Chicago History | Spring 2003

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Spring 2003 VOLUME XXXI, NUMBER 3

Contents

4 20 42 3 56 66

Recasting the Black Sox Legend Daniel A. Nathan

Champions: Sports and the Chicago Daily News Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob

Chicago’s Global Communities Peter T. Alter

Departments From the President Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Index to Volume 31

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Emily M. Holmes Gwen Ihnat Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Publications Interns Maria Cherones Natalie Ford

Copyright 2003 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

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

On the cover: Chicago White Sox outfielder Hap Felsch in 1915.

CHS, SDN-060247

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

TRUSTEES

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

Philip D. Block III David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Lonnie G. Bunch Stanley J. Calderon Michelle L. Collins Kevann M. Cooke John W. Croghan Mrs. A. Campbell de Frise Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Mrs. Victor Elting III Jonathan F. Fanton Sharon Gist Gilliam M. Hill Hammock

LIFE TRUSTEES

Susan Higinbotham David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Jr. Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Paul L. Snyder

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

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

CHS is easily accessible via public transportation. CTA buses nos. 11, 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. All buses except 156 are accessible.

For travel information, call 1-888-YOUR-CTA or visit www.transitchicago.com.

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

Chicago Historical Society

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

FROM THE PRESIDENTI

D

o you root for the White Sox or for the Cubs?

Your answer to this question says different things to different people—they may assume that your response reveals where you live, for example. Although their assumptions may be completely inaccurate, Chicagoans nonetheless use sports and team alliances to help identify who they are and pinpoint what they think others are.

Chicago Sports! You Shoulda Been There, the Chicago Historical Society’s newest exhibition, explores the city’s sports tradition beginning in the early twentieth century. Aside from celebrating the highlights—the Dempsey-Tunney match, the DuSable High School basketball team, the 1969 Cubs, and the 1990s Bulls—this exhibition also reveals how Chicago defines itself through sports.

Over the past few years, historians have discovered that sports is a wonderfully provocative lens through which to explore urban history. While Chicago Sports celebrates the city’s athletic superstars, such as Red Grange, Walter Payton, and Michael Jordan, the exhibition also looks at the academic and community teams that help unify schools and neighborhoods, such as the University of Chicago’s onetime powerhouse football team and the Hull-House women’s basketball players. I hope that you’ll join us for this exciting new exhibition, which opens on Saturday, March 29, 2003.

I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Exelon for their generous support of this exhibition and for their continued commitment to the Chicago Historical Society. In addition, we received funding through a twenty-fifth-anniversar y grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Guild of the Chicago Historical Society, the Blum-Kovler Foundation, McCormick Tribune Foundation, ChicagoSports.com, and the Chicago White Sox. Promotional support has been provided by Pepsi. The exhibition’s outstanding video was produced and donated by The History Channel.

This issue of Chicago History further explores the city’s sports tradition. David Nathan’s “Recasting the Black Sox Legend” looks at the far-reaching effects of the 1919 scandal on American culture. In “Champions: Sports and the Chicago Daily News,” authors Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob present some of the great sports photographs from one of the city’s most storied newspapers.

Lonnie G. Bunch President Chicago Historical Society 3

Recasting the Black Sox Legend DA N I E L A . N AT H A N

Bernard Malamud’s The Natural revisits professional baseball’s darkest days.

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E | Perhaps the most infamous episode in Chicago’s colorful sports past is the 1919 Black Sox scandal, in which the hometown team was accused of throwing the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. One contemporar y newspaper reporter, describing the apocr yphal “Say it ain’t so” exchange between Chicago White Sox player “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and a young fan, summarized the impact of the scandal: “The world of faith crushed around the heads of the kids. Their idol lay in the dust, their faith destroyed. Nothing was true, nothing was honest. There was no Santa Claus.” Melodramatics aside, this reporter accurately sensed that the scandal had scarred the game and its fans forever.

Decades after Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned eight of the 1919 White Sox players from baseball, the incident still resonated with Americans. In 1952, Bernard Malamud published The Natural, a novel about the journey of a young baseball player, Roy Hobbs, who is determined to be the “best there ever was in the game” (a popular movie version appeared in 1984). The book is complex, presenting baseball as a great, almost mythic presence in American life, but one that is also marred by dishonesty and corruption. In this excerpt from his book Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal, Daniel A. Nathan explores how The Natural reflects both the scandal of 1919 as well as the post–World War II social and cultural landscape in which it was written.

I

n early October 1919, the Chicago White Sox lost the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, five games to three. By most accounts, the underdog Reds should not have beaten the Sox, who had won the World Series in 1917. In 1920, several prominent White Sox players testified before a Cook County grand jury that they had conspired with gamblers to lose the series.

All told, eight ballplayers—most famously, the outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson—were implicated. Shock waves of disbelief and indignation rippled across the country.

Although eventually acquitted of conspiracy charges, the eight men, their names forever sullied, were banished 4 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

This pocket watch (left) commemorates the American League’s Chicago White Sox 1917 World Series championship. Pictures of the White Sox appear at each hour marker on the dial.

Below: Members of the legendary 1917 Sox at their victorious World Series. The first four players from the left are Joe Jackson, Swede Risberg, Eddie Collins, and Chick Gandil; Buck Weaver is on the far right.

5

from the game by baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. “I don’t know whether the whole truth of what went on there among the White Sox will ever come out,” lamented Edd Roush, a Hall of Fame outfielder and the last surviving member of the 1919 Cincinnati Reds, more than forty years later. “Even today nobody really knows exactly what took place. Whatever it was, though, it was a dirty rotten shame.”

The Black Sox scandal has remained firmly entrenched in American memories and imaginations. In its day it was reported on the front page of virtually every major newspaper in the country. The scandal and its participants continue to be the subjects of magazine articles and receive attention in academic and popular histories, novels, dramas, feature films, television documentaries, and Web sites. Collectively, these and numerous other cultural narratives and texts, according to the paleontologist (and occasional baseball writer) Stephen Jay Gould, “illustrate the continuing hold that the Black Sox Scandal has upon the hearts and minds of baseball fans and, more widely, upon anyone fascinated with American history or human drama at its best.” . . .

6 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

The champion 1917 White Sox were both sports heroes and patriotic role models. Above: Team members including Joe Jackson, third from the right, register for the draft in 1917. Below: Players recruit for the Army near the elevated train stop at Madison and Wells Streets in 1917.

It is probably wise to provide a more detailed summary of the scandal for the benefit of those unfamiliar with it and as a refresher for those who are. Two caveats: First, a more complete history than what is offered here would include how the scandal was embedded in various social and historical contexts, most obviously the game’s long association with gambling and management-labor relations. Second, my version should not be mistaken for an “objective” account of the affair. Like all historians, I see the past from particular perspectives that affect my understanding of it and thus my storytelling.

Traditionally, Black Sox scandal narratives begin in the fall of 1919, when the Chicago White Sox of the American League faced the Cincinnati Reds of the National League in the World Series. Led by the outfielder Joe Jackson, the pitcher Eddie Cicotte, and the second baseman Eddie Collins, the White Sox were expected to beat the Reds because they had won the series two years before with the same nucleus of ballplayers and because at the time the American League was generally thought to be superior to the National League. Despite being favored, the White Sox played poorly. They lost four of the first five games, rallied to

Above: An official Comiskey Park score book.

Below: The Chicago White Sox in street clothes at Comiskey Park, c. 1917. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte is fourth from the left; second baseman Eddie Collins is seventh; and Joe Jackson is third from the right.

Black Sox | 7

Above: White Sox manager Kid Gleason on the field with umpires, 1919. Pitcher Eddie Cicotte (below) was the first Sox player to testify that the players did indeed throw the World Series. Bernard Malamud’s character Al Fowler in The Natural resembles Cicotte.

Right: “Shoeless” Joe Jackson (seen here c. 1917) shared many traits with Roy Hobbs, the main character in The Natural. Both came from rural origins and possessed tremendous natural ability.

win two in a row, but lost the best-of-nine series on October 9 when the Reds scored four runs in the first inning on their way to a 10-5 victory. Many Chicagoans, perhaps especially the White Sox team owner, Charles A. Comiskey, and the first-year manager, William “Kid” Gleason, were disappointed and frustrated by the Sox’s performance. Often brilliant during the regular season, Cicotte and Claude “Lefty” Williams were unusually erratic on the pitching mound, and Collins, the first baseman Arnold “Chick” Gandil, the shortstop Charles “Swede” Risberg, and the centerfielder Oscar “Hap” Felsch generally played poorly. On the other hand, Jackson, the third baseman George “Buck” Weaver, and the rookie pitcher Dick Kerr were impressive: Jackson had a World Series record twelve hits (including the only home run) and a .375 batting average, Weaver hit .324 and fielded well, and Kerr won two games and maintained a 1.42 earned run average.

8 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Before, during, and after the series, rumors circulated that some Sox had conspired with gamblers and had not played to the best of their ability. Comiskey responded that the rumors were “yarns spun out of the bitterness over losing wagers” and declared that he would offer a reward (some sources say $20,000, others say $10,000) for information confirming team members’ crookedness.

Although he was apparently presented with information indicating that the rumors had some factual basis, Comiskey—advised by his friend Alfred Austrian, a prominent Chicago attorney—chose to do nothing. That winter, the journalist Hugh Fullerton published a series of newspaper articles suggesting that the series had been tampered with by gamblers; nonetheless, the White Sox management sent contracts for the upcoming season to all the men thought to be involved in the plot. With the exception of Gandil, who chose to remain in California rather than play for Comiskey, the 1920 White Sox essentially fielded the same squad as the previous year.

During the spring and summer of 1920, the White Sox generally played well (if sometimes erratically) and contended for the American League pennant. In early September, as the team battled the Cleveland Indians for first place and as Babe Ruth of the New York Yankees was in the midst of shattering the record for home runs in a single season, it was reported that gamblers had tried to fix the August 31 game between the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. The story led to a Cook County grand jury investigation that quickly moved beyond the Cubs-Phillies game and examined baseball and gambling in general and the rumors regarding the White Sox and the 1919 World Series in particular. For the next two-anda-half weeks, a host of witnesses—Comiskey, the American League president (and Comiskey nemesis) Ban Johnson, the former Cubs owner Charles Weeghman, the gambler Monte Tennes, the noted Broadway celebrity George M. Cohan, the Major League ballplayers John “Rube” Benton and Charles “Buck” Herzog, among others—testified about the purported fixing of the series.

Above: Even before the scandal, rumors flew fast and furious that the Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series. This letter, printed in the Tribune on September 19, 1920, speculates, “where there is so much smoke there must be some fire.”

Gambling had always plagued baseball, even in the stands themselves, as this image (right) of a crowd betting on White Sox game in 1911 reveals. To help crack down, police ordered a gambling raid on Comiskey in September 1920 (above right).

Black Sox | 9

The day the scandal hit: On September 28, 1920, the Chicago Daily News ran the news on the front page.

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Editorial cartoons explored the many sides of the scandal. This October 1920 drawing (above) speculated that other great battles had been thrown.

The Tribune column “The Inquiring Reporter” (right) asked the man on the street what he thought of the day’s issues. When asked what effect they thought the investigation would have on baseball, Chicagoans’ responses ranged from “None” to “Somebody will be shown up.”

Then on September 28 the Philadelphia North American reported that a former boxer named Billy Maharg admitted that he and “Sleepy” Bill Burns, a former Major League pitcher, were involved “in the conspiracy that resulted in eight members of the Chicago American League team ‘throwing’ games to Cincinnati in last year’s World Series.” The next day Eddie Cicotte testified before the Cook County grand jury for over two hours and confessed that he had received $10,000 before the World Series to play to lose, which he did. Later that afternoon, Joe Jackson testified that he knew of the plot and accepted $5,000 in bribe money (he was initially promised $20,000

by Chick Gandil), but that he had played to win. It is an apocryphal and now modified story, but supposedly a disillusioned street urchin on the steps of the courthouse confronted Jackson after his testimony. “It ain’t true is it, Joe?” the youngster asked. Jackson reportedly replied, “Yes, kid, I’m afraid it is.” (After the story circulated, Jackson consistently denied that the exchange had occurred.) The next day, Lefty Williams and Hap Felsch Black Sox | 11

confessed—Williams to Alfred Austrian and Felsch to a Chicago reporter—that they too had conspired with gamblers to lose the series. Said Felsch: “Well, the beans are all spilled and I think that I am through with baseball. I got my five thousand and I suppose the others got theirs too. If you say anything about me don’t make it appear that I’m trying to put up an alibi. I’m not. I’m as guilty as any of them. We all were in it alike.” Despite the confessions, it was unclear who did not play to the best of his ability during the series, who had accepted money from gamblers, who knew what and when. Ultimately, in late October, eight players—including Gandil, whom Cicotte described as the plot’s “master of ceremonies,” and Buck Weaver, who acknowledged that he knew of the scheme but denied being involved in it—and five alleged gamblers were indicted on a variety of conspiracy charges.

The infamous New York gambler Arnold Rothstein, often regarded as the affair’s principal fixer, was not among them. A few weeks later, anxious team owners hired the respected if flamboyant federal judge Kenesaw Mountain L andis to serve as organized baseball’s first commissioner.

Left: Outfielder Hap Felsch (seen here in 1915) told a reporter, “I’m as guilty as any of them. We all were in it alike.”

Right: Pitcher Lefty Williams (seen here in 1916) confessed the day after Jackson and Cicotte.

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Chicago White Sox owner Charles A. Comiskey in a Chicago railroad station, returning from a world tour in 1914.

After much delay, partly due to a change of administration in the Illinois State’s Attorney’s Office, the Black Sox arraignment took place in mid-February 1921 and the trial finally began in mid-July. It was an unusual, even farcical legal proceeding. First, the novelty of Major Leaguers on trial caused a great deal of public excitement and media interest. Indeed, one day a riot was narrowly averted “when 500 men and boys besieged the entrance of the courtroom seeking admission,” reported the Chicago Herald and Examiner. To add to the drama, the prosecution announced that the ballplayers’ original confessions and their immunity waivers had mysteriously disappeared from the state’s attorney’s office. As a result, Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams promptly recanted their confessions, which were nonetheless read into the record by court reporters. From a legal standpoint, it did not seem to matter. The very nature of the indictments, which outlined five separate conspiracies, made it diffi-

cult for the prosecution to convict the defendants.

Furthermore, the judge’s instructions to the jury—he explained that the state had to prove that it was the intent of the defendants to defraud the alleged victims identified in the indictments and the public, not merely to intentionally lose the World Series—made a guilty verdict unlikely. On August 2, 1921, the indicted ballplayers and gamblers were acquitted of all charges. It took the jury one ballot and less than three hours to reach its verdict. While it was a somewhat predictable and anticlimactic decision, the defendants, their attorneys, and many baseball fans in the courtroom were jubilant. The next day, however, Landis declared that all ballplayers involved in the incident—Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Eddie Cicotte, Chick Gandil, Hap Felsch, Lefty Williams, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin of the White Sox as well as Joe Gedeon of the St. Louis Browns, who knew of the fix—would be permanently ineligible to play organized baseball. Landis was widely hailed for his decision; it has never been reversed. . . .

The Black Sox scandal obviously remained active in American collective memories during the first half of the twentieth century. But by the early fifties nearly two generations of Americans had no living memory of the event. Moreover, those old enough to remember the scandal firsthand probably developed somewhat blurred and disjointed recollections of the labyrinthine plot.

After all, memories usually fade and become entangled with one another rather than remain vivid and distinct.

For many others, no doubt, time had effectively simplified the complicated. When these developments occur, contends the historian David Lowenthal, when events become increasingly distant from “personal recall, memory within any society gives way to history.” In the case of the Big Fix, as with so many other dramatic historical moments, memory also gave way to literature. At roughly midcentury, as the 1919 scandal began to fade and fragment in the consciousness of some Americans, Bernard Malamud’s novel The Natural (1952) and Eliot Asinof’s popular history Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (1963) took up some of the cultural work of maintaining the affair in private and collective memories.

Malamud’s and Asinof’s books became important sources for new, reinvigorated understandings of the episode. They provided readers with accounts of the scandal when the event was waning in many private memories, and did so with unprecedented sophistication and complexity. Although it is not a strict analog of the affair, Malamud’s novel self-consciously uses the scandal’s basic outline and ethos. A mythological tale, The Natural brings psychological and cultural density to a story that had been traditionally told as a simple morality play. . . .

Black Sox | 13

When Bernard Malamud died in 1986 at the age of seventy-one, his literary reputation was as secure as it was impressive. Born to Russian immigrant Jews and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Malamud worked as a high school English teacher for nine years. Thereafter, he taught writing at Oregon State College and Bennington College and published eight novels and three short story collections. He won two National Book Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for The Fixer (1966), and the respect of myriad critics, writers, and readers. Much of Malamud’s work is about the plight of ordinary (often urban Jewish) men and is imbued with the theme of moral wisdom gained through suffering. Both qualities are found in his first novel, The Natural, which, as Malamud explained “derives from Frank Merriwell as well as the adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field.”

Malamud’s The Natural provides readers with an elaborate account of a mythical baseball world. The novel recounts the tragicomic tale of Roy Hobbs, a naturally talented but heroically flawed baseball player who, for various reasons, fails in his quest to be “the best there ever was in the game.” Divided into two unequal parts, the short “Pre-Game” section presents Roy as an innocent, socially inept, athletically gifted man-child. En route to his Major League tryout, Roy arouses the attention of the mysterious (and perhaps psychotic) Harriet Bird, who shoots him in the stomach, delaying his Major League debut by fifteen years. The second section, “Batter Up!” chronicles Roy’s phenomenal accomplishments and failures as a thirty-four-year-old rookie outfielder for the chronically incompetent New York Knights. After a series of on-the-field heroics and two illfated love affairs, the novel ends with obvious allusions to the Black Sox scandal. Even though Roy changes his mind and decides not to “throw” the season-concluding playoff game, his beloved homemade bat, Wonderboy, splits in two, he strikes out, the media exposes his past and present misdeeds, and he is banished from baseball, his achievements stricken from the record. “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” begs a newsboy in the novel’s final scene.

“When Roy looked into the boy’s eyes he wanted to say it wasn’t but couldn’t, and he lifted his hands to his face and wept many bitter tears” (217).

Often noted as an amalgamation of thinly veiled events and figures transposed from Arthurian legend and baseball lore, The Natural is usually discussed in terms of its mythological associations. Malamud himself did much to promote this view by asserting the “whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.” In addition to the novel’s mythic qualities, repeated excursions into fantasy, complex psychological nature, and overall surrealistic quality, it also evokes an equally well-documented historical past. Neither historical fiction in the tradition of Sir Walter Scott nor post14 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

modern historiographic metafiction in the tradition of E. L. Doctorow, The Natural is nevertheless an oblique history, one that simultaneously reconstructs and reevaluates historical events and figures. This is not to suggest that The Natural is merely a fictionalized version of the 1919 baseball scandal, for it is obviously more ambitious and complicated than that. The argument here is that it is important not to ignore or underestimate (as most critics do) Malamud’s use of the infamous fixed World Series and its most prominent participant, since the Black Sox scandal provides the narrative with its dramatic, arguably tragic, conclusion and its hero’s moral crisis.

The Natural is saturated with specific characters and events drawn from baseball history, but the Big Fix is its most important historical episode. The events leading up to the fixed play-off game, as well as the game itself, occupy approximately the last fifth of the book. The night before the pennant-clinching series, Roy is hospitalized after indulging his voracious appetite. Laid up with a stomachache, he is visited by Memo Paris, the novel’s femme fatale and the object of his sexual desire.

Memo tries to persuade him to throw the final game (funds for the bribe are supplied by her two associates, Judge Goodwill Banner, who owns the Knights, and Gus Sands, a gambler), supposedly so that Roy can obtain the money necessary to support her in marriage.

Unpersuaded, Roy is approached by the avaricious Judge Banner himself. After offering a spurious and self-righteous rationalization of his motives, Judge Banner negotiates with Roy for his betrayal. Ultimately, Roy’s price is met: he is to get $35,000 for throwing the game and is promised a $45,000 contract for the following season.

“The fix is on” (191), Roy tells Judge Banner through a wave of nausea.

The next day, Roy is pulled aside before the game by the Knights manager, Pop Fisher. The paternal and luckless Fisher tries to inspire Roy to do his best and explains to his star player what winning the league pennant means to him: “Roy, I would give my whole life to win this game and take the pennant” (197). Unmoved, Roy intends to go along with the fix. He actively works to throw the game, yet as it progresses Roy begins to have some reservations about his complicity. By the seventh inning, the sun breaks through the clouds in a “golden glow” and Roy feels as though he has “regained a sense of his own well-being” (203). At this point, after intentionally hitting foul balls in the direction of a heckler, Roy accidentally blackens the eye of Iris Lemon, the novel’s heroine, who is (unbeknownst to him) pregnant with his child. “What have I done,” he asks, “and why did I do it?” (205). After Iris tells Roy, “Win for us, you were meant to” (206), he tries to redeem himself. It is too late. Wonderboy, his magical bat, splits in two. His

This cartoon by John T. McCutcheon, printed in October 1920, depicts the Black Sox as backstabbers and outcasts.

Black Sox | 15

16 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

efforts to dissuade Al Fowler, the Knights pitcher, from throwing the game are ineffectual. And in the bottom of the ninth inning, facing a relief pitcher who resembles himself at the beginning of the novel, Roy strikes “out with a roar” (214). Following the game, Roy buries Wonderboy in the outfield “in his stocking feet” (215) and then confronts his co-conspirators. After a brief skirmish with Judge Banner, Gus, and Memo, in which he “shower[s] the thousand dollar bills on his [Judge Banner’s] wormy head” (216), Roy takes to the street, where he is unrecognized. At this point Roy realizes, “I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again” (217). The novel concludes with a reenactment of the apocryphal “Say it ain’t so” scene.

The blending of the general premise of the fix, a few exact details from the actual affair (such as the amount of money reputedly exchanged to ensure the game’s outcome), Roy Hobbs’s well-noted and convincing similarities to Joe Jackson (tremendous “natural” ability, naiveté, rural origins, and farmboy candor), the apparent complicity of Al Fowler (who, as the team’s best hurler, is reminiscent of Eddie Cicotte), the snooping reporter Max Mercy (whom one critic refers to as “a rough-hewn amalgamation of Hugh Fullerton and Ring Lardner”), the sellout to Judge Banner and Gus Sands (often noted as an Arnold Rothstein–like gambler), and, of course, the concluding lament, “Say it ain’t true, Roy,” all combine to make the Black Sox echo in the novel unmistakable.

The cumulative effect of these parallels and connections forces readers to (re)consider the events they are based on and to regard the narrative as something other than mere fantasy. In this way, the novel extracts from history a recognizable story and transforms it into a narrative that is, in Earl R. Wasserman’s words, “both real and mythic, particular and universal, ludicrous melodrama and spiritual probing—Ring Lardner and [Carl] Jung.”

While the mythic elements and symbolism make Malamud’s fictionalized version of the Black Sox scandal somewhat ambiguous, the narrative also seems to offer a rather traditional telling of the episode. Like so much of the novel, its final scenes are simultaneously familiar (at least to many baseball fans) and enigmatic. Roy’s terrible bellyache and his intentionally hitting foul balls in the direction of an abusive fan, for instance, have relatively well-known historical referents and thus suggest a certain degree of realism. Furthermore, the novel’s “Casey at the Bat” ending is both formulaic and ironic in light of Iris’s admonishment to Roy late in the game. And like most previous Black Sox narratives, The Natural surrounds its central figure with influential co-conspirators.

Opposite: The main Sox lineup, c. 1917, included many players who would become prominent in the scandal just a few years later.

As for Hobbs, similar to Joe Jackson at the conclusion of the Black Sox affair, the novel’s indeterminate ending engenders as much pity (and perhaps sympathy) as it does contempt for the corrupted slugger. In these ways, the novel’s climax and dénouement reference events and narratives that further familiarize the already familiar: they help place Roy’s dramatic failure in the realm of the possible, if not the actual.

Still, there are some notable problems with Malamud’s tale. When Roy is in the hospital, for example, Judge Banner urges him to consider his illicit proposition carefully, even though they both know that Roy is not fit to play. To this Roy responds, “Then what are you offering me twenty thousand smackers for—to show your gratitude for how I have built up your bank account?” (128). It is a reasonable question, and one that readers may ask themselves. More substantially, Malamud’s conflation of the real and the mythic in these final scenes (and in the novel in general) forces both to suffer. Malamud’s novel coalesces so much into so little space that some readers are left wondering what to make of it all.

Why, for instance, does Roy Hobbs fail? As a tragic or mythic figure, he has to because it is his fate, as Pop Fisher unwittingly explains to him late in the novel: “You know, Roy, I been lately thinking that a whole lot of people are like him [an old unlucky ballplayer], and for one reason or the other their lives will go the same way all the time, without them getting what they want, no matter what” (196–97). “In baseball and in myth,” write the critics Kent Cartwright and Mary McElroy, “certain things happen because they are a part of a pattern that must repeat itself.” But as a historically based figure Hobbs must also fail. Joe Jackson’s failure was not statistical—he hit .375, had a record twelve hits, and played errorless defense in the 1919 World Series—but moral; he testified before the Cook County grand jury that he received $5,000 to throw games. The problem at the end of the novel is how to read Malamud’s parable of failed heroism, for neither the mythical nor the historical ending is satisfying because they intrude upon and bleed into one another. This ambivalence led the literary critic Sidney Richman to call The Natural “one of the most baffling novels of the 1950’s.”

Anomalous and ambiguous, ironic and indeterminate, The Natural is baffling from some vantage points. But The Natural also suggests that ambiguity, irony, and indeterminacy ruled the day; the novel refracts (not unlike a carnival fun house hall of mirrors) a complex postwar social world in which moral judgments were not absolute.

Although many people continue to think of the fifties as an “innocent” era in American social history best characterized by big-finned cars, poodle skirts, and Hula Hoops, as a period when the country was lulled to sleep Black Sox | 17

Assistant State’s Attorney Hartley Replogle, one of the prosecutors in the Black Sox trial, in a Chicago courtroom in 1920.

by prosperity, in reality the postwar years were rife with conflict and contradiction. For some it was a placid, complacent time of consumption and consensus, but it was also a time of political repression, racial segregation, and stultifying conformity. “It was not a simple time of gray flannel[l]ed respectability and not a time of tailfinned fantasy,” admonishes the historian Todd Postol.

“It was both, and it was neither. It was, above all, not dull, not monochromatic.” A great deal of scholarship suggests that the fifties was a time of significant social anxiety, conflict, and transformation. An era when wartime certainties dissipated and were transformed into cold war and atomic insecurities, the fifties was a time of complexity and tension. Living and writing at a cultural moment still coming to grips with the Holocaust and Hiroshima, a moment when Senator Joe McCarthy was hunting for communists, the Korean War loomed large, and baseball was a preeminent symbol of American values and virtues, Malamud crafted a cartoonish novel in which moral judgments are difficult to make.

By presenting readers with a radically intertextual fictional world characterized by historical and mythical allusion, tragicomedy, and irony, The Natural offers a richly enigmatic version of the Black Sox scandal that resists a simplified moral. Instead the event is presented in all its moral complexity and opaqueness. In this way the novel resists conventional morality and implicitly argues for a version of the Black Sox scandal that adds further complexity to the already murky tale. The Natural culls from American collective memory a story traditionally framed in terms of deceit, betrayal, and disillusionment and retells it so that readers are left with a much 18 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

less unified and coherent parable than many are comfortable with. In other words, The Natural is productively, and perhaps deliberately, unsettling.

Most discussions of The Natural focus on the mythic, universal, and spiritual elements of the novel, and thus they usually do not pay more than passing attention to its use of the Big Fix. Harley Henry’s 1992 essay, “‘Them Dodgers Is My Gallant Knights’: Fiction as History in The Natural (1952),” is a notable exception. A valuable contribution to our understanding of The Natural as a historical text, Henry’s essay documents Malamud’s sources and argues that the novel is primarily “an indictment of both the vulnerability of immature American virtue as well as the corruptive tendencies of Cold War authority and power.” Noting that the “specter of the 1919 scandal is certainly present in The Natural,” Henry contends that “the novel really addresses itself much more directly to a current and immediate dilemma.” According to Henry, “Malamud wrote about a baseball hero who sells out because recurring sports scandals of the forties and early fifties seemed both symptoms and apt symbols of widerspread corruption in American life.”

One problem with this argument is that if Malamud was so affected by the sports scandals of the early postwar era, it seems peculiar that he did not choose a subject or a style that more directly related to them. The college basketball point-shaving scandals were prominent, but this sport lacked the mythological force or cultural importance of Major League baseball in the fifties.

Additionally, the language of the novel does not suggest the decade. Instead, it evokes the manner of speech employed in many of Ring Lardner’s sports columns and short stories and John R. Tunis’s baseball books for boys, in which ballplayers called each other “sport” and “kid” unselfconsciously. In the early fifties, when baseball’s popularity and prestige were unrivaled in American sport, scandals in other athletic arenas did not necessarily debase the national pastime. Nevertheless, Henry argues that the novel “is a cry of ‘foul,’ a warning that ‘it

Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (seated), the first commissioner of major league baseball, signs a contract in Chicago in 1920.

[corruption] can happen here.’” Henry seems to have temporarily forgotten that it did happen here. Despite his exemplary efforts at examining the sources Malamud may have used to craft The Natural, Henry, like most critics, underestimates the lasting effect of the Black Sox scandal in American collective memories and underappreciates Malamud’s use of and indebtedness to it.

It is worth noting that Malamud was wary of commenting on his own work. The literary critic Lawrence Lasher notes that Malamud believed authorial pronouncements were “a disservice to the work and to the reader.” Be that as it may, in 1984 Malamud briefly explained the process of writing The Natural: “During my first year at Oregon State [1949] I wrote The Natural, begun before leaving New York City. Baseball had interested me, especially its comic aspects, but I wasn’t able to write about the game until I transformed game into myth, via Jessie Weston’s Percival legend with an assist by T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Wasteland’ plus the lives of several ballplayers I had read, in particular Babe Ruth’s and Bobby Feller’s.

The myth enriched the baseball lore as feats of magic transformed the game.” One suspects that if the college basketball point-shaving scandals of the early fifties had inspired him, Malamud would have mentioned them. To my knowledge, he never did. Then again, I have not found evidence suggesting that Malamud explicitly used the Black Sox scandal as a point of historical reference or inspiration either—with one somewhat cryptic exception.

In a dialogue Malamud had with himself, he asks, “Why baseball?” Malamud answered: “The poignant Jackson story. Books are about people. Baseball is a meaningful part of the American scene.”

Set in an indeterminate and mythic past, The Natural offers Malamud’s version of heroic failure and corrupted ideals. Much like Joe Jackson, Roy Hobbs cannot resist temptation and must forever bear the weight of his moral failure. A cautionary tale and commentary on the nature of heroism and fate— for Roy is “a hero and undeniable man of destiny” (152)—The Natural also provides us with an oblique reconstruction of an event that, at the time of its telling, was paradoxically fragmenting and relatively secure in American collective memories. For Malamud, the Big Fix provided historical fodder and structure for his transThird baseman Buck Weaver proclaimed his innocence for the rest of his life.

Although Landis banned him from baseball like the others, Weaver joined the semiprofessional Midwest League in 1927 and played for a Hammond, Indiana, team at the age of thirty-seven.

formation of history into myth, but it also provided a site to explore the question that reputedly inspired the novel: “Why does a talented man sell out?” Perhaps Henry is correct and Malamud drew some inspiration from contemporary scandals and a sense that American society was suffering from moral malaise. Perhaps the novel does, as Cartwright and McElroy put it, fall “short of (or beyond) history.” But I find it more compelling to speculate that Malamud created an American Adamic hero in need of redemption as an analog to Joe Jackson and the rest of the Black Sox. Regardless of his intentions, by adding layers of symbolic complexity and moral density to a generally recognizable narrative, Malamud reinvigorated and complicated the legend of Joe Jackson and the 1919 World Series.

In this way The Natural reconstructs history and myth and explores the ways in which they are peculiarly linked. It fosters complexity and ambiguity rather than simplified, moralistic condemnation.

Daniel A. Nathan is an assistant professor of American Studies at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York.

From Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal. Copyright 2002 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 4–5, CHS, ICHi-18010; 5, CHS, SDN061301; 6 top, CHS, SDN-061167; 6 bottom, CHS, DN0068270; 7 top, CHS; 7 bottom, CHS, ICHi-18011; 8 top, CHS, SDN-061908; 8 center, CHS, SDN-059678c; 8 right, CHS, ICHi-20693; 9 top, from Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1920; 9 bottom, CHS, DN-0057763; 9 center, from Chicago Daily News, 13 September 1920; 10, from Chicago Daily News, 28 September 1920; 11 top, from Chicago Daily News, 4 October 1920; 11 bottom, from Chicago Tribune, 26 September 1920; 12 left, CHS, SDN-060247; 12 right, CHS, SDN 060963; 13, CHS, SDN-059168; 15, from Chicago Tribune, 1 October 1920; 16, CHS, ICHi-20704; 18 top, CHS, DN-0072334; 18 bottom, CHS, ICHi-072630; 19, CHS, SDN-066597.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | In addition to The Natural, W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1982) provides a fictional account of the Black Sox scandal. For nonfiction analyses, try Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof (New York: H. Holt, 1963); Blackball, the Black Sox, and the Babe: Baseball’s Crucial 1920 Season by Robert C. Cottrell (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002); and Say It Ain’t So, Joe! The True Story of Shoeless Joe Jackson and the 1919 World Series by Donald Gropman (New York: Lynx, 1979).

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Newspaper photographers greet football star Harold “Red” Grange (second from left) and his father, Lyle, at a Chicago train station upon young Grange’s return to Chicago in 1926 at the height of his popularity. In late 1925, seventy-three thousand fans watched as Grange and the Chicago Bears played the Giants at New York’s Polo Grounds. SDN-066113 20 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

CHAMPIONS:

Sports and the Chicago Daily News RICHARD CAHAN and MARK JACOB

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Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob are the authors of The Game That Was: The George Brace Baseball Photo Collection.

efore Sammy Sosa, there was Hack Wilson. Before Walter Payton, there was Red Grange. Sports have always had heroes, and early newspaper photographers eagerly captured those heroes on film, transforming them into some of the twentieth century’s earliest celebrities.

Sports came of age in America and in Chicago at the turn of the twentieth century. The year 1903 saw the establishment of the modern World Series, and, during the fall classic’s first thirty years, the Cubs and the White Sox brought nine World Series to Chicago. College football became a national phenomenon during these years. The most popular sports for the masses were boxing, baseball, and football; tennis and golf were most popular with the upper classes.

The Olympics boosted America’s pride in such athletes as Jim Thorpe and Johnny Weissmuller.

Around that same time, newspaper photography was becoming more widespread. If you want to see sports celebrities today, you tune in to the ESPN cable television channel.

In 1910, you would have bought a copy of the Chicago Daily News.

Newspapers were star makers then, inventing players’ nicknames, recording their exploits, and making their faces famous. In the first few decades of the twentieth century, before the development of radio and television, newspapers enjoyed an uncrowded media market.

Newspaper photographers glorified the early stars—often meeting them at the railroad station as they arrived in town. Sports pictures from this

era, especially the earlier years, were often posed, taken before or after the actual game. The photographs show sport in its infancy—the early arenas, the wooden bleachers that surrounded baseball fields, and the rugged, open fields where football was played.

They also show the stadiums we came to love, such as Soldier Field, Wrigley Field, and Comiskey Park.

These early shots are formal, taken with large-format cameras most often set on wooden tripods. Each camera was cumbersome and had a short depth-of-field, so photographers generally had to stand back and shoot wide. Film was slow and demanded abundant light and little movement, so action was difficult to catch. As cameras improved, game action replaced off-the-field photographs.

The images in this article come from the Chicago Historical Society’s Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection. Comprising more than 280,000 negatives made by Chicago Daily News photographers between 1902 and 1973, the collection represents one of the most complete visual records of a major American city during the first seven decades of the twentieth century. The Chicago Historical Society recently digitized fifty-five thousand glass-negative images, dating from 1902 to 1933, most of which are available on the Library of Congress’s American Memory website (http://memory.loc.gov).

The digitization and presentation of the Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection was supported by the generosity of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

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oxer Jack Dempsey eating watermelon in Chicago. This photograph was taken in 1927, the same year as his famous rematch with champion Gene Tunney at Soldier Field. Approximately 105,000 people paid a combined $2.65 million to attend the fight, a record that stood for fifty years. Dempsey knocked Tunney to the canvas but failed to return immediately to his corner, delaying the referee’s count.

Tunney got up after the referee reached seven, eight, or nine (accounts vary) and went on win the fight known for the “long count.”

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im Thorpe, considered by many the greatest athlete of the first half of the twentieth century, came to Chicago in many athletic guises. On one of his first visits, he arrived with the nationally famous Carlisle [Pennsylvania] Indian School football team (above), coached by Glenn “Pop” Warner. Thorpe (first row, second from left) stands with the team outside Gaynor’s Buffet during Carlisle’s 1907 visit to play the University of Chicago. SDN-006100

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Six years and two disputed Olympic gold medals later, Thorpe returned to Chicago as a member of the New York Giants, posing in front of grandstands on the field at the West Side Grounds on the Near West Side (opposite). It was Thorpe’s baseball experience that sparked the controversy surrounding his Olympic medals. Thorpe had received money to play in the minor leagues, which made him ineligible for the Olympics according to the rules of the time.

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ew York Yankee baseball stars Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig (front row, third and fourth from left) always attracted a crowd during their frequent visits to Chicago to play the White Sox (and in 1932 to play the Cubs in the World Series). The gentlemanly Gehrig exuded calm and confidence, while Ruth behaved like a mischievous child. “If it wasn’t for baseball,” Ruth once said, “I’d be in either the penitentiary or the cemetery.” Here they pose in 1927, their best year together: Ruth hit sixty home runs that year and Gehrig added another forty-seven as they led the Yankees to another world championship. SDN-067094

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arold Grange (above, in 1926) of Wheaton, Illinois, was nicknamed “Red” because of his shock of red hair. But as he piled up yardage as a star running back for the University of Illinois, he also earned a variety of other nicknames, such as the “Galloping Ghost,” the “Wheaton Iceman,” and the “Flying Terror.” Grange, the most celebrated athlete of his time, was a national idol. He starred in the silent-film 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

sensation One Minute to Play in 1926 and put his colorful moniker on teddy bears, candy bars, and even meat loaf. After college, Grange lent legitimacy to the new National Football League when he signed a one-hundred-thousand-dollar contract to turn professional with the Chicago Bears in 1925 and barnstormed around the nation in a series of games that helped establish the sport. SDN-065772

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nute Rockne learned the game of football on the sandlots of Chicago. After immigrating with his family from Norway to Chicago, he grew up in Logan Square and later in the shadow of the old South Side Park at Thirty-ninth and Wentworth Streets. He worked in the Chicago post office for three years while saving up money to go to Notre Dame, where he eventually became coach of the football team.

The Fighting Irish’s legendary coach was both motivator and innovator, persuading his players to “win one for the Gipper” and refining the use of the forward pass. This photograph of Rockne posing with an airplane in a Chicago hangar during the 1920s is sadly ironic; the coach died only a few years later when the small plane in which he was riding crashed into a wheat field near Bazaar, Kansas, on March 31, 1931. DN-0067774 Champions | 29

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ack Johnson, the country’s first African American heavyweight boxing champion, maintained a jaunty public image in Chicago in 1910 (left). The son of a slave, he was refused a match with white champion Jim Jeffries, only to win the title in 1908 after Jeffries’s retirement. The thought of a black champion so offended Jeffries that he came out of retirement as the “great white hope” and was beaten by Johnson in 1910 in Reno, Nevada.

Johnson often dated white women, a practice that incensed the authorities and may have led to his 1913 conviction in federal court. Charged with transporting a woman across state lines for illicit sexual purposes, a violation of the “White Slave Traffic Act,” Johnson believed that prosecutors trumped up the charges.

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he powerful Bronko Nagurski, a star fullback and defensive lineman, dives for extra yardage during the University of Minnesota’s game against Northwestern University in Evanston in 1930.

Minnesota coach Doc Spears supposedly discovered Nagurski when, on a recruiting trip, he stopped his car to ask directions from a young man plowing a field. To show the way, Nagurski lifted the heavy plow and pointed it in the proper direction.

Coach Spears arranged a scholarship. Nagurski went on to play professionally for the Bears and also was a professional wrestler.

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orwegian Sonja Henie finished last in figure skating in the firstever Winter Olympics in 1924.

She was only eleven years old at the time, and it was clear that she’d never finish last again. She won figure-skating gold in the next three Olympics and captured ten straight world championships before turning

professional in 1936. Here she arrives at a Chicago railroad station in 1930. America’s queen of figure skating, who became a U.S. citizen in 1941, later starred in Hollywood movies and skated in popular ice shows through the 1950s.

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ohnny Weissmuller (shown here in 1922), like Knute Rockne, was an immigrant who learned his sport in Chicago.

Janos Weissmuller was born in 1904 in Freidorf, Hungary (now a part of Romania). His family moved to Chicago when he was young, and he learned to swim at Fullerton Beach.

In 1916, he lied about his age in order to make the YMCA swim team, and, in 1924, he won the first of his five Olympic gold medals.

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Weissmuller’s skills helped save lives when an excursion boat, the Favorite, carrying seventy-one passengers, capsized in Lake Michigan in 1927.

Twenty-seven people drowned, including sixteen children, but many were saved by Weissmuller and other rescuers who rowed a boat to the site. In the 1930s, Weissmuller achieved his greatest fame as the Hollywood actor who uttered the words, “Me Tarzan, you Jane.”

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n 1929, the Chicago Cubs reigned as one of baseball’s dominant clubs, a far cry from the lovable losers of the last half century. Players on that year’s World Series team (shown here warding off the chill in Wrigley Field) included (from left) Hack Wilson, Kiki Cuyler, Cliff Heathcote, and Woody English.

Wilson, who still holds the major league season record for runs batted in, was one of the highest paid players of his era. A few years after this photograph was taken, Wilson’s hard drinking knocked him out of baseball, and he died virtually penniless and shunned by his family. The National League paid for his burial in 1948.

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e never took the field and never roamed a dugout, but Kenesaw Mountain Landis was one of baseball’s most influential figures.

U.S. District Court Judge Landis helped save major league baseball in 1915 by stalling an antitrust lawsuit filed against organized baseball. In 1921, team owners hired Landis to rule over the game with an iron fist in the wake of the Black Sox scandal.

He served as baseball’s first commissioner for twenty-three years and is often credited with bringing honor back to the game. Here Landis tosses out the ceremonial first pitch at a game in 1926. DN-0080540

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etroit Tiger Ty Cobb, widely considered the most intimidating baseball player of his era, tosses his bat and takes off for first after a hit during the 1908 World Series against the Cubs. Cobb, whose mother killed his father in a suspicious shooting that was eventually labeled an accident, lived a bitter life. “I had to fight all my life to survive,” he once said. “They were all against me . . . but I beat the bastards and left them in the ditch.”

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The game shown here took place at the Cubs’ home field, the West Side Grounds, where the Illinois Medical District stands today. This was the last World Series that the Cubs won, and fans have been waiting for “next year” ever since. SDN-007034.

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hoeless Joe Jackson (seated, second from left), the greatest all-time White Sox star, poses with attorneys and fellow players during a break in the 1921 courtroom trial of eight Sox players accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. A Cook County jury acquitted all eight players, who had been indicted for conspiracy to defraud the public, after written confessions of the players apparently disappeared from court records. The following day,

however, baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis banned the eight men from ever playing in the major leagues again. To the right of Jackson, seated, are Sox George “Buck” Weaver, Eddie Cicotte, Charles “Swede” Risberg, Claude “Lefty” Williams and Arnold “Chick” Gandil. Defense attorney Thomas Nash is to the left of Jackson.

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obby Jones, the greatest golfer of his time, was just a teenager when he teed off here in 1917 at the Midlothian Country Club. The golf course was the site of the 1914 U.S. Open, which Walter Hagen won.

Jones captured an amazing thirteen major championships between 1923

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and 1930. In 1930, after winning golf’s grand slam, he retired at age twenty-eight. “Bobby Jones is not one in a million persons,” wrote sportswriter Grantland Rice. “I should say he is one in ten million— or perhaps one in fifty million.”

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elen Wills Moody dominated women’s tennis in the 1920s and 1930s, winning eight Wimbledon singles titles as well as thirty-one additional major titles.

Between 1927 and 1933, she won every set she played. The London Daily Telegraph ranked Moody the number-one women’s tennis player

nine times, more than any other player in history. Known for her businesslike demeanor on the court, Moody’s nickname was “Little Miss Poker Face.” She caused a stir by shunning the long skirts, petticoats, and stockings that other women players traditionally wore in favor of less restrictive attire. SDN-069043

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ix-day bicycle races were popular in the 1920s and 1930s, and Carl Stockholm (shown here in training) was Chicago’s local favorite.

Stockholm, of River Forest, took part in the 1920 Olympics before turning professional and participating in races that lasted 146 straight hours.

His endurance enamored him to fans.

“Women sent him mash notes,” recounts author Richard C. Lindberg.

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“Sometimes they even threw their silk underwear at him.” But the sport didn’t last. “After the stock market crash, we felt the pinch,” Stockholm recalled in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times.

“In the middle of the Depression, the bike game went out of business.”

The bike tracks fell into disrepair and were never replaced. SDN-067857

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mos Alonzo Stagg, known as the “Father of American Football,” was more celebrated than all the other luminaries during the early decades of the University of Chicago. An All-American football player at Yale in 1889, he coached Chicago’s team for more than four decades beginning in 1892, racking up seven Big Ten titles and leading his team to five undefeated seasons.

Stagg was a football innovator,

creating the game we know today by originating the forward pass, tackling dummies, and jersey numbers. He even coined the term “pigskin.” Stagg also organized and coached the university’s varsity basketball team and later was enshrined in the Basketball Hall of Fame. Here he sits on the sideline during a 1906 game at Marshall Field (later Stagg Field) in Hyde Park. SDN-004995

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Chicago’s Global Communities P E T E R T. A LT E R

Recent immigrants from India and Poland reveal their perspectives on Chicago, one of the world’s most ethnically diverse cities.

E D I T O R ’ S N O T E | As part of a project titled Global

Communities, Chicago Historical Society staff members interviewed more than eighty recent immigrants. These interviews offer a glimpse into the lives of various men and women from India, Mexico, Poland, Romania, and Vietnam.

In this article, women from India and Poland reveal their impressions of their lives and work in Chicago.

K. Sujata K. Sujata was born in Bangalore, India, in 1959. She grew up in the small town of Solapur, in Maharashtra state in south central India. Sujata studied engineering at the College of Engineering in Pune, India, and at the Indian Institute of Sciences in Bangalore.

She came to the Chicago area in 1984 to work on her doctoral degree in engineering at Northwestern University in Evanston. Currently, Sujata is executive director of Apna Ghar (Our Home) in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood. Founded in 1989, Apna Ghar originally offered social services for women and children victims of domestic violence from South Asia.

Today Apna Ghar’s services are free and open to all families, not just South Asians.

CHS: Can you speak about your experiences at Northwestern University?

I had the typical, I think, immigrant experience . . . which was rather shocking for me at the time. I went to a convent school; I studied in English. I read English books, novels. I saw English movies, and I thought I was pretty hip to it, right. And then I get here. I don’t know how to use the laundromat. . . .

K. Sujata, executive director of Apna Ghar, at her desk in the organization’s offices in the Uptown National Bank Building.

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As a social service organization, Apna Ghar receives its operating funds from many sources, including annual benefit dinners such as the one detailed in this program (left).

This Indian Reporter article (below) discusses how Apna Ghar helps domestic violence victims in Chicago’s South Asian community.

Fortunately, I had a roommate who was American, and so she took me to the laundromat a couple of times. She showed me how to run the machines. She had to take me to the grocery store. . . .

But it was a very tough thing. I wanted to post a letter. . . . I passed this post box everyday, but I never knew it was a post box. . . . Once I figured out it was a post box, I couldn’t figure out how to put the letter in, because it wasn’t the red pillar box with the little slot [like in India]. . . . Then [there was] the usual thing about the light switches. [They] are the wrong way around. The street traffic is the wrong way around. And to this day I look at both sides before I cross the street.

How did you come to work at Apna Ghar?

During the course of eight or nine years, I’d been able to earn enough money [by working as an engineer]. . . . The job that I was working at was very narrow in focus, and I realized that in the previous jobs that I had, I’d always had enough liberty to do a lot of other things, to try a lot of different projects, to go into a lot of other departments, and really to stretch myself.

And that wasn’t happening at this [last] job. . . . So I think the time was right, and Kanta Khipple, who was one of the founding members of Apna Ghar, called me up and said, “We’re looking for someone to run Apna Ghar. Why don’t you go for the interview?”

. . . And here I am, a year and a half later [2000]. . . .

I’d been volunteering with Apna Ghar for about eight or nine years. I started [volunteering] almost a year . . . [after the] organization began. So I’d been . . . with the organization for a long time, and I’ve worked in various aspects of the organization, in the various programs. So I knew what it was to work as a volunteer but to run an organization is completely different. But I was looking for a challenge, and I think that was the biggest.

What is Apna Ghar’s history?

It sort of began as a grassroots type of movement.

Five women started what was then called the IndoCrisis Line from their homes. . . . As they started logging the crisis calls that came in, they found that most of the calls were from women who were experiencing violence in their own homes and that’s when they decided that they needed to formalize. . . . There was a need to serve women who were victims of domestic violence from South Asian backgrounds. . . .

Chicago’s Global Communities | 43

Stores like this one along Devon Avenue cater to immigrant populations by offering, in this case, women’s clothing imported from South Asia. These shops allow immigrants to maintain some semblance of their homeland culture, even if such clothing is only worn on holidays or for other special occasions.

Women weren’t accessing local services because of language, because of cultural barriers, dietary concerns, and so on. And that’s kind of how we got started. . . . The shelter, actually, at the time was sort of a one-bedroom apartment . . . there was quickly a greater demand for it. And then they went to two apartments and three, and in ’95 they bought a house. It’s a single-family home. It has twelve beds.

Women can stay for a period of about three months, and they get not only food, clothing, and shelter, but other supportive services as well. We provide English classes, parenting classes, a lot of individual and group counseling, art therapy. It’s now a comprehensive program.

What has been Apna Ghar’s structural growth?

Today, we have a staff of about nineteen; about three or four are part-time staff. The shelter is staffed around the clock, so that is a huge pool of staff. . . .

We have [a] staff of [three] legal advocates and two community advocates, and these women help victims through the entire legal system: beginning from helping them file police reports, if they need to; going

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Indian immigrants make up a large portion of the congregation at St. Timothy, a Roman Catholic church near Devon Avenue.

Christians are a small minority in India. Most Indians who come to Chicago are either Hindu or Muslim.

with them to court; and on, almost to the end. There are some women who need help with immigration and self-petitioning and so on. . . .

And we have . . . a bilingual counselor, who supports women, not only through individual and group counseling, but we also have a toll-free line that can be accessed from anywhere within the state. And we get calls from all over, so sometimes you’ll do tele-

This Ramadan poster, created by the IQRA’ International Education Foundation in Skokie, founded by an Indian couple, displays the five pillars of Islam. The IQRA’ organization uses this poster to educate schoolchildren.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 45

The Indo-American Center at 6328 North California Avenue (above) was originally a Jewish community center. The organization acquired the building in 1996 in a classic reflection of the changing nature of Chicago’s ethnic neighborhoods. Today the center serves all the diverse immigrant groups in the area.

The Indo-American Democratic Organization (IADO) was founded in 1980 to involve more Indian Americans in the political process.

This program from an IADO event (below) juxtaposes the Indian and American national anthems over the group’s logo.

phone counseling. Sometimes you’ll go and meet with the person if the woman is frail or has some reason [why] she can’t make it to the office. And then we have a supervised child visitation center, where noncustodial parents can meet with their children and build a relationship under supervised conditions.

Normally, this is if there’s fear of child abduction, child abuse, or if there’s domestic violence. It’s usually [by] court order. And [there] is also one [staff member], a supervisor, and two part-time staff there.

Does the immigrant experience contribute to domestic violence in some way?

I think the experience of the immigrant sort of raises these barriers although the underlying factors are the same for domestic violence. Usually, it’s someone who’s experiencing domestic violence as a cyclical pattern. Their parents were abusive. . . . Apart from that as a cycle, the barriers are much higher because there’s a sense of isolation, isolation of being an immigrant as well as the physical isolation due to domestic violence. So there’s always that increased barrier. You know sometimes it’s a lack of local knowledge and customs. If one carries over as a new immigrant the experience of the home country, for

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Devon Avenue, a cultural center for Chicago’s Asian Indian community, is a major thoroughfare for other city residents, who frequent the area to eat in the restaurants and experience Indian culture.

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Publications such as the India Post newspaper help South Asian immigrants feel connected to and stay up on the news in their homelands. This particular issue commemorates Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights that is celebrated for five days in the fall.

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instance, where sometimes you really don’t go to the police because you need to have some sort of authority or some sort of influence to access legal systems or law enforcement. Whereas here, it’s not the case. You know, so if you carry with you those kinds of burdens or those kinds of barriers, you’re less likely to approach these systems. You’re less likely to know what your rights are. And I think those are the increased barriers, and I think that’s what makes it that much [more] difficult for immigrant women to access [these systems], sometimes, and sometimes women are not familiar with languages. They’re not familiar with local laws.

Are there Indian cultural practices that make domestic violence easier for a man to perpetrate on a woman?

If you take for instance the situation of an arranged marriage . . . I don’t think the arranged marriage system in itself perpetuates domestic violence, but it can set up a situation in a particular case. . . .

Normally, arranged marriages are . . . between families where people [are] of the same social class, . . . education, and background. There’s enough other information there that it should not set up this imbalance of power. And it doesn’t, in the vast majority of cases. I don’t think it does.

Arranged marriages work as well as other types of marriages. But if there’s domestic violence, here’s what happens, I think. I think the situation is where the woman is taken from her home country where she has no relatives in the U.S., for instance, and he has all the relatives here. And he lives in a joint family and when she comes over here, and if there is domestic violence in this family, it sets up a situation, a family violence situation where she doesn’t have any support, any resources. . . . [The resources are] all back in India. And she’s the only one here. She has nobody to go to. And if there’s violence now, it’s not only perpetrated by the person she’s married, but often by the brother-in-law, the sister-in-law, and the mother-inlaw. So in that sense, it’s different, and I think that is what could happen. . . . Like I said, I’m not implying that all arranged marriages cause this, but this is what could happen if a woman is not aware or doesn’t have any family or any other support mechanism [and] gets married into a family which is violent.

What are the greatest challenges faced by Apna Ghar?

I think, actually, the biggest barrier is to get the word to the woman who really needs to know about us because very often she is the one who’s isolated, who doesn’t have a chance to hear that institutions like us exist. Because she is kept so isolated, she can’t talk to her neighbor. She can’t tell anyone on the telephone, because her husband has access to all her telephone records as well as sometimes to the physical phone itself, or [he] locks her up in the house before he goes to work. So that, I think, is the biggest barrier, if we can get people to know that domestic violence is a crime. I think if women become more aware . . . less of it will happen. . . . We almost never turn down an invitation to speak at any sort of venue. Whether it’s to educate the mainstream . . . about these additional barriers that South Asians face or at South Asian organizations and South Asian cultural events, or any venue that we can talk about it. And the more you bring it out in the open, the less place there is for abusers to hide and the less excuses they can make. . . . I think we always hope that, well, someone will hear us who has a sister, a friend, a cousin who can then tell her about us or come to us and seek some solutions.

The wall hanging “Replica of the Holy Prophet’s (POUH) Seal” is a reproduction of the seal Muslim Prophet Mohammed used to sign documents. This decoration, seen in the homes of many Muslim Americans, is sold in religious shops along Devon Avenue.

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Malgorzata Kot Malgorzata Kot was born on June 14, 1972, in Bogoria, Poland. In 1994, after receiving an advanced university degree, she came to Chicago with her husband. Currently, Malgorzata is the head librarian at the Polish Museum of America (PMA) in Chicago.

The PMA exhibits the art, history, and culture of Poland and of the Polish American community. The library houses more than sixty thousand volumes related to Poland and Polish Americans. Malgorzata has found her niche at the PMA, claiming, “I couldn’t find myself out of this job.” Aside from her work at the library, Malgorzata has also worked as a tour guide, translator, writer, editor, and teacher. This interview reflects a snapshot of her attitudes during the spring of 2001.

CHS: What is your background in Poland?

I come from the little town called Bogoria. . . . I was studying in [nearby] Kielce. I did my master’s degree in Polish philology so that is something very good for the immigrant and for a Pole. This course of study connects Polish Americans and Poland together.

Basically, if you would translate Polish philology that is like Polish studies, advanced Polish studies, about Polish poetry, literature, and all about the Polish language. . . . I graduated [with honors] in 1994, and about two months after I graduated, I arrived at O’Hare airport. I never planned to be a part of the immigrants, part of the Polish Americans.

Malgorzata (Margaret) Kot (above) at her desk in the library of the Polish Museum of America.

Below: Kot with her Saturday school class at Holy Trinity Polish Mission along Division Avenue. These Saturday classes teach young Poles about Roman Catholicism as well as Polish language, geography, literature, and history.

Why did you come to Chicago?

In 1993, in the fourth year of my studies, I received information that my godmother sent my personal information into the green card lottery, and I won. . . .

She considered it to be . . . necessary, but I never thought that I would be the one who would win it.

That was interesting, because she entered herself, her husband, her children, her grandchildren, etc., and in my family, my mother, my father, and my sister. The whole family was waiting for it, and I thought, “Oh, whatever, that is never happening to me.” So I didn’t wait for it. Then, I was the lucky one. . . . In 1993, I got married, because we were already engaged, and we decided to be here together. . . . Then in October 1994, I was here in Chicago.

What were your earliest experiences after arriving in Chicago?

I started ESL [English as a Second Language] courses at Wright College. I was doing that during the day.

Then later I took the advanced level, the fifth level,

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and I was going there four times a week, sixteen hours a week. That was truly a lot of work, and during the nights I was cleaning the offices. I was also cleaning a print shop. The people at work were surprised at me that I spoke English and that I have knowledge. And we would have a conversation, and I said, “Oh, I just did my master’s thesis.” And they said, “Ah, and you are working here overnight, that’s

Above: The Polish Museum of America at 984 North Milwaukee Avenue. In the early twentieth century, this area, one of the centers of Chicago’s Polish community, was called the “Polish Downtown.” Although it is no longer a Polish neighborhood, the PMA remains.

Below: The 2000 Casimir Pulaski Day celebration at the Polish Museum of America. The museum’s painting of Pulaski hangs in the background. Pulaski Day celebrates the legacy of the Polish Count Casimir Pulaski, who led American cavalry against the British in the Revolutionary War.

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interesting.” So that was my first job. Then I switched to a Polish bookstore as a clerk that was only parttime, because I was still taking language the other three days. After that, I started working here at the Polish Museum of America. That was June 1, 1995.

And it’s my seventh year here right now [in 2001].

Have you ever networked with Chicago’s Polish organizations?

I had a little experience with the Polish American Association. It was still the Polish Welfare Association then. . . . My husband was working with my uncle. I was working full time and learning full time. I didn’t have time to look around for the Polish Welfare Association. . . . I did hear [that] . . . they were looking for . . . people to work in a school, and that I had to go to the Polish Welfare Association for the interview. So I went and had a conversation with two of the clerks.

They helped me, but that was like personal help. They said that I am not suited for the job . . . but they helped me privately. They showed me how to write a resume. They helped with it so I felt cheered.

Have you lived in Polish neighborhoods in Chicago?

We came to the Polish neighborhood, the newest Polish neighborhood, on Belmont and Central. Our first apartment was there [in 1994]. There were a lot

Although many Polish businesses can be found scattered throughout the Northwest Side, many others are linked, such as this deli and video store (above), to attract more customers.

of Polish stores and a lot of younger Polish people. It was nicer than Milwaukee Avenue. I had to work on Milwaukee Avenue at a Polish bookstore. . . . I saw the better Polish neighborhood on Belmont even though Milwaukee was cheaper. In November of 1995, we moved into the neighborhood, but six blocks away on Addison and Austin Avenues. From Addison and Austin, we moved to Schiller Park where we bought a house. . . . We do have a neighbor [in Schiller Park] who is Polish and a neighbor across the street who is Polish, like third-generation Polish, only the husband.

Dancing plays a large part in Polish culture, and many Poles learn traditional dances at an early age. These children perform at the Polish Museum of America’s 2000 Pulaski Day celebration.

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Polska Stacya, a Chicago Polish saloon, in 1903. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Poles came to Chicago to work in factories, steel mills, packing houses, and sweat shops. Although some returned to Poland, most stayed here.

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In 1979, the former Gateway Theater on the Northwest Side was converted to the Copernicus Foundation Cultural and Civic Center, named for the Polish astronomer. It houses conference rooms, offices, and a ballroom, and serves the cultural and social needs of Chicago’s Polish community.

What are relations like between different generations of Polish immigrants?

This trans-Atlantic dating service for Polish immigrants helps them maintain and restore social ties with native Poles.

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Upstairs [working in the offices], we have those immigrants from after the war or Polish Americans from the second generation, third generation. There’s always a little barrier. For example, some of the older immigrants don’t like us, the ’90s immigrant generation. One of them often tells me, “You know you are such a different person from the rest of your generation.” I say, “Why? All of my friends are like this.

Why are you saying this? I think you are hurting my feelings, and you generally have this fear of us.” You know why? I think it’s because we are already educated from Poland. We come here. We are already making the jobs we have, and we are moving up. We are going to universities, and we are trying to make our living. They [the older generations] still have, I don’t know, if that is some sort of guilt or some sort

of unfulfilled dream. They think, “Why? We had to work hard all of our lives, and you are too proud.

That is too easy for you.” And they still have it. You always have this special look. You have to break the way first to work with some of them, all the time with the older Polish Americans.

How much do you interact with the Polish community?

All my workday [at PMA], the whole week, is [spent] in the middle of the Polish community. People from the consulate, they are coming, all of those prime ministers, all of those politicians, all of those artists from Poland. I sometimes feel that I am still in Poland, right here. I teach Holy Trinity Polish Mission Saturday school and on Sundays sometimes go to church at this mission with masses entirely in Polish. . . . I know almost all of my students. They are fourteen years old and fifteen years old, and they were born in Chicago so I have to know English to explain Polish. It is like Polish is the second language. The previous class, they were born in Poland. They were immigrants like me so that was not very hard. . .

Working at the school, I am connecting every single work of mine. That is totally the thing that I should do. After having a master’s in Polish studies, basically I was the teacher for the older generation, for the teenagers, plus for the students. Because I am the head librarian [at PMA], it is very connected. It is also connected with [the] professional side of me, because it is everything about the Polish literature and language. So I am connecting both things that I loved together, and I am so proud of this place.

Overall how do you feel about living in the United States?

Lately, I just discovered that I am happy. All of my teenage years we were listening to American and English music, and we were normally listening to it without understanding the words. And right now after seven years, I am able to watch television or listen to the radio without a problem and understand the lyrics. That’s a large step in a foreign language.

We had a lot of American movies [in Poland], and all of those scenes in the alleys and streets they were so different [from Poland] and that’s why they were so fine. And right now I am looking for these movies [to watch] . . . [Those scenes are] so much like the street next door or something like that. My perspective is truly changing.

House decorations, such as these Polish dolls in traditional dress, indicate the importance of native culture to Polish immigrants. Dolls like these can be purchased in stores throughout the Northwest Side.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 42, CHS, photograph by Jay Crawford; 43 left, CHS; 43 right, reprint of Indian Reporter article by Akash Pathak, courtesy of the Indian Reporter and World News; 44 top, CHS, ICHi-25787, photograph by Mukul Ray; 44 bottom, CHS, photograph by Swati Shah; 45, CHS; 46 top, CHS, photograph by Virginia Heidenreich-Barber; 46 bottom, CHS; 47, CHS, ICHi25788, photograph by Mukul Ray; 48, courtesy of the India Post; 49, CHS; 50 top, CHS, photograph by Jay Crawford; 50 bottom, photograph courtesy of Malgorzata Kot; 51 top, photograph courtesy of the Polish Museum of America; 51 bottom, CHS, photograph by Virginia Heidenreich-Barber; 52, CHS, photographs by Virginia Heidenreich-Barber; 53, CHS, DN-0000729; 54, CHS, photographs by Virginia Heidenreich-Barber; 55, CHS.

Peter T. Alter is a public historian at the Chicago Historical Society and the project coordinator for Global Communities.

Chicago’s Global Communities | 55

MAKING HISTORY I

Writing Crime in Chicago: An Interview with Sara Paretsky T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

L

ondon has Sherlock Holmes. San Francisco has Sam Spade. And Chicago has V. I. Warshawski. The creation of Sara Paretsky, the character of Victoria Iphigenia (V. I.) Warshawski not only redefined the private eye genre in the final two decades of the twentieth century but put Chicago on that literary map. In 1988, one critic described Warshawski as “one of the finest, if not the finest, of the female first-person shamuses who have appeared in print over the last decade.” Warshawski’s popularity has generated multiple awards for the now-renowned author. In 1987, Ms. magazine named Paretsky “Woman of the Year.” Nearly a decade later in 1996, Paretsky garnered the Mark Twain Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature. Her literary accomplishments now span the Atlantic. Last year, Paretsky became the first non-British writer to win the Cartier Diamond Dagger, the lifetime achievement award of the British Crime Writers Association.

Sara Paretsky was born in Ames, Iowa, on June 8, 1947, to microbiologist David Paretsky and librarian Mary E. Edwards Paretsky. David Paretsky, raised in Brooklyn, New York, learned Russian and Yiddish before ever speaking a word of English. He met Mary Edwards, a native of downstate Illinois, while attending graduate school at Iowa State University. Shortly after completing his doctorate, David Paretsky became the first Jewish person to receive a tenure-track appointment to the University of Kansas. So when Sara was four years old, her family moved to Lawrence, Kansas, where she and her four brothers attended a tworoom country school.

In Kansas, Paretsky’s parents were at the forefront of the leading social issues of the time. David and Mary Paretsky helped found the Lawrence Jewish Community Center and openly supported efforts to end racial segregation and other forms of discrimination. “My parents were very strong in the civil rights movement, working for open housing in the town,” remembers 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Above: The Chicago Historical Society awarded acclaimed mystery novelist Sara N. Paretsky the 2002 Richard Wright History Maker Award for Distinction in Literature. (Photograph by Tom Maday.)

Below: Ms. magazine honored Paretsky among their “Women of the Year” for 1987.

Other honorees included actress-musician Bette Midler and author Toni Morrison.

Paretsky learned her progressive views on social issues and race relations from her parents. Her father, David Paretsky (top), taught microbiology at the University of Kansas from 1951 to 1989. During his tenure, he welcomed colleagues and students of all races, religions, and ethnicities.

Below: Paretsky on her first birthday, June 8, 1948. Left: Paretsky spent most of her childhood in Lawrence, Kansas. During the summer of 1957, Paretsky (second from left) posed with her friends.

Paretsky. “My dad ran an open department, so that there were always people of color—Asian or African American—as students or colleagues.” Yet social tolerance was not always an easy practice in Lawrence, remembers Paretsky, “because we had mandatory prayer in the schools and religious revival meetings that required attendance.”

Despite her parents’ progressive views on social issues and race relations, they remained rather traditional regarding Paretsky’s upbringing. “Even though my mother had gone [away] to graduate school, they wanted me to stay home [for college],” remembers Paretsky. “Looking back on it, from the way my childhood was structured, they had an unacknowledged fantasy that as the girl, I would stay home and look after [my brothers] because I was [their] primary caretaker.”

Making History | 57

While studying for her undergraduate degree in political science, Paretsky desperately wanted to explore the world outside of her hometown. The opportunity came in 1966 during her junior year at the University of Kansas when she volunteered for a summer-in-service program sponsored by Presbyterian Chicago. She was assigned to a church in Gage Park at Seventieth Street and Damen Avenue.

Like her parents, Paretsky was sympathetic to the civil rights movement and the open housing goals of Martin Luther King Jr. She remembers taking field trips on the “L” with teenagers who refused to sit next to a black person.

Yet while living among some openly racist South Siders, Paretsky developed a more complicated view of their situation. “We came prepared to be very censorious of this racist community we were in and we were. They did terrible things,” Paretsky admits. “But at the same time, we could see, even at our age, that [their behavior] came out of this profound sense of helplessness.” In 58 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Paretsky fell in love with Chicago during her first visit, when she spent the summer of 1966 as a volunteer on the city’s South Side. Above: Thirty years later, she shared her experience with readers of the Chicago Tribune. After finishing college, she returned to the city and, in 1977, graduated with both a doctorate in history and a master’s in business administration from the University of Chicago. Above left: The title page of Paretsky’s dissertation.

retrospect, Paretsky believes their intolerance was related to their class and economic circumstances. “These weren’t rich people. They had a bungalow that in those days was worth $15,000,” she remembers. “That was their entire stake in the world, and they were being whipsawed by the banks and the realtors.”

That summer in Chicago transformed Paretsky, and she remained determined to return to the city upon graduation. Through an employment agency, Paretsky found a job as a secretary in the social sciences division at the University of Chicago. She quickly impressed her boss and, by the end of the year, won a university fellowship to study for a doctorate in history.

At that time, graduate study for women at the University of Chicago was challenging. In 1970, few women taught in the history department, and women’s studies programs were nonexistent. According to Paretsky, “There were thirteen women who started with me in the U.S. history field. Twelve of them left at the end of the year, because there was so much faculty contempt for women.” She vividly remembers an orientation meeting at the beginning of her first term. An internationally renowned member of the department told Paretsky and her fellow Ph.D. hopefuls “that women were capable of memorizing and parroting back, but not of original, creative thought.”

As her academic and literary careers attest, Paretsky was not easily discouraged. Her graduate experience revealed her persistence, her writing talent, and her love of crime fiction. She received little guidance at first with her dissertation and was forced to rewrite it three times before finding a mentor to guide her through the fourth and final version. Entitled “Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War,” the dissertation offered few hints of her future success as a novelist. Paretsky focused on a group of nineteenth-century Calvinists, or “Christian scholars,” at Andover Seminary in Massachusetts who were interested in learning for the sake of scholarship as well as religion. This group of theologians allowed her to explore the tension between faith and learning in antebellum America and ultimately the breakdown of traditional Calvinism. At times, however, Paretsky’s interest in literature overwhelmed her devotion to historiography. “I read twenty-four crime novels the month before my oral examination,” she admits.

For someone interested in a career in higher education, Paretsky’s timing could hardly have been worse.

Throughout the 1970s, history departments across the United States shrunk. New openings, when they appeared, generated hundreds of applicants, but Paretsky remained undaunted. Before completing her dissertation, she enrolled in the business school at the University of Chicago.

In 1977, Paretsky graduated with a doctorate in American history in one hand and a master of business administration in the other.

Shortly thereafter, Continental National American (CNA) Insurance Company hired Paretsky as their manager of advertising and direct mail marketing programs. Working at CNA proved more influential on her literary career than any of her degrees. From 1977 to 1986, Paretsky observed the workings of the insurance industry close-up, an experience that became invaluable in developing the various white-collar crimes investigated by V. I. Warshawski.

Paretsky met Courtenay Wright in 1971.

Wright was an experimental particle physicist and professor at the University of Chicago. Paretsky proposed to him on Leap Day 1976, and the couple married the following June. Top and above: Paretsky and Wright on their wedding day.

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Paretsky began writing stories as a child but for a long time did not consider publishing them. “Then around the time I turned thirty, I realized that I really wanted to publish a novel,” she remembers. “I loved detective fiction, but I was troubled by the way women were traditionally portrayed in that genre—they always seemed to be either evil or powerless.” She completed drafts of her first three novels at night while working full time, tutoring, singing in a choir, and managing a home for her new husband Courtenay Wright and her three stepsons.

Paretsky’s goal was to challenge the Chicago-born novelist and crime writer Raymond Chandler, who according to Paretsky, wrote the “defining narrative for the hard-boiled detective.” More precisely, she envisioned a female private eye with “a feminist sensibility.” “I chose a hard-boiled detective because of wanting to go head-to-head with Chandler on the definition of women’s lives and women’s bodies,” recounts Paretsky. “The sensibility of an American city demands, in my opinion, a hard-boiled detective, not an armchair detective.”

Thus V. I. Warshawski, the feminist, street-smart, multiethnic daughter of a Polish American policeman and an Italian-Jewish mother, was born. One of Paretsky’s motivations in creating Warshawski was “to try to combat some of the typical sexual stereotypes in literature,” particularly those depicting women as helpless or predatory. Paretsky remains critical of the female images Chandler created and propagated in his many novels and screenplays.

“Whatever the reasons are,” Paretsky insists, “women who present themselves sexually in his books are inevitably villains.”

Like Paretsky, V. I. Warshawski is a product of the women’s movement.

“What I wanted with V. I. was someone whose sexuality was part of her [but] didn’t define her moral character,” she argues. “I wanted someone who was a problem solver. She might make mistakes. She does make mistakes. She isn’t perfect. She gets on people’s nerves. But she sticks to the task, and she solves the problem.” Paretsky created a character that departed from the female stereotypes found in other private eye novels. Instead, Warshawski represents a female image defined by the “way that most women live their ordinary lives,” believes Paretsky, “not as femmes fatales or as victims.”

Paretsky’s first serious attempt at writing mysteries parodied a Raymond Chandler– type of novel. She struggled with her first heroine, Minerva Daniels, for two years before switching tactics and creating an entirely new literary figure: a serious female detective. V. I. Warshawski (profile above from the Chicago Tribune) became a “woman alone in a hard-boiled world” (left).

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In doing so, Paretsky fashioned a new kind of private investigator. Compare Warshawski to Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple. “Miss Marple has to cloak what she’s doing,” insists Paretsky. “She assumes the persona of the dithering old lady.” Nor does Warshawski reflect the social isolation typified by Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade. Warshawski retains an emotive connection to a variety of friends and family while identifying with the downtrodden and the underdog. In the words of one critic, Paretsky has managed to “open the narrative boundaries of the hard-boiled detective novel and transform its emotional center.”

Paretsky’s more recent fiction has evolved in a different direction. Her earliest novels were primarily a reaction to Chandler and Hammett. “I’ve left that,” Paretsky admits. “Not on purpose, but it just doesn’t work for me any more.” Her later works reflect the influence of modern crime fiction writers such as Robert B. Parker and Michael Z. Lewin. Both authors present “softer” hard-boiled detectives with more complicated and less predictable narratives.

At the same time, Paretsky concedes that this presents new challenges. “I feel sort of panic-stricken as I write,” she confesses, “because I think I don’t have a handle on my narrative.”

Paretsky’s mysteries are both geographically and socially rooted in Chicago.

In the early novels, V. I. Warshawski resides in the city’s Lakeview neighborhood along Halsted Street, just north of Belmont Avenue. In the first V. I. Warshawski novel Indemnity Only (1982), Paretsky’s protagonists include a union leader, a North Shore banker, insurance agents, and University of Chicago students. Deadlock (1984) finds Warshawski investigating Chicago’s

V. I. Warshawski debuted in Indemnity Only (left) in 1982. Paretsky recalls that publishers were almost more concerned with Chicago as the setting than with the introduction of a serious female detective.

In 1998, Paretsky temporarily broke from the Warshawski series to publish Ghost Country (right).

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V. I.’s career of exposing the deceitful and illicit actions of Chicagoans spans ten novels. Clockwise from top left: In Deadlock, Warshawski investigates Chicago’s shipping business; in Burn Marks, she tackles corruption and murder in Chicago’s construction industry; while fighting gentrification in Guardian Angel, Warshawski uncovers a scandal involving one of Chicago’s oldest industrial families; and in Tunnel Vision, she relives the 1992 flooding of the underground tunnels in Chicago’s Loop.

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shipping business. Roman Catholicism takes center stage in Killing Orders (1985) as Warshawski investigates a Chicago monastery with missing funds.

Burn Marks (1990) tackles corruption and murder in Chicago’s construction industry. In Tunnel Vision (1994) Warshawski relives the flooding of the underground tunnels in Chicago’s Loop in 1992.

Unlike Southern California or New York City, Chicago remained virtually untrodden by fictional detectives prior to Warshawski. “When I submitted my first book,” remembers Paretsky, “I think publishers were more unsure about the Chicago setting than they were about a solo female.” In certain respects, the integral role of Chicago in her novels reflects Paretsky’s love for her adopted city. “When you live in a place and it really gets into your blood, it takes over your imagination,” she insists. “The reason I write about Chicago is because I know and love this city really passionately.”

Paretsky’s vivid descriptions of Chicago have generated comparisons with prominent authors such as Nelson Algren. Like Algren, author of The Man with the Golden Arm (1949) and the classic essay “Chicago: City on the Make” (1951), Paretsky chronicles the lives of socially marginalized citizens of the Midwest’s largest metropolis. But Paretsky’s fiction is better understood as part of a longer and broader tradition of Chicago-based urban realism epitomized

by Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Carl Sandburg, Gwendolyn Brooks, and, most recently, Studs Terkel.

Brooks’s In the Mecca (1968) transformed a single South Side apartment building into a paradoxical emblem of African American life and urban renewal.

Terkel’s Division Street (1967) made that local thoroughfare a symbolic divide in not just Chicago but the United States. And Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski evokes a gritty, Above: In 1998, Paretsky participated in CHS’s “Sunday in the Park with Studs” series and attracted more than three hundred visitors. Paretsky wore red shoes to match Terkel’s trademark red socks.

Left: Paretsky with her husband Courtenay, her granddaughter Mara, and her son Philip.

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“Sisters in Crime” is among Paretsky’s most notable accomplishments. She helped found the organization in the mid-1980s to promote the professional advancement of women mystery writers. In 2002, Sisters in Crime celebrated their fifteenth anniversary (below) and boasted almost four thousand members worldwide. “InSinC” (left) is the organization’s quarterly newsletter.

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pragmatic feminism confronting the raw, unrefined, and violent elements of the late-twentieth-century postindustrial metropolis. “Find a writer who has something new and particularly American to say and says it in an unmistakably American way,” H. L. Mencken once wrote, “and nine times out of ten you will find he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan abattoir by Lake Michigan.” Paretsky is one such writer.

When asked to identify her most meaningful accomplishment, Paretsky first cites the translation of her novels into twenty-five different languages. In Japan—her second-largest market after the United States—women call the series “their Vic,” in part because Warshawski offers a model for fighting sexual harassment in the workplace. One woman who worked for Hitachi wrote to Paretsky, “I read Vic every morning before I go to work. She gives me courage for the day.” Paretsky is moved by “the idea that someone in a different culture, a different language, whom I probably will never meet, has her life changed by what I say. That makes me feel like I really exist.”

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 | 56 center, CHS, Great Chicago Stories Collection; 56 bottom, left and right, reprinted by permission of Ms. Magazine, © 1988; 57 top, reprinted with permission of the University of Kansas Archives, Lawrence, Kansas; 57 center and lower right, courtesy of Sara N. Paretsky; 58 right, reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, 9 August 1996, with permission of Sara N. Paretsky; 58 left, reprinted from the University of Chicago Library, with permission of Sara N. Paretsky; 59, courtesy of Sara N. Paretsky; 60 top right, © Tribune Media Services, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Reprinted with permission; 60 bottom left, Copyrighted 1987, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 61–62, reprinted with permission of Sara N. Paretsky and Dell Publishing; 63 center, CHS; 63 bottom, courtesy of Sara N. Paretsky; 64 top, reprinted with permission of Sisters in Crime; 64 bottom, reprinted with permission of Sisters in Crime and Publishers Weekly; 65, courtesy of The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Sara Paretsky has written eleven novels, ten of which comprise the V. I. Warshawski crime mystery series. Ghost Country (New York: Delacorte, 1998) represents Paretsky’s major work outside the Warshawski series, and Windy City Blues (New York: Delacorte, 1995) is a collection of short stories. Paretsky has promoted the myster y genre by editing Beastly Tales: The Myster y Writers of America Anthology (New York: Wynwood Press, 1989); A Woman’s Eye (New York: Delacorte, 1991); and Women on the Case: Twenty-six Original Stories by the Best Women Crime Writers of Our Time (New York: Delacorte, 1996). Less well-known, but a reflection of her intellectual versatility, is Paretsky’s doctoral thesis, “Words, Works, and Ways of Knowing: The Breakdown of Moral Philosophy in New England before the Civil War” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1977).

T H E 2 0 0 2 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.

Making History | 65

Index to Volume 31 This index includes author, title, and subject entries. In each page reference, the issue number comes first, followed by a colon and the page numbers(s) on which the reference appears. Illustrations are indicated in italics. If a subject is illustrated and discussed on the same page, the illustration is not separately indicated.

A

B

Abboud, A. Robert, 2:64 Addams, Jane, 2:4 Adler, David, 2:51 Advertising, Albert Lasker’s contributions to, 2:36–49, 53 Advertising Age (magazine), 2:45 Advertising Federation of America, 2:36 African American Catholic Congresses, 2:6, 8 African American neighborhoods, work of missionary sisters in, 2:4–23 “Albert Lasker’s Advertising Revolution,” article by Arthur W. Schultz, 2:36–53 Alderman v. United States, 1:14 Algren, Nelson, 3:63 Allstate Insurance, 2:68 Alter, Peter T., “Chicago’s Global Communities,” 2:24–35; 3:42–55 American Baseball League, 3:7, 9, 11 American Catholic Church, 2:8 American Classical Music Hall of Fame, 1:58 American Legion Manuel Perez Post #1017, 2:68 American Theatre Wing, 1:61 American Tobacco Company, 2:47 Amistad Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 1:58 Anderson, E. Malcolm, Cup, 2:58 Anderson, Marian, 1:72 Aon Insurance, 2:68 Apna Ghar (Our Home), 3:42–44, 46, 49 Arranged marriages, 3:49 Arthur Anderson, 2:64 Art Institute of Chicago, 2:17 Asinof, Eliot, 3:13 Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1:63 Austrian, Alfred, 3:8, 12 Ave Maria (magazine), 2:22 Azteca Lions Club, 2:68

Baba, George, 2:32–35 Back-of-the-Yards Council, 2:68 Baden Street Settlement House, 1:69 Baker, George F., Scholar, 2:61 Balkan Travel Agency, 2:35 Bank One, 2:54, 68 Banner, Goodwill (character), 3:14, 17 Belafonte, Harry, 1:61 Belding, Don, 2:53 Benton, John “Rube,” 3:9 Benton, William, 2:48 Benton & Bowles, 2:48 Bernardin, Joseph, Cardinal, 2:22 Bernstein, Leonard, 1:58 Better Business Bureau, 2:47 Bicycle races, 3:40 Bird, Harriet (character), 3:14 Black Metropolis (study), 2:4, 13 Black Panther Party, 1:10, 21 Black Sox scandal, 2:48; 3:4–19, 35 Blackstone Theater, 1:60 Bledsoe, Jules, 1:65 Blessed Sacrament Sisters, 2:6, 11, 23 Block, Leigh B., 2:48 Block, Mary and Leigh, Museum of Art, 2:48 Bock, Irving, 1:21 Bok, Edward, 2:45, 47 Bowen, James H., High School, 2:29 Brandenburg v. Ohio, 1:13 Bray, Rosemary L., 2:13 Brent, Sister Juliana, 2:21 British Crime Writers Association, 3:56 Brooklyn Dodgers, 3:14 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 3:63 Bryan, John, 2:71 Burnham, Daniel, 2:70 Burnham, Daniel H., Award for Distinguished Leadership, 2:54

66 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Burn Marks (novel), 3:62, 63 Burns, “Sleepy” Bill, 3:11 Burnside, Ambrose, 1:32 Byrne, Jane, 2:68, 70

C Cahan, Richard, and Mark Jacob, “Champions: Sports and the Chicago Daily News,” 3:20–41 Call Me Mister (play), 1:60 Calloway, Cab, 1:66–67 Camel cigarettes, 2:47 Carlisle (Pennsylvania) Indian School football team, 3:24 Carr, Walter, 1:61, 63 Cartier Diamond Dagger, 3:56 Cartwright, Kent, 3:17, 19 Cashmere Bouquet (soap), 2:40 Casimir Pulaski Day celebration at the Polish Museum of America, 3:51, 52 Catholic Youth Organization day camp, 2:7 Cayton, Horace, 2:4 Center Focus Publishing, 2:34 Centro Comunitario Juan Diego, 2:25, 29–31 “Champions: Sports and the Chicago Daily News,” article by Richard Cahan and Mark Jacob, 3:20–41 Chandler, Raymond, 3:60, 61 Chesterfield cigarettes, 2:47 Chicago Back-of-the-Yards neighborhood in, 2:54, 59 Bilingual Council in, 2:29 City Colleges in, 2:70 Committee on Aging in, 2:70 Department of Public Health in, 2:30 global communities in, 2:24–35; 3:42–55 great fire of 1871, 1:29, 30–31, 41, 51 local school councils in, 2:29 Trade Building in, 2:38 Chicago, University of, 3:41, 58, 59 Chicago Bears, 3:20, 28 Chicago Board of Education, 2:70 Chicago Board of Options Exchange, 2:68 Chicago Board of Trade, 2:68 Chicago Citizens’ Association, 1:51 Chicago Conspiracy Trial, 1:5–25 Chicago Cubs, 2:48; 3:9, 21, 33, 36 Chicago Daily News (newspaper), 1:26, 27, 29, 35, 46, 48, 50, 51–54, 57 Fresh Air Fund, 1:54 Sanitarium, 1:54–55 sports in, 3:9, 10, 20–41 Chicago Defender, cartoon in, 2:19 Chicago Herald and Examiner, 3:13 Chicago Historical Society Chicago Daily News Negatives Collection, 3:21 National Museum Fellows Program for Minority Students, 2:24 Chicago Junior Association of Commerce and Industry, 2:62 Chicago Mercantile Exchange, 2:68 Chicago Metropolis 2020, 2:70

Chicago Police at 1968 Democratic National Convention, 1:5, 13 “Chicago’s Global Communities,” articles by Peter T. Alter, 2:24–35; 3:42–55 Chicago Symphony/Lyric Opera Facilities Fund, 2:71 Chicago Times, 1:26, 31, 32, 34–37, 43, 51, 52, 54, 57 Chicago Tribune, 1:38, 39, 42–46, 51, 52, 54, 57; 3:11 Chicago White Sox, 3:4–19, 21, 37 Chism, Marcus, 2:15 Chowtsun, China, 2:8, 11 Christoffel, Nicholas, 2:8 Church of the Holy Nativity, 2:32, 33 Cicotte, Eddie, 3:7, 8, 11–13, 17, 37 Cincinnati Reds, 3:4, 6–8 Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, 2:70 “Civic Entrepreneurs: Interviews with Richard L. Thomas and Arturo Velasquez Sr,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 2:54–72 Civil Rights Act (1968), 1:13 Civil rights movement, 3:58 Cobb, Ty, 3:36 Cohan, George M., 3:9 Cole, Nat King, 1:63 College football, 3:21 Collins, Eddie, 3:5, 7 Comiskey, Charles A., 3:8, 13 Comiskey Park, 3:7, 21 Commission for Catholic Missions, 2:8, 11 Cone, Fairfax, 2:53 Continental Bank, 2:68 Continental National American (CNA) Insurance Company, 3:59 Copernicus Foundation Cultural and Civic Center, 3:54 Copland, Aaron, 1:58 Cordi-Marion Settlement House, 2:68 Corpus Christi parish, 2:8, 9, 11, 15 Corpus Christi school, 2:17, 22 Crain’s Chicago Business Executive of the Year Award, 2:54 Crime writing, 3:56–65 Cristero movement, 2:54 Crown, Henry, 2:65 Cummings, Nate, 2:65 Cuyler, Kiki, 3:33

D Daley, Richard J., 1:5, 7, 10, 13; 2:68, 69 Daniels, Minerva, 3:60 Daughters of Charity, 2:4 Daughters of the American Revolution, 2:5 Davis, Rennie, 1:4, 7, 11, 18, 21, 22 Deadlock (novel), 3:61, 62 Dellinger, David, 1:4, 10, 21, 22 Democratic National Convention (1968), 1:4–25 Dempsey, Jack, 3:22 Detective journalism, 1:57 Devon Avenue, 3:47 Division Street (book), 3:63 Doctorow, E. L., 3:14 Dominica, Sister, 2:8, 9 Draper, Timothy Dean, “Revisiting 1968,” 1:5–25 Index to Volume 31 | 67

Dreiser, Theodore, 3:63 Drexel, Mother Katharine, 2:5–6, 8, 13, 16, 23 Drexel, Sister Norma (Alma), 2:13, 14, 16 Dubuque Franciscans, 2:11, 21, 22

E Eastman Philharmonia Orchestra, 1:58 Eckert, Father Joseph, 2:10, 16 Editorial cartoons, 3:11 Education, power of, in overcoming prejudice, 2:19 Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (book), 3:13 Eliot, T. S., 3:19 Elliott, Walter, 2:5 English, Woody, 3:33 Enron, 2:64 ESPN cable television channel, 3:21

F Federal Anti-Riot Act (1968), 1:13 Federal conspiracy doctrine, 1:13 Federal Trade Commission, 2:47 Feller, Bobby, 3:19 Felsch, Oscar “Hap,” 3:8, 11–12, 13 First Chicago Bank, 2:54, 61, 64, 65, 68 First National Bank of Chicago, 2:54 Fisher, Pop (character), 3:14 The Fixer (novel), 3:14 Foote, Cone & Belding, 2:53 Foote, Emerson, 2:53 Foran, Thomas, 1:10, 18 Fosse, Bob, 1:60 Fowler, Al (character), 3:17 Franciscan Herald Press, 2:22 Franciscan Sisters, 2:11, 14, 17 Frapolly, William, 1:21 Freeman, Gaylord, 2:64 Friendship Baptist Church (Corning, N.Y.), 1:58 Froines, John, 1:4, 10 From Slave to Priest (book), 2:22 Fullerton, Hugh, 3:8, 17

G Gambling, 3:9 Gandil, Arnold “Chick,” 3:5, 8, 11, 12, 13, 37 Gardner, Ava, 1:65 Garnier, Sister Anthony, 2:21 Garvy, Arnold J., 2:11 Gedeon, Joe, 3:13 Gehrig, Lou, 3:26–27 Gershwin, George, 1:71 Ghost Country (novel), 3:61 Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Civic Entrepreneurs: Interviews with Richard L. Thomas and Arturo Velasquez Sr.,” 2:54–72 “William Warfield: Ambassador of Music,” 1:58–72 “Writing Crime in Chicago: An Interview with Sara Paretsky,” 3:56–65 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Ginsberg, Allen, 1:18, 19 Gleason, William “Kid,” 3:8 Global Communities: Chicago’s Immigrants and Refugees, 2:24 Global communities in Chicago, 2:24–35; 3:42–55 Gould, Stephen Jay, 3:6 Grange, Harold “Red,” 3:20, 21, 28 Grange, Lyle, 3:20 Grant, Ulysses S., 1.39; 1:43 Grayson, Kathryn, 1:65 Great Scenes from Porgy and Bess, 1:69 Guardian Angel (novel), 3:62

H Hackett, Buddy, 1:60 Hagen, Walter, 3:38 Haines Elementary School, 2:55 Hammerstein, Oscar, II, 1:65 Hammett, Dashiell, 3:61 Hammond, John, 1:60 Handel Medallion, 1:58 Hanig, Sister Luke (Clara), 2:15 Harding, Warren G., 2:58 Hard Times (book), 3:40 Harris Bank, 2:68 Harrison, Sister Clement Maria, 2:21 Harrison, Sister Louise, 2:21 Harrison, Sister Venard, 2:21 Hartman, Sister Guadalupe (Helen), 2:10 Hayden, Tom, 1:7, 18 Heathcote, Cliff, 3:33 Hemesath, Sister Caroline, 2:22 Hemesath, Catherine Bohr, 2:22 Hemesath, William F., 2:22 Henie, Sonja, 3:31 Henry, Harley, 3:18–19 Hernandez, Olivia, 2:25, 28–31 Herz, Otto, 1:61 Herzog, Charles “Buck,” 3:9 Hill, George Washington, 2:46–48 Hill, Percival, 2:47 Hip-Hop Summit, 2:31 Hobbs, Roy (character), 3:4, 14, 17, 19 Hoffman, Abbie, 1:4, 7, 10, 18, 22 Hoffman, Julius, 1:10, 12, 14, 18, 21, 22, 25 bailliff’s response to legal question of, 1:21 confrontation with Bobby Seale, 1:23 lapel button endorsing, 1:20 letters received by, 1:7, 13, 17, 20 Holiday, Billie, 1:61 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 1:13 Holy Name of Mary parish, 2:21 Holy Name of Mary School, 2:17, 20, 21 Holy Trinity High School, 2:70 Holy Trinity Polish Mission, 3:50, 55 Home visiting, 2:16 Hope, Bob, 2:48 Hopkins, Claude, 2.39–40 Hoy, Suellen, “Ministering Hope to Chicago,” 2:4–23

Hudlin, Mother Mary Claude, 2:17, 21 Hull-House, 2:4

I Illinois, University of, at Urbana-Champaign, 1:71 Illinois Federation of Mexican Americans, 2:68 Immaculate Conception Roman Catholic Church, 2:25 Immigrants from India, 3:42–55 from Mexico, 2:25, 28–31 from Poland, 3:50–55 from Romania, 2:32–35 Immigration law, 2:24 Immigration Reform Act (1965), 2:24 Indemnity Only (novel), 3:61 India, immigrants from, 3:42–55 India Post (newspaper), 3:48 Indo-American Center, 3:46 Indo-American Democratic Organization (IADO), 3:46 Indo-Crisis Line, 3:43 Inland Steel Corporation, 2:61 In the Mecca (book), 3:63 IQRA’ International Education Foundation, 3:45 Ivory (soap), 2:40

J Jackson, Andrew, 1:36 Jackson, Joe, 3:4–8, 11, 13, 17, 19, 37 Jacob, Mark, and Richard Cahan, “Champions: Sports and the Chicago Daily News,” 3:20–41 Jefferson, Thomas, 1:36 Jeffries, Jim, 3:30 Johnson, Ban, 3:9 Johnson, Jack, 3:30 Johnson, Lyndon B., 1:5, 10, 13 Johnson, Sister Mary of Nazareth, 2:20 Jones, Bobby, 3:38 Joubert, M., Sulpician Priest, 2:21 Juan Diego Community Center, 2:25, 29–31 Jukeboxes, 2:58–59, 65, 71 Jung, Carl, 3:17

K Kallay, Sister Frances Therese (Anna), 2:7, 18 Keel, Howard, 1:65 Kemper Insurance, 2:68 Kennedy, John E., 2:39–40 Kenyon College, Richard L. Thomas Chair in Creative Writing at, 2:71 Kern, Jerome, 1:65 Kerr, Dick, 3:8 Khipple, Kanta, 3:43 Killing Orders (novel), 3:63 Kimberly-Clark, 2:45 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 3:58 Kingston, Sister Margaret (Ignatius), 2:10 Kiniry, Katy, 2:8 Kitt, Eartha, 1:61

Kleenex, 2:48 Klemperer, Otto, 1:58 Kliendienst, Richard, 1:14 Kot, Malgorzata (Margaret), 3:50, 52, 54–55 Kotex, 2:40, 44, 45, 47, 48 Kunstler, William, 1:4, 22

L Ladies’ Home Journal (magazine), 2:45, 47 Landis, Kenesaw Mountain, 2:48, 51; 3:4, 6, 12, 13, 18, 19, 34, 37 Lange, Mother M., 2:21 Lardner, Ring, 3:17, 18 LaSalle Bank, 2:68 Lasher, Lawrence, 3:19 Lasker, Albert, 2:36–53 and Mary, art collection, 2:48 and Mary, Foundation, 2:48 Lasker, Doris Kenyon (second wife), 2:53 Lasker, Edward (son), 2:48, 49 Lasker, Flora (first wife), 2:51 Lasker, Mary (daughter), 2:48 Lasker, Mary (third wife), 2:51, 52 Lasker Plan, 2:48 Medical Research Awards, 2:53 Latino Leaders: The National Magazine of the Successful Hispanic American (magazine), 2:66 Lawrence Jewish Community Center, 3:56 Lawson, Victor, 1:48, 49 Leary, Timothy, 1:17 Lemon, Iris (character), 3:14 Lewin, Michael Z., 3:61 Lewis, Ramsey, 1:58 Liberal Republican movement, 1:42 Library of Congress’s American Memory website, 3:21 Lincoln, Abraham, 1:32 Lincoln Portrait (music), 1:58 Lindberg, Richard C., 3:40 Logan Monument, 1:6–7 Lord, Daniel, 2:36 Lord & Thomas advertising agency, 2:36, 38, 39, 43, 45, 48, 53 Lowenthal, David, 3:13 Lucky Strike cigarettes, 2:40, 47–48

M Maharg, Billy, 3:11 Mahler, Ernst, 2:45 Mailer, Norman, 1:18 Making History Award winners Paretsky, Sara, 3:56–65 Thomas, Richard L., 2:54–72 Velasquez, Arturo, Sr., 2:54–72 Warfield, William, 1:58–72 Malamud, Bernard, 3:4, 13, 14, 17–19 The Man with the Golden Arm (novel), 3:63 Marillac House, 2:4 Marion Star (newspaper), 2:58 Index to Volume 31 | 69

Marjorie May’s 12th Birthday (pamphlet), 2:47 Marshall Field, 3:41 Mary, Sister, of the Visitation Falls, 2:21 Mayo, Charles H., 2:43 McCarthy, Joe, 3:18 McCutcheon, John T., 3:15 McElroy, Mary, 3:17, 19 McMullin, Fred, 3:13 Medill, Joseph, 1:39, 40–43, 46 Melitona Mach, Mother, 2:12 Mellon, Andrew W., Foundation, 3:21 Mencken, H. L., 3:65 Mercy, Max, 3:17 Merriwell, Frank, 3:14 Mexican American Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 2:68 Mexican American Democratic Organization of Cook County, 2:68 Mexican Civic Society, 2:68 Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, 2:54 Mexico, immigrants from, 2:25, 28–31 Midlothian Country Club, 3:38 Miller, Elsa, 1:60 Mill Road Farm, 2:50–51 “Ministering Hope to Chicago,” article by Suellen Hoy, 2: 4–23 Mitchell, John, 1:14 Moody, Helen Wills, 3:39 Morrell, Louise Drexel, 2:5 Morris, John, 2:6 Morse, Elizabeth, 1:72 Morse, Linda, 1:17 Mount Cavalry Evangelical Lutheran Church, 2:33 Mount Olivet Baptist Church (Rochester, N.Y.), 1:58 Mount Vernon Baptist Church (Rochester, N.Y.), 1:58 Mugwump movement, 1:42, 51 My Music and My Life (book), 1:70

N Nagurski, Bronko, 3:30 Nash, Thomas, 3:37 Nathan, Daniel A., “Recasting the Black Sox Legend,” 3:4–19 National Baseball League, 3:7 National College of Education, 2:70 National Commission, 2:48 National Football League, 3:28 National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (Mobe), 1:10, 18 National Study on the Causes and Prevention of Violence, 1:5 Native Americans, Drexel’s commitment to work with, 2:5 The Natural (novel), 3:4, 13, 14, 17–19 NBD Corporation, 2:64 Newspaper Row, 1:28–29 New York City Polo Grounds in, 3:20 Town Hall in, 1:62 New York Giants, 3:20 New York Knights, 3:14 New York Yankees, 3:9, 26–27 70 | Chicago History | Spring 2003

Nord, David Paul, “Read All About It,” 1:26–57 Norris, Frank, 3:63 Northwestern University, 1:71; 3:42–43

O Oblate Sisters of Providence, 2:17, 21 O’Donovan, Sister Paulita (Maureen), 2:13 “Ol’ Man River,” 1:58, 64, 65, 69 Olympics, 3:21, 24 Our Black Shepherds: Biographies of the Ten Black Bishops of the United States (book), 2:22

P Padula, Frank, 2:60 Palmolive Soap, 2:40, 41 Paretsky, David, 3:56, 57 Paretsky, Mary E. Edwards, 3:56 Paretsky, Sara, 3:56–65 Paris, Memo (character), 3:14, 17 Parker, Robert B., 3:61 Paul of the Cross, Sister, 2:8 Pavarotti, Luciano, 1:71 Payton, Walter, 3:21 Peanut Specialty Company, 2:55 Penny papers, 1:52 Pepsodent Toothpaste, 2:40, 42, 43 Philadelphia North American (newspaper), 3:11 Philadelphia Phillies, 3:9 Phi Mu Alpha’s Man of the Year Award, 1:58 Poitier, Sidney, 1:61 Polish Museum of America (PMA), 3:50, 51, 52, 55 2000 Pulaski Day celebration at, 3:51, 52 Polish Welfare Association, 3:52 Pollard, Sister Providentia, 2:21 Polska Stacya (Chicago Polish saloon), 3:53 Porgy and Bess (opera), 1:68, 69, 71 Prejudice, power of education in overcoming, 2:19 Price, Leontyne, 1:63, 65, 67 Pritzker, A. N., 2:65 Provident Hospital, 2:16

R Radio advertising, 2:47 “Read All About It,” article by David Paul Nord, 1:26–57 “Recasting the Black Sox Legend,” article by Daniel A. Nathan, 3:4–19 Reiner, Rob, 1:60 Reiner, Carl, 1:60 “Replica of the Holy Prophet’s (POUH) Seal” (wall hanging), 3:49 Replogle, Hartley, 3:18 Republican Party, 1:41 “Revisiting 1968,” article by Timothy Dean Draper, 1:5–25 Rice, Grantland, 3:38 Richman, Sidney, 3:17 Rights in Conflict (study), 1:5 Riley, Jack, 2:68 Risberg, Charles “Swede,” 3:4–5, 8, 13, 37

Robeson, Paul, 1:65, 71 Rochester, University of, Eastman School of Music, 1:60 Rockne, Knute, 3:29 Romania, immigrants from, 2:32–35 Romania-NATO Alliance, 2:35 Romanian Eastern Orthodox Church of Saint Mary, 2:33 Rose, James, 1:58 Rothstein, Arnold, 3:12, 17 Roush, Edd, 3:6 Rubin, Jerry, 1:4, 7, 18, 21, 22 Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center, 2:70 Ruth, Babe, 3:9, 19, 26–27 Ryan, Rev. John, 2:21

S St. Anselm’s grammar school, 2:10 St. Anselm’s parish, 2:11, 16 St. Bronislava Roman Catholic Church, 2:25 St. Clair Drake, 2:4 St. Elizabeth’s High School, 2:8, 10, 13, 16, 18 St. Elizabeth’s parish, 2:11 St. Francis de Sales, 2:8 St. Josaphat parish, 2:11–12 St. Joseph’s Mission, 2:11 St. Louis Browns, 3:13 St. Monica’s parish, 2:6–8 St. Thomas the Apostle, 2:22 St. Timothy’s (Roman Catholic Church), 3:44 St. Xavier College, 2:70 Sandburg, Carl, 3:63 Sands, Gus (character), 3:14, 17 Sara Lee, 2:71 Saturday Evening Post (magazine), 2:43 Saunders, Warner, 2:17, 22 Saying It’s So: A Cultural History of the Black Sox Scandal (book), 3:4 Schenck v. United States, 1:13 Schiller Park, 3:52 School reform, 2:29 Schultz, Arthur W., “Albert Lasker’s Advertising Revolution,” 2:36–53 Schultz, Richard, 1:10, 17 Seale, Bobby, 1:10, 18, 21 Settlement-house movement, 2:4 Shock, Bigford & Co., 1:30 Shockley, Mother Theresa, 2:21 Short, Bobby, 2:12 Show Boat (musical), 1:58, 65, 69, 71 Sinclair, John, 1:17 “Sisters in Crime” (newsletter), 3:64 Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People, 2:5, 7, 8, 13, 16, 17, 18, 21 Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, 2:11, 17, 21 Smith, Douglas, 2:43 Smith, Gwen, 2:16–18 Smith, Sister Clement Marie, 2:21 Smith, Sister Clotilde, 2:21 Smith, Vincent, 2:13

Smith, Yvonne, 2:17 Social Darwinism, 1:36 Social Gospel, 1:51 Society of Divine Word, 2:16 Soldier Field, 3:21 Solo Cup, 2:31 Sosa, Sammy, 3:21 South Chicago, 2:25–31 Spears, Coach Doc, 3:30 Stagg, Amos Alonzo, 3:41 Starr, Ellen Gates, 2:4 Stations of the Cross reenactment, 2:25 Stockholm, Carl, 3:40 Stone, Melville E., 1:47, 48, 51, 52, 54, 57 Storey, William F., 1:32, 33, 35, 36–39, 41–43, 46 Stritch, Samuel A., Archbishop, 2:21 Students of a Democratic Society, 1:7, 10 Sujata, K., 3:42–44, 46, 49 Sullivan, Barry, 2:64 Swift, Dean, 1:51 Swift Club building, 2:10

T Tacqueria Mexico, 2:59 Tennes, Monte, 3:9 Terkel, Studs, 3:40, 63 Texas, University of, at San Antonio, 1:71 That’s Entertainment (movie), 1:65 Thomas, Ambrose, 2:36, 39 Thomas, Helen, 2:55 Thomas, Irene Harruff, 2:58 Thomas, Marvin C., 2:58 Thomas, Richard L., 2:54, 55, 58, 59, 61–65, 68, 70–72 Thompson, J. Walter, 2:39 Thompson, James, 2:69 Thorpe, Jim, 3:21, 24, 25 Tolton, Augustus, 2:6, 22 Tortolero, Carlos, 2:54 Trans-Atlantic dating service for Polish immigrants, 3:54 Tribune Company, 2:48 Triplet, Mr. and Mrs. John P., 2:18 Tunis, John R., 3:18 Tunnel Vision (novel), 3:62, 63 Tunney, Gene, 3:23 Twain, Mark, Award for distinguished contributions to Midwestern literature, 3:56

U U.S. Steel, 2:28

V Velasquez, Arturo, Sr., 2:54–57, 59–61, 65–72 Velasquez, Eliseo, 2:54–55 Velasquez, Juanita Flores, 2:55 Velasquez Automatic Music Company, 2:59, 65 Vietnam Moratorium, 1:21 Index to Volume 31 | 71

W Wade, Francis, Father, 2:13 Walgreens, 2:31 Walker, Daniel, 1:5 Walker Report, 1:5, 7, 13 Walsh, Raymond B., 2:11 Walter, Bruno, 1:58 Warfield, Bertha McCamery, 1:58 Warfield, Robert E., 1:58 Warfield, William, 1:58–72 Warner, Glenn “Pop,” 3:24 Warshawski, V. I. (character), 3:60–61, 63 Washington, Harold, 2:70 Wasserman, Earl R., 3:17 Weaver, George “Buck,” 3:4–5, 8, 12, 13, 19, 37 Weeghman, Charles, 3:9 Weiner, Lee, 1:10 contempt citation for, 1:24 Weinglass, Leonard, 1:22 Weissmuller, Johnny, 3:21, 32 Wentowska, Mother Regina, 2:11 Weston, Jessie, 3:19 West Side Grounds, 3:25, 36 White Panther Party, 1:17 Wieneke, Philippine, 2:8, 9 Wilkie, Franc, 1:32 Williams, Claude “Lefty,” 3:8, 11–13, 37 Williams, Pauline Lewis, 2:23 Williams, Sister Janvier, 2:16 Williams, Sister Lucy, 2:20, 21, 22 “William Warfield: Ambassador of Music,” article by Timothy J. Gilgoyle, 1:58–72 Willis, Ben, 2:4 Wilson, Hack, 3:21, 33 Wingert, Sister Rosalima (Celestine), 2:15 Wisconsin Steel, 2:25–29 Woman’s Home Companion (magazine), 1:65 Woodbury’s, 2:40 WorldCom, 2:64 World Series, 3:21 Wright, Courtenay, 3:59 Wright, Richard, History Maker Award for Distinction in Literature, 3:56 Wright College, 3:50 Wrigley, William, 2:48 Wrigley Field, 3:21, 33 “Writing Crime in Chicago: An Interview with Sara Paretsky,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 3:56–65 Wustman, John, 1:71

Y Your Hit Parade (radio show), 2:47 Youth International Party (Yippies), 1:7; 10

Z Ziegfield Theater, 1:65

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