Chicago History | Summer 2003 by Chicago History Museum

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 Intern Natalie Ford

On the cover: Libby Prison, Union Prisoners at Richmond VA from Nature by Act. Major Otto Botticher, 1863 chromolithograph/ broadside. CHS, ICHi-35977.

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.

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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

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Summer 2003 VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 24 42 56

A Shrine of Patriotic Memories Jennifer R. Bridge

The Game of the Century Peter T. Alter

Departments Yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s City Joy Clough, R.S.M.

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

A Shrine of Patriotic Memories JENNIFER R. BRIDGE

The controversial and lucrative Libby Prison museum offered a new way to remember the recent Civil War.

The Libby Prison War Museum hosted visitors for nearly a decade. The museum attracted thousands, including Chicagoans, World’s Columbian Exposition fairgoers, and former prisoners of war who lived behind Libby Prison’s walls in Richmond, Virginia.

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n 1899, the Libby Prison War Museum closed its doors after nearly a decade of profitable operation in Chicago, ending a fascinating chapter in the history of the city’s amusements. It was a successful attraction in its heyday, but most historians have subsequently treated the museum as a mere Victorian curiosity, an eccentric and profitable scheme by some enterprising Windy City businessmen. But the Libby Prison War Museum is more historically significant than it may initially appear. The museum’s controversial beginnings, its initial success, and its ultimate decline demonstrate the intersection of three important elements in the public memory of the American Civil War around the turn of the twentieth century: the commercialization of Civil War memory, the creation of a national dialogue urging reconciliation between North and South, and the expansion and subsequent decline of memorialization activity by Civil War veterans and others among the turbulence of the late–nineteenth-century city. Although it is perhaps the consummate example of the concept, the Libby Prison War Museum did not invent the commercialization of Civil War relics in Chicago. The city’s first major displays of Civil War artifacts appeared during the conflict at the Sanitary Fairs of 1863 and 1865. At the 1865 fair, Bryan Hall served as a curiosity shop, displaying contemporary arms, munitions, battle flags, and, as the Chicago Tribune reported, “old books, old medals, old everything that can be scraped together by indefatigable industry; priceless memorials of preserving bravery; and valuable findings from Southern battle-grounds.” Colonel Wood’s dime museum displayed a few pieces of Civil War–related material, including a life-sized figure of Jefferson Davis dressed in replicas of the women’s clothing he allegedly wore when federal troops captured him. The managers of the Sanitary Fairs sold (or returned to their owners) the relic displays after the expositions ended, while the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 destroyed Colonel Wood’s museum. No permanent displays of Civil War relics remained in the city past the 1870s.

Libby Prison War Museum was advertised as a premier Chicago attraction in the 1890s. A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 5

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W. H. Gray (above) organized efforts to relocate Libby Prison from Richmond, Virginia, to Chicago. Left: Union Hall at the 1865 Sanitary Fair. The Sanitary Fairs of 1863 and 1865 hosted Chicago’s first major displays of Civil War artifacts. Generals Grant and Sherman were among the fairs’ many visitors.

Beginning in the 1880s, however, paying audiences in Chicago again showed interest in Civil War artifacts, images, and narratives. The exhibitions of Paul Philippoteaux’s Gettysburg Cyclorama (1883) and Theophile Poilpot’s Shiloh Cyclorama (1885) in the city’s business district were spectacular successes, attracting large crowds. Nationally, the bestselling status of the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant and other Union officers proved the existence of a larger market for Civil War memorabilia. The resurgence in membership of the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) also made the production of uniforms, medals, and related items a profitable business. GAR encampments—the national conventions of the organization—were “such a lucrative event that local merchants put up large sums to attract” them to their towns, reports historian Stuart McConnell. Commercial enterprises seeking to profit from Civil War sites also multiplied during this decade: One company constructed a toll road on Lookout Mountain in Tennessee, while an enterprising businessman set up a tourist trolley to run excursions through the former Gettysburg battlefield. As railroad fares fell in the 1880s, making excursions to tourist spots more affordable for expanding urban populations, the number of these types of attractions increased to meet the needs of a growing tourism market. The lucrative possibilities of Civil War–related tourism inspired W. H. Gray, general manager of the Knights Templar and Masons’ Life Indemnity Company, to hatch A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 7

The Libby Chronicle, the prisoner-produced newspaper “devoted to facts and fun,” featured this image of the prison in the August 28, 1863, edition.

a scheme in 1888 to move Libby Prison, a four-story Richmond, Virginia, tobacco warehouse turned Civil War prisoner-of-war camp, to Chicago. Confederate authorities processed more than forty thousand prisoners at Libby; a few thousand more prisoners (mostly officers) were incarcerated there during the course of the conflict. Many Northerners had heard of the daring escape attempt that took place at Libby in February 1864, when prisoners excavated a fifty-seven-foot tunnel to a shed near the red brick prison; 109 prisoners fled in one night (48 were later recaptured). The prison’s fame was so widespread that, a few weeks after the fall of Richmond to federal forces, the warehouse’s sign “L. Libby & Son, Ship Chandlers” was shipped to New York and exhibited at the New England Rooms on Broadway by Colonel F. E. Howe. No one undertook the preservation of the rest of the building after the war, however; by 1888, when Gray saw it, the Libby warehouse was in disrepair and occupied by the Southern Fertilizer Company. W. H. Gray put together a group of Chicago investors, including Josiah Cratty, Charles K. Miller, and John A. Crawford (superintendent of the Chicago Towing Company) to pool the two-hundred-thousand dollars needed to purchase the building and move it to Chicago. Initially, the syndicate planned to reconstruct the warehouse in Chicago; enclose it in another, glass-roofed 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

building; surround it with a panoramic view of the James River; and fill it with war relics and images of the Monitor–Merrimac battle. In December 1888, after investors settled the deal’s financing, an architect from Washington, D.C., drew sketches of the warehouse prior to its demolition. The prison’s new owners erected a tall fence around the building and charged admission fees. The demolition of the building and its shipment to Chicago on 132 twenty-ton cars of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad began the next April. Despite a freight train accident that scattered pieces of the building (subsequently carried off by locals as souvenirs) for miles along the railroad tracks outside Maysville, Kentucky, reconstruction of the warehouse on Wabash Avenue proceeded apace. Most likely due to cost considerations, the investors abandoned the glass-roofed enclosure and panoramas of the original plan in favor of a castellated stone wall to enclose the old warehouse. Soon after W. H. Gray announced the syndicate’s plan in Richmond, editorial reaction to the Chicagoans’ scheme expanded beyond Virginia and Chicago. Much of the subsequent commentary illustrates some of the broader issues of sectional reconciliation between North and South. According to historian John Bodnar, the 1880s and 1890s saw the rise of the ideology of the “Lost Cause” in the South, in which Southerners “de-

In 1864, more than one hundred inmates escaped from the prison through a fifty-seven-foot tunnel, the entrance to which was displayed at the Libby museum. A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 9

Above: To raise money for the Libby museum project, organizers sold shares of the company in the form of stock certificates. Below: This advertisement illustrated the various stages of Libby Prisonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s move to Chicago from Virginia.

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emphasized commemorative activities centered on grief and sorrow for the dead and defeat itself and fostered a memory designed to speed the process of reunification while preserving something of a sense of regional pride.” Northern veterans started to accept the martial worthiness of their Southern counterparts. Increasingly, in veterans’ publications and public lectures, writers and editors expressed the sentiment that Southerners could not be blamed for the war, because they believed in the cause for which they fought. Historian Gerald Linderman claims that a widespread willingness for sympathy for and reconciliation with the South was stimulated by Northerners feeling “troubled by the [perceived] decline of small-town communities wrought by urbanization and industrialization”—and foreign immigration—in their own section. Southerners’ willingness to participate fully in the economic and political life of the nation, and Northerners’ accommodation of (and agreement with, on some issues, including racial segregation) Southern viewpoints meant that actions perceived as reviving sectional tensions had their fair share of critics in this decade. While Josiah Cratty insisted, “It should be understood that there is no idea of waving the bloody shirt in this. It is simply a business speculation for what there is in it,” the Chicagoans’ plan received criticism as a threat to sectional harmony and a crass exploitation of the former Libby prisoners’ sufferings. The syndicate members’ repeated assurances that the purchase of Libby was merely a business deal seemed to further enrage their critics. Before the warehouse’s removal, Gray was quoted (and requoted) as telling a Chicago reporter, “If the Richmond people should conclude that they do not wish to have this old war-relic removed, and should offer him a handsome bonus to give up his option [on the purchase], it is possible he might sell out and let the South keep her own. He has gone into the deal for the money there is in it, and if the ‘solid South’ can pay down more than Chicago promises to pay in the near future he will surrender.” Such jocular comments enraged some Southerners, who decried the Chicagoans’ plan as sectionally divisive and its propagators as morbid profiteers. Northern newspapers quoted Southern newspapers and anonymous “Southern businessmen” as saying there would be a substantial falloff in Southern trade with Chicago if Libby were rebuilt along Lake Michigan. One Southern paper responded to these speculative reports of merchants withdrawing their trade with sarcasm: It is not exactly clear why Chicago should be punished or held responsible for the venture of a number of speculative cranks. . . . We hope, however, that Libby prison will prove to be a paying institution in its Chicago home, and for the reason

that it is an entirely new industry and may open the way for the development of the new South in an unexpected direction. If the Libby prison prove[s] to be a profitable investment why would it not be practicable to organize a prison association in the South for the purchase of the prison pens at Elmira and Point Lookout and Fort Delaware and Johnson’s Island, where thousands of Confederate prisoners were put to death by slow torture? The editor of the Chicago Tribune scoffed that the “threat to cut off millions of Southern trade is bosh. Southerners will buy and sell where they can get the best bargains regardless of ‘Libby Prisons’ or who owns them.” To Southern critics of the scheme, W. H. Gray replied, “Northern sentiment is not averse to the transfer of the building, and that Southern sentiment certainly should not be, as the effect of the exhibition of the structure will be to show that Union prisoners were provided with pretty decent quarters after all.” But, despite Gray’s confidence to the contrary, the Libby scheme had as many conservative Northern critics as Southern ones. After the speculators announced their plan in February 1888, the New York Times printed a series of letters allegedly sent to W. C. Carrington, mayor of Richmond, from horrified Northerners advising the city to prevent the removal of Libby. One letter from the former captain of Company H, Sixth Pennsylvania Cavalry, declared, I lost a father and two brothers in Virginia, and I have been striving for 23 years nearly to bury the war into oblivion, which is impossible while a Republican lives to wave the bloody shirt. Why, this would perpetuate in the North all the animosity of the war, and what can the people of Richmond be thinking about to permit it, or even harbor the thought for a moment? Better burn the building to ashes than for a few paltry dollars allow it to stand in a Northern city, a standing shame on the fair fame of the South. Criticism also came from former inmates of Libby Prison, including a Captain Stewart, who commented that “It might serve to collect dimes and dollars as a ghastly circus exhibition to fill the pockets of sharp, unprincipled speculators—men that have conceived the selfish and despicable idea of violating the sanctity of the soldiers’ sufferings and to many the very spot of their deaths.” The Richmond Dispatch claimed it had confirmation from Chicago that most of the city was against the removal of Libby; the paper quoted U.S. Attorney W. G. Ewing: “I think that Libby Prison ought to have been blown to atoms twenty-five years ago. There can be no possible public good result from bringing it here or taking it anywhere. Architecturally it is an abortion, and

A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 11

Above: Chicagoans and tourists alike could easily reach the stately museum (seen here c. 1889) by trolley. Right: The successful opening gala for the museum helped quell criticism from detractors.

would be a disgrace from that point alone for any part of Chicago within eight miles of the court-house.” In the face of this critical uproar, the Libby Prison War Museum Association and its allies remained defensive of the project. Supporters of the museum in the press insisted that the fact that half of the building displayed Confederate relics was “significant of this new era of good feeling” between the North and South. The association inserted lengthy justifications of its motives in moving Libby to Chicago in its early publication The Story of Libby Prison, proclaiming the scheme a “patriotic project” that saved “a historical landmark which should not be suffered to fall into decay” and rehabilitated it as “a national reminder of what the country owes to her soldiers” and “a fit depository for relics of the war.” The most vocal criticism of the project faded after the museum’s gala opening on September 20, 1889, made it 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

apparent that no threatened boycott of Chicago business would steer the syndicate from its purpose. More than three hundred guests and dignitaries—including veteran Grand Army of the Republic commanders and army officers and ten former Libby prisoners of war—attended the opening. Newspapers across the country printed favorable reviews of the new venture, in which “the grim walks of the old prison were lit up with electric lights and hung with sabers, swords, muskets, cartridge boxes, and many other relics of the war, lifesize oil paintings of the Union and Confederate generals, photographs of many battlefields and other points of interest.” The “sabers, swords,” and other artifacts came from Charles F. Gunther, whom W. H. Gray appointed president of the newly expanded board of directors of the Libby Prison War Museum Association shortly after the Libby building arrived in Chicago. The new president was a prosperous businessman who owned a large candy store and factory on State Street. Gunther never separated his collecting from his moneymaking endeavors; he found artifacts while traveling on business and displayed a selection of his historical relics on the second floor of his shop for the entertainment of his customers. His career as an artifact collector had some interesting parallels with the more famous P. T. Barnum’s: Both men believed fervently in the power of constant, unrelenting publicity; both successfully parlayed their business and entertainment successes into political careers; both suffered setbacks when fire destroyed a portion of their collections; and both tried to foist their collections onto the public trust when the objects ceased to be profitable. But Gunther—and the Libby Prison War Museum—differed significantly from Barnum and his endeavors in one important respect: While Barnum maintained that visitors to his American Museum Above: The Chicago Tribune’s account of the museum’s gala opening noted the unchanged appearance of prison’s façade and the “wonderful collection of Confederate articles.” Top right: Confectioner and famed collector Charles F. Gunther served as president of the board of directors of the Libby Prison War Museum Association. While Gunther’s career seemed to parallel that of showman P. T. Barnum, Barnum (above right) believed that his viewers enjoyed “humbugs,” or deceptive, misleading exhibitions; unlike Gunther, he did not collect Civil War artifacts or other objects of historical significance. A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 13

As “a Shrine of Patriotic Memories,” the museum’s contents ranged from furniture and stoves to spent artillery shells and letters written by generals and soldiers. 14 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

enjoyed discovering a “humbug,” Gunther insisted upon the authenticity of the war artifacts he presented to the public. As a collector, Gunther gathered provenance material, including legal affidavits regarding the authenticity of artifacts, before he made his purchases. Gunther did display a few fantastic pieces in his candy store, including the alleged fleece described in “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” the supposed skin of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden, and the purported mummy of the Pharaoh’s daughter who rescued Moses from the bulrushes. Still, Libby Prison War Museum did not focus on the horrors or freaks of nature that urban dime museums such as Barnum’s described in their catalogues. Although the museum building’s history would have lent itself admirably to ghoulish interpretation, its proprietors intended to make it “picturesque and attractive . . . Its horrors will be in a measure mitigated by its surroundings.” Libby’s whitewashed walls offered a bright and cheery interior suitable for visitors’ palatable consumption of Civil War history. Two kinds of professional nonprofit museums appeared in American cities during this period: one in which authenticity and provenance were paramount, and the old commercial antebellum dime museums such as Barnum’s, in which “high culture was not yet separated from popular culture.” Libby Prison War Museum developed as a hybrid of both kinds. Gunther intended the museum to be both an edifying and entertaining experience for a mixed audience, advertising it as “A Shrine of Patriotic Memories.” Its owners also intended for the museum to be profitable. The selling of souvenirs—even of pieces of Libby Prison itself—was a natural extension of the commercial tendencies of the enterprise and added a tidy profit to the museum’s cash flow. After their tour among the whitewashed walls and annotated relics, visitors could choose from a bewildering variety of merchandise to commemorate their trip, including: Libby Prison brand cigars (manufactured by Berriman Bros.), medals, bullets, spoons, cotton bolls, Confederate money, photographs of famous

Many former soldiers, including Joseph Egolf, approached the museum to sell items—in this case, Egolf’s book—in the building’s gift shop.

Although the artifacts on display at the museum were historically significant and evoked memories of the country’s most divisive period, Gunther and his associates also intended to make a profit. The museum sought advertisers, including Berriman Bros., maker of Libby Prison Cigars. A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 15

Civil War generals, plates, flag pins, lithographs, books, newspapers, envelopes, canes from trees felled on Civil War battlefields, opera glasses, telescopes, world’s fair souvenirs, flags, match safes, jewelry, images of Chicago, gavels made of Libby Prison wood, and pieces of Libby Prison flooring. One observer noted of the last two items, “There can easily be a supply of such relics as long as there are old pine boards and sticks in Chicago. The war museum in the building is full of objects of interest, most of which are not being given away or sold, as the supply cannot be kept up, as in the case of the building. The value of most relics is the label on them. If that is credited the sentiment comes along all right.” While the Libby Prison War Museum’s brand of commercialized history proved popular with tourists and financially successful for its owners during its first few years, its most lucrative period came during the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. W. H. Gray purchased the Libby building in Richmond in 1890, two years before Congress awarded Chicago the fair, perhaps a farsighted investment on his part. Like other attractions in the city, the museum drew its fair share of the World’s Columbian Exposition’s more than twenty-five million visitors. Although the state and U.S. government buildings of the fair displayed many articles of American colonial and Revolutionary history, the fair did not provide much competition for the museum in terms of Civil War Newspapers such as The Graphic (above) included depictions of the artifacts on display at the museum. This drawing features a Confederate homemade shoe, swords, flags, chairs, and the Appomattox table on which General Robert E. Lee accepted Grant’s terms of surrender (the table is now on view at the Chicago Historical Society). Below: A guide in the museum’s Shellroom, an area highlighting many forms of artillery.

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A veterans’ reunion at the transported prison in Chicago, c. 1890.

artifacts. Historian Susan Prendergast Schoelwer points out that “although some Civil War items eventually appeared in the displays, the initial plans specifically noted, ‘It is considered desirable that all exhibits relating to the civil war should be excluded’” to avoid sectional disputes. Other entrepreneurs besides the Libby Prison War Museum tried to take advantage of the fairgoers’ interest in Civil War artifacts. A group of Washington, D.C., investors paid to move the engine house associated with John Brown’s raid from Harper’s Ferry to Chicago in 1891 in hopes of making money during the fair. The house was reassembled inside a museum of war relics, but low visitor turnout encouraged its principal owner to permanently close the attraction. A group of prominent African Americans in Chicago raised funds to have the engine house moved back to West Virginia; what became of the relics in the museum is unknown. A syndicate also purchased the McLean House at Appomattox, the site of Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant, with the intent of moving it to Chicago; however, the building never made the trip to Illinois (perhaps due to a lack of funding). Gunther himself harbored grandiose (and neverrealized) plans of bringing other famous buildings to Chicago for the fair, including an Egyptian pyramid, Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and the Petersen boardinghouse from Washington, D.C. (where Abraham Lincoln died). Rumors of Gunther’s intentions provoked outrage

among East Coast newspaper editors: “No considerations of sentiment have any weight with Chicago. With her it is only a question of money, and she misses no opportunity to let people know she has plenty of that.” While the World’s Columbian Exposition helped the Libby Prison War Museum capitalize on the national market of interest in Civil War relics in 1893, another development also boosted the museum’s popularity in this period. Nationwide, the 1890s saw the creation of new (and the expansion of existing) patriotic associations of all kinds in America. Particularly prominent in this new crop of organizations were those based on ancestry, such as the Daughters of the American Revolution. Some historians have argued that these patriotic and hereditary groups had their impetus in native-born urban Americans’ anxieties about increased immigration and labor organization in the 1890s. In Chicago, a resurgence of patriotic organizations and memorialization activity began in the 1880s, when Decoration Day celebrations enjoyed new popularity, and local organizations built monuments dedicated to Union Civil War heroes such as Generals Ulysses S. Grant and John Logan. The Chicago post of the Grand Army of the Republic, which had suffered from a decline in interest by veterans in the 1870s, rebounded from its period of flagging membership to become the largest post in the country. This period also saw a significant transition in the focus of the GAR organization. Moving away from its A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 17

Above: A number of former prisoners of war signed this register on the museum’s opening day. One inscribed “Downy Birds of a Feather” across the top of the ledger. Right: Many former prisoners, such as S. O. Blodgett, turned to the institution for assistance in locating other prison inmates.

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roots as a martial Republican organization agitating for soldiers’ pensions, the GAR’s national publications and aging local post members began to focus almost exclusively on fellowship and “sentimental vignettes of camp life . . . the story of a friendly encounter with a Confederate picket, the details of life in a tent, the joys of foraging, [and] the clever rejoinder of the private to the sergeant,” rather than the more bloody and disturbing aspects of life as a soldier. According to McConnell, one symptom of this increased sentimentality of GAR veterans about their war experience was renewed interest in soldiers’ reunions and rustic GAR campfire meetings where “the wartime camp was remembered as a place of camaraderie and sentiment, where brothers in arms ‘drank from the same canteen,’ [and] soldiers surrounded themselves with the re-created articles of camp life, including sleeping in tents, smoking clay pipes, and cooking food over open fires, creating a view of the war that was fixed in time and free of the less comfortable memories of life in combat.” The Libby Prison War Museum served as a site for this kind of fraternal memorial activity in Chicago. Museum manager Robert Clark Knaggs, a retired major of the Union Army and a former Libby Prison inmate, hosted formal veteran reunions at the museum. He maintained a register of visiting former prisoners of war, irreverently nicknamed “Downy Jailbirds of a Feather” on the title page by an unknown hand. The registry entries show that such reunions, sponsored by the Chicago Association of Ex-Union Prisoners of War, were held about every six months at the museum, each drawing between twenty-five and seventy-five veterans. The register shows that the attendees were primarily from Illinois and surrounding states. While many claimed in the register to have been imprisoned at Libby, men from other camps, including Andersonville, attended as well. The register also shows a steady stream of former prisoner of war visitors during regular museum hours. During the first three months the museum was open, 419 ex-inmates signed the register, while the Libby Prison War Museum Association bragged to the press that it had received more than one hundred thousand visitors. Approximately nine hundred former prisoners signed the register in 1890, the first full year the museum was open; Libby’s organizers claimed to have had nearly two hundred thousand visitors in the same time period. In the peak year of attendance, 1893, more than thirteen hundred former prisoners signed the register. The number of signatures per year falls off precipitously after that blockbuster year; only 86 such signatures appear in 1898, the last full year the museum was open. Similar to the local GAR post, the museum served as an informal gathering place for veterans, in addition to

This Civil War veteran posed for a photograph with the woman working at the museum’s ticket office.

hosting more formal reunion events. Museum manager Knaggs received a large volume of correspondence from veterans, including letters from those seeking the addresses of former comrades; veterans asking for pictures of the museum to hang in their GAR post rooms, businesses, pool rooms, restaurants, schools, armories, railway stations, post offices, and hotel lobbies; GAR posts wishing to arrange group visits to the museum; and old soldiers writing memoirs and asking for information—or requesting that the museum stock their books in the souvenir stand. Several veterans—all of whom claimed to be former prisoners at Libby—asked Knaggs to hire them as museum guides. The museum also published the Libby Prison Chronicle, a figurative continuation of a newspaper created by the inmates of Libby Prison during the war. The Libby Prison War Museum Association licensed the paper as a franchise to John L. Ransom, a former prisoner. While the Chronicle’s content may have appealed to a variety of museum visitors, many of its articles were targeted toward former prisoners and other war veterans. In addition to the money made from the Chronicle franchise and the admission fees, the museum association found A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 19

Former prisoners could purchase a plaque to commemorate the place where they slept on the prison floor. The writer of this letter included a diagram with his request. 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

another source of income: Those who had been incarcerated in Libby could purchase a plaque to mark the place where they (or a comrade) slept during their imprisonment. More than four hundred of these plaques were purchased during the museum’s lifetime. The income realized in these memorialization activities was not enough to sustain the Libby Prison War Museum for long. The profitability of the museum had declined by 1897, and Charles Gunther, who had been elected alderman of Chicago’s Second Ward, lost interest in continuing the venture. In June, Chronicle editor Ransom wrote to Gunther, pleading,

Society, where the artifacts of Libby Prison became the basis of a new era of Civil War memorialization activities after World War I. More than 130 years after its conclusion, the Civil War still resonates with Americans. Each year, visitors view artifacts in museums and wander the battlefields where so many Americans died. Hundreds of men and women belong to groups that reenact battles from the war across the country.

I really believe that if you will go to Washington [D.C.] and strike the right element that arrangements can be made to move Libby Prison there together with its contents. . . . I write this in the fear that you may decide to tear down or destroy the building. I do not think this will be allowed if you agitate the subject at headquarters. I am aware that you do not think much of Ex-prisoners of war. The kind that are in Washington are a different class from those you have met at Libby. They have got the money . . . and sentiment to buy up the whole business and will if it is put at them in the right way. Whether or not Gunther— or any of the other members of the LPWM Association— ever attempted to salvage the museum’s financial situation by approaching the federal government is unknown. Libby Prison War Museum closed its doors permanently in 1899, soon to be demolished and replaced by Gunther’s Chicago Coliseum Company’s stadium, a building with a seating capacity of fifteen thousand erected inside the outer castellated stone walls of old Libby. Gunther loaned some of his Civil War artifacts to a few world’s fairs, but the majority of his collection stayed in storage. After his death, Gunther’s heirs sold the bulk of the relics to the Chicago Historical

The Libby Prison War Museum Association letterhead depicted old Libby Prison rather than the reconstituted museum. In this letter, museum manager Robert Knaggs apologizes to a group of Milwaukee visitors who toured an “incomplete” exhibition. A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 21

This interior view (above) shows the wide variety of artifacts displayed on the museumâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s walls. Below: The Columbiad gun, displayed outside the museum, was used aboard the Confederate gunboat Palmetto Tree and was thrown overboard in 1865. It weighed seventy-six-hundred pounds.

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President Abraham Lincoln’s carriage, once property of Charles F. Gunther and displayed at the Libby Prison War Museum, now belongs to the Chicago Historical Society.

Many of the objects displayed in the late nineteenth century at the Libby Prison War Museum can be seen in the Chicago Historical Society’s exhibition A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln, where they remain a popular attraction. Although today’s visitors lack the direct connection to the war that the Civil War veterans who first viewed the artifacts at the Libby Prison Museum possessed, the ongoing display of these objects is a testament to Americans’ need and desire to remember and reflect upon the conflict that nearly destroyed the nation. Jennifer R. Bridge is a graduate student in the history department of Loyola University Chicago. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 5, CHS broadsides; 6–7, CHS, ICHi-15124; 7, CHS, ICHi-24185; 8, from the Libby Chronicle, August 28, 1863, CHS; 9, CHS, ICHi-30985; 10 top, CHS Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 10 bottom, CHS, ICHi-29503; 12 top, CHS, ICHi-17808; 12 bottom, CHS Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 13 left, Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1889; 13 top right, CHS, ICHi-24186; 13 bottom right, CHS, ICHi-23832; 14, CHS broadsides; 15 top and center, CHS

Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 15 bottom, CHS; 16 top, CHS, The Graphic, May 28, 1892; 16 bottom, CHS, A. Whiting Watriss Collection; 17, CHS, ICHi-29504; 18, CHS Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 19, CHS, A. Whiting Watriss Collection; 20–21, CHS Libby Prison War Museum Collection; 22 top, CHS, A. Whiting Watriss Collection; 22 bottom, CHS, ICHi-30991; 23, CHS, ICHI-25407. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on Libby Prison, see Libby Prison and Beyond: A Union Staff Officer in the East, 1862–1865 by Robert Thompson Cornwell and Thomas Bopaz (Shippensburg, Pa.: Bird Street Press, 1999); and The Most Incredible Prison Escape of the Civil War by Fred W. Conway and James M. Wells (New Albany, Ind.: FBH Publishers, 1991). Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory by David W. Blight (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 2001) delves further into the public perceptions of the Civil War. For more on the GAR, read Stuart McConnell’s Glorious Contentment: The Grand Army of the Republic, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1992).

A Shrine of Patriotic Memories | 23

The Game of the Century PETER T. ALTER

This year’s All-Star game marked the seventieth anniversary of an event born in Chicago.

hen the Major League Baseball All-Star game was played at U.S. Cellular Field on July 15, 2003, the “Game of the Century” returned to its birthplace. Original Comiskey Park, the “Baseball Palace of the World” at Thirty-fifth Street and Shields Avenue, hosted the first-ever All-Star contest. The year 2003 marked the game’s seventieth anniversary.

Ward, dubbed the “Cecil B. DeMille of sports,” however, made his contest too tempting for the owners to resist. He arranged for the Chicago Tribune to pay the players’ expenses and committed to donating the game receipts to the Professional Ballplayers of America, a charitable organization for retired major leaguers. Finally on May 18, 1933, the owners agreed to the contest, just six weeks before game day.

In 1933, Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly asked Arch Ward, a longtime Chicago Tribune sports editor, to create a major sporting event as part of the city’s world’s fair, the A Century of Progress International Exposition. Ward dreamed up the All-Star battle and selected July 6, an open date on the schedules of both the American and National Leagues. Ward pitched his idea to the leagues’ commissioner, presidents, and owners, but at first only American League President Will Harridge supported the proposal.

This event also drew the interest of passionate fans, because Ward asked them to pick the teams. Roughly five hundred thousand people across the country clipped All-Star ballots from newspapers and mailed in votes for their hometown heroes. Eager fans submitted more than two thousand ballots in the first four days of voting.

Generally conservative, most baseball owners did not want their regularseason schedules disrupted and feared their star players could be injured. Furthermore, National League owners, having lost five of the last six World Series, believed this Chicago match could establish league superiority. Privately, National League owners worried that if the American Leaguers won the All-Star game National League fans would lose faith in their teams. The newer American League could not be allowed to upstage the National League, the senior circuit by nearly a quarter century.

24 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

They picked two great squads, including New York Yankees legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Jimmie Dykes and Al Simmons represented the White Sox, joining Ruth and Gehrig on the American League team. Cubs Gabby Hartnett, Lon Warneke, and Woody English played for the National League. National League owners coaxed former New York Giants manager John McGraw out of retirement to lead their team. Banking on McGraw’s three World Series titles and seven National League pennants, league owners hoped he could guide the senior circuit to victory. The American League selected Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack as their field general. Mack’s record surpassed McGraw’s with five World Series triumphs and four American League flags.

Comiskey Park won over Wrigley Field as the game’s host venue in a simple coin toss. Owners agreed that National League players would wear a common league uniform while the American Leaguers donned gear from their own teams. With more than 47,500 fans in attendance, Lefty Gómez, a Yankee and future Hall of Famer, threw the first pitch at 1:15 P.M. on July 6, 1933. The first two and a half innings passed without much excitement. Then in the bottom of the third, with a man on first, Babe Ruth, the “Sultan of Swat,” stepped up to the plate. Less than two years from retirement, the Babe was well past his prime, but players and fans could not have cared less. Wild Bill Hallahan, the National League’s starting pitcher from the St. Louis Cardinals later remarked, “We wanted to see the Babe. Sure, he was old and had a big waistline, but that didn’t make any difference. We were on the same field as Babe Ruth.” In 1933, decades before current interleague play, many National Leaguers had never played against him. Hallahan fired a pitch into Ruth, and the Babe leaned into it, smacking the ball straight into the right field seats for a two-run homer. This firstever All-Star game home run gave the American League a 3-0 lead. McGraw pulled Hallahan before the inning’s end, and the Americans went on to defeat the Nationals, 4-2.

A Century of Progress International Exposition (1933–34) brought approximately one hundred thousand visitors a day to its multicolored exhibit halls and attractions along Chicago’s lakefront. During the depths of the Great Depression, the world’s fair promoted Chicago as a progressive city and highlighted technological triumph. Chicago Mayor Ed Kelly hoped a major sporting event would increase fair attendance and bring further acclaim to the city. Game of the Century | 25

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Arch Ward’s one-time-only game caught fire and moved to New York’s Polo Grounds in 1934 and to Cleveland the next year. The Game of the Century returned to Chicago in 1947, but this time to the North Side at Wrigley Field. Wrigley also hosted All-Star games in 1962 and 1990. The American League is undefeated at Wrigley, a National League park. The game returned to Comiskey Park in 1950 and again in 1983 for its fiftieth anniversary. Over the past twenty years, fan interest has waned somewhat as All-Star team managers

began to shuffle players in and out of the lineup to make sure everyone plays. Major League Baseball, however, seeks to revive interest by awarding the league that wins the All-Star game home-field advantage in the World Series.

! Mayor Ed Kelly shaking hands with Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett at Wrigley Field in 1935. In early 1933, Kelly became mayor of Chicago after an assassin killed Anton Cermak. One of Kelly’s first official duties was to preside over the A Century of Progress International Exposition. Hartnett, although not a hero in the

1933 All-Star game, was the Cubs star on the National League nine in the contest. Hartnett became the Cubs regular catcher in 1924 and the team’s player-manager in 1938. On September 28, 1938, he hit his famous “Homer in the Gloamin’” to help propel the Cubs to the National League pennant.

Peter T. Alter was the project historian for the Chicago Historical Society’s exhibition Chicago Sports! You Shoulda Been There. All images in this article are from the collection of the Chicago Historical Society.

" New York Yankee Lou Gehrig, shown here at Comiskey Park in 1927, played first base for the American League in the 1933 All-Star game. In 1920, while playing for Manhattan’s Commerce High, Gehrig launched a home run out of Wrigley Field in the intercity high school baseball championship between the best of Chicago and New York. This began his legendary baseball career during which he played 2,130 consecutive games, a record that stood until 1995. The “Iron Horse” helped lead the Yankees to six World Series championships. Gehrig was unanimously elected into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.

# New York Yankee pitcher Lefty Gómez, shown here warming up at Comiskey Park in 1930, threw the very first All-Star pitch to St. Louis Cardinal Pepper Martin. As a rookie, Gómez threw a devastating fastball. Injuries, however, forced him to rely on his curveball throughout his career. In the days before the designated hitter, Gómez was known as a particularly poor batter, but he still knocked in the first-ever All-Star game run in the bottom of the second inning in 1933. Gómez pitched in the first seven All-Star games, recording three wins against one loss.

Game of the Century | 27

! John McGraw came out of retirement in 1933 to manage the first-ever National League All-Star squad. McGraw began his playing career in 1891, became the New York Giants manager in 1902, and led the team to three World Series titles before his retirement in 1932. Known as “Little Napoleon,” McGraw was a feisty player and manager who was often jeered by opposing fans. Stamped with McGraw’s name, this 1950s Louisville Slugger bat (right) commemorates his accomplishments as a player and manager.

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" Connie Mack, as the senior American League skipper, managed the Americans in the 1933 All-Star game. He took his role as All-Star manager seriously, and unlike todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s All-Star managers who substitute freely, he made only one substitution among his position players. From 1901 to 1950, Mack piloted the Philadelphia Athletics to five World Series titles and eventually became part-owner of the team. Unlike other managers, Mack never wore a uniform, instead donning his trademark dark suits to sit in the dugout. This Louisville Slugger bat (below) includes a facsimile of Mackâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s signature and honors his successes in Philadelphia.

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" Chicago Tribune editor and sports promoter extraordinaire Arch Ward created the citywide Golden Gloves boxing tournament in 1923, the Major League Baseball All-Star game in 1933, and the College All-Star game in 1934. The College All-Star game pitted a squad of the best college seniors against the defending National Football League champions and was played at Soldier Field until 1976. Ward also founded the short-lived All-America Football Conference in 1946. At the time of his death in July 1955, he was preparing to attend the twenty-second annual baseball All-Star game in Milwaukee. ! In 1911, Will Harridge began work as American League President Ban Johnson’s private secretary. He worked his way up through the office and in the spring of 1931 became American League president. He held the job until retiring in 1958. Harridge was the first league official to support Arch Ward’s idea for an All-Star game, and backing Ward was one of the few risks he took as league president. The generally conservative Harridge banned Eddie Gaedel, the midget who batted for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, from baseball so that Browns’ owner Bill Veeck would never again use him as a player.

! Eddie Collins as the White Sox player-manager in 1926. After leaving Connie Mack’s Athletics in 1914, Collins played second base for the World Series champion White Sox in 1917. (He was not implicated in the 1919 Black Sox scandal.) In the winter of 1933, Collins became part-owner, coach, and general manager of the Boston Red Sox and represented them in the inaugural All-Star match up.

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# Joe Benz, pictured warming up at Comiskey Park in 1912, pitched for the 1917 World Champion White Sox. He retired from baseball in 1919 at the age of thirty-three. At the 1933 All-Star game, while sitting in Comiskey Parkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s right-field bleachers, Benz caught Babe Ruthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s homerun blast. He returned the ball to the Babe. Benz attended seventeen of the first eighteen All-Star games, including the 1950 contest at Comiskey Park when he was honored as a special guest on the field during batting practice.

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! Woody English was one of three Cubs on the 1933 National League All-Star team. In the top of the seventh, he flied out as a pinch hitter for his Cubs teammate Lon Warneke, and in the bottom of the inning, he took the field as the National League shortstop. From 1928 to 1934, English was an everyday player for the Cubs at shortstop and third base. He played in World Series contests in 1929 and 1932 but managed only a .184 batting average. The Cubs lost both series. 32 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

! Cubs pitcher Lon Warneke relieved Wild Bill Halahan after Babe Ruthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s home run in the bottom of the third inning of the 1933 All-Star game. Warneke managed to keep the game close, yielding only one run in four innings. He also smashed a triple and scored one of the two runs tallied by the Nationals in the top of the sixth. Warneke was also an AllStar in 1934, 1936, 1939, and 1941.

$ Al Simmons spent three seasons with the White Sox (1933–35) and made the All-Star team each year. In the 1933 game, Simmons played center and left fields and collected one hit. Like Jimmie Dykes, Simmons came to the Sox from Philadelphia. Athletics manager Connie Mack once wished, “If I could only have nine players named Simmons.” He was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953.

! Philadelphia native Jimmie Dykes played for the Athletics from 1918 to 1932. In 1933, his first year as a White Sox player, Dykes made the American League All-Star team. He played third base for the Americans, collected two hits, and scored one run. He became the White Sox player-manager in 1934. After retiring as a player in 1939, Dykes stayed on as the White Sox field general until 1946. In 1951, Athletics manager Connie Mack chose Dykes as his successor.

Game of the Century | 33

# In the twilight of his career, Babe Ruth became the hero of the 1933 All-Star game with his third-inning homer. His accomplishments on the baseball field are legendary. The Babe was the first player to hit 30, 40, 50, and 60 home runs in a season, and his record of 714 career home runs lasted until 1974. Less than a year before the inaugural AllStar game, Ruth added to his legend in the third game of the 1932 World Series against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. His “called shot” home run in that game remains a hotly debated topic.

" This baseball is signed by the 1933 American League All-Stars— including Babe Ruth. At the time, Chicago-based A. G. Spalding and Brothers Sporting Goods manufactured the official baseballs for both the American and National Leagues.

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" Fan favorite Luke Appling played shortstop for the White Sox from 1930 to 1950. He entered the 1947 All-Star game at Wrigley Field to pinch-hit for Washington Senators right fielder Buddy Lewis in the top of the sixth. Appling hit a single and scored a run to tie the game at one run apiece, helping the Americans eventually win the contest, 2-1. Known as “Old Aches and Pains,” Appling blamed his discomfort on the uneven Comiskey Park infield, often complaining, “I swear that park must have been built on a junkyard!”

# Phil Cavarretta, the son of Italian immigrants, grew up on Chicago’s North Side and played baseball at Lane Tech High School for Coach Percy S. Moore. After leading Lane Tech to three consecutive city titles (1932–34), Coach Moore landed “Cavie” a tryout with the Cubs. From 1934 until 1950, Cavarretta was an everyday player for the Cubs at first base and in the outfield. He won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award in 1945, the last time the Cubs captured the National League pennant. Cavarretta played in the 1947 All-Star game at his home park. Game of the Century | 35

! The DiMaggio brothers, (from left) Vince, Joe, and Dom, played in a total of twenty-two All-Star games. Considered one of the best players of all time, Joe won nine World Series titles with the New York Yankees. He also managed a fiftysix-game hitting streak in 1941, a record that still stands, and played in the 1947 All-Star game at Wrigley Field and the 1950 game at Comiskey Park. In the 1950 game, Dom, the youngest, played left field representing the Boston Red Sox while his older brother Joe played right field. Vince, the oldest, spent his entire ten-year career in the National League, playing in the All-Star game twice but never against his younger brothers. The 1947 American and National League All-Stars autographed these baseballs. The American League ball (left) includes the signatures of New York Yankee great Joe DiMaggio and Boston Red Sox phenomenon Ted Williams. In the 1950 All-Star contest at Comiskey Park, Williams broke his elbow and missed the rest of the season. Many big-name players, including St. Louis Cardinals legend Stan Musial, signed the National League ball (right). â&#x20AC;&#x153;Stan the Manâ&#x20AC;? also played in the 1950 and 1962 All-Star games held at Comiskey and Wrigley respectively. Cubs All-Stars Phil Cavarretta and Andy Pafko also signed the National League ball. 36 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

" Cubs outfielder Hank Sauer rounding third base and getting congratulations from his manager Frank Frisch in 1949. Sauer played in the 1950 All-Star game at Comiskey Park. Known as the “Mayor of Wrigley Field” for his outgoing demeanor, Sauer became a crowd favorite. After he hit home runs at Wrigley, Cub fans frequently showered him with pouches of chewing tobacco, as Sauer enjoyed a good chaw. Frisch played in the 1933 All-Star game, representing the St. Louis Cardinals. Frisch’s sixth-inning homer gave the Nationals one of their two runs.

# On July 5, 1947, at Comiskey Park, Cleveland Indians outfielder Larry Doby, shown here in the early 1950s, became the first African American to play in the American League. He was also the first African American to play in a World Series when Cleveland won the title in 1948. Doby collected two hits in the second integrated All-Star game in 1950 at Comiskey Park. In 1956, 1957, and 1959, he played for the White Sox. He returned to Chicago in 1978 as the White Sox manager, making him the second-ever African American major league manager and the first for the Sox.

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! Brooklyn Dodger Jackie Robinson was the first African American to play Major League Baseball in the twentieth century. He led the Dodgers to six National League pennants and a World Series triumph in 1955. Robinson played second base in the 1950 All-Star game at Comiskey, getting one hit. This contest, however, was not Robinsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s first All-Star game at Comiskey. Playing for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League, Robinson participated in the Negro League EastWest All-Star game there in 1945. Negro League All-Stars played the East-West game at Comiskey from 1933 to 1953. In 1997, Major League baseball retired Robinsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s number 42 from all of its clubs. 38 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

# Luis Aparicio (standing) and Nellie Fox were the sure-handed middle infielders for the great Go Go Sox teams of the 1950s. The 1959 White Sox were the last Chicago team to play in the World Series. Aparicio played shortstop in the 1962 All-Star game at Wrigley Field, which the Americans won 9-4. Fox was a twelve-time All-Star but never played in a game hosted in Chicago. Both Aparcio and Fox are in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

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! Cubs outfielder Billy Williams, shown hitting a home run at Wrigley Field in 1969, played for the National League in the 1962 All-Star game at his home park, batting in one run. From 1959 to 1962, the All-Star game was played as a “doubleheader” with two games per season, one in an American League park and the other in a National League venue. This contest at Wrigley was the last of the All-Star doubleheaders. The singlegame format returned in 1963. As a Cub from 1959 to 1974, Williams was a dominant hitter and established the National League record for consecutive games played at 1,117, a mark that stood until 1983.

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" Cubs great Ernie Banks acknowledging the crowd at Wrigley Field in 1969. Banks first played professional baseball for the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro Leagues in 1953. Later that same year, on September 17, he became the Cubs’ first African American player to appear in a regular-season game. In 1958 and 1959, Banks won the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award. He played first base in the 1962 All-Star game at his home park during which he smacked a hit and scored a run. In 1970, Banks became the first Cub to hit five hundred home runs.

! Chicago-based toy manufacturer Cadaco produced this All-Star baseball board game from the 1940s to the 1980s. This Hall of Fame edition dates from 1982. Cadaco originally named this game Ethan Allenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s All-Star Baseball in honor of the major league outfielder. After playing from 1926 to 1938 for six teams including the Cubs, Allen coached Yale University baseball and directed instructional films for the National League.

Game of the Century | 41

YESTERDAY’S CITY I

Chicago’s Sisters of Mercy J OY C LO U G H, R . S . M .

chilly wind blew along the deserted shoreline as the weary travelers stepped ashore. Before them on the shores of Lake Michigan lay an outpost of civilization, a makeshift wooden village sinking in mud. It was September 23, 1846, and the Sisters of Mercy had arrived in Chicago. The sisters had set out from Pittsburgh five days earlier at the insistent invitation of the Right Reverend William Quarter, the first Catholic bishop of Chicago. Accompanied by the bishop’s brother, Reverend Walter Quarter, they had bounced in stagecoaches across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and tossed in boats on Lake Erie and Lake Michigan, wondering what adventures awaited them in “the West.” They completed their journey on foot, trudging from Lake Michigan to the bishop’s residence at Madison Street and Michigan Avenue. Catherine McAuley founded the Sisters of Mercy, a Roman Catholic congregation of religious women, in Dublin, Ireland, in 1831. A woman of means who wished to use her wealth and talents in the service of the needy, Mother McAuley established the religious community to “seek justice, to be compassionate and to reflect mercy to the world.” In the early 1840s, a small band of Sisters of Mercy had journeyed to the U.S. from Dublin. Five of these women made up the group that traveled to Chicago. The sisters had little time to bemoan the Chicago they encountered that day: a dreary, muddy swamp with about seventeen thousand inhabitants. Led by Mother Mary Frances Xavier Warde, regarded as the American founder of the Sisters of Mercy, and Sister Mary Agatha O’Brien, the first Chicago superior, the sisters arrived ready to help the missions and people who needed their services. These sisters included Sister Mary Gertrude McGuire and Sister Mary Vincent McGirr, novices, and Eliza Corbett and Eva Schmidt, postulants. Sister Agatha was the eldest at twenty-four. Within ten years, she and three of her four younger companions would be dead, victims either of their patients’ diseases or the strenuous conditions of frontier life. 42 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Above left: Mother Catherine McAuley founded the Sisters of Mercy in 1831. Above right: Mother Mary Francis Xavier Warde led a small troupe of Sisters of Mercy to Chicago, where they first stayed in Bishop William Quarter’s house. Below: The bishop’s house in 1844, a few years before it became the Sisters of Mercy’s first Chicago convent.

Mercy Hospital (shown here in 1912) was the only general hospital in Illinois until 1866. Its long history includes many contributions to health care and medical education. Yesterdayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s City | 43

Mother Frances soon returned to the east; the five remaining sisters got to work immediately. Bishop Quarter gave them his house for their convent. In October, they opened their first parochial school for fifty girls in a small building behind the convent. Known as St. Mary’s, it was soon followed by St. Joseph School for boys on Madison Street near Wabash Avenue. The sisters began a “select school” (boarding school) for girls where they taught high-school subjects—ten years before Chicago built its first public high school in 1856. The income from the select school, known as St. Xavier Academy, provided for the sisters’ needs and enabled them to conduct the “free” (parochial) schools. St. Xavier Academy was the forerunner of the present Mother McAuley High School and St. Xavier University on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Some rooms of the convent became a boarding house for working girls who received help in finding employment. The sisters offered night school for adults who could not attend day classes. They visited the sick, poor, and imprisoned. These years also saw the novices and postulants take their vows in Chicago’s first ceremonies of

religious profession. At the beginning of the 1850s, the original group had grown to eleven and the pupils under their care to almost two hundred. The sisters moved into a new brick convent—the first erected in Chicago—at 131 Wabash Avenue (near 10 South Wabash today). Chicago’s growth to nearly thirty thousand people by 1850 set the stage for the city’s first permanent general hospital. The population surge brought sanitation problems, outbreaks of contagious disease—such as typhoid, smallpox, and cholera—and other conditions that gave rise to makeshift hospitals. Dr. Daniel Brainard began organizing Rush Medical College, the first medical school in Illinois, soon after his arrival in Chicago in 1835. When Chicago incorporated in 1837, Brainard became the first city physician or health officer and ranked as one of the finest surgeons in the Northwest. He was a neighbor of the sisters in Chicago and took an active interest in their charitable works until his death from cholera in 1866. Dr. Nathan Smith Davis, who came to Chicago in 1849 to join the faculty of Rush Medical College, also pushed for a permanent hospital for the clinical instruction of his students.

Dr. Daniel Brainard (top) and Dr. Nathan Smith Davis (center) encouraged the work of the Sisters of Mercy as nurses in Chicago. The Chicago Sisters of Mercy began their nursing careers at Lake House (above) in 1850. 44 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

In 1849, the city granted a charter for the Illinois General Hospital of the Lake. By the following year, the Lake House, a former hotel on the Chicago River’s north bank, contained twelve hospital beds. Familiar with the work of sisters in the east, Drs. Davis and Brainard looked to the possibility of the Sisters of Mercy as the hospital’s nurses. Sister Agatha, the mother superior, objected that sisters could not be spared from work of the schools and care of the orphans. Still, the sisters felt their work included service to the sick. In December 1850, the Chicago Sisters of Mercy began nursing at Lake House, walking two miles each morning and evening between the convent and the hospital. On February 21, 1851, the Sisters of Mercy received control of the hospital. The doctors agreed to supply medical and surgical services free of cost in exchange for the privilege of conducting teaching clinics at the hospital. The hospital admitted patients without regard to religious affiliation. The Rush medical staff undertook the payment of rent at Lake House for the duration of the original three-year contract. On February 22, several sisters left the motherhouse at Wabash and Madison to take charge of the Illinois General Hospital of the Lake. Sister Mary Vincent, superior of the group, drew support from her brother, Dr. John McGirr, a member of the hospital’s staff and professor of science at the University of St. Mary of the

Lake. He had helped the sisters organize their schools and provided instruction for them in chemistry, physiology, and other sciences. Sister Mary Vincent was also highly educated, but her field was music; to this trained musician fell the task of organizing the hospital. She and other sisters took up residence on the top floor of Lake House and soon had fifty patients under their care. A new charter, in the name of the Sisters of Mercy, was issued on June 21, 1852, under the name Mercy Hospital and Orphan Asylum. Many doctors attending patients and conducting student clinics at Mercy in these early days—including Drs. Nathan Davis, Daniel Brainard, and William Herrick— became prominent in early Chicago medical history. Dr. Davis, for example, founded the American Medical Association and the Chicago Medical Society and was a founding member of various civic organizations, including the Chicago Academy of Sciences and the Chicago Historical Society. He and the other doctors offered free medical services to the sisters and the pupils, orphans, and many other residents of their institutions. Dr. Davis served as the senior attending staff member at Mercy for forty years before his death in 1904. Besides patients hospitalized by their doctors, Mercy served both the U.S. maritime patients and the sick poor of Cook County before these two groups established their own hospitals. The Chicago Marine Hospital

The Sisters of Mercy soon adapted to hospital work; here a sister assists in the operating room in the early twentieth century. Yesterday’s City | 45

Above: Mercy Hospital and Orphan Asylum, established by charter on June 21, 1852, combined the sisters’ care of the local orphans with their new work in medicine. Right: In 1859, Mercy Hospital and the new Lind University medical school collaborated to offer students professional clinics and a graded curriculum.

opened in 1852 under the direction of Dr. Herrick. Cook County paid three dollars a week for each of its patients cared for at Mercy Hospital between 1851 and 1863. Until Cook County Hospital opened in January 1866, Mercy was the only general hospital in Illinois. Lake House proved to be an unsuitable site for quality patient care and medical education. The first floor flooded in the almost annual overflow of the Chicago River. Proximity to the lake brought the smoke and noise of steamboats—not to mention vermin. In October 1853, the sisters moved their patients to two new brick buildings, one for the hospital and one for the orphanage, at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street. Mercy Hospital grew in service at this site for eleven years. The service that took shape in those early years had a dual goal: quality medical care and excellence in medical education. In 1859, Dr. Davis and some associates from Rush Medical School wanted to lengthen and toughen the requirements for a medical degree, and therefore, founded Chicago’s second medical school, the medical department of Lind University. Mercy Hospital collaborated with the new school and became the first U.S. teaching hospital to use a graded curriculum. Doctors from all over the country attended Dr. Davis’s professional clinics at Mercy, and the hospital acquired a national reputation. Later the medical department of 46 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Lind became an independent school: the Chicago Medical College at Twenty-second and State Streets. Since the early 1850s, the Sisters of Mercy had sporadic property difficulties with Bishop Quarter’s successors, who opposed religious women holding title to properties and real estate. Sister Mary Agatha discovered that Bishop James Van De Velde had recorded the deeds for Mercy Hospital (at Wabash Avenue and Van Buren Street) in the name of the diocese, even though funds from the sisters’ academy almost solely supported the hospital and the orphanage. In 1852, Sister Agatha engaged a lay friend to purchase some property for the community at Twenty-sixth Street and Calumet Avenue in Carville—home of the Illinois Central car shops and about three miles from the central city—for six hundred dollars. This property, incorporated into Chicago along with the entire Carville area in 1853, became the site of St. Agatha’s Academy, a boarding school for young women and retreat for the sisters. The stage was set for Mercy Hospital’s move from city to “country.” In the mid-1860s, Bishop James Duggan, then diocesan head, decided to reorganize the orphanage and hospital. The twin brick buildings at Wabash and Van Buren were sold. The orphans moved to St. Mary of the Lake University, and the sisters had to vacate Mercy Hospital with only two days’ notice. Sister Mary Frances Monholland, then Chicago superior, and her assistants hastily conceived a workable plan for continuing their hospital care of the sick. The sixty-five boarders at St. Agatha’s Academy moved to St. Xavier Academy, the sisters’ school on Wabash Avenue. The Mercy Hospital patients were then transferred to the former academy at Twenty-sixth Street and Calumet Avenue, to the amusement of many city residents who shook their heads over a hospital so far out in the country. Mercy Hospital has served Chicago from this site for 140 years. The new site was conveniently located near Chicago Medical College, and the two institutions worked together to strengthen their medical and educational services. In 1869, Chicago Medical College became Northwestern University’s medical department in conjunction with Mercy Hospital. The affiliation lasted for fifty years. In 1870, Northwestern erected a building for its medical college at Twenty-sixth Street and Prairie Avenue on land leased rent-free from Mercy for twenty years. Mercy’s amphitheater hosted Northwestern’s medical clinics, and clinical education took place in all the hospital wards. Also in 1869, the Sisters of Mercy launched an aggressive building program, breaking ground on the 2500 block of South Calumet Avenue for an extensive addition including two large new wings and a new frontage for the Calumet side of the original building. From this “country” location, Mercy became one of the city’s few hospitals to survive the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. In

Bishop James Duggan (seen above in 1861) reorganized Mercy Hospital and Orphan Asylum in the mid-1860s, resulting in the move of Mercy Hospital to the South Side. The new location, near Chicago Medical College, resulted in another Mercy collaboration, as noted on this certificate (below). Chicago Medical College became Northwestern University’s medical department, and the affiliation between Mercy and Northwestern lasted for fifty years.

the wake of the disaster, Mercy opened its doors to countless injured and homeless. As the nineteenth century moved toward its close, Mercy Hospital’s service to Chicago revolved largely around two people: Dr. John B. Murphy (whom Dr. William Mayo described as “the surgical genius of our generation”) and Sister Raphael McGill, who was instrumental in bringing Dr. Murphy and his renowned teaching clinics to Mercy. As hospital administrator for thirty-four years, Sister Raphael directed the recurring building programs, guided the hospital’s adaptation to far-reaching medical discoveries, and inaugurated Mercy’s role in nursing education. Yesterday’s City | 47

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Sister Raphael McGill (above) organized Mercy teaching clinics, encouraged nursing education and the use of the latest medical techniques, and oversaw many construction programs for the hospital. Left: Mercy Hospital (shown here in 1910) moved to Twentysixth Street and Calumet Avenue in the mid-1860s and remains there today.

With an aggressive expansion program in 1893, Sister Raphael began a series of projects that saw Mercy grow from a single building to a network of interconnected wings that stretched around a full city block. The new four-story wing built in 1893, known as the Ward building, housed the pediatrics unit and three large wards. The sisters’ desire to help the patients who came to their dispensary prompted the construction of a threestory clinic on Calumet Avenue near Twenty-fifth Street. When an increase in the number of patients caused by Chicago’s population growth taxed the ever-expanding Mercy facility, the hospital built again: two large wards and fifty private rooms constructed on property vacated by the Chicago Medical College. Next came renovation of Mercy’s amphitheatre, construction of a three-story laundry building, the remodeling of two houses into nurses’ quarters, and the creation of a separate maternity facility. Yet another new wing rose along Prairie Avenue in 1908. Sister Raphael also oversaw construction of a Calumet Annex and a new power plant and laundry. Yesterday’s City | 49

Above: Northwestern University doctors held medical clinics in Mercyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s amphitheater. Here Dr. J. B. Murphy conducts a clinic in front of a large audience in 1910. Below: The womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ward of Mercy Hospital in 1898.

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Mercy Hospital’s many renovations and improvement projects included a new convent wing in 1916.

Though busy with building, Sister Raphael kept her eye on medical advances that challenged Mercy Hospital to grow in other ways. She ensured that Mercy physicians debated the merits and eventually adopted antiseptic technique as part of the hospital’s daily routine. Joseph Lister, an English doctor, developed the germ theory of infection and used carbolic acid to kill germs on infected wounds and during surgery. While visiting London in 1866, Dr. Edmund Wyllis Andrews, Mercy’s chief surgeon since 1855, was impressed by Lister and the new technique for antiseptic germ-killing surgery. Dr. Andrews then introduced antisepsis to Chicago and experimented with and modified Lister’s carbolic spray technique at Mercy Hospital. Sister Raphael also developed training programs to prepare young women to serve as hospital and private duty nurses. Establishing the Mercy Hospital Training School for Nurses required the planning, energies, and dedication of several sisters, including Sister Mary Ignatius Feeney, who became the first female registered pharmacist in Illinois in 1882. Mercy’s Training School was officially chartered in 1892, the second nursing school, and the first Catholic one, in Illinois. In 1896, more than two hundred sisters celebrated the golden anniversary of the Sisters of Mercy in Chicago. In place of an 1850s ramshackle frame building on the lakeshore, Mercy Hospital stood in the Prairie Avenue district, one of the most exclusive residential areas in Chicago. A contemporary author wrote, “[Mercy’s] beautiful grounds and the magnificent buildings constitute a veritable palace for the sick.” Between the World Wars, the sisters followed Sister Raphael’s example and fostered a number of medical advances: neurosurgery, electroencephalography, and physical medicine. Sister Mary Flora Delaney, the first Catholic sister to train as a physical therapist, introduced a wide range of services for the disabled and injured. Sister Flora

set up a postpolio unit and trained in the “Sister Kenny” method of treating the crippling disease (Sister Elizabeth Kenny, an Australian nurse, developed a heat and massage treatment to stimulate paralyzed muscles). The Mercy Free Dispensary opened in 1919 and offered medical and surgical clinics and twelve specialized services, including pediatric, eye, and dental, at a nominal fee. Later the hospital subsidized the Mercy Hospital Clinic with a small amount of government reimbursement to serve the poor. In 1952, the clinic initiated home medical care service. By 1962, with sixty thousand patients using its services annually, according to Sister Gwendolyn Durkin, then-director of the Mercy Medical Clinic, “Total care was rendered to the patient irrespective of . . . race, financial condition, and so on. I think Mercy Clinic should be remembered for the service and love and dedication that the individual employees and the sisters gave to the patients over the years.” In the early 1930s, the sisters linked the hospital’s School of Nursing with another of their institutions, St. Xavier College, in order to advance nursing education. In 1939, St. Xavier awarded degrees to the first collegiate nurses in Illinois; 1,370 R.N. graduates of the Mercy School of Nursing had preceded them. That same year Sister Therese Flatley became nursing school superintendent. In 1942, she became the first religious in Illinois to be appointed to the State Board of Nurse Examiners. In the 1950s, St. Xavier took over responsibility for the nursing program, with students rotating through the hospital departments for clinical experience. In 1955, Sister Annette Walsh, director of the program for twelve years, took on the task of grant writing to garner $1.1 million for the college’s nursing school. Also under her direction, the school offered Illinois’s first master’s degree program in psychiatric nursing. Sister Sheila Lyne, Mercy’s current president and chief executive officer, was one of the seven St. Xavier graduates who formed the first group to earn master’s degrees in psychiatric nursing in 1965. When the Sisters of Mercy celebrated their centennial in Chicago in 1946, they surveyed an amazing history of service. Their number had grown to one thousand members; they had spread from Chicago to other parts of Illinois and to Wisconsin and Iowa; they operated fortysix elementary schools, nine high schools, a college, four homes for working girls, and two residences for the elderly. The Chicago Sisters of Mercy tended the ill in eight hospitals and three sanitariums and advanced the cause of nursing education in six training schools. Some eighty years had passed since the sisters had moved Mercy Hospital to South Prairie Avenue. Yet looking about the neighborhood, the sisters faced the hard reality: the hospital’s dated facilities now sat in the midst of an urban slum. Yesterday’s City | 51

Above: In 1935, the Mercy Hospital School of Nursing merged with Saint Xavier College to establish the first collegiate nursing program in Illinois. Here a 1942 nursing class listens to a sister’s lecture. Right: The Chicago Tribune reported on the centennial of Mercy Hospital in 1946. Below: In 1948, the city honored the Sisters of Mercy with a ceremonial plaque at the site of the sisters’ first convent in Chicago at Madison Street and Michigan Avenue.

In 1959, after long consideration of whether to move north or to stay at its South Side location, Mercy announced plans to build in the vicinity of its current site where the hospital could help stabilize the area and continue to serve the area’s residents. Mercy’s outpatient clinic served many local residents who would find it difficult to travel to a suburban site. Hospital administrator Sister Michael Berry, with the help of Mayor Richard J. Daley and the Office of Urban Renewal, acquired all the vacant land between Michigan Avenue and what is now Martin Luther King Drive, and between Twenty-fifth and Twenty-sixth Streets. 52 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Above: In 1963, Mercy Hospital started construction of a new hospital building alongside the old one, which was eventually demolished. This photograph shows the construction status in September 1966.

A massive fundraising campaign won citywide support for the construction of a new Mercy Hospital. Many community leaders echoed the sentiments of Mrs. Frank J. Lewis of the Lewis Foundation: “Everyone knows and respects the historic role played by Mercy Hospital and the Sisters of Mercy. Our family wished to pay tribute to that great record and, at the same time, help to establish its future in the same neighborhood so important to Chicago.” On November 17, 1963, the hospital broke ground for a twelve-story building on the property west of the still functioning older Mercy. Director of development Sister

Mary Vernarda Lance, her associate directors Sisters Rita Meagher and Josephus Lamansky, and hospital administrator Sister Gwendolyn Durkin guided the project. Sister Huberta McCarthy was the provincial superior of the Chicago Sisters of Mercy who led the hospital’s transformation. As president of St. Xavier University, Sister Huberta had directed the college’s major fundraising and building program that resulted in its new campus at 103rd Street in 1956. As mother provincial, and later as a member of the administrative staff at Mercy Hospital, her experience at fundraising and building proved invaluable. Yesterday’s City | 53

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In 1959, Mercy Hospital decided to stay in its neighborhood, where it remains today to offer health care to the Near South Side.

On January 4, 1968, “Chicago’s oldest and first hospital became Chicago’s newest in four hours and forty-one minutes . . . as 160 patients were moved from the old Mercy Hospital to the new Mercy Hospital and Medical Center.” Sister Gwendolyn remembers: “The dream . . . was a reality . . . but deep in my heart I knew that we were leaving part of us in the old building. There were so many memories. You couldn’t help but think of the sisters who years before had given their lives and dedication and sacrifice to allow for the reality of the new hospital, the outstanding people who had served there and died there.” In 2003, Mercy Hospital remains committed to serving its Near South Side neighborhood, which is undergoing a housing and commercial revitalization. Under the administration of Sister Sheila Lyne, president and chief executive officer, and Sister Lenore Mulvihill, chair of the board of directors, the sisters and their lay supporters face the challenges of twenty-first century healthcare with the same faith and courage as their nineteenth-century predecessors. This article is adapted from Sister Joy Clough’s In Service to Chicago: The History of Mercy Hospital (1979). Sister Joy Clough is president of the Sisters of Mercy Regional Community of Chicago. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 42 top left, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 42 above right, from Reminisces of Seventy Years: Sisters of Mercy, Saint Xavier’s, 1846–1916 (Chicago: Fred J. Ringley Co., 1916); 42 bottom, from In Service to Chicago: The History of Mercy Hospital by Sister Joy Clough (Chicago: Mercy Hospital, 1979); 43, CHS, DN-0059642; 44 top, from The Story of Rush Medical College by Ernest E. Innes (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1953), courtesy of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center Archives; 44 center and bottom, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 45, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 46 top, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 46 bottom, from Northwestern University Medical School 1859–1959 by Leslie B. Arey (Chicago: Northwestern University Medical School, 1959), courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago, Ill.; 47 top, photograph of Bishop Duggan by Alexander Hesler, CHS; 47 bottom, from Northwestern University Medical School 1859–1959, courtesy of the Galter Health Sciences Library, Northwestern University, Chicago, Ill.; 48–49, CHS, DN-0008439; 49 from Reminisces of Seventy Years: Sisters of Mercy, Saint Xavier’s, 1846–1916; 50 top, CHS, DN0008920; 50 bottom, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 51, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 52 top left and bottom left, courtesy of Mercy Hospital; 52 right, Chicago Tribune, September 21, 1946, copyrighted 1946. Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 53–55, courtesy of Mercy Hospital. Yesterday’s City | 55

MAKING HISTORY I

Architects of Chicago Culture: Interviews with Ramsey Lewis and Walter Netsch T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

ew native-born and bred Chicagoans have shaped the city’s twentieth-century cultural landscape like Ramsey Lewis and Walter Netsch. Since 1957, Lewis has performed with more than twenty-five symphony orchestras and at nearly all of the major nightclubs, jazz festivals, and summer venues in the United States. Of the more than sixty records he produced, Wade in the Water (1966), The Sound of Christmas (1968), and Sun Goddess (1976) went gold. His recordings of “The ‘In’ Crowd” (1965), “Hold It Right There” (1966), and “Hang on Sloopy” (1973) received Grammy Awards, the music profession’s highest honor. Netsch’s impact is equally impressive. Associated with Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM) from 1947 to 1979, Netsch became an internationally renowned architect in the second half of the twentieth century. In Chicago, he designed the libraries and other significant buildings at the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and the Illinois Institute of Technology. The entire campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago is a Netsch composition, as is the East Wing of the Art Institute. Netsch’s global imprint was exemplified by his designs for the University of Blida in Algeria and the United States Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado, which many identify as one of the most significant religious structures of the century. Ramsey Emanuel Lewis Jr., born on May 27, 1935, was the second of three children of Pauline Richards Lewis and Ramsey E. Lewis Sr. In 1935, the family lived in a cramped apartment on South Evans Avenue. They later moved to the North Side, living on Schiller and then Cleveland Streets, before finding an apartment in the Cabrini Homes, a low-rise housing project that predated the later and more notorious CabriniGreen housing development. 56 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

In 2002, the Chicago Historical Society awarded Ramsey Lewis (left) the Theodore Thomas History Maker Award for Distinction in the Performing Arts and Walter Netsch (right) the Daniel H. Burnham History Maker Award for Distinction in Architecture and Design.

Lewis fondly remembers growing up in Cabrini. “It was a nice place to live. We had grass and flowers in our front yard. Mom had grass in the backyard, and she also planted little vegetables over in the corner.” The Cabrini Homes attracted a multiracial population during Lewis’s years of residence. “In fact, it was predominantly white when we moved in there,” remembers Lewis. Religion and music were defining forces in the Lewis household. In addition to working as a maintenance man, Ramsey Lewis Sr. was also an amateur church musician and led the gospel groups in which his wife sang. For a time, he directed the choir at the Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church on South Ashland Avenue, near Fourteenth Street. Lewis’s older sister Lucille later became an ordained minister and his younger sister Gloria Jean a choir director and teacher. The church that proved most memorable to Lewis, however, was the Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church, where his father served as choir director. “That’s where I first performed at nine years old in front of an audience,” recounts Lewis. He admits, “At first it was a little intimidating, but I grew into it slowly.”

Lewis fondly remembers many aspects of growing up in Chicago, including his first performance in front of an audience at the Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church (below) at Elm Street and Cleveland Avenue. (Photograph by Jay Crawford.)

Making History | 57

Left: Netsch with his wife Dawn Clark Netsch, who served in the Illinois State Senate from 1972 to 1990 and as the comptroller of Illinois from 1991 to 1995.

Walter Andrew Netsch Jr. was born in Chicago on February 23, 1920, to Anna Calista Smith Netsch and Walter Andrew Netsch Sr. in comparatively affluent conditions. Netsch’s mother was an heiress to a New England meatpacking fortune and met her husband while he waited tables at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. “We came to Chicago [because my father] got a job at Armour & Company,” Netsch claims. “I’m certain he wanted to show the family that he could be a meat packer and he did.” The Netsches resided at 6807 South Paxton Avenue, near Jackson Park in the South Shore neighborhood. Netsch attended O’Keefe Elementary School and Hyde Park High School and as a child dreamed of becoming an artist. His father, however, had other ideas. “I was doing these drawings for my sister, and I was getting pretty good,” remembers Netsch. “My mother had me in the Saturday classes at the Art Institute, and I was doing well, and my father started getting nervous.” When Netsch announced that he wanted to be an artist, his father responded with horror: “You can’t be an artist. We’ll have no artists in this family.” The senior Netsch wanted his son to follow in his footsteps at Dartmouth College. When young Walter protested, his father sent him to the Leelanau School for Boys in Glen 58 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Netsch, as an infant (above) and a little boy (left), grew up in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

As a child, Lewis attended Edward Jenner Elementary School on the city’s North Side. In 1999, he returned to his alma mater to play music with its current students. (Photograph by Rich Hein/Chicago SunTimes.)

Arbor, Michigan. Netsch now concedes that this served as a “holding action” until he and his father worked out a compromise. Netsch eventually matriculated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the time he graduated, the United States was immersed in World War II. Netsch served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from 1943 to 1946. The arts were similarly critical in Lewis’s upbringing, particularly choir and gospel music. “In African American churches, you are expected to move the audience,” explains Lewis. “You are expected to contact the audience and get them involved emotionally in the music one way or the other, and it has to come through the choir.” Gospel music taught Lewis modest, but long-lasting, lessons—specifically, keep it simple. “You don’t go out there and play a lot of complex chords, a lot of complex runs. It’s through melody and it’s through rhythm, and if you can say what you have to say with less notes then it’s better to use less notes,” believes Lewis. “That’s what we’re all about as we mature—learning how to say what we have to say artistically with less.” Lewis received all of his formal education in Chicago. His school years were spent at Edward Jenner Elementary School (1941–49) and Wells High School (1950–54), while he simultaneously attended Chicago Musical College Prep School (1947–54). “Wells High School was the greatest place,” insists Lewis. “When I compare it to life today in public schools, it was like a private school.” Wells offered multiple music-based extracurricular activities, including girls’, boys’, and mixed chorus; modern dance and ballet; a symphony orchestra; and concert, marching, and jazz bands. Additionally the school system provided instruments for everybody. Students could only participate if they received satisfactory grades, so they were motivated to do well in the classroom. “It was just a thrill to go to school,” remembers Lewis. After graduating from high school, he continued his studies at Chicago Musical College (1955–56), the University of Illinois (1955–56), and DePaul University (1956–57). Lewis’s greatest influence was Dorothy Mendelsohn at Chicago Musical College. Lewis began studying with Mendelsohn when he was only eleven years old: “She was a pivotal person in my life, because I didn’t begin to love music until after I was with Dorothy Mendelsohn.” Prior to that, Lewis concedes, music “was a chore, something I had to do before I could play baseball or go to a movie.” More than half-a-century later, Lewis still repeats Mendelsohn’s constant dictum: “Make the piano sing.” At first, the refrain perplexed the young Making History | 59

Chicago’s Inland Steel Building (model shown here) bears Netsch’s imprint. Chicago’s first major skyscraper built after World War II, Netsch believed it would “establish the character” of high-rise development in the Loop. The city designated it a landmark on October 7, 1998. 60 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Left: The design of the Inland Steel Building allowed for flexible interior layouts and column-free office spaces.

Lewis, but over time, he admits, “I learned to enjoy playing the piano to the point where it wasn’t important anymore to go play baseball or go here or go there. The more important thing was to practice.” Netsch’s architecture apprenticeship began after World War II when he returned to Chicago to work for L. Morgan Yost in Kenilworth, Illinois, in 1946. The following year, Netsch joined SOM. He initially worked on housing designs and plans for the new “Atom City” where the military’s uranium was refined in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (1947–49). Netsch’s work at Oak Ridge attracted the attention of Nathaniel Owings, one of the firm’s founders, who later dubbed Netsch and a few of his colleagues “gold nuggets of pure design talent.” After brief stints in San Francisco and Tokyo, Netsch permanently settled in Chicago in 1955, the same year he was named a partner at SOM. According to Netsch, SOM followed a philosophy of anonymity: “You shouldn’t know who was doing what.” Regardless, he and his colleague Bruce Graham eventually became the best-known architects in the Chicago office. The Inland Steel Building (1958), the first major skyscraper constructed in Chicago after World War II, bears both their imprints. Netsch developed the original design, which emphasized the westward-facing Dearborn Street side of the structure, not Monroe Street to the south. “We followed the Chicago Plan to the teeth,” insists Netsch, referring to Daniel Burnham’s 1909

Netsch left his work on the Inland Steel Building for the project that made him an internationally known architect—the Air Force Academy Chapel (below) in Colorado. (Photograph by Anna Risse.)

Making History | 61

scheme for twentiethcentury development in Chicago. “It was the first postwar building and I thought it was going to establish the character” of high-rise development in the Loop. When other projects consumed Netsch’s attention, Bruce Graham completed the design. Inland’s nineteen stories of exposed stainless steel, tinted dual-glazing glass, and uninterrupted interior proved to be an awardwinning design. It remains one of Chicago’s most distinctive structures. Netsch was asked to abandon his work on the Inland Steel Building for the Air Force Academy Chapel in Colorado—the project that ultimately made him an internationally known figure. Noted for departing from the strippeddown, international style conventions, Netsch’s design of the spiked, soaring, tetrahedral chapel was chosen in a competition that included an entry by Frank Lloyd Wright. Upon completion, the chapel became the only American structure where three different religions worshiped beneath one roof. Nathaniel Owings later remarked that the chapel reflected “a time when architects were optimistic about proposing answers to issues of tradition, symbolism, and cultural values.” Whereas Netsch knew from an early age that he wanted to be an architect, Ramsey Lewis’s evolution into a popular musician was almost accidental. In 1949, Chicago musician Wallace Burton and drummer Isaac “Red” Holt had started the Cleffs, a seven-piece group comprised primarily of high school and college students. When the pianist left in 1950, Burton invited Lewis to join, even though Lewis was only fifteen years old. “If it had not been for that fateful Sunday morning after church, I wouldn’t have gotten into jazz at all,” Lewis acknowledges. “I was still aspiring to be a classical pianist and tour the world playing European classical music.” Classical music’s loss was jazz’s gain. From 1950 to 1955, Lewis played in the Cleffs. His classical training gave him certain advantages he did not fully appreciate at the time. Although other members of the band had more experience playing jazz and blues, they lacked formal musical training. Lewis recalls, “The horn players could read [music] pretty good. I think the rhythm section could barely read. Studying classical music was one of the best ways to learn to read music, no matter what instrument you played.” In 1955, while Burton served in the army, Lewis, Holt, and bassist Eldee Young began working together and developing their own bluesy, funk-tinged style. A year later, the Ramsey Lewis Trio recorded their debut album The Gentlemen of Swing for Chess Records’ Argo label. Identified by their soulflavored jazz, danceable rhythms, and straightforward melodies, the group remained a Chess institution until 1971. Their distinctive style contrasted with the harmonic complexity and breakneck solos of bebop, epitomized by trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie and pianist Thelonious Monk. 62 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

In the mid-1950s, Lewis joined efforts with bassist Eldee Yong and drummer Red Holt to form the Ramsey Lewis Trio. The trio became known for their soul-flavored jazz and danceable rhythms and remained a Chess Records institution until 1971.

In 1957, the Chess-Checker-Argo Record Company ran an advertisement (below right) to promote their newest hits, including “Ramsey Lewis and His Gentlemen of Swing,” and the company’s move to 2120 South Michigan Avenue. The city designated the building (below left) a landmark on May 16, 1990. Left: Earth, Wind and Fire, Lewis’s second famous trio (with bassist Cleveland Eaton and drummer Maurice White), recorded their Grammy-winning “Hang on Sloopy” in 1973.

Making History | 63

In May of 1965, the Ramsey Lewis Trio cut The In Crowd live at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C. Argo released the album in July, and almost overnight the group became a sensation. Drummer Red Holt recalled, “It was the greatest time of my life. Those were some beautiful days.”

By 1965, the trio had recorded sixteen albums and released “The ‘In’ Crowd,” an instrumental rendition of Dobie Gray’s soul hit. Cut live at the Bohemian Caverns in Washington, D.C., the composition blended the feel of an African American church service with a freewheeling party atmosphere. Almost overnight, the Ramsey Lewis Trio became a sensation. The record and album sold more than five hundred thousand copies, reached number five on the Billboard singles chart, achieved gold status, and then rose to number two. The record earned a Grammy for “Best Instrumental Recording” of 1965. Music historians now consider “The ‘In’ Crowd” to be “the opening volley” of fusion, music that mixes jazz with elements of rhythm and blues and rock ‘n’ roll. The Ramsey Lewis Trio paved the way for later groups such as Weather Report and the Crusaders. When the group split up a year later, Lewis recruited bassist Cleveland Eaton and Chess house drummer Maurice White to found Earth, Wind and Fire. This trio proved equally successful. Their interpretation of the gospel song “Wade in the Water” (1966) and recording of “Hang on Sloopy” (1973) both ranked in the top 20 on the charts. By the end of the 1950s, SOM’s culture of anonymity and identification with modernism and the international style masked philosophical differences among individual architects within the firm. Netsch and Graham, in particular, embodied different and sometimes conflicting architectural approaches. Graham was closely allied to the corporate world, developers, and commercial interests. In time, he was noted for designing large numbers of office buildings, including the John Hancock Center (1970) and the Sears Tower (1974). Netsch, by contrast, was more theoretically and academically inclined, a tendency that was reflected in both his field theory and the fifteen libraries he designed. Nathaniel Owings promoted this internal diversification because it offered benefits to the firm. Netsch and Graham became, effectively, the “co-chiefs of design” in the Chicago office. 64 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Netsch’s affinity for the sleek lines and simple vocabulary of modernism revealed itself at an early age. During grammar school, he delivered water from a nearby water treatment plant to his neighbors in the South Shore community. Netsch’s route took him past Barry Byrne’s Kenna Apartments at 2214 East Sixty-ninth Street. “While pulling my wagon with my water bottles I would see that and that made a tremendous impression upon me as an elegant structure,” he remembers. “I thought it was a house, but it was three apartments.” Netsch considers the Kenna Apartments to be the first modern building ever built in Chicago. Netsch departed from his partners at SOM in his development of Field Theory. Inspired by architects Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, Netsch followed “a set of artistic principles and [worked] within them.” The theory

Netsch’s Field Theory, as demonstrated in this sketch (above) and installation (left), created distinct designs by rotating a simple square in various ways and circling it out from a central core.

Making History | 65

Netsch designed the Northwestern University Library (second-level floor plan shown left) while developing his Field Theory.

involved twentieth-century mathematics, chaos theory, and a threedimensional, geometric methodology. Netsch developed distinct designs by rotating a simple square in various ways. This “eliminated the linearity of our designs,” argues Netsch. “Our boxes had an emphasis on linearity and had no protrusions. The best thing that we could do was to liven up the architecture.” At the same time, Field Theory structures emphasized flexibility. From the central core, “walls” formed library shelves, laboratory cabinets, or whatever corresponded to the function of the proposed building, thereby creating mobile boundaries. Allowances were made for change and growth without greater expense. Netsch considers the Art and Architecture Building at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) to be his first Field Theory building, although the Air Force Chapel and the Northwestern University Library both display elements of Netsch’s style. By rotating the square, Netsch proposed a methodology to “break out of the box,” while remaining true to the principles of modernism, but like Sullivan and Wright, he was frequently misunderstood, ignored, or excoriated by members of the architectural profession. “In Field Theory, I developed a theory that was simple enough if anyone had the patience. [Frank Lloyd] Wright’s work and [Frank] Gehry’s work requires patience just as much as mine. It was a system more than an individual aesthetic,” believes Netsch. While Netsch transformed the Chicago’s architectural landscape, Lewis helped redefine American music. From the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, jazz was pushed to the periphery of American music, so Lewis recast himself from a jazz piano virtuoso to an easy-listening pop star. With acoustic jazz in decline, Lewis moved to an electronic keyboard to develop a more popular appeal, which resulted in his gold record Sun Goddess (1975). Despite the changes in popular taste, Lewis placed nineteen singles and thirty albums on the pop chart from 1962 to 1984. 66 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Below: Lewis’s many Chicago area appearances included this performance at Skokie Centre East (now the North Shore Center for the Performing Arts) with Billy Taylor in 1991.

Lewis cites Dinah Washington (far left) and Count Basie (left) as two of his earliest musical influences.

Lewis’s admirers described his musical transformation as emblematic of his “freewheeling, come-join-the-party feeling.” Critics were less enthused. Some charged that the sound, texture, and intellectual weight of Sun Goddess was reminiscent of Muzak. Others complained that Lewis’s brand of fusion polluted jazz by introducing a pop-music flavor. Some simply argued that Lewis sold out. Lewis contends that many critics fail to understand the history of music and the specific legacy of jazz. “Jazz, as far back as you can remember, was influenced by the times that it lived, no matter what it was,” he argues. “What was going on musically and what was going on in the world influenced the sound of jazz.” Lewis attributed his fascination with fusing classical, gospel, rhythm, blues, and jazz musical forms, in part, to the multiracial environment of his childhood. “At our high school, during the winter days instead of going outside during lunch or free period, everybody went to the auditorium, and they would turn on the radio and play the music in the auditorium,” remembers Lewis. “Either it was on a white station playing Perry Como and Frank Sinatra, or it was on the black station playing Dinah Washington, Count Basie, Lester Young, and Louis Jordan.” Even today, Lewis’s musical inspiration remains multiderivative. “I intentionally draw from those musics that I enjoy. I may pull out some Brahms or Chopin or Bach, and I’ll play through it. I put the music down, and I turn on the tape recorder, and I’ll start improvising and a song will come. I’ll be inspired by just performing this music, or I’ll hear some gospel music and a song will come. My inspiration still comes from these basic sources.” At almost the same time, Netsch came under critical scrutiny for his most controversial work—the campus of the University of Illinois at Chicago. Designed to ultimately accommodate thirty-two thousand commuter students, it opened in 1965 to nine thousand students. The design included a central, open-air amphitheater and an exposed gathering place around which Netsch organized campus buildings by their functions rather than disciplines or

The University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) campus (model pictured below) is Netsch’s most controversial work.

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During his career, Netsch designed approximately fifteen libraries (the UIC library is pictured above). His affinity for academic libraries stems from his premise that one â&#x20AC;&#x153;define[s] the heart of that university or college by the library and its location.â&#x20AC;? 68 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

Netsch’s design for UIC sought to represent “the idea of disseminating communication” and included an open-air amphitheater.

departments. Netsch allotted structures for administration, lecture halls, classrooms, and faculty offices. Elevated walkways, or “expressways,” connected the campus on multiple levels. Netsch admits he invoked the seminal scientific event of the twentieth century—the double helix—“as an architectural event” at UIC. The landscape of UIC represented Netsch’s own distinct vision of teaching and communication. One observer described Netsch’s work at UIC as “an interpretation of a different way to build a university in an urban environment that needs change.” Some planners even considered the campus to be “the most ambitious U.S. demonstration to date of the idea of a compact, stratified urban core.” Netsch’s UIC design sought to reconcile classical and modern architectural theory. He envisioned a drop of water hitting another body of water and spreading outward. “We did a scheme making the first two years [of college] all together and then into separate buildings for the upper classes.” For Netsch this represented “the idea of disseminating communication [with] lecture rooms in the middle, like the agora in Greek architecture. It was very classically oriented, but very modern.” By 1965, however, Netsch himself hoped UIC was “the last nineteenth-century campus” organized as a group of objects not as a single system that “we ever have to design.” Some critics were unimpressed. One complained that the new campus offered “little to allay the sense of alienation that is an inherent danger in a large university,” adding that the buildings “belong to everyone, and therefore to no one. The environment is hard, unyielding, vast in scale.” Netsch still defends the design of UIC as “the part of the postwar dream of a new society,” but he concedes, “The only mistake we made is we probably should have made it for eighteen thousand, expandable to thirty-two thousand and just started on the ground and not built the walkways.” Netsch intended the walkways to facilitate movement on multiple levels for the planned large, dense, student population. The walkways were also to provide cover on the lower levels from rain and snow. “But no,” remembers Netsch, “They wanted a suburban campus [where] you walked in the snow and you walked in the rain.” He further believes that the walkways were poorly maintained, so they leaked. Improper lighting made the outdoor areas dark and unattractive. In the end, Netsch noted, “It got caught in the whole dynamics of the program where the faculty came on board and wanted “to make it look [traditional] like Urbana,” and not an urban campus. Making History | 69

In 1996, the Chicago Tribune celebrated Lewis’s four decades in music. The article acknowledged, “Ramsey Lewis returns to his jazz roots after a successful but controversial career.”

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For Lewis and Netsch alike, some of their most influential work came later and in spite of their critics. Just when some believed Lewis’s career and influence were over, he resurged. In 1990, he became a national spokesman and promoter of jazz when he began hosting Jazz Central, a weekly jazz cable TV show for Black Entertainment Television. That same year, he started Legends of Jazz, a weekly two-hour jazz radio program on WNUA-FM in Chicago that was syndicated to more than sixty cities in the United States. Since 1997, he has had his own radio production, the Ramsey Lewis Morning Show, also on WNUA. The Records and Radio Industry noted Lewis’s influence and named him Radio Personality of the Year in 1999 and 2000. Lewis also received the Governor’s Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences in 2000. Netsch’s own home is among the most illuminating of his Field Theory structures. The Netsch House (1976) in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood was designed as one basic unit with no corridors. Instead the interior space is entirely open with a variety of vertical and horizontal planes. Although it is a two-story house, it has five levels spiraling around a service core with different points of access. The white, airy, and art-filled interior resembles a great playhouse. Art by Claes Oldenburg, Robert Indiana, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Motherwell, Richard Hunt, and others fills the spaces and walls. Some have described the home as “Sesame Street for adults” or “an art museum with bedrooms.” The unique architectural qualities of the Netsch house will inevitably generate comparisons with other leading North American house designs of the twentieth centur y, such as Frank Lloyd Wright’s Frederick C. Robie House in Chicago and Frank Gehry’s house in Santa Monica, California. Lewis and Netsch are also noted for their civic involvement in Chicago. Lewis’s community involvement grew increasingly visible throughout the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986, he began working with Merit, an inner-city music project that provides lessons and instruments to young musicians, and CYCLE, another program designed to assist urban youths. Since 1990, he has been a board member of the Gateway Foundation, a drug-rehabilitation organization. Lewis remains especially concerned about the public schools. “The opportunities that I had when I was going to high school no longer exist,” he laments. “Very few high schools put on Spring Extravaganzas and Fall Extravaganzas. They barely have instruments.” In 1987, Mayor Harold Washington named Netsch president of the Board of Commissioners of the Chicago Park District. In only two years, Netsch developed plans to decentralize the park district, giving local communities more control over parks and offering more cultural activities. As the author of the President’s Report: Park District Reorganization, Netsch offered a model on how to reorganize a large, urban park system. He set into motion a policy that ultimately led to the restoration of five hundred children’s playlots throughout the city. Other Netsch plans culminated in the redesign of parts of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of the Museum Campus in Grant Park.

Since 1997, Lewis has hosted the Ramsey Lewis Morning Show on Chicago’s WNUA-FM.

Lewis (center) with M. Hill Hammock (left), chair, Chicago Historical Society Board of Trustees, and Lonnie G. Bunch, president, Chicago Historical Society, at the 2002 Making History Awards.

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In careers in which they were adored by fans, praised and bashed by critics, and often misunderstood by both, Lewis and Netsch relish the city of their childhoods. “I want to really thank Chicago for allowing architects like William LeBaron Jenney, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Daniel Burnham to build and to be models for me,” proclaims Netsch. “It has been a good life and a good city.” “You know why I love the city?” asks Lewis. “Because local boy Ramsey Lewis did not have to go away to make a name and then come back. This city allowed me to build and develop a career, become an international name, sell a ton of records, and play here two, three, four times a year, every year for almost fifty years. Do I love this city? You better believe it!” 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 left, courtesy of Ramsey Lewis and WNUA-FM; 56 right, courtesy of Walter Netsch; 57, CHS; 58, courtesy of Walter Netsch; 59, reprinted from the Chicago Sun-Times 30 December 1999 with special permission from the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. © 2003; 60–61 top, CHS; 61 bottom, courtesy of the United States Air Force Academy; 62, courtesy of Universal Music Group; 63 top, courtesy of Morris Music, Inc., Sloppy II Music, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing (“Hang on Sloopy” Words and Music by Wes Farrell and Bert Russell. Copyright © 1964, 1965 by Morris Music, Inc., Sony/ATV Songs LLC, and Sloopy II, Inc. in the U.S. Copyright Renewed. All Rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Songs LLC Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All Rights outside the U.S. Administered by Morris Music, Inc. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved.); 63 bottom left, courtesy of the Commission on Chicago Landmarks; 63 bottom right, reprinted from Billboard magazine, 20 May 1957; 64, courtesy of Universal Music Group; 65, courtesy of Walter Netsch; 66 top, courtesy of the University Archives, Northwestern University Library; 66 bottom, courtesy of Centre East, Inc.; 67–69, CHS; 70, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune; 71 top, courtesy of Ramsey Lewis and WNUA-FM; 71 bottom, CHS; 72 top, courtesy of the Chicago Tribune; 72 bottom, courtesy of The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The most informative article on Ramsey Lewis is Howard Reich, “The Music of His Years,” Chicago Tribune Sunday Magazine, 25 Februar y 1996. Other profiles appear in “Ramsey Lewis,” in Judith Graham, ed., Current Biography Yearbook 1996 (New York: H.W. Wilson, 1996), 310–13, and Ebony (February) 1966. The best introduction to Walter Netsch is “Oral History of Walter Netsch,” interview by Betty J. Blum, Chicago Architects Oral History Project, Copyright © 1997–2000 The Art Institute of Chicago. (Portions of Blum’s interview were quoted in this article with the permission of the Art Institute of Chicago.) Good descriptions of Field Theory include Anders Nereim, “Walter Netsch Having a Field Day,” Inland Architect 34 (May/June 1990), 60–67, and the website developed by Paul Wiggins on the Miami University Museum of Art at www.daviscenter.wit.edu. 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. 72 | Chicago History | Summer 2003

After Mayor Harold Washington named Netsch to the Board of Commissioners of the Chicago Park District, the Chicago Tribune featured him in their Style section as “the man with 500 dreams—each of them a park.”