Chicago History | Fall 2005

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Fall 2005 VOLUME XXXIV, NUMBER 1

Contents

4 32 52

Bookbinding and the Progressive Vision Sherri Berger

Emmett Till’s Day in Court Joy L. Bivins

Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Ellen Gates Starr set out to learn bookbinding so that she might “make something worth making.� Above: Starr at work in her book bindery studio at Hull-House.

4 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

Bookbinding and the Progressive Vision SHERRI BERGER

Through binding books, Hull-House’s Ellen Gates Starr turned her personal faith in art into a program of reform.

I

n the 1880s, the American city changed and expanded rapidly as a result of the Second Industrial Revolution. The “Gilded Age” was a period of industry, product, and consumerism, defined by the flow of goods and the rise of the middle class. Yet, it was also a time of overpopulation, mass unemployment, and poverty. Multitudes of working-class families, many recently immigrated, crammed into small and squalid tenement houses and vied for employment in the new factories.

Progressivism arose in response to these many changes. A multifaceted and often contradictory program of reform, the movement initiated a variety of social programs, professional institutions, and civil actions to help improve the quality of public life.

Regardless of their particular reforms and plans, all Progressives strove to determine how society would accommodate the rise of the city and define the look of urban America in the modern age.

When Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr founded Hull-House in September 1889, they established the first social settlement in Chicago, which would soon become the early center of Progressive reform in the United States. Historian Allen F. Davis describes settlement workers as “progressive with a vengeance” because “unlike some who committed themselves to reform only ideologically, they actually became involved, to the extent of going to live in the slums.” Addressing urban problems at the ground level, Hull-House aimed to alleviate the poor conditions of the city and foster a sense of community among the residents on Chicago’s West Side.

Throughout the decades they spent at the settlement, Addams, Starr, and their fellow activists initiated major reforms in labor practices, health codes, housing standards, and urban living conditions. Believing that quality of life entailed the exercise and enjoyment of human potential, they concentrated on the mental, emotional, and social uplift of the people they helped.

In 1914, Starr joined employees of the Henrici Restaurant to protest their working conditions. After being arrested, she stated, “I do not see why American citizens should not have the right to protest when they see what they believe is an injustice.”

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Although Addams described the handicraft practice. By bookbinding motivations for these reform efforts in at Hull-House, Starr demonstrated her various, now famous, writings, two contradictory reactions to Starr also articulated her underlate nineteenth-century life. The standing of the Progressive goals American craft revival, such as underlying the settlement movement. bookbinding, was indicative of a Taking a somewhat more theoretical therapeutic and largely reactionary approach than Addams and her conresponse to modernity. Many enthutemporaries, Starr wrote in 1896 that siasts of the Arts and Crafts movethe settlement movement originated ment participated in rural crafting “on the basis that the real good of the guilds in a nostalgic recreation of individual and of society must be at the pre-modern past. one.” She explained, “We must work Far from escaping modern consefor [reform] together,” for “to work quences, however, Starr intensified with people and not for them is an her involvement in urban reform essential note of the settlement efforts intensified at the same time motif.” With these statements, Starr that she began bookbinding. After defined the central principles of the joining the Socialist Party in 1902— social settlement and arguably a step radical even among HullProgressivism as a whole. At the close House labor sympathizers—Starr of the nineteenth century, Starr and became the most outspoken and other reformers questioned the social militant activist at the settlement. In value of the individual in the modern the 1910s, Starr played a major role age. Hull-House, Starr maintained, in women’s labor strikes; for attempted to answer that question by example, in the Henrici Restaurant promoting individual development as strike in 1914, she walked the a means of achieving widespread picket line, “harangued” the perpereform. Settlement Progressives aimed trators, and was arrested. This pasto, in her words, “reconstruct life for sionate woman, who “crusaded us all” by encouraging self-sufficiency down dirty streets . . . no more and personal growth. daunted by policemen than she In 1897, Starr suspended her would have been by Saracens or obligations as Hull-House art teacher dragons,” was zealous in her to take an apprenticeship with a fine Progressive conviction—far more so Arts and Crafts bookbinder in than cool-headed settlement coEngland, where she spent fifteen founder Jane Addams. As a result, months of the following two years. historians tend to view Starr’s craftUpon her homecoming, Starr estabwork as idiosyncratic to Hull-House lished a bookbinding studio on the and inconsistent with Progressive third floor of the settlement’s Butler reform. Many typecast Starr as Art Building, where, “surrounded by Addams’s more artistic and soulthe implements of her craft,” she searching sidekick, suggesting that could “be found at almost any hour she looked to bookbinding to fulfill of the day, pasting, sewing, tooling or her unique and personal needs. designing” handmade books. HullOn the contrary, Starr’s bookHouse residents and visitors were binding was the culmination of a curious about this peculiar enter- Starr ran as the Socialist candidate for unique Progressive vision that prise, and Starr admitted, “People alderman of the Nineteenth Ward in 1916. evolved between 1879 and 1902. wonder, I suppose, why a resident of Her modest campaign initiatives included During these years, Starr developed Hull-House chose to bind books and distributing palm cards (pictured above) and a profound faith in art and what connection it has with the work raising the party’s vote in the ward. extended that interest outward in a or life of the House.’ program of collective redemption.

Such curiosity stemmed from the seemingly vague Having found personal meaning in the beautiful and connection between Starrr’s Progressive reforms and her convinced of its value to society at large, Starr fervently 6 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

Although she did not anticipate winning, Starr entered the aldermanic race after learning that the ticket did not contain a Socialist candidate. Above: Starr’s application for alderman. Left: Newspaper coverage of the race.

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other reformers. From childhood, Starr was intrigued by religion and art and became increasingly preoccupied with these subjects as she grew into a young adult. At Hull-House, Starr would forge her own distinct brand of Progressivism out of the ideas and interests she developed in her youth.

Born on March 19, 1859, to Caleb Allen Starr and Susan Gates Childs, Ellen grew up alongside three siblings at Spring Park, a modest farm in the small downstate town of Laona, Illinois. In these early years, Caleb stirred Ellen’s intellectual curiosity and moral sensibilities. In his obituary, Ellen lovingly recalled her father’s “spirited reading” of literature to his children, which “gave us the greatest joy.” Caleb extended his love of reading and his belief in education to the members of his community through his active participation in the Grange, a radically progressive association of farmers. In language Ellen would later use in her writings about the settlement movement, Caleb once announced to the Grange, “The most heinous sin American farmers have been guilty of is the neglect of intellectual culture. All may do something to redeem themselves from the consequences of that error.” Ellen recounted that her father “urge[d] upon farmers the importance of . . . cultivating the sense of beauty.” These comments revealed Caleb’s

Upon her father’s death, Starr wrote and published a ten-page obituary, in which she described him as “a good farmer” and “tirelessly enthusiastic.”

protested the unsightly urban environment and the degeneration of art in the industrial age.

While Starr’s labor activism addressed the need to reform social conditions, her artistic program addressed the need to reform social values. Through art activism, which culminated in her bookbinding, Starr investigated the relationship between the individual and society at a time when these terms were called into question.

Although she certainly was not typical of Hull-House workers, her seemingly peculiar avenues of reform encapsulated the needs, fears, and ideals underlying the Progressive impulse.

In some important ways, Starr’s motivations mirrored those of Addams, who documented the evolution of the settlement in her autobiographical account, Twenty Years at Hull-House, in 1910. Moral, ambitious, and directed, both women formed the social settlement to address problems they saw facing society and to find personal fulfillment in doing so. At the same time, Starr’s unique early life caused her to formulate a Progressive vision that differed in significant ways from that of Addams and 8 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

After she retired, Starr wrote extensively on Catholic beliefs and rituals. In this issue of Sponsa Regis, she wrote an article on “The Liturgy of Palm Sunday and Holy Saturday.”

Eliza Allen Starr (above) gained recognition for her talents as a poet, artist, and educator. As an independent woman and a devout Catholic, Eliza greatly influenced her niece, Ellen.

commitment to the masses, belief in culture as a means of improvement, and faith in individual potential. Ellen admired these traits in her father and demonstrated them in her own beliefs and actions.

Caleb’s sister, Eliza Allen Starr, further exposed Ellen to the arts and cultivated her interest in religion. Eliza was a celebrated poet, artist, and educator who taught drawing to society’s elite, traveled throughout Europe to study the Old Masters, and published works of poetry.

When she moved to Chicago in 1856 to open a drawing studio, Eliza began to spend her summers at Spring Park.

There she augmented her brother’s appreciation of the fine arts and served as a role model and spiritual guide for her thoughtful and ambitious niece. Eliza had converted to Catholicism at age thirty and observed many of her religious duties at Spring Park. Ellen, who was living in Caleb’s largely secular household, was attracted to her aunt’s faith and its ritual. Eliza embodied a synthesis of passions for art and spirituality and demonstrated for Ellen the means by which a woman of talents might live a broadening and successful life.

As a young adult, Starr tried to follow her aunt’s example, but she found herself caught in what Addams

described as the “snare of preparation” facing educated women in the late nineteenth century. Borrowing the phrase from Tolstoy’s writings, Addams defined the “snare” as the frustrating expectation that women be educated, only to have limited opportunities with which to use their knowledge. In 1877, Starr enrolled at the Rockford Female Seminary, an Illinois women’s college, where she delved into art and literature. The seminary also introduced her to a vivacious group of female colleagues, of which Addams became her closest friend.

Unfortunately, after just one year at Rockford, Starr was forced to withdraw because her family could not afford the tuition. Accepting that “duty calls,” she found work in 1878 as a rural schoolteacher, and the following year attained a teaching position at the prestigious Miss Kirkland’s School for Girls in Chicago.

Although Starr’s job kept her busy, it did not sufficiently satisfy her curiosity and ambition, so she continued her own studies. In 1882, she began preparing for the entrance exam to Harvard Annex, the women’s college associated with the university. Determined to pass, Starr upheld a challenging study schedule of Latin, algebra, and advanced literature while keeping up her Bookbinding | 9

Within Hull-House (pictured above, c. 1900), Starr was determined to lead a socially, intellectually, and spiritually meaningful life.

10 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

daytime teaching job. On the scheduled day, however, Starr learned that she could not take the Harvard exam because the women’s test was not administered in Chicago, a regulation that was apparently poorly advertised. Resigned, she returned to her students at Miss Kirkland’s, where she remained for five years. Similar to Addams, Starr had become an educated and cultured woman but lacked opportunities through which she could use, expand, and deepen her knowledge. Starr’s ardent desire to put her talents to use, coupled with the sense of social responsibility she had inherited from her father, caused her to join Addams in an innovative reform experiment.

If ethics and ambition determined Starr’s participation at Hull-House, then her intensifying interest in religion and art dictated the programs she would initiate and how she would spend her time. Sparked by her aunt, Starr’s interest in spirituality escalated when she arrived in Chicago.

Seeking a form of worship that would suit her, Starr embarked on a program of religious “sightseeing and adventure hunting” throughout the city. Often spending more time en route than in prayer, Starr soon became frustrated with her inability to find a stable center of worship. The services and sermons that she attended, while theologically and morally sound, did little to inspire. She could not “endure” a nearby Episcopal church, because she loathed its ministers’ tendency to “go through the service as if their chief aim was to get home early.” In search of a more intense spiritual experience, Starr associated herself with a number of Christian orders, in succession, before converting to Catholicism in 1920.

Many scholars have interpreted Starr’s dramatic changes of denomination as evidence of a crisis of religious conviction. But, Addams more accurately identified the problem when she remarked in a letter to her friend, “You long for a beautiful faith . . . yours is a reaching for higher things.”

Addams was responding to Starr’s confession that only services with art and music reached her spiritually. For Starr, the ability to find meaning in worship depended upon the aesthetic manifestation of religious truth. Beauty, rather than theology, inspired Starr’s faith and helped her to feel connected with a sense of the divine.

Failing to settle on a church with a sufficient aesthetic dimension, Starr turned to secular art in hopes of satisfying her spiritual needs. Her view of art resounded with John Keats’s famous proclamation, “Beauty is truth,

truth beauty.” In an 1884 letter to her cousin Mary Allen, Starr described how Victorian writer George Eliot inspired her faith in a higher power. Starr approached Eliot’s prose as she would scripture, finding that the beautiful writings, though secular in theme, resonated with spiritual meaning. Explicitly, defining spiritualism for Allen in 1891, she explained her “craving after something to clutch at with the hands of the flesh and be dragged over into the infinite and holy.” Notably, Starr emphasized her need to literally grasp the spiritual, intimating her later fascination with craftwork.

At Hull-House, Starr turned her personal faith in art into a program of Progressive reform for Chicago’s working class. From the settlement’s opening, she presided over what Addams termed a “many-sided experiment” to “make the aesthetic and artistic a vital influence in the lives of its neighbors.” Within the first few weeks of the settlement’s existence, Starr led a “reading party” for George Eliot’s Romola. The success of the project encouraged Starr to begin regular lectures on literature and art history. These extension courses were augmented upon the completion of the Butler Art Building in 1891, which provided studio space for fine arts instruction and included a gallery where Starr arranged exhibitions for the general public. To promote art in neighborhood homes, HullHouse maintained a circulating picture collection, from which people could borrow reproductions of fine artworks.

On the surface, these programs seemed to be designed to, as one reporter put it, “spread enlightenment and taste” among the masses living in the ugly shadow of urban development. Yet, given Starr’s spiritual understanding of art, the insertion of beauty into the public landscape was an effort of profound collective renewal.

As Addams observed of her friend, Starr “not only feeds her own mind and finds her highest enjoyment in Art, but . . . believes that every soul has a right to be thus fed and solaced.” In this sense, Hull-House art programs were not unlike missionary efforts. Starr viewed art as a tool of spiritual rejuvenation and saw the social settlement as responsible for using that tool in its project of social reform.

Starr’s most explicit attempt to redeem the community through her art activism was the Chicago Public School Art Society (CPSAS), which she founded in conjunction with Hull-House in 1894. Fearing that children growing up in crowded and ugly tenements lacked access to Bookbinding | 11

Members of the CPSAS strove to give “proper artistic attention” to ordinary schools. Led by Starr, the group redecorated the Drake School as “a model school building.”

12 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

images of “all that makes the world beautiful,” Starr intended to beautify the city’s schools. Her first aim was to create a more pleasing educational atmosphere.

Members of the CPSAS argued that classrooms should be painted in more “agreeable colors” that appealed to the children’s aesthetic sensibilities and were more conducive to learning. The society also solicited funds and donations to acquire a collection of artworks for the schools. Starr and her fellow reformers introduced into classrooms reproductions of famous paintings, portraits of American heroes such as Abraham Lincoln, and pleasing landscapes and country scenes. Teachers were asked to help illuminate the works for the children by discussing them with their classes. This movement garnered much attention within Chicago and beyond.

Throughout 1895 and 1896, Starr delivered speeches to education associations and clubs in Chicago, Detroit, and New York.

In the CPSAS manifesto, Starr stressed the importance of art in the redemption of spirituality and the fulfillment of human potential. “All schoolrooms should be attractive,” she wrote, so that “all the powers of mind and soul may indeed be called forth as far as possible” and asserted that the “soul of man cannot live by the three R’s alone.” The project embodied Starr’s belief that art had the potential to inspire, uplift, and redeem the masses in the midst of bleak city life. Starr contended that the fulfillment of the soul was tied to human growth. Void of inspiration, children without art lacked ideals to which they could aspire. “It is saddening to think,” she wrote, “of the hundreds of children turned out of our public schools without love of the beautiful and the heroic; no ideals to fill their imagination.” Living in ugliness, she wrote, children “must inevitably grow up in a dullness of the sensibilities to beauty and truth.”

Starr’s Progressive vision of art was also a revolt against the impact of modernity on aesthetics. Before the Industrial Revolution, everyday items were unique in their man-made imperfections; the new modern items, modeled after a single pattern and manufactured in bulk, tended to look impersonal and uniform. To Starr, the new aesthetic was a degradation of the truly beautiful, representing in her words the “cheap and nasty.” In an unpublished speech she prepared in 1895, she asserted, “It is only when the commercial motive enters (introduced by ‘Civilization’), and the object becomes primarily to sell and only secondarily to please, that degradation and vulgarity set in.” Using “Civilization” to mean modern commercialism, Starr contended that modern industry sacrificed beauty for economy. Industrialization had allowed for cheaper and faster manufacture, but it had done so at the expense of quality of design.

The “degradation” of aesthetics also included the growing reliance on excessive ornamentation to mask the

Starr viewed the social settlement as an agent of spiritual and artistic redemption. As the resident art teacher at Hull-House, she promoted many art classes, including painting and pottery. Above: A children’s painting class in 1924. Below: Olga Huncke made these copper bowls in the Hull-House metal shop, c. 1915.

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poor quality or artistry of the objects produced.

Commenting on the focus of manufacturers to sell their products rather than design and improve them, she implicitly criticized the culture of commodity that pervaded the American middle class at the turn of the century and supported Thorstein Veblen’s theory of “conspicuous consumption.” Further, she maintained that abundance of goods among these people did not necessarily entail abundance of good taste. Produced simply for the sake of production and consumed for the sake of consumption, modern goods lacked value in and of themselves.

Given Starr’s complex view of art, this seemingly superficial criticism suggested a deeper conflict with the modern world. In destroying artistic authenticity, modern manufacturing caused a waning of spiritual truth. Starr feared this loss of the spiritual, viewed the degradation of the aesthetic as the direct cause of that loss, and in doing so, anticipated a profound consequence of industrialization.

The Arts and Crafts movement in America was, at its base level, a reaction to this waning of authenticity in the industrial age. Suffering from what cultural historian T. J. Jackson Lears has termed a fin de siècle “yearning for authentic experience,” American crafts revivalists advocated a return to aesthetics that were more “real” than their modern commodities. In the late 1890s, these revivalists founded a number of Arts and Crafts societies and guilds to address their concerns and actively practice and promote handicrafts. The main tenet of the movement was truth: truth to the essence of material, the uniqueness of the artist, and the use of the finished object. Craftsmen drew their influences from Gothic architecture, old-world peasant crafts, Shaker designs, and nature—anything that they found spiritual or somehow authentic—to create objects resonating with truth in their form and in their function.

Starr cemented her position in the movement by helping to found the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society (CACS) in 1897. CACS met twice a month in the HullHouse library to discuss and promote the practice of handicraft. By the time Starr left for her bookbinding apprenticeship in 1898, the CACS roster consisted of 128 people. Aiming “to cultivate in its members and through them in others a just sense of beauty,” the society organized exhibits and programs to “influence sources of design and decoration” and to “extend the appreciation of the possibility of beauty in articles of every-day use.” CACS articulated many of the aesthetic goals of the movement in its exhibitions and publications. In addition to stressing simplicity of design and natural forms, CACS focused on the uniqueness of objects and their makers. Human individuality was essential to a successful piece of handicraft, for “it is pre14 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

Hull-House residents greeted their visitors in the settlement’s reception hall, pictured here in 1910.

Bookbinding | 15

Hull-House (above) promoted a variety of clubs, lectures, and entertainments through the Hull-House Bulletin (left). The settlement grounds (map below) provided space for all of these activities.

16 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

cisely this variation,” an exhibition review concluded, “which makes the work of the hand interesting and the work of a machine uninteresting.”

Through both CPSAS and CACS, Starr asserted the universal value of the artistic product in an age that tended to say otherwise. At a time when beauty was obscured from a significant portion of the population, she extolled art’s potential to rejuvenate and humanize the masses; as uniform, mechanized production rapidly became the norm, she defended aesthetic variation as the distinct mark of human expression. Although her dual approach attempted to solve slightly different problems, her underlying belief in both projects was that art reflected, enriched, and propelled the human soul.

This belief formed the basis of Starr’s conception of art as a process. In “Soul Culture,” an 1878 college essay published in the Rockford Seminary Magazine, Starr proposed a theory linking her value of the artistic product with the process of human growth. This essay revealed a Transcendentalist dimension to Starr’s thoughts about the beautiful. Art, she contended, reflected the artist’s soul, ambition, and human ideals. Starr quoted poet Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Each day ye break and image in your shrine / And plant a fairer image where it stood.” In her interpretation of these lines, Starr asserted, “this is not fickleness; it is growth. We form a fairer image to enshrine the fairer sentiment of which we have become capable.” In a display of personal will, the artist strove to approach “something higher.”

This process of individual growth, realized through the practice of art-making, was “the true object of life.”

Starr concluded her essay with the Emersonian conviction that “man must ever measure what he is by what he could be, and look mournfully into the abyss between them.” The meaning of existence, she contended, was the infinite striving of the individual to improve himself: “this longing of the soul, this noble unrest of the mind, lead[s] us onward to a capacity for the highest experience.” The importance of art, therefore, shifted from product to process. Artistic creation allowed the individual to depict, project, and approach a better image of the self.

Living in the Chicago slums, Starr came to realize that modern systems of production threatened this vision of individual growth. At Hull-House, she learned firsthand the horrific conditions in which her neighbors toiled.

Suffering, in Starr’s words, “squalor, deformity and irrecoverable loss of health,” factory workers were the direct victims of industrialization. In an effort to reverse these trends, settlement workers at the turn of the century fought to eradicate child labor, increase wages, reduce hours, and improve conditions for factory workers. At the same time, Starr identified more abstract consequences of the new means of production, ques-

tioning the very nature of industry. In “The Renaissance of Handicraft,” an article in the International Socialist Review of 1902, Starr explained that protest of working conditions was an inadequate response to modern manufacture. She wrote, “Working men complain of injustice done them in regard to too long working hours, too little pay, insalubrious surroundings, tyranny of one sort and another; but seldom if at all do they cry out against the indignity of the kind of work they are forced to do.”

Starr detailed “the kind of work” factories demanded of their employees in the unpublished, undated speech, “Bookbinding as an Art, and as a Commercial Industry.”

Using commercial bookbinding techniques to exemplify all factory methods, Starr described the division of labor that occurred in assembly-line production. Workers, she explained, had extremely specialized functions within the factory, performing no more than “the one or two processes to which their work is restricted.” She continued, “Like the labor in all common factories, the various stages in the making of a book have been specialized and detached until they are done without interest and without love. The work has been unsocialized, de-individualized, deprived of all traces of human touch, and rendered wholly mechanical.” The move to a factory system, Starr pointed out, had changed the very nature of production. While older methods of production had allowed an individual to make a complete product, taking artistic liberties in attention to the details of the design, the newer system stifled the ability to create an item in its entirety with comprehension, pleasure, and expressive freedom.

In making these claims, Starr reiterated ideas fundamental to the Arts and Crafts movement. Before its emergence in the United States, Arts and Crafts had evolved in England throughout the nineteenth century as a series of responses to industrial processes and the artistic consequences of modern production. Art critic John Ruskin and master craftsman William Morris, both formative figures in the movement, influenced Starr’s views. In the 1840s and 1850s, Ruskin first provided the crucial link between art and labor when he judged the aesthetics of buildings according to the means by which they were constructed. Championing the Gothic style, he determined that medieval workmen, though bound by feudalism, retained more freedom than the modern factory employee insofar as they possessed artistic liberty.

Morris, a committed Socialist and master artisan, developed Ruskin’s theories into the “craftsman ideal.”

Redefining art as the joy a man took in his labor, Morris lectured throughout England on the demoralizing affects of industrialization on the individual worker. He established his own workshop, in direct contrast to the modern factory, where he taught and employed unskilled laborers to master and love a craft.

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according to Starr, created not work but toil: a sterile means of production affording the individual no freedom or pleasure.

Starr determined that this kind of production reduced workers to the status of machines, the dull process stripping them of their humanity. Writing in 1902, she angrily observed: How slavish a state of society is this in which the mass of men may not decide whether or not they approve the making of a certain ware, but must perforce go in under a sign of ‘men wanted’ (which should read ‘puppets wanted’) and turn some crank as they are bidden, asking no questions for conscience’s or reason’s sake.

Revealing Ruskin’s influence on her thinking, Starr believed that the industrial system stifled autonomy and denied individuals the exercise of their higher faculties. Modern industry, and by implication modern American civilization, denied an entire class of people what Starr had determined as the “true object of life,” the ability to live and grow as human beings in the projection of their ideals.

Starr believed that the stifling of the worker’s creative potential resulted in the artistic vacancy of society at large. In the final paragraphs of “Art and Labor,” she passionately argued that if modern systems of production were not fundamentally reformed, civilization as a whole would lack art: Starr maintained that the modern factory inhibited the exercise of human strengths, particularly creativity. Aiming to reverse this trend, she and Addams founded the Hull-House Labor Museum to educate workers about their materials and the entire process of production. Above: A loom in the Labor Museum.

Starr incorporated these theories into her own idea of the artistic process to form a Progressive critique of modern production. Responding to the industrial procedures she witnessed at factories, Starr recast her definition of art in light of Arts and Crafts ideals. In “Art and Labor,” an essay included in the sociological study HullHouse Maps and Papers (1895), Starr proclaimed, “It is only when a man is doing work which he wishes done, and delights in doing, and which he is free to do as he likes, that his work becomes a language to him. As soon as it does . . . it is artistic.” The factory system, however, denied workers both their artistic autonomy and the ability to find joy in their labor. Characterizing the factory as an institutionalized system of slavery, she stated that “the fatal mistake of our modern civilization” was that “we have thought . . . that they, the workers, the makers, need not know what grace and beauty and harmony are” in the process in which they were employed.

Division of labor and mechanical reproduction, 18 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

What we do with our hands will be fair, and men shall have pleasure therein. This will be art.

Otherwise we cannot all have it; and until all have it in some measure, none can have it in great measure.

And if gladness ceases upon the earth, and we turn the fair earth into a prison-house for men with hard and loveless labor, art will die.

With this statement, Starr asserted the pivotal and most radical principle of the Arts and Crafts movement: the degradation of art in society was the result of a fundamental social injustice. Cities were not uninspired and drab by nature; ugliness was not necessarily intrinsic to urban development. Rather, modernity had brought about its own artistic demise. As long as some people remained in bondage, denied the right to live and grow, all people suffered the same fate. The reform of modern civilization, therefore, entailed “the freeing of the art power of the whole nation and race by enabling [workers] to work in gladness and not in woe.”

Yet, realizing that a radical shift in industrial processes would take time and massive force, Starr advocated a return to handicraft for the worker so that he might find joy and expression in art. In 1902, she wrote, “The constant and agreeable use in his daily work of all his faculties, which lie dormant for the most part . . . must make

of him a much more effective social factor as well as a happier and more rational human being.” This was a direct articulation of Starr’s Progressive ideology. The nurturing of the individual’s mind and soul through handicraft, she suggested, would render him a “more effective social factor,” thus contributing to the growth and expansion of society at large.

The establishment of the Hull-House Labor Museum marked the formal integration of Starr’s craftsman ideal into the workings of the settlement. Shortly after Starr returned from her bookbinding apprenticeship, she and Addams opened the workshop to “graphically illustrate” various processes of manual manufacture. In the First Report of a Labor Museum at Hull House, they articulated their goals in starting such a project. Inspired by aging Italian immigrants who continued to practice old spinning and weaving techniques, the settlement workers

aimed to create a space in which old-world traditions could be retained, displayed, and taught. Elder immigrants often felt alienated by their new country where they appeared anachronistic in the midst of urban and industrial development. In forming the Labor Museum, Addams and Starr intended to restore respect to these individuals, reincorporate them into the social fabric, and promote pride among ethnic communities in their unique traditions. It would also help bridge the generational gap between elders and their American progeny, fostering a mutual understanding through the shared process of artistic production.

As an active experiment of Starr’s craftsman ideal, the Labor Museum was specifically designed to stimulate younger workers who were already engaged in modern production. One of the objectives listed in the First Report read, “The young people who earn their livings in

Through the museum, Starr and Addams also hoped to bridge the generational gap between elder immigrants and their American-born children and grandchildren. Above: A young girl helps a man work machinery in the Labor Museum.

Bookbinding | 19

the shops and factories would have a chance to gain some idea of the material which they are constantly handling and might in time become conscious of the social connection of their work.” On an individual level, teaching the workers to understand the materials with which they were working restored them with control of production and gave them creative control of the material to form and fashion as they saw fit. In contrast to the division of labor by which modern factories operated, Starr advocated that workers see or engage in the entire production process to give them a fuller grasp of how items were produced in their totality. By making a product from start to finish, workers might begin to regain control of the process, thus taking more joy and pride in their labor.

The Labor Museum also encouraged the worker to see his place in a larger system of production and culture. The First Report stressed the museum’s aim to illuminate the historical and social relevance of the work, for “the natural connection of the [modern] workshop with culture is entirely lost” to the modern worker. Lectures accompanying handiwork demonstrations placed each craft in an historical trajectory and described the social changes that instigated or followed periods of industrial advancement.

The aim in part was to show workers how their suffering and alienation had precedence in the evolution of new technologies, so “the isolated woman who trys [sic] to support herself by hand needlework is analogous in her position to the weaver of one hundred years ago.”

Through these Labor Museum activities, Starr advocated a Progressive revival of handicraft that specifically addressed the relationship between the individual and the collective. Central to this reform project were the notions that collective experience depended upon the expression of individual ideals and that artistic production was a complex cultural phenomenon. In “Art and Labor,” she summarized, “Art must be of the people if it is to be at all. . . . If we look to any great national art . . . we see that it has not been produced by a few, living apart, fed upon conditions different from the common life; but that it has been, in great part, the expression of that common life.”

Starr saw art as the assertion of the collective will through an individual consciousness. The expression of one ideal was the expression of all ideals; the revival of handicraft for one was the revival of art for all.

When Starr opened her bookbindery in 1899, she intensified this Progressive vision by participating in the artistic process. Intending the bindery to be an integral aspect of the Labor Museum, Starr viewed her craft as an extension of her reform efforts. To clarify her interest in the craft for curious settlement visitors, she wrote in the brief Hull-House circular, “I used to enjoy interpreting to others, as far as I was able, the beautiful things which have been made in the past, and to think 20 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

it did good. But . . . it began to seem to me not enough to talk about and explain beautiful and well-made things.” No longer satisfied by talking about art, Starr looked to bookbinding as a means of responding personally to the issues she considered important. In the steady practice of handicraft, Starr articulated in material form her critique of modern industr y and vividly asserted her faith in art. By binding books, she created physical representations of her Progressive values and enacted a process of reform.

Starr’s desire to contribute something of “worth” to society fed her interest in bookbinding. She used “worth” to suggest value on a collective rather than personal scale. With characteristic humility, she wrote, “The influence of anything I could make would, to be sure, be very small,” yet she hoped that her “modest little books” would contribute something of value to contemporary and future viewers. Regretting that her artworks were “necessarily very expensive,” Starr maintained that her patrons were not the primary reason for her to create a binding. Rather, “The chief question is whether the piece of work itself is worth doing. Nobody cares very much . . . for whom one of the Venetian binders bound a book.

One sees these things in a museum and learns from each the lesson of its perfection.” Thus, she viewed her craftwork on a historical trajectory, considering her role as an artisan in a broader social context.

It was a role Starr took seriously, for she strove to achieve highest level of craftsmanship. “It is no light matter to learn a craft thoroughly,” she ascertained, “and if it is not thoroughly learned it does more harm than good.”

Thus she left Hull-House in 1897 to apprentice with T. J. Cobden-Sanderson—a major Arts and Crafts proponent and the craftsman who in her opinion practiced “the most beautiful bookbinding in the world”—at the Doves Bindery in Hammersmith, England. Demanding diligence and fine workmanship from his pupils, he ensured their thorough instruction. Cobden-Sanderson warned Starr before her arrival, “And pray here take note, I have refused two ladies (from America), nay three, because they would not bow the knee to 12 months servitude!” This entailed a strenuous daily schedule over an extended period of time, “the hours . . . nine to four with an hour at noon, a Saturday half-holiday and only two weeks of holidays in the year.” Starr spent a total of fifteen months at the Doves, returning to the United States only to “avoid a second London winter,” during which time she practiced binding from home. Once settled again at Hull-House, she wrote to Cobden-Sanderson to ask for official confirmation of her competence and permission to bind commercially and take on pupils.

Starr was accepted to a bookbinding apprenticeship in England under T. J. Cobden-Sanderson at Doves Bindery (pictured at right).

Bookbinding | 21

Craftsmanship was essential for Starr, because bookbinding was part of her efforts to counter the shoddy production of modern factories. Declaring commercial bindings “frail,” Starr lamented the poor quality of the products, the degradation of their material and construction. Explaining how modern stitching processes bypassed the more intricate sewing of pages into a spine by hand, she remarked, “Of course, this saves much time, trouble and skill; but it injures the book very much.” Starr recognized the relative merits of cheap, mass-produced books, which could be distributed to more people at a lower cost, yet she believed that the continued practice of fine crafts would influence the technique and style of mass manufacture. She even proposed a series of adjustments that could be made, according to fine binding techniques, to commercial procedures in order to increase their quality while keeping prices low. Bookbinding, therefore, became an acute assertion of her devotion to fine craftsmanship in the face of industrialization.

Above: Starr’s intricate binding of The Fables of Bidpai compliments the subtle but complex lessons of the stories, which preceded and influenced the fables of Aesop After setting up her studio, Starr wrote to Cobden-Sanderson to ask permission to take on pupils. Right: Starr pictured in her bindery with Peter Verburg, her most promising student.

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Bookbinding | 23

Starr signed her binding of the Christ of Cynewulf (above) with a stamp on the inside back cover (detail at left).

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Fine craftsmanship entailed not only the proper construction of a functional binding but also the artistic conception of a work of art. Just after Christmas of 1900, Starr received a glowing letter from Yale professor Albert S. Cook, praising her skill in this aspect of handicraft.

She had recently completed the binding of a copy of Cook’s formative translation of the Old English poem the Christ of Cynewulf and had sent it to him as a gift.

Delighted with her handiwork, Cook referred to the bound work as “the Book Beautiful” and commended Starr, “I never was so confident that you have found your vocatio as now.” He stated that he had anticipated that Starr would execute her craftwork with technical precision and tastefulness, but he did not expect that she would demonstrate such “inventive power—the ability to reflect that soul of a book in its binding, to be daring with moderation and restraint, to express vital beauty with decision and grace.” At once convinced of Starr’s talent, Cook proclaimed, “you have never done a piece of work so good.”

Cook went on to list the elements of the binding he felt merited such acclaim. Starr had covered the book in red morocco leather and embossed or “tooled” a striking and unified design in gold. She structured the pattern with the subtle insinuation of a cross on the front and back covers, which Cook commended was “plainly but unobtrusively wrought into the total device.” At the intersection of each cross, Starr had placed a ring of passion flowers, reminiscent of Christ’s crown of thorns.

Starr had repeated these flowers with the slightest nuance in the corners of the covers and again along the spine, adding small leaves and decorations to round out the composition. Even the “arrangement of the title” on the spine evoked Cook’s admiration, for it humbly omitted the name of the translator and again resembled a crucifix. All of these details in design contributed to Cook’s appreciation of the binding. Pleasantly surprised

by Starr’s “poetic conception,” he delighted in “the command of structural masses, subordinated to the central idea; the variety in unity; the art supreme over material, and itself ministrant to religion.”

This binding exemplified Starr’s aesthetic sensibilities and dramatically proclaimed her faith in art in the modern age. Simple in design, true to material, and reliant on natural forms, the book exhibited the fundamental elements of the Arts and Crafts style, thereby asserting its unique, handmade value. Cook’s highest praise, however, was that the binding effectively conveyed the soul of the book and resonated with the poem’s truth. In fact, the design suggests as much. While Cook interpreted the dominant image as a cross, the negative space resembles a window, presumably into the book and perhaps into the divine or spiritual dimension of art itself. Although it is impossible to know whether Starr intended such a visual reading, the Bookbinding | 25

imagery complements her idea of the meaning of art. In 1884, she had articulated a similar thought in a letter to her cousin Mary, writing, “Ruskin says that he knows of no painting really great that has not some beyond; some opening through which one sees the light.”

Whether literally or figuratively, Starr had created a window through which one could “see the light” and lent a spiritual dimension to a material object.

Starr never explained why she chose bookbinding specifically to explore and express her faith in art, aside from writing vaguely that she was “interested in [books] from several points of view.” In selecting this particular craft, however, she dramatically demonstrated her vision by preserving as well as creating art. In a 1915 article on bookbinding, she declared, “There is something to be said . . . for the well constructed book as a sort of strongbox for treasure.” The preservation of literature or “treasure” was both a practical and a symbolic gesture.

Starr often stated in her writings that she only bound “books which seem to me worthy to last.” These included Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Ruskin’s Unto This Last, and eventually Addams’s The Spirit of Youth in the City Streets and Twenty Years at Hull-House. By handcrafting bindings for these books, Starr deemed them salient and valuable written texts. A binding asserted its own artistic worth while protecting and helping to illuminate (as in the case of the Christ of Cynewulf) a piece of literary art. More than any other piece of handicraft, a finely bound book testified to the significance of art in the industrial age. In Starr’s words, it was “an object of luxury and beauty, fitted to peaceful enjoyment and to a life of harmony and possible contemplation.”

Bookbinding also lent itself to Starr’s Progressive vision because it was extremely process oriented.

Demanding extensive practice in order to reach proficiency, it was in her words “one of the most 26 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

arduous of all the crafts.” In a series of four articles she contributed to Industrial Art Magazine, Starr detailed the steps involved in fine hand binding for those curious about the process. She stressed in these writings the amount of time, patience, and attention to detail required to successfully bind books and described thoroughly both the constructive and decorative dimensions of the craft: the preparation of pages for binding by fitting, sewing, and backing them with reinforcements; the means of fashioning boards into covers and lacing them to the pages; and the cutting, covering, trimming, and decorating of the colored leathers she used for her bindings. All of these tasks, Starr explained, demanded dexterity and meticulousness to execute properly. She remarked, “Every ill-done process rises up to accuse and harass all through the work.”

In performing and perfecting this arduous process, Starr enacted her craftsman ideal. Making something with her hands was crucial, she wrote, because “All modern life has been tending to separate the work of the mind and the work of the hands.” While her protest of the factory system aimed to reform the fact that a “vast body [of people] work with their hands . . . which does not in any way engage or develop the mind,” it did not address the issue that another “set of people work with their heads but produce nothing whatever with their hands.” Both types, she declared, “are living partial lives, not using all the powers God gave us.” Thus Starr admitted her own deficiencies in engaging only her mind. In a subtly more personal articulation of her Transcendentalist theory of human progress, she maintained that to fully engage all of her human faculties she would have to physically construct something. Believing human growth to be inextricably linked with the artistic process, Starr began her bindings by sketching potential patterns on paper. Three of her smaller patterns are pictured here.

bookbinding was a project of self-improvement.

Bookbinding allowed Starr to perform the circular process she had described in “Soul Culture,” thereby projecting her ideals and instigating her own growth.

By enacting this process of self-extension, Starr participated in a collective process of artistic production.

Although bookbinding proved to be too intricate and time-consuming to demonstrate properly at the Labor Museum, Starr saw her solitary practice as part of a deliberate social project. In “The Renaissance of Handicraft,” she explicitly contrasted her public vision of craftwork with what she perceived as an insular and disingenuous interest among some members of the societies. She wrote, “The rumor that well bred people nowa-days make things and have exhibitions may not infrequently have suggested the relief of ennui.”

Contrary to this ignoble motivation, she contended, a “genuine and useful” reason for taking up a craft Starr stressed that she only bound “books which seem to me worthy to last.” Left: Her pattern for the binding of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Below: A view of the Hull-House bookbindery.

Bookbinding | 27

Starr bound Some German Woodcuts of the Fifteenth Century using this pattern (left). She remained dissatisfied with the results, however, due to flaws in the leather. In the accompanying note (right), written after she retired and moved to New York, she la beled it “an imperfect book and not properly saleable.”

included, among others, the “desire to unite with those who work with their hands and to find a common basis of life and interest with them.” Starr felt compelled to bind books because she wanted to participate in a broader social process. Far from isolating herself or keeping locked in her bindery, she attempted to negotiate her place in and determine a “common basis” with her community.

Declaring that these “true motives” would be “sufficient . . . to advance a community somewhat toward a reasonable and comely life,” Starr suggested that the revival of handicraft actually contributed to the improvement of society. Ultimately, handicraft was a “worthy” activity because, she thought, making art was in and of itself a project of reform. In fact, Starr incorporated this idea from her bookbinding master’s Arts and Crafts teachings. In an 1899 address to the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society of London, Cobden-Sanderson declared that while true art could only be produced by a liberated people, the production of art by individuals might help move society toward the craftsman ideal. The aim of the Arts and Crafts movement, he declared, “is not merely to help the conscious 28 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

cultivation of art pending the transformation, but itself to bring the transformation about. . . . Art is, or should be, an agent in the production of noble life, and not merely an executant dependent upon and presupposing its existence.”

Starr, accordingly, created her bindings in the spirit of the “transformation.” Feeling that she herself had to take up a craft “if I were to act as I believed,” she bound books as an effort to push her reforms to another level.

Bookbinding, therefore, recapitulated the Progressive values that Starr had expressed through her Hull-House reforms. By working on this craft, Starr inserted herself into what she considered the system of collective production and rejected the modern tenets from which it had originated. To Starr, the practice and perfection of bookbinding was, for a time at least, the most direct confrontation of the modern problem and the most vivid expression of her Progressive vision.

Many years later, Starr admitted to her niece Josephine, “If I had thought it through, I would have realized that I would be using my hands to create books that only the rich could buy.” Indeed, Starr’s years in the bindery cannot be said to have affected as many concrete

Starr wrote extensively on bookbinding practices, including a four-part series for Industrial Arts magazine. The third part, above, was published in November 1915.

Bookbinding | 29

In her binding of Jane Addams’s Twenty Years at Hull-House, Starr decorated the cover with a repeating pattern of a double H enclosed in a circle.

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reforms for Chicago’s needy as did her activism on the picket lines. The majority of her bindings found places on the shelves of her friends and patrons, people to whom art was probably already an inherent and beautiful part of life. Nevertheless, bookbinding gave material form to this woman’s radical and Progressive critique of the values of her time. If Starr’s craftwork did not affect tangible change to society in the common interpretation of Progressivism, it did embody the underlying ideals of a movement that tried to make sense of modernity.

Originating in the intersection of different fears and ideals, bookbinding as an outgrowth of Starr’s reforms raised fundamental questions about the direction civilization took at the close of the nineteenth century.

Idealistic at the core, Ellen Gates Starr proposed and represented a vision of the future in which human society as a whole grew by the striving of one.

Sherri Berger is a freelance writer living in Chicago.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 4, reprinted with permission of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 5, CHS, Crane-Lillie family papers; 6, courtesy of Suellen Hoy, Highland Park; 7 left, CHS, Crane-Lillie family papers; 7 right, CHS, ICHi-39065; 8 top, CHS, Crane-Lillie family papers; 8 bottom, CHS, ICHi39068; 9 left, CHS, ICHi-39060; 9 right, CHS, ICHi-39061; 10, CHS, ICHi-39064; 11–12, reprinted with permission from the Art Resources in Teaching Records (A.R.T. [13-121]), Special Collections Department, The University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; 13 top, CHS, DN-0076595; 13 bottom, CHS, 1979.22, 1979.138; 14–15, CHS, ICHi39063; 16 top right, CHS, ICHi-01547; 16 top left and bottom, CHS; 18, CHS, ICHi-21848; 19, CHS, ICHi-39062; 20–21, reprinted with permission from the Jane Addams Memorial Collection (detail of JAMC neg. 2683), Special Collections Department, The University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; 22–23, reprinted with permission of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 24–25, courtesy of the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College; 26–27 top, reprinted with permission from the Ellen Gates Starr Collection (EGS-PAT 9, 10, 11, and 2), Special Collections Department, The University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; 27 bottom, reprinted with permission of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 28, reprinted with permission from the Ellen Gates Starr Collection (EGS-PAT 6), Special Collections Department, The University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; 29, reprinted with permission of the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College; 30, reprinted with permission from the Ellen Gates Starr Collection (EGS-BIND 11), Special Collections Department, The University Library, University of Illinois at Chicago; 31, CHS, DN-0065382.

Starr maintained a close relationship with her goddaughter, Mrs. Frances Crane Lillie. Above: Pictured together in November 1915, Starr (left) and Lillie (right) shared interests in social welfare and Catholicism.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Ellen Gates Starr’s bound books are housed in the special collections of select libraries, including The Newberry Library in Chicago, The University Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. For more on Starr’s bookbinding and her contemporaries, see Marianne Tidcombe’s Women bookbinders, 1880–1920 (London: British Library, 1996). For more on Chicago’s urban reform movement, see Maureen A. Flanagan’s Seeing with their hearts: Chicago women and the vision of the good city, 1871–1933 (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2002). For more on the Arts and Crafts movement, see Wendy Kaplan’s The art that is life: The Arts and Crafts movement in America, 1875–1920. (1987.

Reprint, Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1998). For an in-depth analysis of the craftsman ideal, see Eileen Boris’s Art and labor: Ruskin, Morris and the craftsman ideal in America (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).

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Emmett Till’s Day in Court JOY L. BIVINS

Franklin McMahon’s courtroom drawings record the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

I

n September 1955, Chicago-based artist Franklin McMahon traveled to Sumner, Mississippi, on his first assignment for Life magazine. There McMahon documented what he since has termed the “trial of the year”—that of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam for the murder of Chicago teenager Emmett Till. For four days, McMahon sketched the critical moments and principal players of the courtroom drama.

Life published a selection of his work the following month.

The Chicago Historical Society acquired McMahon’s courtroom drawings in 2004.

Joy L. Bivins, a curator at the Chicago Historical Society, curated the exhibition, Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which was displayed at CHS June 4–December 4, 2005.

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The story of Emmett Louis Till, retold many times over the past fifty years, is by now familiar.

During the summer of 1955, while on a trip to visit family in Mississippi, the fourteen-year-old Chicagoan was brutally murdered for allegedly whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant.

Till’s fate echoed that of thousands of African Americans lynched in the decades following Reconstruction. Unlike many of those victims, however, Emmett Till’s murder received extensive media coverage and public outrage. His murder helped expose the South’s harsh and violent racial codes, as well as the pain inflicted upon the victims’ families and communities. Through the efforts of his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, much is also known about Emmett’s life, not just his violent death.

Born at Cook County Hospital on July 25, 1941, to Mamie and Louis Till, Emmett spent his earliest years in the close-knit community of Argo, a southwest suburb of Chicago. Under the watchful eyes of his doting mother and grandmother, Emmett, or “Bo” as his family called him, grew to be a healthy and active young man despite a polio diagnosis at the age of six. Emmett and his mother eventually moved to Chicago’s South Side.

Pencil sketches of the courtroom (above) and witness stand (opposite) McMahon’s skeletal sketches provide a visual overview of the segregated courtroom in Sumner, Mississippi. Judge Curtis Swango presided over the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, during which nearly three hundred spectators filled his courtroom. The trial began with jury selection on Monday, September 19, 1955, and ended four days later with an acquittal on Friday, September 23. ICHi-38475, ICHi-38499.

Emmett Till | 33

During the summer of 1955, Emmett asked his mother if he could travel to Mississippi with two cousins instead of going on the family trip she had planned to Nebraska. She refused his request at first but later consented. Before he left, she instructed him about how to behave while in Mississippi. Mamie Till Bradley dropped her son off at the train station on August 20, 1955. Less than two weeks later, she returned to the station to meet his remains.

On the morning of August 28, Roy Bryant and his half brother, J. W. Milam, had abducted Till from the home of his great-uncle, Moses Wright. Three days later, a young fisherman found Till’s severely bloated and disfigured body in the Tallahatchie River. Bryant and Milam, who had admitted to the kidnapping, were indicted for Till’s murder on September 4, 1955, the same day as his burial at Burr Oak Cemetery. Shortly thereafter, jury selection began.

Franklin McMahon’s drawings capture the mood of the courtroom by documenting the nonchalance of the defendants and the brave testimonies of the prosecution’s witnesses.

Moses Wright’s testimony was the trial’s pivotal moment, and McMahon’s ink-and-wash drawing of this witness remains the centerpiece of his collection. In a defiant move, Wright stood to identify Bryant and Milam as the men who took Till from his home. McMahon characterized Wright’s bold act as the “shaking off of three hundreds of years of American history.” McMahon also documented Till’s mother, Mamie Till Bradley, as she related her painstaking inspection of her son’s body. Despite her tragic ordeal, McMahon’s composition depicts her self-composure and steadiness in addressing the jury.

McMahon’s collection also includes sketches of the attorneys who volunteered to defend Bryant and Milam as well as of Sheriff H. C. Strider, the defense’s star witness. Strider testified that the body found in the Tallahatchie could not have been the young Till. This defense, despite the victim’s mother’s testimony to the contrary, proved plausible for the all-white, all-male jury. On Friday, September 23, the jury acquitted the accused men after little more than an hour of deliberation.

Although Life magazine published only six of McMahon’s pieces, the collection includes more than forty drawings, from simple pencil sketches to intricate ink-and-wash compositions. In each, McMahon recorded the details of the trial, from the mundane to the extraordinary. When asked about the impact of his drawings, Franklin McMahon says he was just doing his job. His work, however, is an invaluable record of what became one of the seminal moments in the modern Civil Rights Movement— the murder of Emmett Till.

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Pencil sketch of Mamie Till Bradley with her father, Wiley Nash Carthan | During the trial, Mamie Till Bradley testified that she had meticulously examined the victim’s body and concluded that the corpse was indeed her son. Although Mississippi authorities had advocated a quick burial in the South, Mamie Till Bradley made arrangements to return her son’s body to Chicago. Against the advice of others, she opened the casket (she wanted to confirm that it was not filled with mud or bricks) and identified the body. Despite its condition, she insisted on an open-casket funeral, so the nation could bear witness to the realities of racial hatred. ICHi-38466.

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Pencil sketch of Gerald Chatham | After practicing law for nearly a decade, Gerald Chatham, a resident of Hernando, Mississippi, was elected district attorney in 1942. As the prosecution’s lead counsel, he assembled a fairly respectable case despite very little cooperation from local law enforcement authorities.

His witnesses included John Cothran, deputy sheriff of Leflore County, who arrested J. W. Milam on kidnapping charges, and Benjamin “B. L.” Mims, who testified to the condition of the body when it was pulled from the river and identified the gin fan used to keep it submerged. ICHi-38448.

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Pencil sketch of the prosecution | Three attorneys comprised the team representing the State of Mississippi against Bryant and Milam: District Attorney Chatham, Robert B. Smith III, and James Hamilton Caldwell. Chatham is at the center of the sketch. Caldwell is to the left, and Smith is at the right. ICHi-38440.

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Pencil sketch of Moses Wright (above) and ink-and-wash drawing of his testimony (left) African Americans testifying against whites in open court rarely occurred in the South.

As the prosecution’s first witness, Moses Wright put his life in danger by standing up and identifying Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam as his great-nephew’s abductors. Earlier he had identified his great-nephew’s body by a signet ring inscribed with the initials L.T., standing for Emmett’s father Louis Till; the ring disappeared before Till’s body reached Chicago. After the trial, Wright left Mississippi.

ICHi-38464; ICHi-38467.

Emmett Till | 39

Pencil sketch (opposite) and ink-and-wash drawing of Robert Hodges Eighteen-year-old Robert Hodges was second to take the witness stand for the prosecution. During his testimony, Hodges recalled finding Till’s body while fishing in the Tallahatchie River. ICHi-38436; ICHi-38443.

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Emmett Till | 41

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Pencil sketches (opposite) and ink-and-wash drawing of Willie Reed | As one of the prosecution’s surprise witnesses, Willie Reed testified that he saw Emmett Till in J. W. Milam’s truck early on the morning of August 28 and later heard terrible screams from inside the barn on Sheridan Plantation, the property where Till was most likely tortured and murdered. ICHi-38437; ICHi-38442.

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Pencil sketch of Jesse Breeland | Attorney Jesse “J. J.” Breeland served as lead counsel for the defense. All five of Sumner’s practicing attorneys volunteered to defend Bryant and Milam. Their case hinged on the prosecution’s lack of physical evidence and the argument that the body found in the Tallahatchie was not Emmett Till. Some white Mississippians went as far as to suggest that the body had been planted by those wishing to “disturb” race relations in Mississippi. ICHi-38453.

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Pencil sketch of Roy and Carolyn Bryant consulting with one of their attorneys | Roy Bryant and Carolyn Holloway married in 1951. The couple owned and operated Bryant’s Meat and Grocery, the site of Till’s alleged insult, in Money, Mississippi. After the trial, local African American residents boycotted the Bryants’ store, eventually forcing the family to close it. ICHi-38468.

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Ink-and-wash drawing of Carolyn Bryant on the witness stand During the trial, Carolyn Bryant demonstrated Emmett Till’s alleged “assault.” She claimed that Till had grabbed her around the waist and chased her through her family’s store. Judge Swango ruled her testimony irrelevant and did not allow the jury to hear it.

ICHi-38465.

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Pencil sketch of Sheriff H. C. Strider on the witness stand | In an unusual turn of events, Sheriff Strider testified on behalf of the defense. Despite signing Till’s death certificate on September 1, he testified that the damage incurred by the body could not have happened in only three days. Strider was one of several “experts” called by the defense to argue that the body pulled out of the Tallahatchie River was not Emmett Till.

Mamie Till Bradley later stated that Strider not only looked the part of a racist southern sheriff, he lived it. ICHi-38447.

Pencil sketch of J. W. Milam | In this sketch, McMahon captured the cool demeanor of defendant J. W. Milam. Pictured at the center, Milam is surrounded by one of his attorneys (left); his wife, Juanita Thompson Milam; and his half brother Roy Bryant (back center). According to a reporter covering the trial for Jet magazine, Milam felt comfortable enough in the courtroom to read a newspaper while the prosecution addressed the jury. ICHi-38452.

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Pencil sketches of the clerk and court reporter | Although McMahon documented the hard-at-work clerk and court reporter, the written transcripts disappeared shortly after the close of the trial. No official transcripts were believed to exist until 2005, when the media reported that the FBI had located a third-hand copy of the proceedings. ICHi-38460; ICHi-38473.

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Pencil sketch and ink-and-wash drawing of the jury | Since the end of Reconstruction, Southern whites had met African American attempts to register to vote with hostility and outright violence.

Despite the fact that African Americans comprised more than 60 percent of Tallahatchie County’s adult population, none were registered voters; therefore, none were eligible to serve on a jury.

Thus, the jury consisted of twelve white men: nine farmers, two carpenters, and one insurance agent. Although the jury returned the not-guilty verdict in little over an hour, some speculated that the deliberation took that long only to make it appear that they were carefully considering the decision. ICHi-38478; ICHi-38479.

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Making History: Interviews with Carol Marin and James J. O’Connor T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

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ournalist and television news anchor Carol Marin and utility executive James J. O’Connor both rose from humble beginnings to the highest pinnacles of their professions. Marin has received two George Foster Peabody Awards, two National Emmy Awards, a dozen Chicago-area Emmy Awards, two Alfred I. DuPont–Columbia Broadcast Journalism Awards, and three “Best Reporter” Awards each from the Associated Press and the United Press International. In 1992, she was inducted into the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame.

In 1977, O’Connor became the youngest president in the history of Commonwealth Edison. He went on to lead the company for two decades, transforming the enterprise into the nation’s largest nuclear-energy company.

In addition, many institutions—including the Jane Addams Hull-House Association, the National Football Foundation and College Hall of Fame, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, the Emerald Society of Police Officers of Cook County, and The Woodlawn Association—have recognized O’Connor with various awards for his wide-ranging civic activism.

Although Marin and O’Connor chose vastly different career paths, they share a significant childhood experience: they were born on Chicago’s South Side and raised as Roman Catholics. Marin was born on October 10, 1948, to Knut and Bernice (Johnson) Marin. The Marin family lived near Garfield Boulevard and Ashland Avenue before moving to the Northwest Side near Sunnyside Avenue and Whipple Street. As a child, Marin was exposed to the unique diversity of Chicago’s neighborhoods. Marin remembers the area as a heavily Orthodox Jewish community. Consequently, “I assumed growing up there were only two religions: Jews and Catholics.”

When her family next moved to suburban Rolling Meadows, however, Marin encountered a different community. “We were not exactly welcome,” she recounts. Surrounding suburban residents derided the community as “Rolling Ghettoes,” Marin remembers, as the town was comprised of small tract homes.

But “for my mother,” she explains, “moving out of a basement apartment into a brand new house, even if it was a tract house, was a palace.”

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Carol Marin, recipient of the 2004 Joseph Medill History Maker Award for Distinction in Journalism and Communication.

James J. O’Connor, recipient of the 2004 Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation.

James O’Connor was born in Chicago on March 15, 1937, to Fred and Helen (Reilly) O’Connor. His father had come to the University of Chicago to play football for famed coach Amos Alonzo Stagg. He went on to become a leading trial attorney in Chicago, even serving as president of the Chicago Trial Lawyers Association.

O’Connor grew up in the city’s Gresham neighborhood, in the vicinity of Seventy-eighth Street and Marshfield Avenue. O’Connor identifies the neighborhood as “Little Flower,” the name of the nearby Roman Catholic church.

“The first eighteen years of my life were there,” he remembers. “Back then, your life was pretty much determined by the parish, particularly on Chicago’s South Side.

“I had no obstacle, no adversity that’s even worth talking about, because I had such an unbelievably happy childhood,” he continues. “We weren’t wealthy. We weren’t poor. It was a neighborhood that was probably 80 percent Irish Catholic, and a grade school that really prepared people well for high school. The kids who came out pretty much had their pick of the schools that they wanted.” O’Connor attended St. Ignatius College Preparatory High School on the Near South Side because “my mother liked the Jesuits.” The difficult commute involved an hour-long hitchhike, but “it was an experience that I really enjoyed,” he now reflects. “It was challenging.”

For Marin, growing up in Rolling Meadows represented her first exposure to issues of class and inequality: “The social tracks of whether you’re blue

As a teenager, O’Connor hitchhiked an hour each way to attend St. Ignatius High School on the Near South Side.

Marin attended the University of Illinois in Urbana–Champaign. Left: The Illini Student Union, 1964.

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O’Connor spent his career at Commonwealth Edison. Left: The company’s Chicago Central Division Headquarters in 1963, the same year O’Connor joined CE.

collar or white collar, the wealthier suburbs or the poorer, because we felt we were pretty fabulously well off. . . . I remember that one of my teachers wanted to put me in an honors English class at Palatine High School,” she recounts. “The guidance counselor took me downstairs and said ‘You know, dear, you’re from Rolling Meadows,’” suggesting that students from that town were less academically adept. “So when I went into teaching briefly, one of the things I rebelled against were those social tracks,” insists Marin, “because often the tracks were done economically, as well as intellectually, which I think is brutally unfair.”

After graduating from high school in 1966, Marin attended the University of Illinois in Urbana–Champaign. “I was the first girl in my family to attend college,” she explains. “I loved the University of Illinois. It was huge. It was intimidating, I had no idea what to expect—but I loved it.” She returned to the Chicago area after graduation and worked as an English teacher at Dundee High School for two years.

Her marriage to historian Jonathan Utley in 1972 changed her life, in more ways than one. “We made a deal,” Marin explains. “We would go wherever one of us was making the most money.

He was making more money teaching at the University of Tennessee than I was making teaching in Dundee.”

The move was not easy. “I couldn’t find a teaching job,” she admits.

When she learned that the Knoxville daytime talk show Walleen’s World needed a new host, she decided to try out for the position. At the studio audition, Marin had to pretend to “interview” a member of the crew, who was posing as a famous film producer. When the alleged producer came on stage, he whispered to Marin, 54 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

In 1977, the forty-year-old O’Connor became the youngest president in the company’s ninety-year history.

“Listen, honey, I’m sorry, but they tell me I have to answer ‘No’ to any of your questions. I’m supposed to give you a hard time.”

But Marin had a trick of her own. When the camera came on, she introduced the “famous film producer.” “I then asked him why he produced movies that were condemned by the ACLU and the PTA as the filthiest, most pornographic pieces of material that had ever hit the airwaves,” chuckles Marin. Her shocked subject quickly started talking. “They laughed in the control room,” says Marin, “and they hired me.”

After graduating from St. Ignatius in 1954, O’Connor earned his undergraduate degree from Holy Cross College, a master’s in business administration from Harvard, and a law degree from Georgetown University, the latter while serving on active duty in the U.S. Air Force. O’Connor’s decision to attend law school reflected the influence of his father, who “offered me the opportunity to join him in the law firm.” O’Connor had two small children at that point, however, and he recognized that his father was a workaholic who often put in eighty-hour weeks. “In fairness to my young family,” O’Connor explains, “I just didn’t want to have a situation where it would be very difficult to try to keep up with him.”

Instead, O’Connor took advantage of a Harvard contact. Harris Ward, the future CEO of Commonwealth Edison, had recruited O’Connor while he was studying for his MBA. Even after O’Connor began law school, Ward kept in contact with him. “Shortly before I got out of the Air Force and was trying to think of where I might like to go, he wrote me a letter and said, ‘What’s cooking?’” recounts O’Connor. “That’s all he said in the letter. The fact that he was as consistently interested [in me] during that period really drove me to join him as much as it did to join the company.”

In 1988, Marin went to Belfast to film a Channel 5 documentary called Grief ’s Children.

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O’Connor began working at Commonwealth Edison in 1963, and in some respects, he never left. He rose quickly through the ranks: assistant to chairman of the executive committee from 1964 to 1965; manager in 1966; assistant vice president from 1967 to 1970; vice president from 1970 to 1973; and executive vice president for operations in 1973. In 1977, at the young age of forty, he was named president, a position he held for a decade.

Later, he was named chairman (1980) and CEO of Unicom (1994).

Marin also had a rapid and upward professional path. From 1972 to 1976, she served as both a morning talk show host and an assistant news director on WBIR-TV in Knoxville. She then moved to WSM-TV in Nashville and worked as a news anchor and reporter from 1976 to 1978. She returned to Chicago in 1978 as a reporter for WMAQ-TV. By then, Marin was attracting national attention: beginning in 1984, she periodically filled in for Jane Pauley on the national NBC morning program Today. In 1985, she was named coanchor with Ron Magers on the ten o’clock nightly news broadcast, a position she held for more than a decade.

After a controversial departure from WMAQ-TV in 1997, Marin became a CBS news correspondent for five years, reporting for The Evening News with Dan Rather, 48 Hours, Public Eye with Bryant Gumbel, and 60 Minutes II. She quickly learned that working as a national correspondent required different talents than anchoring a local news telecast. “The big emphasis at 60 Minutes was much less on what the reporter writes and says,” she now concedes, “but it’s what you reveal in the interview. . . . It’s got to be a conversation that really invites the people who are watching into the room with us.” Marin returned to Chicago in 2000 as the anchor for the CBS 2 nightly news, becoming the first solo female anchor of a 10:00 P.M. newscast in Chicago history.

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After Marin left Channel 5, she signed on as a correspondent for CBS News from 1997 to 2002, working on such shows as 60 Minutes, 60 Minutes II, The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, and 48 Hours. She filmed a segment in Afghanistan for 60 Minutes II in 2001 (above).

O’Connor attracted similar attention upon assuming the presidency of ComEd. His decision to give greater emphasis to nuclear energy made him a controversial figure during his tenure.

In 1977, 40 percent of ComEd’s power originated from nuclear energy; by 1998, it was 73 percent, an increase that resulted directly from O’Connor’s decisions. In the 1990s, when O’Connor served as the chair of the board of directors for the U.S. Council for Energy Awareness, he was one of the leading defenders of nuclear energy.

Today, he stands by this decision.

“Nuclear power is far and away the cleanest way to produce electricity, bar none,” he insists. “There are no combustible byproducts. There is nuclear waste, yes, but there’s a way to manage that.”

O’Connor argues that critical facts are often ignored or lost in public discussions over nuclear energy. For example, energy demand rose dramatically in the final quarter of the twentieth century. In 1989, the United States used 50 percent more electricity than it did in 1973 during the Arab oil embargo.

O’Connor also points out that by the 1970s, electricity usage was rising at an annual rate of 7 percent. “Many of our critics, who opined that there would be no need for electricity, found out very quickly” that they were wrong, he argues. “Had we been forced to adhere to what they suggested, we would have had a catastrophic situation.”

O’Connor does not dismiss the need for conservation, the mantra of many of his most vocal critics. “Conservation is important, but conservation would never have made up for the need to meet the demands of a growing economy.” American economic growth throughout the 1980s and 1990s was heavily dependent on affordable and easily available energy. “We felt a very strong need to have new capacity,” he states. Today, he thinks the record speaks for itself. “At the end of the day, in retrospect, we opened plants that are operating extraordinarily well, and saving our customers a lot of money.”

He points to the current price of gasoline: “We see everybody scared to death of what’s going to happen to the price of oil,” a concern magnified by recent events in the Middle East. “You’re pretty much able to manage your destiny with the nuclear facilities, rather than being held hostage to the oil mavens of the world,” concludes O’Connor.

Marin also stands at the center of controversy. On May 1, 1997, she abandoned a $1-million annual contract and resigned on the air at the end of the 10:00 P.M. newscast to protest WMAQ-TV’s hiring of sensationalistic talk show host Jerry Springer as a periodic commentator. “His shows are the bottom of the television news chain. With Springer, we’ve crossed a line,” stated Marin. “The commentary isn’t important; it’s the shock value of it.”

Her coanchor Ron Magers joined her protest and resigned shortly thereafter.

Springer quickly responded with a discourse on the First Amendment, charging that Marin “missed Journalism 101: Free Speech. . . . Who the hell does she think she is?” Springer, however, resigned from WMAQ-TV shortly after his first commentary later that month.

Mayor Richard J. Daley and O’Connor celebrate at an award presentation honoring O’Connor’s service to Chicago’s Irish-American community.

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Marin’s on-air resignation after nineteen years at Channel 5 made front-page headlines.

Marin’s action became a rallying cry for journalists critical of the growing emphasis on entertainment and network profits in news bureaus. The Ethics Committee of the Society of Professional Journalists praised her resignation as a rare act of courage.

“Carol Marin has championed the highest journalistic ethics at a great personal cost,” the committee stated.

“Many of us are not in the position to accept such a personal penalty in similar circumstances, so it is with even greater respect that we commend the courage of a journalist who stood up for her profession by relinquishing her job. It’s the ultimate sacrifice for a reporter who values journalistic integrity.” The Springer incident eventually cost NBC more than $10 million in lost advertising revenue (some reported higher figures). WMAQ’s general manager admitted, “The bottom line was, we made a mistake.”

Marin points out that her protest centered not on Jerry Springer personally, but on “the dumbing down of the news.” She remains, in her words, “a big First Amendment person” and recognizes that Springer had every right to telecast his own show. “What we objected to was that our newscast, which 58 | Chicago History | Fall 2005

The Chicago Tribune printed this photograph of Marin (center) with her former Channel 5 colleagues, associate producer Susan Evans and producer Don Moseley, the week of her resignation. Today, Moseley is Marin’s partner in Marin Corp Productions.

had a pretty decent reputation, was going to be compromised by hiring one commentator.” Furthermore, WMAQ-TV was going through a management transition at the time. Internal discussions increasingly convinced Marin that the philosophy of the station’s new management team departed from her ideas regarding television news. “Jerry Springer really was the last and the least of the issues,” she remembers, “but because of who he is and his broadcast, he certainly was the one that people immediately grasped and understood.” For Marin and her supporters, Springer epitomized “all of the things might be wrong with television.”

Marin, however, is not a naive media idealist. She acknowledges that different kinds of journalism require different kinds of reporting. “I am a believer that television has got to be interesting. . . . it’s got to generate some sparks. It’s got to be a good story,” Marin observes. Entertaining television, however, should not exclude the medium’s educational and informative function. Good journalists find “all sorts of different ways to tell stories,” she believes. “It isn’t a matter of acting. It’s a matter of storytelling: how clearly you tell a story, how engaging you can be and how well you can engage the person you’re talking to.” In the end, “I am a storyteller.” Her favorite stories “have been investigative pieces on public corruption and organized crime.”

Yet, she concedes that she often finds herself returning to the “small stories.”

Specifically, reports on how disfigured people adapt to society or her coverage of a homeless woman in Uptown who, at age thirty-nine, suddenly decided she would get off the street and began managing a small uptown hotel.

“I thought her story was an amazing story,” declares Marin. “I still do.”

In 1994, Governor Jim Edgar and O’Connor were named Lincoln Laureates, Illinois’s highest honor. Below: Edgar (left) with O’Connor and his wife Ellen.

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Pope John Paul II (left) met with O’Connor in Rome in 1983. O’Connor’s wife Ellen (right) and daughter Elizabeth were in attendance.

Just as Marin represents integrity in Chicago journalism, O’Connor’s civic activism is similarly regarded within the business community. At various points he has been a trustee or a member of the board of directors of the Lyric Opera, the Joffrey Ballet, the Helen Brach Foundation, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Northwestern University, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, WTTW-TV, and the Michael Reese Medical Center. He has served as chairman at the Field Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Urban League and is a life trustee of both the Adler Planetarium and the Museum of Science and Industry.

O’Connor attributes his civic involvement to the men who mentored him at ComEd: Harris Ward; Morgan Murphy, who served as chairman of the firm’s executive committee; and Thomas Ayers, O’Connor’s predecessor as CEO. “Their actions persuaded me that philanthropy was very important,” he reminisces. He highlights his activity in the Urban League as he chaired the board during the 1980s, during which time he led the campaign to build the only independent Urban League headquarters. “There are maybe 110 different Urban League chapters in the country,” O’Connor points out, “and we built the only free-standing building to house a chapter of the League, a tremendous symbol on the South Side of Chicago representing the importance of equal opportunity.”

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O’Connor’s philanthropic achievements rival his professional ones. As the volunteer campaign chairmen for United Way in 1988, he raised a record $92 million to support health care and human services in Chicago.

O’Connor was also active in the open housing movement in the 1960s, working to end racial discrimination in Chicago’s heavily segregated neighborhoods. Open housing was, he explains, “one of the gutsiest of the issues back in the Sixties and Seventies. . . . I felt very privileged to be a part of that, because I think we opened neighborhoods that, without the work that we did, would be closed today.” The Leadership Council of the Metropolitan Open Communities identified O’Connor as one of the twenty-five individuals who were most instrumental in advancing fair housing. He considers this one of his most meaningful accolades.

O’Connor’s name is also synonymous with Catholic philanthropy. As volunteer campaign chairman for the United Way/Crusade of Mercy in 1988, for example, he helped raise a record $92 million. He was and remains an instrumental force as chairman of Cardinal Bernadin’s Big Shoulders Fund for Catholic schools, which has raised more than $300 million, providing scholarships and operating support for the schools’ physical structures, many of which are seventy-five to one hundred years old. The fund has helped develop a new financial infrastructure in wake of the decline of nuns as the anchor of the teaching staff. The Archdiocese “has said that were it not for Big Shoulders,”

O’Connor hosted a civic reception for Nelson Mandela (left) in 1993, the year the African leader won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Since 1986, O’Connor has served as chairman of the Big Shoulders Fund, which has raised more than $140 million for Chicago’s inner-city Catholic schools. Left: O’Connor (standing) with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin (right) and schoolchildren.

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O’Connor states, “we probably would have had to close half [the schools] that are in the inner city today.”

O’Connor also takes considerable pride in Chicago’s museums. “We’re blessed in Chicago because I think we have one of the top four or five museums of its kind in the world in virtually every category of museum.”

O’Connor credits individuals such as Stanley Field and Julius Rosenwald, business leaders “who stepped forward and got others willing to involve themselves largely from the business community.” O’Connor believes that the level of private-sector involvement in the city’s cultural institutions is unique.

“I hope we never lose that because I think that’s been a defining characteristic of this community,” he emphasizes, specifically “the willingness of business to step forward and make these things happen.”

In recent years, Carol Marin has moved into uncharted waters. In 2002, her contract with CBS News’ 60 Minutes II expired, partly because she refused to move to New York. Marin now writes periodic columns in the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. She also teamed with her longtime producer Don Moseley to form a documentary production company. Marin Corp Productions is headquartered at DePaul University and allows Marin an independent journalistic vehicle for her work. Her recent documentaries include Lila’s Hope, on the success of the Manley Career Academy in sending more than 70 percent of its graduating seniors to college; Keeping the Faith, on the struggles of forty-two men studying to become priests; and The Fight over Faith, on the battle between conservatives and progressives for control of American Protestantism.

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Above: Marin conducts an interview for 60 Minutes II.

Marin has also worked in print journalism.

After a stint at the Chicago Tribune, she currently writes for the Chicago Sun-Times.

In addition to her already heavy workload, she recently joined WTTW-Channel 11’s program Chicago Tonight as a contributor.

Left: Carol Marin anchors at a 1980s political convention with WMAQ-TV Political Editor Dick Kay.

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Left: Carol Marin (right) at the 2004 Making History Awards.

Below: James J. O’Connor (right) with Monsignor Kenneth Velo at the 2004 Making History Awards.

Marin and O’Connor are impressive because of their modesty and approachability. Don Moseley aptly sums up his fellow journalist: “She doesn’t have a big head or drive a fancy car. All she wants to be is a reporter.”

Similarly, O’Connor was beloved by many at ComEd for “his endearing smile and gentle nod,” according to an unpublished statement by Unicom’s Board of Directors upon his retirement.

“Never did he forget a face. Rarely did he mistake a name. Time was never too short to recognize unique abilities and individual achievements. To know him is to be forever changed.” In their own ways, O’Connor and Marin have changed Chicago.

Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 52, CHS; 53 top, CHS, ICHi-39022; 53 bottom, CHS, HB27713; 54 top, CHS, HB-26691; 54 bottom, Chicago Daily News, December 13, 1977; 55–56, courtesy of Carol Marin; 57, courtesy of James J. O’Connor; 58 top, “Carol Marin Quits WMAQ Over Jerry Springer,” by Steve Johnson, copyrighted May 2, 1997, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 58 bottom, photograph by Carl Wagner, copyrighted May 4, 1997, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 59, courtesy of James J. O’Connor; 60 top, courtesy of James J. O’Connor; 60 bottom, “United Way Raises $92 million,” by Katherine Segenthaler, copyrighted March 9, 1989, Chicago Tribune Company. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 61, courtesy of James J. O’Connor; 62, courtesy of Carol Marin; 63 top, Chicago Sun-Times, September 21, 2005, courtesy of Carol Marin; 63 bottom, courtesy of Carol Marin; 64, CHS.

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