THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Fall 2000 VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 2
Contents
5 26 3
Reel Life, Real Censorship Raymond J. Haberski Jr.
Sears Beautiful Stephen Eskilson
Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams
44
Yesterday’s City
58
Making History
Tom Melville
Timothy J. Gilfoyle
C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Daniel Greene Gwen Ihnat Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Intern Nicole Lyles
Copyright 2000 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 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.
Cover: This illustration gently spoofs progressives’ concerns about the influence of motion pictures.
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
Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth George A. Chivari Michelle L. Collins John W. Croghan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Philip W. Hummer
LIFE TRUSTEES
Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer Margarita Perez John W. Rowe Donald H. Rumsfeld Beth Schroeder Gordon I. Segal James R. Thompson Daniel H. Wheeler
Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Charles T. Brumback John T. McCutcheon Stewart S. Dixon Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss 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. Chicago History is made possible through the support of the Dr. Scholl Foundation. 2 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
FROM THE EDITORI
T
rue politeness, which originates in a union of kindly feeling and good sense, and which has for its object the ease and gratification of our associates, is a truly amiable and praiseworthy quality. The exercise of it spares ourselves, as well as others, innumerable annoyances and offences, and perpetually sheds around a tranquil and social feeling.” From The Young Lady’s Own Book, 1832. In the year 2000, etiquette may seem as passé as rotary phones or black-and-white television sets. Indeed, most people draw on notions of etiquette only on formal occasions such as weddings or funerals. In the latter instance, especially, people rely on rules to guide their actions in a situation where they may feel illat-ease. As the quotation above indicates, however, we need etiquette to ensure relative harmony in our dayto-day lives and to reinfore the social ties that bind us. This necessity is as critical today as it was in 1832. The rules that Americans in the early nineteenth century followed seem quaint to us now, and most have little relevance today. But, like everything else, etiquette is an evolution; as new inventions come about, we develop appropriate etiquette. Just when you think day-to-day good manners and rules of etiquette are hopelessly old-fashioned in this digital age, along comes “netiquette.” As the definition above explains, however, being nice to each other is both ancient and timeless. In the 1932 edition of her classic book, Emily Post notes that when man was in the “primeval state,” he ate alone, away from others who might try to steal his food. She continues, “When eating in common became the vogue, table manners made their appearance and they have been waging an uphill struggle ever since.” Etiquette books such as Post’s reveal these struggles and changes in society. In 1832, for example, young women were advised: “It is scarcely of less importance that a young lady should deport herself properly towards her [servants], than it is that she do so towards her superiors.” A century later, as fewer Americans hired servants, Post reassured readers that “the fact that you live in a house with two servants, or in an apartment with only one, need not imply that your house lacks charm or even distinction, or that it is not completely the home of a lady or a gentleman.” New norms require new forms of etiquette. “Netiquette,” which guides behavior on the Internet, may address a modern technology, but it is based on old-fashioned good manners. Web enthusiasts know that typing words in all capital letters is known as SHOUTING and is discouraged. Nearly seventy years ago, Emily Post advised readers that “a low voice is always pleasing, not whispered or murmured, but low in pitch. Do not talk at the top of your head, nor the top of your lungs.” The medium may change, but the basic need for courtesy remains the same. It’s not just technology that invites new forms of etiquette; so, too, do new sensibilities. The city of San Antonio, Texas, recently published the Disability Etiquette Handbook to advise people on how to properly interact with disabled individuals. Recommendations include “never patronize people using wheelchairs by patting them on the head or shoulder,” and “offer assistance in a dignified manner with sensitivity and respect.” An 1892 book, which included rules on how to properly enter and exit a carriage and which fork to use with which course, also provided an elegantly worded definition: “Etiquette is the term applied to correct behavior in social life, and refers to the manner of actions and the expression of a proper social spirit through the medium of established forms and ceremonies. Polite usage recognizes certain minute distinctions between the mannerly and the unmannerly ways of performing every act of life that affects the comfort and happiness of others.” The language may be different, but the underlying message is still the same. As our parents told us when we were little: “Be nice to each other.” Rosemary K. Adams 3
4 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Reel Life, Real Censorship R AY M O N D J . H A B E R S K I J R .
Chicago’s Motion Picture Commission debated control of a powerful new medium
D
Hollywood did not hold exclusive rights to film production during the early years of the industry. Many motion pictures were filmed in Chicago by local studios, such as the Selig Polyscope Company (above).
uring the late 1910s, the motion picture industry began to take shape as a powerful commercial force. Movie budgets swelled in order to produce more elaborate pictures and to attend to the growing stable of high-paid actors and actresses. A “star culture” flourished as the onscreen performances of Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks made people laugh, cry, and swoon. But the fascination with money also kept people interested in the off-screen fortunes and lifestyles of Hollywood personalities. The influence of the movies as a business, a cultural force, and an art form was almost too great to comprehend. To many civic reformers, the movie industry was an entity that stood apart from the rest of society. Movies’ allure seemed unholy in nature. Throughout the early twentieth century, civic leaders scrutinized the power of this new medium. They argued that the popularity and accessibility of what came to be known as “mass media” (particularly movies) threatened the health of society, especially youth. Many believed that movies were a poor substitute for more traditional forms of art and entertainment. Moreover, one needed only to pass by posters advertising movies such as Blind Wives, The Branded Woman, Discontented Wives, and Forbidden Fruit to become suspicious of what this upstart industry was selling. Even more disturbing to civic leaders, however, was that within the first two decades of the medium’s existence, moving pictures attracted tens of millions of people every week. To many critics, this new medium seemed destined and even designed to create a world morally unhinged and aesthetically numb. To contain this increasingly pervasive threat, civic leaders advocated censoring movies. Unlike any other medium of expression, moving pictures became subject to prior censorship—meaning that censors cut scenes and images from what producers assumed to be finished Reel Life | 5
Charlie Chaplin played a key role in creating the star culture followed by zealous motion picture fans. 6 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Above: Mar y Pickford as a seamstress. Pickford was among the most popular and well-paid female stars of the early twentieth century. Below: University of Chicago professor E. W. Burgess attempted to quantify the effects of movies on local schoolchildren, furnishing the Chicago Motion Picture Commission with impartial, “scientific” evidence.
films. In one of the most revealing confrontations over the use of censorship, the city of Chicago called for hearings to revise its laws governing the exhibition of movies. From September 1918 through May 1919, the Chicago Motion Picture Commission (CMPC) heard testimony from a variety of people associated with this medium— from exhibitors and producers to reviewers and censors. The commission also sponsored a survey, conducted by University of Chicago professor E. W. Burgess, in an attempt to quantify the effects of motion pictures on schoolchildren. Although state and local censorship boards had existed for more than a decade throughout the United States, Chicago’s commission garnered attention for a number of reasons. Chicago was the nation’s second largest movie market; the commission heard a diverse array of opinions regarding the role of movies in American life; and the proceedings marked the waning of civic censorship. Beginning in 1922, movie studios and producers, under the auspices of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), turned to Will H. Hays (at the time the United States Postmaster General), to pass judgement on their products, thereby undercutting local efforts. The hearings in Chicago, therefore, represented one of the last public discussions on the nature of movie power and the public’s ability to control it. From the earliest days of nickelodeons and vaudeville, community leaders had waged battles against questionable material. In fact, Chicago was one of the first cities to institute movie censorship. By 1907, the city reportedly had 116 nickelodeons, 18 vaudeville houses, and 19 Reel Life | 7
penny arcades. The Chicago Tribune said that such amusements had an “influence that is wholly vicious,” a remark that echoed the opinions of most community leaders. To meet this threat to public welfare, the city enacted a censorship law in 1907. Chicago’s city council empowered the chief of police to issue permits for the exhibition of moving pictures. If the city’s censor (usually the second deputy superintendent of the police) denied a permit to an exhibitor, the movie would either have to be cut to meet the censor’s standards or removed from the theater. By 1909, both the Illinois Supreme Court and the United States Supreme Court upheld Chicago’s right to censor movies. The city also enacted a separate permit—colored pink—to designate those movies suitable only for adults over the age of twenty-one. By 1909, America’s largest city, New York, had enacted a censorship law of its own. Mayor George B. McClellan closed all 550 cinemas in New York City in response to the police chief ’s claim that most movie material was reprehensible. In a crowded city hall meeting in December 1909, voices for and against the movie industry vied for recognition. McClellan decided against the industry and ordered the revocation of all operating licenses until conditions (the specifics of which he had not made clear) were met. Although the mayor’s decision was impossible to enforce, his action did reflect the growing frustration of many civic leaders struggling to regulate the rapidly growing moving-picture industry. By 1915, the legal foundation for censorship had been solidified in a United States Supreme Court decision that classified movies as an industry rather than as a means of expression. In the landmark decision Mutual v. Ohio, the Court rejected the Mutual Film Corporation’s claim that movies deserved protection under the First Amendment right to free speech. Instead the Court declared that “the exhibition of moving pictures is a business, pure and simple, originated and conducted for profit like other spectacles, and not to be regarded as part of the press of the country or as organs of public opinion within the meaning of freedom of speech and publication.” In his opinion for the majority, Chief Justice Joseph McKenna added that while the mission of films may not be to harm the public, “they may be used for evil, and against that possibility the statute was enacted.” McKenna’s argument reflected the unique power of movies to appeal to the public. Unlike newspapers or other forms of art that many found offensive, movies “take their attraction from the general interest, eager and wholesome it may be, in their subjects, but a prurient interest may be excited and appealed to [as well]. Besides, there are some things which should not have pictorial representation in public places and to all audiences.” While many critics agreed with McKenna’s general intention, his opinion failed to proscribe an effective form of censorship. 8 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The Chicago Motion Picture Commission Report contained statistical information, such as the amount of footage deleted from films and the causes for censoring.
Movie censorship, a national as well as a municipal concern, can be viewed within the historical context of progressivism. Advocates of the progressive movement contended that government organizations could manage social problems such as alcoholism, poor food quality, the scarcity of medicine, bad working conditions, poverty, and vice, including “dangerous” movies. Progressives hoped to preserve traditional values as defined by the church, the family, and America’s social elite. Community leaders were appalled by the apparent decline of moral standards among the public; they blamed the moving-picture industry for both advancing that moral decline and for capitalizing on it financially by producing movies with salacious titles and scenarios of dubious merit. The Chicago Motion Picture Commission sought to exert a measure of control before the effects of movies eroded civic leaders’ authority as parents, church members, and government officials. The debate over censorship also touched upon the dwindling cultural authority wielded by traditional institutions and the growing (and as yet unformed) power of mass media in society. One side of the debate asserted that the public needed protection from this popular but “vulgar” medium; the other side maintained that the public knew what it wanted, understood what was best for it, and had the capacity to make its own choices about movies.
Vaudeville houses, such as Weber’s in Chicago, offered the public popular entertainment that Progressives found “wholly vicious.” Reel Life | 9
Salacious films promised moviegoers spicy plots and scenes, but horrified civic leaders with their demoralizing motifs. 10 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Left: Newspaper articles showcasing teenage delinquency emphasized the immoral influence of movies on young viewers. Above: Film star Theda Bara (left, with Norma Talmadge) defined the popular/reviled “vamp” style.
Movie censorship had become a contested issue by the 1910s, in part because of the perception that movies tended to assault the moral fortitude of the nation’s children. In 1921, the popular magazine Literary Digest ran an article bearing the ominous title, “Is the Younger Generation in Peril?” “Yes!” the article emphatically declared, because children were becoming more rebellious toward their elders and were bucking older standards of behavior and taste. Near the beginning of the Chicago hearings, the Chicago Tribune reported that two teenage girls had caused a scandal in school by dressing like “vamps.” Dorothy, one of the girls in trouble, wanted to mimic the style made infamous by movie star Theda Bara and arrived at school with her “hair blonde and fluffy and worn in our best moving picture style.” Reporter Maude Evers continued, “Her gown of black satin is also—well, just like Paris—low at the neck and not too long at the bottom. . . . Fifteen year old Dorothy knows all about trimming the wild eyebrows, also.” Rowland C. Sheldon, general secretary of the Big Brother Organization, went so far as to implicate the industry in the creation of delinquency. “How I wish,” he exclaimed, “that the men who write such scenarios and the men who produce them, could visit the criminals they have made!” Critics argued that movies trapped young people in a terrible cycle in which they patronized a busiReel Life | 11
Chicago editorials suggested that chief movie censor Major M. L. C. Funkhouser (above) was fired because he had not played favorites with police-supported movie houses. Below: Commissioners (from left) Charles E. Frazier, Joseph P. Geary, and Dr. Grace Wightman. After firing Funkhouser, Frazier took over as chief movie censor of Chicago.
12 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
ness that subtly challenged their parents’ values. Instead of rejecting the messages they saw, children continuously rewarded movie producers and theater operators by attending as many shows as possible. The younger generation had become both the victims and the supporters of a mass culture devoid of traditional boundaries. And yet, as important and persistent as movie censorship was, it remained a relatively minor issue in 1918, competing as it did with the first World War, Prohibition, women’s suffrage, and the influenza epidemic. Movie censorship had its place, but it was not among the frontpage stories of the day. A scandal that immediately preceded the hearings, however, did directly prompt the convening of the city’s censorship commission. On July 30, 1918, Chicago’s notoriously prudish— though effective—chief movie censor was relieved of his duties. After six years of service, Major M. L. C. Funkhouser lost a five-week trial to defend his office. Chief of Police John H. Alcock had accused Funkhouser of allowing vice to go unchecked throughout the city. The civil service commission, chaired by Charles E. Frazier, heard arguments in a case that was, according to the Chicago Tribune, decided before it began. “We believe,” the Tribune editorialized, “that Maj. Funkhouser, an aggravation as a censor of any kind of artistic expression, was doing able and effective work in an endeavor which almost defies any one to do successful work. The larger idea in the police management that led to the attempt to get rid of him has not been made apparent. A low minded person might even suspect that the intent was to rid the force of an activity useful to the city but embarrassing to the police.” From newspaper articles and testimonies by some of the city’s most respected reformers, it seems that Funkhouser had failed to play favorites with the “right” movie exhibitors and distributors and had alienated not only the movingpicture industry but also the police who had friends in the business. The man who ousted Funkhouser, Charles Frazier, took the major’s place as the city’s censor. In addition to this controversy, the city had another problem with its censorship procedures. The routine of issuing pink permits for “adult” films backfired with a vengeance when movie houses used the police’s distinction to promote rather than to condemn films with salacious material. The overall ineffectiveness of the city’s censorship laws had become apparent to those wishing to continue the fight against movies—promoters advertised pink-permitted movies such as Home Wrecker and The Things Forbidden Are the Things Desired throughout the Loop. On July 18, 1918, the Tribune criticized the means of censoring movies in Chicago and suggested that a “commission be appointed to consider all the questions that [had] arisen in connection with the exercise of the cen-
sorship authority in Chicago.” The next day, the Chicago City Council acted on the Tribune’s suggestion. Alderman George Maypole proposed the formation of a committee with representatives from both the City Council and the community to determine what type of censorship Chicago should enforce. Maypole stated that the best way to address the issue of censorship was to have an “unbiased investigating body” hear from “all persons affected and interested in censorship.” If a substitute for Chicago’s present laws could be found, Maypole said he would be only too glad to support it. The intention of such a commission would not be to debate the merits of inspecting movies, but to arrange for a new set of laws guiding municipal censorship.
This July 1918 Tribune headline announced that a film committee had been formed to revise existing movie exhibition laws. Reel Life | 13
The hearings took place every Friday from September 1918 through May 1919 in the inner chamber of Chicago’s City Hall.
On September 28, 1918, the Chicago Motion Picture Commission convened in City Hall and began public hearings that took place every Friday from September 1918 through May 1919. Twenty civic and religious leaders sat on the commission, but only five were actually elected officials, George Maypole among them. Timothy Hurley, former chief probation officer of Cook County, was appointed chairman. Among the other members were Orrin N. Carter, a justice of the Illinois Supreme Court; Adolph Kraus, author of the city’s first censorship law; Martin J. Quigley, publisher of Exhibitor’s Herald, the most popular trade journal for the moving-picture industry; and Reverend F. G. Dinneen, a powerful member of the Knights of Columbus and the Holy Name Society of Chicago. As a sign of the times, the board included an equal number of clergymen and socially active women. Among the representatives of the latter group was the formidable Florence E. Blanchard, chairwoman of the motion picture and civics department of the influential General Federation of Women’s Clubs. Representing sixty-five thousand women in Illinois alone, that organization had been at the forefront of civic censorship for most of the decade. Blanchard commented, “We are convinced that the people do not demand the sensational movie. The motion picture producers have diverted the mind of the motion-picture-going public and have made profitable a 14 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
type of production that never should be shown. The people never wanted the low saloon, but still the saloon flourished, and sensational movies are in the same class.” As Blanchard’s statement intimates, the debate over censorship ultimately can be understood in the context of a struggle over who was going to define national culture. If society continued to accept traditional definitions of good and evil, then traditional notions of taste would prevail against mediums such as movies. If, however, American society believed popular tastes should determine cultural standards, then elite opinions would be forced to compete with those of the masses. Such a cultural world would be significantly more ambiguous than one in which the church and women’s groups held sway; the authority used to declare what should be considered dangerous and what should be dismissed as inconsequential would drift away from traditional leaders. Quoting a similar board in London, Chicago’s commission noted, “Under wise guidance [the cinema] may be a powerful influence for good. If neglected, if its abuse is unchecked, its potentiality for evil is manifold.” The commission sat bemused, moreover, by moviemakers who would “deny the right of the people to prejudge a picture on the ground that such action is opposed to ‘American Liberty.’” After all, the Illinois Supreme Court had once referred to moviemakers as “that class of people that are shameless and unclean, to whom nothing is defilement, and to whose point of view no picture would be considered immoral or obscene.” The commission quite simply believed that the movie industry was a financial monster, not a group interested in free expression, whose power would grow out of control unless reined in by those concerned with public morality rather than profits. The motion picture had become “the most powerful force in education, and in swaying the mind of the public, greater in the minds of many than the home, the school or the church.” If left unchecked, the CMPC worried, movies would cause a cultural upheaval detrimental to the stability and welfare of the public. The commission justified their own existence by arguing that, “it is surely the right of the public to protect the weak.” The use of such language and metaphors might seem overblown and paternalistic, but progressives believed that social checks were vital to a healthy society. Traditional civic leaders had seen themselves among “the best [and] the most learned minds . . . devoted to educating the youth along the lines of betterment, and protecting the weak and thoughtless from the inroads of designing exploiters.” Faced with the amorphous, popularly driven power of movies, the custodians of culture faced a troubling prospect characteristic of democratic society. The commission had to decide—should they err on the side of freedom of expression, and risk the decline of
Progressives were concerned not only with sensational film content, but with the dim, close quarters of movie theaters. These new areas of public space allowed for intimate relations, as this illustration gently spoofs.
Reel Life | 15
“The use of a gun, no matter in what way, makes the man using it brave in the child’s eyes.” Critics wondered whether motion pictures produced children’s admiration for violence or simply fueled their playful imaginations.
16 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Chicago censors approached questionable films with “the attitude of a child,” which infuriated moviegoing adults. Titillating scenes, such as this one from the Selig production The Woman of It, would have been deemed unsuitable for minors, and thus cut.
“culture” as they understood it, or should they try to restrict a medium unparalleled in its popularity and power? Censorship by community boards such as Chicago’s usually tried to split the difference and, therefore, often failed to affect any real change. Their logic for acting, however, remained insightful: “It cannot be that in this progressive age we should silently consent or concur in having our wives and children, our homes, our schools and our churches turned over to the entertainer in order that he may make a profit regardless of the consequence to the individual.” Such sentiment raised a fundamental question: were elitism and paternalism ever healthy for a democratic society? Many who testified before the CMPC endorsed the authority to oversee public welfare. George Kleine, one of Chicago’s major motion picture exhibitors and one of the first to testify, grappled with issues raised by the power of movies. He explained that he had little hope that the public might “purify itself” since most people liked to attend movies with titles that promised “salacious subjects.” “While I do not believe in general interference,” Kleine maintained that he did “believe that it is the business of the state to interfere in cases where salacious pictures are shown.” To illustrate his sincerity, Kleine vowed, “I would not exhibit any picture that I would not show my 16-year-old girl.” But he also con-
ceded that most directors “were men of enthusiasm. They have an idea. They do not take into consideration when they are working the mixed audience before which these pictures are shown, but they go along with eyes single in their art.” The newness of movies caused problems for cultural critics and censors alike because no one yet knew how movies would affect viewers. Unlike books, theatrical productions, and other works of art, movies allowed spectators to sit passively and absorb. Movies seemed to possess a singular ability to affect an individual’s psyche. Many witnesses who testified before the commission wondered what would become of a country that raised a generation of children to be avid moviegoers. The commission depended primarily on statistical information to determine the effects of moving pictures. A professor at the University of Michigan found, for example, that schoolchildren could identify many more movie stars than figures depicted in the painting The Last Supper. Teachers polled by the commission observed that their students had been profoundly and dangerously moved by motion pictures. One teacher observed: “The use of a gun, no matter in what way, makes the man using it brave in the child’s eyes.” Another suggested that “attendance at the moving pictures creates a desire to be entertained constantly. It leads to cigarette Reel Life | 17
smoking; staying up nights; premature development regarding [the] opposite sex.” The commission also included a newspaper article from Osaka, Japan, detailing a case in which two boys murdered two girls, prompting the police to blame “sensational” movies for inciting the suspects. Observations such as these led respected figures such as Max G. Schlaff, a professor of neuropathology at the New York Post-Graduate Medical School and Hospital, to conclude, “We may not realize it, but we are rearing a race of neurotic children today, and one of the great factors is our perverse idea of youthful pleasure.” Schlaff believed that allowing children to watch a steady diet of “moving-picture thrillers” would make them crave them all the more, thus causing damage to their “delicate nerve centers.” Perhaps the most impeccable hearing witness was Ellis P. Oberholtzer, the chief censor for the state of Pennsylvania, who had stopped in Chicago on what appeared to be a nationwide propaganda tour for movie censorship. Oberholtzer came well-prepared to provide devastating testimony against the evils of movies and in favor of the city’s right to condemn and control them, and he reminded the commission’s members that they comprised an important commonwealth of civic leaders. Their duty, Oberholtzer argued, was to protect those who he called the “lazy” from the influences of the movies. For if a person is too lazy to read, Oberholtzer explained, “he absorbs [the picture] anyhow, and it teaches him in spite of himself how to steal, how to murder, how to rob and how to do a number of different things.” Oberholtzer also cast the battle with the movie industry as an “us versus them” fight. “It is a large and rather arrogant industry,” he argued. “There are many people engaged in it whose opinions do not in any way coincide with our own. The object seems to be, as we all know, to go just as near the line of impermissibility as it is possible to go.” To back up his claims against the industry, Oberholtzer listed movie titles he hoped would illustrate the depravity of the business, including The Sex Lure, The Littlest Magdalene, The Gutter Magdalene, Hell to Pay Austin, The Tainted, The Suicide Club, Shackled Souls, and It May Be Your Daughter. Even with such incriminating evidence, this noted expert on censorship conceded, “It seems to me in looking at pictures you judge them instinctively. You know whether such a thing is permissible or not; you feel it somehow or other. You have no particular doubt about it, and then you look to the standard and try and find a reason for it afterwards.” Although the rationale for censorship might have seemed legitimate, the practice of censorship was anything but clear-cut. Testimony about the difficulties of applying censorship illustrated how basic flaws in theories appeared when an ideal had to be translated into a reality. 18 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Though movies caused controversy, the motion picture industry did provide Chicagoans with jobs. These American Film Company employees edit and perforate film.
Reel Life | 19
Censors used screening rooms, such as the one above, to evaluate motion pictures.
The week before Oberholtzer’s appearance, for example, the commission heard from Kitty Kelly and W. K. Hollander, editors of the motion-picture desks at the Chicago Examiner-Herald and the Chicago Daily News, respectively. Both noted the curious results produced by censorship of completed movies. Audiences would sit bewildered by gaps in story lines and inelegant jumps between cinematic moments. Both editors objected to the way censors assumed the audience possessed a low level of intelligence. Kelly did “not think it is fair to censor pictures entirely from the juvenile standpoint.” Hollander believed the movies operated less as a medium “for the education of the people” than as a “public place for entertainment.” The civic leaders’ expectations for movies were unrealistic and, simply, inappropriate, Hollander argued, because people “see pictures and judge each according to its worth, each according to its merit.” Ultimately, he seemed to suggest, it mattered little what the cultural elite thought because, in the end, the public determined the worth of a movie. 20 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Censorship also became so arbitrary that the arbiters of taste had to admit that audiences had as much a right to determine what was good and bad as did the appointed censors. At a particularly curious session, L. L. Pryor, a member of the Chicago censorship board, and the infamous Major Funkhouser testified that their offices were imperfectly designed to handle an imperfect job. Pryor confessed that among the criteria used to decide how best to censor a picture was the amount of money spent on its production, the names and reputations of those involved in the production, and the expected popularity of the film—not exactly a system based on aesthetic or professional standards. Funkhouser fittingly revealed that not only did censors approach their job “from the attitude of a child, not from an adult,” but that relationships between censors and movie exhibitors and producers routinely corrupted the process. With such forces influencing censorship, it was no wonder that when industry personnel testified before the
commission, they questioned the enterprise of censorship as a whole. At the second-to-last session at which testimony was heard, Arthur Ryan, the man who represented the “big four” of moving pictures—Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and D. W. Griffith—suggested that because of a lack of coherence among censors, the moving-picture world was unfairly subjected to treatment never imposed on other arts and expressions. An exchange between Ryan and Chairman Hurley illustrated that a limit had been reached in the broader debate over censorship: Chairman: Doesn’t the industry realize that censorship is here, and is here to stay? Ryan: They don’t realize it in the full sense of the word from your standpoint. Chairman: Hadn’t you better come in and be part of that movement? Ryan: They want a better understanding of it. The word right away binds up the industry. Chairman: We will have to change the word? Ryan: You have got to change the word. Ryan was a step ahead of Chairman Hurley; the movie industry knew that the kind of censorship practiced by Chicago as well as many other municipalities and states
In the hearings, Arthur Ryan (above) represented the “big four” of Hollywood: Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, D. W. Griffith, and Charlie Chaplin. Below: Two of Arthur Ryan’s “big four,” Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, soon after their 1920 marriage.
Reel Life | 21
22 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
would not last. Ryan believed this not simply because he foresaw the internal measures that would be taken by the industry in the future, but because he understood that movies followed popular whims and interests (no matter how prurient) rather than elite tastes. Movies catered to popular trends; thus the cultural arbiters who had traditionally translated art for the masses no longer mattered. The people knew what they wanted. Cultural authority had passed into the people’s hands. The commission saved its longest and most contentious session for last. On March 28, 1919 (the fifteenth session of the hearings), three hundred people crowded into the Council Chamber at 3:00 P.M. to watch leaders from the movie industry knock heads with civic leaders. William A. Brady, president of the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), and Walter W. Irwin, vice-president of Famous Players–Lasky and chairman of the NAMPI executive committee, headlined the industry’s group. Two months earlier, Brady and Irwin had organized a conference in New York City to appoint chairmen assigned to battle censorship boards in every state. Brady and Irwin approached the Chicago Motion Picture Commission as men acutely aware of the animosity toward the movie industry, but also as businessmen who, like movie stars, were beginning to command more money, power, and prestige in the nation. In their testimonies, Brady and Irwin attempted to return the industry to the mainstream and to counter censorship by arguing for the legitimacy of the movies. During Irwin’s lengthy statement, he referred to censorship as undemocratic, intolerant, and unpopular. He claimed that movies operated best under democratic principles and that only authoritarian nations such as Germany and “old Russia” would censor creative expression. Irwin likened censors to the new rulers of Russia, suggesting that censorship boards were akin to “bolsheviki leaders” who represented the “greatest example of intolerance,” since “censorship is fundamentally based on intolerance.” Irwin then launched a populist attack, asking the commission that if it believed censorship laws represented the will of the people, why then did the city of Chicago fail to “submit [that issue] to the people?” A member of Chicago’s religious community shot back that not only did the commission possess the capacity to speak on behalf of the public, but that to suggest otherwise would be to question the authority of the entire city government. Irwin questioned the unique and, to him, unfair treatment accorded movies. “If we have done something wrong we are held responsible,” he offered. Arguing that remedies other than blanket censorship existed, he pleaded, “You want to have us governed by the law of Left: Women work at the American Film Company. Reel Life | 23
The Chicago Motion Picture Commission Report called for a municipal censorship of motion pictures, outside of the police department’s jurisdiction.
24 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
injunction by which we will be punished for something before we have done it.” But, of course, therein lay the issue that divided the commission from the industry. The former worked from an assumption that movies were generally bad for society as well as a force seemingly outside the control of cultural arbiters. Irwin and other industry representatives saw themselves not as criminals or even as tainted men, but as businessmen who were the producers of potentially the most successful and popular source of entertainment the world had ever known. William Brady, speaking “as a good Catholic,” attempted to raise the discussion to a level where both sides saw each other as equals. He listed his significant accomplishments, including his association with Thomas Edison, his production of Shakespearean plays, and his appointment by President Woodrow Wilson to represent the movingpicture industry in government service during the war. On this last point, Brady added, “I go on record now, ladies and gentlemen, in stating this one fact, which no one in this room can contradict, that throughout the war no industry in the United States rendered to its government without profit, without charge, such distinguished services as were rendered by the motion picture industry of the United States.” A roar of applause followed Brady’s testament. Indeed, the power of movies to sway large populations toward a common goal had been witnessed in the drive to recruit men for the war and to entice civilians to buy Liberty Loans. Returning to the issue at hand, Brady admitted that there were “black sheep” in the industry producing “indecent and immoral pictures.” But, he added, immoral people could be found throughout the city writing for magazines and newspapers. Why, he asked, were movies treated differently from other means of expression? He answered his own question by suggesting that the reason for this double standard rested on the industry’s inability to earn respect through the exercise of political power. Unlike the newspapers, movies “had no religion and no politics,” but, Brady warned, the industry would be “going into politics,” perhaps after which the civic councils would “pay a little heed to them.” Film historian Robert Sklar has written that “there is evidence suggesting that at the time of Brady’s remarks, producers were already entering into discussions with leaders of the Republican party about mutually advantageous ways of working together during the 1920 elections.” By 1922, such informal talk had become policy with the appointment of Will H. Hays, Warren G.
Harding’s postmaster general, as president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, an organization that would develop rules for the editing and distribution of movies. The movie industry founded the MPDDA to counter the censorship boards and legislation in many states that had plagued the moving-picture world in 1921 and 1922. With the establishment of the MPDDA, the industry thought it had a tentative answer to the type of condemnation reflected in the Chicago hearings. At their next session, the commission decided to compile a final report out of the testimonies, studies, and articles that had influenced their work. Chairman Hurley also introduced a motion to create an ordinance that could be given to the Chicago City Council for passage. Between May 1919 and summer 1920, the commission completed and published its final report (which ran nearly two hundred pages) and established the parameters for censorship in Chicago. As the Moving Picture World reported, the commission voted to “give careful consideration to the protests of producers against censorship.” Hurley added, “I believe these people should be met half way.” The commission prefaced its findings saying that it was “unanimously of the opinion that a department controlling motion pictures, constructive in its nature, should be created, fostered, and maintained by the City of Chicago.” While not abandoning the idea that censorship was still needed, the commission wanted to take the job away from the police (who had failed as censors) and give it to an institution that did not battle crime as its primary responsibility. Such a change, the commission wrote, “would eliminate the objectionable word censor and might also take out some of the unsatisfactory limitations of the idea that goes with the word, and add others much better.” The commission proposed paying the salaries of the board members by charging a fee for reviewing movies. Pink permits were dropped from the new code, but a new censorship clause was added to deal with posters advertising movies with salacious titles. The report summarized the proposed ordinance in six parts: first, no legal or constitutional impediments existed to prevent civic censorship of movies. Second, the unpopular approach of police censorship should be disbanded. Third, a new and more professional department of motion pictures should be created to issue permits for the exhibition of movies. Fourth, all posters and advertisements would fall under the department’s jurisdiction. Fifth, a yearly salary of $5,000 for department heads should be requisitioned. And sixth, the pink-permit system should be dropped with the idea that “no picture should be exhibited that could not be shown before the father and mother in company with their children.” By
1922, Chicago had adopted the new censorship code. To contemporary ears, a progressive-era debate over movies may sound arcane. But the motion-picture hearings had raised a crucial question, one quoted in the introduction of the commission’s report and one that still resonates today: “Shall we give our children, and the weak and thoughtless of the community, what they ‘want’ or what they ‘need’?”
Raymond J. Haberski Jr. is assistant professor of history at Marian College in Indianapolis, Indiana.
I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4–5, CHS, DN-062405; 6, CHS, DN073431; 7 above, from Film Flashes: The Wit and Humor of a Nation In Pictures (New York: Leslie-Judge, 1916); 7 below, University of Chicago, Special Collections; 8, CHS, Chicago Motion Picture Commission Report; 9, CHS, ICHi-23396; 10, from Motion Picture Pioneer: The Selig Polyscope Company by Kalton C. Lahue (South Brunswick: A. S. Barnes, 1973); 11 left, Chicago Daily Tribune, March 1, 1919; 11 above, CHS, DN80,348; 12 above, CHS, DN-0066541; 12 below, CHS, DN0075524; 13, Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1918; 14, CHS, ICHi-22529; 15, from Film Flashes; 16, from Film Flashes; 17, from Motion Picture Pioneer; 18–19, CHS, ICHi-26010; 20, CHS, ICHi-25954; 21 above, CHS, DN-73,434; 21 below, CHS, DN-72390; 22–23, CHS, ICHi-26006; 24, CHS, Chicago Motion Picture Commission Report.
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more information on the early years of the motion picture industry, see: Eileen Bowser’s The Transformation of the Cinema 1907–1915 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); Richard Koszarski’s An Evening’s Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915–1928 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1990); Robert Sklar’s Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Thomas Schwartz’s The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988); and Garth Jowett’s Film: The Democratic Art (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1976). Contemporary accounts of the film industry can be gleaned from William M. Seabury’s The Public and the Motion Picture Industry (New York: MacMillian Company, 1926); and from the Chicago Motion Picture Commission Report (Chicago, September 1920). On Progressive reform and the arts, see: Charles C. Alexander’s Here the Country Lies: Nationalism and Art in Twentieth Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980); and Lynn Dumenil’s The Modern Temper: American Culture and Society in the 1920s (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). Reel Life | 25
Sears Beautiful STEPHEN ESKILSON
During the 1930s, the famed Chicago retailer revolutionized department store architecture
C
hicago’s Century of Progress International Exposition closed on October 31, 1934, after a final spectacle of fireworks and polychrome searchlights. Later that Halloween night, thousands of rowdy patrons roamed the fairgrounds, stealing and destroying many outdoor exhibits. Within one year no major exposition structure was left standing. On November 22, 1934, however, Sears, Roebuck and Company opened their fair-inspired Englewood store to a crowd of 225,000, establishing the fair’s place in the history of commercial architecture. The Chicago Daily News reported that the Englewood store proved that the Century of Progress exposition was as important as the earlier world’s fair of 1893: “The new plans [for Sears] show plainly the influence of A Century of Progress and indicate that the big exposition may exert an effect comparable to that of the Columbian Exposition of 1893, which set styles in American architecture for a generation.” The Sears store in Englewood exemplified the profound lasting effects of the Century of Progress exposition on American retail architecture. In fact, the basic design of Sears stores of the 1930s—windowless, moderne styling, with a commitment to display—was first conceived at the Century of Progress under the influence of the fair’s architectural commission. In the years following the fair, Sears embarked on an ambitious retail construction plan, reinventing the use of light in the department store.
26 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
This 1934 Chicago Daily News article hailed the Englewood Sears store as “America’s First Store without Windows.”
The Englewood Sears store that opened in 1934 demonstrated the influence of the Century of Progress exhibition on department store architecture. Sears Beautiful | 27
Aerial view of the fair’s Travel and Transport building, designed by Holabird, Burnham, and Bennett, an example of the modern style that characterized the fair. 28 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Chicago’s Carson, Pirie, Scott store (formerly Schlesinger and Mayer), designed by Louis Sullivan, also brought department store architecture to new heights, although it depended upon natural illumination.
The history of department store architecture begins in Europe in the nineteenth century. Between 1867 and 1876, a group of French architects, including JeanAlexandre LaPlanche, Louis August Boileau, Louis Charles Boileau, and Gustave Eiffel, built and later enlarged the opulent Bon Marché store in Paris, the first department store building. This new structure featured a dramatic spectacle of light focused on merchandise. The architects of this first “palace of consumption” solved the problem of illuminating the store’s interior by utilizing natural light. While employing gas and later electrical artificial illumination, the Bon Marché store relied heavily on its large windows complemented by a series of glazed courtyards to light the merchandise. Architect L. C. Boileau summarized the desired effect of this natural illumination in 1886: “In this luminous concert, the solid architecture will play the role of a setting of dressed stone. There will be just enough to make the interior daylight vibrate with all possible intensity so that the transverse glazed surfaces and the semi-lit depths which surround it will appear as lively, as resonant, and as substantial as if they were in the pure and natural daylight.” Around the turn of the century, American merchants and architects who planned the first American department stores often used the illumination techniques employed by the architects of Bon Marché. Despite advances in artificial illumination, American department stores, including Chicago’s Schlesinger and Mayer (designed by Louis Sullivan, 1899–1904; now Carson Pirie Scott), relied on natural light to illuminate their interiors. Sears Beautiful | 29
The influence of the Bon Marché and other French emporiums on American department store architecture around 1900 has become commonly accepted. Yet few scholars have studied the roots of the second wave of American department store construction in the 1930s and 1940s. Most notably, the substantial impact of Chicago’s 1933–34 world’s fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition, on this genre has received little attention. The style of the fair’s exhibition halls, specifically their elimination of all natural light, became a central tenet of the design of United States retail space after the exposition and led to a fundamental reorganizing of one of the most important community spaces of the twentieth century—the department store. The fair’s architectural impact, however, was not a forgone conclusion. During the construction of the exposition, architect and fair chief of design Louis Skidmore questioned whether its buildings would have any lasting influence on American architecture. The moderne style of the fair’s architecture—an eclectic collection of rectilinear forms and linear detailing—had been popularized
in the United States by New York’s Rockefeller Center (completed in 1939) and Cincinnati’s Union Station (completed in 1929). Although the fair’s buildings also employed this architectural style, the Century of Progress had not been recognized as a significant contributor to the advancement of the moderne style. In fact, sharp criticism of the fair’s buildings was commonplace even before the fair had opened. Architect Ralph Adams Cram provided one oft-cited quip, calling the fair’s architecture “a casual association of the gasometer, the freight-yard, and the grain elevator.” Cram, who derided the fair’s buildings as “ugliness,” hoped that the fair building’s architecture would not have any lasting influence on public spaces in America or elsewhere. The Century of Progress exposition celebrated both the centennial of the city of Chicago’s incorporation and the scientific advances of American society. The idea for the exposition had been launched in 1923 when retailer Myron Adams suggested the concept to Mayor William Dever. The project languished until December 1927 when Chicago’s city treasurer Charles Peterson appointed an
The Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago was a resounding success, attracting 50 million visitors. 30 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
organizing committee of nine, including industrialists Samuel Insull and Chauncey McCormick, as well as Mrs. Medill McCormick (née Ruth Hanna). The committee nominated Rufus Dawes (scion of a banking family; his brother, Charles Dawes, was vice president of the United States from 1925 to 1929) as its president, Peterson as vice president, and Daniel Burnham, son and namesake of the prominent architect, as secretary.* As one of their first orders of business, the fair trustees established an architectural commission. Five prominent architects with offices outside Chicago—Harvey Corbett, Raymond Hood, and Ralph Walker from New York City; Paul Cret from Philadelphia; and Arthur Brown Jr. of San Francisco—were initially appointed by the trustees. Chicago architects John Holabird, Edward Bennett, and * The Daniel Burnham referred to here was the son of the prominent architect of the same name. He did not use “Jr.” or any other designation to indicate that he was not, in fact, his father. At times, this led to some confusion. All mentions of Burnham in this article refer to Daniel Burnham the younger, unless otherwise indicated.
Above, from left to right: Fair general manager Lenox Lohr, fair president Rufus Dawes, and vice president of the United States Charles Gates Dawes. As director of works of the 1933–34 fair, Daniel Burnham (below), son and namesake of the famous architect, oversaw the construction of buildings and exhibitions.
Sears Beautiful | 31
Hubert Burnham (son of the elder Daniel Burnham) soon joined this commission. In addition, a number of adjunct members of the commission influenced the commission’s deliberations. Allen Albert served as the honorary secretary, acting as a spokesman for the trustees; Daniel Burnham was appointed director of works at the behest of the architectural commission, in part because of his father’s significant role in the planning of the Columbian Exposition. In his new position as director of works, Burnham oversaw the construction of the buildings and exhibits. Industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes and architectural draftsman Hugh Ferriss assisted as consultants. The architectural commission convened for the first time in May 1928 at Bennett’s Chicago offices. Members of the commission discussed the issue of illumination at their first meeting and recorded that “artificial light, the tremendous progress of which has astonished all designers in recent years, will become an inherent component of the architectural composition.” Early in the exposition’s planning, the commission decided to eliminate natural light from the interiors of the exposition buildings. In the end, almost all of the major fair buildings—the Hall of Science, Travel and Transport, the Electrical Group, and the General Exhibits Group—were built with few or no windows. Burnham explained this decision in 1932: Practical considerations dictated this windowless feature. Everyone familiar with exhibition buildings knows that sunlight for day-time illumination is a variable quantity. By eliminating windows, artificial light must be used. Thus the architect and exhibitor have constant control over the volume and intensity of light. He also cited the savings gained by avoiding the expense of sashes and glazing, noting that these elements were too extravagant for temporary buildings. In this manner, arguably the most significant architectural innovation at the Century of Progress exposition was motivated in large part by economic considerations. In subsequent years, first at Sears and then at other department stores, these same economic factors combined with a desire to present merchandise in the most effective manner possible, caused the designers of these stores to adopt similar strategies. The Century of Progress International Exposition was a spectacular commercial success. The fair drew nearly 50 million visitors at a time when the country’s entire population equaled 125 million. Visitors entered a site on and around Chicago’s Northerly Island (now Meigs Field), constructed on a strip of land more than three miles long yet only eight hundred feet wide at its greatest point. To the visitor, the most prominent visual sign of 32 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
the past “century of progress” was the startling display of moderne architecture. The Travel and Transport Building, designed by Holabird, Burnham, and Bennett, was the first major exhibition structure completed. Hood and Cret won the commissions for the two most prominent structures, the Electrical Group and the Hall of Science, respectively. These two buildings represent the basic style of the fair’s architecture, constructions built of rectilinear forms surfaced with relief panels. The remaining members of the architectural commission fairly equally split the other design opportunities.
The Travel and Transport building (above), one of the major fair structures, was built without windows so that the architects would have complete control over the building’s interior light. A fair guidebook noted that the “building which strikingly carries out the modern architectural scheme of the Fair is that of Sears, Roebuck and Company” (below).
The Hall of Science building, designed by Hood and Cret, represented the basic style of the fair’s architecture, with constructions built of rectilinear forms surfaced with relief panels. Sears Beautiful | 33
Chicago’s Century of Progress exposition served as a showplace for a new style of architecture.
34 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Sears Beautiful | 35
The Englewood Sears store (above) was hailed as a “new type of department store.” Windowless design allowed an extra six thousand square feet for retail display space (below right).
The major buildings at A Century of Progress were designed by the commissioners and featured a range of general exhibits, but many large corporations also sponsored structures and hired their own architects to build them. The architectural commission reviewed each private exhibition building to ensure that it expressed the general style of the fair. Sears, Roebuck and Company, seeking to underscore the importance of its retail business in the fair’s consumer spectacle, sponsored a large building of its own. “House architect” George C. Nimmons of Nimmons, Carr, and Wright, who designed the building, highlighted the rectilinear tower, a variation on both the fair’s style as well as Sears’s trademark architecture. According to the Official Guide-Book of the Fair, the Sears building at the exposition “strikingly carries out the modern architectural scheme of the Fair.” When Sears finished work on its first postfair store in Chicago in December 1934, the editors of The Architect and Engineer immediately recognized the influence of the Century of Progress exposition: Sears had already had some experience with a windowless building, for its building at the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago had no windows. The Sears display department, in working in this World’s Fair structure, had soon found that the absence of windows greatly simplified the task of injecting power and drama into the displays . . . [Les] Janes and his display department felt that they had learned something of great importance from their work at the World’s Fair. 36 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Nimmons had been planning the Sears store on Sixtythird and Halsted Streets (in the Englewood neighborhood) in Chicago, Sears’s headquarters, for several years. The store was originally intended to be built with many windows, a larger version of the recently opened (spring 1933) store in Brooklyn, New York. In May 1934, however, under the direction of Sears’s designer Les Janes, Nimmons abruptly revised the construction plans and eliminated all of the windows in the building. The influence of the Century of Progress exposition on this design choice was well-publicized. Newspapers reporting on the store’s opening ceremonies of November 22, 1934, announced that “the new store is built in the modernistic windowless architectural style introduced at the World’s Fair.” And tellingly, the past president of the Century of Progress exposition, Rufus Dawes, was invited to speak at the store’s grand opening. The editors of The Architect and Engineer also asserted that “a new type of department store is being completed by Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago. This new structure, which is arousing widespread interest, will contain many radical departures from ordinary construction practices, the most interesting of which is that there will be no windows.” The store designers decided to eliminate windows for many of the same functional reasons that windowless design had prevailed at the exposition: the practice decreased building costs and the depreciation caused by city grime coming into the store, eliminated distractions to customers, quieted the store, and allowed more space for merchandise. Specifically, the elimination of windows at the Englewood store freed an extra six thousand square feet for the display of Sears’s wares. The lack of windows had the additional advantage of lowering the heating and cooling costs for the store, an issue that had not been part of the fair’s planning.
Sears proudly took out a full-page ad in the Chicago Daily Tribune to announce its new, innovative store. Sears Beautiful | 37
Other aspects of the Englewood store also echoed the model presented at the exposition. “An attempt was made to hold the entire expanse of floors, walls, merchandise, and display together like one great stage setting,” one history of Sears explains. “The color scheme was designed to attach individuality to each department while still achieving an over-all harmony.” This type of planning resonated with the example of Josef Urban’s color scheme for the fair, a strategy that unified both the exterior and interior spaces with color. Urban asserted that “it is the color that ties the whole scheme together.” Also, the unbroken walls of the Englewood interior were blanketed with photo murals that showed various products in use. Similarly, the fair’s exhibition organizers had sought to show science in the context of its pragmatic functions. As indicated in the official fair guidebook, “A Century of Progress undertakes to clothe science with its true garb of practical reality.” Thus the architect Ely Kahn wrote in 1933 that he considered the fair’s influence to reside principally in “the splendid handling of the exhibits themselves, the interiors of the various buildings, the lighting, general color schemes and lettering.” The planners at Sears incorporated all of these facets of A Century of Progress’s exhibition design. Use of the evolving technology of air-conditioning signaled the impressive standing of newly designed windowless department stores. In 1932, the American Architect had trumpeted “Clients Will Demand Air Conditioning.” The article warned architects that “the time is near at hand when buildings not air conditioned will be classed as obsolete.” In the world of retailing, where evolutionary values of novelty hold a prominent position ideologically, stores had to be up-to-date in order to draw consumers. The windowless design of Sears, which may have repelled some people with its “peculiar, modernistic appearance,” had the advantage of demonstrating its climate-control advancements to passersby. Despite some objections from merchandise executives, Sears’s top management remained convinced that the world’s fair proved that consumers could be enticed into windowless, warehouse-like structures. The history of Sears helps to explain the company’s ability to embrace the new windowless style of the Century of Progress exposition. Founded as a mail-order business in 1886 by railroad engineer Richard Sears, the company soon became a powerful leader in merchandising. Sears’s catalog became the consumer bible of America’s hinterlands as the company perfected centralized promotion and distribution techniques. For its first thirty-nine years, Sears remained strictly a mail-order concern, catering solely to a rural clientele. Beginning in 1921, however, with business eroding because of the postwar depression, Sears sought to increase its sales by opening retail stores. By the 1920s, more Americans lived in urban rather than rural areas, ever increasing a large market 38 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The fair’s official guidebook (above) featured photographs of its most prominent structures, including Travel and Transport, Hall of Science, and the Sears, Roebuck building. Below: Railroad engineer Richard Sears founded his mail-order business in 1886.
The first Sears catalog in 1894 boasted that Sears trade “reaches around the world.” The popularity of the Sears catalog led to the resounding success of the company’s mail-order business. Sears Beautiful | 39
Sears, Roebuck and Company focused on mail order until the 1920s, when it opened retail stores. Consumers were finally able to shop across the counter, not just from the Sears “wish book.�
40 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The windowless department store structure, as seen in this Sears store in 1926 (above), lent itself to climate control, roomy retail space, and other benefits that pleased consumers. Below right: The Sears store on West Irving Park Road, which opened in the 1930s, helped to popularize this new department-store design across the city. Here the “window” is used for a promotional display, not to bring light into the building.
that Sears had yet to tap. On February 2, 1925, Sears launched its first retail store on the site of its main mailorder plant in Chicago. Over the next seven years, Sears opened 385 retail facilities, from huge urban department stores to specialized car-care centers and rural outlets. The strategy proved a financial success; by 1930, the sales volume of retail business had overtaken that of the mail-order business. While the volume of the retail business was initially impressive, the retail downturn brought about by the Great Depression in 1929 caused company officials to reevaluate their merchandising strategies. Several executives agreed with designer Les Janes, who stated that retail display was “the weakest link in the entire Sears operation.” In fact, Sears’s early stores had been a designer’s nightmare. Jammed into the first floor of mailorder buildings, the stores operated with only the crudest and most perfunctory efforts at display. Historian James Worthy explains, “[G]oods were simply stacked on wooden tables and customers rummaged through them to find what they wanted.” Some reports even suggest that for several years upended crates were used to display merchandise. In response to such haphazard techniques, Sears established the Department of Store Planning and Display in 1932 under Janes’s leadership. This new department oversaw both the architecture of new stores as well as the placement of merchandise within them.
One of the department’s first projects was to design the Sears building at the Century of Progress exposition. Over the next few years, Janes worked with George Nimmons to design an entirely new type of store, one built to present products in the most effective manner possible. At the time of the Englewood store’s construction, architects and designers debated whether or not windowless design had a future. The Architect and Engineer pondered, “Some declare that the store will point the way to a revolution in department store planning and will have a definite effect on other commercial and business buildings in the future; others contend that the design is too essentially a compromise between the functional and the traditional to be of great importance.” Likewise, the editors of Architectural Forum wrote, “Sears’ executives and Architects Nimmons, Carr, and Wright may well have started a train of development that will eventually lead to the complete elimination of the window in certain types of commercial buildings.” In fact, the Englewood store was not a lone experiment at Sears in the 1930s; the company built five more windowless stores over the next five years, including Chicago’s second windowless Sears at 4730 West Irving Park Road. Nimmons’s partner George Carr described the now-standard design of these buildings: “Despite the use of some glass brick for display and decorative purposes, these are essentially windowless structures. All are completely air-conditioned and depend on artificial light for interior illumination.” This series of stores, along with several more completed in the early 1940s, popularized the windowless design across America’s major urban areas. Over the next few years, other architectural firms began to follow Sears’s lead. During the 1940s, prominent industrial designer Raymond Loewy advocated windowless retail buildings. Loewy had become involved in retail store architecture in 1937, when he established a department of architecture and interior design (led by William Snaith) at his design firm in New York. In 1941, Lord and Taylor commissioned Loewy and Snaith to modernize an old
Sears Beautiful | 41
store and build a small outlet in Manhasset, New York. Loewy used windows selectively in both projects. In 1947, during the postwar boom in retail architecture, Loewy won a commission from industry giant Federated Stores to build a huge new department store. This store, Foley’s (Houston), featured the familiar blank windowless facade of Sears’s stores of the 1930s and 1940s. By the late 1940s, the windowless style had gradually become the norm in department store architecture. In 1947, Hecht Company opened a large windowless store in Silver Spring, Maryland (Abbott, Merkt, and Company), while 1948 saw May Company’s windowless expansion in Los Angeles (Albert C. Martin and Associates). Other windowless stores included Milliron’s in Westchester, California (1949, Gruen and Krummeck), and the Burdine’s department store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (1947, Abbot, Merkt, and Company). It is tempting to overstate the influence of A Century of Progress and Sears in the rapid spread of windowless design. Obviously, many of the technologies witnessed at the fair and at Sears’s stores were being discussed elsewhere. The windowless style had been written about in the architectural literature for several decades, and had been utilized in an assortment of structures, mainly a handful of industrial buildings as well as many theater interiors in the United States. However, windowless architecture never had been utilized in the department store environment before the world’s fair of 1933–34. Primers of retail design from the 1940s and 1950s show how sweeping the turn toward windowless architecture had become. In his 1948 book Planning Stores That Pay, architect Louis Parnes pointed out that “for store lighting, three types of light sources may be used—incandescent, fluorescent, and cold cathode.” In his chapter devoted to the interior lighting of stores, Parnes completely ignored the use of natural light, as it simply did not play an important role in retail design. In a similar vein, Morris Ketchum Jr. devoted an entire chapter in his 1958 book Shops and Stores to “Lighting the Sales Space.” Ketchum went into great detail regarding the efficient use of artificial lighting to sell merchandise, and he was unequivocal in his opinion of daylight. “Artificial light within the store is much to be preferred to natural light. Daylight cannot be controlled, it varies with the changing brightness of the sun and the sky. . . . Artificial light, on the other hand, can be perfectly controlled for intensity, direction, and color. It is a flexible tool in the designer’s hands.” Both writers also advocated climate control in order to complement the interior illumination. Clearly, the windowless aesthetic had become a fixture in the minds of architects in the decades following the Century of Progress exposition. In the decades following Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition, Daniel (the elder) Burnham’s “City Beautiful” movement had promoted classically styled architecture in 42 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Sears’s second windowless store in Chicago, on West Irving Park Road.
many American cities. Forty years later, in his 1932 article “Expositions Always Influence Architecture,” Louis Skidmore declared, “Time alone will tell whether the influence of the present exposition will be as marked in the future as the one of ‘93 was in the generation following it.” Anyone who has ventured inside a contemporary department store can attest to the lasting influence of the Century of Progress exposition. The preponderance of windowless design in retail spaces affirms the success of what might be called “Sears Beautiful.” Stephen Eskilson is assistant professor in the art department at Eastern Illinois University.
I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 26, Chicago Daily News, May 22, 1934; 27, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company; 28–29, CHS, ICHI-19901; 29, CHS, ICHI-01571; 30–31, CHS, map from Official Guidebook to the Fair; 31 above, CHS, DN-A870; 31 below, CHS, ICHI-26486; 32 above, CHS; 32 below, CHS, Official Guide and Time Saving Trips through the Fair; 33, CHS, ICHI-02079; 34–35, CHS, ICHI-24212; 36 above, CHS, ICHI04693; 36 below, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company; 37, Chicago Daily News, November 22, 1934; 38 above, CHS, Official Guide and Time Saving Trips through the Fair; 38 below, CHS, ICHI-30737; 39, CHS; 40, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company; 41 above and below, courtesy of Sears, Roebuck and Company; 42–43, CHS. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Contemporary articles on windowless architecture appeared in a few journals, including
the February 1935 issue of The Architect and Engineer, the March 1935 issue of The Architectural Forum, and the September 1940 issue of The Architectural Record. For a general history of Sears, see: Boris Emmet and John Jeuck’s Catalogues and Counters: A History of Sears, Roebuck and Company (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965); and James Worthy’s Shaping an American Institution: Robert E. Wood and Sears, Roebuck (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984). General histories of Chicago world fairs include: John Findling’s Chicago’s Great World’s Fairs (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1995); Robert Rydell’s World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Susan Talbot-Stanaway’s “The Giant Jewel,” Chicago History (July 1993): 4–23; and Neil Harris, Wim de Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert W. Rydell’s Grand Illusions: Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1993). Sears Beautiful | 43
Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y I
A League of His Own: William Hulbert and the Founding of the National League T O M M E LV I L L E
I
n no other American sport is a sense of the past, a continuity with the past, as important as it is in baseball. The game’s very image as America’s national pastime is rooted in this past, and in its great players, clubs, and rivalries. To maintain its standing as America’s pastime, baseball has taken occasional liberties with its history, creating well-intentioned myths such as its identification with rural values, or its spontaneous origin from the mind of Abner Doubleday, both of which, though now discredited, live on as workable fictions much like Santa Claus.
Although legend credits Abner Doubleday (top) with creating the game of baseball in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York, this claim often has been refuted. Above: Baseball’s humble beginnings—the neighborhood sandlot.
44 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Yet in no other sport is accepted image so much at variance with history as it is in baseball. Far from a tale of harmonious continuity and uniformity of trends and objectives, the history of organized baseball reveals conflict, division, and turmoil. The relentless push and pull between the powers that be has resulted in a history punctuated by moral crises, cutthroat competition, and player-management conflict.
No better example of baseball’s sordid history exists than the story of the National League’s origin, which, like the Doubleday myth, has been modified and rewritten to justify the interests of the present. The standardized account of the origin of the National League gained credence with the 1911 publication of the first significant historical work on baseball, Albert Spalding’s America’s National Game. Spalding claimed that professional baseball was “saved . . . from decay or death, when grave dangers threatened it” when Chicago White Stockings president William Hulbert staged a daring “coup” in 1876, overthrowing the corrupt and inefficient National Association (baseball’s first professional league), and establishing the National League. Hulbert’s move supposedly put professional baseball on a morally correct and economically viable path to the future. Like many historical accounts written by the victors, Spalding’s book obscures the broader historical forces at
work. Hulbert’s daring move was without question one of the most important events in baseball history, but this development was widely criticized, strongly opposed, and would lead baseball down a long path of dissension and conflict. Equally important, Hulbert’s plan for organized baseball, as embodied in the National League, represented a nationwide assertion of Chicago’s special role in professional baseball. To properly understand how Chicago assumed this leadership role in professional baseball, it’s important to know the game’s beginnings. Though Americans have enjoyed informal variations of baseball for generations, modern baseball was strictly an urban phenomenon that developed in one city—New York. Here baseball grew into a modern, highly skilled pastime during the late 1850s. Baseball’s New York origin established its association as an urban sport, a critical development for baseball’s future as a mass entertainment.
Albert Spalding’s 1911 work America’s National Game (above) described William Hulbert’s founding of the National League as a “daring coup.” The meteoric rise of Chicago coal merchant William Hulbert (right) to director of the White Stockings team had permanent ramifications for the game of baseball.
Yesterday’s City | 45
Baseball first flourished in New York City, and hometown teams such as the New York Mutuals reaped the benefits.
Baseball’s urban origin in a single eastern city, however, set the game on a peculiar course. As baseball began to spread to other areas of the country after the Civil War, a glaring gap developed between the skill and organizational level of eastern baseball and that of the rest of the country. This skill gap became all too evident during the western tours of top eastern ball clubs such as the New York Mutuals, Philadelphia Athletics, and Washington Nationals during the late 1860s. In most cases these clubs overwhelmed local competition, even the finest clubs in the largest midwestern cities such as Cincinnati, Cleveland, Chicago, and St. Louis. Chicago’s best local club, the Excelsiors, for instance, were completely humiliated at an 1867 home game by the Washington Nationals, 49–4. These lopsided contests not only revealed the technical deficiency of midwestern baseball players, but also wounded civic pride. As Wilkes Spirit of the Times aptly noted, baseball had “dropped in upon the people [of the West] full blown, and hence the extraordinary exertions to catch up to Eastern players.” 46 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Because eastern baseball teams so thoroughly dominated other clubs throughout the country, baseball supporters in the Midwest abandoned their hopes of developing local talent. Instead, baseball club owners hired top eastern ballplayers and relocated them to the Midwest. This, of course, meant that teams had to drop most of their local players, who generally played on a strictly amateur basis, and enroll more skillful and highly paid players from the baseball centers of New York and Philadelphia. The first club to lure players in a systematic manner made its home in Cincinnati. Stung by a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of visiting eastern ball clubs in 1868, officers of the local Red Stockings baseball club decided to build a team of some of the country’s best professional ballplayers. The plan immediately paid handsome dividends. Under the able leadership of ex-New York ballplayer Harry Wright, the Red Stockings completed their famous undefeated season of 1869 that included nearly sixty wins, some against the best eastern clubs. This unprecedented success soon raised some insurmountable problems for Cincinnati. The club had to go
After they built a team of the nation’s finest ballplayers, the Cincinnati Red Stockings boasted an undefeated season that included nearly sixty wins.
deeply into debt to support a championship-caliber team, and when public sentiment soured after the Red Stockings lost some games the following year, club officers decided to disband the team altogether, reverting to amateur status (with only local players) at the end of the 1870 season. After Cincinnati bowed out of the professional arena, Chicago seized the opportunity to prove itself equal to the demands of the emerging world of professional baseball. Like the Red Stockings, Chicago’s club realized it would have to utilize imported baseball players rather than local talent if it wanted to stay competitive with the rest of the country. Organized as a regular stock-issuing corporation, rather than as an association (as was the case with Cincinnati), the Chicago club’s officers quickly assembled a team of top-notch eastern ballplayers that completed the 1870 season with an impressive list of successes and a strong claim to the unofficial national championship, thirty-three years before the first World Series would be played.
Chicago was certainly not the only midwestern club with championship aspirations (both Rockford, Illinois, and Fort Wayne, Indiana, boasted good professional baseball clubs at this time), but Chicago’s club emerged as the prime mover in the course of professional baseball for a number of reasons. First, Chicago’s role in national baseball closely mirrored its role in the national economy. As the industrial power of the Midwest—a mammoth center of business, trade, and transportation in the vast American heartland—Chicago alone had the resources to pay the best players, attract the best teams, and entertain the largest audiences in the area. Second, the Chicago sporting public became virtually obsessed with its baseball team, the White Stockings, as a symbol of civic pride and prestige. Long engaged in an intense sectional rivalry with not only midwestern but also eastern cities in matters of industry and trade, Chicago projected this rivalry onto its baseball. As Wilkes aptly recognized, “New York was to be wiped from the map of the United States in the matter of playing baseball, as it had been commercially and socially long ago by the Garden city.” Yesterday’s City | 47
Teams from the eastern seaboard, including the Philadelphia Athletics, seen here in 1870, dominated midwestern teams in baseball’s earliest years. 48 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
But the budding rivalry with eastern teams also put Chicago in a peculiar position of mutual dependence upon eastern baseball, not only for the best baseball talent, but also for competitive standing and contacts as well. Unlike the top eastern baseball clubs, which had an easily accessible network of good quality clubs and college baseball teams nearby, Chicago baseball existed in relative isolation. The White Stockings had to make long, expensive trips for games, and had to continually prove they were good enough to persuade the best eastern clubs to come to Chicago. To an extent, Chicago’s dominant economic position made these contests versus eastern teams possible. Chicago boasted larger and better-paying baseball crowds than almost anywhere else in the country—an absolute necessity if Chicago was to attract the best players and teams to the city. As Wilkes knew all too well, when it came to baseball in Chicago, “It pays out there, the boys say.” In order to attract large crowds and entice eastern teams to travel west, Chicago needed more than just a good baseball team: it had to have a championship caliber team. Anything short of extraordinary play would mean not simply the decline of Chicago baseball, but its very death. As the Boston Herald rightly observed “nothing can save [Chicago baseball] but continued success.” By the early 1870s, Chicago baseball organizations were locked in a paradoxical relationship with the rest of the country. On the one hand Chicago organizations despised eastern baseball for its prestige and technical achievements, just as eastern baseball despised Chicago baseball organizers for using “filthy lucre” to draw away eastern talent. But Chicago clubs also needed eastern baseball, not only as a talent source, but also as a means to justify its competitive status. Chicago’s clubs existed in fear that eastern baseball would someday decide to “go it alone,” effectively denying Chicago’s national aspirations. The Great Fire of 1871, which destroyed the White Stockings’ ballpark, abruptly halted Chicago’s emerging role in national baseball. For the next two years nobody played professional baseball in Chicago. One important off-field development during this period profoundly affected the city’s baseball future: the rise of William A. Hulbert to the leadership of the Chicago baseball organization. Though born in New York state, Hulbert had been brought to Chicago at an early age. After attending Beloit College in Wisconsin, he became a successful Chicago coal merchant and respected member of the city’s Board of Exchange. Though records indicate he was never an active player himself, Hulbert recognized the White Stockings long-term potential as a tool for civic prestige. He became a director of the club in 1872, its secretary in 1874, and, by the following year, Hulbert
This official National League Score Card lists many of Chicago’s legendary players, including Albert Spalding; in the early days of baseball, the city boasted the country’s largest baseball crowds.
Yesterday’s City | 49
The more widely accepted view is that Hulbert, in creating the National League, wanted to put professional baseball on a more “businesslike” footing, which he did by creating a closed-circuit competition among only the most established clubs in cities with populations of at least seventy-five thousand people. The included clubs also received exclusive territorial rights, certainly an arrangement the other top National Association clubs were more than happy to follow. Hulbert had displeased the National Association by signing away Boston players including Ross C. Barnes (far left) and Cal McVey (left).
assumed its presidency, a position he would hold until his death in 1882. On Hulbert’s initiative, Chicago reestablished a professional team in 1874, in the old-Chicago style. The club again brazenly hired away top eastern ballplayers in its plan to secure nothing less than a championship-caliber team. But Chicago’s reentry into the National Association (baseball’s professional league at that time) did not go according to plan. The White Stockings fared poorly in 1874 and again in 1875. Chicago strained its finances by having to play against such small-market National Association clubs as Keokuk, Iowa, and New Haven, Connecticut. To make matters worse, Hulbert had aroused the league’s animosity by secretly signing away four of perennial champion Boston’s best players: Albert Spalding, Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Cal McVey. The White Stockings’ reemergence provided the background for Hulbert’s famous “coup” early in 1876, when, with the backing of newly formed professional clubs in St. Louis and Louisville, he arm-twisted the top eastern ball clubs to abandon the National Association for a new organization—the National League. Why did Hulbert make the bold move to set up the National League, and why did the rest of organized baseball willfully follow him? One theory says that Hulbert, fearing Chicago would be expelled from the National Association for signing away the Boston quartet, preempted the expulsion by forming the new league. This argument, however, hardly seems likely in light of the fact that wheeling and dealing for top players had been a common, if often criticized, practice among National Association clubs for years. Spalding and Barnes, both originally from the Midwest, had been giving indications for quite awhile that they wanted to play ball in Chicago. 50 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
After their ballpark was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the White Stockings regrouped for a triumphant comeback in 1876.
Hulbert’s plan to set up a completely new professional baseball league, however, did not constitute a “revolution” in organized baseball so much as an “evolution” of preexisting baseball trends along lines that had, up to that time, been beneficial for Chicago. As originally organized, the National Association offered open-ended competition. Any club from any city could enter the championship by paying the nominal $10
entrance fee. The larger eastern clubs accepted this arrangement because they usually only had to make short trips to nearby towns such as Middletown, Connecticut, or Irvington, New Jersey, to play these minor clubs. For Chicago, however, this arrangement caused problems because the White Stockings had to undertake long and costly trips to poor-paying towns whose clubs often refused to make return visits to Chicago. By convincing Yesterday’s City | 51
the top eight professional clubs to play championship games only among themselves—committing to a preestablished schedule—Chicago secured not only a more efficient system but also one that brought the east into greater dependence upon western clubs. Beneficial as this arrangement was for the National League clubs, some outside clubs cried “monopoly.” For all its drawbacks, the old National Association had at least been a “national” championship, open to any club willing to prove itself on the playing field. After the top eight clubs agreed to play in a closed league, critics accused the National League clubs of overthrowing one of baseball’s long-standing traditions for their own personal gain. To deflect this criticism, and to justify the path he had chosen for baseball, Hulbert had to prove that: the National League truly had the best players and the best teams; the league was totally “above board,” worthy of patronage from “respectable society”; and the league could deliver its product—top-notch baseball—to the public in a predictable and regular way.
To accomplish these three goals, however, the National League set itself at odds with some emerging trends in baseball. At a time when good quality play was developing in more and more areas, Hulbert put the National League on a course that restricted and limited baseball contacts with fans considered to be “undesirable.” At a time when more and more people from all walks of life wanted to attend baseball games, Hulbert began a campaign to “keep the rag-tag out of the stand” by instituting a leaguewide fifty-cent admission fee. As a result, the National League had to wage an ongoing struggle during its earliest years to redirect the public’s growing interest in high quality baseball to its own benefit, something that would require all of Hulbert’s ingenuity and perseverance. The first serious challenge to the closed-circuit plan came from within the league itself at the end of its first season. The New York Mutuals and Philadelphia Athletics, pleading poor financial condition, refused to make their end-of-the-season trip to Chicago. Hulbert (who succeeded Morgan Bulkeley as the league’s president that year)
The Philadelphia Athletics, seen here in 1871, had a longstanding rivalry with the Chicago White Stockings. 52 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
immediately expelled the two clubs from the league. Historians have traditionally pointed to this move—dropping league franchises from the country’s two largest cities—as evidence that Hulbert was willing to put principle before profits. But this interpretation overlooks some more calculated factors. The National League franchise in Hartford simply relocated to New York after the Mutuals were expelled, thereby retaining a National League franchise in that city, if only for another year. The expulsion of the Athletics seems to have been personally motivated, a consequence of the bad blood between Chicago and Philadelphia. The two clubs had repeatedly raided each
Many critics saw gambling as an evil that threatened to destroy baseball, as depicted in this cartoon by Homer Davenport. Hulbert made great efforts to eliminate gambling from baseball, including permanently expelling from the league players who gambled.
other for players over the years, a situation that came to a head in 1875, when the Philadelphia-controlled judiciary committee of the National Association voided Chicago’s contract with star player Davy Force and awarded him to the Athletics. By expelling the Athletics, Hulbert had at last rid organized baseball of the “Philadelphia boss rule.” Hulbert’s move further solidified his own leadership position in the league. A more serious crisis arose within the league a year later, when four members of the league’s Louisville club, James Devlin, William Craver, A. H. Nichols, and George Hall, either confessed to, or were convicted of, receiving payment from gamblers to lose games on purpose. Louisville immediately expelled the players for life, an action the league upheld at its annual meeting. Again, historians have pointed to this episode as evidence of
Hulbert’s high-principled efforts to root out corruption from organized baseball, even though the expulsion hurt the league in the short run by bringing down its Louisville and St. Louis franchises (the latter having contracted with some of the expelled players for the following year). The league’s handling of the matter, however, was largely symbolic. Rather than heralding a “new era of prosperity and popularity” for professional baseball, these expulsions did not end corruption in the league. Rumors of corrupt players, umpires, and officials continued to circulate throughout Hulbert’s tenure; some rumors even involved Hulbert’s Chicago players. Forest and Stream expressed a more realistic view of the National League’s high moral stance, noting that “the habitues of the various city pool rooms of New York, St. Louis, and Philadelphia will smile in their sleeves at this.” Yesterday’s City | 53
The financially weak Troy club (above) handicapped the young National League. Below: Hulbert’s Chicago White Stockings were World Champions in 1880, the first year of the National League.
54 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The greatest challenge the National League faced under Hulbert’s tenure was maintaining its status as the organization that represented the best baseball talent in the country. Hulbert always insisted that the nation lacked enough high quality baseball talent to justify more than eight professional clubs in the National League. But game results between league and nonleague clubs seemed to refute this claim. In its inaugural season the National League lost thirty-seven games to outside clubs, nearly one-third of all the games it played. This rate of success led to the formation of a rival league, the International Association, which brought together the top professional clubs in midsized eastern industrial cities such as Buffalo, Syracuse, and Troy, New York, as well as Lowell and Springfield, Massachusetts. The clubs in this league played good baseball, winning more than fifty out of one hundred games they played against National League clubs in 1877. Reduced to only six clubs after its Louisville and St. Louis franchises failed, under pressure from nonleague competition, and continually criticized by sports observers, the National League faced an uncertain future. These compounding crises led Hulbert to confide to Spalding, “the wit of man cannot devise a plan . . . that will control the game of baseball for over five years.” Faced with these mounting threats, Hulbert embarked upon a calculated and at times ruthless four-year cold war against the International Association. To deter the better non-National League clubs from joining the International Association, Hulbert established a League Alliance, granting such independent clubs as Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and Pittsburgh special privileges while allowing the alliance’s top performers the option of joining the National League (which Indianapolis did in 1878). Hulbert also managed to plant the seed of discord among International Association teams by entering into a special agreement with its best clubs—Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and Springfield—offering these teams special playing terms. These inducements enticed Buffalo and Syracuse to abandon the International Association and join the National League. In addition, Hulbert tried to restrict interleague contacts by increasing the number of scheduled National League games while trying to tempt the best International Association players to break their contracts and join the National League. Over time, Hulbert’s tactics paid off. One by one the International Association clubs began to fail until, by 1880, the rival league ceased to exist altogether. Hulbert’s successful tactics, though, had forced the National League into
some decisions and policies that would come back to haunt it. In his attempt to overthrow the International Association, Hulbert had admitted two of its better clubs, Troy and Worcester, into the National League, even though few believed that these communities could support professional clubs. Hulbert’s policies also crippled some of the league’s own franchises. The league’s fifty-cent admission fee, which became mandatory in 1879, hurt attendance so badly at Syracuse that the club disbanded. Some league clubs became unhappy with the player reserve clause (which Hulbert had pushed through in 1879, allowing each club to retain five of its best players indefinitely), fearing it would further solidify Chicago’s competitive dominance in the league. Others protested Hulbert’s uncompromising stance against Sunday games and onpremise liquor sales, a lucrative source of revenue for some National League clubs. These measures seemed to confirm Hulbert’s overriding belief that “what is good for baseball in Chicago is good for the league as a whole.” The most serious threat to Hulbert and his grand vision for professional baseball came from Chicago’s longtime rival Cincinnati. Relations between the two clubs had soured after Hulbert raided the Cincinnati club for two of its best players in 1877. This tension came to a head two years later when Hulbert expelled Cincinnati from the National League for refusing to enforce prohibitions against Sunday games and onpremise liquor sales. Rather than quietly passing out of existence as other failed or expelled National League clubs had done, Cincinnati soon became the focal point of strong antiHulbert sentiment. Spurred on by the league’s harshest critic—Cincinnati Enquirer baseball reporter O. P. Caylor, who never tired of sarcastically denouncing the league as “The Great Moral Show”—the Cincinnati club led the movement to establish a competing league, the American Association, which began operations in 1882. Though demonstrably weaker than the National League in player personnel, the American Association immediately developed into a formidable rival that exposed many weaknesses in Hulbert’s baseball strategy. With all of its franchises located in large metropolitan areas such as Philadelphia, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and Baltimore, the American Association actually William Hulbert passed away on the eve of a new baseball season on April 10, 1882, most likely from heart disease. His grave at Chicago’s Graceland Cemetery features a baseball monument. Yesterday’s City | 55
began to outdraw the National League. The National League, handicapped by its financially weak clubs in Troy and Worcester, suffered because it still lacked franchises in Philadelphia and New York. The American Association also exploited the National League’s uncompromising moral stance by reducing its admission fee to twenty-five cents, allowing individual clubs to play Sunday games, and permitting on-premise liquor sales. Flush with profits from these lucrative revenue sources by the end of its first season, the American Association already planned to hire away the National League’s best players for the following season. During this moment of crisis for the National League, Hulbert, after a long battle with what probably was heart disease, died on the eve of the 1882 season. Though publicly mourned by his baseball colleagues, Hulbert’s death may have actually proved to be a blessing in disguise for the National League. Under the direction of his successor, longtime Chicago associate A. G. Mills, the National League reversed course on a number of Hulbert’s long-standing
policies. The league summarily dropped the Troy and Worcester franchises—something Hulbert had vowed he would never do—and made plans to reestablish league clubs in New York and Philadelphia. Under Mills’s leadership, the league also modified Hulbert’s nonintercourse policy with the American Association and came to an 1883 agreement with its rival to honor each others’ contracts and resume limited interleague play. Although the National League had to backtrack on some of Hulbert’s long-standing policies to make peace with the American Association, Mills preserved and permanently secured Hulbert’s bedrock policies and objectives. The National League remained a closed circuit that designated which clubs and cities could participate in championship baseball. As such, the National League had successfully turned back all pressures to fragment the game into regional competitions, something Hulbert had relentlessly fought. Hulbert’s opposition to Sunday games, player corruption, and on-premise liquor sales also lived on in the National League’s unwavering declaration that it
A. G. Mills, Hulbert’s successor as director of the National League, overturned some of Hulbert’s unpopular policies, dropping the Troy and Worcester clubs and establishing interleague play. 56 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The 1882 official National League rulebook declared, “The objects of this league are: To encourage, foster, and elevate the game of base ball . . . and to make base ball playing respectable and honorable.”
existed not only to organize professional baseball but also to “elevate” baseball into a morally respectable social institution. But Hulbert’s accomplishments also had drawbacks that have impacted the character of organized baseball to this day. With its closed-circuit format, the National League, rather than communities or any other outside organizations, controlled which cities would be granted professional clubs and when. The National League’s strong moral stance also denied the public’s access to professional baseball on Sundays for many more years. Above all, the National League set itself upon a permanent and indefinite path of defense and watchfulness over all potential competitors, a course that effectively institutionalized conflict, tension, and division in organized baseball. Faced with better-organized opposition (such as the American Association), the National League would acknowledge its existence but have as little competitive contact with it as possible (a policy the National League maintained against the American Association’s eventual successor, the American League). This meant that any new professional teams or leagues had to be willing to either oppose the National League or to come to some sort of subordinate, nonthreatening relationship with it. This arrangement effectively ensured that, from the formation of the American League in 1900 to major league expansion in the 1950s, America would never have more than sixteen professional clubs.
Although some may question whether Hulbert’s innovations, which effectively implemented numerous regulations on professional baseball, were good for the game, none can deny his long-lasting influence on America’s pastime. As he shifted the center of the sport’s development to the Midwest, Hulbert realized his vision for a relatively closed professional league that squashed all efforts from competing leagues. This legacy, for better or worse, lives on in American baseball to this day. Tom Melville, an independent scholar of American sports history, is working on a book about the early history of baseball. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 44 top, CHS; 44 above, from America’s National Game by Albert G. Spalding (New York: American Sports Publishing Company, 1911); 45 above, from America’s National Game; 45 right, courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York; 46, from America’s National Game; 47, CHS; 48, CHS; 49, CHS; 50 above, from Baseball 1845–1871 by S. R. Church (San Francisco: Church, 1902); 50 right, CHS; 51, CHS, ICHI-03975; 52, courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York; 53, from The Story of Baseball in Words and Pictures by John Durant (New York: Hastings House, 1947); 54 above, from America’s National Game; 54 below, courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York; 55, from America’s National Game; 56, from America’s National Game; 57, CHS, National League of Professional Baseball Clubs Constitution and Playing Rules. Yesterday’s City | 57
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Chicago Fortunes: Interviews with Lester Crown and John H. Johnson T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
E
very year, Forbes magazine identifies the four hundred wealthiest individuals in the United States. Since the early 1980s, two prominent Chicagoans have been mainstays on the Forbes list: John H. Johnson, the founder and chief executive officer of Johnson Publications, which publishes Ebony and Jet magazines, and Lester Crown, the president and chairman of Material Service Corporation (MSC) and, since 1969, the Henry Crown Company, which holds the bulk of the Crown family interests. Lester Crown (left), recipient of the Bertha Honoré Palmer History Maker Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership, and John H. Johnson (right), recipient of the Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation, at the 2000 Making History Awards ceremony.
The historical significance of Lester Crown and John Johnson, however, goes far beyond wealth. Johnson not only founded the most successful blackowned publication in the modern world, but also championed consumption as a strategy for collective advancement and entrepreneurial enterprise for African Americans. His many awards include the Spingarn Medal (1966), the highest award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); the Columbia Journalism Award (1974); and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1996). Lester Crown, a recent recipient of the Daniel Burnham Award of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce (1998) and inductee to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999), has shaped the business and philanthropic strategies of one of the nation’s most successful families. Together, Johnson and Crown reflect the changing sources of wealth in twentieth-century Chicago, mirroring the city’s evolution from a manufacturing center to a media and financial entrepót. 58 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
John Johnson and Lester Crown came of age in dramatically different Chicago worlds. Johnson was born to Leroy and Gertrude Jenkins Johnson on January 19, 1918, in a shotgun house in Arkansas City, Arkansas. After graduating from the eighth grade, he moved to Chicago in 1933 because Arkansas City had no high school that admitted black students. Johnson attributes much of his success to his mother. “My mother was a widowed woman who had married again. My father had been killed in a sawmill accident when I was six. She never went beyond the third grade but she had great belief and passion for education. She had had two miscarriages before I was born and she told me later that she promised the Lord that if He would let this child live, she would devote her whole life to helping this child have a better life, and she did.” Johnson’s mother was devoutly religious. In retrospect, Johnson believes that if his mother had not participated in the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago and “if I stayed in the South, I was going to be a minister. I just wasn’t going to pick cotton and chop cotton all day for fifty cents a day.” Johnson still vividly recalls his first impression of Chicago. “I remember getting off the train and I remember the fact that I have never seen so many black people together at one time. Black people were coming from everywhere in the South because jobs were here. Opportunity was here. Education was here. And I was just impressed. I just hadn’t seen that many people anywhere—black or white.” Johnson and his mother initially lived a migratory existence. They first resided in a three-flat at 422 East 44th Street off South Parkway (King Drive today) before moving to 5610 South Calumet Avenue and then to 5412 South Parkway, all in 1933. His mother worked as a domestic, but received public assistance from 1934 to 1936. Johnson remembers those years as the most humiliating of his life. Eventually his stepfather joined them in Chicago, and Johnson himself worked for the National Youth Administration, where he founded Afri-American Youth, a mimeographed magazine. At DuSable High School, Johnson served as president of his junior and senior classes and as editor of the school newspaper. By contrast, Lester Crown led an admittedly privileged life. Shortly after his birth to Henry and Rebecca Kranz Crown in Chicago on June 7, 1925, the Crowns moved north. “We grew up in Evanston and were very fortunate to do so,” remembers Crown. “Dad’s business was such that he could afford to buy a house. The company only started six years before that in 1919, but it had done well enough in order to be able to move to Evanston at that time. This was a wonderful middle-class neighborhood, a great place to go to school and to meet people.” After a happy childhood, Crown remained in Evanston to attend Northwestern University. “I went to Northwestern only because of the war,” he claims. “I never intended to go to school that close to home. But the war came on in 1941 and I graduated high school in ‘43.” Crown’s older brother, Robert, and father, Henry, volunteered and were quickly sent into service. But shortly thereafter, Crown’s mother became ill. In retrospect, Crown believes, “she knew there
Top: Johnson’s mother, Gertrude Johnson Williams. Johnson (above) as a young commencement speaker, DuSable High School, 1936. Left: Lester Crown’s mother, Rebecca Kranz Crown. Below: Crown grew up in this house in Evanston.
Making History | 59
was a problem, but she knew how badly Dad wanted to go into service and so she did not tell him. She was then operated on and unfortunately had stomach cancer that was fatal. She lived until November of that year [1943]. With a younger brother, I really had no choice at that point. Somebody had to stay home and take care of John and the house.” In the meantime, Crown completed his undergraduate degree in chemical engineering in 1946. During the following year, he served as an instructor in the mathematics department at Northwestern. He then moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to attend Harvard Business School. Crown always expected to go into the family business. “That’s what I had both hoped to do and planned to do.” Indeed, he admits he “never even thought about doing anything else.” After completing his master’s degree in business administration at Harvard in 1949, however, he did not immediately join the family business. “When I came back, I went to work for Medusa Cement Company, and it was an opportunity to learn the cement business, which was an integral part of the construction business.” These experiences, Crown contends, were crucial to his professional development. “Years later when I was given the responsibility to run all of Material Service there was probably not a foreman or a superintendent of a plant that I had not worked for growing up and that relationship was just invaluable—to have that kind of a relationship with the fellas who actually were doing the work out at the plants and quarries which was so important.” Crown ultimately inherited a business and a legacy from his father. In 1919, Henry Crown founded Material Service Company, a small sand-andgravel enterprise initially worth about $20,000. Eventually, Henry Crown expanded into coal mining, farming, real estate, recreation, trucking, and barge and railroad lines. After World War II, Crown purchased the Mercantile Exchange Building, which served as the headquarters for MSC. Crown also played a key role in helping Conrad Hilton purchase the Stevens Hotel and Palmer House in Chicago and the Waldorf-Astoria in New York, while joining William Zeckendorf and Philip Klutznick in real estate deals in New York and Chicago. Crown helped Klutznick finance construction of the south Chicago suburb Park Forest. Klutznick and Crown later formed Urban Investment and Development Co., which built Water Tower Place and the River Oaks shopping complex, and managed the Oakbrook and Old Orchard shopping centers.
60 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
While his father and older brother served in World War II, Crown (above) stayed home to take care of his mother and younger brother. Below: Henry Crown founded the Material Service Corporation, a small gravel company that eventually grew into a billion-dollar business.
After World War II, Henry Crown purchased the Mercantile Exchange Building, which served as the MSC headquarters.
Making History | 61
Henry Crown became known for selling stakes in smaller companies to buy shares in larger concerns, most notably the defense contractor General Dynamics and the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Company. In 1966, he sold his stock in General Dynamics after a dispute with the management. He then waited for General Dynamics’s stock to drop, repurchased it, and assumed control of the board of directors in 1970. After taking control of the company, Crown used his skill to expand the enterprise and realize enormous profits. By 1986, when Lester Crown began running the Crown family enterprises, his father’s initial $20,000 investment had grown to $1.5 billion. Lester Crown describes his father reverentially. “He was a very, very humble person. He would spend most of his time working. I remember he started the company in 1919 and then they went through the Depression, which was a very difficult time business-wise. How difficult it was, I never understood until years later. I guess he had a one heck of time just keeping ends together. But he did a spectacular job through that time—through the thirties.” Despite his own financial success, Henry Crown did not spoil his children. “During all this time, I worked almost half of every summer, as we all did,” remembers Lester Crown. “I worked at the quarries and sand-gravel plants and the yards, just the way my brothers did. Growing up, the business was an integral part of our family life.” One summer, Lester Crown even concluded his father was underpaying him. “All of my friends were working for construction companies. I remember the figures very, very well. They were getting $1.02 an hour—just laborers and water boys.” Crown and his older brother were running a yard, working fourteen-hour days, and getting $22.50 a week. “I came in and complained to my Dad after four or five weeks about the rate, that I didn’t think it was really very fair,” remembers Crown. “He told me I could either get that salary or they’d pay me what I was worth, and he didn’t think I could afford to work for that. That was the end of any conversation on salary.” Crown eventually joined the other members of his family at Material Service, working for Marblehead Lime Co., a newly purchased subsidiary that produced chemical lime employed in water treatment, acid neutralization, and steelmaking. While handling the major sales for the company, Lester Crown copied a strategy from MSC, moving the plants and kilns closer to the customers to increase the speed and quality of service. Crown eventually became vice president of Marblehead (1950–56), and later served as president (1956–66) and on the board of directors. 62 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Above: Henry Crown and his sons (left to right) Lester, John, and Robert. Below: Henry Crown expanded MSC into coal mining, farming, real estate, recreation, trucking, and barge and railroad lines.
Lester Crown’s first major business deal was impressive: helping his father purchase the Empire State Building in 1950.
Crown’s first major business deal came in 1950 when his father requested his assistance in negotiating the purchase of the Empire State Building in New York. According to Lester Crown, building owner John J. Rascob first suggested selling the structure to the Crowns when they joined him at a baseball game at Yankee Stadium. Crown remembers that he and Milt Falkoff then negotiated the terms of the sale for nearly four days, with little time off for sleep or calling home. When the deal was finally agreed upon, each called home to their respective spouses. Crown vividly recalls Falkoff apologizing for not calling for such a long period of time. “[Falkoff’s wife] understood that Milt would do this kind of thing,” remembers Crown. “But this time, she really was provoked because he was away for so long. And she said, ‘Damn it! You would think you were so busy you were buying the Empire State Building.’ “Milt said, ‘We did.’ And she hung up on him.” Making History | 63
While the Crowns were expanding their family enterprises, John Johnson was creating one of the foremost African American entrepreneurial institutions in the world. Johnson’s high school accomplishments had attracted the interest of Harry Pace, the president of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company and the largest black-owned enterprise in the United States. Pace offered Johnson a job and a scholarship to attend college part-time. Within two years, Johnson moved from office clerk to personal assistant to Pace. While employed at Supreme Liberty, Johnson conceived of a publication that would address the interests of all black Americans. When no one would bankroll his idea, he pawned his mother’s furniture for five hundred dollars, sent letters to the twenty thousand individuals on Supreme Liberty’s mailing list, and solicited a two-dollar, prepaid subscription, calculating that a 15 percent response would give him enough capital to publish the first issue. About three thousand people responded, and the first issue was published in November 1942. Within a year, Johnson’s new magazine, Negro Digest, had a circulation of fifty thousand per month. Johnson published Negro Digest until 1951. Negro Digest marked a breakthrough in African American journalism. The mainstream American media market had a long history of hostility to black publications. W. E. B. DuBois’s Crisis dropped from a circulation of ninetyfive thousand in 1919 to eight thousand in 1934, eventually leading to his resignation from the editorship and the NAACP. In the 1930s, Chicago Defender editor Robert Abbott and writers Dorothy West and Richard Wright started magazines devoted to African American literature and opinion, but none survived. By 1940, only the NAACP’s Crisis and Urban League’s Opportunity existed, and both were supported by organization dues rather than by subscriptions.
64 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Harry H. Pace (above), president of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, Johnson’s first place of employment. Johnson opened the first office of the Johnson Publishing Company in 1942 in a small law library on the second floor of the Supreme Life Building (below).
During World War II, Johnson envisioned still another publication. “Negro Digest was a compilation of what was published [in the mainstream media],” reiterates Johnson, “and what was published was not always inspirational.” Johnson conceived of a magazine that did not just agitate on behalf of African Americans, but motivated them. On November 1, 1945, the first issue of Ebony appeared on the nation’s newsstands. “Ebony was born to highlight the achievements of black people,” states Johnson. “Negro Digest simply printed what was available, but Ebony was something where we sat down and decided that we were going to look for opportunities to make black people feel good about themselves.” Ebony, in Johnson’s words, was created “to help black people have a better view of themselves; to be proud of themselves; to take pride in their achievements by themselves and of other blacks.” Johnson succeeded in reaching African American readers and in fostering pride, probably beyond his wildest imagination. In 1945, Ebony sold out its initial 25,000 copies. Fifty years later, circulation reached 1.5 million monthly. From its inception, Ebony proved to be the largest selling black-owned magazine in the world. By 1990, Johnson stated that Ebony had 9,519,000 American readers, roughly 43 percent of the adult black population in the United States. As Ebony was becoming the world’s leading blackowned publication, the Crowns were expanding their family empire. In the 1960s, the Crowns invested in real estate projects with Del Webb in Arizona, Santa Barbara, and Riverside, California. They joined Robert Tishman in developing projects in New York and Chicago, notably Riverside Plaza. With developer Harold Greenwald and architect Mies van der Rohe, the Crowns were involved in the construction of the landmark buildings of 900 and 910 North Lake Shore Drive and Commonwealth Apartments at Sheridan and Diversey. In 1986, Lester Crown began taking complete control of the family business, then estimated to be worth $1.5 billion. The Crown family holdings included approximately one-quarter ownership of the General Dynamics Corp. and the Chicago Bulls, as well as significant stakes in Chicago Pacific, Hilton Hotels, the New York Yankees, and First Chicago Bank. The Crown real estate portfolio included the Crown Building at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York, parts of South Riverside Plaza, the Midcontinental Building, NBC Cityfront Center, 222 North LaSalle Street, 1350 and 1360 North Lake Shore Drive in Chicago, among other properties in both those cities. The Crowns also have significant investments in planned communities including Fox Valley Villages, a four-thousand acre “new town” near Aurora, Illinois, and Treyburn planned community in North Carolina. In Colorado, they own nearly half of the Aspen Skiing Company. By 1999, the family portfolio had nearly doubled under Lester Crown’s leadership to $2.8 billion.
“Belafonte in the Holy Land” (top) highlighted the December 1960 cover of Ebony. Above: The Johnson Publishing Company’s second office in a storefront at 5619 South State Street, 1943. Below: Johnson Publishing Company’s first major office building and the home office staff, 1955.
Making History | 65
John Johnson’s unprecedented success has not passed without criticism. Ironically, the most caustic attacks have originated from the black intelligentsia. The famed sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, in his often-cited study Black Bourgeoisie (1957), assailed Ebony for shamelessly peddling stories of black wealth and luxury, elevating the values of material success over those of truth in reporting and social justice. Frazier went on to dismiss black elites as irrelevant and deluded. Other militants vilified Ebony as little more than “happy talk,” and Johnson’s rejection of “racial belligerence” as “Uncle Tomming.” Johnson defends his publications by arguing the importance of stressing the positive in black life, thereby giving blacks a sense of their own potential. Johnson refers to critics such as Frazier as people who “had all made it, and I was talking and preaching to the people who didn’t think they could make it. I was trying to show them by example that if all these black people could make it, they could make it.” Johnson insists that “there are many ways to fight. And I believe that mine is more effective than theirs. I think we brought about more changes than Franklin Frazier or some of the other people. I think we have to choose what road we take.” Johnson remains unapologetic. “Without soft-pedaling or ignoring continuing problems, we wanted to highlight breakthroughs and to tell black Americans that there is no defense against an excellence that meets a pressing public need.” Recently, some historians have argued that Johnson may have been more influential than better-known African American intellectuals. Frazier, for example, failed to note that Ebony extensively covered many topics relevant to working-class blacks, making it in effect the creator of both middle- and working-class black culture on a national level. The September 15, 1955 issue, for example, published the controversial photographs of the beaten body of Emmett Till, a Chicago teenager who was lynched while visiting relatives in Mississippi. The prize-winning historian Jacqueline Jones claims that the early growth of Ebony was due in part to the appeal derived from the frequent portrayal of black women as breadwinners and therefore purchasers. Most recently, Northwestern University historian Adam Green has argued that Johnson’s publications constructed a series of new African American identities. “Far from selling out African Americans, Johnson Publishing Company sold the race its own identity.” The result was the creation of a truly national black community, in contrast to earlier communities organized around local or regional interests. In the end, Ebony has reflected the growing plurality of black interests within an increasingly complex and variegated African American population. By some accounts, Johnson was one of the first businessmen to recognize the size of the African American consumer market. Before 1950, American corpora66 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
The November 1960 Ebony cover (above) featured Lena Horne’s daughter and asked “Who Will Get the Negro Vote?” Below: Mayor Harold Washington with Johnson at the celebration of Chicago’s 150th anniversary.
A 1960 feature on the top fifteen Ebony covers highlights the diverse subject matters covered in the magazine, from celebrity profiles to political issues to the integration of the military. Making History | 67
tions and advertisers completely ignored middle-class blacks. Johnson showed that not only did black consumers exist, but also that they had disposable incomes, bought brandname products, and purchased additional products if appealed to directly. In 1946, Ebony’s gross advertising revenue totaled a mere $27,000, far less than a single-page ad would cost in 1995. By 1952, advertising revenue exceeded $1 million. The same year, Commerce magazine declared that Johnson was more responsible than anyone else for educating mainstream corporate America regarding the African American consumer market. Johnson remains quick to point out that other leaders have supported his vision. During a fund-raising dinner on behalf of the then-imprisoned Nelson Mandela during the 1980s, for example, Bishop Desmond Tutu approached Johnson. “I’ve always wanted to meet you,” proclaimed Tutu. “When I was a little boy, Ebony was barred from South Africa. I remember people used to get a copy illegally and hide it.” One day Tutu surreptitiously read Ebony, and was profoundly affected. “For the first time in my life, I saw black people like me who were doing things, making a success of their lives.” Tutu looked at Johnson and continued: “For the first time, it changed my whole life. It made me believe that I could do what these people have done. And I have been doing that ever since.” Johnson bristles upon hearing charges such as those found in Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters. Branch claims that the FBI had “friendly contacts” in the black press, particularly at Ebony and Jet. “I was shocked that someone would believe that we were against Martin Luther King,” says Johnson. More to the point, Johnson labels such stories as simply “ridiculous.” “Martin Luther King relied on us more than he did anybody— Ebony and Jet. Dr. King, number one, was a classmate of Lerone Bennett, who is my executive editor and has been for forty-seven years. [King] was a classmate of Robert E. Johnson, now deceased but who was head of the Jet for forty-seven years. Dr. King would call up and say, ‘Fellas, the white press is ignoring us. They’re not paying any attention to us. Brother Johnson, I need you to send one of your best writers and your best photographers down here to highlight what’s going on.’” Johnson remains emphatic: “The FBI never asked me to do anything. Never. Never.” Throughout his career, Johnson has advocated racial unity over any other ideological division. Not only has Johnson been a member of the NAACP since he was eighteen years old, but he has also refrained from criticizing or serving to divide black interests. “I never knocked anybody. I never knocked Farrakahn. I never knocked the NAACP. I never knocked anybody. We need everybody trying to help us win complete equality. We are a part of the civil rights movement.” For the past half-century, the Crown name has been identified with Chicago philanthropy. Crown philanthropies were initially operated by Lester Crown’s uncles, Irving and Edward Crown, who gave priority to Orthodox Jewish charities because they believed these groups represented the core of Jewish culture. Lester Crown recalls that “my Dad and our uncles’ Jewish roots were very important to them, as they are to our generation. My grandparents were completely Orthodox so they grew up in an Orthodox family. 68 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Johnson received the NAACP’s coveted Spingarn Award in 1966.
My two uncles went to conservative synagogues. And I think that is something that I’m very, very proud of, despite the fact that our interests are much more in the reform than on the conservative side of Judaism.” More broadly, Crown says, “We feel [philanthropy] is a responsibility. I think a lot of people feel the same way. It is not something you should be thanked for. We have been lucky enough to acquire it, we’ve got to put a portion of it back in. There’s a Jewish word—tzedakah, meaning justice and responsibility. The giving back is a responsibility and that’s something we feel very strongly is a responsibility because of what we have been able to acquire.” This charitable vision has guided the Crown family for the past halfcentury. The Crowns have been strong supporters of Israel, playing a significant role in helping to sell Israeli bonds. They gave large sums to Hebrew Union College, Jewish Theological Seminary, Brandeis University, Ida Crown Academy, and Arie Crown Hebrew Day School. But Jewish organizations have hardly been the sole beneficiary of the Crown’s generosity. “I’ll give you the priorities of the way we think about it,” says Crown. “One, Jewish charity comes first—local, national, and international. Second is Chicago—anything that’s involved with reference to Chicago because this is where the family lives. Third, the educational institutions that this very large family has gone to. The fourth is everything else.” Crown believes that “we try and do this as a total family. If a member of the family is really involved in an organization, we will financially support it.” The Crown beneficence is visible throughout the Chicago region: the Arie Crown Auditorium at McCormick Place, the Henry Crown Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Henry Crown Field House at the University of Chicago, the Henry Crown Space Center at the Museum of Science and Industry, the Edward Crown Center for the Humanities at Loyola University, the Saul R. Crown Building at Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Rebecca Crown Administration Building at Northwestern. By 1986, the Crown family had donated more than $75 million to charities. When asked if
The Crowns have always placed a high priority on philanthropy, giving money to Jewish charities, Chicago concerns, and educational institutions.
Making History | 69
that figure now exceeds $100 million, Crown blushes, “We have never totaled it up and I don’t think that that’s important.” Johnson’s philanthropic philosophy was shaped by his early business experiences. “I learned a lot at the insurance company,” says Johnson, recalling his years at Supreme Life. “These people were community minded. They felt it was important if you were doing well to give back to the community—not with the view of getting anything out of it or the view of taking a tax write-off or whatever it was. If you have the money and you’re doing well, do something to help your fellow men. It was instilled in me by the people there [at Supreme Life] and by my mother. And so, I joined a number of organizations and I enjoyed being there and helping to make a difference in a number of things.” Johnson has been most active in the NAACP on the national level and in the Urban League. In an age when conflicts between Jewish and African Americans attract considerable attention, the lives of Lester Crown and John Johnson exemplify what those groups share. Each man acknowledges and remains grateful for the opportunities conferred upon their families by Chicago. Crown admits that his entire family is “thrilled about how lucky we have been and we’re very proud of the ability to be involved in the civic life and the philanthropic life primarily here in Chicago. This has literally been our home for five generations now. We have been given tremendous opportunity and with it, we’ve been very lucky. I feel like I’m just the designated hitter for all of this.” 70 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Three generations of Crowns: Henry, Lester, and Susan, at the Museum of Science and Industry’s Henry Crown Space Center.
Henry and Lester Crown posed with the future of the Crown legacy in 1969. Making History | 71
Johnson at the Arkansas sesquicentennial celebration with Governor Bill Clinton and Daisy Bates, 1986.
Similarly, Johnson argues that “black people have done better in Chicago than anywhere else in the country.” More than anywhere else, “Chicago has been a mecca for black businesses.” Johnson reminds listeners that he has traveled the world, witnessed varieties of discrimination, but, in the end, “we always thought we were making progress.” He speaks both for himself and for Lester Crown when he says, “I have loved every moment of my life in Chicago. I think it is the best city in the world.” I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 58, CHS; 59 top and above, from Succeeding Against the Odds by John H. Johnson (New York: Warner, 1989); 59 left and below, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 60 above and below, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 61, CHS; 62 above and below, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive: 63, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 64 above and below, from Succeeding Against the Odds; 65 top, Ebony, December 1960, vol. XVI, no. II, published by Johnson Publishing Co., Inc; 65 above and below, from Succeeding Against the Odds; 66 above, Ebony, December 1960, vol. XVI, no. II, published by Johnson Publishing Co., Inc.; 66 below, from Succeeding Against the Odds, photograph by D. Michael Cheers; 67 Ebony, November 1960, vol. XVI, no. 1, published by Johnson Publishing Co., Inc.; 68, from Succeeding Against the Odds, photograph by Camera 1; 69, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 70, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 71, courtesy of Henry Crown and Company archive; 72, from Succeeding Against the Odds, photograph by James L. Mitchell. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | John Johnson’s autobiography Succeeding Against the Odds (New York: Warner Books, 1989), written with Lerone Bennett Jr., is an excellent first-hand account of African American life in twentieth-century Chicago. Adam Green’s forthcoming Selling the Race: Cultural Production and Notions of Community in Black Chicago, 1940–1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) substantially revises Johnson’s place in American history. On the black migration to Chicago, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). Lester Crown and his family remain an understudied subject. The best place to begin is Harry Mark Petrakis and David B. Weber, Henry Crown: The Life and Times of the Colonel (Chicago: Henry Crown & Co., 1998). 72 | Chicago History | Fall 2000
Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American histor y at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920.