Chicago History | Spring 2006

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Gwen Ihnat Emily Nordstrom Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Publications Intern Bridget Campbell

Copyright 2006 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago IL 60614-6038 312-642-4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

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

On the cover: Capone talks to attorney William F. Waugh of the American Legion, 1929. DN-0087660

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

TRUSTEES

John W. Rowe Chair

Philip D. Block III David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon Warren K. Chapman John W. Croghan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Jonathan F. Fanton Sharon Gist Gilliam David A. Gupta Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Mrs. Harlow N. Higinbotham David D. Hiller Henry W. Howell Jr. Richard M. Jaffee Gary T. Johnson Barbara Levy Kipper

M. Hill Hammock Immediate Past Chair Barbara Levy Kipper Vice Chair Paul L. Snyder Vice Chair David P. Bolger Treasurer Sharon Gist Gilliam Secretary Gary T. Johnson President

LIFE TRUSTEES

Randye Kogan Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph Levy Jr. Mrs. John J. Louis Jr. David MacKay R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer James R. Reynolds Mrs. John W. Robinson John W. Rowe April T. Schink Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Paul L. Snyder Robert Swegle Samuel Tinaglia

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

Richard M. Daley Mayor, City of Chicago

The Chicago History Museum is easily accessible via public transportation. CTA buses nos. 11, 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. All buses except 156 are accessible. For travel information, visit www.transitchicago.com.

The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the Chicago Park District’s generous support of all of the Museum’s activities.

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Spring 2006 VOLUME XXXIV, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 20 42 60

The Legend of Scarface Theodore J. Karamanski

The Gilded Age of Camp Lincoln, 1886–1916 Eleanor L. Hannah

To Chicago and Back: Bulgaria and the World’s Fair of 1893 Petko Ivanov

Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

The Legend of Scarface Decades after the gangland era, Al Capone continues to haunt Chicago.

THEODORE J. KARAMANSKI

I

n the best musical number in the otherwise forgettable 1964 film Robin and the Seven Hoods, Frank Sinatra, playing a rakish but lovable gangster, sings “My Kind of Town.” The song, a valentine to criminal-friendly Chicago, concludes by defining the city by its familiar buildings and landscapes: “The Wrigley building, Chicago is/The Union Stockyards, Chicago is . . . It’s my kind of town.” Architecture, monuments, and streetscapes, as songwriter Sammy Cahn knew, are critical elements of urban identity and often serve as triggers to a city’s collective memory. Urban landscape and the historical memories it empowers are not merely the result of a city’s natural evolution. While contingency— the unplanned flow of events—plays a role in the chaotic development of city infrastructure, all communities, large and small, purposefully shape their historical landscape to conform to the stories they choose to tell about themselves. The process by which the cityscape is shaped is public, conflicted, uneven, and ongoing. It reveals much about public attitudes toward history, heritage, and historic preservation. The legacy of Al Capone, arguably the most famous Chicagoan, illustrates this process at work.

Renowned as America’s first Public Enemy No. 1, Capone came to Chicago in 1919 at the age of twenty and within three years became one of the city’s most successful gangsters. By 1928, his personal income was estimated at $15 million while his criminal empire amassed profits that exceeded one hundred million dollars. He delighted the press and seduced the public with his lavish lifestyle and attacks on Prohibition. “I’ve given the public what it wants,” he once said. “I never had to send out high-pressure salesmen. I could never meet demand.” On another occasion, he boasted: “I’ll have to

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hand it to Napoleon as the world’s greatest racketeer. But I could have wised him up on some things.”

Unfortunately for Capone, the Internal Revenue Service sentenced the bootlegger to prison for tax evasion in 1931. By the time he completed his sentence in 1939, syphilis had ravaged his mind, and he spent his few remaining years in demented retirement at his Florida estate until his death in 1947.

The fate of three buildings associated with Capone’s tenure in Chicago—his Park Manor family residence; the Lexington Hotel, which served as his unofficial headquarters; and the humble North Side garage that was the site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—reveal the process by which Chicagoans have attempted to both blot out and exploit the gangster’s painful legacy. This kind of collective memory is not easily created, nor can it be neatly summarized. It consists of a dialogue between the thoughts and actions of ordinary people and the culture of public officials and professional educators. Beginning with the generation that followed Big Al’s conviction, a pronounced split emerged between Chicago’s vernacular and official memory of the Capone era.

On the record, Chicago was appalled by the way Capone’s brief reign transformed the city’s national and international image. Prior to his arrival, Chicagoans had exulted in their city’s reputation, from its early recognition as the wonder city of the nineteenth century to the “White City” of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Yet, thanks to Capone, other criminals such as John Dillinger, and a slew of 1930s Warner Brothers melodramas, post–World War II civic leaders smarted when Chicagoans were greeted around the world with a tommy gun pantomime: “Ah, Chicago! Rat-a-tat-tat.”

Perhaps more than any other individual, Al Capone has cast his shadow across Chicago’s image for decades. Above: Capone talks to attorney William F. Waugh of the American Legion, 1929.

Scarface | 5

Capone was a huge local sensation during the gangland era. Above: Crowds mobbed the Federal Building during Capone’s trial, 1931.

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The less-than-flattering notoriety as the home of the St. Valentine Day’s Massacre became particularly worrisome as the city stagnated. Between 1930 and 1955, the central business district added no major new buildings, and industrial linchpins, such as the Union Stock Yard, began to decline. Chicago’s population growth and vitality fled to its increasingly far-flung suburbs, from the much-praised design innovations of the G.I. town of Park Forest to the collar of communities planted around the newly established O’Hare Field.

Amid these troubling signs, the ghost of Al Capone continued to haunt the city. In 1959, as the beloved White Sox enjoyed a rare pennant, Hollywood flooded America with images of Capone-era Chicago. The studios released a feature film biography of the mobster staring Rod Steiger. The hit movie comedy Some Like It Hot, which begins with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, further enforced the gangster image. Most disturbing of all, however, was the highly popular ABC television drama The Untouchables. Based on the 1947 novel by Capone nemeses Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley, the popular series was blasted by critics for excessive and senseless violence. In frustration, the Chicago Tribune lamented, “the St. Valentine day massacre is a piece of Americana as well established as the Johnstown flood or the San Francisco fire.”

For most Chicagoans, the “rat-a-tat-tat” image hardly matched their city of well-kept bungalows and manicured lawns. Other city dwellers, however, understood the need for strong-arm tactics in union struggles, policing the knife-edge of the racial divide, and political contests. In 1952, journalist A. J. Liebling detected a genuine pride in the city’s rough image: I have known Chicagoans who claim they are embarrassed, when traveling abroad, at being quizzed about les gangsters. I have never believed them, because they tell it like a funny story. They remind me of a movie star telling what a bore it is to be recognized. As for the kids in the dreariness of the wards, they have always loved Chicago’s reputation. Citizens of a city celebrated in the movies, they are little Scarfaces as they sit with their molls in the darkened cinemas and identify themselves with the glorious past.

A thinly disguised popular admiration for Capone first emerged in contemporary press coverage of his rise to power and has endured among many residents to this day. Capone’s larger-than-life image fit Chicagoans’ “big shoulders,” tough-guy sense of their city. The Capone-era gangster personified the

The highly popular ABC television drama The Untouchables (1959–63), starring Robert Stack (above), reinforced Chicago’s gangster image with American audiences. Mayor Richard J. Daley (below, in 1960) was one of many prominent Chicagoans who loathed how the Capone legacy affected the city’s worldwide reputation.

savvy urban operator, the man who knows how the system works and plays it to his advantage. Chicagoans of the 1950s and 1960s respected and empowered Richard J. Daley and the City Council for the same reason. Material accumulation and excess were Chicago virtues, and a loose approach to law or ethics was accepted in a city with the official motto of “I Will.”

Capone was both a product of urban culture and its hero. His image personified the belief that the city was its own dynamic, self-contained, and unique world, run by its specific laws and values.

Capone was also an example of the rural reproach of the city as a den of iniquity. During the 1920s, many Chicagoans applauded the gangster’s ability to circumvent the rules in order to give working stiffs the drink they wanted. “Everybody calls me a racketeer,” said Capone in one of his most effective self-justifications. “When I sell liquor, it’s bootlegging. When my patrons serve it on a silver tray on Lake Shore Drive, it is hospitality.”

Mayor Richard J. Daley, the boss of Chicago from 1955 to 1976, particularly Scarface | 7

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre became famous as Capone’s most heinous and violent act. Above: On February 15, 1929, policemen staged a reenactment of the gruesome crime.

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loathed the Capone legacy. Hollywood’s rediscovery of Chicago’s gangster past, however, made it hard to ignore the difference between what city officials said about that era and what Chicagoans remembered. Throughout the 1960s, residents and tourists alike sought the places where the criminal past had played out. The owners of the North Clark Street site of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre were harassed by an unwanted stream of visitors.

Occasionally, tour buses would appear before the moving and storage business that occupied the building, and regularly passersby would press their faces against the glass to get a glimpse of the gruesome history within. “Hardly a day goes by that somebody doesn’t come to the door and ask me to show them the back room where those men were killed,” the building owner complained in a 1964 Chicago Daily News article. “They come from all over the world—England, France, even New Zealand. I am so sick of answering questions—I keep the door locked and don’t let them in.”

City officials shared these sentiments and, as the bulldozers of urban renewal worked their way through the area in the 1960s, the Chicago Tribune applauded the proposed demolition of “Chicago’s symbol of shame.”

Little public comment marked the day of wrecking in 1967. “Generally we try to preserve buildings which are of historical significance to the city,” commented the urban renewal director. “But this is something we’d rather not remember.” Not everyone agreed. The National Wrecking Company held an auction for the back wall of the garage, where the unfortunate members of the Moran gang were gunned down. George Patey, a Canadian businessman who dabbled in the entertainment industry beat out the few other bidders. Patey eventually opened The Banjo Palace, a 1920s-themed club in Vancouver’s Gastown District that became famous for the brick wall in the men’s room. Plexiglas urinals were set on the infamous wall, above which was a sign: “Piss on it. It’s History Down the Drain!”

Although few Chicagoans were interested in participating in the National Wrecking Company’s auction at the time of the site’s demolition, people foraged hundreds of bricks from the building as souvenirs. Many workers at the site loaded bricks into the trunks of their cars and passersby helped themselves to those left overnight at the cleared lot. The bricks quickly made their way into urban lore as “cursed.” Local historian and ghost hunter Ursula Bielski claims that almost everyone who acquired the bricks was “besieged by bad luck, in the form of illness, financial or family ruin, or any of a variety of other maladies.”

Just before the old garage building was torn down, famous B-movie director Roger Corman used it to reenact the mob shooting for his feature film The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. The popular 1967 movie

offered a crash course in Chicago’s gangland shame to a new generation of moviegoers. The destruction of the old garage, however, did little to dislodge the connection between Capone, crime, and Chicago.

The massacre was supposed to have triggered a general mob crackdown in Chicago, but in reality, organized crime was little affected by the imprisonment of Al Capone. The Chicago “outfit,” as the post-Capone criminal organization was known, thrived in the decades that followed. Mayor Richard J. Daley, who had come of age in Roaring Twenties Chicago, knew that organized crime neither began nor ended with Capone. By 1964, Chicago had seen nearly five hundred gangland murders since the supposed end of the gangster era. Daley’s administration was more effective at destroying gangster-era historic sites than it was at eliminating the mob. In Chicago, like many other big cities, organized crime and political machines operated in an uneasy, but lasting détente. In Chicago’s case, the relationship was neither the creation of Irish politicians nor Italian immigrants, but a partnership that went back to the mid-nineteenth century.

Criminals had something all politicians needed— money—and nothing that happened after the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre had disrupted that nexus.

In fact, direct ties existed between Capone and modern political corruption in the city. Capone’s former bodyguard, Anthony Accardo, presided over the “golden years” of organized crime in Chicago, from the 1950s through the 1970s. Capone affectionately nicknamed Accardo “Joe Batters” after he took a baseball bat to the heads of two hit men Big Al suspected of disloyalty. As mob boss, Accardo assumed a lower-profile public role than Capone as he skillfully expanded the outfit’s control of gambling and union interests. Involvement in union pension and health care programs, such as those of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union, made it easy for organized crime to cultivate a close relationship with the Cook County Democratic Party. After a very public series of restaurant bombings in the early 1960s, Illinois Governor Otto Kerner proclaimed, “Since they have thrown down the glove, we’ll pick up the challenge.” Little changed, however, and the mob strengthened its control over restaurant union funds. In 1992, Accardo died in his bed having never spent a night in jail, while Governor Kerner had been arrested and imprisoned for corruption.

The death of Richard J. Daley in 1976 left Chicago with bigger problems than the ghost of Al Capone. The unseemly scramble for control of the spoils of urban government that followed divided the Cook County Democratic Party for nearly a decade. At the same time Chicago, like so many cities across the United States, struggled with a rising violent crime rate, declining public schools, and deteriorating neighborhoods. In Scarface | 9

Capone used the Lexington Hotel (seen here c. 1920) on Chicago’s near South Side as his unofficial headquarters from 1928 to 1931.

The hotel contained an escape route, which Capone used to leave the building undetected.

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1982, a group of Chicago business leaders quixotically attempted to recoup the city’s declining fortunes by taking a page from its history and fighting back against economic hard times by hosting a world’s fair as in 1893 and 1933. The plan was to hold the fair on Chicago’s near South Side and to use the exposition to redevelop that depressed and underutilized area. The plan soon stalled due to poor economic planning and a lack of political support, but not before sparking a flurry of real estate speculation on the near South Side.

Al Capone’s legacy became an issue when the Sunbow Foundation attempted to renovate the old Lexington Hotel. Opened in 1892 as a luxury hotel for visitors to the World’s Columbian Exposition, the gilded ten-story structure later served as Al Capone’s headquarters from 1928 to 1931. The gracious brick and terra cotta structure was a genuine Chicago landmark. In 1983, the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, which studies the eligibility of historic structures for preservation for the City Council,

prepared a report praising the building’s architecture and its role hosting presidents and industrialists. The committee referred to the Capone connection only briefly, in a section of the report on the decline of the building.

The lofty goals of the Sunbow Foundation impressed the City Council. The feminist nonprofit organization aimed to help working-class women benefit from the anticipated world’s fair construction boom by training them in the building trades. They planned to use the hotel’s renovation as an on-the-job vocational education project and then have the building serve as a women’s museum, library, and day-care center. Unfortunately, despite receiving $2.4 million in city grants, Sunbow seriously underestimated the cost of restoring the landmark building. Public interest in the project flagged as the world’s fair bubble burst and with it interest in near South Side redevelopment. “It is sad,” a Sunbow spokesman lamented, “that an important issue like this—training women in nontraditional fields—doesn’t get the attention

To raise funds, renovators capitalized on the Lexington’s Capone connection. Self-proclaimed “Mafia princess” Antoinette Giancana (right), daughter of Capone foot soldier Sam Giancana, attended a Roaring Twenties black-tie event there in 1985.

Scarface | 11

Lexington Hotel renovators returned to the Capone well again in 1986, hosting a huge event that featured the opening of Al Capone’s vaults.

Hosted by television reporter Geraldo Rivera, the live national broadcast of the discovery of the empty vault went down in the annals of television history. Above: A December 1985 press conference held in the Lexington’s grand ballroom, announcing the future vault opening.

it deserves.” To save their failing project, the Sunbow Foundation latched on to the legacy of Al Capone.

At the time, the irony of a feminist group embracing the memory of a bordello boss such as Capone to save their historic preservation project was lost on most Chicagoans.

In June 1985, Sunbow held a Roaring Twenties black-tie benefit to raise much needed funding. The lure of partying at Al Capone’s former hangout brought hundreds of the city’s elite into the “dicey” neighborhood and its dilapidated landmark. To enter the ballroom, guests donned yellow construction hard hats, but once inside the event, the wail of a jazz band brought back the sounds of the 1920s. A Chicago Tribune reporter described the décor of the room as “Urban Rubbish Contemporary.” Among the many guests wearing flapper costumes was the self-proclaimed “Mafia Princess” Antoinette Giancana, whose father, Sam Giancana, was a former Capone foot soldier who rose to prominence in the Chicago outfit. “I have to thank Al Capone,” the event organizer rejoiced. “Without his famous name, we wouldn’t have gotten any attention.”

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Ten months later the Sunbow Foundation, desperate to save their project, again called upon the magic of the Capone name. During their rehabilitation work, the foundation claimed to have discovered a series of secret sealed vaults in the building’s basement. A second gala benefit was organized, called “Capone’s Safe-Cracking Party.” Television personality Geraldo Rivera organized a live two-hour national broadcast of the vault opening.

The Internal Revenue Service helped the hype immeasurably by placing a lien on Capone’s estate, just in case the vaults held the gangster’s long-lost fortune. The program was a low point in television history. As the vaults were slowly opened one by one, each yielding nothing but dirt and old bottles, Rivera tried to fill the dead air with cutaways to the gala party upstairs, tours of the dilapidated building, lessons in tommy gun marksmanship, and finally in desperation gamely singing, “Chicago, Chicago” without accompaniment. By that time, the last of the millions who had tuned in to the program had long ago switched the channel.

The Capone vault caper brought the Sunbow Foundation enough money and attention to keep their dream of saving the Lexington Hotel alive for another year. In March 1987, however, the women’s group gave up the project, having failed to even stabilize the structure’s deterioration. No buyer could be found and for a time the Lexington moldered before being stripped of its landmark status and abandoned to the wrecking ball.

The Lexington Hotel’s pathetic saga indicated that Chicago officials had finally overcome their embarrassment over the Capone legacy. By the 1980s, a new generation of Chicagoans, born long after Capone’s heyday, were running the city. The Chicago Police Department actually cooperated in the making of the 1987 film version of The Untouchables, and the city’s film office opened some of Chicago’s most famous public buildings to the cast and crew. The city was so enthusiastic

Untouchables Tours (above) give visitors a glimpse of Chicago’s “old gangster hot spots and hit spots!” The tour guides sport monikers such as “Al Dente,” “Southside,” and “Big Julie.” Below: Tommy Gun’s Garage on the near South Side, “Chicago’s only original Speakeasy Dinner Theater,” has provided a ganglandthemed musical comedy review to Chicagoans and visitors since 1989.

Scarface | 13

Al Capone bought this brick two-flat in Park Manor in 1923 for his mother, wife, and son. Although Capone lived in the house only sporadically, the building became a featured highlight on many local gangster tours.

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“Capone’s Chicago,” which Gene Siskel dubbed “the downtown mobster museum and tourist trap,” offered a $5.25 tour of the gangland city, featuring an animatronic Scarface. To the relief of many Chicagoans, it closed in 1996 after only three years of operation.

about the income and visibility brought by the production that it entered into discussions to have the television series revived, this time to be filmed on Chicago’s streets, rather than a Hollywood soundstage. More remarkably, city officials enthusiastically hosted Crime Story, a film noir–style television series based on the Chicago “outfit” of the 1960s and starring a former city police officer.

Chicago had finally realized that the image of its gangster past could be turned into cold cash in television and film.

The 1980s were a painful period of adjustment for Chicago. Its population had declined steadily since the 1950s, and it lost the title of “Second City” when Los Angeles passed it in population in the 1980 federal census. Nor could Chicago retreat to Mayor Richard J. Daley’s proud moniker: “The City that Works.” During the 1970s, Chicago rapidly had lost industrial jobs, from the Union Stock Yard to the steel mills of the South Side.

With violent crime on the rise and neighborhoods on the decline, Chicago tried desperately to hold on to its lucrative convention business and attract tourists to the city.

Rather than fight the image of the city’s gangster past, some Chicagoans saw in it a heritage tourism business opportunity. In 1989, Tommy Gun’s Garage, a speakeasy dinner theater venue, began presenting a musical revue and engaged audiences in everything from a mob hit to a police raid. A 1920s automobile, dozens of photographs

from the era, and a replica of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre wall all provided an “authentic” ambiance that delighted visitors. That same year, Untouchable Tours debuted, featuring a black painted school bus and tours of the “hot spots and hit spots” of the era of mobsters and molls (initially, customers even received plastic tommy guns). Tour guides dressed in loud suits and spats kept up a humorous if lurid narration. Even the city of Chicago’s official visitor center on North Michigan Avenue sought to exploit, rather than fight, the Capone-era legacy; the video that introduced the exhibition “Here’s Chicago!” began with the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.

The high tide of the gangster revival in Chicago came in 1993 when Al Capone’s Chicago opened at the corner of Clark and Ohio Streets. This Disney-esque look at the bootleg era featured an animatronic Scarface greeter, a surround-sound shadow show of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, and the inevitable gift shop, which included everything from fake fedoras to a jigger labeled, “a shot from Al Capone.” The display tried to reconcile tourist interest in a lurid past with civic embarrassment by assuring visitors that gangsterism was dead in Chicago.

“We are trying to make this as friendly, cheerful and upbeat as possible,” one of the promoters exclaimed.

After three years of lackluster attention from tourists, the gig gave up the ghost.

Scarface | 15

The Biograph, one of Chicago’s last remaining neighborhood movie houses, recently was purchased by Victory Gardens Theater. Perhaps best known as the site where infamous gangster John Dillinger met his demise, it was put on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, and the city designated it an official Chicago landmark in 2001.

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The creation of Al Capone’s Chicago, although ersatz history, underscored a significant problem for heritage tourism: few actual historic sites had survived the gangster era. A tour of “gangster sites” in Chicago actually featured many vacant lots. One Untouchable Tours customer lamented, “The landmarks to that era are mostly all gone.” The visitor placed the blame on “Chicago officials [sic] stupidity in destroying everything that links them to Al Capone’s Roaring-Twenties.” The principal exception to that rule, and the number-one attraction on any mob tour of the city, was Capone’s house in the Park Manor neighborhood on the South Side. In 1923, “Scarface” bought the modest brick two-flat for his mother, wife, and son, and it was occasionally occupied by one or more of his brothers. Capone himself lived in the house only sporadically, staying instead at bordellos or gang headquarters in Cicero before he eventually moved to Florida. The Chicago home, however, was Capone’s official residence when he was at the height of his criminal career. He entertained reporters there by making batches of spaghetti. In 1924, a wake for his brother Salvatore “Frank” Capone was held there as part of a lavish gangland funeral. The house remained in the Capone family until 1952; remarkably, it was little altered forty-five years later when Timothy Samuelson, then a historian for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, inspected the property.

Samuelson came up with the idea of putting the house on the National Register of Historic Places while giving an informal tour of south Chicago historic sites to the staff of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency. At the time, there was a nationwide movement to make the National Register—a federally maintained list of sites, structures, and districts distinguished in American history—reflect the diversity of the American experience. Both Samuelson and the state historians were struck by how much of Chicago’s famous gangster past had been destroyed. The Capone house was the most important of the remaining sites and the state historians encouraged Samuelson to nominate the building for register status. A few years before, the Biograph Theater, best known as the site where Federal Bureau of Investigation agents gunned down gangster John Dillinger, had been put on the National Register with the approval of the city and no public outcry. Samuelson’s pitch to City Hall included that example and the contention that it was time for Chicago to officially and squarely face the Capone legacy. Mayor Eugene Sawyer’s office approved the project, and the site was nominated for the National Register in October 1988.

Controversy and recrimination followed. A front-page story in the Sunday edition of the Chicago Sun-Times made the historical study the talk of the town: “No doubt Chicago is better known around the world for Al Capone than it is for its great and many humanitarians, artists,

The proposed listing of Capone’s home on the National Register of Historic Places incited a storm of criticism from the Park Manor neighborhood, local government, and area newspapers, especially the Sun-Times (above and below).

authors and scientists,” their editorial warned Sawyer.

“And if the city is pleased with this image, then we suppose Capone’s South Side home ought to be declared a landmark.” Irv Kupcinet, the newspaper’s influential columnist, was even more incensed. He complained that the Capone nomination as a bad as “Germany making Adolph Hitler’s Berchtesgaden a national shrine.”

The uproar was enough to send the Sawyer administration ducking for cover. After the mayor personally repudiated the Capone project, the nine-member Commission on Chicago Landmarks voted to reject the very nomination their staff had produced. Commission Chair Peter C. Bynoe lamely argued that it was “too close in time for historians to accurately and objectively assess the significance of the property.” Other Chicagoans, however, would not allow Capone to be so easily dismissed. Philip Krone, an influential Chicago real-estate developer who once declared that most of the city’s Scarface | 17

neighborhoods deserved to be on the National Register, appealed the nomination to Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council. “All history is not good,” Krone wrote.

“Some is evil but we cannot eradicate one part. . . .

Capone’s physical references should remind us of our past without allowing it to misrepresent our present.”

The Illinois Historic Sites Advisory Council was the next level in the hierarchy that determines which sites are significant to the historical legacy of the United States. Normally nominations are evaluated on the basis of documented historical research and proof of the physical integrity of the property, the core of Samuelson’s nomination. The arguments against the Capone nomination, however, were made in the name of community interests. The Park Manor Neighbors Community Council argued that the Capone nomination was detrimental to their efforts to keep the street gang violence that rocked much of the rest of the South Side out of their quiet, middle-class neighborhood. To “glorify” Capone now, they reasoned, would send the wrong signal to young people trying to resist the lure of crime; the 1980s “gangsta” era had much in common with 1920s gangland Chicago, such as illegal substances, firearms, flashy clothes and cars, and outlandish nicknames. The Park Manor citizen’s request proved highly persuasive to the Advisory Council; by a vote of eight to five, the Capone nomination was rejected.

In less than a month, the spectre of the Capone house again rose before the public. Mark P. Levell, a diligent amateur historian of Prohibition-era Chicago, appealed the nomination to the Keeper of the National Register, an office of the National Park Service and the supreme court of the national historic preservation system. Michael J. Devine, the director of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency supported Levell’s request, stating that the Capone house “represents an important aspect of the psychological and social influence of Capone on the American public during the Prohibition era.”

Now that Capone’s house was a national issue, Chicago’s congressional delegation began to get involved. Charles Hayes, who represented the Park Manor community, disgustedly dismissed Capone as having “represented the worst in American life.”

Representative Frank Annunzio approached the issue “the Chicago way”; he consulted Secretary of the Interior Manuel Lujan behind the scenes and obtained the latter’s assurance that the park service would reject the nomination. Congressman Sidney Yates discreetly added a rider to a $4.7 billion appropriation bill that created a legislative prohibition on placing the Capone house on the National Register. Yates might have been mortified to know that his action placed the Capone house in selective company. The National Park Service was forbidden by law to place on the National Register of Historic 18 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

Places only three other structures: the Supreme Court Building, the United States Capitol, and the White House.

(The ban on the Capone house only lasted a year, however, because it was introduced as part of a budget bill.)

The public controversy over the Capone nomination revealed a split among the keepers of Chicago’s official memory. Unlike vernacular memory, which is multivocal and decidedly nonlinear, official memory resembles a traditional historical narrative. The story must be shaped by accepting some elements and rejecting others. Formal decisions have to be made to build memorials, recognize landmarks, and incorporate memory into the landscape.

The Capone nomination exploded into controversy because the politicians and opinion-makers in the city could not agree on how to incorporate the gangster era into a progressive version of Chicago history.

At the heart of the conflict between those who wanted to confront the past and those who wanted to efface it was the distinction between history and heritage. Samuelson and others saw historic preservation as serving the purposes of history: to accurately determine and present what happened in the past. Italian Americans, the residents of Park Manor, and the Commission on Chicago Landmarks saw historic preservation as a function of heritage. While history is the past as historians unflinchingly interpret it, heritage consists of those stories about the past that people choose to remember. History pretends to be a scientific account of what happened; heritage is the unabashedly idiosyncratic “lessons” of the past. Those who saw historic preservation’s role as the protection of the historical record embraced the Capone house nomination. Those who approved the destruction of the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre site and opposed the Capone nomination saw the designation as not simply a record but a commemoration. In the late 1980s, Chicago was willing to face its history, but not willing to honor it.

Al Capone’s ghost continues to haunt Chicago. In the late 1990s, amid the euphoria surrounding the Chicago Bulls’ string of National Basketball Association championships, Richard Longworth of the Chicago Tribune opined that from huts in the lofty Himalayas to distant Rwandan villages the name of Michael Jordan was linked to Chicago. “The city symbol no longer is a syphilic capo and his henchmen but a stately athlete, unquestionably the best in the business, and his talented teammates.”

Nothing, however, is as transitory as celebrity status. In 2005, when it was the Chicago White Sox’s turn to bask in the media’s fleeting glare, Scarface, not Air Jordan, was resurrected as a part of Chicago’s past. Following the 14–2 pasting the White Sox handed to the Boston Red Sox in the first game of the American League Division Series, the ever-loquacious Chris Berman of the ESPN cable network opined, “The Sox hit so hard in Game 1, Al Capone himself would have been proud.”

The legacy of Al Capone reared up once when the South Side Chicago White Sox won the 2005 World Series. Above: Capone at one of his favorite hangouts, Comiskey Park, 1931.

Theodore J. Karamanski is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of several books about Chicago, including Rally ’Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 5, DN-0087660; 6, DN-0096435; 7 top, from the Everett Collection; 7 bottom, ICHi-25429; 8, DN-0087709; 10, ICHi-00734; 11, “Tattered Lexington Puts on a Show,” by Stevenson Swanson, copyrighted June 12, 1985, Chicago Tribune company. All rights reserved. Used with permission. With Chicago Tribune photograph by Walter Kale. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 11, Chicago Tribune photograph by Walter Kale. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 13 top, courtesy of Untouchables Tours; 13 bottom, courtesy of Tommy Gun’s Garage; 14, DN-0091356; 15, Chicago Tribune photograph by Michael Fryer. All rights reserved. Used with permission.; 16, ICHi-29317; 17 top, “Capone lived here; does that make it a landmark?,” by Lori

Rotenberk, Chicago Sun-Times, October 16, 1988. As published in the Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. Copyright 2006.

Chicago Sun-Times, Inc. Reprinted with permission.; 17 bottom, “No need to honor Scarface,” Chicago Sun-Times, October 16, 1988; 19, ICHi-23881.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Of the many volumes on Al Capone, the best are Lawrence Bergreen’s Capone: The Man and the Era (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) and Luciano Iorizzo’s Al Capone: A Biography (Westwood, Conn.: Greenwood, 2003). To further explore gangland Chicago, read The Outfit: The Role of Chicago’s Underworld in the Shaping of Modern America by Gus Russo (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2002) and Richard Lindberg’s Return to the Scene of the Crime: A Guide to the Infamous Places in Chicago (Nashville: Cumberland House, 1999). David Ruth, Inventing the Public Enemy: The Gangster in American Culture, 1918–1934 (University of Chicago, 1996) offers a closer look at the criminal’s place in popular culture.

Scarface | 19

The Gilded Age of Camp Lincoln, 1886–1916 Although designed as a rigorous training opportunity, summer camp remained the highlight of the year for many members of the Illinois National Guard.

ELEANOR L. HANNAH

O

n a warm summer day in 1897, under the white-oak trees shading the tents at Camp Lincoln, the officers of the First Illinois Cavalry of the Illinois National Guard hosted an elegant tea party in honor of the state’s first lady, Mrs. John R. Tanner, and her friends. The event began when the ladies assembled at the governor’s mansion to be driven out to the camp, where they witnessed a dress parade of the entire First Cavalry. The officers then escorted the ladies to camp headquarters where they enjoyed a band concert and an “elaborate collation” of refreshments. A photograph of the event captures almost two dozen of Springfield’s eligible young ladies and society matrons wearing white summer dresses and flowers on their hats, posing in the company of several officers in front of the company’s tents.

The First Cavalry officers and their troops were attending the annual summer training camp, which gave the men of the Illinois National Guard (ING) the chance to train more rigorously and thoroughly than they could at their home armories over the rest of the year. At summer camp, ING officers and their men also performed military drills and sham battles for large appreciative audiences, entertained lavishly and splendidly, and made the most of these opportunities. Although summer camp served an important purpose, it was the dual and, to some observers, conflicting realities that consistently confounded both National Guardsmen and their audiences. Nonetheless, by the turn of the twentieth century, members of the Illinois National Guard achieved an uneasy, if fleeting, balance between their desire to improve training opportunities and their clear enjoyment of the break in their normal routines. This balance created a heyday for summer training camp as both proof of the seriousness of the volunteer soldiers and a joyous celebration of the same.

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A large, elaborate white gate marked the entrance to Camp Lincoln in Springfield. Above: Spectators watch as guardsmen march in formation, 1901.

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The Illinois militia, functionally nonexistent in 1870, grew quickly to be among the largest in the nation by the 1880s. Observations from inspectors, enlistment rolls, and financial records provide evidence that the Illinois National Guard attracted an exceptionally diverse membership. Through the 1910s, the organization welcomed participants from varying economic backgrounds, ethnicities, races, and regions across the state. The ING served in more than two dozen strike interventions between 1877 and 1908, allowing members to take the full measure of the consequences of this kind of service and ultimately to decide to minimize their politically unsustainable role in the maintenance of domestic order.

In 1898–99, despite its brevity, the ING proudly sent nine infantry regiments to serve in the Spanish American War. Important as these order maintenance and wartime duties were to the ING, the overwhelming bulk of the guardsmen’s time was spent in ceremonial, social, competitive, and training pursuits. These activities lay at the heart of their public persona both within their local communities and statewide and through them ING members created an organization that at once tested and confirmed their claims to manliness, citizenship, and military expertise.

The militias and National Guards of Massachusetts and Connecticut first established regular summer training programs as early as the antebellum years, and the practice gradually spread to militia organizations in other states, arriving in Illinois in the mid-1870s. Militia officers designed summer camp as a training exercise to mimic the conditions of active military duty. Summer camp provided both officers and enlisted men the opportunity to practice the full range of skills that constituted the daily regimen of military service. During summer training, men would learn to follow the routines of camp life, including the basics of setting up, policing, and guarding a camp. Volunteers also had the opportunity to work outdoors in groups ranging from small companydetail to brigade-sized activities. As the decades passed, the training experiences expanded to include combat drills, shooting ranges, various schools for officers at all grades, and instruction for specialized branches. Summer camp gave members of the state militias the opportunity to learn and practice new military skills, break the routine of weekly armory drills, and gather for regimental or even brigade-sized training opportunities.

During 1870s and 1880s, enthusiasts from Illinois and other states aimed to completely overhaul the state militia system nationwide, with the explicit intention of turning the militias into a serious reserve army. In the minutes of the St. Louis convention of the Interstate National Guards Association of 1879, the secretary proclaimed that “the wars of this country have all been fought by citizen soldiers,” implying that all future wars

Above: On May 10, 1898, the men of Company H of the First Infantry, ING, visited Mechanic’s Hall at the State Fair Grounds in Springfield. Opposite: Officers of the First Regiment Infantry, ING, gather at Camp Lincoln in 1890.

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would be fought with the same type of volunteers, who needed to receive serious training. Later, speaking of the importance of summer camp with this end in mind, Colonel Swain of the ING noted that Illinois set aside about $25,000 annually to pay for the entire ING to encamp for four days training, although the state did not yet own a single campground. He concluded his long report of the most recent camp experience of the First Infantry: “I do not think there can be any question as to the advantage of encampments. . . . More can be done in a week’s encampment, I think, to instruct the National Guards in the duties of the soldier, than it is possible to do in armories or by the companies at home and alone during the year.”

In the eyes of the Illinois National Guard officers, any future National Guard missions were likely to involve

duty outside of the United States, supporting the army in a foreign war. To this end, they trained their troops at home and at camp and pitched their mission to new recruits and potential financial supporters. ING officers told recruits that in accepting military discipline and training to support the nation in war, they would prove themselves manly men and honorable citizens. Weekly armory training was geared toward preparing for the “foreign” battlefields of summer camp, and the everincreasing emphasis on marksmanship training focused on the long-range accuracy demanded by this imagined battlefield. The daily routine of summer camp was redesigned to acquaint men and officers with the habits of the U.S. Army while on campaign and with the complex logistics of providing for large bodies of men. These activities consumed the time Illinois volunteer soldiers

In the fields surrounding Camp Lincoln, members of the ING trained to be soldiers. Above: Men from Battery C clean a howitzer, a special type of short cannon, c. 1916. Opposite: Holding their mess kits, soldiers of the First Cavalry wait in a food line, 1916.

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Camp Lincoln | 25

Camp gave officers the opportunity to hone their skills. Above: Members of the ING practice their “Texas Grip” on the eight hundred–yard firing line under the watchful eye of Lieutenant Cary T. Ray. The practice took place at Camp Logan, another ING training ground, during the summer of 1897. Below: In June 1916, the colonel, lieutenants, and captains of the Seventh Regiment discussed strategies at Camp Lincoln.

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devoted to training. Militia officers claimed that formal combat training made them and their troops into a reserve army of which to be proud, and they fervently desired the opportunity to demonstrate their excellence as soldiers to a somewhat skeptical public.

While Illinois did not initially have a permanent campground to offer its troops, individual regiments were able to arrange for temporary space to pursue summer training, sometimes supported financially by the governor and the Illinois adjutant general. In the mid- and late-1870s, camp was held in various places around the state, usually at least in part at the personal expense of ING members. As the importance and seriousness of summer training made an impression on state authorities, the Illinois General Assembly appropriated funds for more regular and formal state-supported encampments. Between 1882 and 1884, the ING held summer training at Camp Logan, about five miles northeast of Springfield. In 1885, the summer training moved to nearby Camp Dickey.

Finally, in 1885, Governor Richard J. Oglesby appointed a military board to select a permanent campground for the Illinois National Guard. The board members inspected sites statewide in Highland Park, Waukegan, Wilmington, Oregon, Kankakee, Ottawa, Quincy, and Springfield. The board eventually selected property roughly a half-mile long and a quarter mile wide on the edge of Springfield. There was a great deal of competition for the permanent campsite as many expected that the surrounding community would profit from the summer visitors. The citizens of Springfield went as far as to raise $3,100 to help the state buy the property outside their community. In April 1886, further supporting the effort to secure the permanent summer campground, the Springfield City Council passed an ordinance to extend the city’s water mains out to and onto the campground at no expense to the state and to supply the water free of charge. The state also authorized the construction of a quartermaster’s house, an icehouse, and a stable to accommodate up to one hundred horses. In July, the state arranged to extend the Springfield streetcar line out to the edge of camp.

Construction took off at a tearing pace, and a mile of track was laid in less than three days. Camp Lincoln was christened on July 6, 1886, and opened for the first summer training camp on July 17.

Although Camp Lincoln now borders the Springfield metropolitan area, it was about two miles northwest of the city in 1886. A large, elaborate white gate marked the camp entrance, with two pedestrian entries flanking one

larger central opening for vehicles. “Just inside the entrance gate lies the wide drill and parade ground; bordering on this and running north, is the camp ground proper, where the tents are pitched. This ground is thinly studded with shade trees. In the rear of this is found the large swimming pool, built of masonry, and yet further back and to the left, is located the rifle range.” Although the city-supplied water line drew constant complaints (it was mostly above ground and the water tended to be quite warm in the summer, which possibly led to a degree of illness while in camp), ING members generally considered Camp Lincoln “a very desirable location.”

Summer camp fit seamlessly into the annual rounds of training, parading, competing, and socializing that marked the yearly calendar for most ING members. In fact, the camp was one of the main attractions and rewards of guard membership. In 1901, private Rufus S. Bunzey of Company I, Sixth Infantry, ING, of Thomas, Illinois, wrote:

Relaxation was as much a part of the camp experience as military drills and instruction. Above: Members of the ING laze in front of their tents at Camp Lincoln.

Camp week is looked forward to, for months. It is the one incentive, urging the men to extra work, in preparing themselves to appear before the public as soldiers. It is the only break in an otherwise monotonous, un-remunerative, voluntary service and is very beneficial to the troops, bringing the officers and men of the regiment in contact with each other, where discipline and obedience are not only expected, but demanded, teaching the men that a soldier’s life is based upon those two principles, also teaching them the duties of a soldier in many ways.

The knowledge thus gained being invaluable, and attainable in no other manner.

Camp Lincoln | 27

Sunday and Thursday, which was also known as “Governor’s Day,” drew the largest crowds of visitors to Camp Lincoln. Above: Springfield residents during a Governor’s Day visit, c. 1903. Below: Governor Dunne consults with Colonel Melton J. Foreman, 1916.

Bunzey went on to stress that at camp companies appeared “before the people of the state, and the Governor, their commander-in-chief,” audiences that were “ever ready to criticize, reflecting on the fitness of this or that officer for the position he holds.” The audiences of public performances—training-related, social, or ceremonial—ultimately decided the long-term viability of the ING and the National Guard in general. If the people of the state and the nation felt that the National Guards were not performing up to expectations, they would stop paying for them, which would end the movement. The ING had to continue to impress audiences with their importance, seriousness, and martial abilities or their institution would not survive.

Summer camp offered the ING many audiences.

Chaplain Horace W. Bolton, author of the History of the Second Regiment and an unofficial army historian, did not regularly mention ING summer encampments in his writing. He did record, however, that General Merritt, commander of the U.S. Department of the Lakes, was a guest of Brigadier General Harris A. Wheeler, ING, 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

during the 1896 camp. Other important guests included governors and their staffs, who visited camp quite regularly in the 1890s, often bringing large crowds of wives, other female visitors, and children. Not only did the governors make official visits, they also responded to social invitations offered by officers during their stay in camp.

In August 1888, for example, Governor and Mrs. Oglesby and their son visited the camp to see the evening dress parade. The event made the news when one of their horses nearly overset their carriage, and in the process of trying to assist the driver, the governor fell and injured himself. Local dignitaries from both Springfield and company hometowns were also regular guests at dinner on Sundays.

Daily visitors could also add up to a quite significant figure. According to a newspaper report of a single day in 1896, “People kept coming and going during the entire day and evening, and on the whole the attendance amounted into the thousands.” On Sundays, in particular, both out-of-town visitors and Springfield residents went to the camp to see the sights. Photographs of the daily dress parades reveal the huge crowds.

In the eyes of many observers, parties like the First Cavalry’s tea for Mrs. Tanner and her friends—in addition to the endless round of dress parades, band concerts, athletic contests, mock events, and heavy drinking—undermined the seriousness of the training efforts. The popular impression that summer camp was little more than fun and games for grownups was common enough that Bunzey was moved to complain, “Why the friends at home continue to retain such an erroneous idea regarding the actions of the men while at camp, has always been a mystery.”

It should not have been. Year after year, newspaper coverage stressed the fun and games over the seriousness of the training efforts. In July 1886, the Illinois State Register reported that as the members of the First Cavalry wheeled their horses across the parade ground in mounted drills, other members of the First (Infantry) Brigade, ING, drilled a troop of volunteers riding wooden sawhorses: “The wooden horse brigade drilled with all seriousness. Finally a trooper was dismounted and a mock ambulance corps went out on the double quick. . . . A hobby horse, which had suffered a broken

“The tented city [Camp Lincoln] was a very popular place every Summer during the State militia encampment,” a written account noted.

Above: Visitors enjoy the hospitality of the officers of the Third Regiment, ING, 1900.

Camp Lincoln | 29

Encampments often encouraged mockery of military conventions. Above: The men of the ING transform themselves into “Cap’n Clarke’s Midway Squad.”

limb, was carefully lifted on the stretcher and carried back to camp, where a surgeon armed with hammer and nails carefully cared for its hurts.” Mock drills, mock court-martials, and parades were considered good fun and often made the local papers.

Well into the twentieth century, encampments also seemed to encourage burlesques on military conventions. Participants mentioned melon thefts, baseball games, and dinner parties more often than the specific training exercises in company and personal memoirs.

Cary T. Ray of the First Infantry and his fellow guardsmen remembered campfires on the river, sing-alongs, dress parades, and passes to town to visit President Lincoln’s home. Aside from notable dinner guests, the historian of Company I, Sixth Regiment, provided only one other mention of camp activities: a long anecdote about stealing watermelons from a nearby field when returning from camp on the train.

Photographs also provide a glimpse of the kinds of revelry and relaxation that ING members prized. A series of pictures taken in the late 1890s records platoon after platoon posed in “clubs” wearing funny costumes and holding silly implements. Other pictures show ING members wearing what appear to be homemade drag costumes as they poked fun at military uniform conventions and manly stereotypes. Still others capture men and boys at ease, entertaining female guests, lolling about in front of their tents, reading newspapers, 30 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

smoking, drinking, playing cards, or staring idly off into space. With these and scores of similar stories and photographs in the historical record, Illinois National Guard summer camp often sounds like little more than a comfortable series of elaborate meals and fancy parties broken up by capering, jokes, and the odd riot over beer.

Newspapers frequently covered the revelry at Camp Lincoln, feeding the popular impression that summer camp was little more than fun and games for grownups. Opposite: A boxing match at the camp, 1902. Above: Guardsmen create a makeshift trampoline, 1902.

Camp Lincoln | 31

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Men traveled to and from Camp Lincoln via train and streetcar. Above: Members of the Illinois National Guard pose for a photograph in front of their train.

Camp Lincoln | 33

Summer camp was one of the main attractions and rewards of guard membership. Above: Men of the Illinois National Guard read and relax outside their tents at Camp Lincoln, 1895.

Tales of misbehavior and tragic mishaps also made the news. In August 1897, the New York Times carried a story with the headline: “Illinois Militia Fight. Three Hundred of Them in a Row with Citizens Over some Kegs of Beer.

A Citizen Wounded.” The story detailed how three hundred members of the Seventh Regiment, ING, “had trouble with citizens today. After a clash about some kegs of beer that the soldiers were bringing into Camp Lincoln the citizens ran and part of the Guard followed.

Three soldiers were prostrated by the heat as a result of the run, and there was a general mix-up between the soldiers and citizens. One citizen was wounded by a bayonet thrust.” Over the years at least three men drowned in the camp swimming pool, and in 1912, papers carried the story of soldiers injured by a lightning strike.

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The African American Ninth Battalion, later the Eighth Regiment, ING, also experienced difficulties at camp. In 1897, just one year after their first successful visit to summer camp since rejoining the ING, Major John Buckner of the Ninth Battalion found himself the center of a controversy that ended only in a court-martial. The disagreement concerned rail travel to and from camp.

Major Buckner claimed that the train cars provided for his troops were unclean and unfit for service and refused to use them, eventually making arrangements on another line. The representative from the adjutant general’s office disagreed and a face-off resulted in a court-martial on two charges of refusing an order. Governor Tanner disallowed the “not guilty” findings of the court-martial and sent the case back to the ING. At the second court-martial, Major

Buckner was also charged with leaving a parade route early, so as not to pass in review before Tanner, and disrupting the procession as a result. He was found guilty of all three charges and suspended from his command for six months.

In 1907, members of the Eighth Illinois attacked “obnoxious motorists” who disturbed a parade through Springfield. In 1909, the papers carried reports of worries about possible violence in Springfield while the Eighth Illinois was at camp. In 1911, the Chicago Defender carried the story of Colonel Marshall being excluded from traditional officer-to-officer courtesies at an officer’s school training in San Antonio because no local officer would take on the task of showing him around. In 1913, a federal inspection report tells of a brick being thrown through the windows of a train car carrying the Eighth Illinois to camp. In 1915 a race “melee” erupted after a white man slashed at an African American soldier from the Eighth Illinois while in Springfield. Despite such discrimination and violence, the members of the Eighth regularly earned the respect of federal inspection officers. In reports from 1902 to 1915, federal officers recorded high praise for the strength, agility, and military fitness of the members of the Eighth Illinois.

The Illinois National Guard comprised several companies of African Americans. Above: The staff of Camp Lincoln’s Commissary Department provided men with equipment and provisions, 1902.

Below: Guardsmen pose for a group photograph, c. 1895.

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In spite of disparate news reports which covered both the entertaining sides of camp life and the tragedy and discrimination, the central—and quite serious—object of summer camp remained to offer military training of more rigor and professionalism than was possible during the weekly ING drills over the long, gray Illinois winters. A typical week of camp consisted of three to seven days for each regiment or occasionally brigade. Each day followed a strict routine laid down in general orders and more or less following standard army practices. Mornings were broken into half-hour segments for a variety of official business from reveille at 5:00 A.M. through breakfast, sick call, morning drills, and assemblies to dinner at 12:00 NOON. Afternoons were generally reserved for a variety of larger drills, sham battles, field exercises and maneuvers, various specialized schools for the officers, and rifle range practice. Generally a dress parade took place after supper and taps sounded between 10:00 and 11:00 P.M. ING members guarded the camp throughout the week, providing an opportunity to practice those skills as well.

Unlike most state militias, the ING commissioned African American senior officers as early as the 1890s. Left: On April 8, 1911, the Chicago Defender reported the mistreatment of ING Colonel John R. Marshall in San Antonio, Texas.

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On the whole, the various inspecting officers who attended ING summer training adopted a tone of moderately hopeful despair, even with the improvements they acknowledged came with increased practice and higher standards of discipline. Federal and state inspectors consistently recognized and applauded individual and company enthusiasm for military drills and practice while bemoaning the shortness of time, lack of preparation for the more advanced work, and problems caused by the steady turnover of junior officers on whom so much depended. In the early 1890s, inspectors were still reporting that “every year, after the companies are assembled in camp for regimental drills, it is found necessary to devote much of the valuable time to company training in discipline and guard duties, and in teaching the company officers the close-order battalion formations.”

As a result, “ver y little more can be done,

and several of the colonels told me that if their regiments reached the point where they left off the year before, they felt that under the circumstances they ought to be satisfied.” Nevertheless, most inspection reports concluded on a hopeful note: “The spirit with which [the men] received instruction showed them ambitious to reach a higher standard, and their zeal proves them worthy of the great State that has done so much for her ‘citizen soldiery’.”

Over the years, the ING adopted evermore ambitious training maneuvers and field exercises with slowly increasing success. In 1896, for example, camp instructors arranged an elaborate exercise that involved marching approximately six miles out of Camp Lincoln, setting up a temporary camp for the night, then marching on the next day in a way that brought two “opposing” regiments into contact to practice battlefield maneuvering.

As years passed, expectations rose for increased military discipline and improved training practices. Above: Officers strategize at Camp Lincoln, 1897. Left: Lieutenant Bruce D. Smith consults with Sergeant J. L. Houghteling of Battery C, 1916.

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As seriously as much of the ING membership undertook their training at camp, it remained the highlight of the year. Opposite: Members of the ING at ease outside their tents at Camp Lincoln.

Above: Guardsmen play their drums, August 20, 1896.

Over the course of the 1890s, especially after the Spanish–American War (1898), summer training was more regularized and in line with standard army practices. Officials frowned on excessive parading, and skirmish and extended-order drills became standard during weekly training sessions. Expectations for military discipline regulating militia behavior increased, and tolerance for the more casual relations of the past went down. The presence of U.S. Army observers, inspectors, and training advisers further improved training practices. With increasing frequency, the army even offered selected National Guard regiments the chance to participate in joint maneuvers. ING officers were given opportunities to hone their increasingly professional skills at specialized camps also offered by the army. These schools acknowledged the growing specialization within the guards—medical corps, signal corps, engineering corps, and naval brigades, as well as the traditional infantry, cavalry, and artillery companies—specialization that mirrored changes in the army. The army had a presence at summer camp at the invitation of the governor from 1885 onward, observing, critiquing, teaching, and sometimes praising, all of these activities. By the early 1900s, photographs from camp show men shooting at the Camp Lincoln | 39

range, participating in extended-order drills, and practicing complicated maneuvers over the rolling terrain of Camp Lincoln.

Despite the increasing military rigor, summer camp continued to offer daily dress parades, constant opportunities for companies to measure their performance against each other and their audiences, sham battles, and a nearly endless round of visiting, dinner parties, and general entertainment for ING members and the public alike. As seriously as much of the ING membership undertook their training at camp, the glamour and excitement for most resided in the opportunities to cement the social, ceremonial, and political ties—an issue commented on with increasing concern by many critics as the century drew to a close. As late as 1896, one federal inspector noted wryly: “The field work was merely an incident of camp routine and did not interfere with drills and ceremonies on the same day.”

Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s, the ING had a diverse membership, made up of socially prestigious units, companies with strong ethnic associations or primarily working-class memberships, a steady procession of African American companies, and companies based in urban and rural areas across the state. For boys from the state’s rural counties to those from Chicago, camp was an exciting time. Remembering summer encampments many years later, former member of the First Infantry Cary T. Ray wrote, “Camp at Springfield . . . Two weeks, or about that time, of outdoor life, Camp Cooking, etc. meant much to the Boys from Offices, Stores and shops . . . always an event in our lives.” The camp was the highlight of the year for many ING members, because it was fun as well as very serious indeed. ING members went to summer camp to learn to be soldiers. The parties, parades, and high jinks were the incidentals that surrounded, but did not overwhelm, the seriousness of the camp’s purpose—to train citizen-soldiers to serve as the nation’s reserve army.

Eleanor L. Hannah, an assistant professor of history at the University of Minnesota Duluth, is the author of Manhood, Citizenship, and the National Guards: Illinois, 1870–1917 (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, forthcoming).

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 20–21, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #908); 22, ICHi-39220; 23, ICHi-39225; 24, DN-0066661; 25, DN0066584; 26 top, ICHi-39219; 26 bottom, DN-0066521; 27, ICHi-39221; 28 top, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #93); 28 bottom, DN-0066516; 29, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #262); 30 top, 40 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

ICHi-39236; 30 bottom, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #1535); 31, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #1533); 32–33, ICHi-39229; 34, ICHi39230; 35 top, Courtesy of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library (Guy Mathis Collection #1454); 35 bottom, ICHi26577; 36 left, reprinted from the Chicago Defender, 8 April 1911; 36–37, DN-0066517; 37, ICHi-39228; 38–39, ICHi39234; 39, ICHi-39231; 40–41, ICHi-39222.

F O R F U R T H E R R E A D I N G | The archives of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield and the Chicago History Museum each contain a rich variety of material on the Illinois National Guard. For more on the history of the National Guard, see Jerry M. Cooper, The Rise of the National Guard: The Evolution of the American Militia, 1865–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997) and John K. Mahon, History of the Militia and the National Guard (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1983).

“All Aboard for Springfield!” Members of the ING on a horse-drawn wagon headed into town, July 1886.

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In 1878, Bulgaria was liberated from centuries of Turkish rule. The newly independent county hoped to establish a strong presence at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Fair visitors viewed traditional goods and costumes at Bulgarian Curiosities on the Midway Plaisance (above).

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To Chicago and Back: Bulgaria and the World’s Fair of 1893 P E T KO I VA N OV

I

n 1994, the Bulgarian government donated to the University of Chicago a monument of the country’s legendary writer Aleko Konstantinov (1863–97), who documented his tourist experiences at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in the travelogue To Chicago and Back (1894). The administration placed the monument in the Regenstein Library and inaugurated it with a modest ceremony that November. Although the event passed almost unnoticed in the university community, it received intense media coverage in Bulgaria and was considered a key indicator of a new BulgarianAmerican cultural partnership. The monument’s intention, however—to help establish a positive Bulgarian image in the United States—by and large missed its target, as most Americans remain unfamiliar with Konstantinov and his famous work.

Bulgarians consider To Chicago and Back a masterpiece by an author so beloved that he is usually referred to by his first name rather than his last. While travelogues rarely attain the rank of canonical text, Aleko’s work is an exception. At the end of the nineteenth century, Bulgaria was a newly liberated country; it had been part of the Ottoman Empire from 1396 to 1878. The country’s cultural endeavors at that time focused inward, and the horizons of the foreign world barely reached beyond the Balkans. Against this background, writer Aleko Konstantinov spent his entire life trying to open up the self-centered Bulgarian culture both spatially and intellectually. He created the first Bulgarian tourist club and was a famous pleasure hiker. Despite his chronic lack of money, he traveled to Russia, Paris, Prague, and London, in addition to his famous trip to America. By testing himself and his literary characters away from their sheltered home territory, he brought the Bulgarian identity to a worldwide arena.

This bust of writer Aleko Konstantinov was originally displayed in Svishtov, Bulgaria. In 1994, the Bulgarian government donated the monument to the University of Chicago, where it now stands in the Regenstein Library.

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The culmination of his career as a traveler was his visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, which resulted in the best Bulgarian travelogue to date. Of the numerous foreign travelogues related to the World’s Columbian Exposition, Konstantinov’s work is probably the only one that had a significant resonance in its home country: generations of Bulgarians have relied on it to form their impressions of the United States.

Passages from the book are known by heart by millions of Bulgarians, as it is mandatory reading in secondary-school programs and has been the subject of numerous literary remakes and parodies.

Konstantinov’s travelogue traces his journey to and from the fair with two compatriots, his close friend Filaret Golovanov and the surgeon Stoian Radoslavov. Boarding La Touraine in Le Havre, the narrator feels as if he is heading “not to the New World, but the Otherworld.”

The sight of an iceberg from the “floating palace” on which the three men spend seven days is the most dramatic moment in a journey composed chiefly of meals

and conversations with chance acquaintances. When they arrive at Ellis island, the obscurity of their native Bulgaria is made painfully clear to Konstantinov and his companions: I, too, approached the official.

He asked me my name. When he heard the surname ending in “off,” he babbled out, “Are you Russian?”

“No, I’m Bulgarian.” “?!”

“I’m Bulgarian, from Bulgaria.” “??!!”

“Bul-gair-i-an!” I cried more emphatically, as I was beginning to be irritated by the inattention of this American: was he deaf?

“Bulgarian!”

“Hungarian,” he corrected me.

“What Hungarian! I’m from Bulgaria, on the Balkan Peninsula.” I was aggravated and amused at the same time as I watched him rack his brains to recall . . . where could such a kingdom be. Our newspapers daily cite such wonderful reports from the foreign

Top: Konstantinov as a student in Odessa in 1882, about a decade before the journey that inspired him to write his most famous travelogue.

Known as the “Mark Twain” of his home country, Aleko Konstantinov’s life and work is commemorated in a museum in Svishtov (above).

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In Bulgaria, schoolchildren are required to read To Chicago and Back, and many natives know passages of the book by heart. Above: The last page of the Konstantinov’s manuscript.

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brochures about America; but Nedelkovich burst my bubble when he informed me that, “There is so much corruption here, the likes of which you’ve never seen before; in Europe people are kings, here gold is king—whoever has the most gold has the most power. Money rules, as they say.”

This cartoon by E. Vedernikov depicts Konstantinov arriving at Ellis Island and was published in a Soviet edition of Konstantinov’s work. In his travelogue, Konstantinov describes his frustration upon his arrival in America, where officials had never heard of his home country. According to official Ellis Island records, however, the writer and his companions were listed as Bulgarians, not Turks as he describes in the travelogue.

press on the progress of our fatherland, and this ignoramus has never even heard the word “Bulgaria”!

I realized that I perhaps was not pronouncing the name of our kingdom correctly, the way they do, so I pulled out and spread before him a map of Europe, and poked my finger at Sofia.

“Oh, yes, Turkey, all right!”

“No, sir!” I protested, but he didn’t want to hear about it and registered me as a Turk. He likewise turned Filaret and the doctor into Turks.

In spite of this disheartening reception, Konstantinov’s impressions of New York are highly favorable. Broadway is “a charming ballerina, dressed in the colors of the rainbow, perpetually dancing,” with no two buildings alike; an extensive description of Central Park, in which “no single man or woman was poorly dressed,” conveys his enthusiasm and admiration as well. Konstantinov is particularly struck by the comportment of the local women, who command respect from all men, though they permit themselves “liberties” that challenge Konstantinov’s European sensibilities. Public institutions likewise garner the author’s praise, especially those of the police and fire department. Potential disillusionment arrives in the form of a certain Mr. Nedelkovich, who suggests that Konstantinov’s admiration is born of naiveté: I started to express my enthusiasm for American freedom, equality, their governmental structure . . . everything I’d become enthusiastic about reading 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

The next stop on their journey is Niagara Falls, where Konstantinov feels as though he is standing “not before God’s creation but before God himself.” The description of the falls is considered a masterpiece and is often anthologized separately. The marvels that follow are, in contrast, to man’s credit—the train ferry across the Detroit River, in itself fantastic, takes the travelers past a city lit by electricity as none they have seen before.

Upon arrival in Chicago, where Konstantinov pays $9.50 for eight days’ lodging in the home of a local German woman, he heads straight to the fair, to which the bulk of his narrative is devoted. Konstantinov’s prinicipal reaction is one of awe: “Faced with the grandeur that is before my eyes, you and your struggles, and even the entire ‘Eastern question’ look like so many microbes,” he declared on a postcard he sent from the exposition, July 26, 1893. Throughout the travelogue Konstantinov’s main device is that of comparison—like the exposition itself, he puts side by side the accomplishments of his own and other nations. To convey the scale of the fair to his readers, for example, he observes that the dome of the Illinois pavillion is so great that all of the domes of Sofia’s churches could gather in it and have a ballroom dance.

Konstantinov’s description of the Court of Honor, the heart of the exposition, reflects the visual impressiveness of the sights he witnessed, as well as the detailed quality of his narrative: We stood before the Columbian Fountain: it was an exquisite marble grouping depicting Columbus’ ship, upon which sat Columbus surrounded by nymphs amongst whom some were presenting him with laurel wreaths, others were trumpeting his glory and the rest were tending the oars. The stairs of the base were bathed by continuous streams of water. On either side of this grouping electric fountains were built, submerged in the waters of the beautiful Basin, on whose opposite side was erected the enormous golden Statue of the Republic. Behind us, facing the Columbian Fountain, was the elegant Administration Building. Architecturally, this building recalled the administration building at the Paris World’s Exposition, but the latter was extraordinarily overburdened with ornaments and florid embellishments while the one at the Chicago Exposition was much larger, more solid and in its elegant simplicity attracted the spectator’s attention

Konstantinov (seen here soon after he became a lawyer in 1885) was killed in a roadside shooting only a few years after the publication of To Chicago and Back.

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and admiration to a greater degree: the Paris building resembled a comely, alluring coquette, the Chicago building—a classic, striking beauty.

To our left was the Palace of Electricity, to our right—the Palace of Machinery. Before us was the Basin, on whose right bank was the façade of the Agriculture Building, and on whose left bank was the narrow façade of the Manufactures Building. Across the way, behind the golden statue a beautiful peristyle was visible, which was flanked by two handsome, identical buildings—one was the Music Hall, the other was the Casino. Behind the Peristyle were the shores of Lake Michigan. Between the Machinery and Agriculture Buildings was the South Canal at whose end rose up a huge obelisk. All of this presented such a magnificent view that, to tell the truth, when I recalled the scene at the Paris exposition, with the exception of the Eiffel Tower, it seemed to me as if it were just a pile of gilded shacks.

The utopia of the White City had its unsavory counterpart in the “Porkopolis” of the Stockyards, a stinking monument to America’s “thirst for gold” in Konstantinov’s view. More sharp contrasts were to follow. In Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia, the modesty of the country’s seat of power (the White House) and the physical orientation of its Young Men’s Christian Association surprised him.

The next and final stop on Konstantinov’s itinerary was Boston, a city of particular interest to intellectuals of the day as the setting for Edward Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward 2000–1887. The socioeconomic questions raised in the novel may have fostered the skepticism that Konstantinov expresses in the final chapter of his American tour. In the “land of the dollar,” Konstantinov comments, all the people seem to have a “metallic chilliness,” to behave as mere cogs in a moneymaking machine: “Capital in America has reached the peak of its development and has strangled its parent, personal liberty.” Konstantinov concedes that the economic well-being of the society is admirable, but questions the cost to the individual of this pursuit of wealth.

If this is the path of progress, “When is it we’re going to live?” he wonders.

To Chicago and Back depended on the then-new idea of tourism. Konstantinov, who confessed that he loved the fragrances of steamships and locomotives, was the first Bulgarian to supplant the traditional notion of travel for business with travel as an intellectual quest. His narratorOne of Konstantinov’s famous passages describes the main basin of the World’s Columbian Exposition. He compares the fair’s Administration Building (right) favorably to Paris’s similar building at its 1889 exposition, calling Paris a “comely, alluring coquette,” while Chicago is a “classic, striking beauty.”

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The Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building at the fair was an example of the “constellations of power” indicated by the placement of certain countries. In the fair’s geography, the Manufactures Building was surrounded by pavilions of the four leading world forces: France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.

protagonist (the author himself) is not a traveler seeking dangerous adventures in unexplored places. He exemplifies a new Kulturträger—the modern tourist who journeys along well-explored routes, where a whole set of safe adventures is “staged” in exchange for an appropriate admission fee. Konstantinov’s travelogue focuses on the two representative tourist activities: traveling and sightseeing. His traveling is prearranged and facilitated by a tourist agency. It has a distinctly tourist goal—the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago—and his sightseeing along the way is constantly directed by the instructions of travel guides. In this respect, To Chicago and Back is both an artistic reflex and a direct product of a sociocultural phenomenon of the late nineteenth century: the development of tourism as a leisure activity for the emerging middle class.

In a manner of speaking, the entire tourist industry, which flourished in both America and Europe during this time, consisted of marketing vantage viewpoints.

The world’s geopolitical space began to be seen as a potential inventory of tourist sights. Tourist managers reinvented these spaces as attractions and brought tourists to them. This involved the development of convenient, luxurious means of transportation, so the 50 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

process of traveling to and from the attractions could be viewed as attractive by itself. Konstantinov’s admirations for the ships and trains on which he traveled rival his descriptions of the places he visited.

The nineteenth-century tourist boom created its own cultural topography, which Konstantinov, a typical product of the emerging tourist culture, dutifully followed on his trip to Chicago. The advertising machine that produced tourist mythologies had programmed him to seek such cornerstones as natural wonders (Niagara Falls), patriotic emblems (the Statue of Liberty and the White House), and industrial landmarks (such as the Chicago stockyards, where the observation of automated slaughtering of livestock was presented as an exceptional tourist experience).

The value of Konstantinov’s travelogue, however, lies in his ability to distance himself from the prefabricated cultural experiences and reflect upon them. He transforms the typical tourist search into a personal quest to position the modern Bulgarian between the conflicting native and non-native points of view. In this search, he compares his native culture with the achievements of the West, within a historical context dominated by the ongoing competition among nations. In the last decades

of the nineteenth century, a new hierarchical vision of world nations, based on their contribution to progress and civilization, stimulated this new global competition.

Konstantinov’s intellectual quest for Bulgaria’s place in the hierarchy of progress reaches its logical climax in his visit to the World’s Columbian Exposition, which constitutes the compositional center of the travelogue.

International world’s fairs—another invention of the nineteenth century—began with The Great Exhibition of Works of Industry of All Nations in London in 1851 and were best exemplified by three consecutive expositions, held in Paris (1889 and 1900) and Chicago (1893). The expositions themselves were advertised as tourist attractions that offered an around-the-world trip in a single day and boosted international tourism to new heights.

Constructed as the world in miniature, each exposition provided a “peaceful battlefield” for nations to demonstrate their advantages to one another and to rearrange the constellations of power once again, according to their contribution to international progress.

The organization of the World’s Columbian Exposition, and especially of the Manufactures Building, is particularly telling in this respect. The interior of the huge building was dominated by a clock-tower, a symbol of technical progress, around which stood the pavilions of the four leading world forces: France, Germany, Great Britain, and the United States of America. These four were surrounded by the pavilions of their less important partners, satellites, or colonies, the position and size of each again proportionate to its worldwide status.

In this rearranged geography, Bulgaria was represented as an insignificant addition to the highly marginalized Ottoman Empire, understandable considering its centuries-long status as a Turkish province. The Bulgarian government sponsored the major part of the country’s official exhibit at the fair, which presented artifacts recently exhibited at the First Bulgarian AgrarianIndustrial Exposition in Plovdiv—at that time the country’s largest city. The Plovdiv fair (1892) was conceived with the purpose of demonstrating “the rapid

Despite the country’s efforts, Bulgaria did not have much of a presence in the White City. It was marginalized as an offshoot to the Turkish empire, although it was no longer a Turkish province. Above: Fairgoers visit the Turkish Building, 1893.

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Bulgaria struggled for a presence at the fair, as this Chicago Daily Tribune article describes (left). Russia and Turkey blocked the newly liberated country from exhibiting at the 1889 exposition in Paris; but in 1893, fair officials voted in Bulgaria’s favor, thanks to hard campaigning by Vulko Shopov (above), the official Bulgarian commissioner to the World’s Columbian Exposition.

progress” of the Bulgarians since their liberation from Turkey in 1878 and was considered evidence that the Bulgarians are “capable of self-government” as well as a symbol of their incorporation into the “civilized world” (as oppose to the “Oriental” Turkey). Through its participation in the Chicago exposition, Bulgaria aspired to secure and legitimize its new place on the international scene. In a note entitled “Bulgaria’s Debut,” the Chicago Daily Tribune (June 26, 1893) reported: Little Bulgaria has never been represented at an International Exposition before, her hard taskmasters, Russia and Turkey, preferring to keep her conspicuously in the background. The bustling country is therefore putting a best foot forward at this first opportunity, and the character of its representative here, Prof. Vulko I. Shopoff [sic], is quite in accord with that policy. He expresses his views of the Fair with stately grace: “The World’s Fair seems to me indescribable. I can best express my opinion of its scope by saying that it grandly typifies the genius, skill, and industry of the people of the United States.”

Industrialist Vulko Shopov (1856–1918), a prominent Protestant in a largely Eastern Orthodox country who eventually became mayor of Plovdiv and chairman of Plovdiv’s Chamber of Commerce and Industry, 52 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

One of the most striking native Bulgarian displays was the traditional bridal costume from the Sofia Province, as printed in The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Vulko Shopov, a native of the province, presented a paper on the wedding rites of his native village at the congress.

To Chicago and Back | 53

organized the exhibit and acted as the official commissioner of the Bulgarian Prince Ferdinand in Chicago.

Shopov himself penned travel sketches about his world’s fair experiences, entitled From Bulgaria to Chicago; he also presented a paper on the wedding rites of his native village of Merichleri at the Folk-Lore Congress held in conjunction with the exposition.

Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria (top, as king in 1912), was represented at the fair by Shopov, who organized the country’s exhibit. Above: The Bulgarian pavilion, located next to the Turkish building in the White City, featured agricultural and manufactured products to highlight its native land.

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The Bulgarian pavilion was located at the southwestern corner of the Manufactures Building, beside the Turkish pavilion. Two main collections—organized by the Bulgarian government and by the Ethnographic Museum in Sofia—represented the country. Both collections included agricultural and manufacture products, mostly food-plants, attar (fragrance) of roses, alcoholic beverages, tobacco, leather and wooden goods, silk, and handmade textiles. Tobacco and attar of roses stood as the most important items (Bulgaria’s motto is “the Country of Roses”) and received the greatest number of awards at the fair. This modest exposition of farmed products and ethnographic commodities, however, made Bulgaria even less visible against the predominantly industrial background of the exposition as a whole. The descriptions in the exhibit’s official souvenir booklet encourage visitors to appreciate the ethnographic value and national character of the goods and crafts displayed: Above: The official Bulgaria: World’s Columbian Exposition 1893 souvenir. Below: Known as the “country of roses,” Bulgaria’s exhibits featured the land’s most famous product, attar (fragrance) of roses, which proved to be a huge hit with fairgoers.

The visitor who passes attentively through the section notices first of all perhaps the numerous rugs and draperies that adorn the wall, all made on hand looms, whose bright colors and curious designs distinguish them from all other castern rugs. . . .

His attention is next attracted by the [life-sized] papier-mâché figures scattered about the section.

There are some ten of them, and they are dressed in peasant costumes, showing the village dress in different parts of the country. An effort has also been made to reproduce as far as possible the different types of features and coloring, with fair success. . . .

An attraction to the lovers of sweet scents is the exhibit of attar of roses in several showcases at one end. The curious flaky crystals that form in the oil when the temperature falls, serve also to prove its purity. This is the largest exhibit of attar of roses ever made, several thousands of dollars and many million roses being represented in the array of flasks and bottles containing the costly perfume.

Outside the White City, the Bulgarian presence was much more prominent in the entertainment complex of Midway Plaisance. The Midway, the playful analog of the official exposition, was dominated by the gigantic Ferris Wheel, around which individual nations were set on display. The Bulgarian-American Iliya Yovchev (1850– 1907)—a teacher, journalist, and translator, known as “the father of the Bulgarian emigration in America”— arranged the Bulgarian pavilion in Midway Plaisance, aptly named Bulgarian Curiosities. He took American citizenship in 1898 and eventually founded Prishlets (Newcomer), one of the first Bulgarian émigré societies in the U.S. At the fair he was assisted by the Armenian merchant from Sofia Stefan Aivazyan, a well-known collector of Bulgarian folk costumes, embroidery, and jewTo Chicago and Back | 55

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The Bulgarian presence was much more prominent in the bustling entertainment complex of the Midway Plaisance (left) than in the White City. Photograph by Walter E. Angier, October 23, 1893.

Above: Iliya Yovchev, dressed in traditional Bulgarian clothes, was the commissioner of the “Bulgarian Curiosities� exhibit at the Midway.

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Konstantinov’s To Chicago and Back helped establish Chicago as a leading destination for Bulgarian immigrants for decades after its publication. Above: A group of Bulgarian men standing outside a building in Chicago, 1920.

elry who reportedly brought to the Columbian Exposition nineteen trunks of such goods. The Bulgarian merchant Solomon Blaustein presented a collection of 100,000 postage stamps at Bulgarian Curiosities. Back in Bulgaria, in his hometown of Ruse, Blaustein built a casino named Chicago that featured a roof-top garden that its guests could reach by the town’s first manually operated elevator. Blaustein’s wife ran a nearby millinery shop called “By Chicago,” where she sold fashions to Bulgaria’s elite.

The pavilion in Midway Plaisance served primarily as a souvenir shop, offering its customers replicas of the artifacts displayed in the official exhibit: rose oil, embroideries, carpets, and a variety of ethnographic knickknacks.

In addition, the shop was decorated with mannequins dressed in traditional Bulgarian costumes from different 58 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

parts of the country. Konstantinov’s description of the shop provides a taste of the atmosphere: On both sides of the entrance there are windows with all kinds of old and new coins, postage stamps and maps. The other two sides, which are also open, contain everything which Aivazyan was able to buy from our peasant women over several years: embroidered towels, kerchiefs, socks, leather shoes, belt buckles, earrings, rings and hundreds of rattles with which the peasant women bedeck themselves. Inside, the hut is decorated with rugs on which are hung bagpipes, shepherds’ flutes, drums, wine flasks, horns, brandy pitchers, and prisoners’ pouches. . . . At a table in the corner some Bulgarian guy, Ganiu Somov, sits in Turkish fashion, on a chest covered with a rug,

wearing a padded jacket with wide red sash and endless blue bloomers, smoking a cigarette in a long black cigarette holder with an amber tip. Before him on the table are displayed several shiny, dark blue vials, half of which are empty, the other half full of tershe [imitation rose oil]. Mr. Yovchev and another helper talk to the “clients” and most conscientiously satisfy the unquenchable curiosity of the American women. Aivazyan adds from time to time: “Come on, words aren’t worth even a dime, why don’t you tell them to buy something?”

Undoubtedly, both the exhibits and their exhibitors contributed to the exotic attractions of the Midway.

Bulgaria presented itself successfully at the exposition not so much as a manufacturer of industrial goods, as a producer of exotic curiosities. Konstantinov, the international tourist, while stunned by the wonders of the White City, ended up spending more time in Midway Plaisance where he, like the majority of the visitors, took advantage of its various attractions. At the same time, Konstantinov could not help but notice the disproportion between the optimistic expectations raised at home by the first participation of independent Bulgaria at a world’s fair, and the modest place reserved for Bulgaria in the symbolic geography of the exposition. Having come to Chicago to celebrate progress and civilization and to synchronize his watch with a rapidly changing world, he had to face the reality that the world of progress had very little time and interest to spare for his small country and its lofty aspirations.

Though the Bulgarian exhibit failed to produce substantial resonance abroad, at home it was successfully utilized by the government to promote its achivements. In the long term, however, the major outcome of the Bulgarian participation at the world’s fair was not its dubious success, but Konstantinov’s travelogue that “made Chicago a household name in Bulgaria.” While the Bulgarian government may have had little success in popularizing its country in the U.S., Konstantinov brought America to Bulgaria in a book that has kept the myth of America alive in the minds of his countrymen for more than a century. To Chicago and Back has been also influential in the history of the Bulgarian immigration to the U.S., particularly in establishing Chicago as the leading community of BulgarianAmericans in the country. As the contemporary Bulgarian poet Tzveta Sofronieva put it: “To Chicago.” Back is in question.

Petko Ivanov is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago.

The Chicago History Museum is grateful to Dimitar G. Nikolov of Lake Forest College for his assistance with this article.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | An English translation of Aleko Konstantinov’s To Chicago and Back (Sofia: Bulgarian Bestseller, National Museum of Bulgarian Books and Polygraphy, 2004) is available at the University of Chicago Regenstein Library.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 42, Chicago Public Library, WCE Collection/C. D. Arnold Photographs; 43–47, Courtesy of the University of Chicago Regenstein Library; 48–49, ICHi-18013; 50, ICHi-22511; 51, ICHi-13699; 52 left, Chicago Daily Tribune, April 30, 1893; 52 right, The Official Directory of the World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Moses P. Handy (Chicago: W. Gonkey Co., 1893); 53, The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Helen Wheeler Bassett and Frederick Starr, editors (Chicago: Charles H. Sergel Company, 1893). From the Northwestern University Library, Evanston; 54 top, CHS; 54 bottom, The Book of the Fair Vol. 1. by Hubert Howe Bancroft (New York: Bounty Books, 1894); 55 top, Souvenir: Bulgaria: World’s Columbian Exposition 1893 (Chicago: A. L. Swift & Co., 1893); 55 bottom, Chicago Daily Tribune, November 1, 1893; 56–57, ICHi-21822; 57, Midway Types: Chicago Times Portfolio. Part One (Chicago: American Eng. Co. Publishers, 1893); 58, DN-005984; 59, Courtesy of the University of Chicago Regenstein Library.

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Making History: Interviews with Andrew McKenna and Ray Meyer T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

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ndrew McKenna and Ray Meyer grew up in modest Chicago families. Few could have predicted they would become two of the leading figures in American sports. McKenna, chief executive of Schwarz Paper Company and one of the current owners of the Chicago Bears professional football team, is the only individual to serve as chairman for both of Chicago’s major league baseball teams. When the White Sox threatened to leave Chicago in 1975, McKenna helped keep the team in the city. Meyer served as the head basketball coach at DePaul University for forty-two seasons, the second-longest tenure of any major college basketball coach in history. He won more than two-thirds of his games, including a 180–30 stretch in his final seven seasons. In 1979, Meyer was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Andrew James McKenna was born on the South Side of Chicago, the eldest of six children to Andrew and Anita Fruin McKenna. “I lived at Seventysecond Street and Crandon Avenue, which would have been described as the South Shore neighborhood,” recalls McKenna. “Of course, there was always the tendency in the city for people, particularly people who were Catholic, [to be] identified by their parish. I was in St. Philip Neri parish.”

During McKenna’s childhood, the South Shore neighborhood was a mixture of housing styles and commercial establishments. “The common street was Seventy-first, which was a row of shops,” McKenna recounts, “but also was known because the Illinois Central Railroad ran down the middle of it.”

McKenna grew up in a devoutly Catholic household. “My mother was very religious,” he explains. “She went to mass every day, and we always lived only a few blocks from church.”

McKenna remembers his parents as not only committed Catholics, but “very faith driven.”

Ray Meyer was born on December 18, 1913, in Chicago, the youngest of Joseph and Barbara (Hummel) Meyer’s ten children. Joseph Meyer, an immigrant from Alsace-Lorraine, ran a wholesale confectionary business, but died in 1926 when Ray was only thirteen years old.

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Below left: Andrew McKenna, the 2005 Marshall Field History Maker Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation. Below: Ray Meyer, the 2005 George Halas History Maker Award for Distinction in Sports. Mr. Meyer died on March 17, 2006, as this article was in production.

McKenna grew up in the St. Philip Neri parish (left, in 1955) on the city’s South Side, where his devoutly Catholic mother attended daily mass. In McKenna’s South Shore neighborhood, the Illinois Central Railroad ran right down Seventy-first Street (below, in 1955).

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Meyer grew up in the vicinity of Thirteenth Street and Central Park Avenue.

Although he remembers the area as largely Jewish, Meyer’s childhood was immersed in Catholic culture. “My mother was like a saint; she was a very devout Catholic and went to church and made all the novenas,” remembers Meyer. “She could hardly walk, but she’d still go.”

Meyer’s mother insisted that her son attend the local parochial school, St. Agatha’s on the West Side, from which he graduated in 1929. As a teenager, Meyer explored becoming a priest and briefly attended Quigley Prep on Chestnut Street for two years. Catholicism, however, introduced Meyer to a different vocation: basketball. “Growing up, I played more baseball and football than I ever did basketball,” recounts Meyer. “It was only when St. Ag’s built the little gym” that basketball became his sport of choice, mainly out of convenience. “Basketball is a do-it-yourself game,” he explains. “You can go shoot the ball, and you don’t have to ever get somebody to throw you the ball or catch it or bat it, so I used to spend a lot of time in the gym.”

In grade school, Meyer played on teams organized by the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO). Founded by Bishop Bernard Sheil, the CYO refused to follow any “color line” in interscholastic sports. Meyer remembers playing allblack teams from St. Elizabeth’s and Corpus Christi churches. “We didn’t think anything of it,” he claims. “When you’re a kid, you don’t know if they’re black or white, and you don’t care.”

The McKennas’ faith helped the family through young Andrew’s two childhood bouts with rheumatic fever, one at age four and another at age nine that kept him out of elementary school for much of the fourth grade. McKenna eventually enrolled at Leo High School, working his way through school at various jobs. For a time, he aspired to be a journalist and briefly worked for then–Chicago Times sportswriter Jerome Holtzman.

McKenna matriculated to Notre Dame in 1947. He subsidized his education by working while going to school full-time, earning a degree in business administration and marketing in 1951. McKenna believed he was destined for a legal career and immediately enrolled in Loyola University Law School. To pay his way, he held four jobs: teaching a high school math class at St. Mel’s on the West Side, delivering flowers, working as a tax counselor at a South Side currency exchange, and tutoring a Russian immigrant engineer in English. When Loyola’s program requirements prevented him from working and completing his degree in three years, he transferred to DePaul University’s Law School and graduated in 1954.

In 1932, Meyer led St. Patrick’s High School to the national Catholic high school basketball championship.

St. Patrick’s was not originally scheduled to appear in the tournament 62 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

Above: At Notre Dame, McKenna paid for his education by working full-time as he earned his degree in business administration and marketing. Below: In 1932, Meyer led St. Patrick’s High School to the national Catholic high school championship. He remained a loyal St. Pat’s alumnus, helping to organize a reunion in 1959.

since the Chicago city champion was St. Mel’s. When another team dropped out, however, St. Patrick’s entered the tournament as a last-minute substitute.

In the tournament semifinal, St. Patrick’s met Campion from Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, led by guard George Ireland. Meyer scored twelve points and sparked his team to a 25–20 victory. (The contest foreshadowed Meyer and Ireland’s notable rivalry as coaches of the DePaul and Loyola basketball teams, respectively, between 1951 and 1975.) St. Patrick’s went on to win the final against St. Mel’s, a team that had defeated them three times during the regular season.

Like McKenna, Meyer enrolled at Notre Dame, where his athletic success continued under the coaching of future Hall-of-Famer George Keogan. Meyer served as team captain in 1937 and 1938, the last two-time captain until AllAmerican Austin Carr in 1969–71. Meyer led his teams to a 40–6 record during those years and earned the Byron V. Kanaley Award as Notre Dame’s best student-athlete.

After concluding his formal education, McKenna’s workplace experiences convinced him that his talents were better applied in sales and marketing than law. He joined the U.S. Camera Corporation in 1954. “I answered an ad in the paper,” McKenna remembers, and persuaded company officials “that I was the right guy for the job, even though I didn’t have a lot of experience that would suggest it.” He was hired as an assistant sales manager. “It was a great experience because this company made inexpensive cameras, primarily under private label for companies like Sears and Montgomery Ward’s.”

McKenna eventually recognized that his prospects were limited at U.S. Camera. “They offered me an opportunity which would have involved a move to either Atlanta or Dallas,” explains McKenna, “but it was still a family business, and even though I could have grown with the company, it was unlikely that I would have had much in the way of senior management opportunities.” When McKenna raised his concern with management officials, one of them said, “You know, a good friend of mine is looking for some guys who can sell, and you can sell.” The company was Schwarz Paper.

Meyer (here c. 1936) continued his athletic success at Notre Dame, serving as captain of the basketball team for two years, leading the team to a 40–6 record, and winning an award as the best student-athlete.

Both Meyer and McKenna attended Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana.

Meyer graduated in 1938; McKenna in 1951.

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Above: Coach Ray Meyer and the DePaul Blue Demons basketball team celebrate after winning the National Invitation Tournament championship in 1945.

To help supplement his income throughout the 1950s, Meyer arranged exhibition games between college players and the Harlem Globetrotters. Right: The Blue Demons take on the Globetrotters.

McKenna had never heard of Schwarz. “I had no idea what this company did,” he admits, “When my friend said the paper business, I thought he meant the Chicago Tribune or something like that.” Schwarz was located at 1430 South Canal Street, on the Near South Side. “I visited with them, saw an opportunity to earn what was a decent living, and left the camera company, but with their blessing.” McKenna joined Schwarz as a salesman in 1955.

Meyer’s early professional path was equally circuitous. After graduating from Notre Dame in 1938, he worked for the Chicago Relief Administration as a social worker. Meyer remembers the relief administrator, Mrs. Wright: “She took one look at me and said, ‘You’re a big, healthy individual,’ so she gave me the Halsted and Madison location,” he laughs. Now a part of Greektown, the area was “a rough neighborhood,” remembers Meyer. “I saw life in the raw. I had that for about six months, and I was very depressed, because all those problems that I was witnessing and had to write up.”

Meyer eventually quit and started playing basketball for the LaSalle Cavaliers, an amateur team sponsored by the LaSalle Hotel and owned by Avery Brundage, future president of the International Olympic Committee.

During Meyer’s years as a player, professional basketball was not very popular. The American Basketball League (1934) was centered along the East Coast, the National Basketball League (1937) in the Midwest. In 1949, the Basketball Association of America (1946) and the National Basketball League merged to form the National Basketball Association. Meyer’s LaSalle Cavaliers played other teams affiliated with the Amateur Athletic Union, such as the Phillips 66ers of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, and the Peoria Cats, sponsored by the Caterpillar Corporation.

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Meyer signed on as coach of the Blue Demons in 1941 and stayed on for more than forty seasons. Left: Coach Meyer and the DePaul University men’s basketball team in the 1950s.

Increasingly, coaching beckoned Meyer as a possible career. In 1933, during his senior year at St. Patrick’s, he had guided the St. Agatha girls’ team to second place in the CYO basketball league. (That team included his future wife, Margaret Mary Delaney.) After college, Meyer’s former coach George Keogan hired him to scout upcoming Notre Dame opponents for $25 a game. When Keogan suffered a heart attack in 1941, Meyer was hired as his temporary replacement for the season. After the final game, Art Morris and sportswriter James Enright approached Meyer. “How would you like to coach at DePaul?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” responded Meyer. “I’ll go talk to Keogan.”

The coach advised his former star player to take the job. “You’re the head coach there, you’ll be an assistant here. Why don’t you take it for a year?”

Meyer followed Keogan’s advice. “I took it for a year,” remembers Meyer. “It was the only contract I ever signed.”

He never left DePaul. For the next forty-two seasons, from 1942 to 1984, he compiled a 724–354 record while guiding the Blue Demons to twenty-one post-season appearances, including thirteen in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament and eight in the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) in New York. In total, Meyer recorded thirty-seven winning seasons and twelve twenty-win seasons, including seven straight from 1978 to 1984. Two Meyer-coached teams reached the NCAA’s Final Four (1943 and 1979), and in 1945, Meyer led DePaul past Bowling Green to capture the NIT, the school’s only post-season title. Meyer was named Coach of the Year multiple times and when he retired, he had the fifth-best record of any coach in NCAA Division I history.

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Members of the DePaul University basketball team in high spirits as they board a United Airlines airplane bound for the NCAA tournament, 1959. Coach Meyer is in the lower right-hand corner.

Shortly after arriving at Schwarz, McKenna began to question the wisdom of switching jobs. “I went to see Sidney Schwarz, the founder of the company, who was at that point seventy-six.” McKenna informed Schwarz that he was going to leave the company to start his own business. Schwarz responded that he was in search of a successor and asked McKenna if he wanted to take over Schwarz Paper. McKenna jumped at the opportunity and rapidly moved up the company’s administrative ladder to become the first non-family member to serve as president. In 1967, McKenna purchased the company.

Schwarz grew enormously under his leadership. In three decades, revenues grew more than 5,000 percent. “When I joined the company, it was described as a ‘paper merchant,’” McKenna explains. “Today, we’re involved in a lot of other substrates and a lot of other materials that either go into packaging or into some of the other needs of our customers. The company looks entirely different today than it did fifty or even thirty years ago.” By the 1990s, Schwarz was selling shopping bags to Gap Inc. and packaging materials to W. W. Grainger Inc. “We are international in scope,” McKenna describes. “We have facilities throughout this country, Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom.”

To keep the White Sox in Chicago, McKenna teamed up with Bill Veeck (left); McKenna eventually became chairman of the team.

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Basketball was a way of life for the entire Meyer family, as this photograph indicates. Joey Meyer (second from left) eventually became his father’s assistant coach at DePaul and took over as head coach when Ray retired.

Just as McKenna was identified with Schwarz, Ray Meyer eventually became the face of DePaul and a nationally recognized celebrity in his own right. His early years of coaching, however, brought little attention. For most of his career, his salary was less than $30,000—a pittance compared to the milliondollar contracts signed by major college coaches today. In the 1950s, to supplement his income, Meyer organized a “barnstorming” team to play the Harlem Globetrotters. A group of basketball promoters “called and asked me if I could get some players to play against the Trotters, so I got two from Notre Dame, two from Iowa, DePaul, Marquette, and some of the teams around there, and we played them,” explains Meyer. “I remember that game so vividly.

Each player got $25.” This one-time offer quickly became a regular engagement. From 1950 to 1960, Meyer coached a college all-star team that played a coast-to-coast series against the Globetrotters. “We started in New York, and we’d play a double header, and we’d work all the way to California,” he explains. “Then from California, we’d work all the way back to Boston.”

Despite Schwarz’s enormous success over the past four decades, McKenna is best known in the world of Chicago sports. He ran the minor-league Michigan City White Caps in 1959 and helped prevent the White Sox major league baseball team from leaving Chicago several years later. In 1975, Leo Breen, McKenna’s law school classmate and chief financial officer of the White Sox, called and explained that the team was about to be sold and moved to Seattle. The Schwarz executive immediately called former White Sox owner Bill Veeck, who was then living in Maryland. “You’ve got to come back to Chicago,” insisted McKenna. “We have to buy the White Sox.” Shortly thereafter, McKenna and Veeck set up an office in the Executive House Hotel on Wacker Drive and began interviewing prospective investors.

“We were able to raise enough money,” recounts McKenna, and eventually McKenna and Veeck’s group purchased 80 percent of the team, keeping the White Sox in Chicago.

After five years, McKenna and his associates sold the White Sox to current owner Jerry Reinsdorf. Shortly thereafter, McKenna received another phone call. “The Tribune Company had worked out a deal with Bill Wrigley and bought the Cubs,” remembers McKenna. “And they asked me if I would serve as the chairman. Having previously served as chairman of the White Sox, [I thought it was] impossible to be chairman of the White Sox and the Cubs, 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2006

but it wasn’t.” McKenna led the Cubs from 1982 to 1984. He remains the only individual to ever serve as chairman of both teams.

When Meyer was named head coach at DePaul in 1942, he had little support from the university. “When I came there, I was the coach, the scout, the recruiter, and in charge of intramurals. I was everything.” Meyer’s responsibilities sometimes extended beyond sports. “I remember on Saturdays and Sundays, if we practiced those days, the janitor didn’t work, so I had to come in an hour early and stoke the furnaces so they’d have heat.”

DePaul itself was much different than it is today. The university was “a day school,” describes Meyer. “For the first twenty-nine years I coached there, we had no dormitories.” This made it difficult for Meyer to compete against Big Ten universities for top recruits. “Even when we had the dorms, we never took boys away from the Big Ten, Notre Dame, or Marquette,” Meyer admits.

“As gangs started to come into Chicago area, [the other schools would] use that [in] recruiting against us. Mothers and dads in area[s] from the South Side, they wanted their boy[s] to go out of town to get away from that kind of a situation, so you had a problem.”

Andrew McKenna (center) received an honorary degree from Notre Dame at commencement on May 21, 1989. To McKenna’s left is Don Keough, chairman of the board of trustees, and on his right is Father Edward “Monk” Malloy, president of the university.

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Before 1970, racism was also a pervasive problem when the team traveled.

“I remember in St. Louis, we went to a restaurant to eat, and they wouldn’t serve us because we had a black [player]. So we ate in the bus stops and train stations.” Such stories were not isolated incidents. I remember another school down south,” recounts Meyer. “We sat there for an hour and they just didn’t say anything, never even brought us a glass of water.”

Meyer’s on-court success generated offers from other major college basketball programs, but he always turned them down. “I just liked where I was; I’m adverse to change,” he admits. “I’m set in all my ways.” But Meyer also displays a fundamental loyalty. “DePaul gave me a chance to coach, and I liked the type of kid I was getting, reminded me of myself,” he concedes. “He didn’t come from an affluent home where you had everything. Most of the kids we had were from the lower classes as far as funds are concerned.”

Meyer’s forty-two-year tenure as head coach of a major college basketball program would be difficult, if not impossible, to match. Meyer says times have changed. “I couldn’t coach today; they’re a different breed. I have a saying: I’d like to buy them for what they’re worth and sell them for what they think they’re worth. . . . Today, they earn big money, so there’s a lot of problems. You’ve got to draw. Anytime [schools] build a big building, that coach is under pressure. He’s got to fill it. You don’t win? Get a new [coach].”

McKenna’s business acumen made him a much-sought figure by numerous corporations. Over the past two decades, he served on the board of directors at Bank One (1991–99), Dean Foods (1982–2000), and the Tribune Company (1982–2002). He is currently a director of the Aon Corporation (since 1970), the Chicago Bears Football Club, Inc., Click Commerce, and Skyline Corporation (a publicly held mobile home manufacturer based in Elkhart, Indiana). In 1991, he was named a director at McDonald’s Corporation, and since 2004, he has served as McDonald’s Corporation’s nonexecutive Chairman of the Board.

In certain respects, however, McKenna’s corporate activities are dwarfed by his service on numerous civic, community, and philanthropic boards. He has chaired the board of trustees of the Museum of Science and Industry (and continues to serve as a trustee), the Economic Club of Chicago, the 1997 United Way/Crusade of Mercy Campaign for Chicagoland area, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, and the Commercial Club itself. He has served as a director of the American Ireland Fund, Children’s Memorial Hospital of Chicago, the Lyric Opera, the Big Shoulders Fund of Chicago, and the Renaissance Schools Fund. He was the founding chairman of Chicago Metropolis 2020. McKenna chaired the board of trustees of the University of Notre Dame from 1992 to 2000 and was vice chairman for six years prior to that. No wonder Bill Veeck once marveled, “I’ve never known anyone who is in so many places at one time.”

When Meyer began playing basketball, all players shot two-hand set shots.

Balls were made of leather and had laces like a football. A center jump was required after every basket. No three-second rule restricted players from staying in the free throw lane. The lane itself was only six feet wide (today it is sixteen feet for professionals, twelve feet for college). Goaltending was legal and the timed possession clock had yet to be invented. Television was nonexistent. When he ponders these changes, Meyer smiles and proclaims, “I had a great run.”

Right: As the honored guests of the Notre Dame/USC football game on October 18, 1997, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew McKenna took part in a flag presentation ceremony. They gave a flag to a member of the Irish Guard, who then raised it as the marching band played the national anthem.

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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 and most recently Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press).

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 60, CHS; 61 top, ICHi-39239; 61 bottom, ICHi-39238; 62 top, University of Notre Dame Archives; 62 bottom, “St. Patrick Alumni Hold Reunion,” copyrighted May 29, 1959, Chicago Tribune company. All rights reserved.; 63, University of Notre Dame Archives; 64–66, DePaul University Archives, Chicago, Illinois; 67, ICHi14720; 68, Chicago Tribune photograph by Carl Hogan. All rights reserved. Used with permission; 69–71, University of Notre Dame Archives; 72, CHS. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best introduction to Ray Meyer is his autobiography written in collaboration with Ray Sons, Coach (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1987). On the role of sports in American cities, see Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Heather Wolf, “Chicago’s McDaddy,” Outstanding Directors (2004), is the most recent profile of Andrew McKenna. The McDonald’s Corporation website has useful information on McKenna at: www.mcdonalds.com/ corp/about/bios/andrew_mckenna.html.

The 2005 Making History Awards were underwritten by AON, Chase, Exelon, LaSalle Bank, Lurie Investments, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, S & C Electric, and Sidley, Austin, Brown & Wood. Media support provided by WTTW 11.

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Honorees Ann Lurie, Andrew McKenna, and Ray Meyer at the 2005 Making History Awards ceremony.