Chicago History | Summer 1999

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Summer 1999 VOLUME XXVIII, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 27 3

Strong Medicine Steven M. Schwartz

A People without a Nation Barbara J. Ballard

Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams

44

Yesterday’s City

54

Making History

Walker Rumble

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Gwen Ihnat Lesley A. Martin Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Intern Emily Holmes Cover: Detail of lithograph by Rodolfo Morgari, ICHi-25233; see page 37

Copyright 1999 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6099 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago Historical Society’s Publications Office.

C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS

TRUSTEES

R. Eden Martin Chair Potter Palmer Vice Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair M. Hill Hammock Treasurer Joseph Levy Jr. Secretary Philip W. Hummer Immediate Past Chair Douglas Greenberg President

Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth Charles T. Brumback Mrs. Ann Middleton Buckley Michelle L. Collins John W. Croghan Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam Douglas Greenberg M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund Harry W. Howell Philip W. Hummer

LIFE TRUSTEES

Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. Wayne A. McCoy R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer Michelle S. Paulsen Margarita Perez Donald H. Rumsfeld Gordon I. Segal James R. Thompson Daniel H. Wheeler

Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair John T. McCutcheon Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEES

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago Michael Scott President, Chicago Park District

The Chicago Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Historical Society’s activities.

2 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

FROM THE EDITORI

T

he editors at Chicago History perform many tasks in creating this magazine: we acquire and review manuscripts, edit articles, work with authors on revision, factcheck, proofread, write captions, etc.

Among our favorite tasks is conducting photo research.

With the Chicago Historical Society’s collection of more than 20 million objects, books, photographs, paintings, sculpture, costumes, manuscripts, and other items, photo research gives us the opportunity to view and study countless historical documents and artifacts, from souvenirs of the A Century of Progress International Exposition to sheet music written in the wake of the Great Chicago Fire, from a letter written by Albert Einstein to a diamond choker owned by Bertha Honore Palmer. Because of space limitations, we cannot always print everything we would like to. In other cases, our research leads us to fascinating pieces that are not directly related to the articles we are publishing.

3

Strong Medicine S T E V E N M . S C H WA RT Z

Michael Reese and Mount Sinai hospitals stood as the cornerstones for two disparate Jewish communities in turn-of-the-century Chicago.

I

t is impossible to discuss the development of one Jewish community in Chicago, but it is possible to speak of the development of two. The German Jews who arrived in Chicago between 1840 and 1870 and the eastern European Jews who arrived between 1880 and 1924 formed two separate communities. The former population tended to be urban, educated, middle class, and embraced Reform Judaism—a movement that emphasized the ethical aspects of the religion instead of its ritual practices. The latter population tended to be more provincial, poorer, and strictly followed the rituals and practices of traditional Orthodox Judaism.

The 1857 engraving Raising the Grade by A. T. Andreas shows a number of Jewish-owned stores on Clark Street.

4 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

The period between 1871 and 1924 stands out as perhaps the most celebrated era of Jewish philanthropic achievement in Chicago, but this period also was characterized by conflict between these two Jewish populations. As the German Jews attempted to incorporate their poorer Orthodox neighbors into their thriving community, these lower-income neighborhoods struggled to create their own identity. Whether Chicago’s Jewish population was to be seen as one community or two was the heart of the conflict between these two groups.

This conflict manifested itself primarily through the city’s Jewish philanthropic institutions. The German Jews attempted to use their already established institutions to unite the two populations under the Reform identity. The Orthodox Jews wanted to create their own institutions and community autonomy, but they were hindered by financial limitations and overshadowed by their Reform neighbors. For many years, Orthodox charities were too poor and disorganized to supersede the Reform network. Consequently, the eastern European Jews were heavily dependent on the Germans for their health and well being. As historian James Grossman points out, “When charity was dispensed, Jews of German descent were likely to be the donors, recent immigrants from eastern Europe . . . the recipients.”

Nowhere did this relationship become more obvious than in the development of Chicago’s Jewish hospitals.

Jews historically have viewed the creation of hospitals as the high achievement of their communities. As Joseph B. DeLee, a prominent turn-of-the-century obstetrician, argued, “The civilization of a community may be mea-

The development of these two hospitals, Michael Reese (top) and Mount Sinai (bottom), helped shape Chicago Jewry as a whole.

5

6 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

sured by the care bestowed on the sick. . . . The Jews have always been famous for the care bestowed on their unfortunates.” Only the synagogue was considered a more important center for spiritual, educational, and philanthropic support. Both the Reform and Orthodox communities in Chicago held this view, but their common vision ends there.

The differences between the two communities led to the development of two Jewish hospitals in Chicago.

Michael Reese Hospital embodied the traditional Jewish belief of serving Jew and non-Jew alike, while emphasizing its role as a scientific medical institution on the forefront of American medicine. Maimonedes Hospital, which later became Mount Sinai Hospital, rejected this Americanized notion, emphasizing its connection to its Orthodox Jewish community. The development of these two hospitals, in the context of the creation of the Russian and German communities, shaped Chicago Jewry as a whole.

The German Jews who arrived in Chicago after 1848 tended to be prominent German citizens who had achieved positions of political and economic leadership in their native country. They were on friendly terms with their gentile neighbors who had emigrated from Europe with them. With a strong sense of community and ambition, these new arrivals had relatively little difficulty adjusting and prospering—both religiously and economically—in their new homes. They quickly established several synagogues and Jewish organizations, including the B’nai B’rith. In 1859, community leaders developed the United Hebrew Relief Association (UHRA), whose constitution declared that the establishment of a hospital and a home for orphans and widows was the “final object” of the association.

The community was embarrassed by the absence of a Chicago Jewish hospital. Jewish doctors also had difficulty finding employment in area hospitals, which were usually run by religious groups. So on March 22, 1864, the German-Jewish community held a banquet to raise funds for a Jewish hospital. The money raised from this affair, together with funds raised in a mass meeting on October 22, 1866, enabled the construction of a small hospital on LaSalle Street, between Goethe and Schiller Streets.

This hospital was the product of a maturing homogeneous community seeking to advance philanthropy as well as its own stature in the city. A relatively simple Jewish landscape facilitated its emergence. The bulk of the German Jews still lived in a tight-knit South Loop community. Signs of change, however, began to appear during the 1860s and 1870s as a small number of Russian and Polish Jews began to immigrate into Chicago’s Near South Side Maxwell Street market, c. 1905. Many eastern European Jews made their home in the Maxwell Street area at this time.

Strong Medicine | 7

LaSalle Street looking west between Randolph and Washington Streets from the Courthouse Dome, 1858. Many Jews lived and worked in this downtown area. Photograph by Alexander Hesler.

8 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

As Jews became more acclimated to American culture, they began their own businesses. Above: H. Shanovski, Family Boot and Shoe House, c. 1895. Below: H. Schroeder piano manufactory, 1800 North Ashland, c. 1895.

(from Clark Street west to the Chicago River and between Polk and Twelfth Streets).

From the start, the assimilated German Jews viewed the new immigrants with a mixture of pity and disdain. This attitude established the tension between the two Jewish communities that would last until well after World War I. Strained relations were typical of the interaction between any first- and second-generation immigrant group. The German Jews wanted their new neighbors to assimilate as they had done. The eastern Europeans, on the other hand, had little desire to mix with their neighbors or the city.

The few who arrived before 1882 established a pattern of importing Orthodox rabbis from their native lands and maintaining kosher traditions.

Although a chasm had begun developing between the German Jews and the small Russian/Polish neighborhood, the fires of 1871 and 1874 radically changed the dynamics between the two communities. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 hit the German population hard. Many prosperous merchants lost their homes and jobs, and the fire destroyed the small Jewish hospital on LaSalle Street. The UHRA and the B’nai B’rith immediately organized relief efforts and allocated funds raised in other cities. Although Strong Medicine | 9

Above: Ruins from a Jewish store on Lake Street after the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Right: The view of Randolph Street from the bridge east to the courthouse after the fire. The fire hit Chicago’s German Jews particularly hard; one of the many losses was the first Jewish Chicago hospital.

the fire had spared the Russian/Polish Jews on the Near South Side, the community lacked the funds to assist in relief efforts.

The city scarcely had recovered from the 1871 disaster when a second fire swept through the Near South Side in 1874 and destroyed the Russian/Polish settlements.

Although this fire did not hit as hard as the first (the German Jews were spared), the eastern European immigrants suffered great losses. Having no charitable organizations of their own, they relied on the German Jews to help them. The UHRA encountered difficulty in raising money, which partially could be attributed to the general lack of funds available after the first fire. But another factor might have been that the German Jews resented the eastern Europeans for not assisting them in their hour of need. Liebman Adler, the most prominent Chicago rabbi of the era, wrote: “Separation, division, dissolution, estrangement, repeated and continual are the words which characterize the history of our brothers in faith until now . . . we are losing the consciousness of homogeneity and the strength gained for each individual by concerted action.” Many referred to the Russians as schnorrers—those who take but never give.

Changing demographics also contributed to the separation and estrangement of the two communities. After the 1874 fire, the eastern European Jews began to move to the Near West Side, while the German Jews migrated to the Near South Side. On the eve of the great influx of the Russian and Polish Jews, the divisions between the two communities had become embedded both geographically and religiously. Adler complained, “How great is the 10 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Strong Medicine | 11

hospital accepted some patients who could not afford to pay. Doctors made house calls under the auspices of the UHRA. The Young Men’s Hospital Association and the Young Men’s Hebrew Charity Association began raising money for the hospital soon after its opening.

Still some saw the hospital’s medical care as impersonal in its quest for efficiency. When a patient entered the hospital, an admissions clerk evaluated the patient’s fiscal and social background to determine financial responsibility and if the admission was medically justified. Not everyone was admitted; for example, Reese turned away tuberculosis patients (as many hospitals did at the time). In striving to attain a Jewish identity, the hospital replaced non-Jewish doctors, but only with German-Jewish doctors, which offended the eastern

Philanthropist Michael Reese left $200,000 in trust to be disbursed by his brother and sister to charity. Reese’s sister, Henrietta Rosenfeld, chose to donate the money to Chicago’s new Jewish hospital.

change! Thousands scattered over a space of thirty miles, in hundreds of streets, divided by pecuniary, intellectual, and social distinctions and differences.”

By 1880, ten thousand Jews, mostly of Germanic origin, lived in Chicago. In that year, construction of the city’s second Jewish hospital, Michael Reese, began on Twenty-ninth Street at Ellis Avenue, the heart of the new South Side German Jewish community. A few wealthy individuals, instead of the general public (which was the case with the first Jewish hospital), funded this institution, including Henrietta Rosenfield, who controlled the estate of the late Michael Reese, a wealthy philanthropist from California. Thus the hospital’s initial ties to the community were not as strong as its predecessor’s. Nevertheless, the UHRA took over the management of the hospital, which ensured its completion in 1881.

When the hospital first opened, few of its doctors and officials were Jewish. Although a large American flag proudly hung above the building, Michael Reese forged its early identity as a philanthropic center for the Jewish community. Adhering to Jewish altruistic tradition, the 12 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Above: The floor plan of the first Michael Reese Hospital shows patient wards on the first floor. Below: An artist’s depiction of the new institution.

European Orthodox community on the West Side. Furthermore, the hospital’s policy of not offering kosher meals frustrated traditional Jews. Not surprisingly, the growing Russian/Polish population withheld community support for Michael Reese. As more immigrants moved into the West Side ghetto, the hospital became more of a focal point of resentment.

After 1881, eastern European Jews flooded into the Maxwell Street area. Initially, this ghetto was a tight-knit independent community with little contact with the outside world—much like shtetls, the small, eastern European Jewish villages from which these Jews emigrated.

Unlike their German cousins, the eastern European Jews made little effort to assimilate into mainstream American life, focusing instead on two central institutions: the family and the synagogue. Between 1880 and 1900, they established more than two hundred Orthodox syna-

gogues in Chicago. The 1880s also saw the advent of schools for the study of Torah, mutual aid and literary societies to assist newcomers, and a Yiddish newspaper—the Daily Jewish Courier.

Michael Reese, which opened on October 23, 1881, was designed by architect John Cochrane and cost $60,000 to build.

Pages from an early Michael Reese logbook. The patient described on the left, ten-year-old Naphtali Pritzker, was a “poor Russian refugee” treated for inflammation of the lymph vessels of the arm on December 14, 1881. The other patient, Robert Williams, a thirty-two-year-old coachman, received treatment for pleurisy on January 11, 1885.

Strong Medicine | 13

This 1877 Jewish Reader for Sabbath Schools shows the inroads the Jewish population made toward the end of the nineteenth century, developing their own schools, organizations, and publications.

14 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

This woodcut, from Louis Wirth’s 1928 volume, The Ghetto, depicts the Maxwell Street area where so many Eastern European Jews lived.

Reform Judaism was as foreign to the Orthodox newcomers as Christianity. In his acclaimed work The Ghetto, Louis Wirth reported one Russian Jew’s reaction to his new surroundings: “I would rather be dead than be the kind of German Jew that brings the Jewish name into disgrace.” The use of English in Sunday (as opposed to the traditional Saturday) Sabbath services and the abandonment of a kosher diet offended the Orthodox community. Many considered the Reform Germans “second-hand” Jews.

While the German Jews felt obliged to help their eastern European cousins financially and medically, these poor relations embarrassed them. As The Occident, a Reform newspaper, remarked in 1886: “26,000 Jews in a single year! These Polish Jews are indigestible for the American stomach as are the Chinese.” The scornful pity seen before 1881 became anxiety in the face of the Russian/Polish influx. The charities of the UHRA, the B’nai B’rith, and the newly established Russian Aid Society provided aid and found employment for the newcomers. At the same time, the Russian Aid Society organized efforts to disperse the Russian Jews to rural areas such as Benton Harbor and South Haven, Michigan.

These seemingly contradictory efforts revealed the uneasiness the Germans felt under changing conditions. The Orthodox Jews’ unwillingness to assimilate aggravated the Reform Jews’ fears that these “uncivilized” arrivals threatened Jewish acceptance in the gentile world.

After liberalism lost favor following the 1848 revolutions in France and Italy, anti-Semitism again reared its

head beginning in the 1880s, which made these anxieties all the more salient for the mainstream-minded Jews. The Reform Advocate announced in 1894: “We can no longer take care of the new accessions to the swarming hives [of] our ghetto! Let Europe be notified to the effect!” The Orthodox Jews also expressed resentment against the patronizing and paternalistic approach of the Reform charitable network. The Russian Jews were not welcomed in many of the German Jewish synagogues and community institutions. This uneasy relationship led Jane Addams to state in 1902: “It seems to me there is more ill-feeling between the Reform and Orthodox Jews, than there is between Jews and Gentile.”

Michael Reese Hospital seems to have embodied this alienation. In 1894, this institution established a dispensary in the West Side ghetto, but without Orthodox doctors or kosher food. As the hospital developed plans for its reconstruction, the policy of hiring only GermanJewish doctors continued. The Yiddish press began to publish letters and editorials calling for the establishment of a new Jewish hospital. But the Orthodox Jews had not yet begun developing an organized charitable network along the lines of the UHRA, so an endeavor such as a hospital remained a pipe dream.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, the immigration flood overwhelmed the network of Reform charities. The myriad organizations that had developed outside the realm of the UHRA since 1881 fell into debt and overlapped their efforts. Consequently, in 1900 all of the Reform charities centralized under one umbrella organization—the Associated Jewish Charities (AJC), which continued to apply the same condescending approach to the eastern European immigrant.

In 1894, Michael Reese opened a dispensary in the West Side ghetto, but since it did not offer Orthodox doctors or kosher food, eastern European Jews still protested.

Strong Medicine | 15

Nevertheless, the Orthodox community began to mature. The original eastern European residents started to move from the West Side ghetto into North Lawndale, an area centered around Douglas and Independence Boulevards, to build homes on wider streets. As this generation began to become more prosperous and Americanized, its institutions began to change and expand.

The international Zionist movement to develop a Jewish state, along with the labor movement, gave the Orthodox community an identity outside of the ghetto. As social lodges, socialist clubs, Hebrew and Yiddish intellectual centers, and Zionist organizations emerged, the Orthodox community began to attain a cultural and political identity that replaced the one based strictly on ritual, following the same pattern as most immigrant communities.

Furthermore, Russian/Polish Jews could now take care of their own. Benevolent societies called Landsmannschaften helped eastern European refugees adjust to their new environment. The Self Education Club, originally a meeting place for Jewish intellectuals, evolved into a cultural and philanthropic institution. Even though the new arrivals still relied on the wealthier and more established Reform charities, the Orthodox community was beginning to establish philanthropic autonomy, even as the AJC was becoming more powerful.

One of the first projects of the newly established AJC was the reconstruction of the aging Michael Reese Hospital. The necessary funds came easily and the new state-of-the-art facility went up in 1907 at a cost of $750 thousand. The German-Jewish community took great pride in the new institution. The Reform Advocate dedicated an entire issue to the hospital before its completion. The Orthodox community also admired the hospital, feeling that it would better serve the community’s needs and again petitioned for a kosher kitchen. The Courier warned that if Michael Reese rejected the request, the West Side would erect an independent medical facility, just as it had erected homes for the elderly and homeless. In the August 29, 1908, issue of the Jewish Standard, the editors argued that since the majority of the patients were Jews, “it becomes more than imperative to respect the feelings and the faith of the Jewish patients in the hospital. These feelings could not be satisfied, nor that faith be respected where there is no kosher kitchen.” But the hospital maintained that it did not want to incur the expense of installing a kosher kitchen.

In light of this rejection, the hospital’s bureaucratic approach to admitting and caring for its patients continued to annoy Orthodox Jews. Patients who were diagnosed as terminal or incurable were turned away, contrary to the Orthodox tradition of caring for the sick to the very end. Orthodox Jews were outraged further by 16 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

These two photographs display the discrepancies between the eastern European and German Jewish neighborhoods around the turn of the century. Above: This c. 1906 photograph by Charles R. Clark shows the eastern European Maxwell Street neighborhood with humble residences and street-peddler carts. Below: This c. 1880 view of Michigan Avenue from Twenty-ninth Street shows the more stately German Jewish neighborhood that surrounded Michael Reese Hospital.

the hospital’s continuing policy of hiring only top-ranked German-Jewish doctors from the medical schools. “Even the interns, although selected by competitive examination, were . . . all German Jews,” according to historian Philip Bregstone. West Side Orthodox physicians suffered economically because they had to send their patients to Michael Reese. An unofficial boycott against the hospital ensued.

The international Zionist movement to develop a Jewish state helped the Orthodox community gain an identity outside of the ghetto.

Strong Medicine | 17

Above: The female medical ward of old Michael Reese shows the large, open rooms to which charity and some paying patients were admitted.

Below: The Associated Jewish Charities made one of their first projects the reconstruction of the aging Michael Reese Hospital; shown here is a drawing of the new hospital.

18 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

The West Side medical community, led by Dr. Benjamin Breakstone, one of the most prominent surgeons in the city, met to formulate plans for a kosher hospital on September 1, 1908. This movement operated under three principles: to free eastern European Jews from dependence on their German cousins; to have a kosher hospital; and to ensure equal opportunity for West Side doctors. One week after this meeting, the Maimonedes Kosher Hospital of Chicago was incorporated. The new building would be constructed on California, near Fifteenth Street—the heart of the emerging Orthodox community of Lawndale.

The establishment of a kosher hospital came at a time when Chicago’s Orthodox Jewish community was making concerted efforts to claim its slice of America’s expanding prosperity. For example, the community was very instrumental in the wave of labor strikes that swept through the city between 1910 and 1913, which incidentally often pitted Orthodox laborers against their Reform bosses. These activities left little time for concerns such as launching a new hospital. Such a largescale endeavor required the financial backing of the entire community and a strong unified philanthropic network. Maimonedes Hospital had neither. The community held frequent fundraising bazaars and benefits over a three-year period, but the public overall displayed indifference.

Many Orthodox leaders remained dedicated to developing philanthropic institutions. As the community began to experience Americanization, many became concerned it was losing touch with its Orthodox identity.

Declining attendance at Sabbath services and intermarriage became more common as people began to move away from the West Side ghetto. As Orthodox Jews settled in the Lawndale area, however, the gentile world did not open its arms to its new neighbors. Existing Lawndale residents excluded Jews from social clubs, fraternities, trade unions, and certain residential neighborhoods.

Orthodox leaders therefore used philanthropy to provide a focal point for a community facing challenges to its identity. As working-class Jews became more involved in the labor movement, the community continued to develop its own charitable organizations, including the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society and the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society. But without a central agency to guide them, the Orthodox charities were uncoordinated. They not only competed with their German counterparts, but with each other. Separate charity balls and fundraising drives exhausted the public’s limited purse and patience. Fundraising for Maimonedes Hospital remained difficult under these conditions.

Bernard Horwich, a wealthy banker and a member of various West Side organizations, led the effort to centralize the Orthodox charities. He quickly gained the

Above: The laying of the cornerstone for the new Michael Reese Hospital, July 4, 1905. The building was completed in 1907 at a cost of $750,000. Below: Early incubator room, Michael Reese Hospital. Dr. Julius Hess perfected his incubator bed for premature infants at Sarah Morris, Michael Reese’s children’s hospital.

support of the Courier, which consistently issued editorials in favor of Orthodox unification. A “Ways and Means Committee to Federate the Jewish Charities” on December 19, 1911, laid the groundwork. The Federated Orthodox Jewish Charities formally incorporated in the autumn of 1912 and immediately accepted eleven charities as well as Maimonedes Hospital.

Strong Medicine | 19

Wealthy banker Bernard Horwich (above) devoted two years to the establishment of the Federated Jewish Charities. Mrs. Edwin Romberg (below) helped save Mount Sinai Hospital from bankruptcy. She eventually served as president of the hospital and of the Mount Sinai Hospital Workers, an organization that she created.

Thus the hospital finally was able to complete construction; its doors opened in July 1912. The Courier declared after the hospital delivered its first baby: “Everything in the Maimonedes Hospital was made after the latest inventions in medical science, and according to professional men it is the best equipped hospital in Chicago.” It appeared that the Orthodox Jewish population finally had matured as a community. But the hospital only came about as a result of the centralization of the Orthodox charitable network. It had never gained the full support of the still relatively impoverished eastern European community, which placed the facility on very unstable ground.

In that first year, Maimonedes Hospital proved to be more expensive to operate than was expected. By the end of 1914, “the Orthodox Federation found its[elf] on the decline, financially . . . and morally, because of dissension and resultant lack of respect received from the community,” according to the Historical Statement of the Jewish Federation Movement in Chicago. The German Jews were unsympathetic. According to Dr. Bregstone, a “war for extermination was waged against [Maimonedes] by the Associated Jewish Charities. Intrigues and vicious politics took the place of erstwhile ideals and high20 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

minded principles.” As the AJC was not willing to ensure Maimonedes’s survival, the hospital floundered.

In early 1915, under the pressure of the AJC, the Federated Charities ordered an investigation of the hospital to evaluate its performance during its first six months of operation. Ten months later, the AJC shut the hospital down. Maimonedes avoided foreclosure only through the efforts of philanthropists Dr. Morris Kurtzon and Mrs. Edwin Romberg. Dr. Kurtzon bought the hospital from under the foreclosure proceedings and assumed responsibility for all of the facility’s debts, which amounted to more than thirty-five thousand dollars. He then reorganized the institution under a new name, the Mount Sinai Hospital Association. Romberg, “spurred on by her own conviction of the necessity of the hospital,” (again according to the Historical Statement) kept together the woman’s organization, which raised eleven thousand dollars for the hospital’s reorganization.

In spite of these efforts, for three years the abandoned building on California remained an embarrassment for the community. Meanwhile, the Michael Reese Hospital continued to fill its beds and expand its facilities. Its Nelson Morris Memorial for Medical Research, with one of the finest research laboratories in the United States, opened in 1911. Two years later, the Sarah Morris Hospital for Children opened. While the kosher hospital struggled against foreclosure, Michael Reese flourished.

Once it became clear that neither the Federated Charities nor the AJC supported Maimonedes, the hospital turned directly to the people. The Courier argued that the West Side needed a “Jewish hospital” to satisfy the ritual needs of the community. But the community did not support a disorganized and ineffective facility, even if it did have a kosher kitchen. The Courier reminded its readers:

War I Lawndale was predominately Jewish. Meanwhile, the Jewish population of the Maxwell Street area had declined from 50,900 in 1910 to 39,100 in 1920. The more affluent neighborhood of Lawndale could better sustain philanthropic efforts.

A person who does not work, but merely lives off of the fruit of others, is considered a parasite—yielding nothing and taking all. The same holds true with a community. A community gets the cooperation of its neighbors when it builds institutions from which they can derive use. . . . Let us prove that the money is not wasted; that we have learned how to run a Jewish Orthodox Hospital in the city.

After the Federated Orthodox Charities reorganized in 1915, it grew more prosperous and self-sufficient. Lawndale became the new heart of the Orthodox community as many Jews left the Maxwell Street area. Despite residents’ efforts to keep the Jews out, by the end of World Mount Sinai Hospital (above and below) was created in response to the eastern European Jews’s demand for an Orthodox hospital. Staffed by Orthodox doctors, the new hospital also featured a kosher kitchen.

Strong Medicine | 21

Above: View of Douglas Park from the roof of Mount Sinai Hospital. Below: Early Mount Sinai’s spacious lobby.

22 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Above: Although Mount Sinai opened to great acclaim, the hospital struggled financially until the formation of the Jewish Charities of Chicago. Below: This pamphlet illustrates the new wave of antisemitism, fostered by the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, that compelled Chicago’s two Jewish communities to work together to reassert their Jewish identity.

The crusade for reopening the hospital now focused on the needs and concerns of the Orthodox Lawndale community and returning war veterans. Once Dr. Kurtzon announced that he did not intend to make a profit from the hospital, the public rallied around the cause. A charitable network developed around Mount Sinai Hospital even before it reopened. In 1918–19, the Mount Sinai Hospital Woman’s Club, the Junior Mount Sinai Hospital Workers, and the Children’s Aid of the Mount Sinai Hospital were established. The fundraising effort also gained momentum. A 1918 bazaar raised eight thousand dollars. In December, a “Tag Day” added sixteen thousand dollars to this sum. After a fifteenthousand-dollar remodeling project, Mount Sinai’s doors swung open for inspection on May 4, 1919. Eleven days later, the hospital officially opened and accepted its first patients to fill its sixty beds.

Neither the AJC nor the Federated Charities provided any financial support for Mount Sinai in its first two years.

The hospital’s immediate expenses were met by personal contributions, the sale of rooms and other privileges, and subscriptions and small donations. A fundraising drive in June 1919 netted almost nine thousand dollars to further cover expenses. The hospital sent letters to patients asking for complaints and suggestions, but received a substantial number of subscriptions instead.

After seven months, Mt. Sinai reported that it had treated more than one thousand patients and delivered almost two hundred babies. A nurses’ training school and a children’s ward opened in 1920.

The Orthodox Jews of Chicago now could claim that they were an autonomous community. Both the German and eastern European communities, however, now faced the new burdens of anti-Semitism. The 1920s saw a wave of xenophobia characterized by the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan and the passage of legislation that established the first permanent immigration quota law. This new environment compelled the two communities to cooperate more and reassert their Jewish identity; but it was largely the Orthodox community that took charge.

After the Federated Orthodox Charities’s banner year of 1918, the organization expanded to include fourteen organizations. By 1919, however, it became clear that all of Chicago’s Jewish charities suffered from internal management problems and lack of coordination. Federated Orthodox Charities president James Davis pushed for the unification of all the city’s Jewish charities. Although both sides had reservations, on January 1, 1923, the Federated Charities and the AJC combined to form the Jewish Charities of Chicago. Mount Sinai was immediately made a constituent, securing its immediate future.

The eastern European Jews came into this marriage on equal terms with the Germans. Jewish Charities president Julius Rosenwald was a prominent leader in both Strong Medicine | 23

When the Federated Orthodox Charities and the Associated Jewish Charities combined to form the Jewish Charities of Chicago on January 1, 1923, Julius Rosenwald (right) became president of the organization. Left: Rosenwald’s letter praising the movement to federate the Orthodox Charities. Below: Mount Sinai board of directors, c. 1920.

24 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

communities. The newly formed Jewish Social Service Bureau administered aid by dividing the city into districts so that the needs of each family or individual would be considered and their distress alleviated—no matter what the situation.

The American experience ultimately tied the Orthodox and Reform communities together. By the 1920s the flight from the West Side ghetto was largely complete.

The “second” Jewish communities in Lawndale and

Hyde Park embraced American values more fully. As historian Seymore Leventman noted, this second generation of Jews “came to accept the anomalies of their life as being somehow inevitable.” This Americanization process, however, meant that both Michael Reese and Mount Sinai hospitals gradually lost their identities as Jewish institutions. After World War II, Michael Reese became a national research center while Mount Sinai lost its Jewish constituency as the Jews who had lived in Lawndale moved to new areas.

This trend was part of a national phenomenon. As Robert Kanigel argued in an article for the Baltimore Jewish Times, “the forces that led to the founding of the Jewish hospitals are obviously a thing of the past.”

Catholic and Lutheran hospitals have now instituted kosher kitchens and Jewish doctors can be found in most medical institutions. The Jewish emphasis on hospitals has been replaced by other priorities such as education, the resettlement of Russian émigrés, and the support of Israel. Philanthropy remains the crux of the Jewish identity, but hospitals are no longer at its center.

Steven M. Schwartz is an interdisciplinary history teacher at Morton East High School in Cicero, Illinois.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Two excellent volumes that tell the story of Chicago’s Jewish population in full are H.L. Meites’s History of the Jews of Chicago (originally published in 1924 by the Chicago Jewish Historical Society; reprinted by Wellington Publishing, Inc. in 1990) and Irving Cutler’s From Shtetl to Suburb: The Jews of Chicago (University of Illinois, 1996).

Sociologist Louis Wirth wrote The Ghetto, describing Chicago’s eastern European Jewish community and where they lived, in 1928 (University of Chicago); Transaction Publishers reprinted it with a new introduction in 1998.

A statue of Michael Reese proudly stands in front of the hospital.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS, ICHi-04139; 5 top, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital; 5 bottom, courtesy of Mount Sinai Hospital; 6–7, CHS, ICHi-19155; 8, CHS, ICHi-05726; 9 top, CHS, G1981.0293.63; 9 bottom, CHS, G1981.0293.90; 10 left, from History of the Jews of Chicago (Wellington, 1990), CHS; 10–11, CHS, ICHi-02807; 12 all, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital; 13 all, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital; 14, CHS; 15 top, from The Ghetto (University of Chicago, 1928), CHS; 15 bottom, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital; 16 top, CHS, ICHi-04285; 16 bottom, CHS, ICHi-04447; 17, CHS; 18 top and bottom, from The Reform Advocate, June 10, 1905; 19 top and bottom, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital; 20 top and bottom, from History of the Jews in Chicago; 21 top, from History of the Jews in Chicago; 21 bottom, courtesy of Mount Sinai Hospital; 22 top and bottom, courtesy of Mount Sinai Hospital; 23 top, courtesy of Mount Sinai Hospital; 23 bottom: from The KKK and the Jew (n.d.), CHS; 24 top left and right, from History of the Jews in Chicago; 24 bottom, courtesy of Mount Sinai Hospital; 25, courtesy of Michael Reese Hospital.

Strong Medicine | 25

The Columbus Genealogical Tree of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, IL 1893, shows only one black-led nation at the fair: Haiti, represented by the Haitian Pavilion and President Florvil Hyppolite (right side, sixth from the top).

26 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

A People without a Nation BARBARA J. BALLARD

African Americans at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition stood as a people without a nation until Florvil Hyppolite let African American leaders use the Haitian Pavilion as a platform for protest.

The legendary Frederick Douglass (above right) said of the fair, “All classes and conditions were there save the educated American Negro.” Above: Certificate from the Board of Lady Managers, Woman’s Building at the World’s Columbian Exposition.

T

he United States Congress established the World’s Columbian Exposition, popularly known as the world’s fair, to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of Columbus’s discovery of the New World. On one level the fair was an economic venture with political overtones, calculated to open new domestic and international markets. It netted millions of dollars for the city of Chicago and exposition financiers.

On another level the fair was a grand amusement park designed to swell patriotic pride and capture the imagination of a fairgoer with the achievement of his or her particular nation and the exotica of the unfamiliar. On a deeper and, perhaps, more profound level, the exposition was a grand display of extraordinary commercial, technological, industrial, and cultural Western achievement in the New World.

Congress invited several states and nations to participate in the exposition. Even Euro-American women, although still without the right to vote, won their fight to erect a building dedicated to female achievement and potential. Yet, black Americans—despite their high hopes—did not have a space or site in which to represent themselves as a separate American racial and ethnic entity. At the World’s Columbian Exposition, African Americans stood as a people without a nation at a gathering of nations.

For African American leaders such as the renowned Frederick Douglass and civil rights advocate Ida B. Wells, the World’s Columbian Exposition was a place to celebrate the contributions, progress, and promise of African-Americans; a space in which to lay claim to the fruits of “civilization.” Outraged by the exclusion of African Americans from the fair, Douglass, Wells, Chicago lawyer and newspaper publisher Ferdinand Barnett, and educator, author, and publisher I. Garland 27

Ida B. Wells and Ferdinand L. Barnett, co-authors of The Reason Why the Colored American..., married in June 1895. This 1917 family photo shows the Barnetts with their children and grandchildren.

Penn wrote a protest pamphlet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition that they distributed at the fair. Douglass, Wells, and other black protesters had hoped to use the world’s fair to demonstrate how far their race had progressed merely three decades after emancipation. The pamphlet explained: Prominent colored men suggested the establishment of a Department of Colored Exhibits in the Exposition. It was argued by them that nothing would so well evidence the progress of colored people as an exhibit made entirely of the products of skill and industry of the race since emancipation. . . . [T]he National Directors . . . decided that no separate exhibit for colored people would be permitted.

In addition to denying African Americans an exhibition hall, fair organizers also excluded blacks from the 28 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

planning, administration, and national ceremonies of the event. Their failure to invite even one African American leader—not even the aged and internationally venerated Frederick Douglass, who was seventy-six in 1893—to appear at the opening ceremony among the hundreds of white notables illustrated the fair’s deliberate exclusion of blacks. Douglass maintained that even one black person on the dais “would speak more for the civilization of the American republic than all the domes, towers, and turrets of the magnificent buildings that adorn the Exposition grounds.”

The few exhibits by black Americans at some of the state’s pavilions provided no single, unified statement about African Americans. Influenced by Social Darwinism, political leaders in the 1890s used theories of biological evolution and species-survival to justify Jim Crow laws and virulent racism at home and imperialism abroad. According to this fairly prevalent perspective, the

In The Reason Why, Douglass, Wells, Barnett, and I. Garland Penn protested African American exclusion from the world’s fair, arguing that the fair would have been an ideal place to show African American progress merely three decades after emancipation. Consequently, The Reason Why contains many examples of African American success, including: Top: Porter Hall, one of the main buildings of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Bottom left: Penn’s chapter on “The Progress of the Afro-American since Emancipation” discusses the advances of former slaves since the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Bottom right: This chart shows the total wealth of African Americans in 1893, broken down by state; the total amount of property owned by African Americans was estimated at $263 million.

A People without a Nation | 29

30 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

strongest nations and races would survive, while those unable to compete in the emerging technological, industrial, and cultural world order would be overrun and disappear. The protestors wrote in The Reason Why: The [f]our hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America is acknowledged to be our greatest national enterprise of the century. . . . The Negro wanted to show by his years of freedom, that his industry did not need the incentive of a master’s whip, and that his intelligence was capable of successful self direction. It had been said that he was improvident and devoid of ambition, and that he would gradually lapse into barbarism. He wanted to show that in a quarter of a century, he had accumulated property to the value of two hundred million dollars, that his ambition had led him into every field of industry, and that capable men [of] his race had served his nation well in the legislatures . . . and as national Representatives abroad.

The pavilion of the Republic of Haiti stood as the only structure erected by a black nation and the only autonomous representation of people of African descent in the White City. The fairgrounds consisted of two distinct parts: a main area called the “White City,” due to the color of its buildings and its pristine environment, and the Midway Plaisance, a narrower strip of land adjacent to the White City that contained amusement attractions, restaurants, and ethnological exhibits. The White City’s grand Neoclassical structures, dedicated to commerce, manufacturing, technology, and the arts, sat on wide boulevards unified by bodies of water, bridges, and walkways. Various exhibitions, state and foreign buildings (including Haiti’s), and the woman’s pavilion resided in the White City.

The disorderly Midway, with its makeshift structures that characterized the villages of “lesser” European nations and so-called primitive peoples, contrasted sharply with the White City. It displayed a variety of amusements such as the world’s first Ferris Wheel, restaurants, and shops selling souvenirs and demonstrating a variety of crafts.

Exhibits representing, and indeed stereotyping, the lifestyles of Dahomeans, Algerians, Tunisians, Bedouins, Egyptians, Samoan Islanders, and Eskimos, among others, also lined the Midway.

According to cultural historian Burton Benedict, living exhibitions of peoples such as the Dahomeans of West Africa and their artifacts emphasized the “ethnic and cultural differences” between these peoples and the fairgoers. These “colonial exhibits,” as Benedict calls them, The splendid pavilion of the Republic of Haiti was the only structure erected by a black nation and the only autonomous representation of people of African descent in the White City.

A People without a Nation | 31

The White City (above) contrasted sharply with the Midway Plaisance (left). While the White City featured pristine grand structures on wide boulevards, the Midway featured sideshow attractions and a variety of amusements.

32 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

served several purposes. Along with their entertainment and instructive value, he contends, they were meant to signify the “trophies” or prizes of the colonizing powers of the West and to justify imperialism.

Although Liberia sent a small fair exhibition shown in the Agricultural Building, the Dahomean village was the largest exhibit representing West Africa, the ancestral home of most black Americans (Dahomey is now Benin).

Dahomeans were depicted as barbarians and cannibals, the most savage of all the conquered peoples at the exposition. A large poster advertising the Dahomean exhibition featured a scantily clothed “native” brandishing a machete in one hand and holding what appears to be the head of a European in the other. A fair guidebook disparagingly described Dahomean women as masculine Amazon warriors and Dahomean men as small and effeminate.

Right: Official Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance, World’s Columbian Exposition. This ten-cent catalog boasted that the “Dahomey Village of thirty native houses has a population of sixty-nine people, twenty-one of them being Amazon warriors.”

Below: The catalog also advertised performances at the South Sea Islands Village; performers line up before they show “the songs and dances of Samoa, Fiji, Romutah and Wallis Islands” at the South Sea Island theatre.

A People without a Nation | 33

As historian Robert Rydell observed, “Visitors [to] the Fair were asked to note the Dahomeans’ ‘regretful absence of tailor made clothes.’” And the mocking tone in some of the popular media, as Rydell illustrates, gives us an indication of how these so-called primitive peoples might have been perceived by the wider public. A vicious cartoon depicted an obese Eskimo female wearing heavy fur clothing and suffering from the heat, while a barely clothed, spear-bearing Dahomean male, with exaggeratedly broad features, shivered from the cold. The Eskimo gives her clothing to the African and romance results.

The satirical magazine World’s Fair Puck outlined a relationship between black Americans and the “savage” Dahomeans, combining long-standing racist and dehumanizing stereotypes, and referring to blacks as “chicken thieves,” intellectually stupid, and akin to the orangutan.

Douglass and other black activists emphatically protested the Dahomean exhibition. Douglass explained in the introduction to The Reason Why: “America has brought to her shores and given welcome to a greater variety of mankind than were ever assembled in one place since the day of Pentecost . . . , and as if to shame the Negro, the Dahomians [sic] are also here to exhibit the Negro as a repulsive savage.” In numerous speeches, during and after the fair, Douglass continued to comment on the racist representation of the Dahomeans. In a lecture entitled “The Lessons of the Hour,” he stated: “All classes and conditions were there [at the fair] save the educated American Negro.”

Black Americans appeared in some numbers at the World’s Congress Auxiliary of the Chicago World’s Fair. The auxiliary, “a parliament of nations,” consisted of a series of meetings designed to “surpass all previous efforts to bring about real fraternity of nations, and unite the enlightened people of the whole earth.” Twenty departments comprised the congresses; each department—such as Woman’s Progress, Temperance, Religion, and Africa—sponsored open forums for the discussion of issues and problems relative to that topic. Many black spokespersons viewed the congresses as a forum for protest rather than celebration. Participants discussed many contentious issues, including women’s rights, European colonization of Africa, and black emigration.

34 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Black leaders protested the Dahomey Village because it portrayed the West Africans as barbarians. Top: Dahomey natives inside the village. Bottom: On the side wall of the building, a sign boasted “Dahomey Amazone in Action.”

The Chicago Times publication Midway Types said of the Dahomey Village: “[I]ts inhabitants were just the sort of people the managers of the Exposition did not banquet or surfeit with receptions.”

“A Climatic Change,” a simplistic cartoon from the publication World’s Fair Puck, features an African falling for an Eskimo and makes fun of both cultures.

A People without a Nation | 35

This World’s Fair Puck cartoon displays stereotypes of African cultures.

36 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

In this lithograph by Rodolfo Morgari, Columbia, a mythical figure representing the New World, displays the fair to various “exotic” cultures as Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, and other figures from American history watch from overhead.

African American women felt out of place in the Woman’s Building, as the white women who erected and managed the building denied African American women a voice in the planning and leadership of this project.

Black women were unwelcome even in the building dedicated to their own gender. The white women who erected and managed the Woman’s Building and the Congress of Women denied African American women a voice in the planning and leadership of these projects.

Prominent black women such as Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, and Fannie Jackson Coppin— who addressed the World’s Congress of Representative Women of the World’s Congress Auxiliary—praised the progress and promise of black women as they denounced the lower status of black Americans in society and at the fair.

A variety of individuals concerned with uplifting what one speaker dubbed the “pariah of continents” attended the Chicago Congress on Africa, one of the many meetings under the auspices of the auxiliary. The contemporary magazine Our Day gave an account of the several days of meetings. Attendees discussed African colonization by Europeans, but the meetings focused on the need to end the slave trade and civilize, Christianize, and commercialize Africa. An array of prominent blacks debated the age-old question of black emigration. Participants also expressed concern for American blacks’ constitutional rights; black-white relations in the South; and the status and future of Liberia. However, the congress was A People without a Nation | 37

The Haitian Pavilion contained many of the country’s treasures, such as the sword of Touissant Louverture, leader of the Haitian Rebellion, and paintings of leaders such as President Florvil Hyppolite.

hardly a comfortable space, as black speakers heard the negative and racist pronouncements of former Confederates and imperialists, some of whom supported the colonization of Africa by Europeans and praised slavery for civilizing blacks in the New World.

Douglass voiced his opposition to emigration at the Congress on Africa. Throughout his career the preeminent black leader and activist stood in steadfast opposition to mass black emigration. In an 1883 address he stated: I will say that I do not look for colonization either in or out of the United States. Africa is too far off, even if we desired to go there. . . . There is but one destiny . . . and that is to make ourselves and be made by others a part of the American people in every sense of the word.

Douglass expressed similar sentiments in 1893 at the Haitian Pavilion: I hold that the American Negro owes no more to the Negroes of Africa than he owes to the Negroes in America. . . . We have a fight on our hand[s] right here . . . and a blow struck for the Negro in America is a blow struck for the Negro in Africa. The native land of the American Negro is America . . . and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood.

38 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

In Douglass’s view, imperialists had overrun much of the African continent. Moreover, American blacks needed their best and brightest at home in the United States.

Furthermore, some blacks of both Euro-American and African American parentage, such as Douglass, found racial and cultural identification with Africa difficult.

Although Douglass consistently opposed mass black emigration, when he temporarily retreated from his position just before the Civil War, he considered Haiti— not Canada, Liberia, or Sierra Leone—the nation for black emigration.

For many blacks, the Haitian Pavilion represented their racial and cultural identity at the fair. Due to the generosity of the Haitian government, the building became the space from which Douglass, Wells, and others protested and staked a claim for blacks in the White City.

When Douglass served as United States minister to Haiti from 1889 to 1891, his duties included presenting the United States’ invitation to the fair to Haiti’s secretary of foreign affairs. In a message to Douglass dated June 27, 1891, Haitian President Florvil Hyppolite accepted the invitation and underscored his government’s hope to maintain amicable relations with the United States. Hyppolite’s reply reflected his awareness

of the symbolic meaning of the fair as a world arena in which evidence of national and racial progress was to be displayed: It will be for us a happy occasion to show to the civilized world our rich natural products and the first efforts which [Haiti] has been able to realize in industrial endeavor and in the liberal arts. Our disastrous civil wars have without doubt greatly paralyzed our march toward progress; nevertheless one will be able to see that we are not lacking in elevated aspirations and that we are endeavoring to figure worthily in the grand concert of American nations.

Hyppolite’s letter also emphasized the progress and potential of Haiti that Douglass and others had hoped to demonstrate to the world on behalf of blacks in the United States. Haiti was black and independent; in 1804

Above: Famed Haitian artist Hector Hyppolite painted President Florvil Hyppolite in this 1947 work. Right: This 1975 painting by Michel Obin depicts the Battle of Vertieres; in the center of the painting, Toussaint Louverture, on horseback, raises his famous sword. Below: An eighteenth-century engraving of Haitian hero Toussaint Louverture.

it fought for and won its independence from France, one of the world’s strongest countries. In spite of its persistent bloody internal strife, Haiti received diplomatic recognition from the United States and other powerful nations. It maintained its sovereignty in the face of U.S. demands to secure a coaling station and naval base on the island; and, despite continuing underdevelopment, had manufactures that suggested future progress. For African Americans denied their own space at the fair, the Haitian Pavilion was an acceptable substitute.

In one of his many public speeches, Douglass established a link between Haiti’s successful revolution against France and the freedom of people of African descent: Civilized or savage, whatever the future may have in store for her, Haiti is a black man’s country. . . . We should not forget that the freedom you and I enjoy today; that of . . . colored people in the British West Indies; the freedom that has come to the colored A People without a Nation | 39

people the world over is largely due to the brave stand taken by the black sons of Haiti ninety years ago. . . .

It was her one brave example that first startled the Christian world into a sense of the Negro’s manhood.

When the Haitian government appointed Douglass its co-commissioner to the fair—along with Haitian native Charles A. Preston, a former member of the Haitian diplomatic corps in Washington, D.C.—Douglass and his colleagues seized the opportunity to use the pavilion.

The Haitian building provided black visitors a place where they could not only feel at home, but could protest black Americans’ exclusion from the exposition and identify with the march of “civilization” in the Western world.

In her autobiography, Ida B. Wells wrote that “had it not been for [the generosity of Haiti], Negroes of the United States would have [had] no part . . . in any official way in the World’s Fair. . . . Haiti’s building was one of the gems of the World’s Fair, and in it Mr. Douglass held high court. . . . Needless to say, the Haitian building was the chosen spot; for representative Negroes of the [United States] who visited the fair were to be found along with the Haitians and citizens of other foreign countries.”

The opportunity to place black America at the fair in the framework of Euro-American cultural achievement held special importance for Douglass. Like most of his peers in the late nineteenth century, Douglass identified EuroAmerican culture with civilization and progress. The Haitian Pavilion was in the White City, situated near the buildings of Germany, Spain, and New South Wales (now Australia); these nations were not England or France but were still respectable European or settler areas.

An official guide to the fair described Haiti’s building as follows: It was in the Greco-Colonial style, surmounted by a gilded dome, which is copied after the State capitol of Massachusetts. The structure has a frontage of 126 feet, including piazzas 12 feet wide which surround three sides of the building. In the center of the facade is the coat-of-arms of the Republic of Haiti in a medallion surrounded by a scroll bearing the following inscription: “Republique Haitienne,” and the dates 1492 (the discovery), 1804 (date of [Haitian] national independence) and 1893 (the present anniversary).

The guide also summarized Haiti’s exhibits and artifacts, which included “some pre-Columbian relics and the authentic anchor of the caravel Santa Maria” from one of the three ships Columbus used on his 1492 voyage, and the sword of Toussaint Louverture, the hero of the Haitian revolution. Another account described the Haitian flag, a marble statue by a native sculptor, 40 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Gravure of poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1914. At age 21, Dunbar worked at the Haitian Pavilion as a clerk and distributed his poems there. Dunbar was one of the first African Americans to gain national prominence as a poet; he wrote several volumes of poetry before he died at thirty-three.

and paintings of President Hyppolite, Douglass, and other prominent black men. One writer noted that “a choice collection of wood was displayed, including a huge block of mahogany. Among the many articles of manufactures were fine specimens of saddlery, laces, and embroidery; and fibers and minerals were exhibited” to represent the natural resources of the island and industry of the Haitian people. “Native hands” prepared and sold Haitian coffee, along with various by-products such as liqueurs, in a restaurant at the southern end of the building.

At the Haitian Pavilion, Wells “spent [her] days putting [copies of The Reason Why] in the hands of foreigners,” eventually distributing ten thousand copies. Blacks also expressed themselves culturally at the pavilion.

According to Wells, Douglass hired the rising African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, “with his first little volume of poems, called ‘Oak and Ivy,’” as a clerk at the pavilion. Wells also recalled that Dunbar’s poems

As a correspondent for several black newspapers, Wells used her news contacts to research lynchings. These accounts helped her to write the “Lynching Law” chapter of The Reason Why (top left), which featured charts showing how many men were lynched each year (top right), and a graphic illustration of a lynching (bottom right). Bottom left: The note on the back of a photograph of a lynching reads: “This S-O-B was hung at Clanton Ala. Friday Aug. 21, ‘91, for murdering a little boy in cold blood for 35 in cash. He is a good specimen of your ‘Black Christian’ hung by ‘White Heathens.’” The statement is signed “The Committee.”

A People without a Nation | 41

Above: Unfamiliar cultures shocked many fair visitors; a line of marching Samoans surprise Midway passersby in this photograph. Below: C. D. Arnold photograph of the Midway Plaisance, 1893.

42 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

were distributed at the pavilion and came to the attention of the American literary critic William Dean Howells: “Mr. Howells reviewed that little volume a few months later in the columns of the Atlantic Monthly, and Paul Dunbar’s fame as a poet was established in America.” In addition to American and foreign fairgoers, Wells indicates, an array of prominent white and black people visited the Haitian Pavilion, including: EuroAmerican abolitionist and woman’s rights advocate Angelina Grimké; Hallie Brown and Mary Church Terrell, educators and black woman’s rights’ advocates; Reverend Alexander Crummell, the former emigrationist and advocate of black racial solidarity and economic selfhelp; and other black poets.

When fair managers designated a “Negro Day” (August 25, 1893), Wells concluded that “Observing the popularity of the Haitian building and the widespread interest of World’s Fair visitors in everything colored, and perhaps deciding to appease the discontent of colored people over their government’s attitude of segregation, the authorities came to Mr. Douglass and asked him to arrange a Negro Day on the program.” She suggested that the fair managers were, in essence, shamed into recognizing the presence of black Americans with a special day of speeches and festivities. Wells maintained that initially she and Douglass differed on whether blacks should participate in what was, after all, an afterthought on the part of exposition directors. Yet, Wells attests, Douglass’s speeches, Dunbar’s poetry, and the music of the Fiske Jubilee Singers changed the tone of the day from one that was apparently intended to merely appease blacks to one of high honor for African Americans.

The existence of a Haitian exhibition in the White City filled a void for many black Americans that other African and third-world exhibitions could not. In a period in which nationhood was viewed as synonymous with civilization and Europeans colonized people of color, black and independent Haiti was a symbol of what African descendants could accomplish.

The decision of Wells, Douglass, Barnett, and others to make their stand at the Haitian Pavilion illuminates racism and the exclusion of black Americans in latenineteenth century American society. Blacks were of African descent, yet cut off from Africa by time and circumstance, in a nation that clearly viewed itself as a white man’s country, despite its increasing ethnic diversity. For the purposes of economic and political exploitation, whites saw blacks as a distinct ethnic and cultural entity; yet whites viewed blacks as part of the American collective in order to render them invisible.

In the Haitian Pavilion, Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, and other black leaders found a place where they could both contest their “invisibility” and affirm their racial and cultural distinctiveness as people of African

and American descent in the world that Columbus “discovered.” Against strong opposition, they refused to be banished from the world’s fair and found a way to make their voices heard—voices that are still being heard today.

Barbara J. Ballard is associate professor of history at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For an overview of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the CHS publication Grand Illusions (1993) is a comprehensive resource. The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition is available in some libraries. Black Women in United States History series by Carlson Press (1990) includes a volume on Ida B. Wells and reprints a selection of her essays, including her chapter on lynching from The Reason Why. Yale University Press published a full set of The Frederick Douglass Papers, featuring the great leader’s writings and speeches, in 1979. Several volumes of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poems are available, including The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (University Press of Virginia, 1993). For more about Haitian history, try Robert Debs Jr., Heinl, et al.’s Written in Blood: The Story of the Haitian People 1492–1995 (University Press of America, 1996). For more images of Haitian art, read Selden Rodman’s Where Art Is Joy: Haitian Art: The First Forty Years (Ruggles de Latour, 1988).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 26, CHS, ICHi-25143; 27 left, CHS, ICHi-25159; 27 top right, CHS, ICHi-10139; 28, courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago Library; 29 all, from The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), CHS; 30–31, CHS, ICHi-25136; 32 top, CHS, ICHi-25057; 32 bottom, CHS, ICHi-25236; 33 top, from Official Catalogue of Exhibits on the Midway Plaisance, World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), CHS; 33 bottom, CHS, ICHi-25747; 34 top, CHS, ICHi-26924; 34 bottom, CHS, ICHi-26906; 35 top, from Midway Types (1893), CHS; 35 bottom, CHS, ICHi-27381; 36, CHS, ICHi-25175; 37 top, CHS, ICHi-25233; 37 bottom, CHS, ICHi-16265; 38, CHS, ICHi-26928; 39 top, courtesy of the collection of the Davenport Museum of Art, Iowa; 39 middle, courtesy of L. Clayton Willis; 39 bottom, from Where Art Is Joy, by Selden Rodman (Ruggles de Latour, 1988); 40, CHS, ICHi-10160; 41 all, from The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition, CHS; 42 top, CHS, ICHi-25237; 42 bottom, CHS, ICHi-13855.

A People without a Nation | 43

Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y The Chicago

The Race is to the Swift: The 1886 National Typesetting Championship WA L K E R R U M B L E

I

For centuries, typesetters relied on “sticks” such as this one, in which to arrange individual pieces of type into words and sentences.

44

n the printing industry of the nineteenth century, composition—the setting by hand of individual letters, first into words and then complete columns of text—had not changed since Gutenberg. A typesetter arranged, one-by-one, upside-down and backward, single metal characters in a “stick”—a metal receptacle he held in his receiving hand that could contain several lines of type. It would be the last technique of traditional printing to be mechanized, lagging behind technological leaps such as rotary steam presses and curved-plate stereotyping. Even after the Civil War and the availability of presses delivering fifteen thousand newspapers an hour, printing still required battalions of hand compositors.

By 1886 Ottmar Mergenthaler’s machine, the blower Linotype, was becoming the fastest and thus the best solution to this bottleneck. Mergenthaler’s machine produced entire lines of type by using a keyboard, typecasting matrices, and a ready pot of molten metal.

Keyboard speed exceeded that of hand-setting individuals at their cases, but more importantly the Linotype eliminated the need to break down and re-sort used letters. The standing type created by the Linotype could simply be melted down for re-use.

A letter from Kohl & Middleton’s during the 1880s shows an idealized portrait of their museum, along with the house rules for the “Artists and Curiosities” booked to perform there. The c. 1890 photograph (below) of Clark Street looking north toward the intersection with Madison Street shows a dime museum at far left, presumably Kohl & Middleton’s. Cartoon depictions of various attractions ornament the upper stories.

Before the use of the Linotype became widespread, however, every composing room in the country was producing its local flash, a “typo” shopmates claimed was the fastest in town—probably the world. Printers called the best of these compositors “swifts,” and rumors flew of astonishing speed in farflung places. Printers throughout the country wanted to regularize these reports and to test themselves against each other.

Throughout the East in the mid-1880s, the printers’ wish to race each other intersected with the public’s desire for entertainment at popular amusement houses called “dime museums.” These museums existed in every city of any size in nineteenth-century America. Originally, they supplied an important dimension of nineteenth-century American democratic culture. As the name implied, they were inexpensive places for clerks, mechanics, and other ordinary people to examine improving books, artifacts, and performances. As the nine-

teenth century progressed, this liberal goal intersected with the marketplace show business of men such as P. T. Barnum and evolved into something altogether less uplifting. After the Civil War, the dime museum could be many things, but many found it a low effort, “a place of amusement,” according to historian Brooks McNamara, where Americans would find “a theatre, some wax figures, a giant and a dwarf or two, a jumble of pictures, and a few live snakes.”

Dime museums discovered and subsequently promoted typeracing, creating a public amusement, a new thing, out of what had been a four-hundred-year-old form of shopfloor athletics. Compositors had raced, of course, from the day there were two of them, usually for beer. Typesetting racing enjoyed particularly widespread popularity during the twenty years from The success of showmen such as P. T. Barnum (left) encouraged dime museums to emphasize entertainment over education in their exhibitions and performances.

45

the end of the Civil War until the mid-1880s.

In 1877, a Cincinnati Enquirer foreman, John Bell, offered a challenge on behalf of his composing-room staff to beat any other ten typesetters in the land.

Harry Cole’s race with Myles Johnson in the rooms of the New York Herald was instantly famous. In the printing trade, “Old ’Arry” was “a true friend, a sincere enemy, a strong labor advocate and [was] well-known in all the sporting circles as ever willing to risk his time and money on any endeavor to best the top records.”

Among all these, a match that took place on February 19, 1870, became a benchmark. On that day, George “The Velocipede” Arensberg set 2,064 ems of type in a single hour, a performance of mythic proportion. An “em,” named for the letter m, the widest of the alphabet, was the standard unit of typographic measurement.

Composing skill and speed necessary to set two thousand ems of type in a single hour were demonstrably out of reach even for gifted workmen. A rate of between eight hundred and one thousand ems an hour was average for the industry. The Arensberg Wager became the most important race of them all and George Arensberg’s accomplishments became a standard.

Chicago’s Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum at 150 South Clark Street (now 10 South Clark Street) hosted the 1886 National Championship, the first of its kind.

The event and its setting marked a coming of age for typeracing. Until the mid-1880s, most important matches took place in crowded metropolitan daily newspaper composing rooms. This is where the hard-eyed professionals hung out, men who liked to bet and drink, and who were renowned in their own working circles.

By 1885, however, typeracing was breaking out of the print shop. Big races between notable swifts had become events of barroom popularity alongside billiards, bicycle racing, and boxing. The International Typographical Union, although never a sporting federation, had published a codified set of racing rules. Dime museums began seriously organizing and promoting typeracing. Notable swifts such as Joseph W. McCann of the New York Herald and William C. Barnes of the New York World attracted the attention of promoters such as J. R. Davis, talent scout for Kohl & Middleton.

46 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

New Yorkers William Barnes (top) and Joseph McCann (left) came to Chicago to compete with the local swifts. Ads placed in local newspapers promised spectators a “grand monster stage show.”

This headline from the January 11, 1886, Chicago Mail set the stage for competition between the New Yorkers and the Chicagoans.

Before he booked swifts in Chicago, Davis had supplied P. T. Barnum’s exotica. He fetched, for instance, the famous Barnum elephant Jumbo and followed that with sacred white monkeys, Nautch dancing girls, and assortments of “hairy people.” Davis lined up printers for the dime museum’s Chicago race. In late December 1885, he busily confirmed this new relationship. “Please send me your picture at the earliest possible moment,” Davis wrote McCann. “Everything is progressing favorably for the tournament.” As McCann would later describe it, “Barnum’s agent” arranged for himself and Barnes “to give exhibitions in the different cities in which [Kohl & Middleton] owned museums.”

Kohl & Middleton billed this Chicago race as the “championship of the world.” The ITU racing rules would be in place at the museum, and Chicago’s Local No. 16 sanctioned and judged the tournament, “to divest the contest of all suspicion of a hippodrome [a fixed race].” The New York Times reported “a large crowd of newspaper men and printers” at the start of the match, “and this interest manifested was very deep.” The printing tradepaper Inland Printer announced it “a novel attraction for Chicago sightseers.”

Dime museums took typeracing off shop floors and out of beer halls, but in so doing turned honest, mundane toil into a public amusement. Some printers found it scant improvement. Like all the others, Chicago’s museum occasionally edified folks, but it always entertained them. Typesetting week, shouted the Sunday ads for the South Side museum, would be “our banner week!” The tournament would not only produce a cham-

pion of the entire world, but would crown that champion in diamonds. Still, in case typesetting was not to everyone’s taste, the museum brought in a standard fare of vaudeville acts. “A grand monster stage show,” appearing throughout the week would accompany it all.

By Monday, January 11, Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum was ready and so were the stars, Joseph McCann and William Barnes. A month before Chicago’s match, on December 16, 1885, McCann and Barnes had squared off in what became the immediate backdrop for the Chicago tournament. The New York Herald’s McCann beat the New York World’s Barnes and won five hundred dollars. That race happened in New York City, a media hub and home of Local No. 6—”Big Six”—of the International Typographical Union. Because Local No. 6 was the strongest local of the nation’s oldest labor union, the rest of the country acknowledged, if grudgingly, McCann’s claim to a “national championship.”

For the Chicago race both of the New Yorkers would participate in the afternoon’s opening heat. Competing alongside them would be two of the local swifts, William J. Creevy of the Chicago Inter Ocean and Joseph M. Hudson of the Evening Mail.

Shortly after two o’clock on Monday’s first day of racing, “a short, thick-set man with a good-natured, red face trotted down the main floor” of Kohl & Middleton.

He paused among compositors poised in front of their typecases and then cried “Time!” It galvanized the contestants—galvanized all, that is, except McCann, the reigning champion. According to a reporter from the Chicago Tribune, “the look of determination that had irradiated his features a few minutes before had faded away into an expression of dreamy cogitation, and he stood, his ‘stick’ in his listless left hand, gazing vacantly into space.” A man nudged his elbow. “Time’s called, McCann,” he whispered. McCann awoke. “Is that so?”

Then, “after an eagle glance at his active fellow-competitors,” Joe McCann “went to work with a will.”

Thanks to McCann’s laggard start, Barnes took a decisive early lead after the first day’s competition. Each of the seven competitors participated in an afternoon heat lasting an hour and a half and repeated the effort at night. Race format called for two afternoon and two evening stints, with the cast of characters dividing and recombining in groups of three and four. In this way, the museum converted the marathon of sustained effort typical of typesetting into a series of sprints. Bursts of headto-head competition kept the action fresh and fun to watch, but scores were cumulative, the eventual order of finish determined only at week’s end. At the finish of a day’s racing, scorekeepers tallied the competitors’ gross scores as well as a proofreader’s judgment of errors committed. The following morning the men corrected their mistakes. Scorekeepers then subtracted that work from Yesterday’s City | 47

This minion type from the Great Western Type Foundry is the size used by the contestants.

Drawings of competitors Clinton DeJarnatt of the Tribune (below), William Creevy of the Inter Ocean (below right), and Leo Monheimer of the Daily News (above right) appeared in the Tribune’s January 12 article on the race. Monheimer was mistakenly identifed here as “Lou,” as he was in the advertisement for the race.

their gross totals, and the standing of the competitors was fresh for the afternoon resumption of racing.

In Chicago the swifts raced with type called “minion.”

Before printing developed a point-measurement system, type sizes had names. The Chicago Evening Mail supplied Kohl & Middleton’s minion, roughly 7-point type, one of the most common sizes used in newspaper offices. Such small type could be difficult to handle and typographical errors were common. Typos, however, were easily corrected. An improper line-ending wordbreak, on the other hand, could be calamitous. Its correction might force entire syllables onto a subsequent line. An “out” was an inadvertent omission of a word or phrase. Such errors involved extensive rejustification of entire lines, the single mistake ramifying throughout the set piece. A well-composed line was a nicely spaced line, without gaps, and the museum’s proofreader, Fred Rae, could insist on this even spacing when scoring the competition.

Throughout the week large crowds filled the great hall of Kohl & Middleton’s Museum to watch the competition.

Races were wagering events, and most Chicago onlookers favored one of the Easterners. With few exceptions, opening-day form held throughout the entire week.

McCann set more type than did Barnes or anyone else, but he also made many errors, allowing Barnes to pull ahead.

First-day errors also ruined the chance of the Tribune’s heralded 48 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Clinton “The Kid” DeJarnatt. A miserable evening heat left the Kid’s proof “so badly marked up” that the early Chicago favorite slid into last place, far behind his mates. McCann finished the day in second place, and DeJarnatt brought up the rear.

The local DeJarnatt’s showing disappointed many, as hometown swifts had itched to strut their stuff. Chicago’s printers “must have a match,” observed Printer’s Circular, a printing trade paper. “Several of her compositors had great records and plenty of friends to back them.” DeJarnatt’s collapse, however, typified an overall failure by the hometowners to challenge the New Yorkers. Later, Barnes noted that DeJarnatt “was in ill health during the Chicago match, as his appearance indicated, and in consequence he was extremely nervous.”

In fact, the entire Chicago contingent seemed nervous.

Some Chicagoans thought the Daily News’s Leo Monheimer better even than DeJarnatt, but “the call of ‘Time’ appeared to ‘rattle’ him badly” noted the Tribune’s reporter, “nearly a minute elapsing before he had fumbled through his first line.” The Inter Ocean’s Will Creevy, a New Orleans native who had worked in Chicago for five years, “did not appear to be in any hurry.” Joseph Hudson of the Evening Mail also carried a stately pace. Hudson at least had a plan. He hoped to win by avoiding mistakes, and his style owed more to careful method than nerves. The Tribune’s reporter also discovered “a look of languid sadness, whether habitual or accidental . . . had overspread the countenance of Thomas C. Levy, the Journal’s representative, as he slowly picked up his ‘stick’ and went to work.”

McCann, the reigning champion, performed badly from the start. At the beginning of the week “JoeMac” got most of the attention. “By far the greatest number of curious visitors grouped themselves in the vicinity of McCann.” By midweek, McCann’s backers “many of whom are alleged to have bet considerable money on him,” reported the Tribune, “looked very lugubrious . . . and the admonitions he received to ‘go slow’ were as numerous as they were emphatic.”

Typically, a typesetter stood to set type as shown below. The type was laid out in a specified order. A Marder, Luse & Co. catalog showed bracket stands and a diagram of a recommended plan for laying out both the upper and lower cases.

Barnes quickly unseated the Irishman as the event’s main attraction, and as early as Tuesday the crowds had shifted from McCann. Barnes combined speed with an exceedingly smooth manner. “Barnes’s record for fine workmanship continues and he is the favorite by heavy odds,” reported the New York Times. “His action was not nearly so rapid to the eye as that of McCann but a great deal more regular,” observed the Tribune. “An old printer, whose mouth was distended in a grin of professional delight as he watched him at work, said he would back Barnes against McCann in a day’s work from start to ‘jig-up’ at long odds.”

Barnes offered tricks as well as style. Between the evening heats of Tuesday’s evening racing, Barnes entertained the crowd in a half-hour exhibition with his typecases reversed. Hand compositors worked facing two trays of type and placed the tray containing capital letters above the lower-case tray, an arrangement that led to our contemporary “uppercase” and “lowercase” terminology. The reverse of this arrangement presented most typesetters with difficulties akin to asking them to set in Cyrillic.

Barnes performed this feat again for “his customary group of admirers” the next morning before racing began. “To judge by the number of spectators on hand interest in the contest for the typesetting championship had not waned,”

by Wednesday, the Tribune noted.

Barnes quickly became a financial as well as an artistic success. By the end of his second Wednesday heat, he had twice exceeded a pace of 2,000 ems an hour, a feat that “gained him a prolonged round of applause and Yesterday’s City | 49

caused substantial fluctuations in his favor in the betting.” Barnes shifted to high gear during Thursday’s afternoon intermission. He first set type from reversed cases, and then awed the crowd by setting blindfolded, as copy was read to him. Finally, Barnes set blindfolded from reversed cases. He made only two mistakes during his blindfolded effort at Chicago, a spacing error and a typo. The Tribune described it as “work never before attempted by any other compositor.” It was also bettable work, and it kept the cash flow alive.

Barnes swept the field at Chicago. By the second day of competition, Chicago’s contingent had shaken off its opening-round lethargy, and “appeared to have got rid of the nervousness, which characterized their work of Monday.” Will Creevy in particular improved, “and the anxious glances he had cast from time to time at his competitors Monday were altogether wanting.” Leo Monheimer, five years from an apprenticeship in Bloomfield, Iowa, had come into the race confident of winning.

Quickly, however, the city’s printing fraternity recognized what their colleagues were up against. Two days into the tournament, the Tribune reporter now found this adopted Iowan more rustic than charming, noting that Monheimer “appeared on the platform in the same shirt that he wore when he left there.”

At twenty-one years of age, Monheimer and DeJarnatt were the youngsters of the tournament. DeJarnatt’s youth had earned him his nickname, “Kid,” but printing ages were deceptive. For example, the Inland Printer noted that Joe Hudson “in his day” had been “the lightning compositor of Chicago.” At race time the over-the-hill Hudson was all of thirty-six years old. In 1886, however, a printer’s average age at death was scarcely longer, a short thirtyseven years. The New York swift Barnes was forty-two years old and living on borrowed time. Hudson certainly seemed a graybeard, beginning with his idiosyncrasies. He stooped at the case and “offset the action of his right hand by an incessant oscillating motion of his left shoulder-blade.” Then, presumably weary, he sat down.

Hudson’s steady style nonetheless easily moved him ahead of his fellow Chicagoans and into third place. A Baltimorean who had arrived in Chicago in 1880, he quickly became a betting shooin for third place and the bragJoseph Hudson (left) was expected to take third place, but when Thomas Levy (above) put on a burst of speed on the final day of the contest the outcome became uncertain.

50 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

ging rights of his adopted hometown.

Bettors who once liked Hudson because he was fast, backed him now because he was immaculate. In an early hour-and-ahalf heat, he set 2,500 ems with but two errors, a record no others approached.

Bettors also knew that Hudson’s Evening Mail had supplied the tournament types, thus providing him with his house type. Each day when the others fell back after the proofreading took place, Hudson reemerged behind the New York leaders.

Chicago proved to be McCann’s worst showing. At Kohl & Middleton’s he averaged 1,921 ems an hour, the only time in his racing career that he failed to average 2,000 ems. McCann was not above griping about the results, often mentioning the museum’s “noise and bustle.” The shopfloor atmosphere of typeracing was rarely serene, but neither was it public in the manner of Kohl & Middleton’s with hundreds of patrons milling around. McCann, as reigning champion, got much of this early attention. On opening day “by far the greatest number of curious visitors grouped themselves in the vicinity of McCann.” Still, the “galaxy of gazers didn’t appear to disconcert him in the least, and save for an occasional glance in the direction of his most formidable rival over the way, Barnes, his eyes never left his copy.” At week’s end he sang another tune. “McCann,” reported the Tribune, “attributes his failure to repeat his performance of beating Editor Pulitzer’s fast printer [Barnes] to the noise made by the crowds of spectators round his case, which disconcerted him badly for the first three days.”

Joe Hudson did well from the start, occupying third place throughout the week, with Tuesday’s afternoon heat particularly well done. His “performance elicited considerable applause.” By Thursday Barnes and McCann were certain winners, and the battle for third became one of “keen popular zest.” Monheimer and Creevy stayed consistently close to third place, passing Hudson in quantity of type set, Hudson swinging back ahead in proofs.

It stayed this way until the weekend, Levy and DeJarnatt apparently out of the running. The Evening Journal’s Thomas Levy remained the event’s forgotten man.

“Bangs” Levy was twenty-seven years old, a veteran compositor from Oshkosh, Wisconsin. Unlike most of his Chicago mates, he carried some impressive public typeracing credentials and, in fact, was among those who claimed to have “beaten” everyone, including the great George Arensberg. In an unofficial test run without acceptable standards, he once set 2,220 ems in an hour’s test at the St. Paul Pioneer. Fully a year before the

Typesetters representing many of Chicago’s newspapers took part in the competition. Seen here are mastheads from the Chicago Evening Journal, the Chicago Mail, and the Daily Inter Ocean.

Yesterday’s City | 51

Chicago match an Inland Printer correspondent thought Levy “may be reckoned as the quickest known.” Still, Levy’s early “apathy” landed him back in the field at fifth, and by midweek he struggled to stay ahead of the fevered Kid DeJarnatt.

Halfway home, many onlookers thought the match was over, with Joe Hudson secure in third place. Barnes, the leader, was getting odds of 5 to 2 “with few takers.”

McCann “virtually concede[d] the battle to his grimvisaged rival, who has given utterance to a determination to wipe out the disgrace of his last defeat by the Irishman.”

Levy, however, was rallying. He picked up his pace on Friday’s fifth day of racing, and when he completed work on Saturday, his gross score had moved him ahead of Hudson. Still, proofreading and corrections on Saturday’s work remained for Sunday morning, and throughout the week Hudson routinely regained ground in proofs. Not, however, this time. “The exceeding closeness of the result, which gives Levy third place and Hudson fourth, is unparalleled,” the Tribune reported.

Levy’s big Saturday had held up in corrections. Still, there was high drama before the issue was settled. Sunday night’s finals paired Levy and Hudson in a showdown match race. Levy drew away from Hudson during that last hour and a half. The reporter for the Inland Printer observed that “his ears were stuffed with cotton batting” to stifle the noise of a packed crowd, and “his black eyes bulged out as he rapidly but nervously snatched the type from the case.” Pandemonium reigned. “Soon the shrill voice of a female sounded above the din.” She was drunk and insulted, and she attacked an offending cop. “Poor Levy was frantic,” recalled onlookers. He stamped his foot.

“For God’s sake, gag her,” he cried.

Levy’s rally almost upstaged the centerpiece of the tournament. On Sunday, by arrangement, the New Yorkers Barnes and McCann each attempted to break George Arensberg’s famous single-hour record. According to McCann, “during this tournament Mr. Barnes and I determined to dispose of the much-talked-of record of Arensberg’s of 2,064 ems made about sixteen years previously and which had never been beaten.” Barnes had outdistanced the field, and Kohl & Middleton welcomed a further way to keep the turnstiles moving to the end. “Both Barnes and McCann are anxious to eclipse Arensberg’s great New York record,” announced the Tribune, “but neither of them intends to attempt it until the last day, and possibly the last heat of the tournament.”

That they did. Both Barnes and McCann surpassed the great Velocipede in a special hour-long Sunday night heat. It was redemption for Joe McCann; he had lost the On January 17, the Tribune informed its readers that only third place remained in question, but called Hudson the “almost-certain winner” of that honor.

52

“national championship” to Barnes. Arensberg remained a legend, however, and his single-hour mark was the standard by which the printing fraternity judged all swifts. McCann’s 2,150 ems at Chicago easily distanced the Velocipede and edged Barnes by fifty.

Sunday night was awards night, a convivial gathering of Chicago’s printing fraternity. The Printers’ Circular described Barnes’s first prize: “a handsome championship emblem in the shape of a gold star pendant from a scroll. In the center of the star was a large diamond, and on the scroll the words: ‘Championship for Fast Type Setting.’” McCann’s runner-up prize was a sterling silver water service. Levy got a silver hunting cup for third. In addition, as the Tribune noted, “all of the contestants received a fair compensation for the week’s labor,” each one receiving standard union-scale wages for the type they had set. After the prize-giving ceremonies they all retired to a late banquet at the National Hotel. “A large number of the members of the Typographical Union were present, and the conviviality was continual until a very late hour.”

Kohl & Middleton’s Dime Museum made stars of them all. Chicago’s swifts had found a path that led not merely to fame and celebrity, but to testimonials—to endorsements! Shortly after the match, Barnes, McCann, and the other competitors emerged in the pages of trade papers boosting Barnhart Bros. & Spindler, typefounders and suppliers of the tournament types. Those types, they said, seemed “as near perfection as any we have ever set.”

Overnight the men became industry models. “Persevere till you do succeed,” the Inland Printer advised apprentice compositors, “and it is quite possible your record may some day outrival that of Barnes, McCann, or Arensberg.”

In Chicago in 1886, ordinary people discovered a shopfloor sport. Entertainment provided a path by which printers could enter a wider world, leaving behind unions and workplaces, the traditional sponsoring agencies of a life of production. J. R. Davis, Kohl & Middleton’s race organizer and talent scout, was already planning the next event. On February 16, he alerted Joseph McCann to the Philadelphia tournament scheduled for the middle of March. Bradenburg’s Ninth and Arch Street Museum would host the next “national championship.” Train tickets were on their way. Tradepapers understood that the Chicago event augured a series of races featuring Barnes and McCann. Tournaments were also scheduled for New York and Boston. It had the makings of a professionals’ tour.

Chicago’s “national championship” highlighted a flurry of similar regional competitions held during the winter and spring of 1886. Memphis, Pittsburgh, and Rochester each staged a local tournament. In Boston, Austin & Stone’s Dime Museum staged a women’s race after that of the men. To the consternation of Boston’s

Compositors were setting type at unprecedented speeds in competition, but their role in the printing industry was soon to change. In 1886, Whitelaw Reid (left), editor of the New York Tribune, installed a dozen Linotype machines at his newspaper, the beginning of the end for handset type.

union printers, L. J. Kenney and two other women outperformed the men. In March 1886 Philadelphia’s Ninth and Arch Street Dime Museum staged another “national championship,” pitting local talent against New Yorkers Barnes and McCann, as well as Chicago’s Levy. A newcomer won the match, however: Alexander Duguid of the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Organized typesetting racing ended at the moment of its greatest popularity. At Philadelphia, Duguid set more type faster than anyone ever would, but his race was the last of them. Boston’s races had suggested changes that threatened printing’s labor force. Women struggled for a foothold among union printers, and the performances at Boston suggested to their brethren that further tests of prowess might best be avoided. Later that year, editor Whitelaw Reid of the New York Tribune installed a dozen of Ottmar Mergenthaler’s new Linotype machines. The fastest swift could never catch the Lino. An era had ended.

Walker Rumble is a printer, editor, and publisher at Oat City, a small press, which publishes limited-edition letterpress chapbooks and broadsides as well as Paragraph, a little magazine of short prose. He lives in East Providence, Rhode Island.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 44, 1931.9, CHS; 45 top left and top right, CHS; 45 bottom, CHS, ICHi-23832; 46 left, top and bottom, from Chicago Tribune (January 12, 1886), CHS; 46 right, from Chicago Tribune (January 10, 1886), CHS; 47, from Chicago Mail (January 11, 1886), CHS; 48 top left, from Great Western Type Foundry (1873), CHS; 48 top right and 48 bottom left and right, from Chicago Tribune (Jan 12, 1886), CHS; 49 top right and left, Marder, Luse, & Co. catalog (1881), CHS; 49 bottom, Abridged Specimen Book of the Chicago Type Foundry (1858), CHS; 50 all, from Chicago Tribune (January 12, 1886), CHS; 51 top, from Chicago Evening Journal (January 11, 1886), CHS; 51 middle, from Chicago Mail (Jan. 11, 1886), CHS; 51 bottom, from Daily Inter Ocean (January 11, 1886), CHS; 52, from Chicago Tribune (January 17, 1886) CHS; 53, CHS Yesterday’s City | 53

M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

Wisconsin’s Finest: Interviews with William Cronon, Abner Mikva, and Patrick Ryan T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

I

n the nineteenth century, they were “hayseeds.” In the twentieth, they are “cheeseheads.” The derogatory labels Chicagoans apply to Wisconsin residents are nearly two centuries old. Most Chicagoans have at least heard the jokes; more than a few have probably told them. Among other things, the banter masks long-standing rivalries between the Midwestern metropolis and its rural hinterland.

The relationship between Chicago and Wisconsin, however, is more accurately one of mutual dependance than heated confrontation. In numerous ways, William Cronon, Abner J. Mikva, and Patrick G. Ryan personify the historic links between the city and its northern neighbor. A historian, a labor lawyer turned politician and judge, and an international corporate executive, respectively, each spent their childhoods in Wisconsin. Ryan, Crain’s 1997 Executive of the Year and the College of Insurance’s 1997 Insurance Leader of the Year, grew up in Wauwatosa, leaving Wisconsin to attend Northwestern University. Mikva, a labor lawyer, Illinois state representative, congressman, federal appeals court judge, and general counsel to the president of the United States, departed from his hometown of Milwaukee after two decades to enter the University of Chicago Law School. And Cronon, now a historian at the University of Wisconsin, never really left Wisconsin; yet his Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991) is regarded as a major reinterpretation of the Midwest’s leading metropolis.

All three were profoundly shaped by their Wisconsin origins. Ryan was born in Milwaukee on May 15, 1937, and grew up in nearby Wauwatosa along with his six siblings. Wauwatosa residents, remembers Ryan, “had a lot of German customs, and they were very warm and very family-oriented.

Everybody that I grew up with worked, irrespective of their financial means.

People developed a very good work ethic early, and it was a community that stayed very close together.”

54 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Top to bottom: William Cronon, Abner Mikva, and Patrick G. Ryan.

Like Ryan, Cronon’s Irish surname camouflages his German roots. “I’m about 80 percent German,” says Cronon. Although he was born in New Haven, Connecticut, on September 11, 1954, and then briefly lived in Washington, D.C., and Lincoln, Nebraska, both of Cronon’s parents were raised in small Wisconsin towns. His family maintained those strong Wisconsin ties during his childhood. “There was a cottage on Green Lake near Princeton that we would make annual pilgrimages [to] from New Haven, Washington, and Lincoln. Wisconsin was a consistent presence from my early childhood.”

Eventually, the family settled in Madison where Cronon’s father was a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin and later dean of the College of Letters and Sciences.

Cronon and Ryan’s childhood memories of Wisconsin are idyllic compared to those of Mikva. “What I remember most about my growing up there was that we were probably the poorest family in the neighborhood, which is not a good position to be in.”

Born on January 21, 1926, Mikva grew up in a Yiddish-speaking, Ukrainian Jewish household in Milwaukee. He vividly remembers that “we were on welfare most of the time. My father lost his job as an insurance agent early in the Depression.” Almost overnight, Mikva’s family descended from a comfortable, middle-class existence into poverty. “While Milwaukee was probably better than most,” muses Mikva, “it still was a pretty poor safety net, and it was a very insensitive one. They gave you almost no cash, everything was in kind, so we used to have to go pick up the groceries in a wagon.

My mother would give us a cloth to cover it, so that the neighbors wouldn’t know that we were picking up welfare. But they knew. I don’t remember it being a particularly happy childhood.”

Summer trips to the town of Green Lake kept William Cronon in touch with his Wisconsin roots during his early childhood.

A busy downtown scene on Third Avenue in Milwaukee in 1941. Abner Mikva grew up in the city of Milwaukee, and Patrick Ryan spent his childhood in nearby Wauwatosa.

Making History | 55

At the urging of Zorita Wise, his wife-tobe, Abner Mikva came to the University of Chicago, where he earned a law degree in 1951. Left: Harper Memorial Library in 1957.

Chicago’s universities were the magnets that attracted Mikva and Ryan to Chicago. After enlisting in the Army Air Corps and training as a navigator in final year of World War II, Mikva initially set out to become an accountant.

“Poverty was a watchword, and it was just something that you tried to avoid if at all possible,” he remembers. From 1945 to 1948, Mikva planned a business career while attending the University of Wisconsin at both Madison and Milwaukee and Washington University in St. Louis. Then he met a University of Chicago student, Zorita Wise, who convinced Mikva to abandon finance in favor of law school at the University of Chicago. She ultimately made such an impression that he not only accepted her advice, but married her in 1948.

While living in Chicago’s Chatham neighborhood, Mikva went on to earn Phi Beta Kappa and edit the Law Review.

Like Mikva, Cronon never anticipated his ultimate vocation. “The earliest decision in my life was to be a writer,” he admits. “When I go back and look through childhood junk in my parents’ boxes, I realize I was writing and thinking of myself as a writer all the way back to probably second grade or third grade.” Cronon seriously considered a career in fiction, dropping out of college for a semester to write a novel. “Becoming a historian was the last thing I would have thought I was going to do, and I made a very odd migration through a whole series of different disciplines as an undergraduate at Wisconsin.”

Yet, Cronon displayed a precocious interest in environmental history at a young age. “I had a very odd hobby all the way from fifth grade on through college where I did a lot of cave exploring in Wisconsin. I probably have been in well over half the caves in the state of Wisconsin.” By junior high school, Cronon was combing old county histories and historical documents in the stacks of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in search of caves.

Cronon attributes his interest in environmental and Western history to his parents and the unique setting of Wisconsin. “All through grade school my mom was very actively encouraging me in various kinds of natural history collecting enterprises, so we had a butterfly collection, a fossil collection, a rock collection.” Growing up in Madison during the 1960s was equally influential.

56 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Not only were the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement prominent issues, but environmentalism was “stronger in Wisconsin than in many other places in the country,” Cronon argues. “I really do believe that Wisconsin generally and Madison in particular has a very deep environmental bias in the way it thinks about intellectual problems in life.”

As an undergraduate, Cronon was influenced by three key intellectual mentors. Ideologically, Cronon describes the Wisconsin ecologist Aldo Leopold as “one of my lodestars in my intellectual development.” In the classroom, Professor Allen Bogue, a specialist in Western and Midwestern history, convinced Cronon to spend his life studying that subject. “I think if I had not taken that course, I think the odds of my being a medievalist now are pretty high.” A medievalist? At Wisconsin, Cronon came under the spell of Professor Richard Ringler, “by far the most important undergraduate mentor that I had.” A specialist on medieval Anglo-Saxon England, Ringler presented what Cronon describes as “the most kaleidoscopic engagement with the past that I had ever experienced.” Ringler convinced Cronon that teaching was “an extraordinary activity; if it was done well, you could really change people’s lives, because he certainly changed mine.”

Cronon’s family returned to Wisconsin when his father began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Student activism there, especially environmental activism, strongly affected Cronon. Below: Wisconsin students protest the Vietnam War.

Making History | 57

Patrick Ryan’s decision to attend Northwestern University departed from most of his peers. “In those days the whole [high school] class went en masse to Madison, to the University of Wisconsin,” remembers Ryan. “You just had to have a C average to go to Madison, and probably $100.” One of Ryan’s teachers was critical of Wisconsin’s democratic admissions system. “He thought that people should have to qualify, and he said at Northwestern, you have to qualify academically to get in. They don’t just take anybody. That really piqued my interest. I was probably thinking of Notre Dame because I wanted to play football. Then after my senior year in football, Northwestern recruited me.” Ryan attended Northwestern’s undergraduate School of Commerce from 1955 to 1959 while minoring in English. “I got a real profound exposure to literature in the College of Arts and Sciences while still being able to do the business focus. It was a great combination.”

By the time Ryan entered Northwestern, Mikva had clerked in Washington, D.C., for Supreme Court justice Sherman Minton. During his clerkship, attorney Arthur Goldberg, a future Supreme Court justice, awed Mikva during the oral arguments regarding President Harry Truman’s steel seizure case in 1952. “I was so impressed with how bright he was,” Mikva remembers. “I really wanted to go to work with him. I wanted to [practice] labor law anyway, so I asked for an interview.” Mikva originally hoped to work in the Washington office, but Goldberg convinced him to return to Chicago.

At that time, Goldberg’s firm represented many industrial unions affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. On occasion, however, Mikva’s interest in civil rights issues put him in conflict with organized labor. “The building trade unions, for instance, were not admitting blacks. I remember 58 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Memorial Hall (above, c. 1947) housed Northwestern University’s undergraduate School of Commerce, where Patrick Ryan earned his degree. Photograph by Chicago Architectural Photography Company.

Goldberg was quite upset with me because I took on the carpenter’s union local on behalf of some black carpenters that were chased off a job because they weren’t union. The reason they weren’t union is because the union wouldn’t take them in!” In another instance, Mikva represented a black musician’s union that was merging with its larger white counterpart. “By that time the black musician’s local had become quite prominent, affluent, and wellaccepted. I was representing the black local and handling the negotiations.

They were very painful because the black local knew they were going to get submerged. The white local was much larger and much more powerful, richer, and we were trying to carve out some kind of temporary hold to make sure that [the black local] didn’t get wiped out completely.”

Mikva entered public life in 1956 when he became one of the first “independent” Democrats elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. For a decade, he was a tireless opponent of the death penalty, a proponent of abortion rights, a critic of the state welfare system, and a supporter of openhousing laws. He later authored comprehensive reforms of the state mental-health and criminal codes. He was consistently named among the “best legislators” by the Independent Voters of Illinois.

Although independents such as Mikva favored many of the same federal programs that “regular” or “machine” Democrats like Mayor Richard M. Daley favored, the two factions were often at odds. “First of all, as far as Daley was concerned, I had gotten in the wrong way,” Mikva explains. Daley believed that one should not run against the party organization; you worked your way up.

Patronage was another source of friction. “As far as I was concerned, patronage was bad for the country and bad for the [Democratic] Party,” maintains Mikva. “One bill that I would put in every two years which used to just drive him up the wall—I never came close to passing it—was to eliminate what were known as ‘temporary employees.’ At the time—since then it’s been changed—you could appoint somebody, even though it was a civil service position, as a temporary employee and keep renewing the appointment indefinitely, so that you turned civil service into patronage. I just put in a bill

One of Abner Mikva’s early cases was looking after the interests of the black musicians’ union local as it merged with the white union local in the 1960s. At left, black union members line up to pay dues in the newly combined union. After Mikva entered politics, the Independent Voters of Illinois consistently supported his campaigns. Above, a sample ballot distributed in 1956 with Mikva’s name marked.

Making History | 59

60 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

that said you get one temporary appointment that lasts for thirty days or sixty days and that’s it. If they don’t pass the civil service exam, that’s the end of their job.”

While Mikva was building a political career, Ryan patiently constructed the insurance giant that became the Aon Corporation. Ryan first entered the insurance business after college, joining Penn Mutual in 1959. “I liked it because in insurance you’re only limited by whatever is self-imposed,” argues Ryan. “You literally could take twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week confronting people to buy insurance. It was totally in your control.” Philosophically, Ryan insists that “if you can sell life insurance, that’s great preparation for almost anything.” Not only does it require good communication skills, “but you have to learn to take rejection. People don’t want to talk about life insurance. When I was out socially, people would say, ‘Well, what do you do?’ and I would say, ‘I sell life insurance.’ All of a sudden, you’d be standing there by yourself.”

Ryan initially combined elements of his father’s automotive dealership and the insurance business, traveling around the Chicago area setting up departments within dealerships to sell auto insurance. “Back in the early sixties there weren’t many people who did that.” But Ryan thirsted for his own business. In 1963, he formed the Ryan Insurance Group, which was incorporated a year later.

From the beginning, Ryan claims three tenets guided him. “One principle was to focus on the special area, a specialty—be the best at that. The second principle was I wanted to build something. The third principle was multiply yourself through others. In other words, if you’re good at something, then go out and get other people and train them to do the same thing so you can spread it. So that’s what I did.”

Ryan now acknowledges that specific, little-known, personal events proved crucial to the expansion of his insurance empire. For example, Henr y Lustgarten, then an executive at Continental Casualty (now CNA), took Ryan out to lunch after graduation from Northwestern.

According to Ryan, Lustgarten said, “I want to give you two bits of advice: never have lunch or dinner with another insurance guy because you can’t make any money. Number two, if you ever need anything, I want you to call me.”

In 1964, Ryan called. He needed assistance in expanding Ryan Insurance into other states, and Lustgarten provided it. A few years later, Ryan went back to the top officials at CNA to obtain a loan to purchase the Great Equity Life Insurance Company of Freeport, Illinois, a dormant operation with virtually no business on the books. CNA turned him down. “I walked out of there, and I must have looked rather disconsolate, because I walked past the guy who I knew from First Chicago, Jack Anderlik. He said, ‘You know, you look like you lost your best friend.’ And I said, ‘Well, I was just over at CNA, and I’ve got this great idea, and I wanted to borrow the money, and they wouldn’t lend it to me.’ He said, ‘Well, tell me about it.’ So we went and had a cup of coffee. He said, ‘How much do you need?’ I told him. He said, ‘I think we’d be interested in that.’” A few weeks later, First Chicago loaned Ryan $400,000.

About the same time, Mikva elected to leave the Illinois legislature after a ten-year career and run for Congress. His opponent was eighty-four-year-old incumbent Barratt O’Hara. Although O’Hara won the 1966 contest, Mikva Opposite: Patrick Ryan at the podium at a Northwestern University event in 1985.

Photograph by Jim Ziv. Making History | 61

attracted an impressive 40 percent of the vote. Two years later he ran again and won. Serving on the Judiciary and the Ways and Means Committees, Mikva quickly became a formidable proponent of gun control and critic of the Vietnam War. In 1971, redistricting eliminated Mikva’s South Side district. Mikva then moved to 1015 Sheridan Road in Evanston and ran in the Tenth District. At the time, the Tenth had the second highest median family income of any Congressional district in the country, a poor portent of success for a liberal Democrat. But Mikva explains that the move made sense because “the exodus had already started from Hyde Park and South Shore out to Skokie and Evanston, and there were a lot of my former constituents who were living out there. The district was beginning to change demographically—a lot more Jews, a lot more Democrats, a lot more middle-income people.” After losing in 1972, Mikva bounced back. He defeated incumbent Samuel H. Young two years later and went on to serve three more terms in Congress.

For Mikva, the 1970s were “an exciting time in the Congress.” A small number of like-minded Democrats—Phillip Burton and Don Edwards of California, Donald Fraser of Minnesota, Bob Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, and others—met regularly and called themselves “the Group.” Mikva remembers, “we were all liberal Democrats, but more than that, we were reformers of the House system. We were pressing to make the rules more democratic and 62 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

When redistricting eliminated Mikva’s South Side congressional district in 1971, he moved north to Evanston in order to run in the Tenth District. Above: Evanston’s Davis Street in 1970. Photograph by J. Sherwin Murphy.

make the procedures more open.” Mikva admits, however, that their accomplishments were double-edged. “Like most reforms, yesterday’s reforms become tomorrow’s repressions. We probably pushed too far in some directions. For instance, we pried open the committee system. There used to be a time when it was strictly seniority; the chair of the committee would appoint the subcommittee chairs. We opened all that up and limited the number of subcommittees that a person could be on and made sure that everybody had a separate committee chair. It made the House more democratic, but it also made it almost impossible to control.” Since then Speakers of the House from James Wright to Newt Gingrich, Mikva points out, “have had the problem of not being able to make the House respond to any kind of leadership.”

Interestingly, Mikva considers his most significant accomplishment to be a forgotten episode of the anticommunist hysteria of the Cold War. An amendment to the National Security Act passed in the 1950s permitted the attorney general to declare a state of semi-martial law and incarcerate “dangerous people” in internment camps, much as Japanese-Americans were interned in World War II. Mikva acknowledges he was literally embarrassed into learning about their existence. “I went to speak to Hyde Park High School. One of the kids got up in the Q&A and said, ‘What are you going to do about all those places you’re going to send us black folk?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’ He said, ‘I got it right here in Muhammad Speaks,’” the Black Muslim newspaper. Mikva admits that at the time “I was not persuaded that Elijah Muhammad always spoke the truth.” Believing the camps were a paranoic folk tale, Mikva said, “I’m sure those don’t exist, but I will check on it.” Mikva assigned an assistant to investigate, who quickly confirmed the charges. The Department of Justice had many sites throughout the country, but none were activated.

Mikva learned that several congressmen had tried to overturn the amendment that authorized the camps. The proposal, however, always died in the conservative-controlled House Un-American Activities Committee. Mikva and his staff ingeniously reworded the bill to amend another act, allowing the amendment to go to the House Judiciary Committee for review and thus bypass the Un-American Activities Committee.

Eventually, the amendment passed both houses and Richard Nixon signed it into law.

In Congress, Mikva was perhaps best known as a leading opponent of the National Rifle Association (NRA), an organization he publicly derided as “the street crime lobby in Washington.” When President Jimmy Carter nominated Mikva in 1979 to the Federal Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, generally regarded as the second most important bench after the Supreme Court, the NRA spent an unprecedented one million dollars to block his nomination. Mikva’s nomination eventually passed 58–31, but he believes he would lose the election today.

Mikva now concedes he underestimated the appeal of the NRA in rural areas, largely for two reasons. “One is that in most of the rural areas, kids grow up with guns. In addition, we have had a mythology about how the West was won, that it was won at the end of a six-shooter with the good guys out dueling the bad guys. In the towns that survived in the ‘Wild West,’ they survived because the sheriff made you check your gun when you rode into town, and if you walked into the bar with a gun in your holster, you were grabbed and out you went. You didn’t get your guns back until you left town. There was no way that we could have created a civilization if everybody was carrying their law on their hip, but this is still what a lot of people believe.”

Making History | 63

64 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Debunking and reinterpreting the myths of the West—specifically the Euroamerican settlement process of North America—contributed to Cronon’s speedy ascent within the academy. After earning his undergraduate degree and being named to Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Wisconsin in 1976, Cronon spent two years at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He returned to the United States to study at Yale as a Danforth Fellow. While taking a seminar with the colonial historian Edmund S. Morgan, Cronon wrote a paper on ecological change in colonial New England. Several years later, a publisher convinced him to expand the essay. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (1983) became Cronon’s first book and garnered the Valley Forge Honor Certificate and the prestigious Francis Parkman Prize of the Society of American Historians. Shortly thereafter, Cronon was appointed to a Yale professorship and eventually became one of the youngest tenured faculty members in the university.

In the ensuing decade, Cronon was elected to the Society of American Historians (1988) and the American Antiquarian Society (1988). He served as president of the American Society for Environmental History (1989–93) and received fellowships from the Mellon, Guggenheim, and MacArthur Foundations, including a five-year “genius grant” from the latter (1985–90). He was named to numerous advisory boards and trusteeships. In 1991, he received an honorary degree from Connecticut College. All these accomplishments came before Cronon’s fortieth birthday.

If Cronon’s success was meteoric, Ryan’s reads like a page out of Horatio Alger. In fact, Ryan received a Distinguished American Award in 1987 from the Horatio Alger Association. Within a few years of its founding, Ryan Insurance was offering multiple services—brokering, consulting, advising, distributing, and underwriting. This was new to the insurance industry, but Ryan Insurance was comparatively small, so the innovation attracted little public attention.

In 1976, Ryan purchased four financial service companies from Esmark.

This time, Ryan called on Homer Livingston at First Chicago. “I’d been banking there all along, and I said, ‘I’ve got a really unique opportunity, and I need $30 million.’ He made the bet on me personally, and loaned us the $30 million.” Ryan admits that the loan was “fundamental to my success” and “began what’s really Aon today.”

Ryan attracted national attention in 1982 with the purchase of Combined Insurance Corporation, then controlled by the flamboyant and sometimescontroversial W. Clement Stone. A year earlier, Combined tried to purchase Ryan Insurance but was rebuffed by Ryan himself. In 1982, Combined executives offered Ryan better terms, specifically giving him majority control.

Despite last-minute reservations on Stone’s part, the deal went through.

Under Stone’s tutelage, Combined Insurance had focused on cut-rate life, accident, and health insurance. By contrast, the nucleus of Ryan Insurance was corporate insurance brokerage and consulting. Ryan took the debt-free Combined’s $500 million shareholder equity and $100 million in cash flow and immediately purchased Rollings Burdick Hunter, then the nation’s seventh-largest insurance broker. Virtually overnight, Ryan Insurance was transformed from a local to national entity. Within five years, Ryan renamed the company Aon (Gaelic for “one”) and moved to 123 North Wacker Drive.

By the late 1980s, Aon was, in Ryan’s words, “a regional broker of modest size.” At that point, Ryan decided to “globalize” Aon. Opposite: Cronon’s Changes in the Land investigates ecological change in colonial New England.

Making History | 65

Aon went on to make nearly fifty acquisitions, expanding the company’s reach in Europe, North America, and Asia. Just as banks expanded their activities to include a wider range of financial services after 1980, Aon reflected similar trends in insurance. Brokers not only expanded their risk management services, but offered financial and consulting advice that never existed twenty years earlier. In less than two decades, Ryan effectively reinvested the cash flow from Combined’s sleepy but profitable door-to-door insurance business to build a $5.5 billion powerhouse of brokers, consultants, and specialty underwriters that is a model in the global insurance brokerage industry.

In the fifteen years during which Ryan transformed Aon into a global player, Mikva sat on the D.C. Court of Appeals, eventually serving as chief judge from 1991 to 1994. Appointment to the D.C. Court gave Mikva a change “to regularize my life.” During his last five years in Congress, he commuted back and forth from Evanston while his wife taught in the Evanston public schools.

He admits that he “missed some of the camaraderie and some of the excitement of the political arena,” but the important and intellectually challenging cases more than made up for that. Mikva’s colleagues on the bench included Robert Bork, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Antonin Scalia, Kenneth Starr, and Clarence Thomas. Nevertheless, “I have to candidly say that the people I dealt with in Congress were as bright or brighter than many of the people I dealt with on the court. The advantage you have being a judge is you have so much more time to think about what you’re doing than an elected official. An elected official is always running from one decision to another. On the bench, if I didn’t think I had it right, I’d take another day or I’d get another memo or I’d talk to my clerk some more and go look at some more cases. There’s just no time limit.”

On the bench, Mikva authored more than three hundred decisions, including the reinstatement of a gay student to the United States Naval Academy and stopping the Federal Aviation Authority from banning political advertisement in Washington, D.C., airports. Yet, Mikva believes the decision “that probably had the greatest impact on the law” was State Farm Mutual Auto Insurance Co. vs. Department of Transportation (1982). In 1979, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a set of rulings requiring auto manufacturers to provide airbags in all cars by the mid1980s. Upon his election in 1980, President Ronald Reagan froze all federal regulations not yet put into effect. Mikva remembers that NHTSA, “with his [Reagan’s] appointees in there, repealed the airbag order. The insurance industry was very much opposed to the auto industry on this issue, because they recognized that seatbelts and airbags save lives and money. So they brought suit challenging the action of NHTSA on the ground that they hadn’t gone through the administrative process the way they should have.” Mikva and his colleagues concluded that federal agencies can change rules, but only by following the same process employed in making the rule. “There have to be hearings, there have to be time periods for comments, and there has to be a reasoned decision-making,” argues Mikva. “Everyone predicted that I would get reversed, and instead, the Supreme Court upheld it, and it’s become one of the more important cases in the administrative law field.”

In 1994, Mikva replaced Lloyd N. Cutler as White House counsel, making him one of a small group of Americans to have served in high positions in all three branches of the federal government. Mikva resigned about a year later.

“I resigned because I was tired. I was absolutely worn out. I had come into the White House at age sixty-nine. I was the oldest person in the White House. I would come in at 6:30 in the morning and leave at 8:30, 9:00 at night.” Even then, Mikva was the first one out of the White House. The pace 66 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

was unrelenting, six and seven days a week. “I just found myself just absolutely running out of gas,” Mikva admits. “It turned out that I had pneumonia that whole winter after I left.”

While Mikva sat on the bench and Ryan built Aon, Cronon was formulating and writing the book that will forever identify him with Chicago.

Nature’s Metropolis is a direct response to Aldo Leopold’s call in A Sand County Almanac (1949) for an ecological interpretation of American history.

Specifically, Leopold asked which events were not just the result of human effort but rather human interactions with nature. Interestingly, the origins of Nature’s Metropolis are not in Chicago, but in England. While studying at Oxford, Cronon produced a three-hundred-page study on energy consumption in Coventry, England from 1850 to 1950. He never published a word of it, yet Cronon emphasizes that “that thesis is the source of Nature’s Metropolis.” In examining the consumption of coal, gas, and electricity, Cronon became intrigued by the environmental interconnections between a metropolis and surrounding hinterland, looking at the changing ways in which that system developed.

In addition, Cronon was influenced by Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” first read in Chicago in 1893. “I thought about Turner very much in terms of the cityhinterland connection.” Cronon asked himself: “Wouldn’t it be interesting to redo the frontier narrative, not from the point of view of the frontier like Turner, but from the point of view of the city, from the expanding influence of the city out in the country?”

At one point, Cronon worried that telling such a story was impossible and that his environmental themes were subsumed by economic developments. He admits that the manuscript “sat there in this crisis for really two years.” He solved this dilemma by writing an introductory, selfreflective prologue, effectively explaining how the book had a personal, even moral agenda.

“The prologue is actually my argument with myself that the book is worth writing. This matters. You need to know about Chicago in the nineteenth cen-

In spite of Cronon’s early doubts about Nature’s Metropolis, the book won immediate acclaim and has encouraged historians to take another look at the history of cities.

Making History | 67

tury because it tells us something about who we are today and why we think about the world in the way we think about it.” Many agreed. Nature’s Metropolis quickly received the Bancroft Prize for the best book in American history, the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize, the George Perkins Marsh Prize from the American Society for Environmental History, and the Charles W. Weyerhaeuser Award from the Forest History Society.

Nature’s Metropolis has forced historians to reconceptualize not only the history of Chicago, but that of all cities. Specifically, Cronon offers an interpretation emphasizing “nonhuman nature.” For Cronon, “the human interface with nature is one of the fundamental historical categories, that if you’re not thinking about the human relationship to nature and all those nonhuman others that are out there, you’re missing a huge part of the story.” According to Cronon, Chicago and the American West was populated by “people getting their sustenance and their livelihoods out of the exploitation of nature.

Workers are benefiting as much from that exploitation as the capitalists are.

The capitalists are benefiting more, no question about that. But everybody is

Annual reports from Aon chronicle the firm’s phenomenal growth under Ryan’s leadership.

68 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

participating in this process of the destruction of the tall grass prairie, the elimination of the North Woods, the destruction of the bison. Workers are as much committed to that project as the capitalists are.”

The nineteenth-century forces that Cronon outlines in Nature’s Metropolis explain how Chicago not only became an industrial center, but also a financial hub that set the stage for future corporations like Aon. One of Ryan’s mentors, Jim Rutherford, the former head of Prudential of Mid-America, told him “Pat, if you can’t make it in Chicago, you can’t make it anywhere.” Ryan now believes was great advice, “because Chicago is such an open city. People said, ‘You ought to go to New York with this strategy. It’s got to be done out of New York.’ I resisted that and said, ‘No, we can do this in Chicago, and it’ll be great for Chicago.’ It has been.”

For Ryan, any question regarding his greatest success is easily answered.

“The most historical thing that I’ve been involved in is the creation of Aon, because Aon really is a vision over thirty-five years. Today Aon employs over 40,000 people in 110 countries. It’s the largest distributor of insurance products in the world. There are very few others like it.” Although Aon is a global enterprise, Ryan asserts “It’s an important company to Chicago because it was created in Chicago by Chicago people. I think people say

In 1992, Cronon left a professorship at Yale to return to the University of Wisconsin in Madison, from which he had graduated in 1976. The campus is shown here in 1979.

Making History | 69

Chicago is a much more important financial service and insurance center than we ever realized it was.”

Mikva considers his role in opening up the governmental process his most important contribution. In the early 1960s, for example, he and Republican legislator Russell Arrington established a legislative intern program. One of the first interns was Jim Edgar, the recent Illinois governor. “I think that that probably has been the most historic thing I’ve been involved in.” Public activism was a consistent theme throughout Mikva’s public life. “Some of those campaigns on the North Shore, and even here on the South Side, involved people for the first time in the political process, and some of them are still involved.” Merrick B. Garland, once Mikva’s press secretar y and now a D.C. Court of Appeals judge, “was a high school student in one of my first congressional campaigns, and that was his first exposure to public life.” State Rep. Nancy Cusick “was a fifteen-year-old precinct worker for me out in Calumet City when she was in high school. Jan Schakowski, recently elected to succeed Sidney Yates in Congress, “was involved in one of my early campaigns as a volunteer. If I look back, I’d say that was the most satisfying thing— reaching out, making it open.”

The research university remains a common bond in the careers of Cronon, Mikva, and Ryan. Although each embarked upon vastly different professions, academic pursuits attracted them to Chicago. More importantly, they remain deeply connected to universities today. During his years in Washington, for example, Mikva taught at the law schools of Northwestern (1973–75), University of Pennsylvania (1983–85), Georgetown (1986–88), and Duke (1990–91). After leaving the White House, he returned to the institution that brought him to Chicago, serving as the Walter Schaefer Fellow in Public Policy at the University of Chicago Law School. Cronon left Yale in 1992 to become the Frederick Jackson Turner Professor of History, Geography and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin. At Madison, he has directed the honors program for the College of Letters and Sciences and served as a founding faculty director of Chadbourne Residential College. Ryan remains directly involved with the university that attracted him to Chicago. Northwestern’s basketball center, Welsh-Ryan Arena, is named after Ryan’s and his wife’s parents. More recently, he contributed more than $10 million for the renovation of then–Dyche Stadium, now Ryan Field. Ryan has served as a Northwestern trustee since 1978, and chair of the trustees since 1997.

Ryan might speak for Cronon and Mikva when he acknowledges that the university irrevocably changed his life. “It’s where I met my wife.

From it, I decided to stay in Chicago. Everything important that I’ve done since I got out of high school has had some direct or indirect connection to my [college] experience.” For Cronon, Mikva, and Ryan, the university not only shaped their lives, but determined how they shaped Chicago.

Ryan’s ties to his alma mater, Northwestern University, remain strong. In addition to serving on its board of trustees, he has made significant financial contributions. Dyche Stadium was recently renamed Ryan Field in his honor. Right: The stadium in 1928. Photograph by Aerial Photographic Service, Inc. 70 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Making History | 71

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Cronon’s most important works include Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991); Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983); Under the Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, edited with Jay Gitlan and George Miles (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); and Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). Profiles of Mikva regularly appeared in The Almanac of America Politics, Michael Barone, Grant Ujifusa, and Douglas Matthews, published semiannually between 1974 and 1982. A more recent profile is found in University of Chicago Magazine 88 (August 1996).

Biographies of Ryan can be found in Crain’s Chicago Business, June 2, 1997, and the Chicago Tribune, September 11, 1997. All three men have entries in the latest edition of Who’s Who in America.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 54 top, courtesy of William Cronon; 54 middle, courtesy of Abner Mikva; 54 bottom, courtesy of Pat Ryan; 55 top, courtesy of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin; 55 bottom, courtesy of the Milwaukee County Historical Society; 56, CHS; 57, courtesy of University of Wisconsin—Madison Archives; 58, courtesy of Chicago Architectural Photography and of Northwestern University Archives; 59 left, CHS, ICHi-21106; 59 right, CHS; 60, courtesy of Northwestern University Archives; 62, CHS; 64, from Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (Hill and Wang, 1983), Chicago Public Library; 67, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (W. W. Norton, 1991), CHS; 68, from Aon annual reports, 1988 and 1990, CHS; 69, courtesy of University of Wisconsin— Madison Archives; 70–71, courtesy of Northwestern University; 72, CHS 72 | Chicago History | Summer 1999

Left to right: The 1998 Making History award winners: Sidney Luckman, William Cronon, Abner Mikva, Patrick Ryan, and (seated) Etta Moten Barnett. (Etta Barnett and the late Sidney Luckman will be profiled in an upcoming issue of Chicago History.)

Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (W.W. Norton, 1992).

He is a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellow for 1998–99.