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: The Bowman and The Spearman statues by Ivan Mestrovic at Congress Street Plaza. CHS, ICHi-36550.
Copyright 2004 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6071 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago Historical Society’s Publications Office.
C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS
TRUSTEES
M. Hill Hammock Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair John W. Rowe Vice Chair David P. Bolger Treasurer Potter Palmer Secretary R. Eden Martin Immediate Past Chair Lonnie G. Bunch President
Philip D. Block III David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Lonnie G. Bunch Stanley J. Calderon Warren K. Chapman Michelle L. Collins Kevann M. Cooke Mrs. A. Campbell de Frise Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Jonathan F. Fanton Sharon Gist Gilliam David A. Gupta Barbara Hamel M. Hill Hammock Mrs. Harlow N. Higinbotham
LIFE TRUSTEES
David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Jr. Richard M. Jaffee Barbara Levy Kipper Fred A. Krehbiel Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer James R. Reynolds Mrs. John W. Robinson John W. Rowe Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Paul L. Snyder Sam Tinaglia
Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Charles T. Brumback John W. Croghan Stewart S. Dixon Philip W. Hummer Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss Joseph Levy Jr. John T. McCutcheon Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Bryan S. Reid Jr. Dempsey J. Travis HONORARY TRUSTEE
Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago
CHS is easily accessible via public transportation. CTA buses nos. 11, 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. All buses except 156 are accessible. For travel information, call 1-888-YOUR-CTA or visit www.transitchicago.com. Chicago Historical Society
The Chicago Historical Society gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Historical Society’s activities.
THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Spring 2004 VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 3
Contents
4 32 48 64
Monuments to a Lost Nation Theodore J. Karamanski
Chicago Teachers Unite John F. Lyons
Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Index to Volume 32
Monuments to a Lost Nation Symbolic Native Americans appeared on the Chicago landscape after the city’s first inhabitants had faded from the area. THEODORE J. KARAMANSKI
With the Treaty of 1833 (opposite), the Potawatomi tribe, Illinois’s largest Indian population, ceded their land to the U.S. government, effectively ending Native American presence in the area. Above: artist Lawrence Carmichael Earle’s Last Council of the Potawatomies, 1833.
W
ith the bright orange glow of the setting sun at their backs, the chiefs and headmen of the Potawatomi people faced the commissioners of the United States government. Most were grave and morose as they signed the treaty ceding their homelands in the Chicago area and agreeing to removal beyond the Mississippi. The 1833 Treaty of Chicago was one of a series of agreements that terminated the native title to the American heartland and seemed to end Native American presence in the life and culture of Chicago. But a rediscovery of the city’s native roots emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This figurative return of the native to Chicago was a symbolic encounter driven by a mixture of nostalgia, guilt, and the need of an industrial metropolis 4 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
to invent a narrative that offered a common background for a community of widely diverse national origins. On the city’s landscape and in its public culture, Chicagoans created statues, monuments, and illustrations—durable visual representations—of how they chose to commemorate the city’s exiled first inhabitants. Symbolic Native Americans appeared on the Chicago landscape only after the genuine article had all but faded from Illinois. During the 1870s and 1880s, when Chicago first began to memorialize its Indian roots, “old settlers” and “pioneer” associations emerged across the prosperous farm belt. The preparation of histories honoring the accomplishments of the pioneers became a major business for commercial public history companies, such as the Western Historical Company based in Chicago. The self-
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 5
By the mid-nineteenth century, Americans had already begun to immortalize the early frontier with pioneer associations, Old Settlers’ Festivals (above, from 1867), and published local histories (below, from 1878).
6 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
congratulatory tone most commonly associated with these formalistic volumes contained a largely nostalgic view of American Indians. An old settler writing in a 1878 history of the Grand River Valley remembered that “as friends, the Indians and settlers lived together with mutual benefit.” Later, when the Indians ceded their lands through a treaty, the settler claimed, “the Indians, knowing they had sold their rights cheerfully gave up their cherished homes to the whites.” Although there were occasional attempts to depict the Indian as a savage enemy, most preferred to believe that the settlers had been friends with those whom they displaced. The Chicago lakefront still boasts a statue that represents, like those commercial county histories, a personal—if highly nostalgic—image of the American Indian. In 1884, a four-figure bronze statuary group was unveiled in Lincoln Park. John Boyle’s creation, The Alarm, features a male standing alert, eyes fixed intently ahead, tomahawk in hand. At his feet, Boyle placed what the Chicago Tribune called a “wolf-like dog, whose shaggy coat bristles with anger at some approaching danger,” while on the ground behind the man an Indian woman protectively cradles her baby. Decorating the base of the monument were four bronze bas-relief depictions of Indian life: The Hunt, Forestry, The Corn Dance, and The Peace Pipe. Wealthy lumberman and fur trader Martin Ryerson donated the group to the city as a tribute to the friendship of the Ottawa and Potawatomi whose trade helped his business grow into one of the largest fortunes in Chicago. A striking contrast exists between the fate of the Indians depicted in the group, exiled to a bleak Kansas reservation, and their young white friend who helped establish high culture in Chicago. Although The Alarm depicts Ryerson’s personal memory of a strong, self-sufficient people, Boyle’s figures bow to the dominant symbols of late–nineteenthcentur y America. The male Indian is not one of the hunters with whom Ryerson worked as a young businessman, but a warrior armed with a tomahawk. The fierce dog at his feet embodies savage nature, while the Indian woman and child, vulnerably exposed on the ground, represent the eventual submission, if not the demise, of the Native American people. This theme of the “vanishing Indian” reappeared a decade later when Lincoln Park featured another Native American statue. The Signal of Peace depicts a mounted Plains Indian in full-feathered headdress holding a coup stick aloft. American sculptor Cyrus E. Dallin created the monument in Paris, and it won an award at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893. Although Dallin had seen Indians in Utah during his boyhood, he based his sculpture on Native Americans brought to Paris in 1889 by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Philanthropist Lambert Tree donated the bronze statue to the Lincoln Park
Chicagoans began to memorialize the area’s Native American roots with public art. One of the first, The Alarm (above, in 1902, and opposite), depicted a man with a tomahawk, a dog at his feet, and an Indian woman cradling her baby. The base of the monument featured four bronze scenes of Native American life, including The Hunt (below).
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 7
The Signal of Peace, showed a Plains Indian in full headdress. In the statue’s original placement, it faced a monument to war hero General Ulysses S. Grant (opposite top). 8 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Commission. “I fear the time is not distant,” Tree explained in a letter, “when our descendents will only know through the chisel and brush of the artist these simple and untutored children of nature who were little more than a century ago, the sole human occupants and proprietors of the vast northwestern empire of which Chicago is now the proud metropolis.” Tree blamed the government for the demise of the Native American: “Pilfered by the advance guards of the whites, oppressed and robbed by government agents, deprived of their land by the government itself, with only scant recompense; shot down by soldiery in wars fomented for the purpose of plundering and destroying their race, and finally drowned by the ever westward spread of population.” The original placement of The Signal of Peace was ironic, if not symbolic: The mounted Indian, gesturing peace, faced the center of the bustling city yet remained dominated by the giant bronze figure of General Ulysses S. Grant, the sword of the republic. The Signal of Peace now stands near the lakefront between Belmont Avenue and Fullerton Parkway. While The Alarm and The Signal of Peace both portrayed the Indian as a vanishing but noble savage, the other stock image of the Native American was that of the warrior, dramatically represented in Chicago’s public space by the Fort Dearborn Massacre. This monument memorialized the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Chippewa attack on the inhabitants of Fort Dearborn during the War of 1812. The battle occurred among the sand dunes about a mile and a half south of the abandoned fort. In the rout that followed, fifty-three men, women, and children were killed. The bodies lay where they fell for three years after the battle. For several generations, the site was marked only by the “Massacre Tree,” a dead cottonwood looming over the sand dunes. George Pullman, controversial industrialist and inventor of the railroad sleeping car, purchased the site and built a mansion on the old battlefield in 1873. By the 1880s, the Prairie Avenue location had become the most elite neighborhood in Chicago and the faux castles of Gilded Age industrialists surrounded the Massacre Tree. “Methinks the place is haunted,” a journalist speculated, “and a subtle spell woven of dead men’s bones attracts to the scene of the massacre the present representatives of a system doomed to vanish like that of the redskins before the advancing civilization of the new social era.” As if to ward off that prospect, Pullman donated the bronze sculpture group to the Chicago Historical Society in 1893 to memorialize the dramatic incident “for posterity.” The sculpture was the work of Carl Rohl-Smith, a Danish artist drawn to Chicago to complete a commission for the World’s Columbian Exposition. Rohl-Smith captured one of the most famed legends of the Fort Dearborn disaster, when Potawatomi Chief Black
The Fort Dearborn Massacre (above, c. 1912) became the most famous of Chicago’s Native American memorials. It depicts Black Partridge coming to the defense of Margaret Helm during the massacre. Monuments to a Lost Nation | 9
10 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Some Chicagoans’ view of Native Americans as savage fighters (left, from 1878), might have stemmed from the aftermath of the Fort Dearborn Massacre, in which Native Americans attacked the area’s first army post during the War of 1812. Above: Watercolor painting of Fort Dearborn by C. E. Petford, 1803. Monuments to a Lost Nation | 11
12 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Before the famous bronze statue group (above), the Fort Dearborn Massacre was memorialized only by a tree, which stood at the spot where the fighting occurred (left). The tree was cut down in 1894.
Partridge reportedly intervened to save the life of Margaret Helm, wife of an officer in the doomed garrison. The bronze group continued the “savage warrior” imagery popular in the era. Although Black Partridge is depicted as strong, commanding, and decisive, the attacking warrior figure dominates the group. His tomahawk is raised, poised to come down on the helpless white woman. His gaze, riveted on his victim, seems pitiless, and his action unstoppable; his fury overshadows Black Partridge’s mercy. The foreground figures underscore the violence of the moment: a wounded white soldier stabbed by an Indian and a white toddler, vulnerable and helpless on the ground, reaching his arms out for help. Rohl-Smith included this haunting figure to represent the dozen white children killed in the battle. As if to draw the viewer to the image of the noble (instead of the savage) Indian, Rohl-Smith inscribed a legend on the base of the monument: “Fort Dearborn Massacre/Black Partridge Saving Mrs. Helm.” The statue enjoyed great public recognition and acclaim. Former President Benjamin Harrison (grandson of former president and War of 1812 hero William Henry Harrison), Robert Todd Lincoln, and many of the city’s meatpackers and merchandisers attended the dedication ceremony. The art critics of the time looked favorably upon the bronze, declaring: “It is one of the greatest pieces of realistic sculpture . . . in this or any other part of the world.” At first, the egotistical Pullman was gratiMonuments to a Lost Nation | 13
fied that the public liked the monument, which for years after was referred to as “the Pullman statue.” Many residents included a stroll to the monument during their afternoon promenade. No one objected when the traffic of elegant carriages increased on the street, but just two months after the dedication of the monument, Pullman regretted his philanthropic action as it became clear that the monument’s crowds included “workmen with their wives and children and occasionally an Italian or a Russian Jew from Canal Street.” Citing the clutter of paper left by picnickers and his trampled lawn, Pullman petitioned unsuccessfully to have the monument moved. The statue remained where history happened, across the street from Pullman’s house. The dedication of the Fort Dearborn Massacre lacked any expressions of guilt over the eventual fate of Black Partridge and his people. Instead there was a triumphalist tone to the proceedings, as the tragic moments depicted in the statue contrasted with the progress and power of Chicago in the 1890s. The splendor of the World’s Columbian Exposition’s White City, just a few miles south of the battlefield, underscored the triumph of white America in the four hundred years since Christopher Columbus’s voyage. In keeping with the “vanishing Indian” stereotype, the Chicago Herald intoned, “The race of American aborigines is rapidly melting away, and the time will come when groups of statuary carved after typical specimens will be permanent objects of great value and interest.” But the monument also contains a subversive quality. The hero of the group is not one of the representatives of white America but a member of the doomed race. The dominant image of the bronze is the ferocity of the Indians, shown to be overwhelming the civilized order, not an image in which a “robber baron” such as Pullman might take comfort as he looked out his library window. In this sculpture, the myths and realities of the American frontier collided with the anxieties of an urban nation in social and economic conflict. The cultural diversity, economic stratification, and general instability of life in late–nineteenth-century cities such as Chicago made many residents yearn for an established order. Even while industrialists such as Pullman used monuments to demonstrate how far the city had come in less than a hundred years, Chicagoans had their own memories that underscored how fragile and transitory such material progress could be. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 had quickly swept away a large portion of the city. In 1873, George Pullman purchased the site of the massacre and built his home there. He then commissioned the Fort Dearborn Massacre and had it placed in front of his house, but he soon tired of the constant foot traffic by curious passersby. This 1911 photograph shows the statue and a portion of the Pullman mansion. 14 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 15
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show (above and opposite) colored many Chicagoans’ perceptions of Native Americans. 16 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
The sudden panics and depressions of 1873 and 1890 wiped out the fortunes of many men seemingly of substance. The Haymarket Affair of 1886 revealed the depth of class resentment and the potential for violence that simmered beneath the surface of Chicago. Pullman and other members of the city’s elite could look at the Fort Dearborn Massacre as an “enduring monument” (according to the Chicago Tribune) in a sea of troubled change, a social anchor. That Pullman so quickly became disenchanted with the monument when the working class appropriated its public space for its own purposes reveals the degree to which he valued social control. This predilection was best demonstrated, of course, in his model industrial town: Pullman, where the industrialist’s desire to control almost all aspects of his workers’ lives contributed to the violent 1894 strike that rocked the entire nation. The connection between urban labor unrest and the last gasps of formal Native American resistance to the United States was both ironic and disquieting to men such as Pullman. Art critics praised Carl Rohl-Smith’s sculpture for the realism of its figures. The artist obtained his models by visiting Fort Sheridan, the United States Army base established in Chicago’s northern suburbs after Haymarket to maintain urban order. At the fort, Rohl-Smith encountered survivors of Wounded Knee, whom he described as “Indians of the most untamed sort.” The men who fought what was perhaps the last organized effort against American continental expansion served as the fierce models for the Fort Dearborn Massacre, making the figures an unstated tribute to Native American resistance. Some Americans compared newly arrived, workingclass immigrants to the land’s first inhabitants. The New York State Sun, writing in the wake of Haymarket, intoned, “Such foreign savages, with their dynamite bombs and anarchic purposes, are as much apart from the rest of the people of this country as the Apaches of the plains.” The association became even more apparent a year after the statue’s dedication when the Seventh Cavalry, which had fought Indians so fiercely at Little Big Horn and Wounded Knee, came to Chicago to quell the Pullman riots of 1894. For all of its unsettling symbolism, the Fort Dearborn Massacre stemmed from a fictionalized account of the past. Some historians regard the incident as the product of romantic imagination instead of eyewitness testimony, stating that Margaret Helm was not the beneficiary of Black Partridge’s dramatic rescue. In fact, before the battle turned into a massacre, Mrs. Helm rode her horse to the shore of Lake Michigan where she found refuge. The legend of Black Partridge’s rescue, however, excited the statue’s admirers by bringing them in the midst of savage war. Rohl-Smith’s figures may have owed more to
Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show than to actual research. William F. Cody brought his famed Wild West Show to Chicago for the world’s fair. Denied a space within the White City, he situated his spectacle near the Midway and drew millions of customers. Cody’s show featured furious fake Indian attacks, with a last-minute rescue of beleaguered white men and women by Buffalo Bill himself. The show, like Cody’s entire career, transformed fading nuggets of historical reality into archetypal stories. The show’s program book described the Indian as “The Former Foe–Present Friend” of the American. Rohl-Smith’s statue captured this formula in his representations of the fierce attacking warrior and Black Partridge as protector. The violence of the scene, similar to the staged violence of the Wild West Show, became the heritage of the frontier, an integral element in the American character. A reporter for the Chicago InterOcean felt that watching Cody’s troupe reenact Little Big Horn made him sensible to “the aboriginal ancestor” that lingered “in us after the long generations of attempted civilization and education.” Public art such as the Fort Dearborn Massacre and The Alarm played a major role in transforming the very real image of the “vanishing Indian” of the turn-of-the-century Monuments to a Lost Nation | 17
into an enduring symbol of regional identity. But twodimensional art also had a resounding effect. In 1907, the Chicago Tribune published a pair of sketches titled “Injun Summer.” These newspaper cartoons also distorted the realities of the Native American experience to tell a story that became an evocative contribution to public memory and resonated among Midwesterners for generations. “Injun Summer” began on an early fall afternoon in the office of Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. Years later, McCutcheon remembered gazing out his window in the Fine Arts Building while his mind wandered to scenes of his boyhood in rural Indiana. During the 1870s, stories of the Sioux War out west mixed in his young imagination with local tales of the Fort Ouitenon trading post and the legendary Tippecanoe battlefield. McCutcheon caught glimpses of his childhood past in the omnipresent fields of corn. “The early fall,” he recalled, “saw the tasseled rows of corn like waving spears of Indians, and a little later came the corn shocks, much like the tepees in the haze of Indian summer. Undoubtedly in my boyish imagination, all these things were registering. Then, when I was hard up for an idea, they came out.” The resulting cartoon consisted of two sketches. The first depicted an old man and a young boy burning a pile of dead leaves beside a harvested field enclosed by a rail fence. In the second sketch, the stacked shocks of corn are transformed by the harvest moon into a village of tepees and the smoke of the smoldering leaves into the forms of dancing Indians. A folksy narrative accompanied the sketches (“Yep, sonny, this is sure enough Injun summer. Don’t know what that is, I reckon, do you?”) as the old timer explains to the young boy the meaning of the term “Indian summer”: the last warm days of a Midwestern October, when the leaves turn bright red and one by one float down from their trees and the ghosts of the long departed Indians return to their old campgrounds. There is nothing to fear from this fleeting return, as the oldtimer assures the boy: “Don’t be skeered—hain’t none around here now, leastways no live ones. They been gone this many a year.” The tone of the piece is wistful, not identifying the Indians with a living dynamic culture but imaginatively rooting them in the landscape, similar to the trees, hills, and streams. McCutcheon’s cartoon first appeared at a time when there was a growing interest in the Native American history of the heartland. Major archaeological studies explored effigy and burial mounds throughout the region. Even within the Chicago metropolitan area, amateur diggers explored the city’s prehistoric past to the dismay of professional archeologists because of the amount of site disturbance. Some collectors simply used the pots and points they discovered as decorations. One North Side tavern owner decorated his watering hole 18 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Cartoonist John McCutcheon (above) was inspired by his rural roots to create “Injun Summer” (opposite). After the cartoon’s debut in 1907, it became an annual, though controversial, tradition.
with thousands of prehistoric pieces. One of the most assiduous of these amateurs was Karl (also known as Charles) A. Dilg, a journalist who devoted several decades to collecting Indian artifacts and studying sites in the Chicago area. Dilg had grander aspirations and assembled his findings into a massive study he titled Archaic Chicago. Another German American, Albert F. Scharf, amassed a huge artifact collection of his own and also aspired to write the definitive work on Chicago’s Indian past. Dilg disparaged Scharf as “a mere relic hunter,” and claimed, “what little knowledge he has, and God knows it is very limited, he received at our hands.” Neither man ever completed their grand documents, although Dilg published many newspaper articles about Indian sites, and Scharf produced a map of Chicago’s Indian trails and villages. Their work raised public consciousness of the area’s Indian roots and preserved important information for future generations of scholars. Even more influential was the support department store millionaire Marshall Field gave to permanently establish a natural history museum in Chicago. By 1900, the Field Columbian Museum displayed one of the largest collections of Native American artifacts in the world. This collection, exhibited in the same building as dinosaur bones and other exotic and extinct animals, emphasized that,
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 19
In the early 1900s, many local archeologists scoured the ground for Native American artifacts. Karl Dilg sketched many of his findings (above left and right).
While Chicago created myths with statues and cartoons, some Indians who lived in the city, such as Dr. Carlos Montezuma (above), became activists who fought for Native American rights. 20 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
however rooted the Indian was in the region’s history, as the old timer in the McCutcheon cartoon put it, “They all went away and died, so they ain’t no more left.” “Injun Summer” proved extremely popular with Midwesterners. Newspapers across the country reprinted it, and it appeared annually in the Chicago Tribune from 1912 to 1992 as a cherished and anticipated seasonal ritual. Unlike the statue The Alarm, which accurately depicted Ottawa Indians and was based on personal memory, “Injun Summer” displayed little connection to the genuine Native Americans of the Midwest. McCutcheon dressed the ghostly Indians in the long feathered headdresses of the Plains Indians; the lodges that appear in the harvest moon are not the bark wigwams of the Great Lakes Indians but the buffalo hide tepees of the far west. More importantly, the Native Americans depicted in “Injun Summer” are identified as a furtive part of the landscape, cloaked from normal view by the light of day and hiding in the shadows, awaiting the harvest moon to make their appearance. The Indian figures rise up from the smoke of the burning leaves, appearing to emerge from the very ground. This close identification of the Indian with nature had long been
part of the European American image of Native Americans, from Jean Rousseau to James Fennimore Cooper to Frederick Jackson Turner. “The Indian is a true child of the forest and desert,” Francis Parkman wrote. “His unruly pride and untamed freedom are in harmony with the lonely mountains, cataracts, and rivers among which he dwells; and primitive America, with her savage scenery and savage men, opens to the imagination a boundless world, unmatched in wild sublimity.” The turn-of-the-century Midwest, however, had lost not only most of its Indians but also its “wild sublimity.” The sense of loss, perhaps even guilt that emerges from the cartoon Indians may well be the emerging nostalgia of an urban people for their own loss of the rural American heartland. From McCutcheon’s day to the present, virtually every train arriving in Chicago carried a migrant from the countryside to the city. No sooner had the generation that had dispossessed the Potawatomi, Ottawa, and Illinois died off than many of their descendents themselves were dislodged from the land by mechanization and market changes, a process that continues to this day. It is ironic that the Chicago Tribune, the voice of the urban business establishment that made such changes
Ivan Mestrovic’s Indian horsemen (shown above in 1949) at Grant Park’s Michigan Avenue entrance. Photograph by Carl P. Richards. Monuments to a Lost Nation | 21
inevitable, would create the image that for thousands of city dwellers symbolized their loss of a landed heritage. Genuine Great Lakes Indians still lived just a few hundred miles north of Chicago in Michigan and Wisconsin. Traditional Indian birch-bark crafts and quillwork became popular with summer vacationers at Mackinac, Charlevoix, and other northern resorts. Native Americans also lived in the city itself. While McCutcheon warmed readers’ hearts with his cartoons, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, outspoken critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, edited a national publication for Indians from his Chicago office. But by the early twentieth century, actual Native Americans ceased to register with a public engaged with what had become a popular culture icon. The Indian had gone from being the “vanishing American” to becoming an effective symbol for all of America. In multiethnic cities such as Chicago, the Indian symbolized a common, mythic past for all Americans, regardless of national origin. The Indian, by being portrayed as having no particular living heritage, could serve as America’s common heritage. American popular culture promoted a generic Indian, locked in time and space. From 1910 to 1918, Chicago’s Essanay Studios helped to pioneer the film industry by producing scores of westerns. Central to the generic Indian image were the Plains Indians’ feathered headdresses, the very icon used to decorate the entrance to Essanay’s North Side studio. The University of Illinois football team, led by Red Grange, adopted the name the “Fighting Illini,” thereby blending the heritage of a local Indian tribe with a mascot sporting a Plains costume. The Eternal Light Christian Spiritualist Church manifested the religious universalizing of the Indian. The church, an exotic blend of spiritualism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and voodoo, was founded by Leafy Anderson, one of thousands of Louisiana African Americans drawn to Chicago during the Great Migration. When Anderson learned of the story of Chief Black Hawk, the Sauk Indian who led the last military resistance to white rule in Illinois in 1832, she made him a major figure in her church as a protective, guardian spirit. The church grew quickly during the 1920s, spreading to Florida, Louisiana, and Texas. Today it continues only in New Orleans. “Black Hawk will fight your battles,” Reverend Jules Anderson declared at a recent service, “because Black Hawk stands for righteousness.” Most Chicagoans identify Chief Black Hawk with their National Hockey League team, established in 1926.
Chicago’s own Essanay Studios, established in 1907, produced many movies that popularized the “cowboys-and-Indians” myth, especially the Broncho Bill western series (right). 22 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 23
The Bowman and The Spearman stand as two imposing statues at Congress Street Plaza. 24 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 25
Not surprisingly, two of the most important artistic additions to Chicago’s public space during the 1920s were Native American figures. As part of Daniel Burnham’s 1909 plan for Chicago, a formal entrance from the Loop commercial district to Grant Park would be ornamented with two large sculptures. The commission for the project went to Yugoslavian artist Ivan Mestrovic. His original plan for the statues called for one Indian and one “Buffalo Bill–like” depiction of the conquering white pioneers. This triumphalist conception evolved into a pair of Indian horsemen, The Bowman and The Spearman. Despite these fierce titles the figures appear anything but warlike; they even lack the weapons for which they are named. Standing seventeen feet high and placed on eighteen-foot-high granite pedestals, the bronze Indians, in the art moderne style of the 1920s, dwarf the downtown stream of pedestrians and automobiles. The figures illustrate the degree to which Indians had been appropriated as symbols of nature, and show Chicago’s isolation from its roots as a woodland Indian center. The second great addition to the city’s public space in the 1920s was architect Edward Bennett’s Michigan Avenue Bridge. Also part of the Burnham Plan, the bridge sat amid the most impressive architecture of 1920s Chicago: the Wrigley Building, the Chicago Tribune’s gothic tower, the Jewelers’ Building, and the London Guaranteed Insurance Building. The location was the site of the original Fort Dearborn, so Bennett choose a series of bas-reliefs depicting the early history of Chicago to decorate the massive Indiana limestone pylons of the bridge. One of the four sculptures documents the Indian’s role in Chicago. The Defense by Henry Hering captured a violent moment in the battle of Chicago, as Captain Nathan Heald is shown locked in combat with an Indian warrior. While Mestrovic’s Grant Park bronzes fall back on noble savage imagery, the Michigan Avenue Bridge art presents a stylized return to the image of the Indian as the fierce enemy. Yet a generation separates the fury and menace of the Rohl-Smith’s Fort Dearborn Massacre from the muted, almost classical vision of the Indian threat presented on Michigan Avenue. While the Rohl-Smith monument was meant to be displayed on a battlefield, the bas-reliefs marked the gateway to what was emerging as the city’s most elite retail district, the so-called “Magnificent Mile,” itself a symbol of a confident, comfortable era. With the closing of the 1920s, Chicago muted its public dialogue with its American Indian roots. The statues The Alarm, The Signal of Peace, and the Fort Dearborn Massacre all moved to new locations. The Fort Dearborn Massacre suffered from vandalism after the elite Prairie Avenue neighborhood waned in status and factories and warehouses replaced its mansions. In 1931, the 26 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Chicago Historical Society (CHS), to which George Pullman had left the sculpture upon his death, moved the figures to its North Side museum, separating the monument from its base. Rohl-Smith’s bronze group became the dominant image of pioneer Chicago for schoolchildren visiting the museum. In the 1950s and 1960s, when young television viewers mimicked Davy Crockett by sporting mock raccoon-skin hats and brandishing cap guns, the statue was proudly and prominently displayed. The shift in social tenor triggered by the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War brought new sensitivities to the fore. In 1972, the Chicago Historical Society added a subtitle to the statue, The Potawatomi Rescue, in an attempt to mute a groundswell of criticism of the bronze’s dated imagery. The relabeling did not prevent a protest rally at CHS in 1973 by dozens of American Indians. The protestors lamented the overall depiction of Native Americans in the Historical Society’s exhibitions, and they singled out the Massacre for its negative view. While Rohl-Smith had used survivors of Wounded Knee to accurately depict the American Indian, eighty years later the Native Americans invoked the memory of the event to attack the iconography of the monument: “Why don’t they show our side of it?” complained one protestor, “Wounded Knee was a massacre too.” Despite such protests, the monument remained on display for more than a decade but became an increasing source of embarrassment for CHS. In the early 1980s,
The Chicago Historical Society displayed the Fort Dearborn Massacre for many years.
This detail of Defense, from the Michigan Avenue Bridge, commemorates the Fort Dearborn Massacre and its casualties, who “will be cherished as martyrs in our early history.� Monuments to a Lost Nation | 27
the museum updated its Fort Dearborn gallery to present a more balanced picture of the pioneer era; in 1986, the Chicago Historical Society took the Fort Dearborn Massacre off display. CHS gave the monument to the city of Chicago, which returned it to Pullman’s old Prairie Avenue neighborhood. A single half-block of elegant old homes remained of what was once the most elite area in the Midwest, a historic district island in a declining industrial belt. Pullman’s old mansion had long since been replaced with a railroad office building, so the city placed the statue group approximately a half-block away from its original location. For nearly a decade, the monument sat forgotten in a small, unimproved green space. In 1997, it became an embarrassment once more, as the city sought a site to honor the First Lady of the United States. The unnamed green space occupied by the Massacre was landscaped in preparation for its dedication as the Hillary Clinton Women’s Park. Not only was the statue considered racist, but even more embarrassing to those planning a women’s park, it depicted a helpless woman in distress. The city packed up the statue; it currently sits shrouded in a blue plastic tarp at a city storage facility. McCutcheon’s “Injun Summer” occupied a more visible and enduring place in Chicago’s public memory, but in the 1990s, it too became the focus of controversy. Complaints, particularly concerning McCutcheon’s dialect text, mounted in the 1970s and 1980s. On October 25, 1992, the paper printed “Injun Summer” for what was thought to be the last time. “It is literally a museum piece, a relic of another age. The farther we get from 1907, the less meaning it has for the current generation,” commented editor Douglas Kneeland. The decision drew another batch of letters from people across the country who longed to see the illustration reprinted, including a woman in Orlando, Florida, who begged the editor to print it just one more time for her husband who was dying of cancer. Many others in favor of “Injun Summer” were older readers who remembered the cartoon from childhood. In 1997, the Tribune celebrated its 150th anniversary, and a new editor decided to fly in the face of criticism and reprint “Injun Summer.” Likening the cartoon controversy to banning Tom Sawyer because of the racist characterization of “Injun Joe,” editor Howard Tyner commented, “There will always be people who are offended. . . . But you have to look at these things in a broad context and my feeling is that ‘Injun Summer’ is really very benign.” On November 5, 1997, “Injun Summer” appeared on the cover of the Tribune’s weekly magazine in full color and with its original accompanying text. A flood of letters-to-the-editor responded to the reappearance of “Injun Summer.” Gone completely was the 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
old frontier era stereotype of the Indian as a savage enemy. Among Chicagoans, the “red devil” was instead replaced by the “white devil.” Complaints of the “horror of the genocide suffered by Native Americans throughout United States history” were typical. Instead of a reference to the so-called “Fort Dearborn Massacre,” Chicagoans expressed concern for “insensitivity to a people that we Americans massacred and exiled.” One reader even likened McCutcheon’s illustration to the “toxic ramblings of the Third Reich.” Other stereotypes, such as that of the “noble savage” and the “vanishing American,” however, were more enduring. One Chicagoan so admired Native Americans, he claimed, “I would have given anything to be an American Indian,” while an Indian woman from New Mexico reminded readers that there were still thousands of Indians in the United States. Inevitably Tribune readers interpreted the cartoon in light of late–twentieth-century culture wars; as one reader commented, “[“Indian Summer”] has all the charm of Chief Wahoo, Stepin Fetchit, Uncle Ben, and Tonto.” Others applauded the newspaper’s decision to again print the cartoon: “The Tribune has done its part to help end the dark era of political correctness.” Perhaps because of the strong response, both for and against, the Chicago Tribune announced in 1997 that it would again print “Injun Summer” annually. Chicago is an Indian word. Depending on which source you believe, or how you feel about the city, the word means wild onion or stinking place. Men and women of Indian descent were among the founders of Chicago. Chief Billy Caldwell served as a justice of the peace; the city’s first sheriff was half-Potawatomi. The federal government’s removal policy in the 1830s, however, severed the city’s Indian roots at a very early date. For the rest of the nineteenth century and much of the twentieth century, Indians were regarded as exotics upon whom the nation’s three great stereotypes could be hung: “savage enemy,” “noble savage,” and “the vanishing American.” Indians became a convenient symbol of the primitive and formative pioneer era. They were portrayed as a people locked in the past, a benchmark against which Chicago could measure its progress. The heated public debate over the Chicago icon “Injun Summer” obscured an important area of common ground shared by all Chicagoans. Whereas in the nineteenth century, many people of goodwill, such as the former fur-trader Martin Ryerson, pitied the Indians for the loss of their lands, by the twentieth century the majority of Chicagoans responded to the nostalgia of “Injun Summer” because what the Indian had lost earlier was now lost to all residents of the city. Neither the friends nor the foes of “Injun Summer” in the 1990s could regard all that had transpired in their city during their lifetimes as “progress.”
In recent years, the “Injun Summer” cartoon has grown controversial, as some find it disrespectful to Native American culture. Above left: In the 1980s, one Tribune editor explored the cartoon’s “charm and challenge.” Above right: “Injun Summer”’s return to its annual appearance in the 1990s garnered a flood of letters to the editor, both for and against. Monuments to a Lost Nation | 29
Chicago’s city seal prominently features a Native American chief, “representing the discoverer of the site of Chicago, [and] is also indicative of the aboriginal contribution which enters into its history,” according to the city’s website. Ironically, the Native American pictured on the seal is in Plains dress, which is not representative of the tribes that once lived in the Chicago area.
30 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
The baby-boom generation witnessed the passing of the last relics of Chicago’s rural past. In 1950, more than 20 percent of the land within the city had yet to be built upon. Open lots in the city, where young kids would build “forts” and their parents would burn autumn leaves, were universally referred to as “prairies,” in a linguistic linkage between the city and the open Midwestern countryside. Yet during the 1960s, these last open spaces were, one-by-one, developed for new construction. The very practice of burning leaves, once a seasonal ritual, was found to be a source of air pollution and banned. The last farms in Cook County gave way to subdivisions. Chicagoans were so resistant to giving up these last connections with a lost way of life that in the late 1980s the Chicago Board of Education established a special agricultural high school on the site of one of the area’s last farms. Ironically, Native Americans were among the thousands of migrants to the city whose presence demanded new construction. During the 1950s, the federal government used Chicago as a relocation center for a program to integrate Indians into the American mainstream. Once a Potawatomi Indian center, Chicago now became the home of Indians from more than eighty different tribes from across the United States. These Indians, largely jammed into the dilapidated Uptown neighborhood, were of less interest to most Chicagoans than the new mythic Indian symbolized by Iron Eyes Cody, the star of the Advertising Council’s teary-eyed 1971 anti-pollution commercial. Simple recognition of their persistence as a people and their presence in Chicago was and is all the genuine Indians have demanded. The reality of a living Native American community, composed of people who held jobs and raised families like other Chicagoans, conflicted with the symbolic social function of the Indian. Chicago’s public memory sometimes depicted the Indian as savage and sometimes as noble, but always the Native Americans were portrayed as part of the landscape and part of the past. In the public art of our parks and print media, the American Indian becomes a figure of nostalgia. Similar to the ghostly dancers in John McCutcheon’s cartoon, the image of the Indian reappears to remind of us what was lost in more than a “Century of Progress.” On the official seal of the City of Chicago a Native American stands expectantly as an immigrant ship approaches on Lake Michigan. Beneath the Indian figure is the city’s Latin motto “urbs in horto,” a garden city. The figure of the Indian reminds Chicagoans that the city is no longer that garden. Yet the Indian remains locked in the symbolic space of the seal, an icon to express the hopes of one age and the anxieties of another.
Theodore J. Karamanski is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and the author of several books about Midwestern history including Schooner Passage: Sailing Ships and the Lake Michigan Frontier (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002). I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, CHS: 5, courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration; 6 top left, courtesy of the Newberry Library; 6 bottom left, from History of Appanoose County, CHS, ICHi-36554; 6 right, CHS, ICHi-03296; 7 top, CHS; 7 bottom, CHS, ICHi-03294; 8, CHS, ICHi-36555: 9 top, CHS, ICHi-36551; 9 bottom, CHS, ICHi-03334; 10 left, from History of Appanoose County, CHS; 10–11, CHS, ICHi-36556; 12–13, CHS, ICHi-03056; 13, CHS, ICHi-36553; 14–15, CHS, DN-0057971; 16–17, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West program, 1888, CHS; 18, CHS, DN-0009949; 19, CHS, “Injun Summer” by John T. McCutcheon, copyrighted September 30, 1907, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 20 top left and right, from the Charles (Karl) A. Dilg archives, CHS; 20 bottom, CHS, DN-001054; 21, CHS, ICHi18359; 22–23, CHS, ICHi-16886; 24–25, CHS, ICHi-36550; 26, CHS, ICHi-36552; 27, CHS; 29 left, “The Charm and Challenge of Injun Summer” by Douglas E. Kneeland, copyrighted October 9, 1991, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 29 right, “Letters to the Editor” by Fred Spannaus, David L. Applegate, Rob Glaser, Robert Stanley, Jenni Noah, Rick Derer, Mary Jo Knuth, Joan E. Bigos, and Scott Hedstrom, copyrighted November 16, 1997, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 30, courtesy of the City of Chicago. F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | For more on Chicago’s Native American population, see Indians of the Chicago Area by Terry Straus (Chicago: NAES College, 1990); Chicago Indians: The Effects of Urban Migration by Prafulla Neog, Richard G. Woods, and Arthur M. Harkins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Training Center for Community Programs, 1970); and the Raymond Foundation publication Indians of Early Chicago (1960). For more on the city’s monuments, see Chicago Sculpture by James L. Riedy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981) and Monuments and Memorials in the Chicago Park District (Chicago Park District Dept. of Public Information, 1979). The papers of Charles (Karl) A. Dilg are in the Chicago Historical Society’s archives and manuscript collection.
Monuments to a Lost Nation | 31
Chicago Teachers Unite Determined to succeed, the new Chicago Teachers Union launched a series of programs to attract members and overcome deep divisions among the city’s educators. J O H N F. LYO N S
I
n October 1937, Chicago public schoolteachers founded the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). To build and maintain the union’s organizational strength and repair years of division among teachers, union leaders initiated a program of study classes, cultural events, and social activities. This initiative attracted members and actively forged a sense of solidarity among Chicago public schoolteachers. By 1938, with more than eight thousand members, the CTU was the largest teachers’ union in the country and represented two-thirds of the city’s teacher workforce. The CTU emerged as a result of the hardships Chicago public schoolteachers endured during the Great Depression. The Board of Education, under the control of Chicago politicians, had long condoned widespread patronage and political corruption in granting contracts
for school construction and equipment. Due to declining revenue brought on by the depression, a tax system investigation that delayed tax collection, and pressure from sections of the business community to lower taxes, the Chicago Board of Education cut public education expenditures in the early 1930s. Between December 1929 and August 1934, fourteen thousand Chicago schoolteachers received their salaries weeks or months late. The Board of Education shortened the school year by one month, cut teachers’ salaries by 23.5 percent, and fired fourteen hundred teachers in what George F. Zook, United States Commissioner of Education, described as “a return to the dark ages in education.” Eventually the adverse working conditions eased slightly: Teachers obtained their back salaries in August 1934, the school term returned to forty weeks in 1940, and the salary cut was rescinded in 1943.
In the early 1900s, Chicago’s teachers had little power to change their working conditions. Above: Boys learn how to cook at Mount Olivet Institute, c. 1917. 32 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
A variety of CTU recruitment brochures and flyers (clockwise from top left): “An Invitation to Join C.T.U.,” 1953; “One Union for Chicago Teachers Is Here!” 1937; “Union Meeting,” 1937; “All-Union Meeting,” 1937.
Chicago Teachers Unite | 33
Shortly after its inception, the CTU began producing a newsletter. This issue, published in September 1937, features a collage of news.
34 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
The payless paydays convinced many Chicago teachers that they needed a strong, cohesive union to promote their interests. Subsequently, in October 1937, the four existing unions merged to form the CTU, formally known as Local No. 1 of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Their goals included obtaining economic remuneration, reforming Chicago public education funding, and removing political influence in the schools. The union linked with other liberal groups and participated in the politics of the city by campaigning for like-minded politicians, such as Paul H. Douglas, who was elected alderman of the Fifth Ward in 1939. To strengthen the organization and pursue its aims, the union had to overcome deep divisions—based on gender, race, and ethnic and religious differences—within its own ranks. Since the late nineteenth century, teaching in American public schools had become a female-dominated occupation. In 1930, approximately 84 percent of American schoolteachers were women, compared to only 61 percent in 1870. “Teaching in the public schools has become a woman’s vocation,” observed Charl Williams, field secretary of the National Education Association (NEA), in 1929. “In fact, when we speak of a classroom teacher, we invariably speak of ‘her.’” Previously a strict gender division of labor existed in schools: the majority of female teachers worked in elementary schools, while most male instructors taught in high schools. By the early 1930s, however, women had gained substantial inroads into the male preserves of the high school and made up 62 percent of the senior high school teachers in Chicago. Male teachers voiced anger at the movement of women into teaching. They resented the identification of teaching with “women’s work” because they believed it devalued the economic status of men. Chicago principal Aaron Kline asked the Board of Education for higher wages for the teaching staff because he noted that inadequate support for education in Chicago had led to “such low salaries that teaching has been less and less attractive to men.” In 1910, the average annual salary for male teachers in Cook County was $1,768 and for female teachers $867. By 1935, as more women entered high school teaching, salaries for men in Chicago had fallen to $1,686 but had risen to $1,432 for women.
Male teachers further resented the perceived decline in the status of high school teaching due to the increase of female instructors. In the early twentieth century, men were attracted to high school teaching because it offered them higher status than women teaching in the elementary schools. Based on gender stereotypes, class prejudice, and prevailing ideas about the greater difficulty of teaching higher-level subjects, school administrators saw high school teaching as intrinsically more important and more challenging than elementary teaching. While female elementary teachers were considered “babysitters” for large groups of predominantly immigrant working-class children, high school teachers—mostly men with specialized knowledge and training—prepared small groups of middle-class students for college and white-collar occupations. By the late 1920s, however, these privileges began to erode, as high The CTU participated in Chicago politics by supporting liberal candidates, including Paul H. Douglas (top). Left: The logo of the American Federation of Teachers. Below: According to this CTU newsletter, the founding of Local No. 1 of the American Federation of Teachers drew “nationwide attention.” The newsletter encouraged teachers: “If you are not a member, join without delay!”
Chicago Teachers Unite | 35
Teachers demonstrate in downtown Chicago, c. 1935.
school teachers’ wages and teaching conditions increasingly resembled those in the elementary schools. As the secondary school population grew, high school teachers began to work with the same immigrant, working-class population, and the distinctions in class sizes between the two types of schools began to diminish. Female teachers also expressed opposition to their unequal treatment in the school system. Elementary teachers resented the fact that they were paid less than high school teachers and prodded the CTU to campaign for an equal-pay, single-salary schedule. Female teachers also felt attacked because of the depression-era tendency to favor men for employment over married women: in 1931, an NEA survey found that only 23 percent of school districts hired married women as new teachers, and only 37 percent retained women teachers after they married. Although married women teachers in urban schools received less direct discrimination than those in rural areas, they still faced criticism from the general 36 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
public. In April 1933, as a group of teachers protested in downtown Chicago against the delay in their pay, a motorist passing by opened his door and shouted to the female teachers, “Go get a husband!” As Chicago’s teachers formed labor unions, these gender differences took organizational form. In 1897, elementary school teachers created the Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF), the first teacher’s union in the country. Under the leadership of Irish Americans Margaret Haley and Catharine Coggin, the CTF sought higher teachers’ salaries and a single-salary schedule, demanded job security through pensions and tenure, and lobbied for increased school budgets. In November 1902, the CTF joined the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), the municipal affiliate of the American Federation of Labor, becoming the first group of teachers to work with a local labor federation. After some of its members were fired in 1916, however, the CTF disaffiliated from organized labor, and in 1937, it refused to join the CTU.
As the secondary school system increased in size, high school teachers founded their own organizations. In February 1912, Herbert Miller, a charter member of the CTF, helped to form the Chicago Federation of Men Teachers, later renamed the Men Teachers’ Union (MTU). The union was established in reaction to the Board of Education’s proposal to introduce a higher salary schedule for male teachers and a lower one for female teachers. As a result, male teachers feared that they would be replaced with lower-paid female workers. In 1914, in response to the MTU, women high school teachers organized the Federation of Women High School Teachers (FWHST). The differences between these unions hardened over time, and they found it difficult to work together. In 1935, Carl Megel, who would become president of the American Federation of Teachers in 1952, moved from downstate Illinois to Chicago to work as a schoolteacher. He remembered, “I never saw more animosity among teachers than I saw in Chicago at that time. The men were fighting the women,
the women were fighting the men, the high schools were fighting the elementary schools, the elementary [schools] were fighting the high school[s], and nobody was getting anywhere.” Even though African Americans constituted less than 3 percent of Chicago public school teachers in 1930, race also remained an impediment to solidarity. Similar to Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and other northern cities with growing African American populations, most of Chicago’s African American teachers taught in overcrowded, segregated schools. The Board of Education was reluctant to assign African American teachers to white schools where parents often protested their presence. When the board did assign African American teachers to schools in white neighborhoods, some white principals refused to accept them. In August 1931, one Chicago teacher complained that the board transferred her after only one day in a school because white teachers “didn’t want to use the same bathroom” as an African American teacher.
In a protest in the Loop, Margaret Haley (center) and her supporters demanded the resignation of John D. Shoop, superintendent of education, 1913. Chicago Teachers Unite | 37
Above: The Chicago Normal School, located at West Sixty-eighth Street and South Stewart Avenue, was the city’s main teacher college. Below: Mayor William H. Thompson at his desk. During his campaign, Big Bill’s supporters alleged that his opponent was out to destroy the public education system.
38 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Ethnic and religious differences also divided teachers. As in many United States cities, a majority of Chicago schoolteachers came from immigrant families, particularly Irish ones. In 1900, 61 percent of Chicago schoolteachers came from immigrant families, and 27 percent of the teaching force was Irish. Irish American politicians in Chicago encouraged the Board of Education to employ Irish American schoolteachers. In response in 1903, the Board of Education instituted a quota at the Chicago Normal School, the teacher training college that supplied most elementary teachers to the public schools. The quota limited the number of African American and Jewish entrants and encouraged Irish Americans to supplement the native-born Protestant workforce that predominated in the high schools; with a teacher shortage and a large number of Catholics entering the Normal School, the board rescinded this quota the following year. By 1920, Chicago Archbishop George W. Mundelein estimated that 70 percent of Chicago’s teachers were Catholic, most of whom were Irish. Tensions between Irish American Catholics and nativeborn Protestants influenced many of the political issues of the day, but the greatest conflict between the two groups revolved around public schooling. In the early part of the century, the Board of Education attempted to halt the influx of Irish teachers from Catholic colleges by allocating a certain number of teaching positions for graduates of the Normal School. In the 1915 mayoral elections, William H. Thompson’s supporters alleged that his opponent, Judge Harry Olson, whose wife was Catholic, was trying to destroy the public education system. In 1924, Chicago Mayor William Dever appointed Catholics to the Board of Education and heightened fears of a Catholic takeover. In 1928, William J. Bogan became the first Catholic superintendent of the Chicago public schools. In the midst of these changes, author George Counts noted, “The belief is firmly grounded that the Pope is endeavoring to place a Catholic in every classroom in Chicago. Already, according to commonly expressed opinions, from 70 to 90 percent of the elementary school teachers look to the Vatican for guidance.” Anti-Catholic and anti-Irish feeling persisted in Chicago during the 1930s. Some Protestants alleged that Catholics had initiated budget cuts in public education as part of a plot to wreck the Chicago public school system. In his study of education in Chicago and New York in the 1930s, William Wattenberg found that religious conflict was “largely a Chicago phenomenon. . . . Religious antagonism existed there in considerable strength.” Many teachers, along with members of the general public, blamed the retrenchment program of July 1933 on the Catholic Church for pressuring Catholic politicians such as Democratic Mayor Edward Kelly to undermine public schooling. An article in The New
Republic declared, “The church supports its own educational system and insists on Catholic parents sending their children to parochial schools. Naturally it wishes to reduce taxation for the public schools.” Even after the Board of Education rescinded the education cuts, some citizens remained convinced that Catholics Mayor Kelly, Board of Education President James McCahey, and School Superintendent William Johnson employed only Catholics in the public schools. These religious and ethnic tensions divided teacher organizations in Chicago. Margaret Haley’s CTF was led and dominated by Catholic, Irish American elementary teachers, while the Chicago Teachers League, established in 1905 and the CTF’s primary rival, was mostly made up of Protestant elementary teachers. The high school teacher unions also exhibited strong anti-Irish and antiCatholic prejudices and often expressed the idea that the CTF was an agent of the Pope. In 1917, high school teachers claimed, “The Roman Catholic Church has conspired to destroy the Little Red School House. The Teachers’ Federation is its agency.” At meetings of the FWHST, speakers gave talks on “Anglo-Saxon ideals.” In the 1930s, rival teacher organizations suggested that Irish teachers, led by Margaret Haley, were part of the Catholic plot to wreck the Chicago public schools. They claimed that the CTF played a major role in organizing a tax system investigation that delayed tax collection during the Depression. The unwillingness of the CTF to reaffiliate with organized labor or work with other teacher unions was also a concern. According to Wattenberg, “Every move made by Miss Haley to strengthen her leadership in the teachers’ association was regarded as part of the Catholic plot.” To overcome these divisions, the leadership of the newly formed CTU initiated a program of cultural, educational, and social events. In December 1937, John M. Fewkes, a physical education teacher at Tilden Technical High School on the city’s South Side, was elected unopposed as the first president of the CTU. Fewkes had risen to prominence in teacher unionism during the early years of the depression. His fiery oratory on behalf of teachers caused TIME magazine to dub him “the John L. Lewis of the teaching profession.” According to Fewkes, the social events would “weld together friendships and loyalties within our membership. Working and playing together, may we become a closely knit unit of great strength, courage, and high ideals dedicated to the service and protection of our public schools.” The main advocate of these programs, and alongside Fewkes the most influential figure in the union, was Kermit Eby, the newly appointed, full-time executive secretary of the CTU. In 1931, Eby, a Brethren minister, assumed a high school teaching position in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he helped organize the town’s first
William J. Bogan, the first Catholic superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, hands his daughter her high school diploma, 1929. Many teachers accused the Catholic Church of pressuring politicians, including Democratic Mayor Edward Kelly (below), to undermine the city’s public education system.
Chicago Teachers Unite | 39
Margaret Haley (above) and John Fewkes (below) were two prominent union leaders. Haley helped found the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, the first teacher’s union in the nation, and Fewkes served as the first president of the CTU.
40 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
teacher’s union. He later joined the Michigan Socialist party where he met and became friends with autoworkers leader Walter Reuther. In 1935–36, Eby helped organize the United Automobile Workers and participated in sit-down strikes that led to employer recognition and a union contract. In 1936, Ann Arbor’s Board of Education suspended Eby for his union activities. The following year, former alderman and progressive reformer Charles Merriman recommended Eby to the CTU. Eby leapt at the opportunity to put his political ideas into action and became spokesman for the union. Fewkes and Eby, the only full-time employees of the CTU, held different visions for the role the new union would play in Chicago politics. While Fewkes believed the union should concentrate its activities on gaining higher wages and better working conditions for its members, Eby envisioned a union that would identify with the concerns of other workers and join a coalition of left, liberal, and community organizations to reform the Chicago political system and improve the schools. In February 1938, six months after his appointment to the CTU, Eby argued that the union must “perpetuate the idealism that made Jane Addams the glory of Chicago.” Deeply committed to Christian socialism and imbued with the ideas of rank-and-file activism, Eby believed that the union should be built on democratic participation of every member in union activities. While Fewkes saw the social activities as a way to unite teachers under a centrally led but distant union leadership, Eby saw the unions’ programs as a way to politically educate the teachers and “stimulate and democratically involve rankand-file membership in the activities of the union.” The CTU’s program of activities built on an older tradition among teacher unions in Chicago. The CTF and the FWHST had both organized social activities for their members, including tea parties, fashion shows, and educational programs. Under Mary Herrick, leader of the FWHST from 1932 to 1936 and first vice president of the CTU, the FWHST put on The Strangest Interlude in a Century of Progress at the Goodman Theatre in June 1933; the play used humor to poke fun at the those in power who had denied teachers their pay and publicized the plight of the teachers during the depression. While these social activities were limited, however, the CTU sought an expanded and diversified program. CTU leaders were particularly inspired by the successes of the National Union of Teachers (NUT) in England and Wales and the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) in New York, who had successfully used dances, dinners, and sports to encourage members to become involved in the union. In 1933, some chapters of the ILGWU had begun educational and social programs to unite a growing multiracial membership, and the NUT, formed in 1870, had successfully built a membership of
On April 5, 1940, the CTU distributed this pamphlet at the “3rd Annual Card Party, Dance, and Style Show� to promote its social activities, from golfing and bowling to dancing, theater, and study classes. Chicago Teachers Unite | 41
Above: John Fewkes convenes a meeting of the CTU executive board. Right: Mary Herrick, first vice president of the CTU, speaks at a labor conference on civil rights.
150,000 teachers by 1940 that embraced 80 percent of the teachers in England and Wales. The CTU social committee studied the social programs of the NUT and the ILGWU, but prepared its own series of activities more suitable to American rather than British teachers and to highly educated professionals rather than garment workers. Under the direction of schoolteacher Marguerite E. Fitzgerald, chair of the social committee, the CTU initiated a program of activities unmatched by any other union. Thousands of teachers attended tea parties, card parties, and style shows in various parts of the city. In early 1938, the first annual card party attracted a crowd of more than two thousand. In addition, the union organized picnics, summer outings to the country, luncheons, and movie shows. Instead of male-orientated sports such as football and baseball, the CTU promoted the more genteel sports of golf, tennis, ping pong, bowling, and softball; by 1939, the CTU bowling league included more than five hundred bowlers divided into thirty-six teams from different schools. The union also provided a much-needed outlet to allow talented teachers to perform the arts; it supported its own 42 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
dance, theater, and writers’ groups, and an orchestra, chorus, and a glee club. The CTU Little Theater Group, advised by William F. Madden, dramatic director of the Loyola Community Theatre, performed dramatic plays, musicals, and comedies. The union glee club put on the operetta Sweethearts at the Goodman Theatre in May 1939. The activities of the CTU proved popular because they reflected the refined professionalism the union and the primarily female schoolteachers espoused. Rather than celebrate ethnic cultures and racial diversity as was practiced by the ILGWU, the CTU organized musical events featuring orchestras, swing music, and ballet, modern, and tap dancing to reflect the tastes of its overwhelmingly white, American-born membership. The CTU also put on operas, theater performances, dances, and style shows at plush downtown venues, including the Stevens and Sherman Hotels, that were likely to appeal to educated professionals. Many teachers played an active role in the life of the union, but undoubtedly the social activities appealed to women more than men. Female teachers, who were more likely than men to be single and constrained by the conventions of the day, welcomed the opportunity to meet new friends and participate in social activities. Style shows, which had both professional models and female schoolteachers modeling women’s clothing, were put on especially to appeal to female members.
The CTU provided women with leadership opportunities, a rarity in the 1930s. Marguerite Fitzgerald (above) chaired the social committee and Shirley Linder chaired the Little Theater Group (below).
Chicago Teachers Unite | 43
To solidify the union, the CTU provided a variety of social activities for its members, including (clockwise from top left) card parties, teas, style shows, and picnics.
44 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Each year, the CTU holds an open house to introduce potential recruits to the union and its officers. Above: Teachers flood union headquarters during the open house in 1942.
Besides breaking down the divisions that still existed among Chicago schoolteachers, the social events helped the union recruit new members and improve relations with the general public. As a public sector union, the CTU needed public support for its demands, including increased funding for public education. Social activities publicized the union and, according to the social committee, helped “all the teachers and the public to see the Union in a favorable light.” Union events such as the style shows, which modeled clothing supplied by the Fair Store and Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, and card parties and dances, which distributed prizes donated by local companies and PTAs, reached out to the public. In December 1938, more than seven hundred teachers and guests attended the CTU’s first annual open house at its headquarters on the fourth floor of 509 South Wabash Avenue. The union played music, showed motion pictures, and organized readings to highlight and promote its activities. To educate young teachers about unions and solidarity, the CTU also held open houses to introduce potential recruits to the union and its officers. While cultural and social events helped create solidarity among teachers, the CTU’s educational activities informed members of the economic and political issues of the day. Evelyn Sholund, chair of the CTU’s study Chicago Teachers Unite | 45
class committee, declared that the classes would lead to more participation “in a strong and democratic union for the purpose of building a more democratic and progressive educational system.” The committee organized biweekly classes, which often included guest speakers. The classes covered topics as diverse as segregated housing in Chicago, juvenile delinquency, teachers and the community, the developing war in Europe, the local press, local elections, teachers’ tenure, taxation in Illinois, vocational education, labor and education, and capitalism and education. CTU education classes attracted speakers such as A. Philip Randolph, leader of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Charlotte Carr, head of Hull-House; and various professors from local universities. Despite an occasional admission fee of twenty-five cents, up to two hundred teachers attended each of the union’s study classes. Chicago public schoolteachers also participated in unprecedented media activities to further union campaigns, act as social and cultural outlets, and serve as training for new union activists. The union’s publicity committee distributed press releases, a weekly newspaper, a monthly magazine, and other publications to civic groups, local newspapers, university and school libraries, churches, and educators. The magazine and newspaper contained cartoons and articles produced by union members that spoke to the political and educational events of the day. From its inception, the CTU sponsored a weekly radio series on WCFL, the Chicago Federation of Labor radio station; it was the only weekly program by an AFT local and continued until 1949. The CTU also set up a speakers’ bureau that presented at hundreds of meetings of PTAs, women’s clubs, unions, educational conferences and conventions, civic organizations, and schools of education. As a result, schoolteacher Carl Megel declared, “the Chicago Teachers Union . . . became the focal point of influence in education in the United States.” American involvement in World War II led to the decline of the cultural, educational, and social programs of the CTU. Chicago schoolteachers actively participated in the war effort and, with gasoline strictly rationed and public transportation difficult to obtain, time-consuming defense work took precedence over CTU social activities. A CTU survey found that during the war approximately one-third of its members participated in civilian defense, almost one-half worked for the CTU Red Cross unit, and nearly an additional one-third reported working on other war-related activities, such as lecturing on gas defense, first aid, and water safety; working on draft and ration boards; participating in the medical corps; and volunteering at the Chicago Servicemen’s Center, sponsored by Mayor Kelly, which opened in August 1941 at 178 West Washington Street to help American soldiers. 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Above: John Fewkes addresses the audience of WCFL. Below: “Our Union Song” creatively promoted the aims of the CTU and encouraged the member loyalty: “To improve Chicago’s schools with vigilance unswerving/Our loyalty in everyway The Union is deserving.”
During World War II, the CTU’s social activities fell by the wayside as many teachers spent their free time supporting the war effort. Above: In August 1943, the CTU raised enough funds to purchase an ambulance.
After the war, the political direction of the union furthered the decline in the CTU’s social programs. In 1943, the union leadership fired Kermit Eby, the main supporter of the educational activities of the union, because of political differences. Without Eby, John Fewkes and his supporters had less enthusiasm for rank-and-file activism and the cultural and educational programs it initiated. The social committee was revived on a limited basis, with most of the activities confined to annual card parties and style shows, which are still used by the CTU today. For its brief lifespan, however, the educational, cultural, and social programs of the CTU served to “knit warm personal relationships among teachers of the various levels,” according to Mary Herrick, first vice president of the CTU. In the process, the union helped teachers become a force in the political life of the city. John F. Lyons, Ph.D., is an associate professor of history at Joliet Junior College. He is currently working on a book on the history of Chicago public schoolteachers and organized labor. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 32, CHS, DN-0067607; 33 top, CHS, CTU misc. pamphlets; 33 bottom, CHS, broadsides; 34, CHS, CTU misc. pamphlets; 35, CHS; 36, CHS, ICHi-20855; 37,
CHS, DN-0061817; 38 top, CHS, DN-0002382; 38 bottom, CHS, DN-0064415; 39 top, DN-0088607; 39 bottom, CHS, ICHi-26507; 40 top, reprinted with permission from the Records of the Redpath Lyceum Bureau, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa; 40 bottom, CHS, ICHi-31918; 41, CHS, CTU misc. pamphlets; 42 top, CHS, ICHi-31920; 42 bottom, CHS, ICHi-27210; 43 top, CHS, ICHi-36561; 43 bottom, CHS, ICHi-31919; 44 top left, CHS, CTU collection; 44 bottom left, CHS, ICHi-34989; 44 top right, CHS, ICHi-36558; 44–45 bottom, CHS, ICHi-20861; 45 top, CHS, ICHi-36557; 46 top, CHS, ICHi-36559; 46 bottom, CHS; 47, CHS, ICHi-30987. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For additional information on the history of Chicago schools, see Mary J. Herrick, The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1971). For an overview of teacher’s unions, see Marjorie Murphy, Blackboard Unions: The AFT and the NEA, 1900–1980 (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1990). For a more contemporary look at urban education, see Diane Ravitch and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds., New Schools for a New Century: The Redesign of Urban Education (New Haven, Connecticut, 1997) and Hopeful Girls, Troubled Boys: Race and Gender Disparity in Urban Education (New York: Routledge, 2002). Chicago Teachers Unite | 47
MAKING HISTORY I
East Coast Transplants: Interviews with Henry B. Betts and Robert V. Remini T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
D
uring the four decades after their arrival in Chicago in the 1960s, Henry B. Betts and Robert V. Remini redefined their respective professions. Betts moved to Chicago in 1963 to begin working at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC) and transformed it into what many consider to be the foremost rehabilitation facility in the world. U.S. News and World Report has named the RIC the “Best Rehabilitation Hospital in America” since 1991. Betts also worked to remove attitudinal and physical barriers to the handicapped, creating, according to one observer, “a life of helping people with no arms and no legs.” He was an influential proponent of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, which represented the largest expansion of civil rights law since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He was also instrumental in passing legislation in Illinois to raise the drinking age to twenty-one and require safety belts for children in automobiles. Henry Betts, writes another observer, is Chicago’s “best known doctor.” Author or editor of twenty-eight books, University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) professor Robert V. Remini is one of the preeminent nineteenth-century historians of his generation. Remini came to Chicago in 1965 to join the faculty at UIC. Since then, he has written influential and award-winning studies of Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John Quincy Adams, and Joseph Smith. His pre–Civil War era studies include a dozen books and represent one of the most comprehensive examinations by a single historian on the early American republic. His most influential legacy, however, is his prize-winning three-volume narrative of Andrew Jackson. Similar to the multivolume biographies by Robert Caro on Lyndon Johnson, Dumas Malone on Thomas Jefferson, and Carl Sandburg on Abraham Lincoln, Remini’s trilogy on Jackson will long be considered the defining scholarship on the subject. Henry Brognard Betts was born in New Rochelle, New York, on May 25, 1928, to attorney Henry Brognard Betts and Marguerite Meredith Denise Betts. When Betts was five years old, his father died suddenly. “Following his death, we moved to very rural New Jersey where my paternal grandfather had a lot of land, and he built a little house for us,” recounts Betts. 48 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Henry B. Betts, M.D., received the 2003 Enrico Fermi History Maker Award for Distinction in Science, Medicine, and Technology.
Professor Robert V. Remini, Ph.D., received the 2003 John Hope Franklin History Maker Award for Distinction in Historical Scholarship.
Remini’s pre–Civil War era subjects include Henry Clay, who Remini explored in his 1993 volume Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union. Above: Henry Clay Addressing the Senate 1854 by John M. Butler and Alfred Long.
Making History | 49
Betts on a farm in the early 1940s. As a child, he and his family lived on rural land that his grandfather owned.
The move was a shock. “We went to a local school, which was a one-room schoolhouse with eight grades in it and no electricity, no indoor plumbing, and one teacher. It was quite an experience,” remembers Betts. “We were city kids, and everybody else was the children of mostly European immigrants, rather simple farmers—not poor, but they just had little farms.” Betts’s transitory childhood continued as his mother remarried, and the family moved to Florida. Only eleven years old at the time, Betts attended elementary school in Coconut Grove and then high school in Coral Gables. “They thought we were outsiders, too,” remembers Betts, “so I got used to that again.” Florida also exposed him to racism and anti-Semitism for the first time: “I was shocked by it—and from then on, I somehow had a feeling for people who were estranged from the rest of us.” Unbeknownst to Betts, Robert Victor Remini was his childhood neighbor. The grandchild of immigrants from Ireland and Italy, Remini was born in the Bronx (a few miles south of Betts’s birthplace) on July 17, 1921, the year Congress passed the first major immigration restriction law in American history. Remini’s grandfather lived on Mott Street in the heart of Manhattan’s Little Italy and ran a tailor shop next to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Similar to many first-generation Americans in New York, Remini’s parents eventually left Manhattan for more spacious and affordable accommodations in other parts of the city. William Francis Remini and Lauretta Tierney Remini moved to a largely Irish section of Astoria in Queens shortly after the birth of their children. Remini spent his entire childhood in Queens, attending Public School 122 and later William Cullen Bryant High School. When it came time for college, he commuted to Fordham University in the Bronx. 50 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Betts served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1958. Above: Betts (back row, center) at Camp McGill in Japan. Later, Betts became Joseph P. Kennedy’s personal physician. Below: Betts and his wife Monika chat with Rose Kennedy (right) at a party in 1971.
Making History | 51
Remini acknowledges that he enjoyed a loving and secure home life. Yet, growing up during the Great Depression “was not a great time.” He adds, “You were always thinking about having to try to get some money.” Like many of his generation, Remini considers World War II the transformative event in his life. While stationed on a U.S. naval destroyer, Remini rose to rank of lieutenant. He originally planned to attend law school after the war but discovered his true passion while at sea: history. “I thank God I was in the navy,” he admits in retrospect. “[It] gave me three years to think about what I wanted to do, and I found myself reading history. I couldn’t get enough of it.” Whenever Remini’s ship went into port, he headed off to the library. “We were in Boston at one point,” he recollects, “and I was allowed to borrow Henry Adams’s nine volumes of History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison from the library. I read every bloody page . . . and loved it.” Remini and Betts each returned to the East for their higher education. Betts moved back to New Jersey to attend Princeton University, where he graduated with his bachelor of arts degree in 1950. Four years later, he earned his medical degree at the University of Virginia. Betts then interned at Cincinnati General Hospital in 1954, served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1958, and moved to New York University for his residency at the Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine from 1958 to 1961, where he worked under Howard Rusk, an early pioneer in rehabilitation medicine. While living in New York, Betts became the personal doctor to Joseph P. Kennedy after Kennedy suffered a stroke in 1961. Since then, Betts has remained a close friend of various members of the Kennedy family. Before 1960, treatment of the disabled was in a veritable dark age. Betts remembers finding disabled people “stored” in hospitals for the “incurably ill” during his medical training in the 1950s. Such facilities confined quadriplegics, many of whom were incontinent and unattended, to boxes filled with sawdust in a basement. “At Stanford, they had blocked off one hallway and put up some pulleys on the wall and that was their rehab center,” remembers Betts. “In Cincinnati General, they had nothing at all. They had a physical therapist down in a subbasement somewhere.” World War II, however, spawned a new medical specialty: rehabilitative medicine. “When the veterans came back from the war,” Betts points out, “there were a lot of disabled people, which had never occurred before because there hadn’t been antibiotics,” which treated formerly fatal infections. Previously, medical education included little, if any, training regarding the disabled. After 1946, however, medical professionals increasingly questioned the practice of discarding the disabled as “cripples” confined to “homes for incurables.” Instead, many were determined to find ways to reintegrate disabled individuals back into society. “They invented rehabilitation around the military hospitals,” insists Betts. After the war, Remini took advantage of the G.I. Bill and enrolled in the doctoral program in Columbia University’s history department. His initial interests were close to home, evidenced by his masters’ thesis on early–twentiethcentury New York City Mayor John Purroy Mitchel. While Remini was preparing for his comprehensive examinations, Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter approached him with a proposal: Columbia would purchase the microfilm copies of the collected manuscripts and letters of a United States president if a graduate student would use them for research purposes. Hofstadter suggested that Remini study Martin Van Buren because he was from New York. “We can bring all the microfilms of all those papers here, and you’d just work here in our library,” Hofstadter told Remini. “You don’t have to go down to Washington.” Remini quickly agreed and thus started his career as a nineteenth-century historian. 52 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
One of Remini’s first important works was Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party, published in 1951.
Remini began working under the tutelage of Columbia’s famed Dumas Malone. A specialist in the early republic, Malone was writing what became a six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson. Although almost two decades would pass before Remini began writing his own multivolume biography of an early American president, Malone proved to be inspirational, the “beau ideal of a biographer and southern gentleman,” according to Remini. Although reviewers describe Remini’s prose as “forceful” and “populist,” his flair for the dramatic narrative and vivid event was never innate. Remini insists he learned to write. While most graduate seminars provided little discussion or training on writing style, Malone proved to be an exception. “I handed in my chapters, and [Malone] told me I was prolix,” Remini admits. “I realized he was saying you have to really think about your style.” Remini adds that Sam Telfair, a colleague at Fordham University where Remini taught from 1947 to 1965, also influenced his distinctive style, as did Making History | 53
54 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
the young Columbia historian William Leuchtenburg. “You better learn how to write,” Leuchtenburg advised Remini. “Your intelligence can be discerned only two ways—how well you speak and how well you write.” Remini never forgot this lesson. In 1963, Betts accepted an invitation to join the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC). Founded in 1954, the RIC was then a small clinic established by orthopedic surgeon Paul Magnuson and housed in a Near North Side warehouse. Betts began as a staff physiatrist: a specialist in physical medicine and rehabilitation. Two years later, he was promoted to medical director, a position he held for more than two decades. In 1986, he was named the chief executive officer and in 1994, president. Since 1997, he has been past medical director, president, and CEO. Throughout his tenure at RIC, Betts has also held appointments at Northwestern University Medical School’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, including the Paul B. Magnuson professorship from 1994 to 1997. At RIC, Betts transformed the treatment of the disabled and redefined the field of rehabilitative medicine. Before 1960, for example, rehabilitation did not begin for spinal cord patients until six months after incurring the injury, during which time the patient suffered from pressure sores and contractures. Betts convinced medical practitioners to begin rehabilitation within seventytwo hours of the injury, now a standard procedure. More significantly, Betts developed a patient-centered, comprehensive approach to rehabilitation; some now call it “collaborative medicine.” Rather than a single medical practitioner treating a single patient, a team of professionals addresses the multiple needs of a patient undergoing rehabilitation. Betts organized physicians, nurses, physical therapists, occupational therapists, recreational therapists, speech pathologists, social workers, psychologists, vocational counselors, and chaplains to work together as a team. He also recognized that rehabilitation required a higher level of community outreach because “that’s where the rehabilitation really takes place.”
Henry Betts found his greatest success at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (opposite), where he enjoys his work with patients (below).
Making History | 55
Betts also sought to empower the disabled. He encouraged those with physical handicaps to assert themselves and their feelings. “If the handicapped feel pitiful, unworthy, rejected, and unattractive, others are apt to see them in this light,” Betts wrote in The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z. “If they have a healthy sense of self-esteem, feel attractive and desirable, others will respond more positively.” All of this, insisted Betts, not only made rehabilitative medicine exciting, but more fulfilling than any other medical field. Yet, he admitted the specialty was painful because “to be successful, one must do continual selfexploration.” Few other medical fields require practitioners to constantly ask if the goals were their patient’s or their own. “Henry [Betts] was ahead of his time,” states Marca Bristo, president of Access Living and head of the National Council on Disability. “He understood that his work did not stop at the hospital doors. He transcended the medical aspects of his work, at which he has been a pioneer, to empower those with disabilities to lead independent and productive lives.” Robert Remini’s first two books—Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (1959) and The Election of Andrew Jackson (1963)—generated a faculty appointment at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Arriving as the department’s chairperson in 1965, Remini served in that capacity until 1971 and expanded the department from six to forty-five professors. From 1981 to 1987, he was the first director of the university’s Institute for the Humanities. Remini’s three-volume, six-hundred-thousand word biography of Jackson, published between 1977 and 1984, emphasizes Jackson’s faith and commitment to liberty and democracy. Remini concurs with the socalled “Progressive historians” from the early twentieth century that “Old Hickory” was a man of the people and actively attempted to advance democracy by insisting that all branches of government reflect popular will. “No American ever had so powerful an impact on the minds and sprits of his contemporaries as did Andrew Jackson,” Remini argues. “No other man ever dominated an age spanning so many decades. No one, not Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin, ever held the American people in such near-total submission.” Despite the popularity of social history among professional historians in the past thirty years, Remini remained devoted to more customary subjects associated with political history. “I’ve always done my books on dead white males. I’m a traditionalist, and I don’t find excuses for it.” He also recognizes that some of his talents lay elsewhere. “I don’t think I can do social history very well,” he admits. “I’m not attuned to it. Without thinking about it, I have always done biography.” Remini concedes that writing for a popular audience required a different strategy. “People got sick of the narrative,” he maintains. “They got sick of heroes.” Academic historians like himself compounded the problem because, he asserts, “historians are very cynical about heroes.” Remini, however, “loves the idea that there are heroic people who did things . . . whose lives were really important for the rest of us.” Remini’s Jackson trilogy almost never happened. After writing five books on various aspects of Jacksonian America, Remini concluded a modern biography of Jackson was badly needed. Remini approached his editor Hugh Van Dusen and suggested a two-volume biography. “Can’t sell it,” Van Dusen shot back. Remini, however, kept pushing, especially after discovering a wealth of previously unexamined archival documents in Spain. His persistence paid off: one night when they were socializing, Van Dusen turned to Remini and said, “You can do two volumes. It’s okay.” 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Andrew Jackson (above) has inspired some of Remini’s best-known works, such as The Election of Andrew Jackson (below), which helped lead to his position at the University of Illinois at Chicago (opposite).
Making History | 57
Left: In 1965, Henry Betts was appointed director of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. Above: Betts speaks at the cornerstone laying of the new RIC building in 1971.
58 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Remini eventually found three themes around which to organize Jackson’s life: empire from 1767 to 1821, freedom from 1822 to 1832, and democracy from 1833 to 1845. Remini then convinced Van Dusen to add another volume. It proved to be a wise decision: Remini received the National Book Award in 1984 for the final volume of the Jackson trilogy. In bestowing the award, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., whose 1947 book The Age of Jackson remains one of the definitive works on the era, issued the highest praise: Remini’s biography brings a great American leader to full and vibrant life against the backdrop of tumultuous times. It is a splendid book, meticulous in its scholarship, masterful in its control of sprawling materials, sympathetic while intelligently critical in its assessment of its powerful, willful, and irascible hero, arresting in its portrayal of a whole generation of commanding political figures, vivid in its sense of the era, written with spirit, passion, and high drama. It places the life in a grand historical context, displaying Jackson’s significance in the expansion of the nation, the growth of presidential power, and the transition from republicanism to democracy. It is superb history that makes the past alive and exciting. Betts’s success in expanding the Rehabilitation Institute changed the Chicago landscape. In 1974, the RIC opened a new highrise tower at 345 East Superior Street, designed by C. F. Murphy & Associates and adjacent to Northwestern University Memorial Hospital. Four years later, the RIC became the federally designated Midwest Regional Spinal Cord Injury Care System. Today, it is the largest spinal-cord injury center in the United States. Betts’s emphasis on community outreach is best evidenced by the many RIC branches in the Chicago area. In response to the growing importance of health maintenance organizations in the 1990s, Betts organized twenty branch centers for RIC. “First of all, they reach into the community,” points out Betts. “They can offer closer care to the patient.” The now thirty-five RIC branches serve more than fifty thousand patients throughout the Midwest and are more profitable than the main RIC center. In retrospect, Betts recognizes that he was unwittingly influenced by a variety of disabled people early in his life. Growing up in New Jersey, he remembers his disabled elementary school teacher Jenny Corcoran. “She was of course quite remarkable to manage nine grades,” recounts Betts. “She was brought every morning in a horse and buggy by her brother and taken to the front of the room and she stayed there all day.” At Princeton, an influential dean of Betts’s was disabled, as was his favorite teacher, architectural historian Donald Egbert. Tom Hunter, the dean of the University of Virginia Medical School who encouraged Betts to accept a fellowship in the physical medicine and rehabilitation department at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York in 1953, was a parapalegic polio survivor. Betts attributes much of the success of the RIC to Chicago’s political, business, and philanthropic institutions, which have been in his words, “unbelievable.” Once Betts convinced leading corporate executives of the need for a rehabilitation center, they opened numerous doors to the city’s financial and philanthropic communities. “No city has ever been like this and it’s partly a Chicago mentality,” believes Betts. In his experience, “A very broad cross-section of people give thought to how they can improve Chicago. They pay attention to Chicago, and they are even likely to think, ‘What can I do to help?’” By way of example, Betts refers to the Daley family. Betts discovered that despite knowing little, if anything, about disability, Mayor Richard J. Daley recognized that Chicago needed a center for the disabled. “We don’t have something like that here,” Daley told Betts. “We should back that.” After Betts Making History | 59
explained the value of curb cuts on street corners (to allow wheelchair access), Daley instigated a program to construct such features on most Chicago street corners. His son, current Mayor Richard M. Daley, proved equally supportive during his tenure as a state senator by sponsoring a provision protecting the rights of the disabled in the amended Illinois Constitution. Betts’s contribution to medicine and Chicago are now known well beyond the field of rehabilitative medicine. In 1998, the block of Superior Street outside the RIC was christened “Henry Betts Street.” Hamilton College and Ohio State University have awarded him honorary degrees. He was a recipient of the Order of Lincoln Medallion in 2001. In 1989, the Prince Charitable Trust, in recognition of Betts’s influence, created the Henry B. Betts Award in conjunction with the RIC and the American Association of People with Disabilities, specifically to honor an individual whose work and scope of influence has significantly improved the quality of life for people with disabilities in the past and will be a force for change in the future. Robert Remini has similarly earned some of the highest awards in his profession. He has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carl Sandburg Award for Nonfiction, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. In 2000, the American Historical Association presented him with a special award for scholarly distinction. Honorary degrees from Governors State University, Eastern Kentucky University, Fordham University, and Columbia College Chicago hang on his wall. The governor of Kentucky even presented Remini with a commission as a Kentucky Colonel in recognition of his biography of Henry Clay. In 1991, Remini lectured on Jackson before President George Bush in the East Room at the White House. Most recently, Remini was chosen to write a history of the U.S. House of Representatives as part of the History of the House Awareness and Preservation Act of 2002. Betts and Remini remain modest in their many public accolades. While most consider the construction of the twenty-story Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago building to be Betts’s greatest professional achievement, he believes that “building the patient load” was his highest accomplishment. “The most significant to me personally was coming here and going into practice, and finding that people wanted to come to me. That was the most satisfying thing; that they thought I could help them. I just loved that.” Remini attributes much of his professional success less to talent and more to his wife, Ruth T. (Kuhner) Remini, whom he married in 1948. “The best thing I ever did was marry that woman,” he insists. “When I started seriously to write books, I set up an office in the basement. I was able to write because she was so supportive.”
Robert Remini’s many awards have brought prestige to the history department at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This 1984 Chicago Tribune article describes his American Book Award for Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845, Volume III. 60 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Above: Remini speaks at the May 2003 opening of the John W. Kluge Center in the Library of Congress. The center enables scholars who are conducting research in the humanities and culture to use the library’s vast collections and interact with the nation’s policymakers. Betts (right) with Senator Edward Kennedy (left) and President Bill Clinton (center).
Making History | 61
Above: Betts discusses his work with actor Christopher Reeve in 1999. Below: Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor and Sunday magazine editor for the Chicago Tribune, presents Robert Remini with his award at the Chicago Historical Society 2003 Making History Awards.
62 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Both Betts and Remini acknowledge a strong affection for their adopted home of Chicago. Remini remembers that it was hard to leave New York. “I would go back every year,” he admits. “But then one year, I realized I didn’t have to come back anymore, that Chicago was a really livable city, that I loved this place. It had everything I wanted.” Coming to UIC, Remini now emphasizes, “was the best thing I ever did.” Betts would concur with Remini’s viewpoint: “I’m not sorry that I left.” 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. ILLUSTRATIONS | 48, CHS; 49, CHS, ICHi-22205; 50–51, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts; 53, Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (New York: Columbia University Press, 1951); 54, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts and Movco Media Productions; 55, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts; 56 top CHS; 56 bottom, The Election of Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1963); 57 CHS; 58 left, copyrighted July 5, 1965, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 58 right, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts and Edwin Bonk Photography; 60, copyrighted November 19, 1984, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 61 top, photograph by John Harrington; 61 bottom, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts; 62 top, courtesy of Dr. Henry Betts; 62 bottom, CHS; 63 top, CHS; 63 bottom, The Elizabeth Morse Charitable Trust.
Betts with The Honorable Judge Ilana Rovner at the Chicago Historical Society 2003 Making History Awards.
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Readers interested in Henry Betts’s approach to rehabilitation should begin with his own writings: “The Rehabilitation Experience” in Nancy Martin, Nancye B. Holt, and Dorothy Hicks, eds. Comprehensive Rehabilitation Nursing (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981); and “Sex for the Handicapped,” The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z (New York: Doubleday, 1978), 977. Useful articles and interviews appear in “The Physician and the Handicapped,” Chicago Medicine 81 (21 Nov. 1978), 1,015, and the Chicago Sun-Times, 5 June 1994. Articles on Remini appear in the Chicago Sun-Times, 2 June 1991; Chicago Tribune, 22 Oct. 2002; and the Chicago Tribune Book Review, 29 Dec. 2002. Remini is best known for his three-volume biography of Andrew Jackson: Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Empire, 1767–1821 (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom, 1822–1832 (New York: Harper & Row, 1981); Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy, 1833–1845 (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), which were reissued in 1998 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. The Life of Andrew Jackson (New York: Penguin, 1988) is a one-volume condensed version of the trilogy. In recent years, Remini has completed biographies of other leading nineteenthcentury figures: Henry Clay (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991); Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997); John Quincy Adams (New York: Times Books, 2002); and Joseph Smith: A Penguin Lives Biography (New York: Viking, 2002). T H E 2 0 0 3 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 Genius (right), daughter of Charles Hosmer Morse, a nineteenth-century Chicago industrialist and land developer. The Trust supports programs that encourage self-reliance, foster self-esteem, and promote the arts, with an emphasis on helping children, youth, and the elderly of Chicago’s disadvantaged communities. Making History | 63
Index to Volume 32 This index includes author, title, and subject entries. In each line reference, the issue number comes first, followed by a colon and the page number(s) on which the reference appears. Illustrations are indicated in italics.
A Access Living, 3:56 Adams, Henry, 3:52 Adams, John Quincy, 3:48 Addams, Jane, 3:40 Advertising Council, 3:31 African Americans in baseball, 1:37–38, 40 election of Harold Washington as mayor and, 2:32–51 as teachers, 3:37 The Age of Jackson (Schlesinger), 3:59 The Alarm (Boyle), 3:6–7, 9, 17, 21, 26 Ali, Muhammad, 2:42 All-America Football Conference, 1:30 All-Star baseball board game, 1:41 All-Star baseball game, 1:24–41 Alter, Peter T., “The Game of the Century,” 1:24–41 American Association of People with Disabilities, 3:60 American Federation of Teachers (AFT), 3:35, 37 founding of Local No. 1, 3:35 logo of, 35 American Historical Association, 3:60 American League, 1:24, 26–27, 29–30, 33–34, 37, 40 autographed ball from, 1:36 American Medical Association, 1:45 American Museum, 1:13–15 Americans with Disabilities Act (1990), 3:48 Anderson, Rev. Jules, 3:22 Anderson, Leafy, 3:22 Andrews, Edmund Wyllis, 1:51 The Ann Landers Encyclopedia A to Z, 3:56 Anti-Catholic sentiments, 3:38–39 Anti-Irish sentiments, 3:38–39 Aparicio, Luis, 1:39 Appling, Luke, 1:35 Archaic Chicago (Dilg), 3:18 “Architects of Chicago Culture: Interviews with Ramsey Lewis and Walter Netsch,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 1:56–72 64 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Architecture. See also Burnham, Daniel; Gehry, Frank; Graham, Bruce; Netsch, Walter; Owings, Nathaniel; Sullivan, Louis; Wright, Frank Lloyd Burnam Plan of 1909 and, 3:26 fireproof, 2:4–5, 8, 10, 12 schools, in the Progressive Era, 2:52–72 Armour & Company, 1:58 Army Corps of Engineers, 1:59 Art Institute, East Wing of, 1:56 Artists for [Harold] Washington, 2:40 Asian American Advisory Committee, 2:43
B Babes in Toyland, 2:7 Banks, Ernie, 1:40 Barnum, P. T., 1:13, 15 Baseball All-Star games, 1:24–41 American League, 1:24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40 Interleague play, 1:24 National League, 1:24, 26, 35, 36, 40 World Series, 1:24, 26 Basie, Count, 1:67 Bauer, Augustus, 2:54 Beman, S. S., 2:61 Bennett, Edward, 3:26 Benz, Joe, 1:31 Berger, Julia, 2:21 Berriman Bros., 1:15 Berry, Sister Michael, 1:52 Betts, Henry B., 3:48–63 Betts, Henry Brognard, 3:48 Betts, Marguerite Meredith Denise, 3:48 Betts, Monika, 3:51 Bilandic, Michael, 2:32 Black Entertainment Television, 1:71 Black Hawk, 3:22 Black/Latino Alliance for Progressive Politics, 2:40 Black Partridge, 3:13, 14, 17 depiction of, 3:9 Black Sox scandal, 1:30 Blodgett, S. O., 1:18 Blues (music), 1:62
Bodnar, John, 1:8 Bogan, William J., 3:38–39 Bohemian Caverns (Washington, D.C.), 1:64 Boston Red Sox, 1:30, 36 Bowen, James H., High School, 2:58, 67 The Bowman (Mestrovic), 3:24–26 Boyle, John, 3:7 Brainard, Daniel, 1:44–45 Bridge, Jennifer R., “A Shrine of Patriotic Memories,” 1:4–23 Bristo, Marca, 3:56 Broncho Bill Western Series (Essanay Studios), 3:22 Brooklyn Dodgers, 1:38 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 2:51 Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 3:46 Brown, John, 1:17 Bryan Hall at Sanitary Fair of 1865, 1:4 Brown, John, 1:17 Bryant, William Cullen, High School (New York), 3:50 Buchan, Anna Belle Whitford, 2:31 Buckley (deputy coroner), 2:27 Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 3:7, 16–17 Bunch, Lonnie G., 1:71 Burial mounds, 3:18 Burnham, Daniel, 1:61–62, 72, 3:26 Burnham Plan of 1909, 3:26 Burton, Wallace, 1:62 Bush, George H. W., 3:60 Butler, John M., 3:49 Byrne, Barry, 1:65 Byrne, Jane, 2:32–33, 35, 40, 51
C Cabrini Green housing development, 1:56, 2:42 Cabrini Homes, 1:56–57 Cadaco, 1:41 Caldwell, Chief Billy, 3:28 Camp McGill (Japan), 3:51 Caro, Robert, 3:48 Carr, Charlotte, 3:46 Carrington, W. C., 1:11 Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company, 3:45 Carville, 1:47 Catholic Church, teaching and, 3:38–39 Cavarretta, Phil, 1:35–36 A Century of Progress International Exposition (1933–34), 1:24–25 Cermak, Anton, 1:26 Charlevoix, Michigan, 3:22 Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, 1:8 Chess-Checker-Argo Record Company, 1:62, 63 Chicago city seal of, 3:30–31 discovery of Native American artifacts in, 3:18, 20–21 Great Fire of 1871 in, 1:4, 47, 2:4 history of teacher’s unions in, 3:32–47 memorializing of Indian roots in, 3:4, 7–9, 24–26 Native American presence in, 3:4, 31 World’s Fair (1893) in, 1:16–17, 3:7, 9, 14
Chicago Academy of Sciences, 1:45 Chicago Association of Ex-Union Prisoners of War, 1:19 Chicago Black United Communities (CBUC), 2:33–34, 37 Chicago Board of Education, 2:12, 54, 58, 61, 63–64, 3:32, 35, 38 Chicago Children’s Choir, 2:51 Chicago City Council Chambers, 2:51 Chicago City Hall, 2:31–32 Chicago Coliseum Company, 1:21 Chicago Cubs, 1:24, 26, 32, 34–37, 40 Chicago Daily News, on Iroquois Theatre fire, 2:17, 20, 24 Chicago Defender, for Harold Washington, 2:49 Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), 3:36 Chicago Federation of Men Teachers, 3:37 Chicago Herald, vanishing Indian stereotype in, 3:14 Chicago High School, 2:53–54, 70 Chicago Historical Society, 1:45 depiction of Native Americans in collection of, 3:26 donation of Fort Dearborn Massacre to, 3:9, 26, 28 Chicago Inter-Ocean on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, 3:17 on the Iroquois Theatre fire, 2:25 Chicago Journal, on Iroquois Theatre fire, 2:24 Chicago Manual Training School, 2:60–61 Chicago Marine Hospital, 1:45–46 Chicago Medical College, 1:47, 49 Chicago Medical Society, 1:45 Chicago Musical College, 1:59 Prep School of, 1:59 Chicago Normal School, 3:38 Chicago Park District Board of Commissioners, 1:71 Chicago Plan, 1:61–62 Chicago public school system, 2:53 Chicago Servicemen’s Center, 3:46 Chicago’s Sisters of Mercy, 1:42–55 Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF), 3:36, 39 Chicago Teachers League, 3:39 Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), 3:32–47 educational activities of, 3:45–46 executive board of, 3:42 Little Theatre Group, 3:43 media activities of, 3:46 newsletter of, 3:34–35 open house held by, 3:45 “Our Union Song,” 3:46 political activities of, 3:35 recruitement brochures and flyers, 3:33 Red Cross unit of, 3:46 social activities of, 3:41, 43–46 war efforts of, 3:47 “Chicago Teachers Unite,” article by John F. Lyons, 3:32–47 Chicago Towing Company, 1:8 Index to Volume 32 | 65
Chicago Tribune gothic tower of, 3:26 on The Alarm (Boyle), 3:7 on the Fort Dearborn Massacre, 3:17 on Iroquois Theatre, 2:12 on Libby War Museum, 1:11–13 on Mercy Hospital centennial, 1:52 publication of “Injun Summer” in, 3:18–19, 21–22, 28–29 role of, in creation of the All-Star baseball game, 1:24 on Sanitary Fairs, 1:4 Chicago Urban League, 2:33 Chicago White Sox, 1:24, 30, 31, 33, 35, 37, 39 Child labor/child labor laws, 2:58–59, 61 Chinatown (Chicago), 2:43 Chippewa, statuary memorizing attack on Fort Dearborn, 3:9 Cincinnati General Hospital, 3:52 City–County building, 2:31 Civil Rights Act (1964), 3:48 Civil Rights Movement, 3:26 Civil War Andersonville, 1:19 artifacts from, 1:7, 14 Libby Prison War Museum, 1:4–23 tourism related to, 1:7–8 Clay, Henry, 3:48–49, 60 Cleffs, 1:62 Cleveland Indians (baseball team), 1:37 Clinton, Bill, 3:61 Clinton, Hillary, Women’s Park, 3:28 Clipper (theater trade publication), 2:12 Clough, Joy, R. S. M, “Yesterday’s City: Chicago’s Sisters of Mercy,” 1:42–55 Cody, William (Buffalo Bill), 3:7, 16–17 Cody, Iron Eyes, 3:31 Cody, William F., 3:17 Coggin, Catharine, 3:36 Collaborative medicine, 3:55 College All-Star game, 1:30 College-preparatory courses, 2:61 Collins, Eddie, 1:30 Colonial Theatre, 2:6, 28 Columbia College Chicago, 3:60 Columbiad gun, 1:22 Columbian Exposition (1893), 3:7, 9, 14 Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, 3:59 Columbia University, 3:52–53 Cominskey Park, 1:24, 26, 27, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38 Committee for a Black Mayor, 2:33 Community outreach, emphasis on, in rehabilitation medicine, 3:59 Como, Perry, 1:67 Compulsory education legislation, 2:61 Congress Street Plaza, Native American statuary at, 3:24–25 Conyers, John, Jr., 2:35 Cook County Court and Recorder of Deeds, 2:54 Cook County Hospital, 1:46 Cooper, James Fennimore, 3:21 Corbett, Sister Eliza, 1:42 66 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Corcoran, Jenny, 3:59 The Corn Dance (Boyle), 3:7 Couch Place, 2:17–19 Counts, George, 3:38 Cowboys-and-Indians myth, 3:22–23 Cranston, Alan, 2:35 Cratty, Josiah, 1:8, 11 Crawford, John A., 1:8 Crockett, Davy, 3:26 The Crusaders, 1:64 Cummings, J. E., 2:27 CYCLE, 1:71
D Daley, Richard J., 1:52, 3:59–60 death of, 2:33 Daley, Richard M., 2:33, 35, 3:60 Dallin, Cyrus E., 3:7 Dartmouth College, 1:58 Daughters of the American Revolution, 1:17 Davis, Jefferson, statue of, 1:4 Davis, Dr. Nathan Smith, 1:44–46 Davis, Will J., 2:7, 27 Death Alley, 2:19 Decoration Day celebrations, 1:17 The Defense (Hering), 3:26–27 Delaney, Sister Mary Flora, 1:51 Dellums, Ronald, 2:35 Democratic Machine, 2:32–33, 40 Democratic party, election of Harold Washington as mayor, 2:32–51 Democrats for Epton, 2:48 DePaul University, 1:59 Dever, William, 3:38 Dilg, Karl A. (Charles), 3:18 sketches by, 3:20 Dillea, Herbert, 2:14, 17 DiMaggio, Dom, 1:36 DiMaggio, Joe, 1:36 DiMaggio, Vince, 1:36 Doby, Larry, 1:37 Donnelley Hall (Chicago), 2:50 Douglas, Paul H., 3:35 Drury Lane Theater (London), 1:7 Duggan, Bishop James, 1:47 Durkin, Sister Gwendolyn, 1:51, 53, 55 DuSable, Jean Baptiste Pointe, 2:37 Dykes, Jimmie, 1:24, 33 Dymally, Mervyn, 2:35
E Earle, Lawrence Carmichael, 3:4 Earth, Wind and Fire, 1:63–64 “East Coast Transplants: Interviews with Henry B. Betts and Robert V. Remini,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 3:48–63 Eastern Kentucky University, 3:60 Eaton, Cleveland, 1:63–64
Eby, Kermit, 3:39–40, 47 Education reforms in, 2:57–58, 61 teachers unions and, 3:32–47 Educators for [Harold] Washington, 2:40 Effigy and burial mounds, 3:18 Egbert, Donald, 3:59 Egolf, Joseph, 1:15 The Election of Andrew Jackson (Remini), 3:56 Elementary-school teaching, 3:36 Ellen, Ethan, 1:41 Ellis, Morris, Orchestra, 2:51 Ender, Julius, 2:54 Engine Company 13, 2:16 English, Woody, 1:24, 32 Epton, Bernard, 2:33, 39, 44, 46–47 Erlanger, Abraham Lincoln, 2:7 Essanay Studios, 3:22 Eternal Light Christian Spiritualist Church, 3:22 Ewing, W. G., 1:11
F Fair Store, 3:45 Federation of Women High School Teachers (FWHST), 3:37, 39, 40 Feeney, Sister Mary Ignatius, 1:51 Fewkes, John M., 3:39, 40, 42, 46–47 compared to John L. Lewis, 3:39 Field, Marshall, 3:18 Field Columbian Museum, 3:18, 21 Field Theory, 1:65–66 Fireproof Magazine, 2:10 Fitzgerald, Marguerite E., 3:42–43 Flanders, John J., 2:55, 63 Flatley, Sister Therese, 1:51 Flentye, Walter, 2:16 Flower, Lucy, Technical High School for Girls, 2:62 Ford Center for the Performing Arts, 2:7, 31 Fordham University, 3:50, 53, 60 Forestry (Boyle), 3:7 Fort Dearborn, 3:11 Fort Dearborn Massacre (Rohl-Smith), 3:9 13–15, 17–18, 26, 28 Fort Ouitenon trading post, 3:18 Fort Sheridan (army base), 3:17 Fox, Nellie, 1:39 Foy, Eddie, 2:7, 12, 14, 16–17 Franklin, Benjamin, 3:56 Freeman, The Honorable Charles E., 2:51 Frisch, Frank, 1:38
G Gaede, Eddie, 1:30 “The Game of the Century,” article by Peter T. Alter, 1:24–41 Gateway Foundation, 1:71 Gehrig, Lou, 1:24, 27 Gehry, Frank, 1:66, 71 Genius, Elizabeth Morse, 1:72, 3:63 The Gentlemen of Swing (recording), 1:62
Gettysburg Cyclorama, 1:7 G.I. Bill, 3:52 Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Architects of Chicago Culture: Interviews with Ramsey Lewis and Walter Netsch,” 1:56–72 “East Coast Transplants: Interviews with Henry B. Betts and Robert V. Remini,” 3:48–63 Gillespie, Dizzy, 1:62 Gómez, Lefty, 1:24, 27 Goodman Theatre, 3:40, 43 Gospel (music), 1:59 Governor’s Committee on Employment of the Handicapped, 3:58 Governors State University, 3:60 Graham, Bruce, 1:61–62, 64 Grammy Awards, 1:56, 64 Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), 1:7, 13, 17, 19 Grange, Red, 3:22 Grant, Ulysses S., 1:7, 17 monument to, 3:9 Grant Park Museum Campus in, 1:71 Native American statues in, 3:21, 26 The Graphic, 1:16 Gray, Dobie, 1:64 Gray, W. H., 1:7–8, 11, 13, 16 Great Chicago Fire of 1871, 1:4, 47, 2:4, 3:14, 17 Guggenheim Fellowship, 3:60 Gunther, Charles F., 1:13, 15, 17, 21, 23 Gyure, Dale Allen, “Monuments to Education,” 2:52–72
H Haider, Donald, 4:33 Haley, Margaret, 3:36, 37, 39, 40 Hallahan, Wild Bill, 1:24, 32 Hamilton College, 3:60 Hammock, M. Hill, 1:71 Hancock, John, Center (Graham, 1970), 1:64 “Hang on Sloopy” (recording), 1:56, 63, 64 “Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement,” article by Tracye A. Matthews, 2:32–51 Harridge, Will, 1:24, 30 Harrison, Benjamin, 3:13 Harrison, Carter, Jr., 2:4, 23, 27 Harrison, Carter, Technical High School, 2:63, 68–69, 70 Harrison, William Henry, 3:13 Hartnett, Gabby, 1:24, 26 Hatch, Anthony P., “Inferno at the Iroquois,” 2:4–31 Haymarket Affair (1886), 3:17 Heald, Captain Nathan, 3:26 Helm, Margaret, 3:9, 13, 17 Henry Clay Addressing the Senate (Butler and Long), 3:49 representation of, 3:9 Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (Remini), 3:49 Herbert, Victor, 2:7 Hering, Henry, 3:26 Herrick, Mary, 3:40, 42, 47 Herrick, Dr. William, 1:45–46 High-school teaching, 3:35–37 Index to Volume 32 | 67
preparation of honoring pioneer accomplishments, 3:4, 7 social, 3:56 History of the House Awareness and Preservation Act (2002), 3:60 History of the United States during the Administration of Jefferson and Madison (Adams), 3:52 Hofstadter, Richard, 3:52 “Hold It Right There” (recording), 1:56 Holland, Frank, 2:14 Holt, Isaac “Red,” 1:62 A House Divided: America in the Age of Lincoln (CHS), 1:23 Howe, Col. F. E., 1:8 Hull House, 3:46 The Hunt (Boyle), 3:7 Hunt, Richard, 1:71 Hunter, Tom, 3:59 Hussander, A. F., 2:62, 65, 68, 70 Hyde Park High School, 1:58, 2:63–64, 68, 70
I Illinois Central, 1:47 Illinois General Assembly, 2:61 Illinois General Hospital of the Lake, 1:45 Illinois Institute of Technology, 1:56 Illinois Law Review, 2:29 Illinois State Board of Nurse Examiners, 1:51 Illinois tribe, 3:21 “The ‘In’ Crowd” (recording), 1:56, 64 Independence Hall (Philadelphia), 1:17 Indian Horsemen (Mestrovia), 3:21 Indiana, Robert, 1:71 “Inferno at the Iroquois,” article by Anthony P. Hatch, 2:4–31 “Injun Summer,” 3:18–19, 21–22, 28–29 Inland Steel Building, 1:60, 61–62 Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine, 3:52 International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), 3:40, 42–43 Iroquois Memorial Association donation receipt, 2:30 Iroquois Memorial Emergency Hospital Fund, 2:30 Iroquois Theatre, 2:4–31 fire at, 2:4, 7–31 Grand Promenade in, 2:8
J Jackson, Andrew, 3:48, 56, 56 Jackson Park (Chicago), 1:58 Jazz, 1:62, 67, 71 Jazz Central (cable TV), 1:71 Jefferson, Thomas, 3:48, 53, 56 Jenner, Edward, Elementary School, 1:59 Jenney, William LeBaron, 1:72 Jeweler’s Building (Chicago), 3:26 Jewish Support Committee for [Harold] Washington, 2:40 Johnson, Ban, 1:30 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 3:48 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, Foundation Award, 3:60 Johnson, William, 3:39 Jordan, Louis, 1:67 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
K Kansas City Monarchs (Negro Leagues), 1:38, 40 Karamanski, Theodore J., “Monuments to a Lost Nation,” 3:4–31 Kelly, Edward, 1:24–26, 3:38–39, 46 Kenna Apartments, 1:65 Kennedy, Joseph P., 3:51–52 Kennedy, Rose, 3:51 Kenny, Sister Elizabeth, 1:51 Klaw, Marc, 2:7 Kline, Aaron, 3:35 Kluge, John W., Center in the Library of Congress, 3:61 Knaggs, Robert Clark, 1:19 Kneeland, Douglas, 3:28 Knights Templar, 1:7–8
L Labor for [Harold] Washington, 2:40 Lake House, 1:44–46 Lake Shore Drive, 1:71 Lamansky, Sister Josephus, 1:53 Lance, Sister Mary Vernarda, 1:53 Lane Technical High School, 1:35 students at, 2:57 La Salle Hotel fire (1946), 2:4 Last Council of the Potawatomies (Earle, 1833), 3:4 Latinos, support for [Harold] Washington, 2:41, 46 Latinos for Washington, 2:41 Lee, Robert E., 1:17 Leelanau School for Boys (Glen Arbor, MI), 1:58–59 Leslie, Amy, 2:12 “Let Us Swear It by the Pale Moonlight,” 2:14, 16 Leuchtenburg, William, 3:55 Lewis, Buddy, 1:35 Lewis, Mrs. Frank J., 1:53 Lewis, Gloria Jean, 1:57 Lewis, Lucille, 1:57 Lewis, Pauline Richards, 1:56–57 Lewis, Ramsey, 1:56–72 Lewis, Ramsey, Morning Show, 1:71 Lewis, Ramsey, Trio, 1:62–64 Lewis, Ramsey E., Sr., 1:56, 57 Lewis Foundation, 1:53 The Libby Chronicle, 1:8, 19, 21 Libby Prison, 1:8, 11–12 criticism of move, 1:11–13 financing of move to Chicago, 1:10 reunion of veterans, 1:17 selling of souvenirs from, 1:15–16 tunnel entrance to, 1:8–9 Libby Prison Cigars, 1:15, 14
Libby Prison War Museum, 1:4–23 advertisement for, 1:5, 14 artifacts at, 1:22, 23 guide and catalog, 1:4 raising money for, 1:10 register for former prisoners, 1:18–19 shellroom at, 1:16 Libby Prison War Museum Association, 1:12–13, 19 letterhead for, 1:21 Library of Congress, 2:8 Lichtenstein, Roy, 1:71 Lincoln, Abraham, 3:48 carriage of, 1:23 death place of, 1:17 Lincoln, Robert Todd, 3:13 Lincoln Park, Native American statuary in, 3:7–9 Lincoln Park Commission, 3:9 Lincoln Park High School, 2:64 Lindblom, Robert, Technical High School, 2:68, 70 Lindblom College Preparatory High School, 2:68 Linder, Shirley, 3:43 Linderman, Gerald, 1:11 Lind University, 1:46–47 Lister, Dr. Joseph, 1:51 Little Big Horn, 3:17 Little Red School House, 3:39 Little Theatre Group (Chicago Teachers Union), 3:43 London Guaranteed Insurance Building, 3:26 Long, Alfred, 3:49 Lookout Mountain (Tennessee), 1:7 L’Opéra Comique (Paris), 2:8, 12 Louisville Slugger bat, 1:28–29 Loyola Community Theatre, 3:43 Lyne, Sister Sheila, 1:51, 55 Lyons, John F., “Chicago Teachers Unite,” 3:32–47
M Mack, Connie, 1:24, 29, 33 Mackinac, Michigan, 3:22 Madden, William F., 3:43 Magnificent Mile (Chicago), 3:26 Magnuson, Paul, 3:55 Major League Baseball All-Star game, 1:24–41 Making History Award winners Betts, Henry B., 3:48–63 Lewis, Ramsey, 1:56–72 Netsch, Walter, 1:56–72 Remini, Robert V., 3:48–63 Malone, Dumas, 3:48, 53 Mantle, Burns, 2:23 Marshall, Benjamin H., 2:6–8, 10 Marshall Field’s department store, 2:12 Martin, Pepper, 1:27 Martin Van Buren and the Making of the Democratic Party (Remini), 3:53, 56 Masons’ Life Indemnity Company, 1:7–8 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1:59 Massacre Tree, 3:9, 12–13
Matthews, Tracye A., “Harold Washington: The Man and the Movement,” 2:32–51 Mayer, Levy, 2:29 Mayo, Dr. William, 1:47 Maysville, Kentucky, 1:8 McAuley, Mother Catherine, 1:42 McCahey, James, 3:39 McCarthy, Sister Huberta, 1:53 McConnell, Stuart, 1:7, 19 McCormick, R. Hall, 2:12 McCutcheon, John T., 3:18, 21–22, 28, 31 McGill, Sister Raphael, 1:47, 49, 51 McGirr, John, 1:45 McGirr, Sister Mary Vincent, 1:42 McGraw, Crystal Haerr, 2:31 McGraw, John, 1:24, 28 McGuire, Sister Mary Gertrude, 1:42 McKinley, William, High School, 2:64–65 McLean House (Appomattox), 1:17 Meagher, Sister Rita, 1:53 Megel, Carl, 3:37, 46 Men, in teaching, 3:35, 37 Mendelsohn, Dorothy, 1:59, 61 Mental discipline approach to education, 2:63 Men Teachers’ Union (MTU), 3:37 Mercy Free Dispensary, 1:51 Mercy Hospital, 1:42–55 clinic at, 1:51 school of nursing at, 1:51–52 women’s ward at, 1:50 Mercy Hospital and Orphan Asylum, 1:45–46 Mestrovic, Ivan, 3:21 Michigan Avenue Bridge (Bennett), 3:26–27 Michigan Socialist party, 3:40 Midwest Regional Spinal Cord Injury Care System, 3:59 Miller, Charles K., 1:8 Miller, Herbert, 3:37 Mitchel, John Purroy, 3:52 Monholland, Sister Mary Frances, 1:47 Monitor-Merrimac battle (1888), 1:8 Monk, Thelonious, 1:62 Montezuma, Dr. Carlos, 3:20, 22 “Monuments to a Lost Nation,” article by Theodore J. Karamanski, 3:4–31 “Monuments to Education,” article by Dale Allen Gyure, 2:52–72 Moore, Percy S., 1:35 Mother McAuley High School, 1:44 Motherwell, Robert, 1:71 Mount Olivet Institute, 3:32 Mr. Blue Beard, 2:7–10, 12–13, 29 Mulvihill, Sister Lenore, 1:55 Mundelein, George W., 3:38 Mundie, William B., 2:53, 64–65, 68 Municipal Auditorium (Chicago), 2:8 Murphy, C. F., & Associates, 3:59 Murphy, Dr. John B., 1:47, 50 Musham, William, 2:25 Index to Volume 32 | 69
Musial, Stan, 1:36 Music gospel, 1:59 jazz, 1:62, 67, 71 Ramsey Lewis’s contributions to, 1:56–72 Muzak, 1:67
N National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Governor’s Award, 1:71 National Baseball Hall of Fame, 1:27, 33, 39 National Book Award (received by Robert Remini), 3:59 National Council on Disability, 3:56 National Education Association (NEA), 3:35–36 National Hockey League, 3:22 National League (baseball), 1:24, 26, 40 autographed ball from, 1:36 Most Valuable Player Award, 1:35, 40 National Union of Teachers (NUT), 3:40, 42 Native American artifacts, 3:18, 20 Navy Pier (Chicago), 2:51 Negro Leagues (baseball), 1:38, 40 Netsch, Anna Calista Smith, 1:58 Netsch, Dawn Clark, 1:58 Netsch, Walter Andrew, Jr., 1:56–72 Netsch, Walter Andrew, Sr., 1:58 Netsch House, 1:71 New Republic, on Chicago’s schools, 3:38–39 New York Giants (baseball team), 1:24 New York Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 3:58 New York’s Polo Grounds, 1:26 New York State Sun, on Haymarket, 3:17 New York University, 3:52 New York Yankees (baseball team), 1:24, 27, 36 Noonan, Thomas, 2:27 North Division High School, 2:54–55 Northrug, Charles W., 2:31 North-West Division High School, 2:55, 57 Northwestern University architecture of, 1:56 in Chicago, 2:19 Library at, 1:66 medical department at, 1:47, 50 Medical School’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 3:55 Northwestern University Memorial Hospital, 3:59
O Oak Ridge, Tennessee, 1:61 O’Brien, Sister Mary Agatha, 1:42, 45, 47 Ohio State University, 3:60 O’Keefe Elementary School, 1:58 Oldenburg, Claes, 1:71 Old Settlers’ Festivals, 3:6 Old Town (Chicago), 1:71 Olson, Judge Harry, 3:38 Operation PUSH, 2:33 70 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
Order of the Lincoln Medallion, 3:60 Oriental Theater, 2:7, 28–29 Ottawa, 3:21 statutary memorizing the attack on Fort Dearborn, 3:9 Our Lady of the Angels school fire (1958), 2:4 “Our Union Song” (Chicago Teacher’s Union), 3:46 Owings, Nathaniel, 1:61–62, 64
P Pafko, Andy, 1:36 Palmer, Jorja, 2:34 Palmer, Lutrelle “Lu,” 2:34, 36 Palmer, Lu, Foundation, Women’s Auxiliary of, 2:34 Parkman, Francis, 3:21 The Peace Pipe (Boyle), 3:7 People Organized for Welfare and Employment Rights (POWER), 2:33 People’s Movement for Voter Registration, 2:33 Perkins, Dwight Heald, 2:64–65, 67–68 Petersen boardinghouse, 1:17 Philadelphia Athletics (baseball team), 1:24, 29, 33 Philippoteaux, Paul, 1:7 Phillips, Wendell, High School, 2:52, 64 students at, 2:56–57 Pickerell, Keith, 2:17 Pioneer associations, 3:4, 6 Plachecki, Emil Von, 2:17, 26 Plamondon, George, 2:12 Poilpot, Theophile, 1:7 Potawatomi tribe, 3:7, 21, 31 statutary memorizing the attack on Fort Dearborn, 3:9 Treaty of Chicago (1833) and, 3:4, 5 Powers, Harry J., 2:7 Prairie Avenue district (Chicago), 1:51 Prairie School architecture (Frank Lloyd Wright), 2:67 President’s Report: Park District Reorganization (Netsch), 1:71 Prince Charitable Trust, 3:60 Princeton University, 3:52, 59 Professional Ballplayers of America, 1:24 Progressive Era, school architecture in, 2:52–72 Public art in Chicago, 3:17–18, 26 Public School 122 (New York), 3:50 Pullman, George, 3:9, 14, 17, 26 mansion of, 3:14–15 Pullman riots of 1894, 3:17
Q Quarter, Rev. Walter, 1:42 Quarter, Right Reverend William, 1:42, 47 house of, 1:42, 44
R Randolph, A. Philip, 3:46 Ransom, John L., 1:19, 21 Ray, William H., School, 2:63–64 Reagan, Ronald, 2:39 Records and Radio Industry, 1:71
Reeve, Christopher, 3:62 Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago (RIC), 3:48, 54, 55–56, 59–60 Rehabilitation medicine advances in, 3:48 emphasis on community outreach in, 3:59 impact of World War II on, 3:52 patient-centered, comprehensive approach to, 3:55–56 Remembrance Day Ceremony, 2:31 Remini, Lauretta Tierney, 3:50 Remini, Robert V., 3:48–63 Remini, Ruth T. Kuhner, 3:60 Remini, William Francis, 3:50 Reuther, Walter, 3:40 Robie, Frederick C., House, 1:71 Robinson, Jackie, 1:38 Rohl-Smith, Carl, 3:9, 13, 17, 26 Rousseau, Jean, 3:21 Rovner, The Honorable Ilana, 3:63 Rudolph, Charles, 2:57 Rush Medical College, 1:44, 46 Rush Medical School, 1:46 Rusk, Howard, 3:52 Ruth, Babe, 1:24, 31–32, 34 Ryerson, Martin, 3:7, 28
S Sackett, Lester, 2:16 St. Agatha’s Academy, 1:47 St. Joseph School for boys, 1:44 St. Louis Browns (baseball team), 1:30 St. Louis Cardinals (baseball team), 1:24, 36, 37 St. Mary of the Lake University, 1:47 St. Mary’s girl’s parochial school, 1:44 St. Xavier Academy, 1:44, 47 St. Xavier College, 1:51–52 St. Xavier University, 1:44, 53 Sallers, William, 2:14, 16 Sandburg, Carl, 3:48 Sandburg, Carl, Award for Nonfiction, 3:60 Sanitary Fairs of 1863 and 1865, 1:4, 6–7 Bryan Hall at, 1:4 Union Hall at, 1:6–7 Saucedo, Maria, Scholastic Academy, 2:68 Sauer, Hank, 1:37 Scharf, Albert F., 3:18 Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr., 3:59 Schmidt, Sister Eva, 1:42 Schoelwer, Susan Prendergast, 1:17 School architecture, in the Progressive Era, 2:52–72 Schurz, Carl, High School, 2:66–67 Sears Tower (Graham, 1974), 1:64 Secondary education, changing role of, in American society, 2:52–72 Senn, Nicholas, High School, 2:62, 68, 70–71 Seventh Cavalry, 3:17 Shedd, John G., 2:12 Sherman Hotel (Chicago), 3:43
Shiloh Cyclorama, 1:7 Sholund, Evelyn, 3:45–46 Shoop, John D., 3:37 “A Shrine of Patriotic Memories,” article by Jennifer R. Bridge, 1:4–23 The Signal of Peace, 3:7–9, 26 Simmons, Al, 1:24, 33 Sinatra, Frank, 1:67 Sioux War, 3:18 “Sister Kenny” method of treating crippling disease, 1:51 Sisters of Mercy, 1:42–55 Sit-down strikes, 3:40 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), 1:56, 61–62, 64–65 Smith, Joseph, 3:48 Society of Midland Authors Award, 3:60 The Sound of Christmas (recording), 1:56 South Division High School, 2:54–55 Southern Fertilizer Company, 1:8 South Shore community (Chicago), 1:58, 65 Spalding, A. G., and Brothers Sporting Goods, 1:34 The Spearman (Mestrovic), 3:24–26 Starks, Robert, 2:36 Stevens Hotel (Chicago), 3:43 Stewart, Captain, 1:11 The Story of Libby Prison, 1:12 The Strangest Interlude in a Century of Progress, 3:40 Sullivan, Louis, 1:65 Sun Goddess (recording), 1:56, 66–67 Sweethearts (operetta), 3:43
T Task Force for Black Political Empowerment, 2:36–37 Taylor, Elizabeth, 3:62 Teachers African American, 3:37 demonstrations by, 3:36–37 ethnic and religious differences in, 3:38 female, 3:36–37 male, 3:35–37 working conditions of, 3:32 Teachers unions, history of, in Chicago, 3:32–47 Teaching Catholic Church and, 3:38–39 elementary-school, 3:36 men in, 3:35 secondary-school, 3:35–37 women in, 3:35, 36 Telfair, Sam, 3:53 Theatrical Trust, 2:7, 12, 29 Terkel, Studs, 2:51 Thompson, Bill, 3:38 Tilden, Edward, Technical High School, 2:68, 3:39 Tilden Career Community Academy, 2:68 Tom Sawyer, 3:28 Treaty of Chicago (1833), 3:4–5 Tree, Lambert, 3:7, 9 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 3:21 Tyner, Howard, 3:28 Index to Volume 32 | 71
U Union, Alfred R., 2:67–68 Union Hall at Sanitary Fair of 1865, 1:6–7 United Automobile Workers, 3:40 United States Air Force Academy Chapel, 1:56, 61–62, 66 United States Census Bureau, 2:58 University of Blida (Algeria), 1:56 University of Chicago, 1:56 University of Illinois at Chicago, 1:56, 59, 67–69, 2:35, 3:48, 56–57, 63 Art and Architecture Building, 1:66 Institute for Humanities at, 3:56 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 3:22 “Fighting Illini,” 3:22 University of St. Mary of the Lake, 1:45 University of Virginia, 3:52 Medical School at, 3:59 Uptown neighborhood (Chicago), 3:31 U.S. Cellular Field, 1:24 U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 1:59 U.S. Navy, 3:52 U.S. News and World Report, 3:48
V Van Buren, Martin, 3:52 Van Dusen, Hugh, 3:56, 59 Velde, James Van De, 1:47 Vietnam War, 3:26 Vincent, Sister Mary, 1:45 Virginia, University of, 3:52, 59 Vocational programs for girls, 2:61–62 Voice of Ethnic (VOTE) Communities, 2:33 Voter registration, election of Harold Washington and, 2:32–33 Vrdolyak, Edward, 2:33
W Wade in the Water (recording), 1:56, 64 Waller, Robert A., High School, 2:64 Walsh, Sister Annette, 1:51 Ward, Arch, 1:24, 26, 30 Warde, Mother Mary Frances Xavier, 1:42, 44 Warneke, Lon, 1:24, 32 War of 1812, 3:9 Washington, Dinah, 1:67 Washington, George, 3:56 Washington, Harold, 1:71, 2:32–51 Washington, Roy, Sr., 2:32 Washington Senators (baseball team), 1:35 Wattenberg, William, 3:38–39 Wayman African Methodist Episcopal Church, 1:57 WCFL (Chicago Federation of Labor radio station), 3:46 Weather Report, 1:64 Webster, Daniel, 3:48 Wells High School, 1:59 West Division High School, 2:54–55, 57 Western Historical Company, 3:7 72 | Chicago History | Spring 2004
White, Maurice, 1:63–64 Willett, James R., 2:54 Williams, Billy, 1:40 Williams, Charl, 3:35 Williams, Ted, 1:36 The Wizard of Oz, 2:7 WNUA-FM, 1:71 Women as members of teachers union, 3:43–45 in teaching, 3:35–36 Women’s Auxiliary of the Lu Palmer Foundation, 2:34 Women’s Network for [Harold] Washington, 2:40 Wood’s, Colonel, dime museum, 1:4 World’s Columbian Exposition (1893), 1:16–17, 3:7, 9, 14 World War II, impact on rehabilitation medicine, 3:52 Worrill, Conrad, 2:36 Wounded Knee, 3:17, 26 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1:62, 65, 66, 71, 72, 2:67 Wrigley Building, 3:26 Wrigley Field, 1:24, 26, 27, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40 Wynn, Ethyl, 2:16
Y “Yesterday’s City: Chicago’s Sisters of Mercy,” article by Joy Clough, R. S. M., 1:42–55 Yost, L. Morgan, 1:61 Young, Eldee, 1:62 Young, Ella Flagg, 2:68, 70 Young, Lester, 1:67
Z Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church, 1:57 Zook, George F., 3:32