the conflict became more and more obscured.

The Veterans Union League, which was dedicated in 1880 to "encourage the spirit of universal liberty, equal rights, and justice to all men, regardless of nationality or color," had degenerated into a mere social club by 1890.

Memorial addresses were replete with the overt racism of the late nineteenth century. Of the early Lincoln statues, Saint-Gaudens ' bronze was one of the first to omit any reference to the Emancipation Proclamation .

Members of the city's African American corn-

Memory'sLandscape

Above: The Chicago Publi c Library (now the Chicago Cultural Center), which was built with space to house the Grand Army of the R epublic's M emorial H all, from a pamphlet jJUblished in 1900. Below: The Memorial Hall displayed relics from the Civil War.

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Memory's Landscape

Opposite:This rnonurnentin Oak WoodsCemetery was erectedin rnerno1y of thefour thousand Confederate soldierswho died in Chicago's Camp Douglas. Undated photographby W. T. Barnum. Above: A bird's-eyeview of Camp Douglas.

munity, who had participated in Lincoln's funeral ceremony in 1865, played no formal role in the dedication of the statue in 1887.

The Beaux Arts monuments to the Civil War largely omitted any reference to broader values and instead honored the heroic qualities of particular men. Individual veterans might still rally to the progressive rhetoric of 1863; for example , at an 1887 national GAR meeting, Chicago veteran Edward S. Salomon spoke out against a Georgia GAR commander's refusal to charter a black post. "I for one," Salomon said, "would rather shake hands with the blackest nigger in the land if he was a true and honest man, than with a traitor. " But neither Salomon's egalitariani m nor his disdain for former rebels was shared by all veterans .

In May of 1895, Chicago veterans gathered with a delegation of former Confederate sol-

diers to dedicate a monument to the more than four thousand Southern sold iers who d ied in Chicago 's Camp Douglas prisoner -of-war camp. Nothing more sharply contrasted the brutal events of the war years with the veterans' carefully manicured memory of the conflict than the monument in Oak Woods Cemetery on Chicago 's South Side . Some of the Confederate prisoners had died because of the wretched sanitary conditions in the camp. All of the prisoners had suffered from short rations, although Chicago was the Union's food distribution center. In fact, at one point in 1865, the Chicago Board of Trade petitioned Lincoln to cut the prisoners' food allowance even more to make the men suffer. Most of the men who died did so because Jefferson Davis's government refused to exchange captured United State Colored Infantry for white soldiers.

The e realities were muted in favor of a cere71

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mony of reconciliation that was widely acknowledged throughout the country.

One of the smallest veterans' organizations in Chicago, the Ex-Confederate Veterans Association, successfully made a general appeal to the citizens of Chicago to help them complete the project. While the majority of Chicago veterans approved of the project, a reservoir of bitterness remained beneath the surface. On the evening before the Confederate memorial was unveiled, vandals defaced it. Union supporters also later erected a granite cenotaph opposite the monument in which they carved in stone their enduring denunciation of the Confederate cause. More typical was the GAR post commander who observed, "Our Union soldier dead cannot receive their need of praise without the fullest recognition of the most unqualified admiration of the magnificent bravery of their Confederate opponents." Amid appeals to the common Anglo-Saxon heritage of both sides, the monument was dedicated in the hope of forever "sealing the book of ill-will between the sections."

The Confederate memorial reveals how well veterans had integrated their memory of saving the Union with the postfire myth of Chicago.

At the banquet honoring the city's Southern guests, Mayor George B. Swift repeatedly referred to Chicago as "the greatest city in the world." General M. C. Butler of South Carolina said, "I do not believe there is another city on the face of the earth that would have had the audacity to have done what Chicago has done in inviting us rebels." For Chicagoans it was a clear demonstration that, as one participant noted, "Chicago knows no sectional lines. " A Confederate monument in the city was proof that in Chicago "no American is a stranger."

By 1895, the desire of Civil War veterans to leave an enduring testament to their accomplishments had merged with the desire of a growing city to demonstrate that, like the great cities of Europe with their grand public monuments, it had come of age. For veterans, the memorials symbolized the city's recognition of their service and helped them to reintegrate into the dynamic, industrial city born during the war. Chicago's expansive memorial landscape is a testament in marble and bronze of how a city divided by war again became one.

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ILL UST RATTO S

55, CHS, ICI-Ii-20781; 56, CHS, ICHi-23905; 57, CHS, ICHi-21004 ; 58, courtesy of David Wendell ; 59 top, CHS, ICHi-20597; 59 bottom , from Historyof Batteiy 'i1" First Illinois Light Artillery (1899), CHS Library; 60 top left, CHS, CI-430; 60 top right , from The Story of Chicago (I 892) , CHS Library ; 60 bottom , CHS , ICHi-12022; 61, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 62, from History of Chicago from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (188 5), CHS Librar y; 63 , from Geschichte der Kathol. Kirche Chicago's, mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung des Katholischen Deutschthwns (1889) , CHS Library; 64 top , courtesy of the Chicago Public Library, Department of Special Collections ; 64 bottom , from PadesritileteJubileurn Geskeho Nrirodn1ho H1:bitova v Chicago, Illinois (1927) , CHS Library ; 65, CHS, GI 987 .02 I 0, 27-7567; 66, from Official Souvenir Program; Grand Anny of the Republic 34th National Encampment (1900 ), CHS Library; 67 , CHS , ICHi23906 ; 68 , CHS , ICHi-26076 ; 69 top , from Thirtyfourth An nual Encampment of the GAR; Encampment Programme and Souvenir of Chicago (1900) , CHS Library; 69 bottom, courtesy of the Chic ago Publi c Library , Deparunent of Special Collections ; 70, CHS, ICHi-19743 ; 71, from Hist01y of Chicagofrom the Earliest Period to the Present Time (1885), CHS Library FOR F U RT H ER READING

For- an overview of war commemoration in America, see John Bodnar ' Remaking America: Public Memory, Commemoration, and Patriotism in the Twentieth Centwy (Princ eton: Prin ceton Universit y Press, 1992).

111eodore Karamanski 's Rally 'Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1993) explores the Civil War 's economic and social imp act on Chicago . Two social histories of Civil War soldiers are Gerald F. Lind erman 's Embattled Courage: The ExjJerience of Combat in the American Civil War (New York: Free Press, 1989) and Reid Mitchell's Civil War Soldiers ( ew York: Viking, 1988). Thomas Leonard 's Above the Baille: War-Making in Americafr om Appomallox lo Versailles (New York: Oxford University Pres , 1977) and G. Kurt Piehler 's Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1995) both des cribe the effects of remembering war on American society. Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865-1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press , 1992) , by Stu art McConnell, is the definitive history of the Grand Army of the Republic.