Chicago History | Summer 2000

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Summer 2000 VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 22 3

The Backbone of the Union Paul Street

Fighting Racism at the YWCA Virginia R. Boynton

Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams

40

Yesterday’s City

58

Making History

Chris Serb

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

Copyright 2000 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6099 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

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

Cover: YWCA members gather around a piano to sing.

CHS, DN-0093769

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

TRUSTEES

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

Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth Charles T. Brumback George A. Chivari Michelle L. Collins John W. Croghan Stewart S. Dixon Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam Douglas Greenberg M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Philip W. Hummer

LIFE TRUSTEES

Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. 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 John T. McCutcheon Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEES

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

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

Chicago History is made possible through the support of the Dr. Scholl Foundation.

2 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

For many children, summer was not complete without at least one spin on Riverview Park's Flying Turns ride. The legendary amusement park, which closed its doors in 1967, lives on in the memories of the boys shown here and the thousands of other Chicagoans who visited during its half-century of operation. CHS, ICHi-16399.

FROM THE EDITORI

3

The Backbone of the Union PAU L S T R E E T

During the 1930s, formerly company-loyal black workers in Chicago’s stockyards emerged as dedicated union members.

F

The Armour and Swift and Company plants provided the backdrop to Chicago’s sprawling union stockyards.

4 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

ebruary 15, 1938, was a tense day at the Wilson and Company meatpacking plant in Chicago’s South Side stockyards district. That afternoon, eighty-seven workers in the Wilson’s sheep-killing “gang” idled the plant’s entire sheep division for nearly an hour. The workers stepped down from their raised work platforms, leaving valuable sheep carcasses spoiling and dangling from overhead conveyors, to protest the discharge of veteran black worker Johnny Johnson, who had been fired because blisters prevented him from tying lamb legs at the pace demanded by his foreman. The striking workers included both blacks and whites. Given the predominantly black composition of the stockyards’ cattle-, hog-, and, especially, sheep-killing departments in the 1930s, however, most of the strikers were African Americans. Faced with dramatic, interracial resistance at a strategic beginning point in the continuous-flow slaughtering, processing, and packing process, Wilson took Johnson back on another job.

The striking workers belonged to the recently formed Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee (PWOC), an especially aggressive and idealistic affiliate of the militant new Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

The industrial-unionist CIO formed in 1938 to rival the more conservative, cautious, and craft-oriented American Federation of Labor (AFL). The CIO dedicated itself to the organization of all industrial workers, regardless not only of skill, but also of race, religion, and ethnicity.

The work stoppage at Wilson’s represented one of many examples of black packinghouse workers’ early

Harold Preece’s 1939 Chicago Defender article (above) exposed conditions faced by black stockyard workers. Two stockyard workers (below) fold hides.

Backbone of the Union | 5

Protests in the stockyards were not uncommon. In 1921 (above), one of the most notorious labor strikes in the yards occurred. Black workers (right) replaced whites who had walked off the job during the 1904 stockyards strike. The 1917 drawing by Joseph Pennell (opposite) depicts the tasks of stockyard laborers.

6 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

participation in the militant new unionism of the CIO. When journalist Harold Preece surveyed Chicago’s meatpacking district for the black daily Chicago Defender in 1939, he found “colored members”—from the union’s Assistant National Director Hank Johnson “down to the Negro shop-steward who may preach at some storefront church on Sunday”—to be “the backbone” of the PWOC. That same year, the University of Chicago’s Oscar Hutton argued that black workers were “the backbone of many CIO unions” in Chicago, especially the PWOC. He discovered that black packinghouse workers “remain intensely loyal” to their CIO union even after long periods of layoff from the meatpacking industry.

One year earlier, a PWOC officer told black sociologist Horace Cayton that blacks had surpassed Polish-Americans as “the best union members” in the Yards’ largely Polish- and Lithuanian-American workforce. Blacks comprised a disproportionate share of the union’s stewards, volunteer organizers, and committee members. The animal-killing floors, staffed primarily by African American males, made up the early PWOC’s most militant and heavily organized work departments in Chicago.

“Colored people has woke up to unionism now,” one black packinghouse laborer told Cayton. “[The black worker] won’t accept the boss-man’s telling him, ‘you don’t want to be with the white man’ . . . The average Negro makes a good union man.”

The special militancy was not limited to black males. In 1939, Chicago PWOC activist Anna Novack told Betty Burke of the Federal Writers’ Project that “the Polish and Lithuanian girls” were “the hardest to get in” the CIO packinghouse union. “The colored girls,” by contrast, “come into the union easy, and at union meetings they now they [sic] stand up and have their say.” More than three decades later, Sophie Kosciolowski, an early CIO shop steward at the Chicago Armour plant and the first head of PWOC’s Women’s Organizing Committee, seconded Novack’s claim: “The colored girls were better,” Kosciolowski recalled, “easier to organize than the white women.”

This new black militancy marked a significant turn of fortune for those engaged in the struggle to organize workers in the notorious industrial setting that Upton Sinclair dubbed “the Jungle.” Before the 1930s, packinghouse union activists had been frustrated by what they perceived as black workers’ tendency not to join unions.

During national meatpacking strikes in 1904 and 1921–22, Chicago packinghouse unions had collapsed, thanks partly to the packers’ use of black strikebreakers, who refused to join “the white man’s union.” Black workers, hired in part for their perceived company loyalty, attained a permanent and significant presence in the packinghouses, particularly on the strategic, allimportant animal-killing floors, where the packing companies especially valued “loyal” (nonunion) workers.

How and why did these previously company-loyal black workers emerge as the stockyards’ best, most militant union members during the 1930s? A combination of forces simultaneously pushed and pulled black workers into the new industrial unions of the 1930s. On the push side stood black workers’ troubled relationship with industrial employers, who betrayed the mostly nonunion black community by designating blacks as the “first fired and the last rehired” during the Great Depression. At the same time, employers’ conscious scattering of black workers throughout workplace facilities during the interwar years produced a shared, interracial experience of exploitation, interdependence, and resistance for black and white workers.

On the pull side, many CIO unions made special appeals to black labor, putting the particular needs of black workers at the forefront of their list of demands.

CIO leaders and organizers knew that the industrial model of union organization they championed required racially integrated unions, especially where blacks made up a significant portion of the workforce. CIO leaders knew that leading industrial employers had used black workers to break unions and that managers placed black workers in hot, filthy, backbreaking, and otherwise disagreeable tasks at the strategic front end of the modern industrial work process (killing floors in meatpacking and iron foundries in Detroit’s auto plants). CIO orga-

Backbone of the Union | 7

nizers courted black workers because, despite their unpleasant working conditions, these laborers possessed the greatest capacity to halt production and damage materials. Black workers perceived AFL unions as hostile and indifferent to blacks’ needs and capacities; this knowledge benefited the CIO’s influential Communist and leftist organizers, for whom belief in racial equality remained both a fundamental article of faith and a practical organizing necessity.

The combination of forces pushing and pulling black stockyard workers into CIO unions during the 1930s led to a shift of worker allegiance from companies to unions.

Chicago’s meatpacking industry possessed each of the factors that historians deem crucial to CIO success with black workers: a long-term black position in the workplace; the racial integration of key work departments; the betrayal of black employees’ company allegiance through racially discriminatory layoffs during the Great Depression; and a strong union commitment to racial equality influenced by effective left-wing leadership.

Black workers’ distinctive all-or-nothing relationship with employers also contributed to CIO success in organizing packinghouse employees. Since packinghouse managers were far less tolerant of resistance by black workers than by white workers, black workers who chose trade unionism in the Yards required a strong and militant union that could protect them against employer retaliation. Despite black workers’ historical role as what packinghouse managers called “strike insurance”—an antiunion labor reserve that could be counted on to side with management during often-violent labor-capital conflict—meatpacking companies reduced blacks’ share of Chicago packinghouse jobs from more than 31 percent to less than 20 percent between 1930 and 1940. “As unemployment sweeps the city,” University of Chicago economist Alma Herbst noted in 1932, blacks found themselves “fighting for the unskilled stockyards work which in Chicago has become traditionally ‘Negro.’” As black Armour sheep butcher Elmer Thomas told Betty Burke of the Federal Writers’ Project in 1939: When they raise a gang—that’s a term they use in the Yards when there’s new men being hired—you can bet you won’t see any Negroes coming in. Like in ’33, they were hiring young white boys, sixteen and eighteen years old, raw kids, didn’t know a thing, but there was plenty of colored boys waiting for the same chance who never got it. [PWOC’s] Hank Johnson said just the other night . . . there hadn’t been a Negro hired in Armour’s in seven years. He knows what he’s talking about.

The weeding out of black labor, facilitated by management’s deliberate starring of blacks’ time cards to prevent the “accidental” placement of blacks in such relatively prestigious and well-paid jobs as carpenter and 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

The Communist Party distributed this newsletter (above) in 1934 in their attempt to lure workers to join their party.

electrician, gave the black community a chilling lesson in the limits of company loyalty as a strategy for personal and race advancement. The lesson was not lost on black community leaders, who dropped much of their traditionally outward-stated appreciation for the packers’ supposed corporate racial paternalism and their aversion to trade unionism. The influential Defender even praised the antiracist activism of the Communist Party, which championed black employment and civil rights during the Depression decade.

Still, blacks in the stockyards would not have overcome their tendency to side with capital over labor without the formation of a union remarkable for the depth of its commitment to addressing black workers’ special concerns. Chicago Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee activists threatened work stoppages on the killing floors—a recurrent and effective PWOC tactic—to end the racist starring of black workers’ time cards in the Armour and Swift plants. PWOC activists opposed what they derisively labeled the packers’ “lily white” job ceiling, threatened to expel white union members who voiced racist sentiments, and anticipated modern affirmative action when they won an agreement from Swift and Company in 1937 to hire blacks

The Swift plant (above) dominated the stockyard landscape. The PWOC demonstrated outside of St. Agnes Church (below) where black workers had been harassed.

“according to their proportion in Chicago’s population.”

The PWOC encouraged blacks to take an unlimited share of union offices; blacks held nine of fifteen Chicago PWOC local union presidencies by 1939. The PWOC also encouraged white workers to accept black shop stewards as shop-floor grievance representatives.

An Irish-American divisional superintendent at the Swift plant asked one Polish-American worker, “Do you mean to say you want this [black] man to represent you?

What’s the matter with you and men like you . . . can’t you take care of your own affairs?” PWOC activists criticized the absence of blacks in city transit jobs and major league baseball, collected signatures in black churches against the southern poll tax, sponsored interracial social gatherings in a period when such interaction was rare, and threatened union boycotts against neighborhood taverns and restaurants denying service to blacks. The PWOC even demonstrated outside St. Agnes, a whiteethnic South Side Catholic church where black Armour workers attending the wedding of a Polish-American coworker had been harassed by parishioners.

Leading union official Hank Johnson contributed to the PWOC’s success with black workers. The eloquent, barrel-chested “Negro orator of the Yards” defied timeBackbone of the Union | 9

10 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

worn white stereotypes of blacks as “poor trade unionists,” excited the black rank-and-file for the CIO cause, and helped legitimize that cause in the black community.

Borrowed from the CIO’s Steelworkers’ Organizing Committee for the packinghouse campaign, Johnson was a Communist Party member, the veteran of two race riots, and the son of a proud, race-conscious member of the radical Industrial Workers of the World. His writings in the PWOC’s newspaper coolly analyzed the union’s problems and possibilities. His lunch-hour speeches in the packinghouse district brilliantly ridiculed the packers and preached interracial working-class solidarity.

Johnson’s handling of the negotiations between the legendary Union Stockyards Transit Company (the oldest establishment in the Yards) and the mostly IrishAmerican livestock handlers when the latter struck in the fall 1938, demonstrated the union’s commitment to racial equality. Irish-Americans had been blacks’ most dangerous and persistent antagonists through decades of racial tension on the rugged South Side.

The PWOC achieved notable success in breaking down racial divisions within the packinghouse workforce. Recalling earlier racial tensions in and around the stockyards, Elmer Thomas told Betty Burke that “with the CIO in, all that’s like a bad dream gone . . . this time the white men are with us.” Thomas cited the case of an Irish-American worker who amazed Armour officials by vouching for a black worker seeking a loan from the company credit union, telling one manager “that black boy’s [sic] my friend. He works with me. He’s a union brother . . . and I’m with the union too.” According to the Chicago Defender, a longstanding and vociferous critic of racism in Chicago unions and neighborhoods, the PWOC’s “fight to abolish racial terror and discrimination” transformed race relations even in the legendary, white-ethnic Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood (directly adjacent to the packinghouse district) where blacks had long been unwelcome: Today, because the PWOC planted the seed of unity in the stony soil of Packingtown, Negroes walk freely and in safety. Any public place which refused them service would be quickly put out of business by a boycott of the white union members. On the very streets where danger once lurked for Negroes, colored men stop for long chats about baseball with Polish or Irish workers.

Oscar Hutton found that the PWOC’s influence on the relationships between blacks and whites filtered down to Back-of-the-Yards children, who stopped “shouting derisive statements” at blacks walking to and from the packinghouses.

Black laborers in the stockyards (left).

Backbone of the Union | 11

But discriminatory layoffs and interracial cooperation with the union were not the only factors contributing to black workers’ militancy in the 1930s Chicago stockyards. In a 1970 interview, former PWOC organizer Sophie Kosciolowski speculated that blacks’ particularly subordinate, declining workplace position made them more “courageous . . . maybe because they felt they didn’t have much to lose.”

Black workers’ company loyalty earlier in the century always had been conditioned by packinghouse employers’ tendency to view all black workers as an undifferentiated mass. As one Chicago Defender writer claimed in 1923, “Negroes are employed by the bunch in certain industries, or they are kept out as a group.”

Given managers’ notions—partly inherited from the South and supported by the “scientific” industrial eugenics of the time—of black labor as inherently “inefficient,” black workers depended for their relatively scarce job opportunities on bosses’ perception of them as a uniformly loyal, nonunion reserve: strike insurance. Blacks could risk the appearance of protest sentiment far less than white workers could. Thus, “the Negro worker,” as NAACP official William Dean Pickens noted in 1923, “cannot afford to be neutral” in labor-capital conflicts. Since the black worker, more than his white counterpart, burned bridges (for himself and other workers of his skin color) to gainful hire through participation in a union, “he must be either for labor organization or against it.”

Given managers’ historical labeling of blacks as inferior workers useful mainly as an antiunion reserve, black workers in the stockyards previously had felt intense pressure to adopt an outwardly deferential attitude toward bosses. Once black workers burned the increasingly frayed paternalist bridge to packinghouse employment through participation in the CIO, however, their stake in the success of the PWOC—sworn as it was to defend blacks’ interests—became especially pronounced. Given their difficulty in finding other work, black packinghouse workers, even more than white workers in the 1930s, seeking to improve their working conditions had to do so through action in their current workplace.

But the new black militancy reflected black workers’ sense of power and pride as well as their feelings of betrayal, desperation, and entrapment. Relatively unburdened by memories of previous crushing union defeats that haunted many older white workers, blacks in the stockyards brought some dis12 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

tinct advantages to the CIO cause. Their entrenched position down on the killing floors—in the industry’s strongholds of technically irreplaceable knife skill, working-class shop-floor manliness, and workplace bargaining power—had given rise to a number of “natural” black shop-floor leaders even before the rise of the interracial PWOC. Packinghouse unionism’s leading workplace militants always had emerged on the “kill and cut,” where legendarily rugged packinghouse workers were least timid and, not coincidentally, where workers could most effectively protest the employers’ driving work regime (by damaging materials or “bottlenecking” the labor process).

Early black PWOC worker-activists and local union presidents Jefferson Beckley (Armour), Phillip Weightman (Swift), Ken Collins (Wilson), Samuel Clemens, Pete Brown, and Jesse Vaughn (heads of PWOC locals in independent, medium-sized porkpacking plants known as the “little six”) learned about shop-floor resistance long before the rise of the CIO. They built on their experiences as they undertook “quickie” job actions, leaving valuable, highly perishable materials to waste and stopping the “endless chain” of packinghouse work until grievances found resolution. Throughout the late 1930s, they helped make Chicago’s killing floors turbulent hotbeds of direct workplace action on behalf of union recognition, racial justice, and a new measure of rank-and-file work control, creating what Armour managers considered a “chaotic” shop-floor environment.

Some black PWOC pioneers brought to the union prior organizational skills related to their shop-floor status and skill.

Brown and Vaughn headed locals of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters and Butcher Workmen (the PWOC’s AFL rival) prior to the PWOC’s formation (they quickly led their Amalgamated locals into the PWOC), suggesting pre-CIO origins to the special black militancy and biracialism of the industrial workers’ movement in the 1930s stockyards.

Phillip Weightman had been a rank-and-file leader in Swift and Company’s antiunion system of welfare-capitalism. A highly skilled hog-butcher with a history of engaging in informal killing-floor job actions and settling grievances through personal dis-

The broadside above announces the appearance of CIO president John L. Lewis at a Packinghouse Workers’ Organizing Committee gathering in 1939. Meat cleaver (opposite) c. 1920.

Backbone of the Union | 13

cussion with supervisors, Weightman possessed considerable influence with managers. Weightman’s days as a self-described “Swift-oriented company man” ended in 1938, when he failed to secure the rehiring of a coworker who Weightman felt had been fired wrongly. Weightman read recently passed federal legislation giving workers the right to organize (the National Labor Relations Act), and decided that the PWOC’s sincerity and depth of commitment to black workers was different from earlier packinghouse unions. His formidable shop-floor presence became a key weapon for the fledgling PWOC local at the Chicago Swift plant.

Black culture directly complemented workplace and labor-market militancy in Chicago’s stockyards. A PWOC leader reported that blacks’ facility with the English language gave them an edge over workers of Eastern European ancestry in playing leadership roles within the union. “The Negro,” the PWOC activist told Cayton, “is best informed on union procedure and is most articulate.

The foreign groups understand but aren’t articulate because of language difficulties.” African Americans’ rich and highly expressive culture of song, aggressive public speaking, and preaching merged well with a CIO “movement culture,” which challenged workers to transcend their private fears by engaging in dramatic public actions and demonstrations.

Leading PWOC activist Herbert March signed a union placard in 1939 (above). March’s arm is in a sling because he had been shot as he left the founding meeting of the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council. The cartoon (below, left) dramatizes the plight of overqualified black workers forced to take low-paying jobs during the 1930s.

The black community’s distinctive emphasis on education as a path to personal and “race” advancement also played a significant role in blacks’ union leadership.

Black Belt residents exhibited higher rates of elementary and high school attendance and graduation than inhabitants of the predominantly Polish and Lithuanian Backof-the-Yards. According to leading Chicago industrial employers in 1926, educational attainments enabled black workers to play a leading role in companysponsored employee representation plans during the 1920s. Black workers articulated PWOC demands to supervisors and management and performed key PWOC tasks such as handling grievances with management, writing union shop-papers, and speaking to fellow workers about the benefits of organization.

Leading PWOC activist Herbert March remembered that black Armour workers who possessed college and professional degrees became some of the local’s most effective, articulate union leaders. March’s recollection suggests a curious way in which black educational attainments interacted with the racial inequities of Chicago’s professional and clerical job market to deepen the logic of blacks’ ascendance to positions of leadership within the union. A disproportionate number of highly educated black Chicagoans could not find employment matching 14 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

their qualifications. Blacks with college and even graduate degrees worked as Pullman porters, rail-station “red caps,” hotel bellhops, and stockyard laborers. These remarkable, not-so “rank-and-file” black workers had special talents for which they found no outlet in the operations of a discriminatory economic system. For some of these highly educated black workers, the distinctly antiracist PWOC provided a logical outlet.

Differences in black and white working-class religious practice on Chicago’s South Side also contributed to black union leadership. As Harold Preece found, twenty of the Chicago Armour CIO local’s fifty black shop stewards in fall 1939 served as storefront preachers. While an often-conservative, full-time clergy (highly suspicious of the PWOC’s Communist connections) exercised authoritarian rule over a handful of ornate and formal Catholic parishes in the white-ethnic Back-of-the-Yards, the most ubiquitous religious institution in the Black Belt was the storefront church. St. Clair Drake identified 338 such churches in Chicago’s Depression-era black community.

Usually run by a weekday wage-earner who “felt the call

to ministry,” the commonly Pentecostal or Baptist storefronts served as “decidedly lower class churches” that permitted “the widest range of personal expression” and often held to a socially egalitarian code. “The poorest man in the church,” one storefront member told Drake, “is just as big as the richest.” During the late 1930s, black packinghouse worker-preachers brought spiritual zeal, egalitarian sentiments, and useful organizational, rhetorical, and leadership skills to the CIO cause in the stockyards. Like the CIO packinghouse union, the small churches run by storefront preachers were voluntary associations that depended on contributions from lowerclass parishioners, democratic participation, and rankand-file leadership.

Black packinghouse workers’ race consciousness revealed a new capacity for merging with and informing labor resistance in the stockyards. On the basis of interviews with hundreds of black Chicagoans during the 1930s, Cayton and Drake found that blacks’ inferior status and minority position convinced African Americans of the futility of individualism and the necessity for group solidarity:

Preachers from small storefront churches like this one (above, c. 1950) brought spiritual zeal to the packinghouse workers’ cause.

Backbone of the Union | 15

Although Negroes of all class levels stress individual initiative as a factor in “racial advancement,” they are keenly aware that as a separate subordinate group in American life, the dice are loaded against the individual. Everybody knows that “no matter how high a Negro gets, he’s still just a Negro.” Race consciousness breeds a demand for racial solidarity . . . they see their ultimate hope in presenting some sort of united front against the world.

Such thinking closely corresponded with the inherently anti-individualist cultural requirements of labor movements. Unions depend on the notion that the odds of marketplace capitalism are stacked against (workingclass) individuals and that working people must present a “united front” against employers and those who support the bosses. Once divorced from the discredited strategy of company loyalty and linked to the union cause, this race consciousness isolated those in the black community who still wished to criticize participation in the labor movement and complemented the all-ornothing logic of black trade unionism.

Race consciousness simultaneously informed black labor militancy in a more individualistic fashion. In Cayton and Drake’s findings, black Chicagoans disproportionately denied access to the city’s better jobs and homes expressed “race pride” in compensatory ways, including leadership in civic organizations and other activities. “Race heroes” such as boxer Joe Louis and track-and-field star Jesse Owens “beat whites at their own game” and were “fearless in their approach to white people.” This rugged, race-conscious mentality found expression through black workers’ many dramatic confrontations with white foremen and managers on the chronically turbulent killing floors. Race consciousness also encouraged black workers to take a primary role on the shop floor and in the labor movement. As Oscar Hutton found in 1939, Hank Johnson’s success in recruiting black packinghouse workers reflected his position “as a symbol of the New Negro in the trade union movement.”

Black workers’ historical race consciousness further helped make them the best PWOC members by giving a double meaning to their activism. Hank Johnson spoke for many black PWOC members when he told the Chicago Defender in 1939 that: The present conflict at Armour & Company is more than a battle between a corporation and a union. It is also another chapter in the long epic of the Negro people. The PWOC has not only protected workers in their rights as workers but in their rights as citizens [emphasis added]. Since the coming of the PWOC, Negroes entitled to promotion have a better chance of getting it because the union feels that every man has the right to advance according to his ability, whatever his color.

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Both boxing champion Joe Louis (above) and track-and-field standout Jesse Owens (below) competed against whites before the integration of professional team sports in the United States. Louis and Owens’s domination of their respective sports fostered race pride.

Herbert March (above) addresses a crowd at a rally in the stockyards, c. 1946.

In the stockyards as elsewhere, the unionization campaign of the 1930s represented a movement for democratic self-expression and civic inclusion for all industrial workers. But black packinghouse workers perceived the PWOC as something more than a practical, economic struggle for “bread and butter.” They saw the CIO as part of an older, democratic freedom struggle for equal rights.

The point emerges strikingly from the comments of Jim Cole, an African American beef butcher who started working in the stockyards in 1919, the year of a bloody race riot on Chicago’s South Side. Twenty years later, Cole told Betty Burke: I don’t care if the union don’t do another lick of work raising our wages or settling our grievances about anything [emphasis added]. I’ll always believe they done the greatest thing in the world getting everybody who works in the Yards together, and breaking up the hate and bad feelings that used to be held against the Negro.

Nineteenth-century European workers’ struggle to wrest democratic, human rights from feudal and absolutist structures empowered them in their battles with employers. Similarly, many black workers in the stockyards viewed the PWOC cause as part of a related quest for race equality. Generations of class- and race-based exploitation—what Communist theoreticians and onetime stockyards activist William Z. Foster termed “double oppression”—combined with the packers’ discriminatory workplace practices to ensure that black labor militancy in the stockyards expressed material selfinterests as well as the more outwardly idealistic quest for racial justice.

Black workers’ race-conscious activity directly influenced the direction of PWOC activism. The union’s racial policies reflected the role played by black activists as well as the interracial strategies and beliefs of leading white militants. Since black militants entered the union early—“on the ground floor,” as Oscar Hutton put it— Backbone of the Union | 17

18 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

the PWOC’s black civil rights dimension reflected as well as attracted black worker-activists who made no distinctions between traditional union objectives and the more seemingly idealistic goal of racial justice.

The packers’ racial divide-and-rule personnel practices backfired—one might even say boomeranged—in the late 1930s. Incredulous Chicago packinghouse managers predictably blamed radical “outside agitators” for the new interracial and black labor militancy in their workplace establishments. They were not entirely mistaken.

Some leading activists in the Chicago PWOC, including militants Herbert March and Hank Johnson, were in fact Communists with origins outside the local industry.

And, by all accounts (even that of the subsequently antiCommunist Phillip Weightman), Communists spearheaded the remarkable racial cooperation that made the PWOC attractive to black packinghouse workers and helped break through potent working-class racial divisions in meatpacking.

Bloody race riots broke out on Chicago’s South Side in 1919 (left).

Armed policemen supervise the eviction of black residents (above) during the 1919 race riots.

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But deep racial inequities in the workplace, black workers’ increasingly long-term presence in strategic shop-floor jobs, and black workers’ cultural and community resources and consciousness also contributed to the new black militancy. In linking their aspirations to the union cause on an unprecedented scale, Chicago’s black packinghouse workers showed that class- and race-consciousness were neither inevitably nor absolutely opposed to one another. Those workers also revealed that their racially distinct experience, culture, community, and consciousness played important roles in the struggle for unionization in Chicago.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS, ICHi-24442; 5 top, CHS; 5 bottom, CHS, ICHi-21357; 6 top, CHS, DN 73.628; 6 bottom, CHS, DN 989; 7, CHS, ICHi-04109; 8, CHS; 9 top, from The Worker Speaks His Mind on Company and Union by Theodore Purcell (Harvard University, 1953); 9 bottom, CHS, DN 51780; 10–11, CHS, ICHi-21358; 12, CHS, ICHi-29808; 13, CHS; 14 top, courtesy Herbert March; 14 bottom, CHS, ICHi-21418; 15, CHS, Deutch G1989.152; 16 top, CHS, SDN-076872; 16 bottom, SDN-078873; 17, courtesy Herbert March; 18–19, CHS, ICHi-29663; 19, CHS, ICHi-23870; 20-21, from Out of the Jungle by Leslie F. Orear (Hyde Park Press, 1968).

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more information about packinghouse workers and unionization efforts, see: James Barrett’s Work and Community in the Jungle: Chicago’s Packinghouse Workers, 1894–1922 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1986); Lizabeth Cohen’s Making a New Deal: Chicago’s Industrial Workers, 1919–1939 (New York: Cambridge University, 1991); Rick Halpern’s Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–1954 (Urbana:University of Illinois, 1997); Roger Horowitz’s “Negro and White, Unite and Fight!”: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking, 1930–90 (Urbana:University of Illinois, 1997); and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (Urbana:University of Illinois, 1906, 1988). For more information on African American history in Chicago, see Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake’s Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1945); James Grossman’s Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1989).

Paul Street has a Ph.D. in history from Binghamton University and teaches American history and media courses at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

In 1943, the PWOC became the United Packinghouse Workers of America. Black and white workers cooperated at this PWOC meeting (right) during the mid-1940s.

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Backbone of the Union | 21

Fighting Racism at the YWCA V I R G I N I A R . B OY N T O N

As the country fought racial prejudice abroad, Chicago YWCA members tackled the issue at home.

S

tories about racial protest in America usually bring to mind the bus boycotts and solidarity marches of the civil-rights era. But twenty years before that, when racial and religious intolerance resulted in horrifying consequences overseas, some Americans had begun to stand against injustice in their own country. Protest movements of the 1930s sometimes made significant gains against prejudice and intolerance. One such movement occurred at Chicago’s Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), where members fought YWCA leadership to gain equal access to housing, recreational, and employment opportunities for women of all races.

Women in cities throughout the Northeast and Midwest, including Chicago, established YWCA branches in the latter half of the nineteenth century to provide young working women with opportunities for recreation, education, companionship, and housing in supervised settings. By the early twentieth century, the organization also began to address social justice concerns, particularly the needs of working women for adequate wages, safe working conditions, and unionization.

In the 1930s, YWCAs in several cities, including Chicago, turned their attention to issues of racial justice as well.

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The Chicago YWCA encompassed four geographical branches, including the Central Branch or “Loop Center,” which opened in 1876; the South Side Branch; the South Parkway Branch; and the West Side Branch.

The South Parkway Branch, located in the heart of Chicago’s Black Belt, served the women of the black community. In 1936, all of the branch’s nearly eighteen hundred members were African American. At the other three branches more than 99 percent of members were white, although the West Side Branch included a growing number of African American members. This segregation within the YWCA resulted primarily from the combination of the YWCA’s decentralized geographical organization and the extreme residential segregation of African Americans in Chicago; in 1930, 93 percent of Chicago blacks lived in the city’s Black Belt. Not surprisingly, 97 percent of all African American YWCA members in Chicago belonged to the South Parkway Branch.

The YWCA (logo shown above) began in the nineteenth century to provide services to young working women. Opposite: Turn-of-theCentury YWCA annual reports featured photographs of a typical boarder’s room, “domestic science” kitchen, and gymnasium. Background opposite: The YWCA always stressed healthy activities; here, club members swim outdoors, c. 1900.

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This 1938 map demonstrates the YWCA’s growth, showing the concentrations of club participants around the Chicago area.

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The YWCA encouraged both political participation and leisure activities. Left: Club members cast ballots during an election. Below: Members gather around a piano to sing.

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Above left: Playful YWCA members hold a “tea party” in the West Side pool. The West Side residence (above) became the temporary home for many weary female travelers, as described in the 1910 annual report (below).

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South Parkway and West Side Branch YWCA members actively involved themselves in national civil-rights issues.

In 1936, African American women from the South Parkway YWCA joined the YWCA’s national board and other civil-rights and reform-oriented organizations in the ultimately successful nationwide movement to pardon Angelo Herndon. Herndon, a young African American organizer of community unemployment councils and a Communist Party member, had been charged with inciting Georgia blacks to insurrection after leading a peaceful demonstration of Atlanta’s unemployed African Americans on the steps of the Fulton County Courthouse. In 1932, Herndon received an eighteen-to-twenty-year sentence in a chain gang, overturned by his 1936 pardon.

YWCA members also became involved in one of the most important civil rights crusades of the 1930s—the battle to pass an antilynching law. The national campaign against lynching found support from the YWCA’s League of Industrial Girls (LIG), which consisted of factory and domestic service workers. In 1938 and 1940, African American members of Chicago’s interracial LIG organized letter-writing campaigns in YWCA clubs to urge congressmen and senators to support congressional antilynching legislation. Although the legislation ultimately failed, the letter-writing campaign raised many white YWCA members’ awareness of continued violent racial discrimination.

During World War II, white LIG members again joined their African American counterparts to press for the “equality of all races,” according to a 1944 LIG report on interracial practices. This movement took several forms: support for the establishment of a permanent Fair Employment Practices Commission to stop employment discrimination; support for the abolition of the poll tax, which limited African Americans’ voting rights in the South; and a boycott of activities sponsored by United Service Organization (USO), which refused to hire African American hostesses at their functions. In addition to these national campaigns, YWCA members actively demonstrated their interest at the grassroots

level, organizing local boycotts to raise awareness about these national issues.

The women’s most extensive grassroots activism challenged racism within the YWCA itself. In both the mostly white West Side Branch and the all-black South Parkway Branch of the Chicago YWCA, members refused to allow their own organization to employ the racist policies and attitudes that they protested in the nation at large. YWCA women opposed segregation within the West Side Branch’s facilities. South Parkway’s African American women confronted a more subtle form of racism embedded in the branch’s programming.

At the West Side Branch, white and black YWCA members joined to organize a campaign, beginning in the mid-1930s and continuing into the mid-1940s, to overturn the YWCA policy that prohibited African American women from using the agency’s pool and from living in its residence. YWCA members engaged in a variety of protest activities to prompt the Chicago YWCA’s Metropolitan board of directors to end these policies of racial exclusion and segregation. Although the board had

removed the “absolute color bar” at the West Side YWCA in 1927, securing the right for black women to participate in most branch activities including clubs and classes, as of 1936, the branch’s African American members still could not use its swimming pool or live in its residence.

The national leadership of the YWCA held relatively progressive views on racial issues in the 1930s and 1940s. But its failure to fully desegregate Chicago’s West Side YWCA demonstrates that the impetus for integrating the West Side facilities did not come from national, metropolitan, or even branch leadership.

Instead the women who belonged to its clubs and lived in its residence led the campaign for racial justice at the West Side YWCA. These women included members that the YWCA board labeled “industrial” women (factory workers and household employees) as well as “business” women (office workers and sales clerks). The same white members who participated in recreational programs and who lived in the West Side YWCA residence favored full and immediate racial integration of the YWCA, rejecting

The large YWCA organization broke down into many smaller groups; this 1950s photograph shows the Jolly Go-Getter Club Halloween committee.

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In the 1930s, a heated debate ensued between the YWCA board of directors, who forbade African American women from using the West Side pool (above), and YWCA club members, who wanted to open the pool to all women. In response, the board explored the YWCA’s interracial policies (right). The last page of the 1945 report (bottom right) denotes the board’s decision to accept African American women as “transient” guests at the West Side residence, which only highlighted the racial barrier in the YWCA’s policies.

the board’s suggestion of more gradual and conservative integration.

In the mid-1930s, the members of the Jolly-GoGetters Club, an industrial women’s club that already included a few African American members, decided to combat the “segregation and race hatred” they detected at the YWCA. Eager to remove what they considered a blot on the YWCA’s strong record of support for progressive causes, in 1936 the members of the Jolly-Go-Getters Club “announced that they were going to invite more Negro girls to join their club.” The branch’s white staff urged them to move slowly on this matter and to thoroughly discuss the potential ramifications. The club members resisted, replying that “such a discussion would only mean another act of discrimination and . . . they were not going to make the inclusion of Negro girls a problem . . . but let it be a natural increase in their membership.” Eventually, the YWCA staff “decided to accept [the Jolly-Go-Getters’] thinking on this matter.”

Despite the integration of the Jolly-Go-Getters, branch rules still barred African American women from swimming in the West Side Branch’s pool. As a result of the Jolly-Go-Getters’ new policy on African American membership, a staff member noted that “the additional number of Negro girls in the group only enlarged the problem of the pool.”

By 1937, other clubs had joined the Jolly-Go-Getters in demanding the removal of the racial barrier at the pool, and white YWCA members stopped using the pool in protest. The willingness of the white women to forego their own privileges in order to pressure the YWCA to modify its segregationist policy demonstrated a commitment to racial justice rare among white Americans in the 28 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

Although many African American women joined the Indiana Branch of the Chicago YWCA (as seen in this 1921 photograph, above), this branch was eventually closed to become a recreational facility. Below: the controversial West Side pool, c. 1925.

late 1930s. The metropolitan board of the Chicago YWCA, yielding to the pressure from West Side YWCA women, opened the pool to all women, regardless of race. This proved to be an important step in the Chicago YWCA’s journey toward racial equality, which happened only in response to prodding from its members.

The following year, the Metropolitan Chicago YWCA board of directors “recognized that the Negro women in

the [West Side Branch’s] community are conscious of long-standing discrimination in the branch and that the YWCA has not been very skillful” in handling the situation. Unfortunately, segregation and discrimination at the West Side YWCA did not end when the pool opened; in 1942, the African American women of the Joy Makers Club complained to the YWCA’s Metropolitan board about their continued exclusion from parts of the YWCA’s “extensive and beneficial” program, specifically health education. They expressed their “keen desire to participate in the program according to actual individual need and choice in addition to accepting what is offered us as a racial group” to the board. They particularly criticized the “unfairness and undesirability of discrimination simply on the basis of race,” an argument particularly salient in 1942 due to America’s fight against Nazi racism during World War II. Thus, the impetus for change once again stemmed from participants in the YWCA’s programs, against resistance from staff and board members. There is no evidence that their white counterparts joined the members of the Joy Makers Club in their protest, nor is there any evidence that these African American women achieved their shortterm goals. Nonetheless, the members’ critique of racial discrimination at the YWCA demonstrates that black women did not ease their pressure on the YWCA after significant gains such as the desegregation of the pool. The knowledge of their own ability to effect change whet their appetite for further progress.

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This 1945 report on the history of YWCA residences (above) shows that although the organization used to have two segregated “Black Residences,” the YWCA adapted an integration policy in the mid1940s. Left: A female traveler interviews for admittance to a YWCA residence.

Segregation at the West Side YWCA existed not only in its recreational programs. The branch also maintained a women’s residence, established in 1932 to house 114 women, which excluded black women for its first ten years. In 1942, staff members of the YWCA’s three allwhite residences, including the residence operated by the West Side Branch, bypassed their all-white residence governing committees and recommended to the interracial Metropolitan board of directors, which included several African American members representing the South Parkway Branch, that all Chicago YWCA residences be opened to African American women. The board, however, instead chose to take a gradual approach, reporting to the national YWCA that “this problem was something that could not be done away with over night.” The board decided to allow the all-white residences, including the Chicago YWCA | 31

In the 1940s, the YWCA board spent much time contemplating its racial policies. This report (top) describes a meeting during which discussed “taking in a limited number of . . . Negro guests” at YWCA residences. Above left: Club member Virginia Lewis expressed a desire to serve on the “Committee to Study Interracial Practices in Community YWCAs.” Another letter (above right) reveals that the YWCA board postponed making a decision about “inter-racial recognition at the U.S.O. Club.”

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West Side residence, to accept African American women as “transient”—but not permanent—guests. Designation as a “transient” meant that an African American woman could use a YWCA residence for temporary lodging, but could not make it her long-term home. Although most residents stayed for at least a year at the large downtown McCormick residence, many women stayed only temporarily at smaller facilities such as West Side.

When implementing the board’s new policy, the directors of the YWCA’s two smaller all-white residences, West Side and McGill, reacted cautiously, stressing at a 1944 residence directors’ meeting that “if girls do not seem to fit into the life of the residence, it is possible to arrange to keep them only one night and then assist them in finding other living accommodations.” Such accommodations might include the South Parkway Branch’s all-black residence on Chicago’s South Side, or McCormick, the YWCA’s much larger residence in the city’s downtown Loop district, which had accepted African American women as transient guests even before the board’s decision made it official policy. Despite their eventual willingness to open their doors to African American women, the directors of both the West Side and McGill residences possessed a less-than-wholehearted commitment to full racial equality in all YWCA facilities.

Without such sustained grassroots pressure from YWCA members, one suspects that integration of YWCA residents would have occurred much more slowly.

The board of directors believed that allowing black women to live in YWCA residences was “an entirely new idea to many of the residents” and that it would therefore be “difficult for them to accept this new plan.” The white women of the West Side residence proved to be much more progressive than the board expected. In June 1944, Mildred Slaughter, an African American personnel worker in the War Department, moved into the West Side residence as a transient guest (and the facility’s first African American resident), where she was “readily accepted” by the white boarders, according to the residence’s director in a 1945 report. The apartment that Slaughter had found would not be available for two months, and she asked the all-white West Side residence committee to allow her to remain at West Side in the interim. Although the residence director pointed out to the members of the committee that the relationships between Slaughter and the white residents had been “very happy” during Slaughter’s stay, the committee voted that she could not remain. The maximum transient period at West Side had been set at two weeks, and, because she was African American, Slaughter was not eligible for permanent residence.

Unwilling to accept the committee’s ruling, Slaughter’s fellow residents, all of whom were white, organized a petition drive and “requested that Miss Slaughter be allowed

to live in the residence as a permanent rather than as a transient [guest] until August 1st.” Although Slaughter was an employee of the War Department, the West Side YWCA residents did not base their plea on her behalf on her valuable contribution to the war effort, nor did they stress the irony of racial discrimination in America in the midst of a war fought against race hatred overseas.

Instead, they carried out their action as a reasonable request for fair treatment for someone they had come to know and like.

Although the West Side residence committee, not the Metropolitan board, had imposed the two-week limit on transient guests, the committee refused to change its own rules, to extend Slaughter’s stay as a transient, or to change her status to permanent resident. Slaughter, who the residence director characterized as “very understanding in her attitudes,” was forced to move to the YWCA’s downtown McCormick residence, where she was found to be “working out very well as a transient guest” (according to McCormick’s director) until her apartment became available in August.

Slaughter’s departure in summer 1944 did not end the controversy about racial segregation at the West Side residence. In November of that year, the directors of all four Chicago YWCA residences met with representatives to discuss the YWCA’s interracial policies. At this meeting, the white resident representing West Side was “very interested” in the issue of breaking down racial barriers in the residences, according to the YWCA’s records, and “wondered why they could not do more in the field of race.” The next month, the Metropolitan board of directors finally voted to open all of its residences to African American women as permanent residents as well as transient guests. Although the residents had lost their struggle for equal treatment for Mildred Slaughter, they eventually succeeded in changing the policy that had excluded her from the residence.

Nonetheless, most of Chicago’s African American women remembered the YWCA’s previous reluctance to renounce discrimination. Between 1942 and 1945, the West Side YWCA still had only two African Americans (including Mildred Slaughter) apply for permanent housing. After such a long history of discriminatory behavior, merely eliminating the exclusionary policies that banned African American women did not achieve significant integration at YWCA residences.

As World War II continued, the all-black South Parkway Branch experienced problems of its own. In May 1944, Chicago’s YWCA began an employment counseling service at the South Parkway Branch for African American women living on the city’s South Side.

Although housed in the African American branch, the counseling service was a project of the entire metropolitan YWCA. From the project’s beginnings, the Chicago Chicago YWCA | 33

YWCA’s largely white Metropolitan Service Department, not the South Parkway Branch’s black staff, supervised the employment counseling service. The single counselor assigned to the employment service was the lone white staff member at South Parkway.

The South Parkway employment counseling service opened after white employers in factories and offices “complained of many maladjusted Negro female employees,” according to a report by the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago. The YWCA’s service, as conceived by the metropolitan office, emphasized “helping the girl adjust to her job rather than . . . giving her full vocational counseling and testing.” The service did not encourage African American women to seek more rewarding and satisfying avenues of employment, but merely assisted them in coping with their current, frequently unsatisfactory positions.

When employers failed to refer their employees to the YWCA’s new program, the YWCA “went to the girls themselves in their own natural groupings”: their YWCA clubs. African American working women expressed interest in the program, but “almost invariably in the realm of requests for vocational counseling.” Rather than hoping to fit in at their unsatisfactory jobs, the women wanted to find “more satisfying or more secure fields of employment, securing the training needed to enter upon and progress in such employment, and obtaining information regarding present and future work opportunities.” As a consequence, the counselors found that “the girls themselves are demanding a broader counseling program than we had anticipated.”

Despite program leaders’ admission of a “continuous growth in the demand for vocational counseling” by African American women, the white counselors did not completely relinquish the YWCA’s paternalistic effort to help black women “adjust” to their current jobs. The YWCA’s metropolitan leadership continued to believe that “true job adjustment and therefore adequate performance is one method of achieving job security,” and argued that “this can be facilitated through a program which assists people to choose and prepare for occupations for which they have ability and interest, and in which there are opportunities for employment.” The YWCA planned to continue to incorporate these elements into its counseling service while also addressing “the increasing emphasis upon vocational counseling necessitated by the girls’ requests.” The YWCA counseling program ultimately suffered because its designers underestimated the employment goals of African American women, who continued to strive for racial gains that the YWCA leadership remained somewhat reluctant to allow.

Right: YWCA members pose for an acrobatic photograph on a gymnasium floor before a 1950s square dance.

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As World War II drew to a close, employers began to lay off African American women, who usually had been the last workers hired. South Parkway’s counseling committee, which evaluated the program in fall 1946, found that “the re-absorption of the unemployed is being impeded by the disinclination of many employers to utilize non-whites” and that “many employers have already begun closing their doors to women.” Thus, “the Negro woman worker . . . faces both the discrimination against her sex and her race” in looking for a new job. The YWCA’s leadership once again emphasized the need for African American women workers to make “adequate adjustment on their present jobs” by lowering their expectations and accepting racial barriers in the workplace.

The tightened postwar labor market brought “an increase in demands for technical vocational counseling” at South Parkway’s employment counseling service.

“Girls actually displaced from war-time industrial jobs or anticipating lay-offs,” the counselor reported, “requested vocational counseling before seeking new avenues of employment.” The employment service continued to provide African American women with this counseling, as well as information on “securing the kind of training which will enable them to compete effectively in times when the employment situation is most stringent.” The South Parkway employment counseling service illustrates YWCA members’ refusal to accept racial injustice within their society, rejecting the argument that African American women should “adjust” to the reality of limited employment options, and challenging the legitimacy of those limitations. The YWCA leadership, consequently, had to readjust its original plans because of demands from female African American workers.

During the World War II period, YWCA club members and residents often worked amicably with staff and board members on issues. But when attempting to desegregate their own local YWCA branch or to shape its programs to meet their own needs, the members’ activism challenged the organization’s leaders to revise its policies and practices to match their claims to support the ideals of racial justice. Club members’ familiarity with the ability of women of different races to live together without incident led them to different conclusions about the prospects for full racial integration at the West Side YWCA than those reached by the more racially conservative board members. Similarly, the membership, not the leadership, of the YWCA challenged the nature and goals of South Parkway’s employment service. Only with considerable prodding from the African American women for whom the program was intended did the white counselors and the YWCA’s Metropolitan Service Department expand the purpose and approach of the employment counseling service.

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Top: The South Parkway Center YWCA offered employment and trade programs for club members. These South Parkway members (above) attend a 1932 sewing and household management class.

The relative open-mindedness of national and local YWCA leaders toward racial justice provided fertile ground for the YWCA members’ grassroots activism at the West Side and South Parkway Branches. The Chicago YWCA members did not face an enemy unalterably opposed to their goals; they were instead pressuring reluctant adversaries unsure that the time was right to take action that they supported in principle. The atmosphere in which the YWCA members sought progressive change was a more supportive one than that faced by most other activists who attempted to act on behalf of racial justice during the 1930s and 1940s.

By drawing on their own experiences and pressuring the already somewhat-sympathetic board and staff members, black and white YWCA members successfully goaded the leaders of the Chicago YWCA’s branches into abandoning the racial-exclusion policies of the West Side Branch and broadening the scope of South Parkway’s employment counseling service. Their activism during the Great Depression and World War II eras placed them squarely in the midst of the sporadic grassroots protests

Right: In this 1953 newsletter article, the YWCA announces a special “Race Relations Sunday” to help mend rifts in the organization.

This 1954 report (below) documents the YWCA’s special efforts to recruit “Negro and Oriental girls.”

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Left: This 1970 YWCA newsletter article, “YWCA Pioneers Race Relations,” chronicles the organization’s interracial efforts in the 1930s and 1940s. Legendary gospel singer Mahalia Jackson (above) sings at a South Side tea to raise funds for a new YWCA center.

against racial injustice that preceded the national civilrights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

During the postwar era, the YWCA’s commitment to ending bigotry continued to grow. In the late 1940s and 1950s, the national organization emphasized integrating the YWCA’s segregated branch structure, eventually eliminating the separate African American branches that had characterized the association before the end of World War II. During the 1960s, the YWCA’s national leadership coordinated its antidiscrimination efforts with the leaders of the major civil-rights organizations, taking a number of concrete steps to support the burgeoning activism, such as providing financial and legal support to YWCA members arrested during protests and exerting economic pressure on local stores to end racist hiring practices. By the 1980s, African American women had assumed significant national leadership positions within the YWCA, benefiting from a fifty-year history of challenging racism within the organization.

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Left: In 1969, Doris Wilson became the executive director of the YWCA of Metropolitan Chicago, one of the first African American administrative heads of a major metropolitan social agency. Above: Since the 1960s, the YWCA has helped girls of all races win scholarships, accept awards, and achieve their goals.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 22, University of Illinois at Chicago,

University Library, Special Collections, Young Women's Christian Association Records, YWCA neg. 52; 23 forefront, top to bottom: UIC, YWCA neg. 27; UIC, YWCA neg. 50; UIC, YWCA neg. 49; UIC, YWCA neg. 47; 23 background, UIC, YWCA neg. 40; 24, UIC, YWCA neg. 35; 25 above, CHS, DN-0095956; 25 below, CHS, DN-0093769; 26 above left, UIC, YWCA neg. 39; 26 below left, UIC, YWCA neg. 53; 26 above right, CHS, DN-0089833; 27, UIC, YWCA neg. 58; 28 left, UIC, YWCA neg. 46; 28 right, top to bottom: UIC, YWCA neg. 30; UIC, YWCA neg. 28; UIC, YWCA neg. 29; 29 above, UIC, YWCA neg. 45; 29 below, CHS, DN-0084191; 30(31, UIC, YWCA neg. 37; 31, UIC, YWCA neg. 34; 32 above, UIC, YWCA neg. 33; 32 below left, UIC, YWCA neg. 41; 32 below right, UIC, YWCA neg.

31; 34(35, UIC, YWCA neg. 38; 36 above, UIC, YWCA neg. 44; 36 below, UIC, YWCA neg. 56; 37 above, UIC, YWCA neg. 54; 36 below, UIC, YWCA neg. 32; 38 left, UIC, YWCA neg. 36; 38 right, UIC, YWCA neg. 51; 39 left, UIC, YWCA neg. 57; UIC, YWCA neg. 48.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the YWCA’s urban racial policies, see Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, ed., Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997); Judith Weisenfeld, African American Women and Christian Activism: New York’s Black YWCA, 1905–1945 (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1998); and Elsie D. Harper, The Past is Prelude: Fifty Years of Social Action in the YWCA (New York: National Board of the YWCA, 1963). For more on female political movements in the early to mid-nineteenth century, see Susan Lynn, Progressive Women in Conservative Times: Racial Justice, Peace, and Feminism, 1945 to the 1960s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992). The comprehensive Chicago YWCA archives are housed at the University of Illinois–Chicago.

Virginia Boynton is assistant professor of history at Western Illinois University.

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Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y

The Beach Boys: Chicago’s First Junior Lifeguards CHRIS SERB

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n the early 1900s, the relatively new sport of recreational swimming gained popularity all over the country. The city of Chicago and its local park districts (which were autonomous until 1934) cleared much of the lakefront and built jetties and piers to capture sand and create beaches, then hired the best swimmers to serve as lifeguards. Most of these lifeguard services operated on shoestring budgets, and a lifeguard typically watched an entire mile (or 1,760 yards) of beach, compared to about 150 yards today.

As lakefront swimming became even more popular, most beaches hired more lifeguards. But World War I and the influenza epidemic of 1918 caused a staffing shortage, and the city faced a dilemma. Leaving the shore uncovered or lightly covered certainly would lead to accidents and deaths, but the city lacked the funds to hire more guards—if it could even find any to hire. In 1919, the city’s superintendent of beaches, Tom Daly, decided to form an unpaid junior lifeguard corps to help watch the three biggest beaches: Rainbow Beach at Seventy-ninth Street, Clarendon Beach at Montrose Avenue, and Rogers Park Beach at Touhy Avenue (also known as Touhy Beach)—a corps that is still intact today.

The first city junior guards were an all-male, loosely

Around the turn of the century, Chicago’s new beaches, such as Clarendon Beach (right) attracted hundreds of visitors but not enough lifeguards to watch them all.

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Top: Youngsters enjoy the new sport of recreational swimming at Montrose Beach. Chicago’s 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches showed how flood lighting could illuminate the beaches at night (above left), and described what Chicago’s earliest lifeguards should wear (above right).

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organized group. Each boy helped watch a designated area of the beach before the season officially started and during busy hours, and would report any trouble in the water to the lifeguards. In reward for their services, the junior guards received T-shirts and swim trunks; in their free time, they also got to practice with rowboats, canoes, and other equipment. Junior guards also had the inside track on future lifeguard positions. At Rogers Park, the first junior guard crew included Bob Dooley and Fran Conway, who would both be associated with the beach for decades.

Other than the T-shirts and the rowboats, junior guarding was a somewhat sedate, thankless job in the early days. With only twelve to twenty boys in the program in the early 1920s, junior guarding lacked the social element for which it would later be known. The patrols tended to be very tedious, consisting of hot days spent watching a little stretch of beach while other youngsters performed cannonballs off the Touhy Beach diving platform. Occasionally, however, the junior guards saw action.

In August 1924, the Casmere, a thirty-five-foot sloop sailing from Belmont Harbor, got stuck on a sandbar about fifty yards off Chase Avenue. As the surf pounded the boat, the five passengers knew the Casmere would break apart in minutes. Six junior guards—Bob Dooley, Buddy Edwards, Bob Franks, Harry Sutherland, Pete Obermeyer, and Byron Speares—launched the crew boat, an old twenty-six-foot Coast Guard surfboat. Dooley and his mates rowed over to the Casmere and, by rocking the boat back and forth during each break in the waves, freed the sloop in eight minutes, the first recorded rescue made by Rogers Park junior guards.

Within a few years, Superintendent Daly’s junior guard crews stagnated at Clarendon and Rainbow Beaches, but the program took off in Rogers Park. One reason for the Rogers Park program’s success could be the fact that Daly lived in a city-owned house right behind Touhy Beach; possibly he kept a closer eye on his home neighborhood program. In 1926, Touhy Beach boasted 30 junior guards, while Clarendon—the city’s biggest beach—had only 14. The Rogers Park Beach program grew rapidly, tallying 64 boys in 1929, 90 in 1931, and 160 by 1939. The boom could be traced to two factors: Rogers Park’s growth as a residential neighborhood with many families, and beach director Sam Leone.

Leone, a short, muscular, chain-smoking Sicilian immigrant and World War I Navy veteran, arrived at Touhy Beach in 1925 at age twenty-five, after spending five years as a lifeguard at Clarendon. A high-school dropout, Leone proved to be a capable administrator who pioneered many lifeguarding and lifesaving techniques. As Leone himself put it, “We teach them to be happy in the water and feel just as much at home in the lake as they would in their own home.”

The 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches ranked attendance at beaches and pools for the year. The number of Chicagoans who swam recreationally increased more than 200 percent between 1915 and 1916, foreshadowing how popular the beaches were about to become.

Leone was one of the first guards to advocate “preventive” lifeguarding—keeping beachgoers out of trouble instead of making dramatic rescues on swimmers who had already gone down. Leone also was the first Chicago lifeguard to make use of a variety of new technologies to aid rescue attempts. He pioneered the diving helmet; portable resuscitators to inflate drowning victims’ lungs; two-way radios for emergency communication; and use of the “Aqua Lung,” now known as SCUBA, for rescue and recovery. During his forty years at Rogers Park Beach, Leone personally made more than five hundred rescues, and his lifeguards and junior guards saved more than ten thousand lives, while losing fewer than ten—a record that, according to the Chicago Sun-Times, “was believed to be unmatched anywhere.”

Yesterday’s City | 43

Leone achieved these results by establishing strict rules for both his lifeguards and his junior guards. He required his guards to be at work on time, and to respect authority figures. The hot-tempered Leone fired dozens of lifeguards and expelled many junior guards for small transgressions, although he often relented after making his point. “Sam Leone was the Vince Lombardi of lifeguarding,” 1940s junior guard Ed Kahn said. “There was no nonsense, and there was no arguing. Just his look was enough to make grown men wilt.”

Despite his tough rules—or maybe because of them— Leone won the love and respect of thousands of guards over the years. Many former junior guards, now in their sixties and seventies, still think of him as a second father.

“You always wanted to please him,” 1940s junior guard Dick Shiman remembered. “If you were at the chin-up bar and he happened to walk by, you’d want him to see that you could do ten pull-ups.”

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Above: Rogers Park Beach drew many visitors in 1929. Below: A Chicago guard practices a lifesaving dive off of a rowboat.

Above: At Rogers Park Beach, Sam Leone (in captain’s hat) spearheaded the junior lifeguard program, training neighborhood boys in lifesaving techniques. While the regular lifeguard corps focused on precision and discipline (above right), junior guards enjoyed more recreational activities (below right).

When he took over the program, Leone quickly realized that the boys could only stand around and watch a beach for so long. He kept the junior guards on beach patrol part of the time, but he also set up a wide range of other activities. Leone split the junior guards into teams for rowing and swimming races and for softball and football games. Leone and his lifeguards taught classes in swimming, sailing, basic lifesaving skills, artificial respiration, knots, and tumbling. They also set aside time for fun activities: picnics on the beach; wrestling matches on the diving platform; ten-mile rows to Wilmette Harbor and back; “free-for-all” canoe races in which teams would try to flip their opponents’ canoes; and rides in the Alert, Leone’s patrol speedboat, reported to be the fastest on the lake. “I wanted to swim, and row, and play football, and wrestle,” said 1920s and 1930s junior guard Tom Dolan. “There was always something like that going on at Touhy Beach.”

Leone and his lifeguards developed a peer leadership system for the program. The oldest boys, fifteen to seventeen years old, were dubbed Seniors—later renamed Leaders—and oversaw activities for the younger junior guards. They officiated sports, took the younger participants out in boats, and assisted with swimming lessons.

When lifeguards needed help watching the beach on particularly hot, busy days, they recruited the Leaders first.

The best Leaders usually earned a paid spot on Leone’s lifeguard staff when they turned eighteen. “We try to make the kids see a part of life they otherwise might not become acquainted with, especially the older ones,” explained Leone. “The leadership they show is very gratifying. I teach them and they come right back and do a better job running activities than I could do.”

Leone dubbed the middle group, ages twelve to fourteen, the Juniors; this group played ball games, rowed boats, took swimming lessons, and enjoyed other activities supervised by the Leaders. The nine-to-twelve-year-olds, the Midgets, participated in many of the same activities as the Juniors, usually on a less-intense level. Midgets, for example, played T-ball instead of softball, and wrestled instead of boxing.

The Midgets were the youngest group until Leone added another junior guard class in the 1940s: Atoms, for boys between six and eight years old.

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Sam Leone (second row from bottom, furthest left), an experienced lifeguard himself, used the junior guard program to introduce neighborhood boys to the wonders of the beach. Consequently, the popularity of the Rogers Park Junior Guard program soared.

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Eventually, Leone developed another designation for the junior guards—the “220 Club,” awarded to any member of the program who could swim 220 yards in the lake, or three full lengths of Touhy Beach. The regular junior guard program activities occurred only during the morning, but 220 Club members could stay for advanced water sports during the afternoons—water skiing, “Aqua Lung” diving, sailing, and the free-for-all canoe race. Leone required all Leaders to swim the 220. In gratitude, he often took the older group on annual out-oftown camping trips and gave them jackets with the junior guard insignia. “When you got that jacket, you were king of the neighborhood,” 1950s and 1960s junior guard Pat Hall recalled. “Everybody knew what it stood for. We were like the Marines of Rogers Park—everyone in that program was a cut above.”

The typical day for a junior lifeguard in the 1940s and 1950s resembles today’s junior guard schedule. The program evolved from a lifeguard assistance program into a lifeguard training program, which focused on developing lifesaving and aquatic skills, but also featured sports and recreational activities. Each day started out with roll call, with all the Atoms and Midgets splitting into teams named after their pro and college heroes: Cubs, Dodgers, Eagles, Fighting Irish, Blue Demons. After roll call, each separate team went to an assigned activity.

For water sports, teams split further into crews named after some sort of fish—Eels, Pike, Smelt—and raced in five-oarlock wooden rowboats, with one boy to each oar and the crew captain as coxswain. Other teams sent their crews out in canoes, and still others piled into the crew boat—a massive old Coast Guard lifeboat that fit about three junior guards to each oar and thirty to forty guards total. When the time came to switch classes, Leone towed the crew boat back to Touhy with the Alert. “You’d try to go as far out as you could,” 1950s junior guard Allen Hyman recalled, “because the farther you went, the better the ride back in.”

Leaders gave lessons to improve the Atoms’ and Midgets’ swimming styles. Midgets “jousted” by standing on the fronts of canoes and hitting each other with water polo balls tied to the end of broomsticks.

Teams held inner-tube races, games of water football, underwater knot-tying drills, lessons in boat and oar parts, and boat capacity drills, with fifty or so Atoms piling into a rowboat until it sank.

On land, the junior guards played maul ball, capture the flag, and other lawn games; practiced their tumbling; 48 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

worked on pull-ups, penny-flips, and other horizontal bar skills; wrestled; played dodgeball and tetherball; worked on their artificial respiration techniques; and practiced athletic skills such as broad jumping, high jumping, and throwing a football. They also participated in a fairly harmless variety of boxing: “You had nine-yearolds with sixteen-ounce gloves; one glove [was] bigger than your head, and they [were] soft as pillows,” 1940s and 1950s junior guard Fred Zoes remembered. “To hurt yourself was almost impossible.”

Almost—but not totally. One boxing drill required juniors to fight each other blindfolded, with one hand. “I hated that drill,” said Jerry Gavin, a 1950s junior guard. “You couldn’t even see the other kid, you’re blindfolded, he’s pounding on you. I got the crap beat out of me more often than not.”

Top and middle: Junior guards proudly sported their badges and jackets. The boys learned not just about swimming, but also about other water sports such as sailing (above).

To accommodate all of the boys who wanted to join the junior guard program, Leone created the Atom division for younger junior guards.

Here an Atom commandeers a rowboat in 1952.

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In the late 1940s, Leone discovered a new-fangled contraption: Jacques Cousteau’s Aqua Lung. “This goes all the way back to the early days of SCUBA,” 1940s and 1950s junior guard Jim Miller recalled. “[Leone] basically said, ‘Breathe normally, don’t come up faster than your bubbles, and have a good time.’” Leone was quickly hooked on scuba; the junior guard program bought five of the devices, and the Aqua Lung became one of the most popular features of 220 Club.

Another new sport, water skiing, also became a top 220 Club activity. In the late 1940s, Leone towed junior guards behind the Alert on handcrafted skis from the beach’s boat shop, cramming as many skiers behind the boat as possible. Leone described, “I wish I had a picture of a boy’s face when he first climbs into a boat or learns to swim and water ski.”

Over the years, Leone added a few annual special events to the summer program: a Junior Olympics Day, with sprints, three-legged races, blindfold races, and water balloon-passing relays; an Obstacle Course Day, in which the guards had to run through inner tubes, jump over oars, and crawl through ditches; an All-Star Softball game, featuring the best Midgets from across the program; and the Scavenger Hunt, during which mixed Atom-Midget teams searched for both everyday objects (five live black ants, an unused match, a dandelion) and offbeat items (a .22 shell, a guard’s foot print) within a

Morning program usually ended, as it does today, with an extended “free swim” period. As the program lifeguards watched from lifeboats, the Leaders formed a giant ring in the water, and two hundred or so screaming Atoms and Midgets jumped in, playing in the waves and splashing each other for ten to fifteen minutes.

In the afternoons, the 220 Club participated in advanced water activities, including sailing, free-for-all canoe races, flipping the crew boat, and searching the lake bed with Leone’s homemade, hand-pumped diving helmet. “You’d walk on the bottom; it was really strange,” remembered 1930s and ’40s junior guard Tom Burns. “A couple guys had to pump it for you, and if you had some lazy guy up there who slowed down, the water would come right up your nose.”

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Other water-related activities the junior guards enjoyed included crew (above left, c. 1950) and waterskiing (above, in 1967).

In the late 1940s, Sam Leone introduced his guards to a new apparatus called SCUBA (left).

When Leone took his junior guards waterskiing, he tried to fit as many skiers as possible behind his boat, the Alert, as seen in this 1960s photograph (below).

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On Obstacle Course Day, junior guards would jump over oars, race through inner tubes, and crawl over benches (above). Below: Eventually the junior guard program grew so large that Leone hired an assistant, Fran Conway (front row, furthest right), who ran the junior guard sports programs.

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two-block radius of the beach. In 1948, the junior guards’ first Water Show featured swimming and rowing races, a water skiing demonstration, displays of lifesaving skills, and other demonstrations and events; the show, which has been held every year since, regularly draws several thousand spectators.

But all was not fun and games on the beach. The Leaders made hundreds of rescues and assists over the years, mostly by fishing out the younger junior guards during swim lessons or an unexpected trip into deep water. During their beach patrols, junior guards saved dozens more lives. In June 1930, junior guards Frank Milner, Jimmie Ramey, Frank Stockrighter, and John Harvey rowed two miles into the lake to save two boys in an overturned canoe. In July 1936, several junior guards and lifeguards pitched in to save the Alert, Leone’s motorboat, from certain destruction by a sudden gale. In June 1940, junior guard Wilbur Gilbert rescued a man who had attempted suicide by jumping off a pier. And in August 1956, junior guards Bob Kennedy and Joe Springer saved a woman who was washed under by the waves.

The junior guard program eventually developed into a program for the “whole boy,” with camping, field trips, hobbies, and sports, that went far beyond what Superintendent Daly originally intended when he needed a little

The junior guard program did not stop when summer ended: the young guards also played football (left, 1950) and went on camping trips (above, 1951).

extra help on the beaches in 1919. Around 1930, Leone hired his first year-round, permanent staffer, former junior guard Fran Conway, to help direct the program.

Conway took the “permanent” designation literally—he stayed at Leone’s right hand for thirty years. Conway, a public school teacher, daily communicant at St. Jerome’s Church, and lifelong bachelor, never moved out of his mother’s house, but all the boys of Rogers Park Beach considered him family, and vice versa. “He was gentle yet firm, and he loved kids,” described 1930s junior guard Jack Annetti. “Sam Leone was the man on the beach, but Frannie Conway was your mentor.”

While Leone had overall responsibility for the junior guard program, Conway oversaw most of the day-to-day activities and administrative chores such as planning schedules and making Leader assignments. Conway also coached the beach’s sports teams (which were made up of junior gaurds), winning city youth baseball championships in 1931 and 1933 and city basketball titles every year from 1933 through 1939. No records exist for the World War II years, but the Rogers Park athletes thrived again after the war, going undefeated in football in 1947.

In the late 1940s Conway left the beach for a couple years to coach at Wrightwood Park; Sam Leone’s son Phil and former junior guard Jack Annetti briefly took over Conway’s coaching duties. Their 1949 teams won city titles in ice skating, baseball, track and field, softball, volleyball, and basketball. The Touhy Beach athletes also brought home special trophies for leading the league in both overall athletic wins and participation. “This was

just a great place for sports,” enthused 1940s and 1950s junior guard Jim Anderson. “It didn’t matter what the sport was—skating, boxing, track and field, or whatever, we won it.”

“Those were some of the best kids the beach ever had—and there were so many of them,” Annetti recalled. “If there was a volleyball tournament, we’d have three teams when all the other parks would have just one. If it was skating, we’d have one hundred skaters show up. And the kids were winners—they had that winning attitude, and that’s so important.” Conway returned to the beach in 1950, and the Rogers Park Beach athletes never missed a beat, winning city championships in softball, track, and other sports throughout the decade.

Each summer, Leone and Conway assigned two or three lifeguards to help them with the junior guards.

These included Bobby Bruns, who would become world heavyweight wrestling champion; Ray Essick, a top collegiate swimming coach and longtime head of U.S. Swimming, which oversees competitive swimming programs and organizes the Olympic and World Championship teams; Tom Aykroid, a three-sport star at St. George High School who later played football for Purdue University; Dick Shiman and Dick Blackmore, who coached swimming and football, respectively, while teaching at Loyola Academy; and Sam Leone’s son Phil, who died tragically in 1954 after pulling his father and two fellow lifeguards out of a car wreck. Beach legend has it that Oak Street Beach lifeguard and Olympic swimming champion Yesterday’s City | 53

Johnny Weissmuller briefly worked with the Rogers Park junior guards before he headed to Hollywood.

Many famous Chicago sons spent their formative years rowing and swimming at Rogers Park Beach, including best-selling novelist Sidney Sheldon; television and radio host Norman Ross (never a formal member, he said, but always a beach rat); brothers Len and John Jardine, who coached football at Brown University and University of Wisconsin, respectively; real estate magnate Sheldon Good; Dick Thornton, Northwestern University AllAmerican football player and a member of the Canadian Football League’s all-time all-star team; and a wisecracking youngster named Sheldon Greenfield, better known today as comedian Shecky Greene. Hundreds of others became prominent in business, in coaching and teaching, or on the police force or fire department.

“Some of our guys were really successful,” Good recalled. “Sam would be proud of us all.”

Leone and Conway considered junior lifeguarding a year-round activity, and they kept their young charges busy during the fall and winter months. While Conway

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Above: The junior guard baseball teams, coached by Fran Conway, easily won league and city titles. Below: In addition to all of their recreational activities, the junior guards still learned lifesaving techniques, as these 1980s (now co-ed) junior guards demonstrate.

and Annetti coached the sports teams, Leone held regular calisthenics, boxing, and wrestling lessons and sponsored youth tournaments. The boys took carpentry and boat-building lessons, learned how to use bows and arrows, watched educational movies, and went on field trips to far-off places such as Washington, D.C., and Florida, and local sites such as the Curtiss Candy Company, the Chicago Tribune printing plant, and the Chicago Stockyards. One year, Leone gave taxidermy lessons, and the boys prepared deer, owl, squirrel, rabbit, and sparrow hawk specimens. “There was always something to do, even during the idle time,” remembered 1940s and 1950s junior guard Rich Pigott.

Leone converted Touhy Beach into an ice rink during the winter, flooding an area about the size of a football field. Leone, Conway, and volunteers from the neighborhood—mostly junior guard parents—scraped the ice nightly, filled the divots left by skate tracks, and sprinkled and leveled the field, in the days long before Zamboni machines. After heavy snows, an army of volunteers often worked all night to clear the rink. In the early 1930s, Leone installed floodlights, set up loudspeakers, and played music for nighttime “couples” dances and skating parties. The beach house served as a warming station, with hot coals on the fireplace and coffee and cocoa available. On pleasant winter days, Leone’s rink would draw several hundred skaters.

Skating kept the junior guards busy during the winter months, with skating lessons and team practices every afternoon, weather permitting, and intramural and citywide skating meets. Fran Conway’s brother Dan was one of Rogers Park Beach’s first city champions. The Touhy athletes posted an outstanding record over the next twenty-five years, winning several regional and citywide skating competitions.

Fran Conway scaled back his work with the junior guards during the late 1950s and early 1960s, first giving up his fall and winter coaching duties, then cutting back on his summer activities. Leone remained active with the lifeguards and the junior guards until the summer of 1965, when he contracted lung cancer. He died on October 8, at age 65. The following year, Mayor Richard J. Daley rededicated Rogers Park Beach as Sam J. Leone Park and Beach. In a city where most parks are named after presidents, military heroes, and local politicians, Leone is the only one named for a lifeguard.

The junior guard program remained strong after Leone’s death, led by former junior guards such as Dick Shiman, Allen Hyman, Dick Blackmore, Bob Jardien, and Bob Diamond. The program ran much as it did in Leone’s day, with Atoms, Midgets, Leaders, the 220 Club, and all of the special events and trips. The biggest change came in 1970, when girls were allowed to join for the first time, led by pioneering junior guards Eileen

The Rogers Park junior guards won trophies in multiple sports (above, c. 1950). Below: Generations of junior guards enjoyed the free-for-all canoe race (as seen in this mid-1980s photograph, below).

Colleran, Lisa Goldman, and Cathy Rogers. The beach briefly gained national attention in the mid-1970s, when the CBS television show KidsWorld taped a segment on the Leone junior guards, with Leader Brian Murphy serving as guest host.

Beginning in the 1970s, the city’s other beaches and pools, which had abandoned junior guards during the Depression and World War II, gave the program another try. By 1981, a handful of beaches and pools each had about one or two dozen junior guards in their programs, Yesterday’s City | 55

Thanks to the junior guard program, Chicago’s lifeguards had some backup when they needed help watching the city’s increasingly crowded beaches, such as Oak Street Beach on this busy day in 1929.

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and the Chicago Park District began holding a citywide junior guard competition, with assorted swimming, rowing, running, and rescue races. The Leone Beach junior guards, as the oldest and largest program, dominated competitions for the first few years. In 1984, Hartigan Beach— just a half-mile south at Pratt Boulevard and the lake—and its young coach, Mary O’Connor, who recruited the top swimming talent from several northwest side pools, upset Leone. Hartigan won the junior guard games each year until 1994, when O’ Connor transferred to Touhy Beach and started coaching the Leone junior guards. Leone has won the junior guard games every year since.

The junior guard concept also gained popularity around the country.

Los Angeles County began its own junior guard program in 1960; lifeguards there claim to have founded the first junior guard program in the countr y, but generations of North Siders know better. Over the next thirty years, aided by both the United States Lifesaving Association and the popularity of the TV show Baywatch, junior lifeguarding spread along the nation’s coasts. Today, almost ever y major beach in the countr y has some form of a junior lifeguard program.

In 1985, the United States Lifesaving Association began holding a national junior guard competition every summer. While Los Angeles County, New Jersey’s Monmoy Beach, and Fort Lauderdale might evoke “beach boy” images, Chicago produces champions. The Chicago Park District’s junior guard teams, made up mostly of Leone Beach junior guards, have captured seven of the fifteen national titles to date, easily outpacing their ocean-based rivals.

The Leone Beach junior guard program continues to thrive, drawing about 350 boys and girls each summer, including many second- and third-generation program members. Last year’s roster included youngsters Grace, Claire, and Robbie Dooley, who enjoy swimming, rowing, and watching the beach as much as the “original” junior guard, their great-grandfather Bob Dooley, did eighty-one years earlier.

Junior guard horseshoe champs, 1951. Through Sam Leone’s leadership, the Rogers Park junior guard program developed into a summer recreational program for children of all ages.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 40–41, CHS, DN-073292; 42 above, CHS, ICHi-29290; 42 below left and right, CHS, 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches; 43 CHS, 1916 Annual Report on Parks and Beaches; 44 above, CHS, DN-088419; 44 below, CHS, DN-0100134; 45 above, from St. Jerome Parish annual report; 45 above right, CHS, DN-0100135; 45 below right, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 46–47, courtesy of the collection of Allan Paterson; 48 top, collection of the author; 48 center, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 48 bottom, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 49, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 50 top, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 50 above, courtesy of Bud Bertog; 51 above, CHS, DN-0092908; 51 below, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 52 above, courtesy of Allen Hyman; 52 below, courtesy of John Scotese; 53 left, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 53 right, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 54 top, courtesy of Jack Annetti; 54 bottom, courtesy of Bud Bertog; 55 above, courtesy of the Leone Beach Archives; 55 bottom, courtesy of Bud Bertog; 56, DN-088433; 57, courtesy of Jack Annetti.

Chris Serb, a junior guard from 1980 to 1986 and a lifeguard since 1987, recently published a book, Sam’s Boys, on the history of Leone Beach.

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

Corporate Consciences: Interviews with John H. Bryan and Newton N. Minow T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

I

n the late-twentieth century, Newton N. Minow and John H. Bryan emerged as moral consciences in the worlds of American communications and corporate life. As chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) during the Kennedy administration, Minow’s description of television programming as a “vast wasteland” transformed him into the ethical lightning rod of the broadcasting industry. He later played prominent roles in the creation of the public broadcasting system and the nation’s satellite communications network. Bryan, after assuming the helm of Chicagobased Consolidated Foods Corporation in 1975, converted the firm into Sara Lee Corporation, a twenty billion-dollar enterprise and the nation’s leading apparel company. John Bryan’s Sara Lee Corporation has been described as “one of the most socially-conscious companies in the world,” in the words of former Atlanta mayor and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young. “Bryan should not only be judged by the financial bottom line, but also by the moral bottom line because he makes fairness to minorities and women the major part of the business of his corporation.”

Born on January 17, 1926, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Newton N. Minow remembers, “I have very fond memories of my childhood. Neither my mother [nor] my father were born in the United States. My mother was brought to Milwaukee in 1910 when she was ten years old. My father was brought to Chicago when he was about six or seven years old. So, technically speaking, I’m a first generation American.” Minow’s parents, Jay A. Minow and Doris Stein Minow, married in the early 1920s, after which the family moved from Chicago to Milwaukee to join a family laundry business with Minow’s maternal uncles.

“We didn’t have much money, but we were never conscious of any economic deprivation.”

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Newton N. Minow received the Harold Washington History Maker Award for Distinction in Public Service. Minow’s wife, Jo, a life trustee of the Chicago Historical Society, presented him with the award.

Minow developed his political sensibilities in Wisconsin. “I think we were very conscious of the progressive tradition in Wisconsin of the LaFollettes,” Minow believes retrospectively. “Wisconsin, Milwaukee in particular, had very clean governments, just the opposite of what you hear about in big cities with corruption. In Milwaukee, if you were a public official and you made a private phone call on government expense, you could go to jail.”

The Minows resided in a workingclass neighborhood at 3303 North Sherman Boulevard. “We lived in rented flats—usually a two-flat building—until my parents had enough money to buy a house, which was when I was about eleven or twelve years old.” Minow attended Washington High School, which he admits “had a very major impact on my life.” According to Minow, Washington High School “was a very strict and very rigorous high school.” His classmates included Abner Mikva, the future Illinois Congressman, federal judge, and counsel to President Clinton, and Milton Shadur, also a federal judge. In retrospect, Minow claims that all three of them would admit “that we got a better education there than we did in college.”

Bryan’s pedigree departs dramatically from Minow’s. “I’m the son of fifthgeneration southerners, all from a small town in Mississippi,” states Bryan. “My great-grandfather was killed at the siege of Vicksburg. Most of my ancestors were in Mississippi in the Civil War. Before that, they were all from Virginia, North and South Carolina.” Born on October 6, 1936, in West Point, Mississippi, John Henry Bryan was the first of John H. Bryan and Catherine Cameron Wilkerson’s four children. Bryan grew up on Bryan Hill, next to the company headquarters and family enterprise of Bryan Brothers Packing Company. Combining livestock raising, slaughtering, processing, and marketing, Bryan Brothers became one of the largest companies in the South by the 1960s. “My early recollections are living in a house right adjacent to this small but growing meat processing plant. It was my playground; a slaughterhouse and processing plant right next door to where I lived until I was twelve years old.”

Bryan readily admits his mother had a considerable impact on his liberal political outlook. Catherine Bryan was more than just a strong personality. She was a social worker who refused her diploma from Mississippi State College for Women because it was signed by the racist governor Theodore Bilbo. “She was a very independent kind of a person for that time,” admits Bryan. “She has stayed an unreconstructed Roosevelt Democrat to this day.” Bryan is quick to point out her sympathy for “underprivileged folk and handicapped people. Her home is being left to a handicapped children’s school, which she started.”

John H. Bryan (above) as a young teen in West Point, Mississippi. Below: Bryan (left) received the 1999 Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation from 1998’s recipient, Patrick G. Ryan, Chairman, President, and CEO of Aon Corporation.

Making History | 59

The John Bryan Sr. family (above) took an extended tour of Europe in 1954. Shown on the eve of their departure are Catherine and John Sr., seated, and, standing, left to right, Kitty, John Jr., Caroline, and George. John Bryan (below) posed for this photograph as a student at Southwestern College.

Two key events of his youth—a family trip to Europe in 1954, which exposed him to a foreign culture for the first time, and his choice of college—affected Bryan greatly. “I finished high school in 1954 and wanted to go to the university there in the state, but my mother didn’t want me to,” he remembers. “She wanted me to go to a small, liberal arts college in Memphis, Tennessee, which had a Presbyterian affiliation. I always recollect sitting on the back of a bus in France in 1954, finally acquiescing to her demand that I go away to school, to get out of the state and not go to the university with all my friends.” Bryan matriculated to Southwestern College in Memphis from 1954 to 1958, now called Rhodes College. “It turned out to be very important because of the liberal arts education. The experiences of being in a small school gave me the chance for a lot of leadership positions that I might not have gotten in a big school in a southern state.”

Bryan returned to Mississippi after graduation. In 1960, his father let him manage Bryan Foods at the ripe old age of twenty-three. By then, the company was largest employer in West Point. Bryan emphasizes that his father “gave me the gift that is so rare and the most important that you can give a child—confidence beyond that which they are entitled to. He let me start running the business at age twenty-three. He made me reside in his office with him, and he just left and went into another business.”

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Northwestern University attracted Minow to Chicago. Upon returning to the United States after serving in World War II, “I was trying to figure out whether I should go to Harvard or go to Michigan. My dad kept saying, ‘You should look at Northwestern.’ Neither my mother nor my father had ever gone to college; they didn’t know much about it. But a business competitor of my dad’s had a son that had gone to Northwestern, and my dad admired him.” Anxious to make up for lost time, Minow attended Northwestern year round, and graduated in 1949. A year later, he received his law degree, the same year he would have graduated if he had not served in the war. Minow edited the Northwestern Law Review, and graduated first in his law school class.

After graduation, Minow moved to Washington to clerk for Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson. Minow remembers that the talented clerks of 1951 and 1952 included Abner Mikva, future Secretary of State Warren Christopher, and future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist.

Upon completing his clerkship, Minow had just returned to his law practice with Mayer, Brown, and Platt when he was invited to serve as the administrative assistant to Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II. Stevenson was one of the leading candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 1952, and Minow served as a special assistant in Stevenson’s 1952 and 1956

In 1951, Supreme Court Chief Justice Fred Vinson posed with three of his clerks. Seated left to right are Minow, James C. N. Paul, Justice Vinson, and Howard J. Trienens.

Making History | 61

presidential campaigns. In the interim, he joined Stevenson’s new law firm, serving as partner in Stevenson, Rifkind, and Wirtz from 1955 to 1961.

Minow’s activism in Democratic Party politics paid off in 1961 when newly elected president John F. Kennedy appointed him chairman of the FCC at the age of thirty-five. Minow served as FCC chair for only two years, but they were among the most decisive of his career. By the end of 1961, Minow had made more television and radio appearances than any other member of the Kennedy administration except the president. The Associated Press’s annual poll of editors voted Minow the top newsmaker for 1961 in the field of entertainment, outpolling earlier winners such as Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley.

One event defined Minow’s tenure at the FCC. On May 9, 1961, he addressed the National Association of Broadcasters. “I invite you to sit down in front of your television set,” he implored. “I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience-participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons.” Minow’s name was forever linked with television’s first enduring sound bite: “vast wasteland.”

Broadcast and network executives immediately dubbed the day “Black Tuesday.” Some still refer to the address as simply “the speech.” Critics from the U.S. News and World Report and the Wall Street Journal, and Louis Jaffe of Harvard Law School charged Minow with advocating censorship and violating the First Amendment. The Chicago Tribune labeled Minow “the cultural Khrushchev.” More than three decades later, Minow is quick to admit that “the vast wasteland [speech] is highly overrated.” Yet, “it somehow struck a chord. What people don’t understand about me is that I happen to love broadcasting. I meet people who say, ‘I agree with you. I don’t even have a television set in my house.’ I say, ‘You’re missing life because this is where everything’s going on.’” For Minow, television itself was not the problem. Rather, the mass media’s violence, banality, and failure to educate were the source of his ire. “What upsets me and what frustrates me is that it does not fulfill what it could.”

Bryan similarly found himself immersed in political controversy during the 1960s as an early supporter of Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement. “It was a time when I was confronted, about as harshly as one can be, with the issues of what we would call the Black Revolu62 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

Minow advised John F. Kennedy (above) during the 1960 presidential campaign and became a nationally known figure when Kennedy appointed him chair of the FCC. Minow appeared on the cover of Newsweek (below) in 1961.

On May 9, 1961, at a broadcasting convention, Minow shared a podium with JFK and dubbed television programming a “vast wasteland.� Above: The cover of the booklet containing the addresses to the convention.

Making History | 63

tion—integration and segregation,” he remembers. Bryan openly rejected the racial status quo. First, he desegregated Bryan Brother’s water fountains, rest rooms, cafeterias, and white-collar ranks. Then he joined the black community and sued the school board when it closed the local public schools rather than integrate them. “They often wanted to kick people out of the school for racial reasons and I would vote against it. We went to court and I had to testify against the school board on a number of occasions.” When town officials later closed the community swimming pool rather than integrate it, Bryan responded by building a new one. “So in six months I had a new swimming pool built in the black areas, borrowed the money myself, and got it built.”

When the previously black elementary schools reopened, Bryan’s children were among the students. “The thing that shocked people most was me sending my children to the black schools.”

In retrospect, Bryan states, “I was in a leadership position, so I was forced to make choices. The security I had in the town and the confidence I had in my own self and, in a way, some of the religious training led me to be absolutely certain about the choices. I’m just very pleased that I made the right ones.”

In 1968, Bryan negotiated the sale of Bryan Foods with Nathan Cummings of the Consolidated Food Corp. of Chicago. Consolidated’s origins dated back to 1939 when Nathan Cummings purchased the C.D. Kenny Co., a small distributor of wholesale sugar, coffee, and tea in Baltimore. Over the next two decades, Cummings acquired other companies, moved the company to Chicago, and changed its name three times before settling on Consolidated 64 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

Bryan, long a champion of civil rights, meets Bishop Desmond Tutu (shaking Bryan’s hand) and Chicago’s late Mayor Harold Washington (center).

Foods Corporation in 1953. In 1956, the firm acquired the Chicago-based Kitchens of Sara Lee. Bryan continued working in Mississippi when, “one night I was at home and I got a call from Nate Cummings, asking me to come to New York,” he remembers. Cummings “had made up his mind that he was going to discharge the chairman and wanted me to become the chief executive. On February 12, 1975, a snowy day, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, a special board meeting was called here in Chicago and I was made the chief executive officer” at the age of thirty-eight.

A year later, Bryan was elected chairman of the board and he immediately began transforming Consolidated Foods. “The board in those days was packed with these barons from out in the field who had sold their business,” remarks Bryan. “They were really running the company and were afraid of the professional managers who might do it differently from the way they were.”

In time, Bryan borrowed upon his experiences in Mississippi, instituting diversity programs that insured that women and minorities worked in every level of the corporation.

Bryan quickly recognized that the food industry’s potential was limited because the American population was only growing at an annual rate of one percent. This convinced him to diversify, even though other food giants such as Kraft and RJR Nabisco had abandoned efforts in nonfood industries. Bryan targeted products with two major characteristics: staples that people bought in good and bad times, and products with fragmented markets. Among the

Bryan, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and Bryan’s wife Neville, January 1993.

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first to recognize the growing importance of brand labels, Bryan and Consolidated astutely acquired retail brands where private labels dominated, such as underwear, socks, and hosiery. They then wooed customers by offering a quality, branded product at only a slightly higher price.

In 1978, Consolidated acquired Douwe Egberts, the Dutch coffee and tea company and a major European-based consumer packaged-goods company.

The acquisition gave the company a superb European base. A year later, Consolidated acquired Hanes Corp., a Winston-Salem knit manufacturer. In 1985, Bryan convinced shareholders to change Consolidated’s name to Sara Lee Corporation. Bryan quickly poured money into advertising and marketing and used its food distribution channels for nonfood products (for example, supermarkets sold L’Eggs hosiery). From 1990 to 1995, Sara Lee acquired more than $4 billion in European assets, purchasing the largest coffee companies in Hungary and Czechoslovakia while expanding into France and Great Britain. By 1992, European sales made up 35 percent of Sara Lee busi-

ness, ranking the company fourth among consumer-goods companies with business in Europe (after Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, and Procter and Gamble).

Bryan proved to be a wise soothsayer. From 1986 to 1992, operating profits from Sara Lee’s nonfood businesses grew 50 percent faster than food businesses did. By 1994, Sara Lee had become the largest apparel company in the United States. During the 1980s, Sara Lee delivered better returns to shareholders than any other Fortune 100 company. From 1984 to 1994, the firm enjoyed an average annual earnings growth of 14.5 percent per share, usually outpacing both the Standard and Poor 500 and the Standard and Poor foodapparel composite.

By 1998, Sara Lee was a diversified, global consumer packaged goods company with more than twenty billion dollars in annual revenues and leading positions in packaged meats, frozen baked goods, shoe care, coffee, hosiery, underwear, and fleecewear. The firm employs 139,000 workers, maintains operations in more than 40 countries, and markets products in more than 140 nations under brand names such as Sara Lee, Douwe Egberts, Hillshire Farm, Hanes, Coach, and Playtex. Once associated with bakery goods, by the 66 | Chicago History | Summer 2000

Bryan (seated, far left), chair of Sara Lee Corporation, with the members of the board of directors in 1991. Sitting to Bryan’s immediate left is Newton Minow.

early 1990s only 42 percent of Sara Lee’s operations originated with food. “We are not a food company or an apparel company or a shoe-care company,” insists Bryan. “We are—and shall continue to be—a global marketer of branded consumer packaged goods.”

Minow remains a controversial figure in broadcasting. In 1997, the Clinton administration invited Minow to chair the so-called Gore Commission, a presidential commission investigating the responsibilities of broadcasters in the digital age. Pressure from Minow’s critics, however, quickly mounted. Although he was named to the commission, he did not serve as chair. “They had Noah’s Ark on the commission,” he complains. “They had two of this and two of that. And the commission from the first day was, in my opinion, a total disaster. They took on too many issues.”

For Minow, the Gore Commission was “a lost opportunity.” In 1996, for example, $1.8 billion was spent in all federal races, most of it devoted to advertising. “We should change the way politics and television are used today. We should not allow the sale or purchase of broadcast time for campaigning. It should be provided, as it is in most countries throughout the world—including England—on a public service basis. It’s not to be sold to the highest bidder.” Minow contends that “[n]o citizen has a constitutional right to buy or sell our natural resources—land, minerals, water, trees, or the broadcast spectrum—without congressional approval. Just as Congress has the authority to clean up our natural environment, it has the authority under our Constitution to clean up the current political broadcasting mess we have inflicted upon our republic.” Now, according to Minow, “you’ve got a colossal irony. You’ve got politicians selling access to something all of us own: our government, so they can buy access to something all of us own: our airways.”

Minow insists that television, “the greatest instrument of communication in history,” has created a new kind of dictatorship—a dictatorship of the dollar.

“Fundraising, not governing,” protests Minow, is “the principal business of our elected officials.” In a scathing dissent, Minow bluntly concludes: “Today we take only timid, baby steps when we should take giant strides to match the giant leaps offered by this most promising technology. Our grandchildren will one day regret our failure to meet one of the great communications opportunities in the history of democracy.”

Most grating for Minow are critics who misrepresent the First Amendment. For nearly four decades, Minow has insisted that the First Amendment forbids government from interfering with free speech; it does not prohibit citizens, including broadcasters and viewers, from objecting to speech that they do not like. Minow stresses a simple but important point: “Because you have the right to do something does not make it the right thing to do.” Minow offers a strict and narrow interpretation of the First Amendment, insisting that it “is not a restriction on an editor. It is not a restriction on a sponsor. It is not a restriction on a producer. It is

Bryan (above) in 1991, pictured with (left to right) Dorothy I. Height, first lady Barbara Bush, and Robert J. Brown. The Minow family (below) visited with President Kennedy in the oval office on May 29, 1963.

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Minow presented Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (pictured here with Minow) with an honorary degree at Northwestern University in 1998.

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a restriction only on the government.” The practical result is that television is “becoming worse all the time.”

In retrospect, Minow acknowledges a strategic mistake in his criticism of commercial television. Asked what he would do differently if he could relive his FCC chairmanship, he quickly replies: “I would have limited my whole argument to children. It’s indefensible. You can argue all you want about other things; you cannot argue about children. That’s where we ought to be putting our attention.” Minow laments, “In 1961, when I called television a ‘vast wasteland,’ I was thinking of an endless emptiness, a fallow field waiting to be cultivated and enriched. I never dreamed we would fill it with toxic waste.”

While Minow emerged as the leading critic of the twentieth-century mass media, Bryan inadvertently became a spokesman for a new corporate model.

In “reinventing” Sara Lee, Bryan views his experience as emblematic of significant changes in the global economy. “You have to realize that companies are born at a time when markets are closed, and therefore they need to actually manage and own the supply chain all the way through. Then all of a sudden, you become obsolete as a model.” More specifically, Bryan sees “new generation companies being modeled on low assets.” Computer companies, for example, “don’t make computers. They don’t assemble computers. They don’t make the parts. All they do is to design [and] manage the supply chain.

They manage the marketing and the distribution.

That’s the important thing.”

Bryan believes that the current age marks “the final end of the industrial age as it relates to America.” For him, “slaughtering hogs and running knitting machines are businesses of yesterday.” Companies such as Sara Lee, Dell, Disney, Arthur Anderson, and Merrill Lynch are becoming “assetless companies”—outsourcing virtually all production, concentrating on managing brands, helping customers decide what they need, and tailoring products and services to satisfy them. The vertically integrated corporation is outmoded because of “the inflexibility of it” in a world where somebody can specialize in doing a “functional activity for you,” argues Bryan.

Bryan meets considerable resistance to these ideas. “I find that a lot of people shake their heads at the heresy of anybody talking about how anything can be of value unless it’s manufactured. They relish the notion of a man in overalls with a lunch pail, walking in, doing manual labor to make things.

‘How can you build an economy if you haven’t got somebody making things, John?’ President Clinton has had a fit two or three times, talking with me about it.” But Bryan asks: “If people no longer have to do dirty jobs that just move their hands, much of it mindlessly, all day, aren’t we better off? When I grew up in Mississippi, 99 percent of the people were engaged on the farm.

How productive were we? Not very productive.”

Information is the key for Bryan. “You’re not going to get anything in the world of tomorrow by trying to make money off of a labor force. The truth is, the world is awash with labor. You’re not going to make it on capital. The world’s got so much capital; it doesn’t know what to do with it.” For Bryan, the solution is quite simple. “You’re going to make it with ideas. You’re going to make it with coming up with a better product, a better way of marketing.

It is demonstrably evident, if you look around, where all of the activity is in the marketplace today. It is in the ‘new age’ businesses.”

Minow met Pope John Paul II at the Vatican in 1984.

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Both Bryan and Minow have been deeply involved in philanthropy. At various times, Minow served as chair of the governing boards at Jewish Theological Seminary (1974–77) and the Public Broadcasting Service (1978–80), as well as a trustee at the Carnegie Corporation (1987–97, chair, 1993–97), the Chicago Orchestral Association (1975–87, life trustee, 1987–present), Northwestern University (1975–87, life trustee, 1987–present), and the Mayo Foundation (1973–81). For Minow, interfaith involvement “has been a central part of my life. I think it’s hard for me to explain exactly where that came from or how I was prompted to do that. One of the most fulfilling parts of my life was my experience with Notre Dame, where I served on the board for more than thirty years.” In 1964, Minow became the first Jewish trustee at the University of Notre Dame (1964–77, 1983–96), where he was later named a life trustee (1996).

Similarly, Bryan has been a leading figure in Chicago philanthropy, serving as a trustee for the University of Chicago, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center. He has chaired the board of directors of Americans United to Save the Arts and Humanities, the National Trust Council of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and most recently, the public-private partnership to build a $250 million millennium park on Chicago’s lakefront.

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Jo, daughter Mary, and Newton Minow (left to right) celebrate at the Making History Awards dinner in May 1999.

Bryan also chaired the fundraising campaign that raised one hundred million dollars from Chicago’s corporate community to rebuild Orchestra Hall and the Civic Opera House. No other city has raised so much corporate money so quickly for important cultural institutions. Forgotten in this success is that Bryan originally led an effort to develop a plan for a new performing arts center in Chicago. But Bryan remembers that opposition quickly mounted. “The symphony didn’t want to leave Symphony Hall. At the Opera House, they didn’t want to leave. The newspapers were writing articles about how we were going to have an ugly Lincoln Center here. So, I redirected the whole thing.” Bryan approached architects Skidmore, Owings, and Merrill, who determined that the Lyric Opera and the Symphony could be renovated.

Bryan then devised a strategy to raise one hundred million dollars, which was no easy task. From 1989 to 1999, national giving to cultural institutions declined, and art museums in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia nearly closed. Bryan explains that, as a fundraiser, “You go in and you tell them that organization is important to the definition of Chicago. You wrap that civic cloak around it.” But, adds Bryan, “you’ve got to have people who respond to that, and we do; we’ve traditionally had that in Chicago.”

Looking back, Minow concedes that he will forever be recognized for the words “vast wasteland.” “But I think some of the things that we did in the

Bryan, the late Ardis Krainik, and Samuel Ramey (left to right) enjoying the opening night of Mephistofele at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, September 1991.

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government while I was there were much, much more important than that.”

As chair of the FCC and later, Minow led the effort that generated three important pieces of legislation: a communications satellite bill, the Educational Television Facilities Act of 1962 (which led to the creation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967), and the All-Channel Television Receiver Act of 1962, which provided television consumers with more choice. “I’m probably most proud of the growth of public television. When I went to the FCC, it was a shock to discover there were no such stations in Washington, D.C., New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Baltimore, Houston. We built a nationwide system of a not-for-profit, noncommercial service. The other thing I think that we did that was very important was to build the first communication satellite program, which totally transformed communications around the world. I think those two things are much more important than the words ‘vast wasteland.’”

Bryan is similarly proud of his public contributions. “The public responsibility aspect of Sara Lee is something for which I am proud,” Bryan claims.

“We spend 5 percent of our profits on charities. Twenty-seven percent of our management is [made up of] women. We have a large minority population in the company. That is very important to me.” For Bryan, no corporation is an end in itself. “I don’t have any illusion that a company is forever. As institutions, we don’t have to last. We’re here to efficiently and effectively deliver goods and services to people. We can survive only as long as we’re satisfying those who fund us and those we’re serving. And I’d like to think my extracurricular activities made a difference.” Most would agree that John Bryan and Newton Minow have indeed made a difference.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Entries on Newton Minow and John Bryan appear in Who’s Who in America, 1999 (New Providence, N.J.: Marquis, 1998). Minow’s most important publications include Equal Time: The Private Broadcasters and the Public Interest (New York: Atheneum, 1964); (with Craig L. LaMay) Abandoned in the Wasteland: Children, Television and the First Amendment (New York: HarperCollins, 1995); and “Out of the Wasteland, A Jackpot,” New York Times Magazine, December 4, 1994.

Coverage of Minow, his career, and his influence can be found in James L. Baughman, Television’s Guardian: The FCC and the Politics of Programming, 1958–1967 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); and Mary Ann Watson, The Expanding Vista: American Television in the Kennedy Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990).

Bryan’s professional career is documented in the annual reports of Sara Lee Corporation and its predecessor Consolidated Foods. Articles with discussions of Bryan appear in the Economist, November 14, 1992, and May 25, 1996; Financial World, January 4, 1994; and the Chicago Tribune, October 26, 1997, and January 29, 1999.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 58, CHS; 59 top, courtesy Sara Lee Foundation; 59 bottom, CHS; 60 top and bottom, courtesy Sara Lee Foundation; 61 top, from As Our Parents Planted for Us, So Shall We Plant for Our Children: A Family Memoir by Josephine Baskin Minow and Newton N. Minow (1999); 62 top and bottom, CHS, As Our Parents Planted for Us; 63, CHS, Addresses at the 39th Annual Convention of the National Association of Broadcasters; 64, photography by Eric Werner, courtesy of Sara Lee Foundation; 65, courtesy of Sara Lee Foundation; 66, CHS, Sara Lee Annual Report, 1991; 67 top, official White House photograph, courtesy Sara Lee Foundation; 67 bottom, As Our Parents Planted for Us; 68, As Our Parents Planted for Us; 69, As Our Parents Planted for Us; 70, CHS; 71, courtesy Sara Lee Foundation.

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