Chicago History | Summer 2002

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Summer 2002 VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 26 58

Revisiting 1968 Timothy Dean Draper

Read All about It David Paul Nord

Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

4 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Revisiting 1968 TIMOTHY DEAN DRAPER

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial attempted to make sense of the events of the Democratic National Convention but created its own chaos.

T

he events of August 1968 in Chicago are etched on the historical psyche of America.

Chants of “the whole world is watching,” reporters being clubbed by Chicago police, demonstrators screaming epithets at law enforcement officers, tear gas wafting through Lincoln Park—all of these and other reminders of the 1968 Democratic National Convention have become part of our collective memory of the late 1960s.

In the aftermath of the violence, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed a Chicago Study Team to the National Study on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. Noted Chicago attorney Daniel Walker headed a staff of more than two hundred individuals who carefully studied the events of August 1968. The result was a voluminous study, Rights in Conflict, informally known as the “Walker Report.” The study agreed that authorities had experienced severe provocation at the hands of protestors, but it attributed the greatest blame for the violence in Chicago to the police department and by inference the Daley machine. In doing so, the report angered the Daley administration and failed to satisfy the majority of Americans who sought greater meaning in the turbulent events of Convention Week 1968.

Right: A demonstrator waves the flag of the National Liberation Front outside the Conrad Hilton Hotel in August 1968. Opposite: The faces of the Conspiracy, clockwise from top left: Abbie Hoffman, of the Yippies, with his wife; Jerry Rubin, also of the Yippies; veteran pacifist and Mobe leader David Dellinger with his wife; defense attorney William Kunstler; John Froines of Mobe; and Rennie Davis, Mobe leader and former SDS activist. (Photographs

by Stephen Deutch.)

Revisiting 1968 | 5

6 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

After the release of the Walker Report, the federal government, pressured by the Daley administration and its allies, delivered criminal indictments to eight leaders of the antiConvention activities in Chicago. These indictments transformed eight individuals into the Conspiracy—a self-constructed abstraction of radical ideals that sought to turn what was perceived as government repression of dissent on its head in order to prove that America itself was corrupt and dangerous to the people’s will.

The Chicago Conspiracy Trial represented an attempt by the government to overthrow the conclusions of the Walker Report and to redefine the riots surrounding the Democratic National Convention as conscious acts of subversion by eight sinister radicals. Ironically, the indicted co-conspirators sought to use their federal trial as a forum for accusing the federal government of conspiring with the Daley administration to prohibit the exercise of constitutionally protected free speech and assembly in Chicago. Such diametrically opposed agendum promised an intense courtroom drama, and the personalities present in that courtroom often took the case beyond the dramatic into the surreal.

The eight indicted radical leaders were very different types of men. Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin represented the Yippies, or the Youth International Party (more of an ephemeral political charade than an actual organization), although both had solid Movement (an ambiguous label for the various left protest movements of the period) credentials in civil rights and anti-Vietnam work. If the Yippies were the Movement’s irreverent clowns, Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis were the straight men. Highly intellectual organizers who came from conservative Midwestern families, both Hayden and Davis had graduated from Students of a Democratic Society to antiwar Protestors surround the Logan Monument in Grant Park (left) in August 1968. Chants of “the whole world is watching” became connected first with the events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention and later with the Conspiracy trial. During the trial, Judge Hoffman received this letter (above) from a concerned citizen in While Plains, New York.

Revisiting 1968 | 7

8 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Demonstrators face police at the corner of Michigan and Balbo Avenues on August 29, 1968, at approximately 11:20 P.M. The demonstrators were in violation of public space restrictions ordering that city parks be vacated by 11:00 P.M.

Revisiting 1968 | 9

activism and, along with veteran pacifist David Dellinger, led the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe). Lee Weiner of the Yippies and John Froines of Mobe were academics and of lesser stature in the Movement. Bobby Seale was cofounder and chairman of the Black Panther Party and had only been in Chicago in August 1968 to deliver one speech.

Collectively the eight were not intimately acquainted and frankly did not always care for one another despite the Conspiracy’s rhetoric to the contrary. Such a cast of characters did not represent the vision of America shared by prosecutors Thomas Foran and Richard Schultz, ambitious, loyal Democrats, and by Judge Julius Hoffman, the wealthy Republican appointee from Chicago’s affluent Gold Coast neighborhood who presided over the Conspiracy Trial.

To Movement leaders, Chicago itself probably appeared a bit surreal in the summer of 1968. A rust-belt city in transition—long-held to be the most racially segregated urban area in the country—Chicago was the domain of Mayor Richard J. Daley, one of the last great political bosses and an influential figure in Democratic national politics. For political and cultural radicals, Daley’s Chicago (which some later called “Czechago” in sardonic reference to bloody events overseas that year) represented the antidemocratic, racist, violent, and exploitative strain in the American way of life that led to such tragedies as the war then raging in Vietnam.

As Chicago prepared to host the Democratic National Convention in August 1968, antiwar leaders and other dissidents planned to bring thousands to the city to celebrate a “Festival of Life” in juxtaposition to the Democrat’s “Convention of Death” (as dubbed by Abbie Hoffman).

Daley was proud of his city and was not about to allow it to be portrayed unflatteringly by peace-chanting, longhaired rebels. During the trial, he testified that he had ordered the deputy mayor and department heads “to meet with [protest leaders] to try to cooperate with them” while negotiating park permits in connection with demonstrations during the convention. Those involved with the Movement and sympathetic observers tended to doubt the mayor’s veracity. In fact, the Conspiracy alleged that Mayor Daley had himself conspired with the Johnson administration, the Democratic Party, and other powerful forces to thwart legitimate dissent in Chicago and cited, among other things, the mayor’s infamous “shoot to kill arsonists and shoot to maim or cripple looters” order during riots in the city in the spring of 1968.

Regardless of Daley’s exact orders to subordinates prior to convention week, the city remained committed to controlling the use of its public spaces. The protestors’ requests for permits to sleep in Chicago’s parks were rejected, and this conflict instigated the violence.

A few observations of the events of convention week provide key insight into the nature of the trial. First, both government and Movement believed that they were 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Above: The prosecution called Mayor Richard J. Daley as a witness during the trial. This Chicago Tribune article, from the opening days of the trial, reports on Daley’s disapproval of the presence of demonstrators outside of the courthouse. Opposite: On Wednesday, August 28, 1968, a conflict between protestors and police mounted rapidly in Chicago’s Grant Park, and Rennie Davis found himself trapped between his own Movement line and the advancing police.

During the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, Davis recalled being struck by police thirty or forty times before crawling through a chain link fence, walking into the middle of the park, and losing consciousness.

(Photograph by Ron Pownall.)

Revisiting 1968 | 11

Above: Judge Julius J. Hoffman, c. 1970, presided over the Conspiracy trial. Opposite: During the trial, Judge Hoffman received many letters of support, including this note from a couple in Highland, Indiana.

12 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

threatened by conspiratorial forces in August 1968.

Second, each side blamed the other for fomenting, instigating, and using violence for furthering specific objectives. Third, both sides realized the power of modern media to shape public perception of events. Fourth, the government and the Movement each discovered that the conclusion to the violence in Chicago could not be the end of the affair—with the disturbances in Chicago, a new line had been crossed in national political life.

It then became necessary to control the interpretation of the convention disturbances. The Movement believed that Daley and Johnson had done everything in their power to silence the protests. The Walker Report blamed all sides, although the Chicago police more than any other. The United States Department of Justice, in delivering criminal indictments to eight Movement leaders, cited them as culpable of bringing further violence to American political life.

Powered by these strong political beliefs and impassioned convictions, the Conspiracy Trial opened in Chicago on September 24, 1969. In the courtroom, a fundamental disagreement over issues of freedom of speech and the federal antiriot statute of 1968, the nature of the conspiracy doctrine, and the use of illegal wiretaps revealed a chasm that separated the federal government—Judge Hoffman and the prosecutors—and the defense. The division stemmed from two basic points of political conflict.

First, federal jurisprudence operated from the premise that the courtroom was a rational, objective venue established to protect civil rights and liberties. In contrast, the co-conspirators believed in the essentially biased nature of traditional governance and sought to use the trial as a vehicle for portraying the inherent inequities of the liberal Cold War state, challenging that the government had produced and nurtured racial inequality, maldistribution of wealth, and the vile war in Vietnam. Thus, a disagreement on the fairness and objectivity of the government precluded a serious discourse on the defendants’ alleged breaches of the social contract.

Second, criminal law on the federal level presumed a national consensus on the nature of civil rights and liberties. The judiciary—unlike the executive and legislative branches—operated from a level of political independence that allowed it greater jurisdiction to protect the individual liberties of the defendants in spite of their ephemeral outrages. Yet, how could the court meet the expectations and needs of defendants who believed it bound up in a politically corrupt state? This disintegration of a consensus fundamental to traditional views of justice transformed the Conspiracy Trial from yet another criminal proceeding into a compelling national drama that questioned the evolving nature of political expression in a mass media culture.

The guarantee of free speech became an important issue during the Conspiracy trial, because the defendants were indicted under the Federal Anti-Riot Act, a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which focused, in part, on the “intentions” of the defendants.

Constitutional protection of inflammatory speech had long been a controversial issue. Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes’s “clear and present” danger dictum from Schenck v. United States in 1919 largely guided federal courts in the twentieth century, including the Brandenburg v. Ohio decision in 1969, which upheld “that the First Amendment protects all advocacy except that which directly incites and results in unlawful acts.” The antiriot law, however, by proscribing criminal “intentions” to incite riot, appeared to many civil libertarians and Movement leaders as going far beyond the parameters set by earlier precedents. Defenders of the Conspiracy charged that the co-conspirators were being tried for exercising legal rights of assembly and speech in Chicago.

This charge seemed to resonate with those concerned with the federal conspiracy doctrine. Critics protested that the antiriot law had too loosely defined conspiracy, which they charged made it a likely tool for the repression of legitimate dissent. For prosecutors, the conspiracy doctrine was ideally suited for trying difficult cases where little physical evidence existed, for the law allowed prosecutors to seek convictions upon the basis of agreement Revisiting 1968 | 13

between two or more persons to commit an illegal offense.

It mattered little whether the Conspiracy defendants had met together to plan or had actually committed illegal acts in Chicago in 1968. To convict the defendants under the antiriot law’s conspiracy definition, all that the government needed to prove was that the defendants had conspired together with the intention of inciting riots in Chicago.

Presumably, if the city had provided overnight permits and no disorder had occurred in Chicago during the Democratic National Convention, the defendants could still be in violation of the antiriot law if they had conspired together with the intention to promote violence.

Controversy over illegal wiretapping also arose during the trial. In 1969, the United States Supreme Court decreed, in Alderman v. the United States, that any information obtained through illegal wiretapping had to be turned over to the defense counsel. This precedent caused the Justice Department to pause before proceeding against the Conspiracy. The government balked at turning over all its electronic evidence to the defense, because illicit wiretapping had been used to gather information on the defendants and included taps of foreign embassies. Attorney General John Mitchell defended such wiretapping for “national security” reasons. Judge Julius Hoffman’s decision to table the issue until the end of the trial simply reinforced the Conspiracy’s anxiety over a concerted government crackdown.

The Conspiracy trial emphasized the potential for divergent strategies of prosecution and defense in an adversarial

system of justice. The vastly different arguments and legal tactics used by both sides seemed to bewilder the judicial process, and the court found itself ill-equipped to respond impartially to a defense strategy that found the American concept of justice inequitable. Such dichotomous views of American justice contributed to both sensationalistic press coverage and the symbolic nature of the trial in regard to contemporary social and political tensions.

The government entered the Conspiracy case knowing that it faced a difficult trial, but the construction of the antiriot law and opportunities provided by the conspiracy charge boded well for the prosecution.

The tone for its legal strategy was set when Deputy Attorney General Richard Kliendienst declared, “If people demonstrated in a manner to interfere with others, they should be rounded up and put in a detention camp.” Initially, the government would pursue the defendants as criminals and deny that the proceeding was any kind of “political trial.” The government wanted to present its case as efficiently as possible and provide witnesses who could attribute overt criminal acts to the co-conspirators. In fact, the prosecutors desired to label the defendants as devious men who had lured innocent protestors and hippies to Chicago with false promises of festivals and legitimate protests.

Prosecutors contended that the defendants desired to create a situation where the city’s refusal to accede to negotiable demands would create a volatile situation and lead to rioting in the streets.

Above: Originally, nine attorneys represented the Conspiracy. Some withdrew their representation via telegram, but during the pretrial, the judge rejected these withdrawals. He ordered that all lawyers appear in court “as expeditiously as possible” and issued bench warrants for their arrest if they failed to comply. Opposite: The Conspiracy trial quickly became a national affair. This political cartoon was printed in the Los Angeles Times in September 1969.

14 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Revisiting 1968 | 15

Across the country, demonstrators protested the Chicago Conspiracy Trial. On September 25, 1969, the Chicago Tribune printed articles on protests in both Chicago (right) and Washington, D.C. (above).

16 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Several weeks into the trial, Judge Hoffman received this postcard from a resident of Chicago.

In presenting this case, the government simply had to prove that the defendants used interstate commerce with the intention to incite riot and acted to encourage that riot.

In his opening remarks, Assistant United States Attorney Dick Schultz maintained that the defendants lured legitimate protestors to Chicago where they had created a climate for disorder. Schultz argued: “The government will prove that each of these eight men . . . united and conspired together to encourage people to riot during the Convention” and interfered with government attempts to maintain order.

The witnesses that the government presented to support such objectives were primarily police officers, city officials, undercover agents, and paid informers. Eventually, the defense forced the government to switch tactics by painting many of these witnesses as somehow duplicitous or as agents provocateur.

By the end of the trial, the government turned to emphasizing the political nature of the Conspiracy and demonizing the protest leaders. Schultz told the jury that the defendants “wanted the [convention] riot to start a Vietnam in the United States,” and his superior, United States Attorney Thomas Foran, described the defendants as “highly sophisticated, educated men . . . evil men.”

The conspiracy issue had become a moral crusade for the government’s attorneys.

The Conspiracy legal strategy was based on the hope of a hung jury rather than outright acquittal. The defense sought to present its case in the context of the broad dissident movement of the 1960s. This tactic would estab-

lish the essence of the defendants’ “states of minds” and reinforce the political rather than criminal aspect of the case. To the Conspiracy, the law was political, the denial of legitimate protest was political, and the decision to prosecute was political; therefore, the defendants and counsel concluded that the trial was inherently political and must be treated as such in determining legal strategy. Despite individual disputes over trial tactics, the defense agreed to present the case as if it were a political trial and attack the supposed “moral pretensions” and “decrepit authority” of the nation’s judiciary. The defense contended that the defendants had come to Chicago for peaceful and legitimate protest and that disorders were the result of an “official [government] conspiracy” to prohibit opposition to the Democratic Party and its policies. Additionally, the defense sought to point out the overtly political aspect of the law under which the defendants were indicted.

While the government had relied mainly upon government employees as witnesses, the Conspiracy drew upon a wide range of individuals. Their witnesses were intended to be part of the defendants’ political education of the public and included Linda Morse, a former pacifist who began training with an M-1 rifle after the 1968 disorders, and Timothy Leary, a Harvard clinical pathologist and a psychedelic drug guru. The defendants even attempted to get imprisoned White Panther Party founder John Sinclair to testify on their behalf. Overall, the defense witnesses, while conveying a sense of the Revisiting 1968 | 17

radical movement, failed to strengthen the defendants’ legal case. Instead, the witnesses seemed, in fact, to reflect disruption by so-called outside agitators, because they consisted mainly of non-Chicagoans who had been present at the convention disorders.

The two defense witnesses who seemed most controversial, particularly to Judge Hoffman, were Allen Ginsberg and Norman Mailer. Ginsberg and Mailer were called to explain the defendants’ beliefs and how these beliefs related to plans for the August 1968 protests.

Ginsberg, Beat poet and student of eastern mysticism, astounded persons in the courtroom when he chanted and recited poetry from the witness stand. During his testimony, Ginsberg recalled that Abbie Hoffman had explained to him that the Yippie “Festival of Life” was an alternative to the “intolerable” lifestyle of brutality, police violence, pollution, and materialism that pervaded American society. Ginsberg’s rather theatrical appearance bothered the officers of the trial. One observer remarked that “misunderstanding mounted rapidly” between the judge and chanting poet, and prosecutor Tom Foran sardonically attacked the poet during cross-examination and was heard to sneer at Ginsberg, “Goddamned fag,” as the witness left the courtroom.

While witnesses such as Ginsberg visibly upset the judge and the prosecutors, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Norman Mailer seemed just as bothered by what he perceived as the court’s narrow-mindedness. Mailer engaged Judge Hoffman and Thomas Foran in a colloquy over language and interpretation, while testifying that Jerry Rubin had planned “to have a youth festival in Chicago in August 1968 . . . [with] a hundred thousand young people . . . at a festival with rock bands [that Rubin believed] would so intimidate and terrify the establishment that Lyndon Johnson would have to be nominated under armed guard.”

Two of the defendants also testified: Abbie Hoffman represented the Yippies and Rennie Davis spoke on behalf of Mobe. Hoffman introduced himself on the stand as “Abbie . . . an orphan of America” and then described his vision of a “Woodstock Nation” dedicated to “cooperation versus [traditional American] competition.” While Abbie Hoffman frequently clowned on the stand, Rennie Davis provided a serious, analytical testimony by describing attempts to negotiate with city officials. Davis recalled that the city seemed opposed to any demonstrations during the convention and testified that he had assured local authorities that the planned action “was not like the Pentagon, where civil disobedience was called for, but was more like the character of the April 15 demonstration in New York, where we were to be effective in our protest by numbers and not by militant tactics.”

The testimonies of Hoffman and Davis were important in the process of political education, but political educa18 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

tion was not tantamount to winning legal testimony and appeared to have a negligible effect on the case. In fact, while the defense case had been enlivening, informative, and even entertaining, in retrospect, it appeared to have little effect on the jury. While the Conspiracy had sought to provide a public political education, the political theater that accompanied such lessons produced a maelstrom of controversy and left important legal issues and defined legal strategies largely forgotten.

A central problem with the courtroom dynamics during the Conspiracy trial was that normal rules seemed to be irrelevant. Since the defendants were unwilling to accept the validity of either the trial or the judicial system, they purposefully refused to follow normal courtroom procedures.

Thus, the case appeared to be a unique experience for the American judiciary. Ordinarily, defendants on trial for life or liberty seek to impress jurors favorably with their appearance and demeanor. The defendants in Chicago, however, chose to “politically educate” the jurors through rhetoric and lifestyle and did not conform to courtroom convention.

Furthermore, believing themselves “railroaded” by the government, they were unwilling to accept quietly what they believed to be inevitable imprisonment. Accordingly, Abbie Hoffman recalled that “as the trial proceeded or degenerated, it became our job to attack the unnatural attitude that persons condemned to prison should respect the system about to deny them their freedom.”

Much of the defendants’ contemptuous behavior simply resulted from the frustration and indignation they felt toward the conduct of the trial. Although Tom Hayden maintained that the disruptions were “intended to drive [home] a political and legal point,” they were too often portrayed by the press, and perceived by the public, as bereft of any political import. One of the milder offenses the Conspiracy committed was refusing to rise as Judge Hoffman entered and departed the courtroom. Although by itself the failure to rise was rather innocuous, it greatly bothered Judge Hoffman, a man reputed to be a stickler for courtroom tradition. Another mild form of contempt occurred when Rennie Davis, prohibited from giving Bobby Seale a birthday cake, cried out in court, “They arrested your cake, Bobby.” Other times the defendants simply flaunted their courtroom privileges or playfully chided the prosecutors about their personal lives. Such acts individually did not constitute a great affront, but considered over a lengthy period of time, they seemed to some as an attack upon the authority of the judicial system.

Opposite: Beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg in Grant Park on August 28, 1968. Ginsberg delivered one of the Conspiracy trial’s most controversial testimonies. The defense called him as a witness to explain the defendants’ nonviolent beliefs and intentions, but Ginsberg also frustrated the judge and bewildered the jury by reciting poetry and chanting in Sanskrit. (Photograph by Ron Pownall.)

Revisiting 1968 | 19

National reactions to the trial were as unpredictable as the behavior within the courtroom. Above: A lapel button endorsing Judge Hoffman. Right and below: A handmade postcard from Long Beach, California, expressing contempt for Judge Hoffman’s courtroom demeanor.

20 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

Not all the defendants’ disruptions were so frivolous and many sought to convey important symbolic messages. On the day of the Vietnam Moratorium, the defendants displayed Viet Cong and American flags on their table and wore black armbands. David Dellinger attempted to read the names of war dead and then argued with the judge while trying to explain the symbolic importance of addressing the issue of the war in such a manner.

Sometimes outraged defendants confronted what they perceived to be perjured testimony by government witnesses. When Irving Bock, a police agent whom Rennie Davis had befriended while Bock worked for Mobe, testified, an infuriated Davis shouted, “Why don’t you arrest this lying police spy? He has filed an affidavit.” During the testimony of Chicago’s deputy chief of police, David Dellinger’s remark, “Oh, bullshit. That is an absolute lie,” contributed to the revocation of Dellinger’s bail and a veritable battle between the defendants and marshals.

In the days to follow, defendants Hoffman and Rubin furiously assailed the judge, and one day both wore judicial robes into the courtroom. Abbie Hoffman proceeded to throw his robe onto the floor and wipe his feet upon it to show his contempt for Judge Hoffman.

The aggressive and unruly actions of the other defendants paled in comparison with those of Bobby Seale.

After being denied his choice of counsel by Judge Hoffman, Seale insisted on the right to self-counsel. As his demands to defend himself were rebuffed throughout the trial, his protests became increasingly strenuous. He objected to William Frapolly’s testimony, shouting, “I object to that because my lawyer is not here,” and when later admonished by Judge Hoffman for a similar outburst, the Black Panther stated, “I admonish you. You are in contempt of people’s constitutional rights.” Seale was attempting to show the jurors that he was being denied his rights, but his efforts only elicited an ominous warning from the judge. As Seale continued to insist upon his constitutional rights, Judge Hoffman ordered federal marshals to bind and gag him in open court. The shackling of Bobby Seale was a desperate act, and it only caused greater disruption as Seale fought against his restraints and the other defendants assailed the harsh actions of the court. At one point, when marshals sought to strengthen Seale’s restraints, Jerry Rubin shouted, “Look, they’re beating Bobby!” Finally, Judge Hoffman consented, sentenced Seale to four years in prison for contempt, and severed his trial from that of the other defendants, who, nevertheless, continued to push the bounds of courtroom decorum.

Before ordering the binding and gagging of Bobby Seale, Judge Hoffman asked the bailiff about previous incidents of gagging defendants in open court (top). The bailiff’s response (right) advises the judge to announce his intentions prior to taking action.

Revisiting 1968 | 21

Personal issues sometimes became focal points of contemptuous conduct that occasionally involved both the defendants and other participants. Such an issue was Jewishness, which involved the judge, defense attorneys, and several defendants. Jews, like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, were disproportionately represented in Movement ranks, and the two Yippies’ cultivation of the Jewish leftist heritage greatly differed from Judge Hoffman’s mien as a sedate, successful Jew assimilated into mainstream WASP society. Abbie Hoffman perceived sensitivity on the judge’s part toward his religion and constantly made references to the latter’s Jewishness.

During a particularly tense moment in the trial, Abbie Hoffman shouted to the judge, “Your idea of justice is the only obscenity in the room. You schtunk. Schande vor de goyim [front man for the gentiles], huh?”

At the end of the trail, the behavior of the defendants resulted in lengthy contempt sentences from Judge Hoffman. Reactions to the confrontation between Seale and Judge Hoffman and the revocation of David Dellinger’s bail and the defendants’ political messages and personal attacks upon the judge and prosecutors were all deemed contemptuous acts by Judge Hoffman.

The judge even criticized the defense attorneys William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass for getting caught up in the intensity of the trial and letting their personal devotion to the defendants’ causes carry them beyond what he considered to be professional conduct. While the jury deliberated, Judge Hoffman sentenced the defendants and their attorneys to more than twenty years of imprisonment for contempt. Before his contempt sentence was read, Rennie Davis addressed the court and told the judge, “You represent all that is old, ugly, bigoted, and repressive in this country.”

When the verdict was handed down, the jury found five of the defendants guilty of individual acts of crossing state lines with the intent of inciting riot, but all seven not guilty of conspiracy. With this decision, the jury recognized the reality of an adversarial system of justice based more on finding a consensus than the pursuit of truth. When thousands of protestors took to the streets in Chicago, New York, Seattle, Ann Arbor, and other cities in objection to the verdicts, their actions reflected a broadened sense of skepticism toward the equity of American justice.

The endless contention and confrontation of the Conspiracy trial precluded its leaving any real great mark on American jurisprudence. Newsweek complained that the lamentable behavior by all sides—the judge, defendants, and attorneys—had undermined serious legal issues through silly antics. Unsurprisingly, the liberal press castigated Judge Hoffman for courtroom terror tactics, while the conservative journals predicted that the dissident movement had lost more than it had gained 22 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

The Bobby Seale–Judge Hoffman confrontation resulted in a great deal of front-page press coverage (opposite and bottom) and an eruption of criticism for the judge, including these telegrams from Atlanta (left) and Chicago (below). Eventually Hoffman consented to separate Seale’s trial from that of the other Conspirators.

Revisiting 1968 | 23

After the trial, Judge Hoffman issued lengthy contempt sentences to each of the defendants and their attorneys.

Above: A copy of the first page of Lee Weiner’s contempt citation. Right: Shortly after Hoffman announced the contempt sentences, protestors organized a rally. Eventually, the appeals courts overturned all of the sentences.

24 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

due to the abhorrent conduct of the Conspiracy. In the end, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial functioned more significantly on a symbolic level by reflecting the fragmented public mind of the late 1960s and early 1970s in regard to lifestyle, liberty, protest, and the war in Vietnam.

Ultimately, the Conspiracy trial challenged many fundamental issues of the American system of justice. The defendants and the rest of the Movement held that the trial procedures and findings were unfair, and to a certain degree, the courts through the appeals process agreed with them. After sentencing the defendants, Judge Hoffman had denied bail for the radical leaders. The Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals later approved bail, and the defendants were released from prison after two weeks of confinement—the only prison time they served for the rulings in the Conspiracy trial.

In the lengthy and expensive appeals process, the defendants’ claims were justified when more than one hundred of Judge Hoffman’s decisions were found to contain irreversible errors and 162 of the original 175 contempt citations were overturned. In voiding the five trial convictions, the Court of Appeals unanimously ruled that “the demeanor of the judge and the prosecutors would require reversal, if other errors did not.” The government never appealed the Circuit Court’s rulings, partly because by 1972, it no longer perceived the Movement to be as great a threat, but mainly because the government did not wish to accede to the Circuit Court’s order that illegal wiretaps would have to be disclosed in any new trials.

Many observers argued that the jury’s findings in the Conspiracy case proved that the American judicial system “worked.” Perhaps it did. For in overturning Judge Hoffman’s contempt citations and the jury’s questionable verdicts, the Appeals Court had been able to lift the issue out of the volatile environment of Judge Hoffman’s courtroom and find some degree of redress in the legal process.

The legal process itself, however, had taken key leaders away from a dissident movement at a critical juncture and had been unable to prove their guilt. To conservatives, this was emblematic of the problems of a liberal appeals process. To liberals, this was symbolic of the frailties of their own establishment. To the radicals, this was symptomatic of government repression. To most Americans, the Chicago Conspiracy Trial was evidence that not even their bedrock faith in justice could be preserved in a society seeming to tear itself apart.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS, Stephen Deutch Collection; 5, CHS, ICHi-14787; 6–7, CHS; 8–9, CHS, ICHi-18356; 10, Copyrighted 1969, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 11, “Rennie Davis Bloodied,” © copyright Ron Pownall. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission; 12–13, CHS; 14, Copyrighted 1969, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 15, © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All rights reserved.

Reprinted with permission; 16, Copyrighted 1969, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 17, CHS; 19, “Allen Ginsberg,” © copyright Ron Pownall. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission; 20–21, CHS; 22, Copyrighted 1969, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 23 top and center, CHS; 23 bottom, Copyrighted 1969, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 24, CHS. F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For overviews of the Chicago Conspiracy Trial, 1969–70, see Jason Epstein, The Great Conspiracy Trial: An Essay on Law, Liberty, and the Constitution (New York: Random House, 1970); J. Anthony Lukas, The Barnyard Epithet and other Obscenities: Notes on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); and John Schultz, Motion Will Be Denied: A New Report on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1972). For defendant views on the trial and American politics, see David Dellinger, More Power than We Know: The People’s Movement toward Democracy (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1975); Tom Hayden, Trial (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970); and Abbie Hoffman, Soon To Be a Major Motion Picture (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 1980).

The best abridged transcript of the trial is Judy Clavir and John Spitzer’s, eds., The Conspiracy Trial (New York: Bobbs–Merrill, 1970). Additional information on the Conspiracy trial can be found at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law’s “Famous Trials” website at www.law.umkc.edu/ faculty/projects/ftrials/ftrials.htm.

Timothy Dean Draper is an instructor of history at Waubonsee Community College in Sugar Grove, Illinois.

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Read All about It DAV I D PAU L N O R D

Three newspapers competed for readers in a growing and increasingly diverse Chicago.

T

hough newspapers have always resided in cities, they have not always lived in them— lived in the sense of understanding, embracing, and building an ethos of urbanism.

The urbanization of the American newspaper was a late nineteenth-century phenomenon, and a prototype of the new “urbanized” popular press was the Chicago Daily News, founded in 1875.

The Chicago Daily News, and newspapers like it, represent a kind of second stage in the development of the modern, urban newspaper in America. Earlier big-city newspapers of midcentury were more modern than urban. They were modern not merely in their business and journalistic practices but in their ready acceptance of the formal, contractual society and their enthusiastic promotion of capitalism, industrialism, and the justice and discipline of the marketplace. Their very modern economic and political views, however, were rooted in notions of private property rights, individualism, and laissez-faire that were being challenged in the late nineteenth century by the imperatives and growing complexities of urban life. Like many city institutions built by individual entrepreneurs, big-city newspapers, even selfconsciously popular ones, did not necessarily grasp what was happening to the collective life in the metropolis.

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Chicago’s competing newspapers, including the Chicago Times (above) and the Chicago Daily News (opposite), have long offered different perspectives on urban life.

Publishers were rather like Jeffersonian yeomen transplanted unthinkingly into capitalism. Their newspapers were the products of the “private city,” and they remained private in outlook, thoroughly individualistic in editorial policy and news philosophy.

Newspapers such as the Chicago Daily News, on the other hand, began in the 1870s and 1880s to develop a new vision of community life for a new kind of city—the modern metropolis. Theirs was a vision of community that was inspired less by a nostalgic longing for the communal seventeenth century than by a fear of the very tangible social problems of the capitalistic, individualistic nineteenth. This was community forced by urban life and, it was hoped, suited to the inherent impersonality of large-scale urban existence. It was public community—that is, a kind of association founded upon communitarian notions of interdependence and identity, of sentiment and sympathy, yet powered by formal organizations and activist government and guided by the new agencies of mass communication.

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This 1851 lithograph of “Newspaper Row” shows an early Tribune office.

The important differences between the urban press of the late nineteenth century, such as the Chicago Daily News, and the big-city press of earlier decades were not what they sometimes are thought to have been. The Daily News was not the first sensational paper, the first politically independent paper, the first departmentalized paper, the first telegraph newspaper, the first multiclass paper, or the first screaming headline paper in Chicago. In short, it was neither the first popular nor the first modern newspaper in the city. But it was the first thoroughly urban one—that is, the first to articulate a vision of public community. . . .

The Chicago Daily News was born into a city that was becoming a giant metropolis. By the time of the great fire of 1871, nearly 300,000 Chicagoans crowded along the shores of Lake Michigan. The fire scarcely slowed the pace of growth. By 1880 Chicago was a city of 500,000; by 1890 more than one million. Such rapid growth undermined traditional community life in Chicago.

These many thousands of newcomers were a diverse lot, arriving from all parts of America and the world and bringing with them their peculiar institutions, habits, and prejudices. By the 1870s neighborhoods, churches, social clubs, immigrant newspapers, mutual aid societies, patriotic associations, and political organizations were fragmented and isolated from one another along class, ethnic, and linguistic lines. And the pot was slow to melt these disparate, wary, fearful peoples.

Public institutions in Chicago in the 1870s were also fragmented and were increasingly unable to cope with the growing problems of collective life in a large, modern city. The rapid concentration of industry and population created enormous environmental and social problems that defied solution by traditional means. Problems of sewerage, water supply, transportation, smoke abatement, crime and fire control, housing, unemployment, and scores of other matters of health, sanitation, and public welfare all grew more intense as the city grew more complex and congested. But neither public nor private institutions were well equipped to confront these crises of urbanization. After a brief spurt of public spirit and concerted action after the fire of 1871, Chicago’s city government seemed to decline in power and effectiveness during the 1870s. Though population continued to rise, taxes and revenues fell, and public works and services remained undone. The depression of 1873–77 was the chief culprit but not the only one. The public philosophy of Chicago was as fragmented as the material life of the city. Chicago remained a private city, with no consensus on what should be the public response to urbanization, no consensus on the place of public action in economics and social life, no consensus on the meaning of community in the modern metropolis.

In the early 1870s, before the Daily News entered this new urban world, the largest and most popular newsChicago Newspapers | 29

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paper in Chicago was the Times, perhaps the apotheosis of modern big-city journalism in midnineteenth-century America. Like the popular press of other large cities, the Times was sensational, irreverent, diverse in content, and quick in news coverage. Its very modern production practices influenced papers all over the country. Yet, while the Times was a paper that would sell in the city, it was never a part of the city. Despite its popularity, the Times never developed a particularly urban outlook.

Despite its cosmopolitan veneer, the Times remained committed to conventional values of individualism, private property, and small-scale, face-to-face community.

In the week following the Great Fire of 1871, the Times and the Tribune bolstered Chicagoans with inspiring editorials. Left: Here Schock, Bigford & Co. open the first store in the burnt district. A year after the fire, the Chicago Times published an overview of the proliferation of new city construction (above).

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The Times was the creature of Wilbur F. Storey, a kind of nineteenth-century entrepreneur run amok. Storey’s most striking personality trait was his ferocious, idiosyncratic, absolutely rock-hard independence. He is remembered today, if he is remembered at all, as the journalistic nemesis of Abraham Lincoln, as the vitriolic Copperhead editor whose paper was shut down by Gen. Ambrose Burnside for two days in 1863. Yet, despite his unwavering devotion to the Democratic Party during the Civil War, Storey broke with the party after the war because it failed to follow him. He was guided and he guided his paper by his own lights. The Times masthead declared simply: “The Times . . . by W. F. Storey.”

Storey was notorious in Chicago in the 1860s and 1870s for what his long-time associate Franc Wilkie called the Times’s “glaring indecency . . . which reeked, seethed like a hell’s broth in the Times cauldrons.” In the idiom of the era the Times was salacious, licentious, scurrilous, vituperative, blasphemous, obscene, debased, debauched, depraved, and generally deplored. No American newspaper before the Hearst papers of the 1890s or perhaps even the jazzy New York tabloids of the 1920s was as dedicated as the Times to sensationalism. Sexual violence was probably the Times’s favorite form of sensation, though either sex or violence separately served almost as well.

Rapists, lechers, sadists, polygamists, arsenic fiends, and spouse roasters—all clamored for coverage in the Times, and all found room in the daily round-ups of “Heathenish Horrors,” “Sin and Sorrow,” “The Age’s Abominations,” and “The Prevailing Putridity.” Executions were always hot news for the Times, and Storey’s most famous headline was one that stood at the top of an account in 1875 of four murderers who had repented of their sins at the gallows: “Jerked to Jesus.”

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The Chicago Times’s most notorious moment came in 1863 when General Burnside shut down the paper for alleged treason. This broadside (above left) ordered that all copies of the Chicago Times should be “seized and destroyed.” “Jerked to Jesus” from the November 27, 1875, edition of the Chicago Times (above) stood as publisher Wilbur F. Storey’s (opposite) most infamous headline, as it described the grisly tale of four men hung in the gallows. Storey’s sensationalist journalism policies made him a rich man.

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To win customers, nineteenth-century news carriers offered fancy holiday greetings, such as this 1877 New Year’s message.

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By the time he died, Storey was heartily despised by the “better element” of Chicago, but he was also a millionaire. His genius lay in mingling sensation and scandal with solid news reporting. In its golden age in the 1860s and 1870s no other newspaper west of New York carried so much news. Storey knew how to produce a paper with murder, suicide, and divorce on one page and the most extensive and complete market reports in town on another. By all accounts, the Times’s readership was wide, cutting across class lines and neighborhood boundaries, both within Chicago and throughout the Midwest.

In its fascination with the sordid underworld of city life on the one hand and its devotion to the city’s business world on the other, the Times would seem a decidedly urban institution. In a sense it was. But the Times had no vision of the collective life of Chicago. The city was merely a complex of marketplaces where individuals conducted their private affairs. Like its editor and many of its readers, the Times remained a wary stranger in the city, an outsider, an uneasy spectator. Its values remained private, individualistic values, and these values shaped both the editorials and the news content of the paper.

For the Times, the city of Chicago meant the individual people and the private property in it. In editorials Storey spoke explicitly for the “owners of Chicago,” that is, the people who actually held title to the lots, the buildings, and the businesses. During the first half of 1876, when the new Daily News was just getting started in Chicago, the Times was tremendously agitated and outraged by what it saw as the depredations of local government “taxeaters” upon those owners of the city. The Times insisted that the “city” was merely individual people, and people must take care of themselves. Government must be small and weak, and only property owners should be allowed to vote and participate in it. Voluntary associations must be small and local and built upon neighborhood relationships.

Lower taxes, government retrenchment, and protection for property owners from corrupt office holders— these were Storey’s chief local concerns in the 1870s. In the first six months of 1876 the Times carried sixty major editorials calling for drastic cutbacks in local government and taxes, and another seventy denouncing local government officials, editorials in which “tax-eating” was the common theme. This was fully half of all editorials on local subjects. In Storey’s view, government was an “irresponsible, corrupt devourer of property and industry” that had to be stopped. The Times urged individuals to take matters into their own hands, to resist taxes; and the paper heartily applauded those “patriots” who simply declined to pay. “There is no way to compel the devouring monster called government to surrender and submit to the economic law, but to cut off the supplies.”

By 1885, the Chicago Times had created a family of newspapers (above). A few years later, the paper published an inside look at the World’s Columbian Exposition (below).

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The Times did not shrink from the obvious logic that to cut off taxes meant to cut off government. The dismantling of government, except for the barest of necessities, was precisely what the paper proposed. At least two-thirds of the city government should be abolished, the Times declared—maybe all of it. The board of health, the fire department, the building inspector’s office, the library, and other examples of “useless officialdom” should be killed outright. Other agencies, such as the police department and the public schools, should be saved but greatly reduced. On occasion the Times argued that even these should go.

In place of an increasingly complex and, in the view of the Times, increasingly corrupt and paternalistic city government, the paper urged upon the citizens of Chicago the traditional values of self-help, self-sufficiency, and free enterprise. Abolish the fire department, and the insurance underwriters would quickly organize private brigades. Abolish the police department, and within forty-eight hours its place would be filled by an extension of the private night watch services. Abolish the public works department, and property owners would hire their own private contractors for sewer and street improvements. Abolish the public schools, and people would be forced to spend their own money instead of someone else’s on their own education. The Times proposed to fragment the municipality into hundreds of small neighborhood subdivisions, each with its own “New England town meeting.” These many meetings of neighbors could contract for their own police, fire, and community services. Only a skeleton central city government should be retained. Such a decentralized system would make government directly responsible to the individual taxpayers, the owners of Chicago. It would allow each citizen to live his own private life, in but not of the metropolis.

Permeating the Times’s editorial philosophy was a firm belief in the morality and the efficacy of free markets, private enterprise, and competition. Monopoly, where it existed in railroads, public utilities, or other businesses, was the result of unnatural government regulation, the product of the “statute spawners.” In scores of editorials in 1876 the Times railed against the tariff and currency policies of the federal government and against any kind of “special legislation.” Moreover, in arguments that echoed the social Darwinist philosophy of the day, the Times carried its belief in laissez-faire beyond the business world to denounce charity and social reform and to embrace personal liberty for individuals in matters such as temperance and observance of the Sabbath. The paper followed what Storey took to be the philosophy of Jefferson and Jackson, insisting that in this world individuals must make their own way. The rise of the city made no difference. Storey’s image of Chicago was a marketplace, where individuals struck the best deal they 36 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

could. If lighting gas prices were too high, switch to kerosene; if there were no jobs, move to the country.

Neither government nor charity could contravene the iron laws of the market and of individual responsibility.

The popularity of the Times undoubtedly did not rest upon its editorials. After its demise, the paper was remembered for its editorials, but it was celebrated for its news. Like most American newspapers from that era to our own, the Times emphasized the news of government, politics, and business. Major national government stories could dominate front-page coverage for months. But the most striking characteristic of the [Times]’s news coverage, taken as a whole, was its astonishing diversity.

In 1876 the Times was a daily extravaganza of information. Major stories, such as the Whiskey Ring trials and the Hay[e]s–Tilden election, were covered in stupefyingly fine detail, frequently with long verbatim transcripts of legal proceedings, legislative debates, speeches, letters, and interviews. But more striking than the depth of the Times’s news coverage was its breadth. The paper was filled with column after column of tiny stories from everywhere on every conceivable subject. Many of these were unrelated, one- or two-sentence items grouped together under headings such as “Slices of News,” “News Nebulae,” or “Local Skimmings.” Counting all of these little unconnected items along with the scores of longer stories, it was not uncommon for an eight-page paper to contain more than a thousand separate bits of news.

The “News Nebulae” column suggests the nature of this approach to news. One of these columns begins: They have a chain gang in Fort Wayne.

Terre Haute is going to have a soup house.

An Indiana man has 17,000 cat skins for sale.

Here comes Greencastle, Ind., with the smallpox.

The crusaders of Keokuk will soon commence street work.

Some of the news bits were departmentalized, as in “The Religious World.” An example: There are 77 Protestant Episcopal churches in New York.

The death is announced of Rev. A. H. De Mora, a Protestant Episcopal minister, at Lisbon, Portugal.

The report that Mr. Moody received a purse of $1,500 at Augusta, Ga., is denied on the best authority.

These examples are merely the first few items; each of these columns goes on and on. And columns such as these appeared daily throughout the paper.

Opposite: One of the most popular features in the Times “by W. F. Storey” (left) was the “News Nebulae” column (right), which featured rows and rows of seemingly unrelated tidbits of information, as this edition from January 11, 1876, shows.

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This strange randomness of news was not confined to the special columns of miscellany. Though the longer stories were usually grouped and classified in a more orderly fashion, the tendency of the whole paper was toward the miscellaneous. Government news ranged from the doings of President Grant to the exact amount of fees collected yesterday at the Water Department; court news ranged from Supreme Court decisions to minor bankruptcies in distant cities; religious news, from the health of the pope to the number of Quakers in Iowa (there were 8,865); foreign news, from the crisis in Turkey to an ice-skating accident in France. In short, virtually any event from anywhere in the world could make the paper.

Storey’s goal was to provide something for everyone, individual items for individuals. This approach to news did not develop accidentally at the Times; it complemented the editorial philosophy of the paper. In the 1870s the Times was a marketplace of the sort that Storey favored, filled with infinite choice. The news content of the Times was as diverse, fragmented, disorganized, and bewildering as the life of the city it served. The modern city scene portrayed in the news columns was an enormously complicated spectacle, spread out in disarray before the reader like the city itself.

In the 1870s the chief competitor of the Times was the Chicago Tribune. Unlike the Times, the Tribune did not aspire to be a general circulation newspaper, nor did it pretend to appeal to the masses. It was, by its own declaration, “the businessman’s newspaper,” and it scoffed at the Times’s efforts to entice readers from the “slums and back alleys” of Chicago. The Tribune prided itself on being part of the modern metropolis that Chicago had grown to be by the 1870s. The paper chided the Times for its lingering small-town ways. To the Tribune the Times’s endless, miscellaneous gossip from the local churches and neighborhoods “belongs to the worst class of newspaper enterprise of small towns, where everybody knows everybody else.” The Tribune reminded Storey that “the mingled town and village aspects are gone. . . .

The tendency is to the metropolitan in everything— buildings and their uses, stores and their occupants. And village notions are passing away with them. . . . We are getting to be a community of strangers. No one expects to know and nod to half the audience at church or theatre, and, as to knowing one’s neighbors, that has become a lost art.” Yet, despite the Tribune’s mockery of the Times’s outmoded vision of city life in Chicago, the two papers were not strikingly different in their understanding of either urban community or urban journalism.

After 1874, when he gained controlling interest, Joseph Medill was the editor and guiding light of the Tribune in much the same autocratic way as the Times was “by W. F. Storey.” Storey hated Medill, and Medill

In the 1870s, the Chicago Tribune (opposite) was the Times’s chief competitor, describing itself as “the businessman’s newspaper.”

Above: This Tribune trade card proclaims high goals for the newspaper. Below: This 1897 Tribune broadside offered artists a chance to sketch “the next mayor of Chicago.”

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A month after the fire, Joseph Medill became mayor of Chicago on the Union-Fireproof ticket.

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hated Storey. They were antagonistic in almost every way—in politics, in business, in social circles, and in personal style. Yet beneath surface contrasts lay similar commitments to private property and individualism and similar notions of what news should be in a big-city newspaper. Medill was closer than Storey to the political and social elites of Chicago, but the values reflected in the editorials and in the news content of the Tribune remained, like the Times’s values, private and individualistic.

Because Medill was a political as well as a business and social insider, the Tribune harbored less suspicion than Storey and the Times of government per se. Medill was an organizer of the Republican Party, a drafter of the Illinois state constitution of 1871, and mayor of Chicago from 1871 to 1873 in the aftermath of the great fire.

Through the Tribune Medill affirmed the necessity of urban government and branded the Times’s call for complete tax resistance in 1876 as “an infamous incendiary The Tribune has long been associated with the Republican Party.

This letter (below) contains a subscription request by soon-to-bepresident Abraham Lincoln. Right: Medill’s most famous editorial, “Chicago Shall Rise Again” (right), was printed on October 11, 1871, two days after the Great Chicago Fire.

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The popular Tribune feature, “Events of the Week” (above), featured humorous illustrations of worldwide activities drawn by “HRH” (shown here: the week of November 4, 1894). Below: This 1893 poster offered holiday greetings from Tribune news carriers.

appeal.” The Tribune argued simply that life would not be endurable in Chicago without tax-supported government to handle essential services such as water supply, sewerage, police, and fire protection.

Medill believed that the range of proper government authority was broader than the Times perceived it to be, but that range was still quite limited. Though a party regular, Medill was in other ways part of the philosophical 42 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

tradition of the liberal Republican and Mugwump movements of the 1870s and 1880s. He believed that the purpose of government was the preservation of private property and free business enterprise. Like Storey, Medill viewed Chicago as essentially a marketplace. The Tribune fought taxes because taxes encumbered property and hurt business. Private property and business, however, required a minimal level of public collective action.

Commerce depended upon paved streets, wellmaintained bridges, and even schools and libraries. As a former mayor elected on the “Union-Fireproof” ticket, Medill was especially concerned about fire protection.

Fires were bad for business, and fire insurance rates were sky high in Chicago after 1871. For the Tribune, fire control was a clear case of an appropriate collective function; the protection of life and (as the editorials more typically suggested) property.

Government activities not directed toward those ends were inappropriate, in the opinion of the Tribune. The paper was especially opposed to the notion that government should serve a welfare function, except for orphans and the disabled who were without family. On that subject the Tribune saw no difference between the industrial, metropolitan Chicago of 1876 and the village of Chicago forty years before. People must take care of themselves.

The government should be out of the charity business almost altogether, and even private philanthropy should be curtailed in order to preserve the character of the individual and the vitality of individualism in society.

Even the appropriate functions of local government must be strictly limited to achieve salutary ends. The Tribune argued in 1876, for example, that the great public works of the city were largely done. The street grade had been raised to improve drainage, the main streets were paved, the water supply was supposedly pure and ample, the river was a bit less horrible. Now property owners could take care of their own street and

sewer extensions and repairs without the intrusion of government. The collective work of the city could now be limited to routine maintenance of the infrastructure that had already been built. Thus, the paper argued, government could be reduced significantly and taxes cut dramatically, all of which would increase the value of property and enhance the true business of Chicago, which was business.

Though it chastised the Times for rejecting government altogether, the Tribune was nearly as hostile as the Times to the continuing expansion of local government and to what it perceived to be the corrupt domination of government by loafers, bummers, and tax-eaters. In the first six months of 1876 the Tribune carried 115 major editorials pleading for retrenchment and lower taxes in local government and another 119 attacking local government officials, usually for extravagance and corruption. This adds up to nearly two-thirds of all editorials on local subjects. Like the Times, the Tribune brooded and fulminated over the “spendthrift, reckless demagogues who think that Governments are instituted for no other purpose than to confiscate private property.”

The Tribune preferred that local government be run as an adjunct to the business culture of the city. The paper professed a belief in democracy, while at the same time it insisted that government should be the province of “better classes”—“men of brains, wealth, and standing in the community.” Medill could openly favor aristocracy because he believed it was merely meritocracy, rule by a natural, free-market-generated elite. So convinced was the Tribune of the righteousness and efficiency of private enterprise and the free market in urban life that it saw no need, as the Times did, to limit democracy. Surely, all rational people could be persuaded to support a business-oriented government, because what was good for business was good for Chicago.

At the same time that it professed an abiding faith in

democracy and American public institutions, the Tribune warned in 1876 that the country was rapidly sliding into a deep and general moral decline. The corruption of government, ranging from the Grant administration to the ward machines of Chicago, the Tribune traced to individual immorality. To solve the problem the paper continually urged a return to old-fashioned honesty, frugality, simplicity, work, church, and family. Society was simply the gathering together of individual people and very small-scale communal institutions, and “individual integrity and purity of life must be again recognized as among the highest requisites of social life.”

In 1876 Wilbur Storey bragged that the Times spent twice as much as the Tribune on news gathering and that the Tribune was a decadent and decaying news medium. The content of the two papers suggests otherwise. The Tribune was the rival of the Times in all departments of news and information. Medill’s paper was less scandalous and sensational than Storey’s, but the variety of subjects covered and the amount of space devoted to broad categories of subjects were virtually identical in the two papers, despite their differences in ideology, politics, and target audiences. Like the Times, the Tribune favored news of government, politics, and business. Moreover, the Tribune handled the news much as the Times did. Every day the paper contained hundreds of items of the most amazing diversity. Like the Times, the Tribune was a teeming marketplace of miscellaneous information.

Overleaf: Although dubbed the “businessman’s newspaper,” the Tribune offered something for everyone as these sample columns of the paper from 1876 show, from a finance column to “Gossip for the Ladies” to gruesome crime details. And although it scorned its rival, the paper sometimes reprinted Times articles such as “Storey on Tilden,” the publisher’s commentary on 1876 Democratic presidential candidate Samuel Tilden.

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When the Daily News arrived on the Chicago newspaper scene in 1875, it soon claimed a healthy percentage of the market, as this trade card (above) indicates. Opposite: Daily News founder Melville E. Stone stressed community service and the public trust.

The organization of this mass of information was not altogether random. Typically, it was well classified under headings such as “Foreign,” “Washington,” “The City,” “The Court,” “Criminal News,” “Fires,” and “Finance and Trade.” Under any one of these broad categorical headings, the scores of items usually varied enormously and included much of the same kind of trivia that filled the pages of the Times. For example, the Tribune’s “Washington” column was filled daily with stories, reports, statements, speeches, and the verbatim proceedings of Congress. The “City Hall” column listed virtually every official happening in city government, many in single-sentence briefs, from the day’s water rent receipts to the number of buildings inspected. “The City” included personal gossip, real estate transfers, anything that could 46 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

be written in the form of a brief statement of fact. Like Storey, Medill proposed to print all the news of the day.

The Tribune in the 1870s called itself the businessman’s newspaper, and so it was. But as a circulation leader it was not unlike an aggressively popular newspaper such as the Times. On the editorial page it stood for conventional values—individualism, private property, and free enterprise. In the news pages it conducted a marketplace of information with something for everyone—a spectacular bazaar that reflected more than interpreted the complexity and diversity, the individualism and privatism of the modern metropolitan city.

It was into this urban and journalistic milieu that the Chicago Daily News was born in December 1875. The Daily News succeeded almost from the start. By the early weeks of 1876 the paper claimed a larger circulation than any other evening paper in Chicago, about ten thousand daily.

This was probably an exaggeration. But by June of its second year the Daily News averaged about twenty thousand per day, a figure surpassed in Chicago only by the two giants, the Times and the Tribune. By the 1880s the Daily News itself was the giant, with a circulation of more than 150,000. Although no other Chicago paper (except the Record, the morning edition from the Daily News shop) achieved a steady circulation of 100,000 before the twentieth century, the Daily News hit 200,000 by 1895.

Publisher Victor Lawson boasted matter-of-factly in 1886 that nearly everyone who read English in Chicago read the Daily News. This was exaggeration, to be sure, but not by much. The Daily News was the only approximation to a modern medium of mass communication in Chicago in the nineteenth century.

The Daily News was a newspaper quite unlike the Times or the Tribune or any other paper in Chicago. It was a “penny paper,” a small-format, four-page sheet, selling for one cent instead of the usual four or five cents. In appearance alone it was strikingly different. Everything was on a smaller scale—smaller format, fewer stories, and fewer departments; everything tightly edited and drastically condensed. But, in a more subtle sense, its philosophy was as different as its look. Of course, the Daily News was a business enterprise, and its enterprising founders shared many of the business values of men like Wilbur Storey and Joseph Medill. The Daily News also reflected many of the social values of the dominant, Protestant, native-born elites of Chicago. Yet, when it turned to concrete issues in the city of Chicago, the Daily News seemed to recognize certain imperatives of collective life in the modern metropolis. Despite its general commitment to private enterprise, the paper promoted from the beginning a kind of community life much less dominated by rigid notions of private property and individualism. In both editorial philosophy and journalistic technique the Daily News was an urban newspaper, an activist portrayer and promoter of the public community.

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The founder of the Daily News was Melville E. Stone, a classic example of the self-made man, the son of a poor itinerant Methodist minister and destined to become one of the most prominent journalists of his time.

Throughout his life Stone celebrated the homely virtues of his childhood on the Illinois frontier—family, honesty, hard work, equality. As a young, energetic citizen of post–Civil War Chicago, Stone became an active participant in the associational life of the city, serving on the boards of a variety of government agencies and private organizations. In politics he was a Lincoln admirer and a Mugwump, or, as he liked to say, “a Republican with a conscience.” He professed to believe that a newspaper should be independent of party politics, devoted to the presentation of “facts” rather than the manipulation of public opinion. Stone’s partner almost from the beginning of the Daily News was Victor Lawson, a man much like Stone in personal background, political philosophy, and social vision. Lawson took over sole control of the Daily News in 1888 and continued Stone’s editorial tradition while contributing his own special talent for the promotion of advertising and circulation.

Although Stone and Lawson were probably more involved in voluntary organizations than most businessmen, they were in most respects not exceptional men in nineteenth-century America. Their biographies read much like those of other self-made businessmen, including newspaper publishers such as Storey and

Medill. Their professed values were conventional. But the nature of their newspaper led Stone and Lawson, almost in spite of themselves, down a different path, away from an unexamined devotion to private property and individualism and toward a vision of collective life and community in the fragmented “private city” of the late nineteenth century. Stone’s aim was not to publish a smorgasbord paper, with some different thing for everyone, in the style of the Times and the Tribune and other popular papers. His aim was to print a small newspaper, edited so that a majority of the content would appeal to a majority of the readers. Like the Times, the Daily News was to be a mass-audience paper, aimed at all the citizens of Chicago. But rather than serve the individual tastes of individual readers, Stone sought out the common tastes of a community of readers.

The image of Chicago evoked in the Daily News editorials was one of community and family rather than of individualism and marketplace. From the beginning the editorial philosophy of the paper was much more attuned to interdependence than to individualism in the great metropolises of the late nineteenth century.

The social obligations of Chicago to its people were frequent editorial themes. In a remarkable editorial during its first month of life, the Daily News argued that the city should provide public relief and employment for all in times of need, because hard times were much more difficult for the unemployed in a modern city than in

This 1876 front page (above) shows the Daily News’ usual balance of attention-grabbing headlines (“The Hanford Murder”) and dedication to public service (“The Hospital War”). Opposite: Victor Lawson (shown here c. 1882) took over management of the Daily News in 1888, but kept Stone’s community-minded values intact.

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Popular Daily News features in 1876 ranged from “Curiosities of Crime” (left) to a “Housekeepers’ Department” (right).

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the countryside or a small town. Moreover, to care for the poor was to care for the whole community. Such a plan, of course, would cost money, the paper admitted; but in a larger sense “nothing would be lost, but simply capital would be removed from one pocket to another, to be circulated for the good of the community.” And, anyway, community spirit, not cost, should be the sole concern: “Are we, citizens of the boasted Queen of the West, the first in every enterprise, to pause to consider a question of dollars and cents when a great end is to be accomplished?” The argument was based less on Christian charity and more on the practical requirements of life in a large city. “No class in society can afford to ignore another,” the paper declared; “we are far too interdependent.”

To some extent Melville Stone’s editorial philosophy grew out of his own personal sense of place in Chicago.

On the one hand, Stone was part of the business and social elite of the city, relishing his membership and leadership in upper-class clubs and societies. On the other hand, Stone loved the “other half” of Chicago just as well. He seemed to attract and to support with great good humor a long line of drunks and vagabond reporters and editors on the staff of the Daily News. He proudly numbered among his friends drifters and burglars as well as business magnates and presidents. Fifty years later he recalled how he had loved it all, from top to bottom. “As Dean Swift would have said,” he wrote, “we lived all the days of our life.”

More specifically, the Chicago fire of 1871 became an enormously important event and symbol for Melville Stone’s understanding of Chicago and of urban life in general. During the unhappy winter of 1871–72, Stone was one of the chief directors of relief efforts in the city, and he came away from the experience much impressed by the commonality of interests among residents of a large city, regardless of their class or occupation. “There was no shelter for the rich, none for the poor; for the time being the millionaire was no better off in worldly goods than the pauper,” Stone wrote on the fifth anniversary of the fire. In that fall of 1876, with the city in economic depression, Stone reminded Chicagoans that the whole community must rise together as it had five years before. “The poor shall not suffer, the sick shall not be neglected,” he wrote, “and all must look forward to better times that are coming.” In effect, Stone had accepted the idea that private property in a large city has social roots and community obligations—a view not fashioned through study and reflection but forged in the fire of 1871.

Because of its belief in the interdependent nature of urban society, the Daily News was much less inclined than the Times or the Tribune to place the blame for social problems upon the heads of individuals. Stone

argued that the poor were poor because of hard times; prostitutes were prostitutes because they could find no honest work; bad boys were bad because of poor nurture in the schools and churches. With such a view of the power of environment and community over the individual, it is not surprising that the Daily News was a strong advocate of charity and an early proponent of what would soon be called the Social Gospel. The paper urged the creation of all sorts of philanthropic organizations, including shelters for prostitutes and homeless waifs, public baths, soup kitchens, mutual aid building societies, and especially unemployment relief agencies.

Almost always, interdependence and sympathy were the key ideas, the organic city the key image. In calling for large-scale, organized charity for the approaching winter of 1876–77, the Daily News rejected the idea that a person would have to be a property owner to be a part of the city. “It is enough for charitable people, for Christian people, for humane people, to know that a man is in need, whether he comes from Maine or California, from Illinois or Kentucky, from Germany, Ireland, or the Cape of Good Hope, he is still a man.” But, as usual, Stone’s reasoning was based as much on the practical interdependence of city life as on the moral obligations of Christian charity. Recalling again the aftermath of the fire, Stone reminded Chicagoans that “the man who would refuse to aid his fellow man this hard winter will, in all probability, find use for a soup house himself before he dies.”

While promoting voluntary association as a way to strengthen community life in the city, the Daily News also urged formal public action through government. In this respect the Daily News early drifted from the individualistic and voluntaristic reform ideology of conventional Mugwump organizations such as the Chicago Citizens’ Association, founded in 1874 as the city’s first permanent municipal reform group. Melville Stone was certainly no socialist in the ideological sense. Like Medill and Storey, he complained about high taxes and governmental waste and corruption. He even sometimes spoke in the abstract of immutable laws of political economy.

But on most concrete cases the Daily News found itself advocating increased governmental intervention in business and urban life and even arguing from time to time that taxes were not too high, considering the social tasks at hand. In the first six months of 1876 the paper carried more than three times as many editorials calling for expansion of government activities as for retrenchment.

While the Times was calling for the dismantling of city government and the Tribune was carefully drawing the boundaries between the proper realms of public and private action, the Daily News was urging more government enterprise and more government regulation as the only way to make life livable in a modern city.

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Victor Lawson’s Daily News (above) promoted a stronger role for government to ensure the health and safety of Chicagoans.

Opposite: This trade card suggested that the whole family— including the dog—read the Daily News.

The Daily News promoted government enterprise for two reasons. First, the paper argued that large-scale urban centers such as Chicago demanded large-scale public works. For simple reasons of health and safety, streets must be repaired and extended, sewers and waterworks maintained, trash collected, schools and parks operated, public baths built, air pollution controlled, and hospitals improved. In this the Daily News was not unlike the Tribune. But in its advocacy of public works the Daily News went far beyond the Tribune and the business-dominated reform tradition in Chicago. The Daily News urged government enterprise not only because it was necessary to provide an economic infrastructure for private enterprise but also as a way to provide work for the unemployed. In early 1876 the Daily News called upon the city to provide a job to every man who needed one. The paper believed that the community owed its most unfortunate members help in time of need, for their misfortune was no fault of their own and was the community’s misfortune as well. While the Times was counseling the unemployed to get out of town, the Daily News was urging the town to take them in. In a traditional community this might have been accomplished by the private action of kin or clan. In the modern urban world such community building would require the formal, organized effort of government. It would require the public community.

The Daily News promoted an expanded role for government in regulation as well as enterprise. The paper proposed that city and state governments take more responsibility for ensuring the health and safety of citi52 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

zens, through the control of railroad and wagon traffic, the regulation of food and drug quality, the enforcement of fire codes, the inspection of buildings, the abatement of smoke and foul odors, and the regulation and municipal ownership of public utilities. The Daily News was much less doctrinaire about the rights of private property than were the Times or the Tribune. In the social scheme of Stone and the Daily News, business was meant to serve people, property to serve community. If business and property failed in this service, the people should intervene.

As a penny paper, the Daily News gathered an audience that was heavily working class, and the paper sought to affirm its sympathies with the laborers of Chicago. The Daily News, however, was not in any sense a socialist or labor paper. Its aim was to promote community across class lines and to appeal to common interests of all classes. While its calls for public works and government regulation of business may have been in the interest of the lower classes, the paper also favored social regulations, such as antigambling laws, liquor control, immigration restrictions, compulsory school and Sunday school attendance, and compulsory English language instruction. This insistence of the Daily News upon social control and conformity, along with extensive economic regulation, suggests that the paper’s ideology was a transformation of older ideals of an ordered, organic community rather than an incipient class-based socialism. Though the Daily News’s program might be labeled socialistic, its goal was not radical social change; rather, it was social and community preservation against the storms of urbanization.

If its editorial philosophy set the Daily News apart from the other leading newspapers of Chicago, its news policy was just as different. In a prospectus the first day of publication, Stone promised potential readers a compact newspaper that would cover a variety of news but without the “never-ending miscellany” of other popular Chicago papers. He said the paper would carry the latest telegraph news, plus the criminal, legal, social, religious, political, and trade news of Chicago. He also promised more of what might be called “urban consumer news”— housekeeping tips and advice on insurance and other consumer purchases. And Stone promised more sporting news and a daily short story of “intense dramatic interest”—“instructive as well as entertaining.”

Stone’s philosophy of editing was to edit, rather than to print, “all the news” in the custom of popular newspapers of the day. This, more than the content of the information, is the key to the paper’s news policy. Stone believed that busy readers preferred the condensed format and preferred to focus their attention on one big, continuing story at a time. Stone criticized newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune, which he said “was conducted upon the theory that it was justified in publishing whatever it believed the public would enjoy reading.” Perhaps thinking of the

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The Daily News stressed the need for altruism in the community, setting an example with its own Fresh Air Fund (above) and sanitarium for the city’s children (right, c. 1902).

Times, Stone said, “It is easy to edit a newspaper if one does no thinking. . . . He then labels all murders and suicides and hangings and prize fights and chicken fights as news, and his task is a simple one.” Stone did not disapprove of sensationalism and human interest news. He merely felt that both good business and good morality required editors to be highly selective in shaping their product. Rather than cater to the myriad interests of a complex city, he would seek the common interest— assuming, of course, that there was such a thing.

In its first year the Daily News only partly lived up to its prospectus and to Stone’s notions of good popular journalism. In general, the paper carried a smaller proportion of government news than the Times and the Tribune and somewhat more consumer news and fiction.

Stone regularly included household tips, medical advice, and scientific news, along with a few tersely written editorials. This material was what Stone had in mind when he talked of news of interest to the majority of readers.

The Daily News carried crime and disaster stories as well as other human interest news, but the paper carried very few purely private items, such as society gossip, church news, and other such “tittle-tattle,” as Stone called it.

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Handbills like this showcased the many options for Chicago newspaper readers as the Times, Tribune, Daily News, and other papers vied for their attention.

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The Daily News was so condensed in 1876, however, that its only real news page—page one—read almost like the miscellaneous shorts that Stone had renounced in his prospectus. Major stories were usually only one or two column inches long, and many items were singe sentences. Neither Stone nor his staff favored the extreme condensation of the Daily News in its very early years; it was forced by the financial needs to keep the paper small while accepting as much advertising as possible.

Gradually, as the Daily News grew in size, it settled upon investigative reporting and crusading as its chief strength.

From the beginning Stone was fond of what he called “detective journalism,” especially the “investigation of public wrongs.” In 1877, for example, the Daily News began a crusade for state inspection and regulation of savings banks, as part of its interest in consumer protection. In the course of the investigation Stone exposed a crooked bank president, who fled to Canada and then to Europe. Stone personally gave chase and finally tracked him down in Germany. This was the first of many such investigative stories, and all of them provided just the sort of news that Stone liked: stories of wide interest among all readers; stories that continued day after day, focusing the attention of the whole audience; stories that served the “betterment of readers”; and stories laced with drama and inherent sensation.

The old popular city press, such as the Times and the Chicago Tribune, and the new metropolitan press, such as the Chicago Daily News, both had to confront the problems of the growing complexity and diversity in modern cities and the breakdown of traditional community life. To some extent all recognized and celebrated diversity; they had to in order to be broadly popular. And all recognized that much of modern city life had become formal and impersonal. But in a more fundamental sense their confrontations with complexity took quite different turns. The Times and Tribune conceived their function as serving essentially private interests. As proponents of laissez-faire, they drew a sharp distinction between public and private. Certainly, they covered in great detail the chief public institution, government. But the public realm was strictly limited. The rest of the life of the city was simply the aggregation of private lives, and the task of the newspaper was to serve these private interests—diverse, discrete, and individual. The Daily News, on the other hand, conceived of a public of a few broadly shared interests. The Daily News understood that the denizens of the modern city did not share many strictly private interests, as did the members of traditional face-toface communities. The populations of cities were, in fact, becoming increasingly heterogeneous, isolated, and private.

Yet, paradoxically, the growing interdependence of life in the modern city made some private interests public, in the sense of being widely and deeply shared. For the Chicago Daily News, the task was to locate and to serve those interests, to promote a new kind of public community.

David Paul Nord, a professor of journalism and American studies and an adjunct professor of history at Indiana University, is an editor of the five-volume History of the Book in America.

From Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers by David Paul Nord (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001). This article was first published in the Journal of Urban History 11 (Aug. 1985): 411–41. © 1985 by Sage Publications. Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 26–27, CHS; 28–29, CHS, ICHi04593; 30–31, CHS, ICHi-02773; 31 right, from New Chicago: A Full Review of the Work of Reconstruction, for the Year (Chicago Times, 1872), CHS; 32 left, CHS; 32 right, CHS, Chicago Times, 27 November 1875; 33, CHS, ICHi-21288; 34–35, CHS; 37 left, CHS, Chicago Times, 27 November 1875; 37 right, CHS, Chicago Times, 11 January 1876; 38–39, CHS; 40, CHS, ICHi16828; 41 left, from History of the Chicago Tribune 1847–1922 (The Tribune Company, 1922); 41 right, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 11 October 1871; 42–43, from Events of the Week Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune: A Pictorial Record of the Year by HRH (Chicago Tribune, 1893–94); 42 left, CHS; 44–45 background, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 29 July 1876; 44 left, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 24 July 1876; 44 center, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 24 July 1876; 44 right, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 23 July 1876; 45 center, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 30 July 1876; 45 right, CHS, Chicago Tribune, 30 July 1876; 46, CHS; 47, CHS, ICHi-24173; 48, CHS, Chicago Daily News, 8 August 1876; 49, from Victor Lawson: His Time and His Work by Charles H. Dennis (University of Chicago, 1935); 50 left, CHS, Chicago Daily News, 24 July 1876; 50 right, CHS, Chicago Daily News, 14 August 1876; 52, CHS, Chicago Daily News, 14 August 1876; 53, CHS; 54 left, CHS, Chicago Daily News Fresh Air Fund: Story of Its Stewardship during 1893; 54–55, CHS, DN0000142; 56, CHS. F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on American newspaper history during the nineteenth century, read The Golden Age of the Newspaper by George H. Douglas (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999). Prairie Voices: A Literary History of Chicago from the Frontier to 1893 by Kenny J. Williams (Nashville, Tenn.: Townsend, 1980) looks at other newspapers and publications from Chicago’s earliest days. For more information on individual newspapers, see Lloyd Wendt’s Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1979), Victor Lawson: His Time and His Work by Charles H. Dennis (University of Chicago, 1935), and To Print the News and Raise Hell! A Biography of Wilbur F. Storey by Justin E. Walsh (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1968).

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MAKING HISTORY I

William Warfield: Ambassador of Music T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

W

illiam Warfield ranks among the most influential American musicians of the twentieth century. Since gaining international attention with his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1951 musical Show Boat, Warfield, a bass-baritone, has excelled in virtually every area open to musicians. He has worked with the leading composers and conductors of the twentieth century, including Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Bruno Walter, and Otto Klemperer. In 1984, he received a Grammy Award for his narration of Copland’s Lincoln Portrait accompanied by the Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra. The recipient of the Handel Medallion, New York City’s highest cultural honor; the Phi Mu Alpha’s Man of the Year Award; and the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Amistad Foundation, Warfield was also inducted into the American Classical Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 1999.

William Caesar Warfield was born on January 22, 1920, in West Helene, Arkansas, the eldest of five children of Robert E. and Bertha McCamery Warfield. “My father at that time was a sharecropper and had no education,” recounts Warfield. “He received a calling to the ministry and felt that he must come educate himself for that, and he knew that he could come north and go to night school.” Warfield’s family moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, and then to Rochester, New York, where Warfield’s father was mentored by the locally celebrated Dr. James Rose, pastor of the community’s leading African American congregation at Mount Olivet Baptist Church. Robert Warfield’s hard work led to pastorships at Friendship Baptist Church in Corning, New York, and the Mount Vernon Baptist Church in Rochester.

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Above: William Warfield (left), recipient of the 2001 Theodore Thomas History Maker Award for Distinction in the Performing Arts. Composer, pianist, and radio personality Ramsey Lewis (right) presented Warfield with his honor at the Making History Awards ceremony.

Opposite: William Warfield, c. 1955.

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To this day, Warfield describes himself as “a preacher’s kid.” His father’s churches, in fact, were key elements of Warfield’s upbringing and provided him with his first “theater” experiences. “My childhood was spent centered around church,” admits Warfield. “All the music I learned started in church.”

By age nine, Warfield was taking piano lessons from the church’s music minister, and as a teenager, his voice started attracting attention. “One day the teacher tugged me around the shirt and said, ‘You got a nice voice. Why don’t you come in after school and I’ll give you voice lessons,’” remembers Warfield. “My first appearance was in an assembly program.”

Warfield encountered little racism growing up in Rochester. “We all still believed in the idea of America as a melting pot, and my high school, like my neighborhood, was a real healthy cauldron. If some of the other ethnic groups didn’t always take to Negroes all that well, it was rarely a cause of unpleasantness.” At Washington High School in Rochester, Warfield was studentbody vice president and won the National Music Educators League Competition in St. Louis, which earned him a scholarship to Eastman School of Music at the University of Rochester where he eventually earned his bachelor’s degree and began his master of arts degree.

Warfield’s talents were not only in music; he was also adept in languages.

“I was studying with Ms. [Elsa] Miller [in high school] and there was a German piece that I wanted to sing, and she said, ‘Well, dear, you don’t know what the words mean. I’ll tell you what, if you take up German next year, I’ll let you start studying German literature,’” remembers Warfield. Within a few years, Warfield was winning prizes for his recitation of German poetry.

Warfield’s language facility proved instrumental later in his career. He remembers that nearly all of his mentors later insisted that “if you’re going to sing in a language, you should know what it’s all about and understand the words and have some feeling of its grammatical structure.” By the time he graduated from high school, Warfield had language training in German, French, Italian, and Latin. As a music teacher today, Warfield tells his students, “If you can’t recite it, you’re not going to be able to sing it well. The only way to really get a feeling of the language and its culture is to study the language itself.”

Like many Americans of his generation, Warfield’s professional interests were interrupted by World War II. Within a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Warfield was working in the military intelligence division of the army at Camp Ritchie in Maryland in large part because of his language abilities.

The military marked Warfield’s first experience in a completely segregated setting. He remained at Camp Ritchie until he was mustered out in March 1946.

Warfield immediately returned to complete his master’s studies at Eastman. But shortly after his arrival, he received a call from the impresario John Hammond who wanted Warfield to audition for the national road show of Call Me Mister. Warfield was offered the part almost immediately. “I went on the road for one year, cross-country touring,” remembers Warfield. “As a matter of fact, my first appearance in Chicago was in the summer of 1947, at the Blackstone Theater.” Warfield’s costars included then-little-known entertainers Bob Fosse, Buddy Hackett, and Carl Reiner. Warfield remembers, “There was a young comedian who was just married and had a little son [named] Rob Reiner. I used to bounce him on my knee back in the 1940s when he was just a little boy.”

The tour experience changed Warfield’s life. Rather than returning to Eastman, Warfield thought, “I think I’ll stick around here and see if I can make a career of this.” Warfield moved to New York City and lived at the Americana Hotel on West Forty-seventh Street, while waiting for a room to become available in the Woodrow Wilson Apartments, a well-known artists’ 60 | Chicago History | Summer 2002

On March 19, 1950, William Warfield made his debut at New York’s Town Hall.

Warfield sang several selections, accompanied by Otto Herz, and recited a handful of poetry selections, including work from Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, and Tennessee Williams.

residence across the street. At the Americana, Warfield “got to know Sidney Poitier. He was trying to make it as a young actor.” Other times, adds Warfield, “I remember going down to the Village Vanguard to hear a young guy that was trying to make it as a nightclub singer—Harry Belafonte.”

Like many young artists in New York, Warfield scraped by with little. “We were gypsies,” he states. To supplement his income, Warfield played the piano and sang in cocktail lounges and nightclubs. He spent his free time at the Rustic Café on West Forty-fifth Street, along with Billie Holiday and Eartha Kitt. He continued his musical training at the American Theatre Wing in New York and with his coaches and accompanists, including Otto Herz and Yves Tinayre. But Warfield is quick to admit that without the “nightclub thing” surviving in New York would have been difficult.

Indeed, the “nightclub thing” was a decisive part of Warfield’s career. “It was in one of the nightclubs in Toronto that I met the man that sponsored my debut,” explains Warfield. Walter Carr, a Canadian stockbroker, was impressed with the young singer’s voice. According to Warfield, Carr “said that at a crucial point in his life somebody stepped forward and did the things that made him successful. He figured that before he died he had to pass that on to someone, and he decided that it was going to be me.”

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Warfield identifies his debut at New York’s Town Hall (opposite) as the key moment in his career. Left: Warfield gave this portrait to New York’s Carnegie Hall in the summer of 1966.

On March 19, 1950, with Carr’s financial backing, Warfield made his debut at New York’s Town Hall. To this day, he considers it the key moment of his career. Music reviewers were quick to acknowledge the birth of a new star. “It is especially delightful to welcome a new recital artist when he comes to public attention virtually unknown. Mr. Warfield’s debut was the more impressive for qualities hitherto unrevealed in several Broadway assignments,” wrote one reviewer. Another bluntly concluded: “There is no facet of the singer’s art missing from Mr. Warfield’s equipment.” He was immediately invited by the Australian Broadcasting Commission to tour Australia for thirty-five concerts, including solo performances with their five leading symphony orchestras.

Warfield admits that if Walter Carr had not “discovered” him or if his talent agency had promoted his nightclub career more, “I would have happily followed the Muse in that direction. . . . I’d like to think I would have fallen into a category comparable with Nat King Cole.”

Shortly thereafter, Warfield met and married the future opera diva Leontyne Price. Warfield proposed to Price in Chicago. “Every time I came to Chicago, I stayed at the Congress Hotel,” remembers Warfield. On this occasion, Warfield and Price were sitting in a hotel restaurant at a table by themselves with his manager nearby. “I had the engagement ring and while we were sitMaking History | 63

Warfield burst onto the national musical scene with his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” in the 1951 remake of Show Boat. Warfield believes that over the years, the changing lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” have reflected the increased intolerance of racisim in the United States.

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ting there I reached under the table and took her hand and tried to put it on her and dropped it. She didn’t know what I was doing.” His manager then joined them. “We were all under the table looking for this damn ring.” In August 1952, Warfield and Price were married in New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church. Warfield’s father assisted with the ceremony.

For both Warfield and Price, the pressures of careers and breaking the “color line” in their fields put a heavy strain on their marriage. Each were compelled to follow different career tracks: Price sang in Europe for several years before her San Francisco Opera debut in 1957 while Warfield stayed in New York and pursued his already successful vocal career. In 1958, they separated and remained separated for more than a decade before divorcing in 1972. “The problem was two careers,” says Warfield in retrospect. “We never saw each other, never had a chance for the marriage to settle. Neither of us ever remarried. I guess we both figured we had the best.”

The event that catapulted Warfield into the nation’s consciousness came in his performance of “Ol’ Man River” in the MGM revival of Show Boat in 1951.

Playing “Joe,” a Mississippi River dockhand, Warfield starred alongside Ava Gardner, Howard Keel, and Kathryn Grayson. Warfield’s execution of the song was so impressive that it was recorded in one take and later included in the film That’s Entertainment, a compendium of the greatest scenes in the golden years of MGM musicals.

Warfield emphasizes that the changing lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” reflect the vicissitude of race relations in the twentieth-century United States. The musical was based on Edna Ferber’s book Show Boat, first published as a serialized novel in Woman’s Home Companion in 1926. With music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Show Boat rejected the fluffy musical comedies and melodramatic operettas common before 1930 and focused on the controversial themes of unhappy marriages and racial prejudice.

The character of “Joe” was largely created by Jules Bledsoe, who sang “Ol’ Man River” in the premier of Show Boat at the Ziegfield Theater in 1927 and again in the first film version in 1929.

According to Warfield, the lyrics in the 1927 version were:

Leontyne Price and William Warfield’s engagement photo. Warfield and Price met while performing in Porgy and Bess.

Warfield proposed to Price during dinner at Chicago’s Congress Hotel, and the couple married in August 1952.

Niggers all work on de Mississippi.

Niggers work while de white folks play, Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset, Gittin’ no rest till the judgment day.

After 1930, however, African American vocalists grew more assertive and demanded that the racial epithet be replaced with less offensive terms such as “colored folks” and “darkies.”

Warfield believes that in 1936, when the entertainer and civil rights activist Paul Robeson prepared to sing “Ol’ Man River,” he forced filmmakers to adopt still another version: Making History | 65

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The cast of Porgy and Bess arrives in Chicago in June 1952. Leading cast members, second from left to right: Cab Calloway, Warfield, and Price, pose for a photograph outside Dearborn Street train station with a goat that appeared in the show.

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Above: Warfield in his role as Porgy.

Left: The program from the 1952 Chicago production of Porgy and Bess.

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There’s an ol’ man called the Mississippi.

That’s an ol’ man I would like to be.

What does he care if the world’s got troubles?

What does he care if the lands ain’t free?

Warfield adds that as “Ol’ Man River” became Robeson’s signature work, he changed other parts to reflect his disdain for racial segregation and prejudice in the United States. The line “Get a little drunk and you land in jail,” Robeson changed to “Get a little gump and you land in jail.” According to Warfield, Robeson was charging that “if you protest they’ll throw you in jail.”

For these and other reasons, some consider Show Boat to be the most influential musical of the twentieth century.

Show Boat was not the first time Warfield ever sang “Ol’ Man River” in a production. Warfield admits he had once forgotten when he first sang the work. He was at a book signing in Rochester in the late 1990s when a childhood friend from the Baden Street Settlement House reintroduced himself.

Warfield remembers his friend handing him an old program: “I looked down and guess what I was singing? ‘Ol’ Man River.’ I was only sixteen years old.

That would have been in 1936, and I probably had just seen Paul Robeson [in the film Show Boat].”

Warfield’s success in Show Boat resulted in an invitation to play the lead role of “Porgy” in Porgy and Bess in 1952. To some, Warfield’s portrayal of “Porgy” surpassed his performance of “Ol’ Man River.” He sang in New York City Opera productions of the musical in 1961 and 1964 and received a Grammy Award for the RCA Victor recording Great Scenes from Porgy and Bess, which he performed with Leontyne Price. Warfield’s version of “Porgy” was so impressive that the United States Department of State invited him to do six different international tours of the production, more tours than any other American solo artist. Warfield was described as “a musical ambassador.” He opened diplomatic doors in countries that resisted encounters with the United States diplomatic corps. Even after he “retired,” Porgy and Bess remained a part of Warfield’s oeuvre. In 1989, he worked with the Jim Cullum Jazz Band as narrator in the band’s concert presentation of Porgy and Bess.

Left: A “Synopsis of Scenes and Musical Numbers” from Porgy and Bess, in which Warfield and Price performed several duets.

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The international tours also exposed Warfield to European audiences, which were sometimes more appreciative of African American performers than audiences in the United States. From 1965 to 1974, Warfield performed in various productions of Porgy and Bess and Show Boat in the Vienna Volksoper. In those years, Vienna became a second home to Warfield.

Warfield is quick to defend both Show Boat and Porgy and Bess against critics who interpret the productions as racist. Warfield believes Porgy and Bess is an “authentic” folk opera because composer George Gershwin “spent so much time in Charleston and had so many black people sing their songs and spirituals for him. He absorbed all the street calls and the music being sung in the black churches and transcribed it.” Similarly, Warfield believes that critics of Show Boat are “misinterpreting the intent.” The scene where Julie is thrown off the boat because of her racially mixed parentage is included “to point out how wrong that was,” argues Warfield. “The fact that they did the movie was something that brought people’s attention to do something about it. I think this is the face of art.”

In 1975, Warfield became a professor of music at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign at the invitation of John Wustman, an accompanist of Warfield’s and a professor at the university (Wustman later became Luciano Pavarotti’s pianist and accompanist). In 1990, because of retirement laws, Warfield was forced to retire from the University of Illinois. Shortly thereafter, changes in federal retirement laws enabled Warfield to briefly teach at the University of Texas at San Antonio before accepting an appointment at Northwestern University in 1994.

Warfield finds teaching to be one of the most satisfying endeavors of this life. “To be perfectly frank with you, my whole idea of a profession was to teach,” he admits. “I found, for instance, that when I got on the stage my performance expanded even by [the] connection with the teaching.” Although he will always be remembered for his stage and movie performances, Warfield says, “Teaching has been one of the greatest fulfillments of my life.”

Music critics and historians have and will continue to compare Warfield with Paul Robeson, largely because both were the leading African American vocalists of their generations and starred in productions of Show Boat. Here, however, the similarities end. “Robeson was a person who used music as a communication for righting the wrongs,” states Warfield. “When he decided to learn folk songs, it was because he wanted to know the people—what they were thinking of their troubles, their trials, their tribulations—and he learned all of these things and identified with that as a humanitarian.”

Opposite: The cover of William Warfield’s autobiography, My Music and My Life.

Above: The Chicago Tribune ran this article in January 2000 in honor of both Warfield’s numerous accomplishments and his eightieth birthday.

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By contrast, Warfield thinks his style and approach to music shares more with Marian Anderson, the African American opera star of the 1930s and 1940s: “She immersed herself in art, and if she came out as a shining symbol, it was because of the art, not because she was using the art as a method of correcting things.” In Warfield’s mind, Anderson “was the epitome of serving art itself, and if she shined, it was because of what she was expressing from art itself.” To this day, Warfield sees himself as “a servant to his singing.”

In looking over his career, Warfield expresses no regret that he was not an American opera singer or a Hollywood star. “Opera wasn’t ready for me, or any black male. Hollywood was still wrestling with its own soul, and not ready to open up to African American themes. Broadway, and the theater in general, was still struggling with the same issues. As I progressed along my career ladder I found a few rungs missing, and sometimes had to look for a foothold in the most improbable places.”

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.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 58, CHS; 59, CHS, Scotty Piper Collection, ICHi-32086; 61–62, courtesy of The Town Hall, New York City; 63, courtesy of Carnegie Hall Archives; 64, © Warner Bros. Publications. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission; 65, CHS, DN0-6090-A; 66–67, CHS, DN-0-6090; 68 top, courtesy of NBC Studios and the Gershwin Estate. Print from the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division; 68 bottom–69, CHS; 70, book cover reprinted courtesy of Sagamore Publishing. Within cover, photo courtesy of Carlton Bruett/University of Illinois Alumni Association; 71, Copyrighted 2000, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 72 top, courtesy of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign Archives; 72 bottom, courtesy of The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best place to learn about William Warfield is his autobiography, William Warfield: My Music and My Life (Champaign, Ill.: Sagamore, 1991). A recent article on Warfield’s life in Chicago is by John von Rhein, “William Warfield is not the retiring type,” Chicago Tribune, 16 January 2000.

T H E 2 0 0 1 M A K I N G H I S T O R Y AWA R D S were underwritten through a generous grant from The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. The Trust honors the memory of Elizabeth Morse (right), daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a nineteenthcentury Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities.

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Of all of the roles he has played in his life, Warfield finds teaching among the most satisfying. The Champaign-Urbana Courier announced his professorship at the University of Illinois in 1975, with this picture accompanying the headline “‘Showboat’ star teaches at UI.’”