Chicago History | Summer 2001

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editor Gwen Ihnat

Copyright 2001 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org

Designer Bill Van Nimwegen

ISSN 0272-8540

Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford

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

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

Cover: This John McCutcheon drawing depicts the “15th Annual Hoosier Salon,” a fictional event highlighting many of Indiana’s claims to fame, including Purdue University and the Indiana Society of Chicago. CHS, McCutcheon Cartoon Collection.

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

M. Hill Hammock Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair John W. Rowe Vice Chair David P. Bolger Treasurer Potter Palmer Secretary R. Eden Martin Immediate Past Chair Lonnie G. Bunch President

Philip D. Block III David R. Boles David P. Bolger Laurence Booth Lonnie G. Bunch George A. Chivari Michelle L. Collins Kevann M. Cooke John W. Croghan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock Cynthia L. Hedlund Susan Higinbotham

LIFE TRUSTEES

David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Beth Schroeder Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander

Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Charles T. Brumback Stewart S. Dixon Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss John T. McCutcheon Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEE

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

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

Chicago Historical Society 2

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

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Summer 2001 VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 1

Contents

5 22 64

Exiles in Suckerland Timothy B. Spears

The Irish of Chicago’s Hull-House Neighborhood Ellen Skerrett

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Exiles in Suckerland TIMOTHY B. SPEARS

Even as nineteenth-century small-town migrants reached for the glamour and prosperity Chicago promised, they longed for the good old days on Main Street.

I

n the spring of 1911, the Indiana Society of Chicago invited its members to attend the “annual summer outing to take place at Indianapolis, Indiana, where you will be the guest of the Fatted Calf Society.”

Founded in 1905 by a group of transplanted Hoosiers, the Indiana Society of Chicago was organized around a nostalgic attachment to being Hoosier, thinking Hoosier, and staying Hoosier. The invitation, with its tongue-incheek invocation of the Prodigal Son, foregrounds these common ties, suggesting that all will be forgiven if the migrants give up their profligate, urban existence and return to Indiana soil.

The souvenir booklet commemorating this homecoming—written by the Come on Home Society of Indianapolis, and copyrighted by Those Who Stayed at Home—addresses these divided loyalties explicitly. “Dear Exiles in Suckerland,” one of the enclosed letters begins, “I am greatly pleased to join the ‘Native Bunch’ in a most cordial invitation to you to come back home for a brief spell in the merry month of June.” It goes on to wonder “why it should be necessary to send an invitation to a native Hoosier who has lived in exile even for a day in Chicago, to come back to good old Indiana.” The plaint of the 4 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Thomas Hovenden’s Breaking Home Ties (left), Paul Dresser’s song (opposite left), and John Whitcomb Riley’s poem (opposite right) capitalized on the sentimentalism felt by small-town migrants nostalgic for home.

uprooted Hoosier echoes throughout the literature of the Indiana Society and can be heard in some of the more popular expressive forms of the period, such as the song by Paul Dresser, “On the Banks of the Wabash, Far Away,” and James Whitcomb Riley’s poem, “The Hoosier in Exile.”

Born Paul Dreiser, Dresser anglicized his German surname after leaving his Terre Haute home in the 1870s to pursue a career as a singer and composer of popular songs. Coauthored by his brother, Theodore Dreiser, who wrote the first stanza and the refrain, Dresser’s ballad was enormously popular in 1899; Indiana eventually adopted the tune as the official state song. Outside Indiana, “On the Banks of the Wabash” likely appealed to the very figure imagined in Riley’s poem: a Hoosier migrant making his way through “the thronging maze/Of alien city streets” with his thoughts “set in grassy ways/And woodlands’ cool retreats” where “he hears the dove/And is at peace within.” Like Thomas Hovenden’s painting Breaking Home Ties (one of the most popular exhibitions at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago), both Riley’s poem and Dresser’s song underscore the affection that linked urban migrants to their former homes.

THE HOOSIER IN EXILE The Hoosier in Exile—a toast That by its very sound Moves us, at first, to tears almost, And sympathy profound; But musing for a little space, We lift the glass and smile, And poise it with a royal graceæ The Hoosier in Exile!

The Hoosier in Exile, forsooth!

For though his steps may roam The earth’s remotest bounds, in truth His heart is ever home!

O loyal still to every tie Of native fields and streams, His boyhood friends, and paths whereby He finds them in his dreams!

Though he may fare the thronging maze Of alien city streets, His thoughts are set in grassy ways And woodlands’ cool retreats; Forever, clear and sweet above The traffic’s roar and din, In breezy groves he hears the dove, And is at peace within.

When newer friends and generous hands Advance him, he returns Due gratefulness, yet, pausing, stands As one who strangely yearns To pay still further thanks, but sighs To think he knows not where, Till—like as life—with misty eyes He sees his mother there.

The Hoosier in Exile? Ah, well, Accept the phrase, but know The Hoosier heart must ever dwell Where orchard blossoms grow The whitest, apples reddest, and, In cornlands, mile on mile, The old homesteads forever stand— “The Hoosier in Exile!”

Exiles in Suckerland | 5

At his Indiana estate, George Ade played the country squire, regularly hosting elaborate parties with renowned generosity.

This John McCutcheon drawing portrays a picnic with Ade in the foreground at bat.

6 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

In nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century America, moral arbiters, social reformers, realist writers (and later, urban and rural sociologists) focused on the demographic shift from country to city. Urban migrants, in particular, remembered the “old country home” as a repository of virtue and an object of sentimentalism. “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “The Hoosier in Exile” served this nostalgia straight: a full dose of longing for home. The Indiana Society invitations, on the other hand, treat such sentiment with self-conscious humor, acknowledging its members’ nostalgia for a home that is no longer accessible. The society’s membership roster helps explain this detachment: with jobs ranging from modest white-collar work to corporate directorship, these enterprising rubes-turned-Chicagoans seem to have done quite well in the big city.

For some hinterland migrants to Chicago, such expressions of hometown loyalty played an important role in the development of middle-class, urban identity. In a city of newcomers, where the population soared from one hundred thousand in 1860 to more than one million in 1890, most had foreign-born parents. Furthermore, residents born in Old Northwest states constituted nearly 80 percent of the native-born population. These small-town, rural migrants could claim their indigenous birthright by asserting their difference from other newcomers to Chicago. Like foreign immigrants, hinterland migrants constructed an identity based on their shared backgrounds. This identity grew from their interactions and common attachment to a home other than Chicago, and was a function of their status as white, native-born provincials, distinguishing them from foreign-born immigrants marked by linguistic or religious difference. Small-town migrants might have felt like outsiders in metropolitan society, but to the degree that American-born Chicagoans controlled the city’s dominant economic and cultural institutions, they were potential insiders and a vital part of Chicago’s burgeoning middle class.

One marker of the migrants’ ongoing attachment to Main Street was nostalgia, a register of the attitudes and values that constellated around their former home.

Nowadays, nostalgia denotes a bittersweet longing for past circumstances, places, or things; the concept revolves around temporal differences. But throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, nostalgia referred primarily to geographic dislocation and gave a medical definition to the sense of languish felt by urban migrants, mercenaries, and other exiles. Nostalgia literally means homesickness, and it became a serious enough affliction that the Union army reported more than five thousand cases of the malady during the first year of the Civil War. As a disease of “provincial origin” caused by the disruption of domestic living patterns, nostalgia—like neurasthenia, whose symptoms include

As Purdue undergraduates, George Ade and John McCutcheon became fast friends. Throughout their lives, McCutcheon would frequently sketch caricatures of Ade, such as this one.

fatigue and lack of motivation—was both a medical and cultural condition.

Of course, nostalgia did not affect all provincial migrants equally. Some people remained indifferent to the homes they left behind and approached their change in station prosaically—as the natural extension of lives begun on Main Street. Still, given the strong commercial ties between Chicago and its hinterland, not to mention the ongoing movement of small-town and rural migrants into the city, Chicagoans could not help explore their provincial roots. For some migrants, nostalgia was not simply a static recollection of past circumstances that developed in opposition to city life; rather, it was a pressing cultural and emotional matter, alive and constantly evolving. In this respect, nostalgia served as a potentially creative force in urban culture, guiding the drive to “make it” that compelled many migrants to leave home in the first place.

No one better knew the cultural and emotional dynamics that joined country to city than John McCutcheon and George Ade, perhaps the best-known Exiles in Suckerland | 7

Hoosiers in turn-of-the-century Chicago. The two friends arrived in the city in 1889 and 1890 respectively, and went to work for the Chicago Daily News’s early edition, the Morning News (later renamed the Record), McCutcheon as an illustrator and cartoonist, and Ade as a reporter. During the 1890s, they collaborated on hundreds of stories that helped make the News a leading paper in the Midwest, with both urban and rural readers.

By the end of the century, both men had left the newspaper: Ade for a lucrative career as a syndicated journalist, humorist, and playwright; McCutcheon for a prominent spot on the Chicago Tribune. These career 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

paths made McCutcheon a Chicago institution, and enabled Ade to purchase an Indiana estate, which served as his home base when he became a part-time Chicago resident and frequent traveler. As Purdue University alumni and fraternity brothers, Ade and McCutcheon were close friends before they arrived in Chicago, and they remained so—socially and professionally. After their work on the News ended, McCutcheon continued to illustrate Ade’s writings. Both men, even when they did not collaborate, remained preoccupied by their connection to the hinterland, especially Indiana, and the meaning this had on their lives.

Ade’s and McCutcheon’s careers were closely linked.

Both men grew up in genteel, middle-class families in small northwest Indiana towns, where frontier conditions blended with the bourgeois values characteristic of Main Street culture. Like many midwesterners who left small towns for urban opportunities, Ade and McCutcheon remembered their childhood homes as peaceful, upstanding communities. In their autobiographical writings they both wistfully described the pleasures of going barefoot in the summer and exploring the nooks and crannies of their communities, which for Ade was the small village of Kentland, and for McCutcheon, Lafayette.

Left: When McCutcheon was a freshman and Ade (middle row at the far left) a junior, the two met as fraternity brothers at Purdue University. Above: Both Ade and McCutcheon grew up in small northwest Indiana towns, Ade in Kentland (top) and McCutcheon in Lafayette (bottom).

Exiles in Suckerland | 9

McCutcheon’s series of “A Boy in Summer Time” drawings bring to life his childhood memories when he “went bare-foot until the meadows were silvered with frost, fished in tiny ‘cricks’ and splashed in muddy swimming holes.”

Despite retrospections approaching the idyllic, the men also noted the ambitions that drew them away from home and the social forces that put Main Street in the orbit of Chicago’s developing power. As Ade once reportedly joked (and spent much of his public life denying), “A lot of smart men come from Indiana, and the smarter they are the quicker they come.” Yet his “revolt from the village,” as the intellectual migration to the cities would later be described, was less a rebellion than an example of midwestern self-making. More than “jes folks,” smalltown Hoosiers generally adhered to socially conservative, commercially progressive values, an agenda that made the state home to an emerging industrial economy. This cultural disposition is evident in Ade’s and McCutcheon’s decisions to attend Purdue University, the new agricultural and engineering school whose rawboned modernity and practical curriculum attracted students during the 1880s and 1890s.

Although neither Ade nor McCutcheon had much interest in technical training, their Purdue educations placed them at the forefront of Main Street progressivism and introduced them to other small-town midwesterners who were eager to get ahead. Of the forty-three students who entered with Ade, all except one was from Indiana, and most—there were eight from Lafayette—came from small towns including Millville, Wea, Otterbein, and 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Benham’s Store. Two years later, when McCutcheon matriculated, the pattern remained much the same.

Although the attrition rate for these classes was fairly high, those who did graduate typically left Indiana behind, embarking on careers that led them to metropolitan areas or took them to engineering projects elsewhere. Presumably, many of these graduates realized that a Purdue education would point them toward professional opportunities outside their home state.

As a joke made by one Hoosier about fellow migrants, Ade’s quip was perhaps less a dismissal of provincial life than a geographical view of the process that brought a generation of midwesterners into a transformed, urban middle class. Chicago in the 1890s was filled with people like Ade and McCutcheon, migrants from country towns and midwestern colleges who had “drifted” there—as turn-of-the-century periodical literature put it—to rise with the city and its expanding white-collar professions. Ade and McCutcheon established their journalistic reputations in part by describing this migratory experience to an audience who had participated in it.

Both claimed that their sensitivity to the texture and drama of urban life was due to their small-town roots and, by implication, their ability to see the city in terms of small-scaled, human interaction. The column they began working on in 1893, roughly three years after their arrival on the News—entitled “Stories of the Streets and of the Town”—reveals how they adopted this perspective in carefully formulated explorations of urban culture.

With Ade writing the prose and McCutcheon contributing the illustrations, the column became a centerpiece in Chicago’s golden age of journalism.

In the “Stories” column, Ade established a journalistic voice both personal and detached. Although his attention to mundane details seemed to place him on the scene—as an intimate observer—he invariably adopted an omniscient, third-person point-of-view within a narrative structure that resembled fiction, thus endearing him to writers such as William Dean Howells, Henry Blake Fuller, and Theodore Dreiser, who were likewise concerned with developing realistic portrayals of urban life.

While these articles are too numerous and varied to be easily summarized, many point to the dynamic, frequently ironic, presence of “country” in the city. One early story, entitled “Her Visit to Chicago,” focuses on the visit of a Mrs. Latimer to her son John and his wife who live in Chicago. Mrs. Latimer is visiting from John’s hometown of Birdville, Ohio, which Ade describes as “neither village nor city, although possessing the virtues of each.” John Latimer represents a type that appears frequently in Ade’s reporting: an “eminently respectable” migrant who has thrived in Chicago but whom the city has not “spoil[ed].” He has a family, a good job, and a social position. “Therefore,” Ade writes, “he was more

than willing that his mother should come and investigate and learn just what her son had accomplished. He had a feeling that Birdville did not appreciate his success.”

Although John does not long for his boyhood home, he nevertheless brings Birdville to Chicago in order to claim the Fatted Calf that goes to local boys who have made good in the outside world. Ade makes it clear that John measures the world and his success by provincial standards—expectations, as his very coming to Chicago suggests, that begin with the promise of urban migration.

But his mother’s visit does not have the desired effect since she refuses to be impressed by any display of urban pretension, or to acknowledge that Chicago has anything on Birdville. When her daughter-in-law—a Chicago native—takes her into society, Mrs. Latimer mentions she is from Birdville. Her hostess (a society “leader”) condescendingly calls it a “charming place” and says she “dearly love[s] the country.” Bridling at the idea that Birdville is “country”—it has twenty thousand inhabitants, old families, colleges, and literary societies—Mrs. Left: In addition to writing regular newspaper columns, Ade was also a successful playwright and author of books such as In Babel.

Below: In 1893, Ade and McCutcheon began their professional collaboration with the Daily News column “Stories of the Streets and of the Town.”

Exiles in Suckerland | 11

Latimer asks her hostess where she grew up. This is a bold question, Ade explains, as “Everyone in society knew that the leader had romped away her girlhood around the country stores and jack oaks of an Illinois way station, but not one ventured in ordinary conversation, to go more than ten years back into history.” The leader’s answer dismisses her humble roots: “It was some queer little place, I believe. Really, I can hardly remember a thing about it.”

This version of Chicago history in the making features selective genealogy and class power combining to create a heritage worthy of a great city. Especially worth noting is how this constructed past depends on the suppression of small-town/rural origins and how Ade’s subjects negotiate, or fail to negotiate, this suppression. Ade was not alone in drawing attention to American migrants who left their past behind; beginning in the 1890s, Chicago fiction writers particularly stressed this point. But more than any other commentator, Ade brought these tensions into public discourse, dramatizing for an extensive readership how regional connections figured in Chicago’s emergent and fluid cultural hierarchy. Like foreign immigrants adapting to American ways, Ade’s newcomers strive to fit into the city. At the same time, he emphasizes the persistence of small-town perspectives in the seemingly urban order. The society leader in the Latimer story reveals her village background by dissociating it from her present urban identity; John Latimer exhibits his by dramatizing the distance he has traveled from his smalltown origins; and his mother reminds everyone of how close the provinces still are. Though Mrs. Latimer’s democratic attitude apparently distinguishes Birdville values from urban culture, the story itself takes place in Chicago. In other words, this triangular drama—of a Chicago native (John’s wife), a small-town resident (his mother), and two urban migrants (John and the hostess)—is less about the difference between Birdville and Chicago, and more about the mix of regional tensions that constitute urban identity.

Because Ade’s subjects are often respectable, genteel, and democratic, scholars have stressed his representation of Chicago’s burgeoning middle class. Yet if Ade constructs hinterland migrants in class terms, he also inverts this relation so that class status becomes subordinate to regional identity. For instance, in “Effie Whittlesy,” one of Ade’s best known articles, Ed Wallace, another successful small-town migrant, comes home from work one day to discover that the servant his wife has hired is a native of his hometown (and formerly his family’s hired girl). To the dismay of his cosmopolitan wife—a Baltimore native—Wallace treats Effie as a friend and equal. At first Wallace hesitates, but then “the panorama of his life was rolled backward” and the “democratic spirit” of his small-town upbringing asserts 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

itself, leading Ade to wonder whether this was “an old settlers’ reunion or a quiet family dinner.” Although the moment does not last, the shared history of the small town levels class distinctions. Wallace remembers he is “a child of the soil, who worked his way through college and came to the city in a suit of store clothes”—in fact, he still subscribes to his hometown paper. Mrs. Wallace recalls that this small-town outlook is what attracted her to Ed in the first place. As for Effie, her role as a catalyst of small-town democracy is left unresolved. Determined to underscore their connection to the hinterland and their hometown values, Wallace encourages her to visit her folks back home and, if she returns to Chicago, to come to his house as “an old acquaintance—a visitor, not a servant.”

The migrants featured in the Birdville sketch and “Effie Whittlesy” create communities that, though shaped by memory and emotion, have a dramatic, living presence in Chicago culture. Given concrete expression through Effie, the internal emotions that tie Ed Wallace to the provinces become the catalyst for human exchange and action. Here, nostalgia is a vital force, capable of undermining class barriers with face-to-face democratic values.

In this respect, late-nineteenth-century Chicago’s modernity—its ongoing newness—was tied as much to the emotional capital generated by provincial migrants as to the financial resources and raw goods that circulated between city and hinterland.

In many ways, Ade’s presentation of midwestern migrants as a distinct social group resembles the treatment usually accorded immigrant groups. But even if he had the term at his disposal, Ade likely would have resisted calling these transplants “ethnics” since doing so would have qualified their Americanness. As McCutcheon observed of his own profession, the cartoonist “is at liberty to lampoon Americans all he wishes, because Americans are a rather uncertain mass that lacks cohesion,” but must avoid targeting ethnic groups since they “are quick to resent any slur against their nationalities.”

Certainly, “Stories of the Streets and of the Town” tended to be free of caricature; however, the claim that the native-born are an “uncertain mass” does not ring true since McCutcheon here implicitly—and later in these remarks, explicitly—distinguishes the American “race” from other ethnic groups. More importantly, the apparent absence of definable features among nativeborn citizens gave the cartoonist reason to find a discursive means of transforming this uncertain mass into a recognizable group. Ironically, Ade and McCutcheon’s gentle brand of nativism led them to underscore the distinguishing characteristics of white Americans—in short, their ethnicity.

The subtext for these representations was Chicago’s rapidly growing immigrant population. Ade wrote about

the city’s foreign-born residents but not in a comprehensive or self-conscious manner. In the “Stories” column, migrants and immigrants remain mostly separate. In Babel, his 1903 collection of News and Record writings, reveals his scope; the dramas of one story rarely intersect with those of another. Still, they sometimes parallel one another. For instance, in an early piece entitled “Several Square Miles of Transplanted Poland,” Ade suggests that the West Chicago Polish community (located in and around the streets of West Division, Noble, Blue Island, Milwaukee, and Clybourn) was but an extension of the Old World. But the limits of this description are evident in “Cooped Up in Town,” an 1897 “Stories” article about an American-born, small-town manufacturer who searches the city for his migrant brother. After riding the cars to visit his brother Silas, Greenlee Banford finds himself on the city’s outskirts (in the middle of the prairie) and stops at a “Stories of the Streets and of the Town” struck a chord with many hinterland migrants who could relate to the characters’ small-town values. Below right: Cover of a collection of Ade and McCutcheon’s column.

house to ask for directions. According to Greenlee, a “big, dark-complected woman” came out and “jabbered at me in some language I couldn’t understand.” Walking to the next house—a half mile away—he sees his nephew Thaddeus, and thus discovers Silas’s home.

These two pioneer households clustered at the ragged edge of an expanding city are separated by skin color, language, and culture. All these differences distance Banford from the immigrant, align him more closely with his migrant brother, and accentuate the story’s point-ofview. Seen almost entirely through the eyes of Banford, who is describing his Chicago visit to the folks back home in East Sirocco, “Cooped Up in Town” emphasizes the ongoing connection between town and country while disrupting the hinterland’s conventional view of Chicago. Silas’s relatives believe he and his family will “never be happy in town,” especially since they’ll be “huddled in with the swarm of strangers in the new and wicked Babylon.” But Silas likes his job in the electric-car barn and while his wife is lonesome, it is not because Ade and McCutcheon’s column often focused on the isolation a crowded city could hold, as in this article entitled “Looking for a Friend.”

14 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

they are “packed into one o’them big flat buildin’s like mackeral in a kit” and do not know “who or what [their] next-door neighbor is.”

In “Looking for a Friend,” a “Stories” article published in 1895—five years prior to Theodore Dreiser’s fictional treatment of urban alienation in the popular novel Sister Carrie and well before sociologists at the University of Chicago conceptualized the notion of urban alienation— Ade offered a textbook description of the anonymity that faced newcomers from places such as Mathersville, which, like “every other town with a radius of 500 miles from Chicago” had “contributed its colony to increase the growing population of the city.” Friends back in Mathersville, Ade went on to observe, could not understand how former neighbors could become “hopelessly lost and diluted in the mass of 1,500,000 persons.”

Although some Mathersville migrants eventually find one another, they discover that “the loneliest spot on earth is in the thick of a multitude of strangers.” In “Cooped Up in Town,” Chicago’s vast scale also impedes face-to-face interaction, but there Ade turned his previous notion of urban alienation inside out by suggesting that rural spaces, not urban crowding, are responsible for the wife’s isolation. Ade left intact East Sirocco’s condescending views of immigrants and, like his narrator, did not push past superficial knowledge to challenge the urban/rural boundaries that readers on both side of the divide took for granted.

Ade’s fascination with the tracts of open prairie within the city limits suggests that he, and perhaps some of his readers, were not quite comfortable with Chicago-lovers’ “windy” insistence on the city’s metropolitan greatness.

Greenlee Banford cannot believe he is still in Chicago when he rides the streetcar north from Milwaukee Avenue on the Oregon Avenue line. He tells the folks back home that “The houses kep’ gettin’ farther apart, and for awhile we was runnin’ right through the open prairie. Then there’d be a row of houses and then some more prairie. I begin to be suspicious.” Banford had good reason to be confused. By the mid-1890s, Chicago comprised more than 180 square miles, much of it rural.

Indeed, Ade estimated that half the city was “farm and garden land, open prairie untouched by scythe or plow, or timber country which has been allowed to remain unaltered.” Chicago’s rural patches allowed people to keep cows and vegetable gardens, and harvest crops of dandelion greens.

The city’s split personality culminated in unsettling incidents, as when a man was murdered on a street corner, and his body was later torn apart by prairie wolves. Such events dramatized the natural wildness of Chicago’s frontier. The very shape of the land, Ade suggested, was at odds with traditional notions of urban space. For whenever a man travels north, south, or west

on a streetcar, “he is seldom able to point out to his carmate where the city leaves off and the country begins.”

He has no idea when he has left the city since “the imaginary line has no artificial landmarks to show its course.”

From this vantage point, late-nineteenth-century Chicago was indeed nature’s metropolis—a city whose rural hinterland often seemed very close at hand.

Thus exposed, the city limits seemed a subjective, human contrivance rather than an authentic dividing line. Pushing inward from that boundary, Ade used “Stories of the Streets and of the Town” to show the patchwork nature of Chicago’s “urban” landscape and, in his most deconstructive perceptions, suggested that what seemed to be town might really be country. On the other hand, Ade in no way claimed that hinterland and city were interchangeable. Size, scale, and variety of human experience—the spectacle of urban life—clearly distinguished Chicago from Lafayette or Kentland.

Time and again, Ade put a face to urbanization by portraying migrants who cross the line into Chicago and inhabit a space that is in the city but not of it. Ade and McCutcheon’s mid-1890s sketches attempt to document these migrants’ distinctive features and their special perception of city life. McCutcheon’s contribution to this effort is worth noting since his images tend to be illustrations rather than caricatures. Gradually, this style evolved so that by the turn of the century, McCutcheon’s representations were closer to caricature. In this change, Ade was the leader—indeed, McCutcheon credited him with guiding his early work on the News—and the cartoonist followed him toward a more humorous style of representation, a shift that led Ade to his widely read column “Fables in Slang” and first taste of national fame.

The popularity of these fables and McCutcheon’s own success on the Record necessarily changed the nature of their collaboration and their relation to the cultural forces that had brought them to Chicago. While during the early to mid-1890s, the two shared an apartment— and in the lean years, even a bed—by the early twentieth century they were each enjoying successful, prosperous careers. Both Hoosier migrants had “made it,” and their status as well-known Chicagoans was evident in the expressive work they continued to produce together.

Consider, for instance, Captain Fry’s Birthday Party, a play they collaborated on for the Little Room. Founded in the late 1890s, the Little Room was a social club whose members discussed cultural issues with a sense of humor. In 1903, the club included Chicago’s social, artistic, and professional elite: Jane Addams, Henry Blake Fuller, Harriet Monroe, Melville Stone, Edith Wyatt, Ade, and McCutcheon. The Little Room brought together old and new Chicago, urban natives from prominent families as well as newcomers such as Ade, McCutcheon, and Addams.

Exiles in Suckerland | 15

McCutcheon based his popular cartoon series “Bird Center” on a fictitious Illinois town whose residents “are all good, generous, and genuine.” This cartoon depicts some Bird Centerites returning home after a visit to Chicago, summing up the travelers’ sentiments with this line: “We had an elegant time, but we are glad to be back home again.”

16 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Though Ade wrote the script for the play, Captain Fry’s Birthday Party was based on a cartoon series that McCutcheon had begun at the Record and continued to publish in the Tribune. In the series, McCutcheon dramatized the daily goings-on of Bird Center, Illinois, a town name he borrowed from one of Ade’s fables. Still, he maintained that the characters featured in Bird Center—for instance, the town minister, banker, Civil War veteran, and several eligible young ladies—were “types which I had known during my experience in a small town.” They were “nice people, genuine and generous, and their social circle is one into which any one gifted with good instincts and decency may enter.” This claim of realism found support from his audience—in particular from Brand Whitlock, the Ohio-born Chicago journalist-turned-novelist and Progressive politician. Whitlock wrote McCutcheon from Toledo, where he was serving a term as mayor and reading the Tribune on a daily basis, to say “you have caught the very essence and spirit of our life here in the Middle West, and have portrayed it with an honesty that appeals especially to a rabid realist like me.”

Despite Whitlock’s claim of realism, the Bird Center drawings are closer to what McCutcheon called caricature. Although the images of the town green and parlor gatherings as well as the accompanying text identify Bird Center as a late-nineteenth-century midwestern village, most of the faces lack identifying features. More cartoonish than objectively realistic, Bird Centerites are icons whose meaning depends on what the reader brings to the image. This combination of realism and iconic abstraction made the town as much a concept as an identifiable place. It allowed viewers to reconstruct their own provincial lives—past or present—within a culturally familiar but geographically abstract environment. For Whitlock, Bird Center was both a recognizable town and the very essence of midwestern life. To the extent that his reaction—and audience response in general—derived from the memory of growing up in a small town, McCutcheon’s retrospective vision had the potential to create a community of readers based on nostalgia.

Chicago’s cultural elite followed the instructions on their Little Room invitation and, on January 30, 1904, “metamorphosed into natives of Bird Center.” Guests also came “in the character and garb of Bird Centerites.”

In assuming roles in this imagined community, the Little Roomers drew upon symbols and rituals of small-town life that, simply by reading the newspaper, most Chicagoans would have recognized. When urban natives and newcomers donned costumes and performed their Right: McCutcheon’s “Bird Center” column gained popularity, prompting Ade to write a play based on one of its most popular articles, “Captain Fry’s Birthday Party,” in January 1904, which the Little Roomers performed.

roles as Bird Centerites, they mimicked the ethnic identity that recent midwestern migrants experienced on a daily basis, acknowledged the contributions that smalltown migrants had made to Chicago, and perhaps most importantly, designated Main Street as a touchstone of distinctly American values. Moreover, these nostalgic reenactments demonstrated how hinterland ethnicity— being white, native born, and of provincial origin—could be marshaled to consolidate social and class power.

The Little Room drama signified the privileged place the small town would play in cosmopolitan twentiethcentury American life. Located somewhere between the objectively rendered landscape of the small town and abstract, expressionistic parodies of that landscape, Bird Center, in all its renditions, emphasized the provincial antecedents of urban culture. Contrary to Whitlock’s claims, its hold on reality was only provisional since the Little Roomers enacted a social reality that migrant Chicagoans had already abandoned. Ironically, Captain Fry’s Birthday Party resembled the ethnic literature of foreign immigrants since its concept of “home” had more to do with what the migrant longed to see than what home actually was. Although the comic antics that characterized the Little Roomers’ performance may suggest that there was little at stake in these cultural politics, the humor affirmed the migrant’s hybrid identity as a Main Street Chicagoan. At least, for Ade and McCutcheon, the joke could be quite serious. The play was their life; performing in it was an autobiographical act. Behind the burlesque lay a commitment to Hoosier ties, which the play’s generic picture of the small-town both acknowledged and obscured.

According to Ade, Captain Fry’s Birthday Party (right) gave the Little Room players the opportunity to experience “some of the characteristic features of a small social affair at Bird Center.” Far right: Little Roomers pose as characters for Captain Fry’s Birthday Party. A young John McCutcheon appears smiling to the far right in the back row.

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Exiles in Suckerland | 19

Though a prominent Chicagoan for the majority of his life, McCutcheon remained loyal to his Hoosier roots. This drawing depicts the “15th Annual Hoosier Salon,” a fictional event showing many of Indiana’s most famous claims to fame, including Purdue University and the Indiana Society of Chicago.

Provincials-turned-urban-insiders, Ade and McCutcheon celebrated their success with fellow Hoosiers in the Indiana Society of Chicago. As cofounders of the society and mainstays in the organization’s early development, these two men worked hard to promote the inherent— and paradoxical—virtues of being a Hoosier and a migrant. In this sense, their shared work, while lacking the intense self-consciousness of literary modernism, nonetheless marked a new note in the construction of Hoosier/urban identity. The creation of the society itself and its annual banquets and meetings, which continued into the 1960s, suggest that the ad hoc gatherings of Hoosiers—similar to the groups of migrants described in “Stories of the Streets and of the Town”—eventually grew into a self-acknowledged community. Similarly, by embracing their Hoosier identity, Ade and McCutcheon acknowledged their participation in the same migratory culture they represented. Together, authors and subjects collaborated in establishing the Indiana Society.

As for the gag invitations and stunts that highlighted the Hoosier ties of transplanted Chicagoans (the Fatted Calf invitation is only one example), in the end the Indiana 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Society seems cartoonish. Its identity was conceptual— flexible enough to contain the hyphenated contradictions of small-town and rural people living in and building modern Chicago. These tensions fueled the society’s ironic, self-congratulating sense of having made it in the big city, prompted their campy, sometimes edgy assertion of being from the sticks, and informed the production of their annual spectacles, which were perhaps more like the Little Room’s staging of Bird Center than any foreign immigrant society’s celebration of ethnic roots. Wayward Hoosiers were more provincial than ethnic—more provincialized than ethnicized—since they had options that most immigrants lacked. As Theodore Dreiser acidly observed at the outset of his novel Sister Carrie, home was just a train ride away, and the hinterland migrant could simply respond to the tug of nostalgia or the hardships of city life by following the tracks back to Wisconsin or Indiana. Yet if the proximity of the hinterland complicated the migrant’s metropolitan identity, it also had significant implications for the reputation of Chicago, which itself was but an hour away from the provinces and, even today, is known for its close connection to the “heartland.”

As George Ade acknowledged at the Indiana Society’s first annual banquet in 1905, smart men did leave Indiana—and they did so to make their fortune in a city whose opportunities were there for the taking. Speaking before the 375 transplanted Hoosiers, Ade recalled his arrival in a Chicago surcharged with Hoosier exiles—men who were here not because they wanted to leave Indiana, but because the population up here could be worked more easily than the bright native article down home. You know it has been said that a great many men who are Hoosiers by birth are suckers by instinct. And so we who are true to the old State cannot blame you for remaining here in Chicago, although I trust that all of you are following my example and if you succeed in separating the Chicago public from any part of its revenues, that you will invest your ill gotten gains in Indiana.

According to this view, the exiles who comprised the Indiana Society were ambitious men who had no choice but to leave home, so hemmed in were they by canny Hoosiers, so drawn were they by Chicago’s economic opportunities, its gullible citizenry, and, of course, their own desire to succeed. This notion of migrant identity has less to do with roots back home (though Indiananess remains an inherent virtue) than with a process of selfmaking that linked Main Street to Chicago at the very moment of the migrant’s birth. According to Ade, Hoosier migrants did indeed possess a hyphenated identity; they were “Hoosier-Suckers.” In uniting these terms, he referred both to the economic snares that faced greenhorns in the city, and to a long-standing nickname for Illinois residents. As early as the 1830s, state settlers were called “suckers,” after the migrating fish that flourished in

The friendship of Sigma Chi fraternity brothers Ade and McCutcheon spanned their adult lives.

Illinois rivers. Not exactly a compliment, the term also implied that settlers were easy marks. It is this sense of the word that Ade evoked and then reclaimed. On the one hand, Chicago-Hoosiers were to be admired for separating Illinois residents from their cash. On the other hand, having now become residents of Suckerland, they ran the risk of turning native—and becoming fools themselves.

No fool himself, George Ade went back home to Indiana a successful Prodigal Son, while John McCutcheon stayed in Chicago, where he became a figure beloved by Suckers and Hoosiers alike. More than an after-dinner joke, however, Ade’s thrust at urban culture underscored what migrants, hayseeds, and exiles had always known: that the origins of modern Chicago lie somewhere in the hinterland.

Timothy B. Spears teaches American Literature and Civilization at Middlebury College, and is the author of 100 Years on the Road: The Traveling Salesman in American Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4, Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Ellen Harrison McMichael in memory of C. Emory; 5 left, photos courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago; 6, CHS, McCutcheon Cartoon Collection; 7, from John McCutcheon’s Book by John McCutcheon, courtesy of John T. McCutcheon; 8–9, from The Centennial History of Sigma Chi Fraternity: 1855–1955 by Robert M. Collett (Evanston: Sigma Chi Fraternity, 1955) courtesy of Sigma Chi International Headquarters; 9 top, from George Ade by Fred C. Kelly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947); 9 bottom, from Drawn from Memory (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950); 10, from John McCutcheon’s Book by John McCutcheon, courtesy of John T. McCutcheon; 11 top, In Babel by George Ade (New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1903); 11 bottom, “Her Visit to Chicago,” Stories of the Streets and of the Town (Chicago: Chicago Record, 1894); 13 left, “Cooped Up in Town,” Stories of the Streets and of the Town (Chicago: Chicago Record, 1894); 13 bottom right, CHS, McCutcheon Cartoon Collection; 14, “Looking for a Friend,” Stories of the Streets and of the Town (Chicago: Chicago Record, 1895); 16, CHS, McCutcheon Cartoon Collection; 17, courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago; 18–19, courtesy of The Newberry Library, Chicago; 20, CHS, McCutcheon Cartoon Collection; 21, from The Centennial History of Sigma Chi Fraternity: 1855–1955 by Robert M. Collett (Evanston: Sigma Chi Fraternity, 1955), courtesy of Sigma Chi International Headquarters.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on nineteenthcentury small-town migration to big cities, read The Country and the City by Raymond Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). For more on John McCutcheon, read his autobiography, Drawn from Memory (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950).

Also see a collection of some of his best illustrations in John McCutcheon’s Book (Chicago: Caxton Club, 1948). For an enjoyable autobiography of George Ade, read George Ade by Fred C. Kelly (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1947).

Exiles in Suckerland | 21

The Irish of Chicago’s Hull-House Neighborhood ELLEN SKERRETT

Holy Family Parish brought art and culture to its West Side neighborhood.

A settlement looks about among its neighbors and finds a complete absence of art.

—Jane Addams, “A Function of the Social Settlement”

My grandmother contributed 25 cents toward a stained glass window in [Holy Family Church].

She was proud of this all of her life.

—James T. Farrell, personal correspondence Holy Family Church towers over its neighborhood in this view of Roosevelt Road, looking west from Blue Island Avenue. Nearly twenty thousand people belonged to the church, the most highly organized English-speaking parish in the city.

“The Irish of Chicago’s Hull-House Neighborhood” by Ellen Skerrett is reprinted with permission from the volume New Perspectives on the Irish Diaspora, edited by Charles Fanning (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000).

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D

etermined to live meaningful lives among the poor of Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded HullHouse on September 18, 1889. The story of how two middle-class women brought beauty and refinement to a slum district captivated audiences around the country and focused positive attention on the settlement house movement. Indeed, Hull-House quickly achieved a reputation as “Chicago’s Toynbee Hall,” the famous London settlement organized in 1884 by Rev. Samuel A. Barnett.

Addams and Starr began their work in Chicago with an unshakable belief in the transforming power of art and beauty. A Chicago Tribune feature in 1890, among the first of thousands of articles on Hull-House, praised the two women for sharing “their books, pictures, learning, gentle manner, esthetic taste” with the “uncultivated.” In her own eloquent account written for the Ladies’ Home

Before Jane Addams (top) and Ellen Gates Starr established HullHouse in 1889, nuns from Holy Family Parish, such Mother Elizabeth Sheridan, RSCJ, (above) brought education and culture to the West Side Irish.

Holy Family Church prior to street improvements.

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The Tribune covered an event at Hull-House in May 1890 (above).

Opposite: The walls of the Hull-House nursery featured reproductions of great art such as Raphael’s Madonnas. Addams noted that the children “talked in a familiar way to the babies on the wall, and sometimes climb[ed] on the chairs to kiss them.”

Journal, Addams recalled the excitement she felt on discovering “a fine old house standing well back from the street . . . [with] pillars of exceptionally pure Corinthian design and proportion.” Clearly influenced by John Ruskin and William Morris, Addams and Starr decorated the old Hull mansion on Halsted Street with “photographs and other impedimenta . . . collected in Europe, and with a few bits of family mahogany.” And they hung their “best and largest photographs,” the Madonnas of Raphael, where children in the day nursery and kindergarten could see them.

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The walls of the Hull-House nursery featured reproductions of great art such as Raphael’s Madonnas. Addams noted that the children “talked in a familiar way to the babies on the wall, and sometimes climb[ed] on the chairs to kiss them.”

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Hull-House and Butler Art Gallery, c. 1892. At the art gallery’s opening, the featured speaker proclaimed, “pictures were invaluable for poor people.”

Like middle- and upper-class Protestants of their generation, Addams and Starr regarded European cathedrals and their artistic treasures as powerful symbols of refinement and beauty. In the 1880s, they had spent considerable time together in Munich, Rome, and Madrid, studying great masterpieces and church interiors. Indeed, thanks to Ellen’s aunt, Eliza Allen Starr, Chicago’s most famous Catholic convert, the young women secured coveted tickets to ceremonies in St. Peter’s in Rome in conjunction with Pope Leo XIII’s jubilee in 1888. It was during this trip abroad that Addams resolved to establish a “cathedral of humanity,” a place both large and beautiful, dedicated to human solidarity.

On their return to Chicago, the young women formulated plans for a settlement and committed themselves to making “the aesthetic and artistic a vital influence in the lives of their neighbors.” Personal experience only deepened their conviction that rich and poor alike had a right to art and beauty. In working with children at HullHouse, Starr noted that the mind of the young responds “almost miraculously . . . to what is beautiful in its environment, and rejects what is ugly.” Addams observed the same thing in the settlement nursery. She recalled that, 26 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

surrounded by reproductions of Raphael, Donatello, and Della Robbia, the neighborhood children “talk[ed] in a familiar way to the babies on the wall, and sometimes climb[ed] upon the chairs to kiss them.”

Less than two years after beginning their work in Chicago, Addams and Starr had persuaded a wealthy donor to finance an art gallery, the first new structure in what became a complex of thirteen buildings by 1907. Reverend Barnett, vicar of St. Jude’s and the internationally known founder of Toynbee Hall, was the featured speaker at the opening of Hull-House’s Butler Art Gallery on June 20, 1891. Praising the work of Addams and Starr, he recounted his own success with “Free Picture Shows” among the poor of London’s notorious Whitechapel district. “Pictures were invaluable for poor people,” Barnett told the “public-spirited and distinguished people” who gathered in the old Hull mansion, reminding them that “the common enjoyment of common treasures would make a common life the strength of great cities.” Art Institute president Charles L. Hutchinson agreed, especially since art “brings home to the people conceptions of the great realities of Christ and immortality, and . . . develops taste and the higher purposes and instincts of humanity.”

Jane Addams speaks at a cornerstone-laying ceremony at Association House.

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A newspaper described the corner of Halsted and Polk Streets, in the center of the Hull-House neighborhood, as “one of the Chicago’s busiest crossroads.” The directory lists the classes, clubs, apartments, and music school housed in the building.

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Painting of the Holy Family, based on a work by Murillo, located above the main altar at Holy Family Church. Journalists and social reformers identified Hull-House as the neighborhood’s central cultural institution; Holy Family Parish, however, enjoyed a reputation for art and music that dated to 1857.

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Although journalists and social reformers described Hull-House and the Butler Art Gallery as the only places of beauty in the neighborhood, this was hardly the case.

Just a few blocks away stood Holy Family Church, a landmark on Twelfth Street since its dedication in 1860.

And right next door was St. Ignatius College (1870), a massive four-story structure with an ornate library, museum, and meeting hall. The Gothic church of Holy Family, built by Irish immigrants, was a working-class “art institute” with stained glass windows, intricate stencils and frescoes, elaborately carved altars, and statues.

Indeed, one of its most prominent features was a copy of Murillo’s “Holy Family,” which hung above the main altar. Also nearby were the parishes of St. Francis of Assisi (German), St. Wenceslaus (Bohemian), and Notre Dame (French). Considerably smaller than Holy Family, each church nevertheless was a place of beauty and refinement. And others would follow. In 1899, Italian Catholics began worshiping in Holy Guardian Angel Church and, by 1910, a second Italian parish, Our

Lady of Pompeii, organized to meet the needs of the growing population.

As a result of Addams’s skills as a writer and lecturer, Hull-House soon became “one of the most useful and most widely known institutions in the world for the uplifting of the neglected masses.” In an address before the School of Applied Ethics in Plymouth, Massachusetts, in 1892, Addams discussed the underlying motives behind settlement work and its attraction for educated young men and women who “long to give tangible expression to the democratic ideal.” Drawing upon her own experience on Chicago’s Near West Side, she asserted that the poor “live for the moment side by side, many of them without knowledge of each other, without fellowship, without local tradition or public spirit, without social organization of any kind.” And she lamented that “The people who might [remedy this situation], who have the social tact and training, the large houses, and the traditions and customs of hospitality, live in other parts of the city.”

St. Ignatius College, located next to Holy Family Church, offered an ornate library, museum, and meeting hall.

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Holy Family, like many other Catholic churches, held bazaars (above) and other neighborhood fundraising events. Money raised went to the parochial schools and enhanced the beauty of the church.

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Copelin and Son photograph of the regal Holy Family Church interior. Irish immigrants built this working-class “art institute,� which features stained glass windows, intricate stencils and frescoes, elaborately carved altars, and statues.

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This 1854 lithograph, “Outward bound/Quay of Dublin,� depicts a poor Irishman dreaming of boat passage to America. While many Irish citizens shared this dream, they often found poverty and discrimination here. Holy Family Parish helped immigrants adjust to their new lives.

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Many immigrants found community in ethnic organizations and clubs. Here the Irish Fellowship Club holds its banquet on March 16, 1909.

Addams’s harsh assessment of neighborhood life would have confounded the twenty thousand Irish men, women, and children who belonged to Holy Family, the most highly organized English-speaking parish in Chicago. Not only did they worship in one of the most beautiful churches in the city, but they came into regular contact with educated people, Jesuit priests and brothers, the Religious of the Sacred Heart, and the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who taught five thousand young people in Holy Family’s schools, fully 15 percent of the entire Catholic school population in the city in 1890. Equally significant, the “mother parish” of the Near West Side had already fostered religious vocations among the children of Irish immigrants, providing leadership in the immediate neighborhood as well as in new Catholic parishes beyond.

That the Irish of Holy Family remained virtually invisible in the early scholarly literature on Hull-House is not surprising. By her own account, Addams preferred newly arrived Italians who reminded her of the picturesque quarters she had visited in Naples and Rome. In March 1889, for example, she began “looking up different slums” in

Chicago with an attendance officer from the Board of Education. While expressing compassion for the poverty of the North Side Italians, she noted that the “mild eyed Madonnas . . . never begged nor even complained, and in all respects are immensely more attractive to me than the Irish neighborhood I went into last week.”

In light of Addams’s apparent dislike of the Irish, it is a mystery why she opened her settlement just blocks from Holy Family, the most prominent Irish Catholic church in the city—and the most Roman. While she shared many of Starr’s ideas about beauty and art, Addams remained deeply suspicious of elaborate Catholic ritual. During her 1888 trip to Rome, for example, she wrote her sister lengthy descriptions of a beatification ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica.

Although clearly awed by the decorations in the chapel “ablaze with candles, thousands of them on all sides,” the procession of “thirteen gorgeously red cardinals,” and the very fine music, she concluded that it was “absurd . . . to connect all this pageant and pride with the religion which Christ himself taught.” Moreover, Addams characterized the veneration of saints’ relics as “depravity,” wondering, “how in the world sensible people ever got into it.”

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Above: Holy Family Church prior to the completion of the tower. Below: Holy Family Church, St. Ignatius College, Sodality Hall, and nearby buildings, 1890s.

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This article explores the neglected Irish dimension of the Hull-House neighborhood. It is an attempt to describe the Irish of Holy Family as they saw themselves, not as impoverished slum dwellers without fellowship or organization, but as urban, practicing Catholics whose church and schools invested neighborhood life with meaning and beauty. The photographs published here address three questions: what did Holy Family parish look like in the nineteenth century, how did it become a sacred place in the lives of Irish Catholics and their neighborhood, and what difference did it make for the larger city?

Above: the plot of the location of the buildings in the neighborhood. Holy Family parishioners viewed themselves as urban, practicing Catholics whose churches and schools invested neighborhood life with meaning and beauty. Right: This ledger lists income and expenses for items such as church bazaars, which raised money for church improvements. Many parishioners donated money to the church for aesthetic purposes. This ledger also notes a redecoration of the church in 1889, the same year that Hull-House opened.

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This 1923 map of the Holy Family Parish shows how the church’s many buildings spread out over the entire neighborhood. The map also highlights the city’s origins as well as the starting point of the Great Chicago Fire.

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This 1857 Chicago Tribune editorial cautioned against the establishment of a Jesuit church and university because “the Society of Jesus is the most virulent and relentless enemy of the Protestant faith and Democratic government.”

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Creating Sacred Space on the Prairie It is no exaggeration to say that the Jesuit parish of Holy Family put the Irish on the map. When the Catholic diocese of Chicago was established in 1843, there was a single parish in the city, St. Mary’s, at Madison Street and Wabash Avenue. Between 1846 and 1856, ten more parishes organized, but even these were inadequate for the rapidly expanding Irish and German Catholic population. The extent of the problem was clearly revealed in August 1856 when Rev. Arnold Damen, SJ, preached a mission. Twelve thousand men, women, and children received Communion, but “[none] of the churches could accommodate the multitude that crowded from all parts of the city.” Even with its new galleries, St. Mary’s Cathedral was too small, and the mission was transferred to the Irish parish of Holy Name on the North Side.

After conferring with his Jesuit superiors in St. Louis, Father Damen agreed to establish a parish in Chicago but refused the bishop’s request to take over Holy Name as well as his offer of property at Madison Street and Ogden Avenue. Instead, the forty-two-year-old priest purchased thirty-two lots near the intersection of Blue Island Avenue and Twelfth Street, directly south and west of the city’s business district, convinced that “Here we will have a large Catholic population at once, sufficient to fill a large church.” And he was right. Between 1857 and 1860, 151 men and women were married at Holy Family and 1,462 babies were baptized.

While sacramental records confirmed Father Damen’s optimism, they tell only one part of the Holy Family story. When the Chicago Daily Journal announced that a church, college, and free school would be constructed “on a scale of magnitude equal to any of the same character in the United States,” the Chicago Tribune struck back. In its lead editorial of May 25, 1857, the widely respected abolitionist newspaper “beg[ged] Protestants to think twice before they aid in any way the founding of Jesuit institutions in this city.” Reflecting nativist sentiments of the day, the Tribune claimed: “We do this not in a spirit of intolerance, but upon the warrant of facts which show that the Society of Jesus is the most virulent and relentless enemy of the Protestant faith and Democratic government.”

The anti-Catholicism of the Tribune notwithstanding, there was another, equally compelling, obstacle. As the Depression of 1857 deepened, Chicagoans of all classes began to feel the effects of bank failures in the East and Midwest. Nevertheless, Father Damen raised thirty thousand dollars in pledges toward the new church and college on Twelfth Street, informing his provincial in May that “people are astonished that I can get money at all.”

The cornerstone laying of Holy Family Church on August 23, 1857, set the tone for parish life for decades to come.

Press accounts commented favorably on the large crowd

Published in 1878, this booklet called Holy Family Church “one of the wonders of the West.�

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The first Holy Family Church building on Eleventh Street opened in 1857 as a temporary structure until the permanent church was dedicated in 1860. This original frame church was destroyed by fire in 1864.

that gathered for the “appropriate and imposing ceremonies” conducted by Bishop Anthony O’Regan, “assisted by the entire body of the Chicago Catholic clergy.” Moreover, the presence of “several military groups and the Hibernian Society” confirmed Holy Family’s status as an Irish parish.

Although newspapers in the nineteenth century routinely characterized Catholic devotion as spectacle, providing readers with detailed accounts of rituals and their meaning, there were limits to such favorable coverage.

The Tribune, for example, regarded it as scandalous that Irish Catholics sacrificed to build beautiful churches. An 1857 editorial claimed that “nine-tenths of the beggars” in Chicago were Irish and that “hundreds of poor servant girls and laboring men, now in want of food, shelter, and fire” have spent their hard-earned money on the Catholic Church. Indeed, the newspaper suggested that Bishop O’Regan ought to turn Holy Name Cathedral “into a workshop for the unemployed.” Yet as construction proceeded on Holy Family Church, the Tribune began to sound a different note. When the parish sponsored a five-day fair in Metropolitan Hall downtown during the Christmas season of 1857, the newspaper conceded that “the Church will be one of the finest stone edifices in the West and will add greatly to the character of our growing city for architectural taste and grandeur.”

According to Father Damen’s written reports, by August 1858, approximately eight thousand men, women, and children worshiped in the temporary frame church every Sunday and “quite a number of them assist at the holy sacrifice of the mass every day.” Nearly 400 42 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

children had been prepared for their First Communion and 258 confirmed. He reported, “We have also commenced two day schools for the poor,” with an attendance between 300 and 400 children. Despite these signs of spiritual success, however, Father Damen noted, “times have turned out in such a manner that we foresee nothing but misery and poverty. Last winter we . . . [relieved] about 3,000 persons or families. This winter the poverty will be greater and we must be prepared to relieve a greater number of poor people.”

Considering the material circumstances of Holy Family parishioners, did it make sense to invest so much money in a permanent church capable of accommodating six thousand people? Far from being a luxury, the new edifice was essential because the temporary wooden structure was filled to overflowing—even on weekdays.

During May 1859, for example, “about eight hundred persons, for the most part women, came to mass [and devotions in honor of the Blessed Virgin Mary] and in the evening as many men to the sermon.” These numbers were all the more significant because they reflected the profound changes wrought by the “Devotional Revolution” in Ireland. After the Great Famine of the 1840s, Irish Catholics became more regular in their practice of religion, contributing to the erection of new churches and enthusiastically supporting such devotions as novenas, rosaries, benediction, and Stations of the Cross. Just as important was the growing presence of Irish males in the pews of American Catholic churches.

That working-class Irish men attended mass week in and week out amazed—and sometimes puzzled—social

“The Window of the First Vows,” commemorating the beginning of the Society of Jesus, was installed in Holy Family Church in 1907 during the parish’s fiftieth jubilee.

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The breathtaking main altar of Holy Family, carved in 1865 by Anthony Buscher, during High Mass. The altar has five Gothic turrets capped by electric lights added in 1899.

reformers. But as the Holy Family experience makes abundantly clear, the benefits of attending church were cultural as well as spiritual.

With its price tag of two hundred thousand dollars, Holy Family was the most expensive church erected in Chicago in the 1850s—and the most beautiful. As news accounts confirmed, creating this sacred space was not a pious activity for the fainthearted. It involved cooperation, commitment, and money—lots of it—as well as competition. That Holy Family compared favorably with the Gothic edifices built by Protestant congregations was no accident. Father Damen hired John Van Osdel, the city’s leading architect, to complete the interior, and he specified that Robert Carse, the noted New York stained 44 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

glass expert, create windows equal in quality to those in St. James Episcopal Church on the North Side! Moreover, the brickwork of Holy Family was to be “of best possible character,” and Patrick O’Connor’s workers were instructed to fill the joints “solid with good lime and clean lake shore sand mortar.”

Contrary to conventional wisdom, investing scarce resources in refinement and beauty paid dividends. In addition to providing jobs for immigrant laborers, the construction of the Gothic edifice actually helped to build community in the developing neighborhood. Accustomed to “penny-a-week” collections for new chapels in Ireland, the Chicago Irish responded enthusiastically to appeals for Holy Family Church. Right from the start, the parish

was divided into seventeen districts (much like the precincts of a city ward), each with its own volunteer collector who went door-to-door soliciting funds. Twelve more men served as “rovers” in the city at large, relying on their own personal contacts to raise funds in offices, hotels, saloons, and factories. The campaign to complete Holy Family did more than strengthen the link between parish and neighborhood; it also boosted the political careers of aldermen “Honest John” Comiskey and Patrick Rafferty. During their tenure on the city council, the immigrant Irish aldermen voted for public works projects that materially improved the neighborhood. And Comiskey and Rafferty also used their influence to ensure that the spacious grounds of Holy Family Church and St. Ignatius College remained intact.

The annual fairs in the parish played a crucial role in establishing Holy Family as a place of culture, according to the Tribune, “in the outskirts of the city.” The lavish exhibition and concert, which opened in the unconsecrated nave of the Gothic church in June 1859, for example, began a tradition that continued for decades. Part highbrow entertainment and bazaar, Holy Family’s fairs featured drama and music as well as the sale of domestic goods, everything from fancy needlework and homemade delicacies to rosaries, paintings, and statues. Few congregations—Protestant or Catholic—were as successful in raising funds, and Chicago newspapers regularly reported the proceeds, which ranged from $8,500 in the 1860s to a phenomenal $20,000 in the 1890s. Beyond their significance as an important source of revenue, these events contributed to Holy Family’s growing reputation as a center of neighborhood life and refinement.

The completion of Holy Family Church in three years’ time was a remarkable accomplishment for a predominantly working-class Irish parish. (The much larger St. Patrick’s in New York, begun in 1858, for example, was under construction for twenty more years.) Although the Tribune characterized the exterior of the Gothic edifice as “huge and unattractive, [looming] above the humble [homes] . . . like a stately ox among so many sheep,” the newspaper praised its interior as “one of the most elegant we . . . have seen, and will challenge comparison certainly with any in the Northwest.” The prediction was soon fulfilled, thanks to Anthony Buscher’s craftsmanship.

According to neighborhood legend, Father Damen found the German immigrant carving cigar store Indians and persuaded him to devote his artistic talents to Holy

This rendition of Da Vinci’s Last Supper (far left) was carved into the main altar

by Sebastian Buscher, nephew of Anthony (left). Holy Family’s strong sense of Irish heritage can be seen in the church’s impressive statue of Saint Patrick (below), patron saint of Ireland.

Family Church, with dazzling result. Buscher began his work at a time when American Protestants were debating the propriety of ornament in their churches, especially such marks of refinement as stained glass windows and frescoes. That the Irish of Holy Family had no such qualms when it came to enriching the interior of their Gothic edifice became clear in 1861 when they took up a collection for a statue of St. Patrick. Buscher’s carving of the patron saint of Ireland didn’t disappoint: the only gold-leafed “St. Patrick” in Chicago, it constituted a positive symbol of group identity in an era when the Irish were still being portrayed as crime-ridden and drunken sots. And that was merely the beginning.

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One of Holy Family’s side altars, the Altar of the Blessed Virgin, decorated for the month of May. 46 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Buscher’s masterpiece, financed by the contributions of eight hundred men and women, was a fifty-two-foot-high main altar, a veritable “Communion of Saints” that symbolically linked parishioners with God in heaven. Just above the gold tabernacle that held the Blessed Sacrament stood figures representing the Greek and Roman doctors of the Church. At the very top were statues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, the cardinal virtues to which all Catholics aspired (each statue bearing its own disParishes charged pew rents to make money. This 1896 diagram (below) shows rents ranging from fifty dollars a year for the best pews to eight dollars a year for the least desirable. Above: the young Rev. Arnold Damen. Born in Holland, he traveled to America in 1837 to begin his novitiate.

He spent several years in St. Louis before moving to Chicago in May 1857.

tinctive symbol). But for many parishioners who had left behind beloved parents and siblings in Ireland, the main altar took on new layers of meaning.

Surrounding the traditional oil painting of the Holy Family were statues of Jesus’ maternal grandparents and cousins—reunited under the watchful gaze of celestial cherubs and God the Father. And, over the years, more than a few mothers and fathers sitting in the pews must have thought, “Sure weren’t they the Holy Family, they only had the one!”

Despite the fact that the ritual blessing and mass took the better part of Sunday, October 15, 1865, crowds remained behind long after bishops from Milwaukee, Detroit, Alton, and Pittsburgh had left the church. Why? Part of the reason had to do with the illumination of the main altar by gas jets, a marvel of technology. Because Buscher worked in wood, rather than marble, he was able to create an altar of massive proportions, one that nearly touched the ceiling of Holy Family Church. Press accounts were lavish in their praise, describing it as “the most beautiful altar ever erected on the soil of the new world.” But there was more to it than that, asserted the Chicago Republican.

Explaining that Catholicism was “a religion of symbols,” the newspaper insisted that “it appeals to the soul through the senses . . . employ[ing] poetry and music, sculpture and painting, and the symbolism of color to reach the feelings, and connect them with the divine by a bridge of beauty.”

In terms of its structure and organization, Holy Family was clearly a Jesuit parish, yet it was also unmistakably Irish—with one important difference. Very few of its members had ever worshiped in such a magnificent church in Ireland. Indeed, the Gothic edifice on Twelfth Street was wholly an American creation, supported by voluntary contributions, and, thanks to Father Damen, it enjoyed a national reputation. Born in Holland in 1815, Father Damen emigrated in 1837, determined to become an American Jesuit missionary and preacher. And he did.

Although English was his second language, Father Damen gained a reputation as a speaker of “uncommon eloquence.” His sermons in the College Church of St. Louis University between 1847 and 1857 drew “all classes of persons,” and a newspaper dubbed him the “Catholic Beecher,” after the famous Presbyterian minister Lyman Beecher. Moreover, during his first two decades in Chicago, Father Damen personally conducted more than two hundred missions, making Holy Family a household name in cities across the country.

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In this portrait of The Great Jesuit Missionary Fathers of the Last Half of the Nineteenth Century (above), Father Damen is in the front row with his arm over the chair. Below: Father Damen’s fiftieth year as a priest was marked with a Golden Jubilee that featured an organ recital, choral performances, and a benediction.

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This “Address to Rev. Arnold Damen, S. J., on the Occasion of His Golden Jubilee” congratulated the priest “in behalf of all your old parishioners, present or absent; and in the name of the entire city.”

Above: Mother Margaret Gallwey, RSCJ, a native of County Cork, Ireland, welcomed the opportunity to establish a convent academy in the Jesuit parish.

Catholic Schools in the Urban Neighborhood Far from being a “ghetto” parish that limited the aspirations of poor Irish families, Holy Family set new standards for church building and decoration as well as for Catholic education. At the same time that architect Van Osdel was completing the interior of the Gothic edifice on Twelfth Street, the Religious of the Sacred Heart commissioned him to draw up plans for their new convent and academy on Taylor Street. Significantly, although the Tribune continued to criticize the Jesuits of Holy Family, the newspaper had looked favorably on the girls’ school because it also served the city’s Protestant elite. Under the heading “West Side Improvements,” in January 1860, for example, the Tribune noted that the nuns were building a sixty-thousand-dollar structure “in the same style they have at New Orleans, Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis and other cities in the United States.”

Mother Margaret Galwey, RSCJ, a native of County Cork, Ireland, welcomed the opportunity to establish a foundation in the Jesuit parish. Not only had the sisters’ boarding school on the North Side become crowded, but its location near the Rush Street Bridge was a danger to students. On the sparsely settled West Side, however, the “Seminary” would enjoy landscaped grounds with ample room for expansion. Although there were obvious class differences between parishioners and the teaching sisters, the Irish of Holy Family held the Religious of the Sacred Heart in great esteem, as events in August 1860 revealed. In their convent journal (written in French), the nuns commented favorably on the crowds of parishioners who turned out to help them move. “Never before had the city of Chicago witnessed such a parade,” they claimed. The daily newspapers concurred, noting that “this removal of ordinary household goods, chattels and fixtures was made quite imposing by a procession of forty drays and thirty-five express wagons, in all seventyfive loaded vehicles.”

In contrast to the publicly active Irish Sisters of Mercy, who were known as Chicago’s “walking nuns,” the Religious of the Sacred Heart remained semi-cloistered.

Nevertheless, through their work in the classroom they influenced thousands of young people in Holy Family parish, using tuition from boarders to pay the costs of educating the poor. While the Constitution of the Society of the Sacred Heart clearly established that impoverished children enjoyed “additional claims to the tenderness and zeal” of the sisters, the depth of their commitment was astonishing: from 1867 through 1899, the “Madames” (as they were often called) annually taught nine hundred students and also prepared classes for First Communion and confirmation. Father Damen noted, gratefully, in his reports to his Jesuit superiors that in addition to contributing toward the construction of Holy Family, the Sacred Heart nuns “render immense service Holy Family Parish | 49

Top: Sacred Heart Convent Chapel, 1879, a rare example of women’s sacred space. Above: View of Sacred Heart Convent Academy and grounds, later the Chicago Hebrew Institute.

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The task fell to Sister Mary Agatha Hurley, a native of Cloyne, County Cork, and a small band of sisters who arrived in Chicago in August 1867. The contrast with Iowa’s rich farmland could not have been more shocking. Nearly sixty years later, Sister Mary Scholastica McLaughlin still recalled with clarity the brutal heat wave and the sight of “three hundred children whose laughs grew stronger the louder they screamed, jumping over gates.” She remembered the taste of lukewarm Lake Michigan water, noting poignantly that “those days we lived like the poor who never buy ice nor did we want it.” Within two months, the community of eleven nuns could point with pride to an enrollment of 850 students in two schools, “with 150 more striving for entrance.”

Sister Agatha and her BVM colleagues continued to live and teach in makeshift quarters until 1870, when the modern brick school and convent of St. Aloysius opened on Maxwell Street.

St. Aloysius School, 631 West Maxwell Street, c. 1880.

to our church. They teach the parochial school of the girls . . . and they do it for nothing.”

Catholic schools strengthened parishioners’ ties to the neighborhood and deepened the bonds of community.

Yet from the Protestant vantage point, there was little reason to celebrate the growth of parishes such as Holy Family. On the contrary, warned Baptist minister Warren Randolph, DD, of Boston. At a national meeting in Chicago in May 1867, he asserted that the future of America as a Christian country was imperiled by “Romanists who have already come up like the frogs of Egypt, into all our houses, and who are still pouring in upon us at the rate of almost a thousand a day.”

To ensure these arrived immigrants would have access to Catholic education, Father Damen sought more teaching nuns from a predominantly Irish order, the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs). Founded by Dublin native Mary Frances Clarke in Philadelphia in 1833, the community had grown dramatically since the nuns established their motherhouse in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1843.

Despite initial setbacks, the BVMs prospered to such an extent that they were able to make a foundation in Chicago in 1867, a decision that had profound consequences for the city as well as for their order. Father Damen’s request was characteristically blunt. “We would like to get nine Sisters,” he wrote the nuns’ spiritual director, “but try to send three or four at once if possible and let them be good teachers, so as to make a good impression, for the first impression is generally the lasting one.”

Sister Agatha Hurley established St. Aloysius School in Holy Family parish in 1867, the first of more than twenty BVM schools in Chicago.

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The ninety pupils of Room 18, Holy Family School, 1892. Below: Mother Isabella Kane, BVM. Mary Kane, an immigrant from Ireland, was among the first of 196 young women from Holy Family Parish to join the BVM order between 1870 and 1925.

What difference did these women religious make in the lives of Irish immigrants? No clearer example exists than the career of Mary Kane. Born in Carrigaholt, County Clare, Ireland, in 1855, she came with her widowed mother to Holy Family parish in 1865. As a student under the care of the Religious of the Sacred Heart, Mary participated fully in the sacramental life of the parish, making her First Communion and confirmation in front of the massive altar in the Gothic church on Twelfth Street. In August 1867, she joined hundreds of children gathered to welcome Sister Agatha Hurley and was entrusted with the altar stone for the nuns’ chapel on Halsted Street. Mary Kane not only became a diligent BVM pupil, but in 1870 she joined the order, among the first of 196 young women from Holy Family parish to take the veil during the next fifty years.

Her working-class origins notwithstanding, Sister Mary Isabella Kane became an accomplished musician and art teacher and she steadily rose through the ranks of her community, eventually serving as Superior in academies in Iowa and Kansas. Elected head of her order in 1919, Mother Isabella was directly involved in opening thirtythree new schools in the Midwest and California. But two Chicago institutions bore her special imprint: Immaculata High School (1922), designed by the noted architect Barry Byrne; and the Art Deco skyscraper known as Mundelein College (1931). Not only did 52 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Mother Isabella arrange financing for the million-dollar liberal arts college during the depths of the depression, but she took an active role in decorating the fifteen-story limestone “temple of classic beauty in the heart of a great city.” Shortly before Mother Isabella Kane’s death in 1935, Loyola University awarded her an honorary doctor of law degree, publicly acknowledging her role as an “eminent builder.”

That Holy Family parish also succeeded in educating the sons of Irish immigrants was due in no small part to the “Brothers’ School” directed by Jesuits Andrew and Thomas O’Neill. As Famine refugees from County Wicklow, Ireland, the O’Neill brothers knew firsthand the difficulties facing newcomers in America. From the 1860s through the 1890s, their school earned a reputation for preparing nearly thirty thousand boys to function in the larger society, with no distinction made for students unable to afford the tuition of fifty cents a month. In terms of its physical plant, the Brothers’ School on Morgan Street compared favorably with local public schools, and it enjoyed several advantages. The eleven-month course of study emphasized mathematics and bookkeeping, skills that had practical application in Chicago’s expanding economy. And at a time when there were few Catholic teachers in the public schools, the faculty at Holy Family included Irish schoolmasters as well as young women who had grown up in the parish.

Revising Stereotypes To an extent that historians have not fully appreciated, parishes represented a new beginning for immigrants who had escaped Famine and eviction. By building and decorating churches and establishing schools and charitable organizations, the Irish created a place for themselves in Chicago. Moreover, as the case of Holy Family demonstrates, participation in religious rituals and parish organizations contributed to a more positive image of the Irish city wide. From the 1860s through the early 1900s, Chicago’s newspapers routinely commented on the crowds at Sunday mass, the decorations at Christmas and Easter, and the devotions, such as the Stations of the Cross and the May crownings. But year after year, it was the Corpus Christi and Confirmation Day parades that received the most attention. The sight of hundreds of children dressed in white marching through the neighborhood—models of order and decorum—offered visible proof that the Irish were becoming devout, disciplined urban dwellers.

One of the most cherished traditions to emerge in Holy Family was the annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration.

In contrast to the official parade and banquets downtown, which were predominantly male oriented, these events brought together thousands of Irish men, women, and children. What attracted them? Primarily entertainment, which was remarkably broad in range. An early program, for example, featured such crowd pleasers as traditional Irish airs and music by the juvenile band along with selections from Mestrino sung by eight choristers “dressed in Jewish costume.” Among the dramatic presentations were “The President and the OfficeSeeker,” a farce entitled “The Spectre Bridegroom,” and “The Brigade at Fontenoy,” a patriotic ballad beloved by Irish nationalists. The evening, termed a “brilliant success” by the Chicago Times, concluded with four grand tableaux vivants depicting scenes from the life of St. Patrick. Far from being stuffy, staid affairs, the March 17 celebrations were a source of genuine delight for adults and children alike. Particularly memorable were the firstnight performances by children in the primary grades, who sang songs and answered catechism questions. In addition to bridging the gap between Irish immigrants and American-born sons and daughters, these performances fostered pride in a common Catholic identity.

Audiences eagerly awaited Rev. Andrew O’Neill’s query, “What is the One True Church?” Invariably, a boy or girl would reply with great enthusiasm, “Holy Family,” bringing the house down with laughter.

Holy Family’s commitment to beauty and refinement was further enhanced in 1870 with the opening of St. Ignatius College, the forerunner of Loyola University.

According to one Jesuit visitor from Europe, the $230,000 building just east of the Gothic church was

Advertisements from local newspapers appealed to parents of children making their First Communion.

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In the 1880s and 1890s, thousands of neighborhood residents turned out to see the Holy Family Confirmation Day parades, annual events that received widespread coverage in the metropolitan press.

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Above: This German woodcut depicts an interesting view of “Hl. Familie Kirche und St. Ignatius College.”

On October 27, 1870, the Great Organ of Holy Family Church, the largest organ in the United States at the time, was introduced to parishioners with a sacred concert. Right: the instrument and its organists.

begun “on a large scale to make it possible to compete with the Protestant colleges and the public schools, which are like palaces.” While few Irish parishioners could afford the luxury of a college education, they enjoyed the benefits of art and culture. The first production in Chicago of Mozart’s “Twelfth Mass,” for example, occurred at the dedication of Holy Family in 1860, no small feat in a city that lacked a symphony orchestra. But it was the organ, with its sixty-three stops and nearly four thousand pipes imported from Paris, that assured Holy Family’s reputation for fine music. Built by Louis Mitchel of Montreal, “The Largest Church Organ in the United States” was inaugurated with a great concert on October 20, 1870, featuring selections from Rossini, Mendelssohn, Haydn, and Handel.

Had it not been for the Great Fire of October 1871, Chicagoans may have remained unaware of the modest circumstances in which many Holy Family parishioners 56 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Above: The O’Leary home (137 De Koven Street) after the Great Fire of 1871. Catherine and Patrick O’Leary were respected members of Holy Family Parish. Chicago’s Irish population suffered due to the myth of Mrs. O’Leary’s cow starting the fire (below).

lived. All that changed when a fire in the barn behind Catherine and Patrick O’Leary’s frame house on DeKoven Street roared out of control and spread eastward, eventually destroying the city’s business district as well as residential areas on the north and south sides of the river.

Newspaper reporters quickly pinned the blame on Mrs. O’Leary and her cow, creating perhaps America’s first urban legend. In recounting his search for the O’Leary home, a New York Daily Tribune correspondent drew on accepted stereotypes of Irish Catholic immigrants as poverty-stricken and superstitious. He described the neighborhood of “shabby wooden houses, with dirty dooryards and unpainted fences falling to decay” and “[s]latternly women [whose] bare-legged children skirmished with the geese.” Proclaiming that “there was no shabbier hut in Chicago nor Tipperary,” the reporter informed his readers that the O’Leary house bore a curse as powerful as any in Greek mythology. Moreover, in characterizing Catherine O’Leary, a respected member of Holy Family Church, as “Our Lady of the Lamp,” the New York Tribune account denigrated Irish Catholic veneration of saints, especially Mary.

Lingering anti-Irish and anti-Catholic sentiment may explain, in part, why Holy Family parishioners soon embraced a different myth about the Great Fire of 1871. It involved Father Damen, who was preaching a mission in Brooklyn when he learned that Chicago was in flames. During the night, while “praying for the safety of his church and the homes of his parishioners,” Father Damen sought the intercession of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. If Holy Family were spared destruction, he promised to light candles in front of her statue. Whether the Gothic church and St. Ignatius College were directly threatened remains unclear, but the wind did shift and crossed the river, burning down huge sections of the city.

Popular belief in the myth of divine intervention was apparent within weeks: at a special ceremony, parishioners sang “the Miserere to atone for the faults, committed during the last year, and . . . the Te Deum, to extend thanks to God for ‘all blessings received.’” Moreover, according to the pulpit announcements, there were collections “after all the masses to keep lights constantly burning before the statue of Our Lady of Perpetual Help,” fulfilling Father Damen’s vow.

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The parish’s many schools included (clockwise from top left): St. Agnes’, Sacred Heart, St. Joseph’s, St. Aloysius, Holy Family, and Guardian Angel.

Investing in the Future However despised by Protestants, Catholic material culture continued to matter to Irish men, women, and children, and it also had long-term consequences for the larger city. In contrast to mainline Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues that sought new locations after the Great Fire of 1871, for example, Holy Family parishioners reinvested in their neighborhood. The litany of improvements to the church alone was impressive, indeed: new side altars; Stations of the Cross; intricately carved confessionals; imported statues from Europe; and in 1874, a massive 266-foot tower built by parishioner James P. Tracey. Equally significant was the expansion of the parish’s school system to include three new institutions—Guardian Angel on Forquer Street, St. Joseph on Thirteenth Street, and St. Agnes on Morgan Street. In an increasingly urban neighborhood, these branch schools not only reduced the distances smaller children had to walk, but they also helped to build up the parish. (By his own account, Father Damen estimated that the sisters reached at least four-fifths of the congregation through the Catholic schools.) While critics continued to lam58 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

baste the Irish commitment to “brick-and-mortar” Catholicism, Holy Family’s success could not be ignored.

Far from being a burden to taxpayers, one newspaper noted, the parish had filled up the neighborhood “with a dense and closely settled population—thus swelling the assessed value of the property by many millions and increasing the revenues of the city and county in a corresponding ratio.”

Although continued immigration from Ireland during the late 1870s and 1880s brought new life to Holy Family parish, depressions in the local economy and labor strikes profoundly affected the neighborhood. A Jesuit census taker put the matter succinctly by expressing the hope that “before the end of this long and tedious Visitation of the Parish not more than 300 families had struck their tents & pitched them elsewhere.” Left behind were many destitute Irish men and women, as the Little Sisters of the Poor—a third community of nuns in the neighborhood—discovered in 1876 when they opened a home for the elderly in the Hull mansion on Halsted Street (the same red-brick building in which Addams and Starr would later begin their social settlement).

Almost immediately, however, the Little Sisters of the Poor made plans to erect a new complex because their rented space had become overcrowded and “badly adapted to the present requirements.” Using donations from their daily rounds of begging, they purchased a large tract of land along Harrison Street, and before long, sixteen nuns, many of them of Irish birth, were caring for upwards of two hundred men and women without “distinction made as to creed or nationality.” A few weeks after Hull-House opened, Archbishop Patrick A. Feehan dedicated yet another brick building for the growing number of elderly. He praised the sisters’ devotion to the poor and commented on the beauty of the chapel where the aged and infirm would worship. And the archbishop reminded the great crowd at the dedication that “it would be well for all of every class and condition” to see for themselves the good work being done by the Little Sisters of the Poor.

As far as the Irish of Holy Family were concerned, there was not anything unusual about men and women who chose to live among the poor, caring for the aged, teaching in classrooms, and preparing children to receive the sacraments. In contrast to Irish politicians, whose exploits provided colorful copy for newspapers and grist for reformers, men and women religious neither expected nor sought public notice. Yet the presence of nuns, especially, did not go unobserved or unappreciated by neighborhood residents. Indeed, even Jane Addams of Hull-House benefited.

While riding the streetcar home one evening, she discovered that an Italian laborer had paid her way. Drawing comfort from this “little courtesy,” Addams asked the Irish conductor to point out her benefactor and was told, “I cannot tell one dago from another when they are in a gang, but sure, any one of them would do it for you as quick as they would for the Sisters.”

Elizabeth Mary Sheridan and Thomas S. Fitzgerald offer classic examples of the way in which “homegrown” talent provided leadership and continuity in an IrishAmerican neighborhood. Born in London in 1847, Lizzie Sheridan came to Chicago as an infant. She made her First Communion in the original frame church of Holy Family and was the first girl from the parish to enroll in Sacred Heart Convent Academy in 1860. After graduation, Sheridan began her teaching career in the Brothers’ School in a classroom of seventy-five boys. The experience stood her in good stead after she joined the Religious of the Sacred Heart and was appointed principal of the girls’ school on Taylor Street in 1878.

Maintaining order and educational standards for nearly one thousand students was a challenge, but Mother Sheridan “quickly [won] the esteem and confidence of both parents and pupils . . . [and] her name was a household word throughout the parish for more than twenty years.”

Having grown up in Holy Family, Sheridan was well aware of class distinctions between girls in the Sacred Heart Convent boarding school and those in the “poor school.” But she also understood and valued the power of Catholic ritual to mediate difference. Her staff made sure that girls from the parish were as properly outfitted as the boarders in white dresses and long white veils for First Communion and confirmation, the sacraments that symbolized their “coming of age” as Catholics. That the Religious of the Sacred Heart took great pride in this work is undeniable. In reports to their motherhouse in Paris, they described “the grand parish school” in Holy Family as “the principal work of our mission.” Indeed, a high point of Mother Sheridan’s tenure occurred in 1886 when “all the nuns and pupils from the Academy had the privilege” of joining nine hundred girls from the “ecole” (parish school) in the first mass celebrated in their new chapel.

Thomas S. Fitzgerald, born in Tipperary during the Famine, came to Chicago as an infant in 1849 with his parents, who became respected members of Holy Family parish. After attending the Brothers’ School, he studied at St. Louis University, formally joining the Jesuit order in 1869. (Four of his sisters also chose religious life as BVMs.) Recognized as a scholar and administrator, Fitzgerald completed assignments at Marquette College in Milwaukee and at Creighton College in Omaha before returning to his boyhood parish in 1891, where he served dual roles as rector of the church and of St. Ignatius College.

Like Lizzie Sheridan, he had spent countless hours as a child inside Holy Family Church, attending Mass and participating in processions and feast day celebrations.

The experience of this sacred space with its illuminated main altar and stained glass windows had clearly left its mark: Fitzgerald devoted much of his energy to reviving old traditions such as the “elaborate but artistic decorations” at Christmas and during the month of May to honor Mary the Blessed Mother. He also spearheaded a major fund-raising campaign to refurbish the grand pipe organ, renewing Holy Family’s reputation for sacred music. And, once again, the parish’s bazaars merited coverage in the daily papers for their exhibits of “handsome, rare, and costly [articles], artistically arranged as to gratify the most fastidious taste.”

Thanks to the creation of new Catholic parishes in emerging residential districts, Holy Family’s extensive boundaries had been reduced to little more than one square mile by the late 1880s. No longer a prairie, this part of the Near West Side had become a densely populated urban neighborhood, home to increasing numbers of Eastern European Jews and Italians. All the more reason, perhaps, that the Irish continued their tradition of elaborate celebrations, especially the Confirmation Holy Family Parish | 59

Day parades. These processions were public acts of faith that provided immigrants and their children with an opportunity to create a more positive group image. And they did. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s, Chicago newspapers carried detailed accounts, column inch after column inch, describing the sight of hundreds of girls in white dresses and veils and boys in wide collars and new suits marching in formation to meet the carriage of Archbishop Patrick A. Feehan. In 1895, for example, a platoon of policemen, mostly Irish, led the parade, followed by 1,800 members of the Married Men’s Sodality; the Father Mathew Temperance Society; the Emerald Cadets in their colorful military uniforms; and the First Communicants, organized by school. The second division of the parade featured more Total Abstinence bands, Holy Family’s Cadets, and members of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. And bringing up the rear were members of the Catholic Order of Foresters, the fraternal group founded by John F. Scanlan, one of Chicago’s most famous Fenians. In addition to praising the order and decorum of the parade, press reports invariably commented on the special stops made by the archbishop at Catholic institutions in the neighborhood—the Sacred Heart Convent on Taylor Street; St. Joseph’s Home for Working Girls; Sodality Hall; and St. Ignatius College, where he reviewed the marchers before proceeding into Holy Family Church for the confirmation ceremony.

Despite the regular public parades and processions that filled the streets in Holy Family parish, the Irish were conspicuously absent from Hull-House Maps and Papers, the pioneering sociological study published in 1895 by Jane Addams and the settlement residents. Whereas investigators devoted entire chapters to the neighborhood’s Jews, Bohemians, and Italians, discussing the synagogues, churches, and religious schools these groups had created and the special problems they faced as immigrants, there was no mention of the Irish—nor of any of their institutions, such as the great Gothic church, St. Ignatius College, or any one of the parochial schools with their annual enrollment of five thousand children.

What possible reasons could there be for neglecting the neighborhood’s largest and oldest ethnic group?

Perhaps after living in the area for five years, Addams and Starr believed that the Irish did not need—or want— their help or that there were more deserving ethnic groups in the immediate neighborhood. And they may have been right, judging from the settlement’s aggressive, but unsuccessful, campaigns to unseat “Johnny” Powers, the boss of the Nineteenth Ward since 1888. That an Irish immigrant politician was “teach[ing] political methods to the other foreigners living in an oppressed industrial quarter” was bad enough. But Powers had become something of a folk hero, finding patronage jobs for Irish and Italian residents, contributing prizes to

The Married Men’s Sodality Baseball Club was just one of many social groups available to Holy Family parishioners.

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Cartoon of Alderman John Powers throwing a rock at Hull-House.

During the 1898 campaign, Powers’s alleged vow to drive HullHouse from the Nineteenth Ward filled newspapers.

church bazaars, attending baptisms and weddings, and arranging funerals for impoverished neighbors.

According to the Tribune, on Christmas Eve, 1896, the saloonkeeper-alderman personally distributed twenty-five thousand pounds of turkey, chicken, goose, and duck to 2,600 families in his ward. Hull-House residents and members of the Municipal Voters’ League steadfastly maintained that the alderman’s generosity was the direct result of unethical conduct, payments he received for granting municipal franchises to traction companies.

During the 1898 campaign, Chicago newspapers were filled with stories about Powers’s alleged vow to drive Hull-House from the Nineteenth Ward. While he received a barrage of negative publicity, there was one vote of support and it came, surprisingly, from Finley Peter Dunne, the most well-known Irish Catholic journalist of the day. As an editorial writer, Dunne had been a vociferous critic of Irish “boodler” politicians, yet in one of his most memorable dialect columns, he denounced as naive and hypocritical the campaign to replace Powers with a reform candidate. Mr. Dooley explained to his friend Hennessy that “I’m not settin’ up nights wishin’ f’r th’ desthruction iv Jawnny Powers an’ th’ likes iv him.” The philosopher of Archey Road

painted a sympathetic portrait of the Nineteenth Ward alderman as a quiet, “innocent little grocery-man that knew no thieves but thim that lurked along alleys with their hats pulled over their eyes, bein’ inthrojooced to bigger thieves [on the city council and in business] that stole in th’ light iv day, that paraded their stovepipe hats an’ goold watches an’ chains in Mitchigan avnoo.”

Thanks in great measure to Addams’s writing and lectures, especially her 1898 classic, “Why the Ward Boss Rules,” Powers achieved notoriety beyond Chicago’s Nineteenth Ward. In clear language that national audiences could understand, Addams explained why an immigrant population preferred his “big Irish heart” to the “big guns who are always about talking civil service and reform.” While Addams conceded that Powers “understands what the people want, and ministers just as truly to a great human need as the musician or the artist does,” she never wavered in her belief that “the many small personal favors done in the ward by Mr. Powers blind the voters to their real rights and interests.”

It is ironic, indeed, that Addams was so perceptive when it came to Alderman Powers yet ignored the institutions Irish Catholics created and sustained in the HullHouse neighborhood. As the photographs in this essay attest, it would have been hard to miss the massive Gothic church of Holy Family, whose bells rang three times a day, or the Confirmation Day parades with their brass bands and American flags. And yet Chicago’s largest Irish parish in the 1890s is all but invisible in the literature on America’s most famous urban neighborhood. Addams’s 1906 memoir, first published in the Ladies’ Home Journal, provides an important clue to this omission.

Although fifteen years had passed since she and Starr had opened the doors of their settlement, Addams still remembered in vivid detail her search for the Hull mansion. On the way to a Congregational mission in the Pilsen neighborhood in the spring of 1889, she caught a glimpse of the house from the window of her carriage.

Convinced that this would be the perfect place for the settlement, she set about the next day to retrace her steps—but to no avail. For the better part of a week she searched for “the fine old house,” and then nearly a month passed before she discovered it by accident.

Addams finally realized her mistake: she had left Halsted Street a block too soon and followed “Blue Island Avenue into the Bohemian quarter.” Few, if any, middleclass readers of the Ladies’ Home Journal would have known—or cared—that in her search for Hull-House, Addams had passed by Holy Family Church and St. Ignatius College not once but several times. She could not have failed to notice them. Yet Addams left the distinct impression that Hull-House was the only place of refinement and culture in the neighborhood. What then, Holy Family Parish | 61

St. Joseph wearing a derby hat, side altar, Holy Family Church, 1873.

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I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 22, CHS, in Holy Family Parish Priests and People by Brother Thomas Mulkerins, S.J. (Chicago: Universal Press, 1923); 23 top left, CHS, ICHi-09364; 23 bottom left, from Holy Family Parish Priests and People; 23 right, Holy Family Parish; 24, Chicago Tribune, May 1890; 24–25, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago; 26, Jane Addams Memorial Collection, Special Collections, The University Library, The University of Illinois at Chicago; 27, CHS, ICHi-29408; 28–29, CHS; 30, Holy Family Parish; 31, Illinois State Gazetteer and Business Directory, 1880; 32, St. Ignatius College Prep.; 33, CHS; 34, CHS, ICHi-08506; 35, CHS, ICHi-22885; 36, Holy Family Parish; 37 left, CHS, 1886 Sanborn Fire Insurance maps; 37 right, Midwest Jesuit Archives, St. Louis; 38–39, Holy Family Parish; 40, Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1857; 41, CHS, History of the Organization and Growth of Holy Family Jesuit Parish, Chicago; 42–44, Holy Family Parish; 45 top left and right, Holy Family Parish; 45 bottom, photograph by George A. Lane, S.J.; 46–47, Holy Family Parish; 48 top, Holy Family Parish; 48 bottom, CHS, Father Damen’s Golden Jubilee; 49 top, CHS, Address to Rev. Arnold Damen, S.J., on the Occasion of His Golden Jubilee; 49 bottom, Holy Family Parish; 50 top, photograph courtesy of Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart; 50 bottom, Chicago Jewish Archives, Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies; 51 top, Sisters of Charity, BVM Archives; 51 bottom, Holy Family Parish; 52, Holy Family Parish; 53, from Holy Family Church Calendar and Sodality Bulletin, Loyola University of Chicago Archives; 54–55, Holy Family Parish; 56 top, from Geschichte der Kathol, Kirche Chicago’s by J. C. Bürgler (Chicago: Wilhelm Ruhlmann, 1889); 56 bottom, Holy Family Parish; 57 top, CHS, ICHi-32030; 57 bottom, CHS, ICHi-02826; 58, Holy Family Parish; 60, Holy Family Parish; 61, CHS; 62, courtesy of the author; 63, CHS, The Sunday School Messenger: A Monthly Selection, published by the Holy Family Sunday School Association.

The Sunday School Messenger, published by the Holy Family Sunday School Association, contained stories about saints, prayers, hymns, and even jokes for the young parishioners.

was the great Gothic church of Holy Family, built with the nickels and dimes of Irish immigrants and decorated with imported oil paintings, statues, elaborate carved altars, and Victorian stenciling? Or the convents and chapels of the nuns who educated thousands of children every year?

Did it matter that Addams never publicly mentioned the sacred spaces of her Irish Catholic neighbors?

Absolutely. Not only have historians perpetuated the myth that Addams and Starr alone brought art and culture to the poor, but they have missed an equally compelling story: by building ornate churches and establishing schools, working-class Catholics created community and identity—and put their imprint on the urban landscape.

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MAKING HISTORY I

Chicago Intellect: An Interview with Garry Wills T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

I

n the final third of the twentieth century, Garry Wills was arguably America’s most prolific writer. The author of more than twenty books and over one thousand articles and essays, Wills first attracted national attention with his soothsaying analysis in Nixon Agonistes: The Crisis of the Self-Made Man (1970), a work that seemed to predict the downfall of America’s thirty-seventh president. Since then, Wills has written in almost every genre: biography, political commentary, social criticism, theology, history from the medieval to the American, classical thought, Shakespearean drama, literary criticism, investigative journalism, fiction, and autobiography. Historian Gordon Wood has described Wills as “the closest thing we now have to what used to be called a ‘man of letters.’ No one writing in America today has so many intelligent things to say about such a broad range of subjects.” Wills’s most notable prize-winning works include Inventing America: Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence (1978) and Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (1992); the latter received a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Wills received a Peabody Award for Excellence in Broadcasting for writing and narrating The Candidates, a documentary on that year’s presidential race. A decade later, Bill Clinton awarded Wills the Presidential Medal of the Endowment for the Humanities. Garry Wills, writes historian Michael Kazin, “may be America’s greatest living intellectual.”

Garland Lee Wills was born in Atlanta on May 22, 1934, the son of John and Mayno (Collins) Wills. His mother was a devout Roman Catholic, “part of that Catholic Irish,” according to Wills, “that are the people of Gone with the Wind, except they didn’t have a plantation.”

Catholicism played an instrumental role in Wills’s upbringing. “My grandmother Collins had a strong influence on me,” remarks Wills. “That whole side of the family was very religious, with a lot of priests and nuns in it.”

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Garry Wills, one of America’s most prolific and acclaimed writers, in a photograph taken by his wife, Natalie.

In Lincoln at Gettysburg (above right), Wills explains how the Gettysburg Address revolutionized American intellectualism. Wills’s analysis of the Nixon administration in 1970’s Nixon Agonistes (above left) landed him on the White House enemies list. The book became an overnight sensation and propelled Wills to publishing stardom after Nixon’s resignation. Below: Vice President Richard Nixon speaks at the 1960 Republican National convention in Chicago.

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During Wills’s infancy, his family suffered from the effects of the Great Depression. “My father couldn’t get work when I was born in 1934,” admits Wills. “For a while, he peddled bread that my grandmother made door-todoor, trying to make a living and couldn’t. So he started traveling north when I was less than a year old.” By the time Wills reached school age, his family had lived in Indiana, Wisconsin, and Michigan. After working as a salesman for a gas company and as the boxing coach at Albion College, Wills’s father finally established a home for the family in Adrian, Michigan. “When my father went off to the war, we went back to Albion to take care of a house that we owned there,” but within a few years the family returned to Adrian. Wills also developed a strong connection to Chicago during these years, as his paternal grandparents lived in Oak Park. “We were here a lot,” remembers Wills, “so I knew Chicago very well from an early time.”

The seeds of Wills’s intellectual proclivity were sown early. “I was always a bookworm,” he confesses. Wills’s mother taught him to read before he attended school. “I just read a lot,” he admits. “When I caddied for my father at golf, I would have a book in the bag to read whenever they would stop, which he didn’t like.” As far back as Wills can remember, “I loved books; I loved words,” he maintains. “I wrote god-awful poetry in grade school and through college, and I always liked to write.” Wills kept his nose in so many books that his father even offered to pay him not to read for a week one summer. “[My father] owned several houses in Adrian,” Wills recalls, “and I’d mow the lawn for all those houses. I would always be taking time off and reading. So finally, he paid me not to read.” Wills concedes that his father’s restriction “was okay because I bought books with the money.”

Wills briefly attended Georgia Military Academy in grade school and matriculated to Campion High School, a Jesuit boarding school in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin. Campion proved to be a formative experience for Wills.

He was particularly impressed by the intellectual enthusiasm of the young Jesuit trainees—scholastics, as they are called. “They were bubbling over with all this energy,” remembers Wills. In addition to the rigorous academic curriculum, “I did extracurricular seminars on Aristotle’s poetics, papal encyclicals, and music.” Wills was so impressed that he entered the Society of Jesus, studying as a Jesuit seminarian from 1951 to 1957.

In the seminary, Wills “discovered” the Catholic writer G. K. Chesterton, a “talismanic” figure for him. “Chesterton was a very important part of my life,” admits Wills. “One of the things that I went through in the seminary was a kind of adolescent depression and loss of faith. Chesterton went through that when he was in school. His notebooks from that period are the place where he works out his view that existence was so incredibly miraculous.” Chesterton proved so influential that the English writer became the subject of Wills’s first book, Chesterton: Man and Mask (1961).

Wills eventually decided that monastic life was not his vocation. He left the seminary in 1957, attended Xavier University in Cincinnati for one year, and then moved to Yale University to complete a doctorate in classics in 1961.

Upon withdrawing from the seminary, Wills wrote and sent four essays to a variety of magazines. William F. Buckley, then the young, conservative editor of the two-year-old National Review, discovered Wills’s submission in the magazine’s slush-pile. Impressed, Buckley invited Wills to serve as a contributing and cultural editor while completing his Ph.D. at Yale. Over the ensuing decade, Wills penned more than 150 essays for the National Review.

Shortly after leaving the seminary, Wills also encountered a flight attendant on one of his trips to New York. She noticed him because he was reading The Two Sources of Morality and Religion by the Nobel Prize–winning French writer 66 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Henri Bergson. “Aren’t you a little young to be reading that?” she inquired.

The attendant, Natalie Cavallo, estimated that Wills was about seven years younger than his twenty-three years. A graduate of Sweetbriar College, she was also familiar with the book’s complexity. In 1959, Wills and Cavallo married and eventually had three children.

In 1962, Wills became an assistant professor of classics at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, while he continued to write for the National Review. In 1964, he was invited by the National Catholic Reporter (NCR) to write what proved to be his first syndicated column. By 1966, Wills had published, in addition to the Chesterton book, Politics and Catholic Freedom (1964) and Roman Culture: Weapons and Man (1966). Yet, senior members of the classics department at Hopkins complained that too many of Wills’s publications were outside his field of classics. Ironically, his more specialty-minded colleagues held Wills’s far-reaching erudition against him. In 1966, he was denied tenure at Hopkins. Wills was hardly discouraged, however, viewing the rejection as a blessing in disguise. “When I broke the news to Natalie, I brought home a bottle of champagne and said we should celebrate.”

Wills then embarked on a career as a freelance journalist, working mostly for Esquire magazine. At first, he thrived in the literary world because it was, he says, such “a different part of life.” He now admits, “I didn’t think I was going to spend my life in it.” Nor did he expect writing for magazines to change his life so dramatically. In 1968, Dorothy de Santillana, a Houghton Mifflin editor, read a Wills article on Richard Nixon and offered him a book contract with his first considerable advance. Wills admits, “I was very reluctant to write the book.” But, he followed Nixon for the rest of the campaign, and ultimately wrote Nixon Agonistes. The book’s success was “an accident,” admits Wills.

“The hardcover didn’t sell well at all, but Watergate occurred between the hardcover and the paperback. The paperback then took off.”

Above: Wills and his children (from left): Garry, Lydia, and John. Below: A strong supporter of civil rights, Wills wrote about racial discontent in America in his book The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (The New American Library).

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The success of Nixon Agonistes and later Inventing America generated a variety of professional opportunities for Wills. In 1980, he was named Henry R. Luce professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University. Although he resigned from the position in 1988 to devote his energies to full-time writing, Wills remains an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern.

Furthermore, he has received numerous publisher invitations to write biographies of recent American presidents. Wills, however, has rejected most requests, opting instead to write about George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and even John Wayne (John Wayne’s America: The Politics of Celebrity, 1997). “The ones I did,” explains Wills, “were symbolic figures and lightning rods of hostility or affection in a way that a Bush or a Carter were not.” After writing Reagan’s America: Innocents at Home (1987) Wills admits, “I looked around to find another politician, but I couldn’t come up with one. That’s when Wayne came to mind—he’s the closest thing to a Reagan, closer than any other political figure.”

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Above left: Wills in his 1968 book jacket photograph for The Second Civil War. Below: Protest during a Richard Nixon visit to Chicago, July 25, 1960. Covering such controversies during the 1960s generated Wills’s intellectual and moral evolution beyond the conservatism of his youth.

Left: Evanston’s Northwestern University, where Wills teaches history as an adjunct professor. Below: Northwestern University president Henry S. Beinen introduces Wills at the university’s recent sesquicentennial celebration. Wills’s keynote speech was titled “Is the University Obsolete?”.

Investigative journalism for Wills was a confessional experience, “confession” implying not only an admission of guilt or error, but also a profession of faith.

Before 1980, Wills identified himself as a conservative, best exemplified by his intellectual autobiography, Confessions of a Conservative (1979). Certain elements of Wills’s thought did indeed epitomize twentieth-century conservative thought: an emphasis on small communities, a defense of Roman Catholic traditions, and opposition to the tactics of the civil rights movement. Like many conservative critics of Martin Luther King Jr., Wills argued that integration was more of a matter for an intimate tribunal than a courtroom. He maintained that government had little business trying to lead a reluctant community.

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At the same time, Wills’s conservatism shared much in common with turnof-the-century socialists such as Eugene Debs rather than with such late-twentieth-century conservatives as Milton Friedman. Whereas Debs challenged the laissez-faire beliefs of America’s “robber barons” as destructive of small-town, middle-class America, Wills repeatedly attacked the ever-growing American emphasis on market systems to organize society, often at the expense of destroying local communities. “No society can ever be formed on the basis of individualism,” writes Wills, “togetherness deriving from apartness.” Early on, Wills rejected classical liberalism’s reliance on reason-based models of change.

For Wills, the collaboration between American corporations and the federal government hardly represented a “free market,” but rather a new form of state capitalism. Like Debs, Wills saw unbridled corporate and state power as an authoritarian threat to communitarian ideals and values.

Wills’s critique of liberalism extended not only to American society, but also to his own Roman Catholic Church. In Bare Ruined Choirs (1972), he charged that liberals attempted to reform the Church by relying on an open market of ideas in which any thought was as good as the next. In so doing, Wills argued, liberals opened the debate to those who pulled the Church further away from orthodoxy and those who charged that any change was heresy. Wills believed that just as secular liberals created the conditions for domestic civil war over the Vietnam War, Catholic liberals succeeded in splitting their community apart.

Nearly thirty years later, Wills aimed his critical sword at the papacy. In Papal Sins: Structures of Deceit (2000), Wills charged the twentieth-century Roman Catholic hierarchy of often abandoning its larger mission of spiritual salvation in order to protect its more earthly, temporal interests.

Then as now, Wills’s writing escaped easy categorization, in part because he has been so willing to change his mind.

While covering the civil rights movement, for example, Wills experienced a dramatic conversion. Increasingly, he recognized that Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy of civil disobedience was part of a long American tradition, and that historical change was more often initiated by the principled few, rather than by politicians.

For similar reasons, Wills publicly supported his controversial friend, the radical priest Daniel Berrigan, in his opposition to the Vietnam War. “Francis Cardinal Spellman expelled Dan from New York for his activities and there was a public [opposition] letter written by NCR types and Commonweal types and I signed it.”

Wills’s support of Berrigan divorced him from his journalistic mentor, 70 | Chicago History | Summer 2001

Below: The summer 1995 issue of Northwestern University’s magazine Northwestern Perspective featured a cover story on Garry Wills by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist R. Bruce Dold.

William F. Buckley. “He thought that was terrible,” remembers Wills, because “it was disrespectful to the Church.” For Wills, covering the controversies of the 1960s generated both an intellectual and moral evolution that moved him beyond the narrow, anticommunist conservatism of his youth. “The experience of what goes on out in the street entirely changed the kind of abstract view I had before when I was just a Greek teacher.”

Wills’s identification with conservatism also reflected the influence of St. Augustine. The excessive police brutality against civil rights leaders, the violence surrounding the Democratic convention in 1968, and the Vietnam War persuaded Wills that the government had violated its conservative function at home and abroad. Attempting to enforce peace in the ghettos and justice around the world had provoked a domestic civil war. “The Augustinian morality could only look at this spectacle and ask: ‘When did God turn the day of judgment over to you?’” Wills concluded that only through civil disobedience could American citizens force the state back into its proper role. In 1972, Wills allowed himself to be arrested at a peace rally in the nation’s capitol.

In Wills’s intellectual odyssey, Augustine has been his philosophical beacon.

“One of the things that Augustine gave me is a picture of a church life quite different from the current one,” Wills now admits. “His church didn’t have papal infallibility or a lot of the things we have today. One of the ways I remained a Catholic was to realize that Catholicism doesn’t only mean what the current pope says.” For Wills, each step of his political development—rejection of laissez-faire values, acceptance of civil disobedience, opposition to the Vietnam War, support for Church radicals including Dorothy Day and the Berrigans, criticism of papal corruption—was part of a continuity that brought him closer to an authentic Augustinian perspective. According to Wills, Augustine based

Wills (second from left), his sons Garry and John (third and fourth from left), and his daughter Lydia (fifth from left) pose with the Clintons at the White House.

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Garry Wills (left) receives the John Hope Franklin History Maker Award for Distinction in Historical Scholarship from Northwestern University president Henry S. Bienen.

society on the “things one loves,” emphasizing will over intellect, and love over the theories of justice espoused by classical thinkers such as Plato and Aristotle.

Augustine is not just a frequently appearing figure in Wills’s writing; Augustinian ideals infuse his myriad interpretations of American society. In addition to writing a biography of the bishop of Hippo in 1999, Wills interprets such controversies as the teaching of evolution in public schools as a contest between Augustinian (scientific experts) and Lutheran (fundamentalists) views of the Bible. Wills argues that Augustinian theology served as a source of religious disestablishment going back as far as Roger Williams’s founding of Rhode Island in 1635. The theology of Martin Luther King Jr., particularly King’s emphasis on love as the foundation of civil society, is filled with Augustinian principles, according to Wills. In Reagan’s America, Wills relies upon Augustine to explain the relationship of Reagan’s popularity, American innocence, and the doctrine of original sin.

Augustine still speaks to Americans today. For Wills, the American separation between church and state represents not only “the great American achievement,” but also an unacknowledged reflection of Augustine’s influence. Wrestling with tensions between earthly and spiritual concerns, Augustine recognized that “the state doesn’t pretend to be the ‘City of God.’” At the time of the establishment of the republic, this was “the brand new thing about America,” concludes Wills. This is of no small importance. For Wills, “it’s what has kept both religion and politics vital in America.”

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 64, photograph by Natalie Wills; 65 top left, from Nixon Agonistes (Atlanta: Cherokee Publishing Company, 1970); 65 top right, from Lincoln at Gettysburg (New York: Touchstone, 1992); 65 bottom, CHS, ICHi-26173; 67 top, photograph courtesy of Garry Wills; 67 bottom: from The Second Civil War: Arming for Armageddon (New York: The New American Library, 1968); 68 top, from The Second Civil War; 68 bottom, CHS; 69 top, CHS; 69 bottom, courtesy of Northwestern University; 70, Northwestern Perspective, Summer 1995, courtesy of Northwestern University; 71 left, photograph courtesy of Garry Wills; 72, CHS. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | By last count, Garry Wills had written twentythree books, many of which are mentioned above. The best introduction to the early years of Wills’s intellectual development is his autobiography Confessions of a Conservative (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1979). Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (Garden City, N.J.: Doubleday, 1983) offers insights into his early career as a journalist. The best biographical accounts of Wills are Alexander Kaplan, “A Prophet in His Own Country: Garry Wills, the Man Who Left the Right Behind,” Chicago Reader, August 26, 1983; and an article on Wills in the Chicago Tribune, July 17, 1992.

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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.