C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Associate Editors Emily H. Nordstrom Amanda B. Stenlund Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Photography John Alderson Jay Crawford Publications Intern Katrina Paukstys
Copyright 2008 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: A woman rouses Chicagoans with a speech. As a hub of the labor movement in the late nineteenth century, Chicago supplied a lyrical voice with protest songs and poetry. See story on page 31.
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 Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Patrick F. Daly T. Bondurant French Sallie L. Gaines Timothy J. Gilfoyle Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Jean W. Haider Barbara A. Hamel Susan S. Higinbotham David D. Hiller Dennis H. Holtschneider Falona Joy Randye A. Kogan Judith Konen Russell L. Lewis Paul R. Lovejoy Timothy P. Moen
Barbara Levy Kipper Vice Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Vice Chair Paul L. Snyder Treasurer Paul H. Dykstra Secretary M. Hill Hammock Immediate Past Chair Gary T. Johnson President
Robert J. Moore Eboo Patel James R. Reynolds Jesse H. Ruiz April T. Schink Gordon I. Segal Larry Selander Robert W. Swegle Jr. Samuel Tinaglia LIFE TRUSTEES
Lerone Bennett Jr. Bowen Blair Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon John W. Croghan Alison Campbell de Frise Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner Henry W. Howell Jr.
Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Katherine Mayer John T. McCutcheon Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Potter Palmer 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. 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 2008 VOLUME XXXV, NUMBER 3
Contents
4 30 46 62
Regulating Urban Living Margaret Garb
Solidarity Forever Bucky Halker
Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Index to Volume 35
Ramshackle housing met the immediate needs of a quickly growing population of immigrant wage laborers who moved into the city in the late nineteenth century to fuel its flourishing industries. Above: The corner of Cleveland Avenue and Oak Street. 4 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Regulating Urban Living Tenement buildings spurred some of Chicago’s earliest government regulations, but housing reform exposed a new society plagued with racism, class conflict, and capitalist power. BY M A R G A R E T G A R B
W
ithin a few years after the Great Fire leveled nearly a third of Chicago’s residential buildings, another scourge appeared, posing a perhaps more insidious threat to the well-being of the city. Even as wage laborers sought to purchase lots and one- and two-family dwellings, the city’s newspapers, business and labor leaders, and a number of municipal officials insisted that Chicago faced a serious housing problem. The rows of two- and threestory frame dwellings that a few years earlier had been seen as a sign of the city’s resurgence after the devastating fire were by the mid-1870s viewed as a harbinger of its potential downfall. Tenements—low-rent multifamily dwellings—it was argued, threatened the health of the city’s populace, the stability of its businesses, and the morals of its laboring classes. In September 1874, the Chicago Daily Tribune issued a stern warning to its readers: “It has been a common boast among citizens of Chicago that the peculiar human residence known as a ‘tenement-house’ did not flourish in their midst.” Those “sanguine and egotistical” citizens, the article added, would be astonished to learn that “we are cursed with a tenement system, which although not so general, is infinitely more offensive than that of New York.” The tenement “threat,” described and condemned in increasingly lurid newspaper accounts, mobilized a group of reformers who, while debating the causes of the problem, agreed on at least one point: tenements and their residents required municipal regulation. The city’s first housing ordinances, passed in 1880, effectively codified a distinction between the rights of tenants and those of home owners. Municipal regulations and public rhetoric designated tenants as vulnerable, dependent, and a danger to public health, while home owners, largely exempt from regulation, retained distinctive rights to the uses of and control over their property. Under new city laws, home owners preserved their claims to autonomy.
Tenants were responsible for maintaining their own apartments until codified building regulations emerged in the 1880s. 5
The Tribune’s report was among the first of what would become a stream of stories detailing new dangers associated with urban living. In the labor and business press, and in reports issued by municipal officials and leaders of civic reform organizations, the tenement loomed as an emblem of a wide array of social problems in the industrializing city. Defined as any dwelling housing three or more households living independently, the tenement quickly became associated with the city’s unskilled laborers, immigrants, and impoverished families. Lacking indoor plumbing and often housing several families in a few tiny rooms, tenements did endanger the health of residents. Diphtheria, typhoid, cholera, smallpox, and yellow fever regularly appeared in working-class neighborhoods. Many of the city’s journalists, however, framed the “tenement threat” in language that resonated beyond the immediate menace of contagious disease, warning against a host of social dangers associated with the industrializing city and drawing readers’ attention to the potential benefits of single-family home ownership. More than a decade before lawmakers approved legislation designed to regulate factory conditions or set maximum working hours, city and state officials moved to regulate the uses, forms, and functions of urban residential property. Asserting a public health interest in regulating tenement dwellings, municipal officials distinguished housing from other commodities like clothing or labor power itself, and established a government presence in housing markets. The fire limits legislation, the first effort by Chicago authorities to regulate urban housing, had generated significant controversy and divided the city along class and ethnic lines. But beginning in the mid-1870s and lasting through the turn of the century, despite increasingly hostile conflicts between labor and capital, there was widespread agreement that the public had an interest in regulating the housing of some Chicago residents. This shift in views of the relationship between the law, markets, and housing had longterm consequences on property relations in the city. In an 1874 article, a Tribune reporter described himself as an “explorer,” taking readers on a tour of three buildings, the “like of which can not be imagined outside the realms of the damned.” The image of the urban explorer, a literary trope repeated in articles published in late nineteenth-century urban newspapers in British and American cities, established the reporter’s authority as an objective observer, a student of dark, dangerous, and apparently foreign sections of the city. Functioning as guides to exotic landscapes, “urban explorers” offered readers a mix of the spectacular and the grotesque as they toured impoverished districts, typically drawing a map of the city that distinguished the respectable from the alien communities. But in Chicago, where multifamily and single-family dwellings were intermingled, the 6 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Contagious disease was the leading cause of death until the early twentieth century, however, the prevailing medical view was that such disease originated from filth rather than infection.
Regulating Urban Living | 7
Disease became associated with the nationalities of the residents within squalid tenement housing. 8 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Tribune’s reporter roamed through neighborhoods and streets well known to his readers; his aim was to highlight specific buildings and expose the “alien” spaces inside. Tenements, he stated, stand “in our midst,” housing dark and threatening environments largely invisible to Chicago residents. Commenting that the façade of one tenement “present[ed] no very bad appearance to the careless observer,” the reporter added, “Within however all this is changed.” Tenement dwellings, the reporter implied, threatened the health and morality of Chicago citizens of all classes precisely because the tenements stood, largely unrecognized, on well-traveled streets. “These places are not confined to one section of the city,” the reporter asserted, “but are scattered through its whole system, even as leprosy is dispersed through the human frame.” Hidden pockets of contagion, emblems of terrifying, deadly, and inexplicable disease, the tenements could at any moment launch an invisible attack on the city as a whole. Certainly epidemic disease did spread quickly through mud-soaked basement dwellings and two- and threestory buildings housing as many as twenty adults and children, including attic apartments with few windows. Journalists’ depictions did draw attention to the dangerous and debilitating conditions of much of the city’s housing. “I found in a basement, the kitchen so dark as I entered that I could see no one to own the voice that saluted me,” wrote an advocate of tenement reform. “An alley ran by the side of the small window, but an immense wall shut out all the light.” The resident of the two-room basement dwelling, a sixty-three-year-old widow “was full of genuine aches and pains, in head, limbs and lungs . . . . I stepped into the dark, dingy bedroom, and wondered to myself how it was possible for anyone in sickness ever to get well when confined in such a place.” Tenement dwellings might cause and exacerbate sickness, writers agreed. The issue then was in diagnosing the source of the “tenement problem.” The Tribune’s reports focused on tenement residents’ national origins and their “inherited” behavior. Reporters linked dwelling types to various “races” of humanity, translating the social difficulties associated with poverty into “biological flaws” and highlighting the “better sort,” the residents of single-family dwellings. By blurring the effects of poverty on housing conditions with the national origins of the tenements’ residents, the article presented readers with an elaborate chart of racial hierarchies and a corresponding geography of property relations in the city. Wandering into a row of “dilapidated wooden houses” the reporter found “Italians—men, women, and children—of the lowest order. Their chief vocation is rag-picking, and the entire charnel-house smells of tainted raiment, steeped in swill beer and stale alcohol.” Invoking the deepest fears of nineteenth-cen-
tury racists, the reporter implied that the tenements’ residents transgressed a “natural law” by mixing races. The “Italians,” he commented, were the “lowest types of human society—almost black—a cross between Polish Jews and the very worst class of plantation darkies. It is impossible to suppose that these beings have in their veins the blood of the conquerors of the ancient world.” Asserting that tenement residents posed a “chronic threat” to the health and riches of the city’s propertied classes, the reporter offered a “biological” explanation for deteriorated dwellings and their residents’ apparent “degradation,” transferring the social inequalities of property relations to the immutable realm of biology. A depiction of tenement living conditions as determined by the residents’ race highlighted the contrast between the tenant and the “healthy house-holder,” while at the same time justifying government regulation of the seemingly inevitable actions of tenement dwellers, of those who lacked the “character and independence” to purchase their homes and were “unfit” to maintain sanitary dwellings. The distinction between tenant and home owner obscured the role played by the city’s landlords in controlling the quality of housing for lease. Landlords of low-cost rental dwellings typically refused to invest capital in sanitary improvements, like well-fortified privy vaults, sewer services, or indoor plumbing, which would have gone a long way toward preventing the spread of contagious diseases. Once a lease was signed, the law held tenants responsible for maintaining their dwellings, protecting the property owner from accountability for the public health threat of tenement living conditions and further enhancing the profits a landlord could extract from his investment in multifamily dwellings. Certainly, concern with sanitation was part of a genuine effort to improve the health of the city’s residents. But images of disease and contagion buttressed by the emerging field of biology also served “the institutionalization of fear.” An analysis that linked disease to race or national origin of tenants permitted propertied Chicagoans to avoid investing capital in improving tenement dwellings and provided them with (pseudo)scientific justifications for regulating the immigrant poor. The Tribune reporter launched his article by claiming that the tenement “has been the nucleus of contagion and the recruiting-sergeant of death.” Even in tenements where the Board of Health had “done all that lay in its power to render the den less offensive,” municipal regulations were not stringent enough to compel tenants to improve their behavior. He concluded that the public interest in preserving the city’s health demanded conceiving of tenants’ rights in housing as unlike those of home owners and, of equal importance, unlike other commodities, an arena open to government regulation. Regulating Urban Living | 9
The city’s labor leaders welcomed the Tribune’s call for municipal regulation of tenement housing. But advocates for organized labor framed the problem of tenement housing, and a rationale for municipal regulation, in terms very different from those of the Tribune’s reporter. The Progressive Age, the city’s leading Englishlanguage labor paper and the official newspaper of the Trades and Labor Assembly, campaigned for legislation to require Health Department inspections of tenement housing. When the law was passed in 1880, labor leaders claimed responsibility for the legislation. Priced at $1.50 for a year’s subscription, the paper was widely read among English-speaking laborers. Though probably not read by recent immigrants, and at times critical of immigrants who, the paper argued, were willing to work for low wages and undercut the wages of nativeborn laborers, the Progressive Age represented the views of the sometimes competing leaders of the Trades and Labor Assembly. By the late 1870s, housing conditions, and particularly tenements, were attracting increasing attention from the paper. In the hands of Progressive Age writers, disease was a real and frightening danger to urban workers, but the “tenement problem” also provided another point of contention between labor and capital. Unlike the Tribune and Chicago Times reporters, the Progressive Age writers equated landlords with employers, arguing that just as capitalists sought to wring the most profit from workers, landlords aimed to draw large profits from the shelter needs of vulnerable working-class households. As industrial labor relations limited the power of wage laborers, so too had the industrial housing market left workingclass tenants “at the mercy” of landlords. Tenants, the paper commented, “are in their [the landlords’] power, and they exercise it without stint or mercy.” Framing the tenement problem in terms of class conflict, labor leaders cast tenement residents as a dependent class and urged the passage of legislation to protect them. “The health and comfort of this vast population, entirely at the mercy, as they are, of employer and landlord, so far as sanitary matters are concerned, fix and control the death rate, and cry aloud for protection,” a reporter noted. Progressive Age writers argued that the “capitalist class” sought to exploit low-income tenants by raising rents and providing few, if any, “sanitary improvements” in the buildings. “[T]here are thousands of families in this city renting houses who do not know where or how to seek relief from the imposition of landlords, who build pest houses by contract to the lowest bidder,” wrote a Socialist Party leader in a letter to The Plumber and Sanitary Engineers, a locally published monthly journal. Distinguishing between the amenities available in single-family and multifamily rental dwellings, the Progressive Age noted that landlords garnered greater 10 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
profits from poorly maintained tenements than from “first class residence property,” which were single-family houses. “[T]hat latter,” the paper continued, “being rented only in entire buildings to one family, of course puts them beyond the reach of poor people, whose lim-
A widely read labor paper, the Progressive Age took a strong stance on how the government should protect tenement residents from opportunistic landlords.
While the tenement problem was framed as a public health issue, it furthered racial and class stereotypes because most residents were poor immigrants.
ited means compel them to occupy apartments where the monthly charge is small, regardless of the inadequate accommodation and the unwholesome surroundings.” The paper was not portraying all wage laborers as dependent. Indeed, it regularly published advertisements for building and loan associations, which urged workingclass men to join the association and purchase a singlefamily house. These advertisements, along with articles detailing the benefits of home ownership, functioned to
contrast tenement rentals to single-family home ownership. The paper’s readers might not be able to afford to purchase residential property, but they would likely be informed that tenement residents, unlike home owners, were vulnerable and dependent. Though at least some tenements were owned by skilled workers who had no connections to the city’s native-born elite, the newspaper critiqued the concept of landed property as an investment, asserting that “[p]romiRegulating Urban Living | 11
nent capitalists buy up every desirable piece of property in the market with the sole object of forcing the price still higher by raising the rents to create this fictitious valuation.” When treated as an investment, as supporters of the city’s fire limits legislation had demanded, residential property was thus invested with “false” value, a move that undermined the ability of laboring men to purchase their homes. The paper clearly simplified what was a complex housing market, including multifamily dwellings owned by wage laborers who often could not afford to maintain their properties, provide sewer and water hookups, and accumulate some profits with the rents they charged. Though many of the skilled workers who supported the labor movement were home owners and some owned multifamily dwellings, the paper assumed an undifferentiated working class, one that
sought home ownership as a means to assert autonomy and generate additional household income. The Progressive Age writers overlooked the differing resources of skilled and unskilled wage laborers and their varied uses of property rights in housing. Tenement housing was dangerous precisely because it threatened the health of tenement residents. Landlords’ strategies for generating profits combined with inadequate municipal funding for “sanitary purposes,” the paper argued, was “responsible for the terrible scourge of small pox as well as the exceptional mortality from other forms of disease.” The paper’s writers rejected the Tribune’s concern about contagion to the city’s propertied classes by noting that wealthier families living in single-family houses already were protected from the spread of disease. “Wards where every available foot of
The environmental hazards of Chicago’s industrial waste quickly became apparent. An offshoot of the south branch of the Chicago River (above) earned the nickname Bubbly Creek for the chemical decomposition of waste dumped by the stockyards into its waters. 12 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
ground is occupied by tenements into which the people are crowded and packed to the point of suffocation have less sanitary provision, less than one-third the extent of sewerage per acre, and less attention from scavengers (day or night) than other wards where single families occupy large houses set in the middle of lots.” Unequal distribution of municipal services, limited as they were, left tenement dwellers at greater risk for disease. Seeking protection for vulnerable tenants, labor leaders urged the passage of laws requiring the Board of Health to inspect tenement housing. The legislation, they argued, would mediate between the housing market and the shelter needs of the city’s impoverished classes. “Landlords are not philanthropists,” the paper proclaimed, “and it is useless to expect them to fulfill the letter of the law unless the law is supported by a stronger power than moral sentiment.” Since landlords, like employers, would maneuver to gain the greatest profits from their property, the city needed laws governing the construction and the maintenance of residential properties. “The Health Commissioner shall cause to be visited at least once a month every place of employment and habitation,” a group of labor leaders affirmed in January 1881, just weeks before the Common Council addressed the issue. Labor leaders sought to place at least some of the financial burdens of maintaining rental dwellings on the property owners, calling for inspectors to ensure that landlords abided by the law. To secure the health of tenement residents and to protect them from the “greed” of landlords, they called on the council to deploy the police power of the municipal government to monitor the households of the urban poor. Though identifying different sources of the tenement problem, these distinct strands of argument were drawn together by the urban sanitation movement, which in the 1870s was seeking a stronger position in the city’s government bureaucracy. A mix of physicians, lay reformers, builders, engineers, and public officials, the sanitarians, as the health reformers were called, led efforts to improve urban living conditions in the 1870s and 1880s. Though industrial waste was polluting Chicago’s water and airways, tenement housing would serve health reformers as a wedge issue, providing the new field of public health with a stamp of legal authority. Drawing on the language and concerns of the city’s business and labor leaders, Chicago’s health officials maneuvered between scientific, social, and moral explanations for the tenement problem to establish the legitimacy of their field and legal authority for their interventions in the homes of the urban poor. The history of Chicago’s Department of Health and its expanding focus on tenement housing offers a particularly vivid illustration of the ways ideas about property rights in housing were transformed in the late nineteenth
century. In the 1880s, Chicago’s Health Department commissioner Oscar Coleman De Wolf was among the most vocal of the sanitarians to articulate a public interest in regulating the interior space of the workingclass home. He sought to regulate both industry and housing, but rising opposition from the city’s employers gave his efforts to monitor multifamily rental dwellings success that largely eluded his campaigns for supervision of industrial production. Though the state’s 1881 tenement and factory ordinance, designed to replace the city’s 1880 law and promoted and implemented by De Wolf, gave the Health Department the authority to review plans for new construction, it left legal responsibility for maintaining existing dwellings with the tenants, permitting landlords to evade responsibility for their properties. The Health Department’s inspections of tenement housing established a legal and bureaucratic distinction between the property rights of home owners and business owners and those of tenants. The growth of Chicago’s Health Department also provides a striking example of the tangled development of municipal governance in the post-Civil War years. The Board of Health, and later the Department of Health, often acted ahead of the city and state legislative bodies, issuing regulations and sending sanitary inspectors into the homes of Chicagoans before the elected officials voted on those policies. By 1876, when the Illinois Supreme Court ruled that the Board of Health as an appointed body had no authority to regulate business, the board had already issued and enforced a string of regulations concerning business and housing. When butchers and packinghouse owners balked at the health department’s attempts to ban the sale of adulterated foods, the department reinforced its authority by stressing its inspections of tenement housing. Health department officials effectively used tenement housing as an area through which they could expand the department’s authority and gain legitimacy for the new field of public health. Chicago organized a board of health in 1862, when in the midst of a particularly widespread smallpox outbreak the Illinois general assembly enacted legislation providing that the mayor and six other persons be appointed by the judges of the superior court to constitute a board of health. Three members were to be physicians. Following the lead of the legislature, the Common Council passed an ordinance calling for the hiring of a city physician, who would be appointed by the mayor. The initial resolution provided that the physician be paid $1,000 per year, but when the ordinance was passed, the council did not finance the position. Lacking a salary and a staff, the position was never filled. The 1862 ordinance detailed the responsibilities of the health board, providing health officials a decade later with a document Regulating Urban Living | 13
on which to rest their claims to legal authority. The physician was to supervise “the sanitary condition of the city and to report to the mayor all nuisances, the prevalence of any epidemic, contagious or infectious diseases, which in his opinion, may require the action of the police authorities.” Under the ordinance, the physician’s duties were broad and vague. With the establishment of the city’s first permanent board of health on March 9, 1867, the Common Council asserted a public interest in the health of the citizenry. A physician was hired, with a salary, to serve as the city’s sanitar y superintendent and oversee the work of a wide variety of city employees. In the tradition of antebellum health reformers, the physician, John Henry Rauch, launched a vigorous public campaign to cleanse the city’s streets, establishing a scavenger service to remove garbage from the streets and hiring sanitary inspectors to patrol the streets and alleys and report those who suffered from contagious disease. In the days and weeks following the fire of 1871, Rauch organized health services and worked to provide clean water, food, and housing for the 112,000 people left homeless. A former lieutenant colonel and surgeon in the union army, Rauch helped found the American Public Health Association, becoming the organization’s president in 1876. He was appointed to chair the Illinois State Board of Health in 1877. In the years immediately following the Civil War, there was little consensus over the role and the function of the Board of Health. Health officials promoted the extension of the city’s sewer and water lines and urged more extensive sanitary inspections of residential neighborhoods and industrial sites, but these and other efforts prompted opposition. The city comptroller, arguing that Rauch had exceeded his legal authority in hiring sanitary inspectors, refused to pay the sanitary inspectors, raising the prospect of a struggle over which city agencies were authorized to hire and pay municipal workers or to distribute patronage jobs. When the board sued the city, the case was decided in its favor, but only after several years of battles among city officials over expenditures for health-related activities. By 1874, the board, under the leadership of Dr. Brockholst L. McVicker, again sought to expand its authority by highlighting the dangers emanating from tenement dwellings and warning the Common Council that regulation of tenement housing “deserves the most serious consideration.” Like the health reformers in New York City two decades earlier, the board called for “stringent regulations” to oversee the “cleanliness and ventilation” of tenement buildings. Defining health as a public interest unrestrained by property lines, McVicker argued the health “not only of the inmates of such buildings, but the entire population” was at stake. “A combination 14 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
of growing manufactories and the high price of real estate” in the city would, McVicker’s report to the council stated, over the next few years “throw large communities together in buildings, where rooms can be obtained at a cheap rate.” Tenements’ inmates, McVicker contended, required immediate regulation. When a smallpox epidemic appeared in several of the city’s poorer neighborhoods just a few months after the Tribune story was published, the board again took steps to strengthen its position. It authorized its sanitary inspectors to remove those suffering from smallpox to the city hospital, involuntarily if necessary. McVicker’s pro-
gram, which was recommended by Rauch, was designed to gain support from the city’s business interests. Rather than enact a “shot-gun” quarantine of large sections of the city, he sought to isolate sick individuals “thus effecting an immense saving to commerce” (and not quarantining those who did not need to be quarantined). The board’s policy generated some opposition. The commissioner, in his report to the council in 1876 strained to articulate the larger public interest in supporting his program. “In some cases,” he wrote, “it may seem hard to isolate and remove a parent or child, but for public safety it should be done and no exceptions made.”
In July 1876 the mayor, under pressure from McVicker’s opponents, disbanded the board and replaced it with a Department of Health. Instead of a sixmember board that supervised the city physician, the new department would be run by a single commissioner, a physician appointed by the mayor. That fall, Mayor Monroe Heath called Oscar Coleman De Wolf to a meeting in his office. There, he apparently announced, “My board of health of six members is a set of thieves. I have secured the authority to abolish the board, and to appoint in their place a single commissioner. Will you be the man?” De Wolf accepted.
Around the turn of the century, new medical theories about the cause of disease put a focus on vaccination rather than sanitation. Above: County workers receive a smallpox vaccination. Regulating Urban Living | 15
Oscar Coleman De Wolf had arrived in Chicago in 1874 and set up a small and struggling medical practice. Medicine, public service, and a reformer’s zeal were in his blood and in his training. He was born in 1835 and raised in Chester Center in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts, where his father, Thaddeus K. De Wolf, practiced medicine for sixty-two years and participated in a local temperance movement. Thaddeus De Wolf’s temperance activities apparently angered some of his neighbors. During Oscar’s childhood, Thaddeus De Wolf received several threats on his life and the family’s house was reportedly set on fire. “My father was a man with a host of strong friends and a host of strong enemies,” Oscar later commented to a reporter. Oscar De Wolf studied with his father, then attended a two-year course at the Berkshire Medical College in Pittsfield before heading to New York in 1858 for further study. Two years later, he went to France, where he studied medicine for nearly five years. When the Civil War began, he returned to the United States and was appointed assistant surgeon of the First Massachusetts Cavalry in 16 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
After the smallpox epidemic subsided in the mid-1860s, support for Chicago’s first board of health dwindled. The office underwent a number of iterations before a permanent department of health was established and led by Oscar De Wolf (above) in 1876.
1861. A year later he became surgeon for the Second Massachusetts Cavalry and served throughout the war. De Wolf’s training in New York City and in France may have brought him in contact with many of the ideas that would influence the emerging field of public health. But his service during the Civil War likely crystallized those ideas into a more practical form. The war, the nation’s largest and most devastating medical event in the nineteenth century, sparked unprecedented involvement in medical matters by government. Many physicians who watched as thousands of recruits died from diseases associated with poor sanitation in army camps left the service with a new appreciation for sanitation and hygiene. Their experiences during the war seemed to demonstrate that disease could strike even the best of men; disease was not a moral but a sanitary problem.
Faced with creating a department of health from scratch, one of De Wolf’s first orders of business was to expand his staff with a cadre of sanitation inspectors. Above: Policemen assist the Department of Health during a scarlet fever epidemic.
The work of the United States Sanitary Commission demonstrated that government could play a significant role in preserving the health of recruits. De Wolf was forty-two when he was appointed Health Department commissioner by Mayor Heath. His nearly thirteen years as commissioner of the Department of Health marked the centerpiece of his medical career. As he used his position to expand the authority and the bureaucracy of the Health Department, he established a national reputation as a leader in the growing public health movement. In 1882, the British Association for the Advancement of Science made De Wolf an honorary member. A year later, he received the diploma of the Society of Hygiene of France. On his death in 1910, the Journal of the American Medical Association remarked that De Wolf “had achieved national prominence in sanitary matters.” De Wolf used his position to create a professionalized bureaucracy to supervise the city’s health. Under De Wolf’s leadership, the Department of Health was transformed from a small semiofficial entity into a firmly established agency within the city’s government. “When he took charge of the office it could hardly be called a department of health,” the Chicago Inter-Ocean reported in 1889. “The department has since developed into the most active and efficient health service in the United
States.” Under De Wolf’s command, the department’s staff increased from one physician, an assistant commissioner, two secretaries, two meat inspectors, and thirteen untrained sanitary inspectors to nearly fifty inspectors and physicians in 1889. In 1877, the department’s budget stood at $36,640, excluding amounts designated for scavenger service and dead animal removal, representing a little less than nine cents per capita for general health work. By 1885, the department received a total appropriation of $240,460, including $171,383 for scavenger work and removing dead animals. Since the city’s population had grown rapidly, hitting 664,000 in 1885, the department’s per capita expenditure for health-related work increased to just over ten cents per person. De Wolf’s aim was not merely to establish the newly specialized field of public health, but also to create areas of specialization within the field. Possibly using New York’s health department as his model, he divided his staff among various specialty areas. There were medical inspectors, sanitary policemen, meat inspectors, and tenement and factory inspectors as well as a physician managing a smallpox hospital. Each unit of inspectors was supervised by a manager, who worked directly under De Wolf and was required to produce a yearly report of his unit’s activities. Regulating Urban Living | 17
De Wolf’s methods for preventing the spread of contagious disease represented a transitional period in medical science and in the field of public health. In the 1880s, a new field of medicine, bacteriology, emerged from the discovery of the cholera vibrio by German physician Robert Koch. Similar independent experiments by Louis Pasteur in Paris had demonstrated decisively that disease was caused by microorganisms, not by dirt. Several Chicago researchers were among the first in the United States to publicize the new germ theory of disease, and courses on germ theory were introduced into the Chicago medical school curricula in the mid-1880s. De Wolf, apparently ambivalent about rejecting the older views, gradually introduced germ theory to public health work. In 1888, he declared that diphtheria was “not a filth disease, but an infectious disease, like smallpox.” By then he already had published a paper on Asiatic cholera, mentioning Pasteur and asserting that bacteria caused disease. “It is not probable that the cholera poison is wafted about in the atmosphere except in a very limited extent,” De Wolf wrote in the 1885 essay. While he promoted sanitary measures, such as the expansion of the city’s sewer system and regular cleaning of privy vaults, his agency helped shift focus of public health practice from a primary concern with the cleanliness of the urban environment to the diagnosis and prevention of specific diseases. In Chicago, as in cities across the country, the gradual incorporation of bacteriology into public health measures initially prompted renewed efforts to identify disease and prevent its spread. De Wolf established new and more rigorous requirements for reporting all varieties of disease. His yearly reports to the City Council, beginning in 1880, included an array of statistics covering all causes of death and all outbreaks of disease, carefully listed by the sufferer’s age, nationality, and residential district. To demonstrate the need for full inspections of tenements, De Wolf in 1879 appointed a voluntary corps of thirty physicians to survey all tenement dwellings in the city. With that report in hand, he appeared before the Common Council and urged the members to pass a tenement housing ordinance. The city’s first housing ordinance, passed by the Common Council in 1880, further fueled the growing debate over how best to balance the public interest in a healthy environment against the responsibilities of owners of multifamily dwellings. Asserting a public interest in the cleanliness of the city’s factories and housing, the law granted the Health Department the right to inspect and regulate sanitary conditions in places of employment and in tenement dwellings. It required property owners to remove all stench-causing refuse and to provide tenement residents with containers for garbage. Builders and landlords objected to the regu18 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Armed with new information about the spread of disease, sanitary inspectors were given the authority to remove chronically sick residents from their homes for quarantine in hospitals. Above: Old Cook County Hospital.
lations, complaining of the additional costs and challenging the city’s right to regulate the sanitation of private property. Claiming that a man “should have complete jurisdiction” over his private property, one landlord urged the council to repeal the ordinance. “The law of the survival of the fittest,” another argued, should “appl[y] in all these cases of disease,” making “the rigid inspection of tenement houses” an unnecessary invasion of a property owner’s rights. Debates over the extent of property rights and over the legal responsibilities of property owners would repeatedly emerge in struggles over housing and factory laws. With landlords refusing to comply with the municipal ordinance, the General Assembly, under pressure from labor and housing reformers, passed the state’s first tenement and factory ordinance on May 30, 1881. The legislation, reflecting De Wolf’s concerns and fulfilling the demands made by the Tribune and Progressive Age, provided Chicago’s health officials with legal authority similar to that of New York’s. The law put the sanitation and construction of all tenements, workshops, and lodging houses under the supervision of the Department of Health. Under the law, all plans for new construction required the department’s approval. The commissioner was required to review specifications for “the ventilation of rooms, light and air shafts, windows, ventilation of water closets, drainage and plumbing.” Tenement dwellings were placed in a legal category that included factories and workshops and excluded singlefamily houses. Tenements, defined as those buildings housing three or more independent households, were open to inspection and regulation in ways that owneroccupied or rented single-family dwellings were not, and though property owners were responsible for scavenger services, tenants would be cited for violations in existing buildings. As De Wolf expanded the reach of
The city’s first housing ordinance regulated the sanitation of tenant-occupied buildings only. Landlords were outraged that private property was susceptible to government interference. Regulating Urban Living | 19
Indoor plumbing was a luxury until about the mid-nineteenth centur y. By the 1910s, most Chicagoans could afford it, and by the 1920s, it was standard in all homes.
the Health Department and its inspectors, property rights in the family home increasingly were conceived as rights that adhered only to owner-occupied and single-family home dwellings. The establishment of building regulations disturbed many who were accustomed to assume rights over private property were permanent and complete. Initially, builders opposed the measure and routinely sought to evade the department’s inspectors. De Wolf noted that many builders, resisting the Health Department’s regulations, seemed “to think that the law should leave them to construct buildings entirely of their own ideas.” As New York’s tenements reformer, Robert W. DeForest, would note two decades later, legislation designed to regulate construction on private property seemed to run counter to the most fundamental ideals of American liberty. “Most of us have been brought up to believe that, as owners of real estate, we could build on it what we pleased, build as high as we pleased, and sink our buildings as low as we pleased,” he wrote. “Our ideas of what constitutes property rights and what constitutes liberty are largely unconventional.” By the middle of the decade, however, builders were submitting design plans and gaining department approval for most new residential 20 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
construction. In 1883 and 1884, 2,444 permits were issued for construction of dwelling places. Of these, 1,142 were for so-called “flat” buildings (two- or threestory buildings fitted for only one family on each story), 484 for tenement houses containing three or more families each (including one, not yet under construction, to contain thirty-four families), and 116 brick cottages to accommodate one family each. The remaining 702 houses included “all classes of one and two family buildings from the mansion of the millionaire to the hostler’s living apartments in the upper story of a barn.” As emerging building codes suggested, property rights claims were not absolute. Tenants living in multifamily dwellings would—after builders who submitted plans for construction—be the first to confront the reconception of property rights. While generating conflicts over control of landed property, the ordinance also incited challenges from builders, architects, and plumbers who rejected the codes as unfair government interference with the practice of their trades. At stake were not the rights of the building owners, but the professionals’ and tradesmen’s claims to ownership of the body of knowledge associated with the construction trades. The conflict was smoothed over in the spring of 1887 when De Wolf participated in a conference jointly sponsored by the Illinois Association of Architects, the Chicago Master Plumbers Association, and the Health Department. The conference attendants agreed to an amendment to the state tenement and workshop law of 1881. Instead of assigning ordinary sanitary inspectors to survey new construction, the conferees proposed that the Health Department hire “a fixed ration of thoroughly practical plumbers as tenement and factory inspectors.” De Wolf fully approved the proposal, saying it would “entirely satisfy an increasing opposition on the part of architects and plumbers to having these inspections made by men of no previous education or experience in their profession or guild.” The amended law, he added, would “certainly remove much of the friction and inconvenience of the present law,” resolving the tensions among the trades and professions involved with home construction. Though both wealthy and working-class Chicagoans seemed to welcome the tenement legislation, even the Health Department’s seemingly minor efforts to regulate the property rights of the city’s more affluent residents proved controversial. Many who recognized an abstract public interest in preventing the spread of contagious disease balked when they realized the regulations might impinge on the home owner’s claim to control the household. Just days after his appointment as commissioner, De Wolf announced a policy that drew the attention of newspapers in New York and Boston and attracted much local opposition. The program called for sanitary inspectors to
The Department of Health sent thirty physicians to survey the city’s tenement houses to help convince the local government to pass the first housing ordinance. Above: A nurse visits a poor family.
place a red card on the door frames of houses in which scarlet fever was found. Opposition came from business leaders and some physicians, who argued that the red cards threatened the security of the family home. In a speech at the fifth annual meeting of the American Public Health Association, which was held in Chicago in 1877, Dr. Henry M. Lyman deplored the waste of cards and tacks, claiming the people revolted against the “yellow card nuisance.” The policy, which affected owner-occupied and rental dwellings, remained but was rarely implemented in later years. Few complaints were heard, however, when De Wolf urged regular inspections of the rented homes of the city’s laboring and impoverished population. During his first year in office, De Wolf expanded the squad of sanitary inspectors and pushed the Common Council for new appropriations to employ them year round. Only close
inspection of tenement districts, he argued, could prevent the spread of contagious disease. “Incessant, systematic and searching inspection from house to house and street by street, from January to January, can alone prevent the growth of sanitary evils, which when matured and in full force, are beyond the control of men.” The “incessant, systematic and searching inspection” for disease was performed by former policemen who personified the department’s authority in the streets and dwellings of the city’s laboring classes. Sanitary inspections, De Wolf noted in a speech before the state medical society, represented the “police authority” in tenement “districts.” The Health Department granted sanitary inspectors the same “powers” as “regular police,” with one exception. “This,” according to the board’s yearly report, “is the power to enter any house without a search warrant between the hours of sunrise and sunset.” Regulating Urban Living | 21
Moreover, the sanitary police were authorized to involuntarily remove those suffering from smallpox to the city’s smallpox hospital. The inspectors faced little resistance. Health Department reports from the 1880s generally include comments about the two or three households per year that refused entrance to the sanitary inspectors. In most cases, the inspectors called regular police, the homes were forcibly inspected, and sick residents were forcibly removed to the city’s hospital. Not until 1922 did a legal challenge to the inspectors’ authority reach the state appellate court, which ruled that the state’s health officers had the legal authority to inspect dwellings and quarantine the carrier of contagious disease, in this case boardinghouse owner Jennie Barmore, a carrier of the typhoid bacillus. Sanitary inspections likely incited some ethnic hostility among the city’s recent immigrants. The inspectors were predominantly Irish, charged with entering and inspecting the homes of recently arrived Polish, Greek, Italian, and Eastern European families. The city’s labor leaders, along with much of their constituency, however, affirmed the need for housing inspections and urged all Chicagoans to allow the Health Department’s inspectors to entire their homes.
Ethnic conflicts between the inspectors and tenement dwellers, however, prompted De Wolf to seek administrative control of the sanitary inspectors, an issue that became a point of conflict, possibly the only conflict, between De Wolf and Mayor Carter Harrison. The mayor, whose immense charisma and masterly control over the distribution of patronage jobs yielded five terms in office, personally hired all sanitary inspectors. Harrison, though born in Kentucky and a Democrat, pulled together a diverse coalition to win in a city that regularly voted Republican in national elections. He was, as Richard Schneirov notes, “a broker between most of the city’s organized interest groups,” including middle-class reformers, business moderates, German socialists, and Irish immigrants. To reward supporters and stifle opposition, Harrison placed several Socialist leaders in the Department of Health. But the mayor’s power was rooted in the city’s Irish communities. In the 1880s, the Irish were not the largest of the city’s immigrant groups, but they were among the most vocal and most politically active, a powerful force in the Democratic Party since the 1850s. By 1865, one-third of Chicago’s police were Irish and in the 1880s, under Harrison’s patronage, the Irish
Owner-occupied homes, especially those in wealthy neighborhoods, were not under the jurisdiction of any regulatory office. Above: An illustration from Land Owner magazine, 1874. 22 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
gained an even greater proportion of the coveted jobs. Sanitary inspectors, hired from the police force, were predominantly Irish. Despite De Wolf’s repeated complaints that the system was tainted by politics, Harrison refused to relinquish control of even a slice of the city’s patronage jobs to the health commissioner. The Health Department’s inspection procedures illustrate the distinction drawn between the property rights of tenement dwellers and those enjoyed by people living in single-family dwellings. While health inspectors regularly entered tenement dwellings without warrants or court orders, they also made “special examinations” of dwellings occupied by a single family, but only at the request of physicians, occupants, or owners. “This class of work [inspection of single-family homes] was not at first intended to form a part of the ‘regular’ work of the inspectors,” De Wolf announced in 1882; nevertheless, “the public generally are recognizing the true value and benefit to health of perfect house sanitation,” which such inspections and the suggestion of “proper remedies for all defects found” contributed to. In most cases, these inspections were made “as a last resort” by the occupant seeking relief from odors or poor construction. Unlike owner-occupied or single-family homes—and unlike businesses owned by corporate and individual entities— multifamily rental dwellings could be entered by policemen without particular cause. No single area of the city was targeted for inspections, but the single-family homes of the city’s elite were excluded. The department’s report for 1885 noted that inspections covered every area of the city, “except those classed as strictly ‘residence’ streets of the most expensive and thoroughly improved character.” Neighborhoods with large numbers of multifamily rented dwellings, often the subdivided homes of poorer or working-class families, were more likely to be inspected than streets lined with single-family dwellings. “The method adopted,” the report commented, “was to apply the entire working force of inspectors to the most insanitary localities first, following this with the next most urgent localities, and so on to the end of the work.” This approach, which reinforced distinctions between elite districts and those housing the laboring classes, further enhanced the status of those who could afford to rent or buy single-family houses in districts beyond the reach of the department’s inspectors. Presenting his achievements and sense of mission in his yearly reports to the Common Council, De Wolf revealed his somewhat inconsistent analysis of the link between tenement dwellings and public health. De Wolf initially attributed the most intractable tenement conditions to the immigrant families. Like the Tribune’s reporter, De Wolf contended that the national origin of the occupants determined the sanitary conditions of tenement dwellings. Native-born Americans lived in “well-
furnished” flats; Germans tended to occupy tenements that were “comfortably built, but having less of the socalled modern conveniences.” That native-born and German workers tended to congregate in higher-skilled and better-paying jobs, thus enabling them to afford more comfortable housing, did not apparently occur to De Wolf. Instead, De Wolf blamed the inferior quality of the tenements occupied by Italian, Polish, and Bohemian immigrants on a mix of custom and biology. “There are a great many old buildings in this city which are unfit for habitation by civilized people,” he wrote. “Yet they are inhabited, and generally by Italians, Poles, Bohemians, and others, who, in their trans-Atlantic homes have been accustomed to live in crowded quarters, in close proximity to their domestic animals, which in this city are not allowed to be kept within the premises used for human habitation.” De Wolf added that it was difficult to enforce tenement housing ordinances “against such habitual and hereditary insanitary modes of living.” Since these immigrants rarely understood health departments regulations, they required “constant watching” by sanitary inspectors. But De Wolf did not believe that the residents’ nationality was the sole source of the tenement problem and the consequent spread of disease in the city. Property rights and the ability of wage earners to acquire “sanitary” housing also entered his analysis of the public health threat. Pointing to the 1880 census, De Wolf wrote “that the whole number of occupants of tenement houses is about equal to the foreign population, not because of their nationality, but because it is wage workers of all nationalities who are compelled to occupy tenement houses.” De Wolf’s views proved an exaggeration; more than one-third of the city’s wage laborers, most of whom were immigrants, owned some real estate in 1880. Yet De Wolf contended that property rights in housing, the difference between the home owner and the tenant, were a primary feature separating the healthy from the diseased, the sanitary from the unsanitary home. This had been labor’s position for nearly a decade. By the early 1880s, Chicago had become the headquarters of the nation’s socialist and anarchist movements and a center of strength for the more moderate Knights of Labor. As De Wolf’s inspectors roamed the tenement districts, unions associated with the Trades and Labor Assembly held regular meetings on the city’s South and West Sides. More significantly, some of the city’s labor activists worked with the sanitary reform movement, seeking to use health regulations to improve living and working conditions for the city’s working classes. Carter Harrison, aiming to reconcile his often conflicting coalition of supporters, had placed at least one outspoken socialist on the Health Department staff. Factory inspector Joseph Gruenhut was a leader of the Socialist Regulating Urban Living | 23
The residential community (above) built by George Pullman for his workers was cited as an example of success between labor and capital.
Party and a columnist in the Progressive Age. Gruenhut regularly attacked both employers and landlords for the treatment of the “laboring classes.” He had been an early advocate of the tenement and factory ordinance, issuing a report, approved by the Trades and Labor Assembly, which called for monthly inspections of “every place of employment and habitation to enforce the laws, ordinances, and regulations for the safety and health of the occupants.” Gruenhut’s proclamations, rejecting more radical demands for worker control over business, ultimately left him alienated from the Socialist Party, but he remained a steady advocate for sanitary reform. De Wolf, clearly aware of the rumblings of the city’s labor movement, hardly commented on labors’ battles. Yet the increasingly aggressive language and tactics of organized labor did not escape the attention of sanitary reformers. As collective organizing threatened to undermine the growth and stability of the businesses on which Chicago’s industrializing economy was based, the reformers looked to the Health Department for solutions. The Citizens Association of Chicago, the oldest permanent 24 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
civic reform organization in the nation, organized in 1874, began to argue for the construction of “model tenements,” a solution first proposed in London and later promoted in New York in the 1840s. Working with volunteers from the association, the Health Department in 1884 conducted a nine-month survey of all tenement dwellings. The “unpleasant fact,” De Wolf wrote, was “that practically no provisions are being made to house the toiling multitude of wage-workers in our city.” The association’s committee on tenement housing, reporting its findings, was more explicit. Remarking on the recent conflict between labor and capital, the association argued that the construction of model tenements would “be a long stride in the direction of a general movement to bring capital and labor into closer economic union.” Those willing to construct rental housing for wage workers would not be expected to forgo a profit. Pointing to the success of the community built by George Pullman just south of the city, the reformers argued that the construction of “blocks of tenement houses on the most approved plans for the wage working poor” could prove “highly profitable.” No one came forward to test this
thesis. But in ignoring the relationship between wages and the ability to buy or rent “sanitary homes,” the sanitarians moved to separate housing from other issues of conflict between wage laborers and their employers. If constant surveillance of tenement dwellings did not eliminate contagious disease, the Health Department’s inspection program did establish the municipal government’s legal claim to intervene in the households of the laboring poor. The widespread destruction caused by the fire of 1871 had helped to affirm a larger social interest in regulating the construction of urban dwellings. In casting tenement housing as an equally compelling danger, sanitarians argued that the public interest in the health of the urban populace as a whole justified government surveillance of the interior space of the tenement households. Legally sanctioned inspections of tenement dwellings conflicted with the head of household’s customary rights to supervise the family home and undermined the rhetorical separation of public from domestic space. When home owners resisted the placarding of their homes and builders resisted building codes, De Wolf either backed down or negotiated with his opponents. No one in the late nineteenth century, however, challenged the legitimacy of tenement inspections in the courts. In the absence of any legal challenge, De Wolf established the principle that the public welfare was best and most efficiently protected by regulating the living conditions in the rented dwellings of working-class households. Property rights in a home, it seemed, adhered only to owner-occupied single-family dwellings.
During the same years that tenement housing alarmed municipal officials, fears of adulterated foods provoked new public outrage. The same industries that drew thousands of workers who lived in tenement dwellings also processed foods that were sold in Chicago and throughout the northeast. The most famous were packaged beef and pork produced from the thousands of animals slaughtered, butchered, and packaged each day in the Union Stock Yard. Just as he fought to reform tenement housing, De Wolf sought to inspect the meat sold by the city’s packinghouses. The contrast between the two public health campaigns—the easy achievements of tenement inspections and the decades-long legal battles with slaughterhouse owners—reveal much about power relations and politics when it came to property rights in the industrializing city. De Wolf’s crusade against the packinghouses gained widespread publicity in the fall of 1879, when Boston reformer George Angell arrived in Chicago to investigate the prevalence of contaminated food in the city. Within days of his arrival, the Chicago Daily Tribune published a series of articles calling on the Common Council to pass an ordinance banning the sale of contaminated meat and urging Chicagoans to respond to the danger of “poisoned” food. The generally staid and staunchly probusiness Tribune urged the city’s citizens to form a “protective health association” to expose “every merchant guilty of adulteration.” An association was formed and immediately sent a petition to Congress, which was published in the Tribune, demanding legislation to pro-
It was not long before De Wolf attempted to widen his department’s reach into the commercial sector with the regulation of food industries, but business was a more powerful adversary than tenement landlords. Above: Workers at the Union Stock Yard. Regulating Urban Living | 25
tect the nation from adulterated food. It would be another twenty-five years before Congress moved to inspect the nation’s food supplies. By 1879 Chicago’s health officers had made several largely unsuccessful efforts to regulate the slaughterhouses and restrict the distribution of contaminated food. (Though most of the slaughterhouses were outside the city limits, the packers dumped waste in the Chicago River and sold meat in the city, which the department attempted to regulate.) The city’s food processors proved powerful opponents. In a letter addressed to George Angell and published in the Tribune, De Wolf commented, “While I fully appreciate the necessity of additional laws, I must add that it is in my judgment absolutely impossible for the public officers in this country to contend successfully with great financial interests unless sustained by active organizations of good and patriotic citizens.” Despite the efforts of the Association for the Suppression of Food Adulteration, the “patriotic citizens” did not garner the political influence to tackle the corporations marketing processed meats. As De Wolf recognized, the city’s “financial interests” could and did deploy substantial resources to protect the interests and property rights of corporations. While the Tribune devoted several weeks in the fall of 1879 to whipping up public outrage over adulterated food, the owners of the city’s slaughterhouses already had spent the previous eight years battling Chicago’s health officials in the courts. Almost since the Union Stock Yard opened in the village of Lake just south of the city border on Christmas day 1865, residents of neighboring communities had complained about the “noxious odors” emanating from the plants. Drawing on their eighteenth-century legal concept of “common nuisances,” long applied in northeastern cities to bar industries like tanning, bone-boiling, or butchering within residential districts, the city’s health officers sought to eliminate the stench by regulating the businesses. In Chicago, however, the doctrine proved highly controversial. When the Department of Health issued a dozen citations for “noxious odors” in 1877, after nearly eight years of legal battles over regulating the slaughterhouses, jurors in the city’s police courts refused to convict the packinghouse owners, instead “censoring the health officer for interfering with legitimate business.” Undeterred, De Wolf continued to argue for inspections of meat sold in the city and for the regulations of noxious odors emanating from the stockyards. George Angell provided De Wolf with his first broad public support. It would be fifteen years after De Wolf’s dismissal that the meatpacking industry could be touched by the Meat Inspection and Pure Food and Drug Acts. Right: Canning Room at the Union Stock Yard. 26 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Regulating Urban Living | 27
Chicago’s infamous Union Stock Yard (above) had been under public fire since its inception with charges of “noxious odors.”
Spurred by the Tribune coverage of the health reformers’ investigations of adulterated foods, the Common Council in the fall of 1879 engaged in heated debates over how best to control the sales of contaminated meats. In previous years, when health officers discovered tainted meat in the city’s markets, they soaked the meat in kerosene and left it with the butcher, assuming the kerosene rendered the meat unmarketable. De Wolf urged legislation to authorize health inspectors to confiscate and destroy all tainted meat products. He gained support from the mayor, whose personal experience with tainted meat outweighed the substantial influence of the industries’ representatives. The mayor and several members of his family had become seriously ill after eating sausages “sprinkled with kerosene.” Although his cook denied purchasing contaminated sausage, an investigation “found that all the diseased meat subjected to a bath of kerosene by the Health Officer was sent to sausage factories.” Despite the mayor’s vigorous support, aldermen aligned with the meat packers successfully held up the legislation for several weeks. The Tribune editorialized that “Dr. De Wolf, our Health Commissioner, has for eighteen months fought this diabolical trade with an energy and determination that have won for him universal honor and praise.” Even the mayor received the Tribune’s acclaim. “The Mayor, to the credit of his head and of his heart,” the newspaper commented, “insisted that the consumers of meat should have some protection from the deathdealing dishonesty of the dealers in rotten meat.” 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
While De Wolf cast the controversy in terms of protecting the public health, the meat packers defended their rights to control their property. Arguing that city officials could not legally take their property, the packers sought payment for all confiscated meats. In attempting to negotiate compromise legislation with the mayor and health commissioner, they urged that confiscated meat be sold at public auction with the receipts going to the meat’s original owners. De Wolf rejected this suggestion. His stance generated additional support from the Tribune, which claimed that diseased meat did not “constitute property.” Ultimately, arguments for a public interest prevailed over the meat packers’ assertions of property rights in tainted meat. Under sustained pressure from the city’s newspapers and health reformers, the council finally granted the Health Department the authority to confiscate and destroy diseased meat. By the late 1880s, health inspectors were stationed at the gates of the packinghouses and authorized to examine all livestock entering and all packaged foods leaving the premises. Each of the department’s yearly reports listed total amounts of meat confiscated by the inspectors. Although the law came down on the side of the Health Department and the controversy over adulterated foods subsided, enforcement of the regulations was limited. Health reformers repeatedly criticized the meat inspectors and renewed calls on the commissioner to better enforce the meat inspections. Significantly, the campaign to regulate packaged meat resulted in a new mayor—DeWitt C. Cregier, a
Democratic rival of Harrison—firing De Wolf in 1889. The Health Department had successfully asserted its right to regulate private property, both tenement housing and packaged meat, but corporate entities, better financed and with substantial political muscle, had put up a strong fight and would continue to resist health regulations through the turn of the century. In the late nineteenth century, as lawmakers and judges contended with legislation designed to regulate corporate property, municipal agencies like Chicago’s health department moved, almost unnoticed, to redefine property rights in the homes of the city’s poorest residents. Ultimately, industrial production would come under municipal and later federal regulation, but not until a new generation of reformers had sufficiently expanded the definition of the public interest to include the regulation of corporate property. Some tenement dwellers probably welcomed the sanitary inspectors, hoping that the inspections would force their landlords to improve living conditions in the tenements. Even those cited for violations of the sanitary codes had little choice but to let the department’s inspectors into their homes. Impoverished and lacking the language and the finances to maneuver the American legal system, tenement residents proved weak opponents to health and housing reformers determined to control their dwelling spaces. It is not surprising that the meat-packing industrialists put up a more effective fight in the courts and on the floor of the Common Council. While De Wolf’s decade-and-a-half-long battle with the meat packers ultimately resulted in his removal from office in 1889, De Wolf had helped to redefine the scope of property rights in housing by establishing the principle that tenement and factory inspections served a public interest in protecting the public health. Faced with opposition from single-family home owners and corporate entities, De Wolf proved most successful when he focused on the multifamily rental dwellings of the urban poor. His reports further solidified categories of ethnic and racial identity by linking housing conditions to the “blood” and “heredity” of the dwellings’ occupants while at the same time divorcing housing from other areas of conflict between labor and capital. Most significantly, his sanitary housing inspections established a legal distinction between the property rights of tenants and those of home owners. The factory and tenement legislation, the most farreaching housing laws passed in the twenty-five years following the Civil War, did assist impoverished and working-class households to improve living conditions somewhat. The law and its implementation in Chicago neighborhoods also functioned to draw attention to the potential benefits of property rights in housing; home owners could call on the Health Department for assis-
tance without facing regular and unannounced inspections. With its regular inspections of the homes of tenement residents, the Health Department helped to crystallize the legal definitions and social benefits of property rights in housing. By 1900, when urban reformers looked to single-family dwellings as the solution to the problem of tenement housing, the Health Department had developed legal and bureaucratic structures to justify their claims. At the turn of the century, however, many of those concerned about tenement conditions would find that efforts to legislate solutions to the city’s housing problem would prove inadequate. Even in the 1880s, as sanitary reformers and municipal officials began to rely on major and expensive infrastructure improvements, particularly sewer and water lines, to ensure the health of the urban populace, the Health Department was less able to, and often less concerned with, ameliorating the dangers of tenement living.
Margaret Garb, associate professor of American history at Washington University in St. Louis, is working on a study of African American politics in late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Chicago. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | All images are from the Chicago History Museum archives, unless otherwise noted. 4, Daily News collection, DN-56708; 5, ICHi-32524; 6, ICHi-03852; 8, ICHi-03821; 10, ICHi-51615b; 11, ICHi-03879; 12, Daily News collection, DN-0056899; 14, Daily News collection, DN001479; 16, ICHi-35465; 17, Daily News collection, DN004619; 18, ICHi-22455; 19, ICHi-00808; 20, ICHi-11976; 21, ICHi-21072; 22, ICHi-38261; 24, Daily News collection, DN-001761; 25, Daily News collection, DN-000979; 26, ICHi21839; 28, ICHi-37943. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | This article is an excerpt from Garb’s City of American Dreams: A History of Home Ownership and Housing Reform in Chicago, 1871–1919 (University of Chicago Press, 2005). For more on this subject, see Maureen Ogle, All the Modern Conveniences: American Household Plumbing, 1840–1890 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Hives of Sickness: Public Health and Epidemics in New York City, David Rosner, ed. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995).
Regulating Urban Living | 29
Strikes were all too common in Chicago in the fifty-plus years of industrialization after the Civil War. Above: A labor organizer makes a speech to a crowd. 30 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Solidarity Forever Between 1865 and 1900, thousands of labor songs surfaced in Chicago, urging the workingman to battle for his rights. BY B U C KY H A L K E R
T
he gun barrels had barely cooled from the Civil War when readers of Fincher’s Trades’ Review in Boston heard the call from Chicago for a new cause. In lofty lyrics that recall the country’s many battles to preserve freedom, the author summoned readers to battle for the workingman, the labor movement, and the eight-hour workday: Let us gather once again, Let us fight with might and main, Let us overcome the proud without delay; Let the laboring men unite, For each one must have his right, And the law be made for work, Eight Hours a day. Employing the tune from the popular Union Army song “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” the chorus of “Eight Hour Song” echoes the sounds of marching troops: Hear your leader’s voices call you, Hasten quickly on your way; We must rally for the fight, Stand for justice and for right, Till the law for work be made 8 hours a day. In the remaining stanzas, the author left little doubt that the fight for workers and the eight-hour day was as important as any the country had yet faced. To lose would bring disaster to the nation and the advent of the worst form of tyranny.
Now the lowly must be raised, And the haughty made to feel That oppression can no longer be endured; If we stand as firm as steel, Then the foe shall surely yield, And the evils that we suffer will be cured. Forward boys and fill the ranks, Press the foe in front and flanks, We must fight until the victory is won; If we crush the tyrant’s might, We shall then emerge from night, Let us work until our glorious task is done. Put each shoulder to the wheel, Crush the foeman ‘neath your heel; Let each laboring man be steady in the fight— We must break the tyrant’s power, Now’s the glorious day and hour, If we strike we’ll surely win the cause of right. In truth, Charles Haynes, the author, was precocious in his attempt to rally workers to the cause of the eighthour day. It would be several years before the movement gained momentum, swept the city, and generated an appropriate anthem. Still, given his humble means, the fact that Haynes wrote a song is noteworthy in itself. He left little record of his life, other than a song, his name and address, an editor’s comment that the author was 31
Reasonable workday hours became the clarion call for a new set of social issues associated with industrialization.
blind, and entries in the Chicago city directory as “musician.” He otherwise remains as anonymous as the millions of workers with whom he cast his allegiance. Haynes was not alone. Between 1865 and 1900, thousands of labor songs and poems surfaced in Chicago, and hundreds came from the pens of the city’s own labor supporters. Long before Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger used their talents to advance the working class during the Great Depression and World War II, many forgotten Chicagoans wrote verses for labor. Historians, folklorists, journalists, and music fans overlook this fact, but Guthrie and Seeger, as well as more contemporary songsters Utah Phillips, Si Kahn, and Billy Bragg, stood on the shoulders of Haynes and fellow worker bards. In part this oversight derives from the advent of sound recording and the subsequent radio boom of the 1920s. Just a decade later the folk revival that began in the New Deal did much to popularize folk music, including artists aligned with labor. This revival also contributed to a romantic view that placed the labor song and its history in the eastern coal fields and surrounding Appalachian terrain or in the radical subculture of the Industrial Workers of the World and the Communist Party. This view slighted midwestern folk music and ensured that Chicago’s tradition of workingclass protest music and poetry was largely forgotten. In truth, it is hardly surprising that Chicago produced more songwriters and protest songs and poetry than any other region in the country until 1900, if not 1920. The city stood at the center of the postbellum, Gilded Age revolution in American industry and society. Workers flooded Chicago in response to industry’s demand. Immigrants from across Europe filed into the city’s burgeoning workshops where 32 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
they generally received good wages but faced long hours, harsh working conditions, harassment in myriad forms, and regular bouts of unemployment. Almost as soon as the Civil War ended, workers began to seek methods of collective redress for a growing list of grievances. The urban labor movement that these workers generated proved almost as diverse as the workers themselves. A fractious lot of conservative trade unionists, such as bricklayers and carpenters, joined unruly anarchists, ballot-box socialists, moderate social reformers, eighthour advocates, Knights of Labor members, and federationists and industrial union backers of every stripe, under the labor banner. The combination yielded a vibrant movement capable of mobilizing massive numbers of workers who challenged the city’s ruling elites. Part of their strength came from the subculture that sprang up around the movement. Less self-conscious than later groups of the 1930s, this subculture included a labor press, reading rooms, social dances, plays, tableaus, bicycle and athletic clubs, lecture series, picnics, orchestras, and formal balls. Literary and musical offerings were standard fare at labor gatherings and in the pages of the city’s many labor papers. The subjects that occupied worker bards mirrored the varied topics taken up by the labor movement during the last part of the nineteenth century. Contracts, wages, strikes, working conditions, the eight-hour day, boycotts, the meatpacking industry, immigration, child labor, poverty, union recognition, socialism, anarchism, the Haymarket Affair, unemployment, scabs, calls to workers to rise and smash their chains, and paeans to specific unions and trades found their way into songs and poems. In 1880 William Creech, an iron molder who often performed his songs at labor events, joined Haynes in support of the eight-hour day. Years earlier in 1868, John James, a Braidwood, Illinois, coal miner, admonished workers to join the new labor party. John Shelton from Brown’s Mills, South Chicago, called upon fellow workers to “Do What’s Right” by siding with their brothers and not caving into the pressure of bosses. Mrs. P. W. Casey, one of a number of female writers, cast her lot with the Knights of Labor in “Honor’s Test” and advised others to follow. Ellen Dare agreed. She boldly claimed the “moral right” of the Knights and the working-class cause. One anonymous writer told the story of the “South Halsted Street Strike,” and another called upon readers to “Boycott Armour” in 1887. Michael Schwab, one of a number of journalists and worker bards in the city’s German community and later a Haymarket martyr, sang praises to his ideological mentor in “In Memory of Karl Marx.” Fellow activist and martyr Albert Parsons prefaced his final courtroom words with a twelve-stanza clarion call to workers to rebel against capitalist oppressors. Similar to Schwab and
other German labor leaders, Parsons skillfully stirred emotions with pointed words: Man of labor, up, arise! Know the might that in thee lies, Wheel and shaft are set at rest At thy powerful arm’s behest. Thine oppressor’s hand recoils, When thou, weary of toils, Shun’st thy plough; thy task begun When thou speak’st: Enough is done! Break this two-fold yoke in twain; Break thy want’s enslaving chain; Break thy slavery’s want and dread; Bread is freedom, freedom bread. A few months after the Haymarket Affair in 1886, John Thompson, ardent Knights of Labor champion and frequent contributor to the labor press, compared Milwaukee to Bethlehem when labor won a victory in that city’s election. Labor song-poets often employed Christian imagery and language in their work as Thompson demonstrated in “Hail Milwaukee”:
The Haymarket Affair of 1886 brought eight known anarchists and socialists to trial. Four men, including Parsons, were hanged for conspiring to commit murder. Above: A depiction of the convicted men in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.
A Bethlehem star shines out from the north, O’er the City by Michigan’s waters, And a conquering shout from out Labor’s clean swarth, Where the vanguard of truth the enemy slaughters, Milwaukee, advance! your place is in front, The birthplace of freedom’s success, And the eyes of glad labor looks up to the font, The baptismal place of freemen’s redress. Samuel Stoves and J. W. Jackson also tackled the election topic. In his letter to the editor of Knights of Labor and two-stanza “Take Your Choice,” Stoves reminded workers to use their ballots wisely and to vote against politicians such as prominent Republican James G. Blaine: “The leader of the robber of babes/The defender of the Boards of Trades.” Jackson borrowed his tune from Philip P. Bliss’s well-known evangelical hymn “Hold the Fort” as a musical guide and informed listeners of their mission in “A Campaign Song”: Now the fight is in the ballot, For the right or wrong; ‘Tis for you which way to use it, For the weak or strong. The chorus issued the rousing plea:
Albert Parsons was editor of Chicago’s most important Englishlanguage socialist paper, the Alarm.
Brace up, boys, the foe is coming— Gird your armor on; Stand your ground and be undaunted, Every mother’s son. Solidarity Forever | 33
Englewood resident Isaac Hanna preferred less overblown language for his “Company Store.” Coal mining had generated a long tradition of balladry, poetry, and recitation that favored a more journalistic, social-realist approach, which Hanna shared and which later figured in early country music. However, long before Merle Travis penned the million-selling “Sixteen Tons” in 1946, Hanna told readers that Illinois coal operators exploited their employees even while they were off the clock: The lot of the miner, At best, is quite hard; We work for good money, Get paid with a card; We scarcely can live, And not a cent more, Since we’re paid off in checks On the company store. The great coal monopolies Are growing apace, They are making their millions By grinding our face; Unto their high prices The people pay toll, While they pay fifty cents For mining their coal. They keep cutting our wages, Time after time; Where we once had a dollar, We now have a dime; While our souls are near famished, Our bodies are sore, We are paid off in checks, On the company store. Unfortunately, information on writers such as Isaac Hanna is not easily located. We can probably assume he was not part of the local elite or even the middle class. Most labor bards earned modest livings, even if they experienced some upward mobility during their lives. Given their status, however, many are very difficult to trace in historical sources, unless their work was signed with a name, a union local number, a city, or an address. Some song-poets signed their work with a simple notation of their occupation: “a digger” or “a molder.” Others left only their initials, and a few listed pen names like “Le Reggod.” Sometimes we can find occupational information on writers by looking to their union locals. City directories remain the best source, however, as workers themselves, labor bards moved frequently and census takers were less concerned with collecting data about the lower class. Women are nearly impossible to trace because they usually don’t appear in directories. We can sometimes gain appreciation for their economic status if 34 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
The “labor question� at the heart of the movement was considered broadly; wages, socialism, tariffs, and child labor were all part of the discussion that would eventually shape a new economy and society. Above: Construction of the Tribune Tower. Solidarity Forever | 35
In the late nineteenth century, Chicago was a printing hub for small newsletters and journals, many of which were devoted to the city’s numerous trades and unions.
we locate occupational information on a male family member at the same address. As a whole, the writers of this period are quite different from the paid professionals who agitated in song, poetry, novels, and plays during the labor rising of the Great Depression. Before it was feasible to earn a living as a full-time labor bard, Isaac Hanna could submit his work to the United Mine Workers Journal. Some could scrape by as publishers and editors of labor papers, such as A. C. Cameron, editor of the Workingman’s Advocate, Albert Parsons from the Alarm, and Gustav Lyser from Vorbote. Most writers, however, held occupations that were of the skilled working class with hours that allowed some time for self-education and reflection. William Creech worked as an iron molder. Alexander Spencer received his paycheck as a printer. James and Emily Tallmadge, both significant songwriters, also worked as printers and occasionally as editors. John Thompson, another active man of letters, and Thomas Kesson, earned their livelihoods as stonecutters or calciminers. Thomas O’Rourke toiled in the railroad trades as either a fireman or conductor. J. W. Howe was a carrier and a clerk according to the city directory. John James, a fiery union leader, worked in the coalfields of Scotland and Braidwood, before he was blacklisted and debt forced him to give up the pits. James Adolphus labored within the metal trades when he contributed his poem for the Knights of Labor, a group that counted a number of writers among its members. 36 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
While there is some truth to the stereotype of labor songs written only as sing-alongs led by working-class guitar slingers to excite the masses, music had many functions within the labor movement. In fact, not every labor bard thought about singable melodies. The vast majority of songs and poems appeared in trade papers of one kind or another. Writers sent their work to sympathetic editors who happily printed them as regular features knowing that union members wanted to read each other’s opinions, including opinions from around the world. Editors reprinted the works of other known and unknown labor bards from the United States and Europe, including socialist poet Gerald Massey and journalist Charles Mackay. The works of such popular writers as Whittier, Dickens, Duganne, Burns, Lazarus, Browning, and Lowell were also reprinted and often served as models for Chicago’s labor writers. From our present vantage, the literary aspirations of our local bards are less important than their collegial spirit and willingness to share their words in a public forum. Even the worst of their offerings provide a window into their hopes, views, and goals. For a molder, miner, or engineer’s wife to make the time to write a poem or song and send it off for publication ought to be judged no small feat. We should appreciate their simple acts, even if they rarely reached a wide audience. Newspapers were but one medium for labor’s poetic voice. Many works were also recited or presented as solo musical pieces; in fact, the line between poetry and
The volume of labor songs is attributed, in part, to the practice of writing lyrics to already popular tunes. Originally written by Chicagobased George F. Root for the Union army, “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp� was so popular that the Confederacy wrote their own lyrics, too. Solidarity Forever | 37
music was vague. Lyrically driven, these works educated, elevated, and entertained listeners. They didn’t need to be sung by the audience to serve a vital group function. James H. White, a socialist lecturer from Chicago, believed the best method of agitation for labor’s cause combined recitation, impersonation, lecture, and song into a program that edified and entertained. His “programme” lists four songs, ten recitations, a speech, and three impersonations. Bringing the message to the masses included more than the dramatic group singing at rallies, parades, and demonstrations. A rousing round of music was probably unavoidable at many gatherings, but songs were performed with piano—rather than guitar—accompaniment or no instrument at all. Workers were often quite proud of their union halls, including the pianos they purchased for business and social functions. Finding someone in their ranks who knew how to play it and read music, however, was not always so easy. Little wonder that songs were typically performed a capella. James and Emily Tallmadge’s version of “Hold the Fort” was one of those songs that could be heard in the streets and meeting halls of Chicago during the Knights of Labor’s rise in popularity and influence in the 1870s and 1880s. In one form or another, “Hold the Fort” became the most popular labor song in the city and quickly emerged as labor’s anthem in the United States. Eventually it spread to England, Australia, and New Zealand before circulating back to the United States in yet another form in the early twentieth century. In 1876 Mrs. S. M. Smith, wife of a Kewanee, Illinois, farmer, rewrote the lyrics to the gospel hymn “The Ninety and Nine” for the Greenback Party presidential campaign of Peter Cooper, and the song continued to serve in other Greenback battles of the decade. Revised later, and as “Labor’s Ninety and Nine,” Smith’s song gained popularity among the Knights of Labor and appeared in their songbook. Chicago workers adopted Smith’s reformist hymn and helped establish it as one of the three most popular labor songs of the nineteenth century. Borrowing a familiar tune made group singing easier, especially among a crowd that could not read sheet music. Like Mrs. Smith, writers chose tunes from popular evangelical hymns. Naturally, labor found these hymns adaptable to its own mission, which carried a strong religious and moral purpose during this period. Labor bards employed religious language and themes, saw their cause as that of Jesus the carpenter, and used hymn tunes to further the notion that labor and Christ The variety of entertainment at labor gatherings exemplifies the artistic culture of the movement, a characteristic that would fade from the next generation of labor reform. 38 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
The Protestant evangelical hymn tradition, furthered in Chicago by preacher Dwight Moody and his music director, Ira Sankey, depended on participation and was thus musically accessible to a broad public.
marched together for a more humane world. Chicagoans Dwight Moody and Ira Sankey unintentionally furthered the practice of adopting religious tunes. Moody, the nation’s most prominent evangelist, and Sankey, his music director, wrote hymns that were among the bestknown and best-selling songs of the day. Sankey effectively served Moody’s campaign for Christ with melodies and lyrics that audiences enjoyed and remembered. Other writers demonstrated practicality of a different sort with their tune of choice. Folk songs, minstrel airs, and Civil War melodies commonly appeared as the framework behind new lyrics. William Creech chose the folk tune “Yankee Doodle” for one offering and the Civil War’s “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” for another. A fellow molder borrowed “Wait for the Wagon,” an 1850s minstrel song made even more popular in its many Civil War variants. Likewise, long before Ralph Chaplin borrowed the tune “John Brown’s Body” in 1915 for the anthem “Solidarity Forever,” J. O. Barrett used the popular Civil War tune for “The Labor Battle Song” in 1886. Yet another writer borrowed the air “Susannah” for “The Bondholder and the Solider.” Others adapted the melodies of “The Wearing of the Green,” “Marching Through Georgia,” “Rally Round the Flag,” “Auld Lang Syne,” and “Bruce’s Address,” to name a few.
The role of Civil War music in labor’s ranks had a Chicago connection not unlike the Moody-Sankey hymns. During the war, Chicago emerged as the center for composing and publishing songs for the Union cause. New songs, often mere parodies of others, were churned out daily. Although repetitious, their popularity at the time is undeniable. They were the hits of the day and enjoyed wide circulation in working-class circles. It seems appropriate that the tunes were then drafted into service in the army of labor. However popular one of these songs became, its status wasn’t enough to propel its writer to fame and wealth, but some minor notoriety could be earned. The business of songwriting was not yet a business per se in the labor movement, but writers such as William Creech would become relatively well known for their volume, variety, and modes of expression. Unlike some of his comrades, Creech never compiled a songbook, but he did contribute a number of works to the local press and was a regular appearance at labor events. When he was invited to perform a song at a meeting at Turner Hall in 1879, he “favored the audience with a parody on ‘Yankee Doodle’” that blasted German Prince Otto von Bismarck’s law of 1878 that gave the government legal authority to suppress any expression of pro-socialist Solidarity Forever | 39
Editors that supported labor published union meeting schedules and news as well as poems, songs, and other musings submitted by readers. Above: Billposters strike of 1902. Below: Excerpt from the Knights of Labor newspaper, 1886.
sentiment. Creech’s ardently socialist view endeared him to Chicago’s German socialists, an audience that counted several writers in its own ranks. In “The Socialists Are Coming,” Creech revisited the national railroad strike of 1877 and the lesson learned at the hands of the railroads and government: They called out their brave volunteers, Who quickly fired on them, And butchered full five hundred Of true, honest, workingmen! They brought us to submission, But it did not make things right; It learned us one good lesson, boys, And that was, how to fight! Creech then joined those who cast their lot for socialism and admonished others to carry the banner to the fore: So come, my friends and join us, And you’ll never rue the day, 40 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
For we’ll change this present system To the Socialistic way. We’ll make this earth a paradise, For so it ought to be, And make every man a brother, boys, As well as you and me. Creech hardly pigeonholed himself with his socialist vision. He lent his skills to the eight-hour cause and fellow iron molders. Borrowing the tune of the ever-pop-
ular Civil War song “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” for “Eight Hours A Day,” Creech advised listeners that the labor movement fought the good fight, and he insisted that they not give up the struggle for a shorter workday. During the 1880s, Creech contributed several songs to the Iron Molders Journal, the official organ of the Iron Molders International Union. When fellow tradesmen in Cincinnati won their 1880 strike, Creech quickly stepped forward to lend praise and congratulations with the song “Good News.” In it Creech employed the comeall-ye format, a type of English song that summons all to listen up: “Come brother molders through the land,/And listen to my rhyme.” The lines that follow recount the story of the strike that began when arrogant bosses tried “To break our Glorious Union up,/And cut us ten per cent.” Union, Local 3, however, held its ground against owners and scabs and stood triumphant. The infectious spirit of victory filled Creech as he implored workers to battle onward: Success to every Trades Union, No matter where they be; They are the poor man’s hope and friend, Bulwarks of liberty. Our cause is one throughout the world— In Russia, France, and all; Then keep the ball a-rolling, says, That good old Union Ball! Throughout his work Creech encouraged workers to stand in unity for craft and class. He relied on a set of shared values that included a strong sense of brotherhood and community, and he joined those who drew lessons from the Bible, particularly the social teachings of Jesus in the New Testament. In “Help One Another,” Creech took his tune from “Do A Good Turn When You Can” and made his message clear: The law that was made by the Master Should always be first in our mind, To love and obey the Creator, And to one another be kind. If that law was loved in this world, Contention and strike would be o’er; Oppression from us would be hurl’d, And peace would be our evermore.
The informal, social nature of many labor gatherings was opportunity for people of all ranks to share their latest verse. Above: An advertisement in the Socialist.
Come, molders, unite all together, Be true to each other, like men, Stand firm to your Union forever, For union is strength, and ‘twill win; The past let us bury forever, In future our motto must be, To stretch forth the hand of a brother, Whenever oppression we see. Solidarity Forever | 41
Though the style of language changed in labor songs written in the new century, music remained an important part of the movement’s culture. Joe Hill would stand out among the next generation of labor supporters affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World. 42 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
While Creech distinguished himself on the strength of his verse and personal appearances, James and Emily Tallmadge took a different tactic. Following a pattern established by evangelicals, abolitionists, Free-Soilers, and other reformers, the Tallmadges compiled Labor Songs Dedicated to the Knights of Labor, a portable songbook that proved popular enough to be printed in three editions. They printed the songbook at their shop at 271 North Dearborn Street and sold copies for ten cents. The songbook comprised twenty-nine songs, including a few standards such as “Workingmen’s Marseillaise” and “Labor’s Ninety and Nine.” Primary space, however, was given to original works, such as J. O. Barrett’s selfexplanatory “Home Rule For Ireland” and “The Labor Battle Song.” Similar to other songs in the collection, the latter relies heavily on the social message of Christianity laced with labor’s own form of patriotism. Barrett left no doubt about which side God favored: See the Christ of Labor coming in the glory of the Lord, With the news of reformation that is heralded abroad, Of a victory impending by the ballot for our sword, As we go marching on. Hear the trump of resurrection that’s awakening alarm, Like the charges of the angels when they order us to arms— From the clutches of the despots save our country, homes, and farms, As we go marching on. The Tallmadges’ opinions on the labor question—on what terms people will work—followed similar lines of thought. Like many in the movement, they combined patriotic sentiment for the Republic with a brand of Christianity that considered Christ and his teachings in the service of the working class and its cause. In “When Workingmen Combine,” listeners learned that workers united would “have power most divine.” They could defeat the “banks and railroad kings,” the “idle drones” who “live like kings,” and the “thieves and rings” who stole the fruits of those who labored to create wealth. “Our Battle Song,” the Tallmadge version of “Hold the Fort,” also offers listeners a powerful mixture of religion and pro-labor sentiments, with the Knights of Labor leading troops in glorious battle: Hark! The bugle note is sounding Over all the land; See! The people forth are rushing, Oh! the charge is grand! Storm the fort, ye Knights of Labor; ‘Tis a glorious fight; Brawn and brain against injustice— God defend the right!
The collection known as the Little Red Songbook receives most of the credit for Chicago’s tradition of labor songs. The still-popular book has been printed in thirty-seven editions since 1905.
God and the Knights would win, defeating those who were destroying the fabric of this great country: the money kings; the slavery grabbers, thieves, traitors and their minions; and all whose “vile injustice fills their coffers/ With their blood-bought gold.” The final stanza chides those who dare retreat from a fight both patriotic and pro-labor, once more raising the specter of slavery: Who will dare to shun the conflict? Who would be a slave? Better die within the trenches Forward, then, ye brave! This kind of evangelical and patriotic fervor permeated the Tallmadges’ songbook. H. A. Coffeen’s “Labor’s Emancipation,” uses the well-worn classic “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” for a melody and lashes out at rulingclass thieves who stole the wealth that workers—the “useful classes”—created. The litany of oppressors Solidarity Forever | 43
included “selfish rulers, scheming landlords, idle useless things” worshipped as “Industrial king,” and legalized monopolies. In his concluding stanza Coffeen offered words that sound like the pleadings of prayer: May the God of truth and light, guard and guide us all the way, May the victory of right o’er wrong be won; May all men who teach and pray do the right as well as say, And the heavenly will on earth be also done. Coffeen was hardly content to wait for this scene to materialize on its own. Similar to Creech and the Tallmadges, he saw cause for optimism in the movement, especially with thousands and thousands marching for victory, joining in chorus: Tramp, tramp, tramp, see thousands coming, Marching on o’er hill and plain, Singing, shouting, moving on, Toward a better day to dawn, Faith, and hope, and love inspire the world again. From our vantage, the revivalism found in the Tallmadges’ songbook may seem peculiar. In its time, however, it stood squarely within the main of the labor movement. Workers and their leaders embraced a line of reform thinking that owed much to the Second Great Awakening and the many social movements that followed in its wake—abolition, women’s rights, and advances in higher education. Such thinking became less common in the twentieth century as a more secular attitude grew ascendant in labor’s ranks, both conservative and radical. The language and style used by the Tallmadges declined, and song and poetry became less enmeshed in labor’s day-to-day world. The radical Industrial Workers of the World (“Wobblies”), founded in Chicago in 1905, carried on the tradition of working-class letters. Songs and poems performed an important role among Wobblies, and talented writers Joe Hill, Ralph Chaplin, and T-Bone Slim emerged from their ranks. Yet even a cursory glance through the Wobblies’ famed Little Red Songbook demonstrates the distance between Joe Hill and the Tallmadges. Still, those millions of workers who would sing Chaplin’s 1915 anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” would hear strains of Chicago’s impressive working-class tradition of song and poetry.
Bucky Halker, PhD, is a Chicago songwriter, performer, and historian. He produced the CD series Folksongs of Illinois, Volumes 1–3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), and his most recent CD of original songs is Wisconsin, 2-13-63, Volume 1 (Chur, Switzerland: Brambus Records; Chicago: Revolting Records, 2007). I L L U S T R AT I O N S | All images are from the Chicago History Museum archives unless otherwise noted. 30, ICHi03200; 32, ICHi-381030; 33 top, ICHi-19664; 33 bottom ICHi-03696; 34, ICHi-01966; 36, Daily News collection, DN0001335; 37, photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago; 38, photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, reprinted with permission from the Wisconsin Historical Society, WHS image ID 57223; 39, ICHi-51778; 40 top, Daily News collection, DN-0000425; 40 bottom, ICHi-38103; 41, ICHi-38128; 42, photo courtesy of the Newberry Library, Chicago, reprinted from Joyce Kornbluh, Rebel Voices; 43, ICHi37006; 44, Daily News collection, DN-0000082. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For additional information on the German community’s talented labor bards, see John Jentz and Hartmut Keil, German Workers in Chicago: A Documentary History of Working-Class Culture from 1850 to World War I (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1988). For full lyrics to many songs, see Philip Foner, American Labor Songs of the Nineteenth Century, (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1975). On the history of popular music in the nineteenth century, including Civil War songs, see Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America, (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1979); Julius Mattfield, Variety Music Cavalcade, 1620–1969 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1971); and Nicholas Tawa, Sweet Songs for Gentle Americans—The Parlor Song in America, 1790–1860 (Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1980). For more on the Industrial Workers of the World, particularly their music, poetry, and literature, see Joyce Kornbluh, Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing, 1998).
As labor’s political strength grew, the cultivation of its cultural traditions diminished. Opposite: An elaborately embroidered union banner, c. 1902 Solidarity Forever | 45
M A K I N G H I S T O RY
The Linebacker and the Nun: Interviews with Dick Butkus and Sister Rosemary Connelly T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
A
t first glance, Dick Butkus and Sister Rosemary Connelly share little in common. Butkus was a consensus All-American football player at the University of Illinois before going onto a prolific National Football League (NFL) career with the Chicago Bears. NFL founder and Bears coach George Halas later acknowledged Butkus as “the greatest player in the history of the Bears.” Many consider him to be among the ten best football players of all time. Connelly is a pioneer in the caring and treatment of the developmentally disabled. Since 1969, she has run Misericordia, a nationally recognized home for more than five hundred severely disabled children and adults. In 2004, the Chicago Sun-Times named her one of the ten most powerful women in Chicago nonprofit organizations. Reverend Charles T. Rubey of Catholic Charities has called her “a Mother Teresa for the developmentally disabled.” Yet, Connelly and Butkus both exemplify Chicago’s historic Catholic immigrant heritage. Connelly’s parents, Peter and Bridget Moran Connelly, immigrated to Chicago from Ireland in the early twentieth century: “They lived in a rural area in County Mayo, and the farm probably went to the oldest son, so the opportunities weren’t there,” explains Connelly. “So as so many of their brothers and sisters did, they left Ireland and came to America.” Her father, who Connelly describes as a gregarious and affable man, eventually operated a tavern at Cicero Avenue and Van Buren Street to support Connelly and her five siblings. 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
The 2006 Making History Awards celebrated five esteemed Chicagoans, including sports icon Dick Butkus and humanitarian Sister Rosemary Connelly.
Butkus and his siblings grew up in a modest home on Chicago’s South Side. The home (pictured at left) still stands in the city’s Roseland neighborhood.
Richard Marvin Butkus was born in Chicago on December 9, 1942, the youngest child of Emma and John Butkus. His mother, Emma Ramona Goodoff, came from a Lithuanian immigrant family that worked in the mines of southern Illinois. His father, John Butkus, was born in Kaunas, Lithuania, and immigrated to Minnesota to work in a lumber camp before securing a job at the Pullman Palace Car factory in Chicago. John and Emma Butkus raised eight children in the city’s Roseland neighborhood. Butkus describes his childhood home as “more like a converted garage than a house,” a mere nine-hundred square feet and only two bedrooms. He recalls, “Four of us lived in one bedroom, two bunk beds, and [my parents’] bedroom was the other bedroom. The walls, of course, were like paper, and you’d hear them talking in Lithuanian all the time.” His father used the front yard to grow a garden as well as raise chickens, ducks, geese, and sometimes pigs. Similar to Butkus, Connelly was born and raised in Chicago, yet her neighborhood had a distinct Irish flavor. “I grew up on the West Side of Chicago, and as most [Catholic] Chicagoans do, I identify the locality by the parish.” Resurrection Catholic Church was the focal point of her family and immediate community. She estimates that 90 percent of the families in her neighborhood were Irish. “They were the policemen and the motormen and the firemen and the working people,” she remembers. “And my dad was a little different than the rest, because he owned the Irish pub.” Making History | 47
Connelly attended Resurrection’s elementary school and then Siena High School, both of which were staffed by the Sisters of Mercy. Their influence on Connelly proved instrumental. After studying for a year at the College of St. Teresa in Winona, Minnesota, she elected to enter a Roman Catholic order. “I had twelve years with the Sisters of Mercy in grade school and high school,” she explains. “The Mercies were located in Chicago, too, and that was a real attraction to me.” Connelly completed her novitiate at Old St. Patrick’s Academy in suburban Des Plaines. In 1952, she professed, took her first vows, and began teaching in local Catholic schools; she took her final vows in 1955. Over the next decade, Connelly taught at a variety of schools in the area: Mother McAuley, Precious Blood, and St. James in Chicago; St. Stephen’s in Des Plaines; and Mary Queen of Heaven in Elmhurst. At the same time, she completed her undergraduate studies at St. Xavier University, a master’s degree in sociology from St. Louis University, and another master’s degree in social work from Loyola University in Chicago. Just as the Sisters of Mercy influenced the young Connelly, sports shaped Butkus from an early age. He grew up playing in his neighborhood’s undeveloped blocks and empty lots, often called “prairies,” as well as at Fernwood Park, which was down the street from his house. His parents sent him to Fernwood Elementary School rather than the parish school at nearby St. Helena’s Roman Catholic Church where he was baptized. Butkus remembers his mother as “fairly religious” but unable to afford parochial schooling for all of her children. “I didn’t want to go anyways,” adds Butkus, “because they had no sports.” 48 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
The young Connelly (above) completed her novitiate at Old St. Patrick’s Academy in Des Plaines, Illinois. Since then, she has become an influential member of the city’s Irish community. Top: Connelly celebrates with the South Side Irish, including Richard M. Daley.
Butkus’s love of athletics also determined his choice of high school. The head football coach had recently left nearby Fenger High School, so Butkus traveled several miles farther to attend Chicago Vocational High School (CVS). At CVS, Butkus played for Coach George Moran and then former Notre Dame star Bernie O’Brien, who became head football coach at the start of Butkus’s second season. By his junior year, Butkus was a virtual one-man team. In addition to starting at both fullback and linebacker, he kicked off, punted, booted extra points, and received credit for 70 percent of the team’s tackles. Regarded as one of the most talented players in the city, Butkus led CVS to the Chicago Public League championship game. In 1959, the Chicago Sun-Times named him High School Player of the Year; Butkus was the first student to receive this recognition as a junior. While playing fullback at CVS, Butkus honed the abilities that would help him become a star linebacker:
Butkus attended Chicago Vocational High School (above), where he played football. In 1959, the Chicago Tribune singled him out as “Vocational’s most dependable ball carrier, best blocker, and best kicker.”
I noticed if I was running the ball and someone would bear hug me or hit me high and try to force me back on my back, there was nothing to break the fall. And then if you try to break your fall with your arm, then you open yourself to fumbling it, and that’s the whole key is trying to get turnovers on defense. So then I just started thinking, okay, this is what I’ll do. This proved to be a signature tactic for Butkus in both his college and professional careers. At various stages of their careers, Butkus and Connelly were compelled to make transitions: Butkus when he advanced from the amateur to professional Making History | 49
Playing center as well as linebacker at the University of Illinois, Butkus became known as one of the best college football players of all time. He remains one of two players to have his number (50) retired by the university; the other is Harold “Red� Grange, the Galloping Ghost. 50 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
ranks and Connelly when she became an administrator after many years of teaching. In 1969, she was appointed as chief administrator at Misericordia South. Founded in 1921 as a home for unwed mothers on Chicago’s South Side, Misericordia (which means “heart of mercy” in Latin) began offering programs for infants and children with developmental disabilities during the 1950s. When Connelly took over the institution, it served more than 130 children under the age of six. “It was a time when there were no programs for children with mental disabilities,” she emphasizes. “The only ones that they had programs for in the school were those that tested ‘educable.’” At first, Connelly felt overwhelmed. “I was a social worker, I was a teacher, but I had never been a manager, nor had I worked with children with disabilities,” she admits. “Misericordia was [run like] a nursing home and I would look at these little kids and think, ‘They’re not sick. Why are they in a nursing home?’” Connelly laments, “In one room, little children, grown girls, and elderly women [were] pulling on each other’s clothes, tearing them apart. It was really bad.” Conditions actually worsened when residents left Misericordia since no outside programs existed to address their needs. Connelly describes being “just abhorred at what I saw” and decided that something had to be done to prevent residents from being released into such an unsupportive environment. Her solution was simple: “We just kept them longer.” Soon after, Illinois state welfare officials complained to Connelly that children older than six years of age remained in residence. She admitted to the fact but politely challenged, “Well, what are you going to do about it?” In response, Connelly recalls, the agents “would walk out and leave us alone.” While Connelly transformed the treatment of the developmentally disabled, Butkus changed the landscape of Chicago sports. In 1961, he elected to attend the University of Illinois because he liked the new head coach, Pete Elliott. Another factor, however, was one of the few non-football considerations in his young life. Butkus was contemplating proposing to Helen Essenhart, his high-school girlfriend whom he eventually married. He eliminated Notre Dame upon learning that the university prohibited married men from playing on the football team. Notre Dame’s loss was Illinois’s gain. At Illinois, Butkus became one of the best-ever college football players. He was a three-time all–Big Ten selection, a two-time unanimous All-American, the 1963 Defensive Player of the Year, and the 1964 American Football Coaches Association’s Player of the Year.
At the close of the 1963 season, the Chicago Daily Defender (left) called Butkus the “key to Illini success” in the Rose Bowl. Butkus’s efforts on the field (right) earned him recognition as the season’s Defensive Player of the Year.
Making History | 51
In the 1965 draft, Butkus was the top pick for both the Chicago Bears and the Denver Broncos. After choosing Chicago, the collegiate star returned home to play at Solider Field (pictured above).
He finished sixth and third in votes for the Heisman Trophy in 1963 and 1964, respectively. Butkus led Illinois to a Rose Bowl victory against the University of Washington after the 1963 season and a third-place national ranking by the Associated Press. He remains one of only two players to have his number (50) retired by the University of Illinois, and he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983. In 2000, College Football News ranked Butkus the sixth-best college player of all time. In 1965, Butkus returned to Chicago after the Bears selected him in the third overall pick in the NFL draft. As a rookie, he quickly made his mark, leading the Bears in tackles, interceptions, and fumble recoveries. During his nine years with the team, Butkus was elected to eight consecutive Pro Bowl teams, seven all-NFL teams, and named NFL Defensive Player of the Year in both 1969 and 1970. His talent was well respected: “In 1970, a panel of NFL coaches voted Butkus the player they would start with if they were building a new team from scratch.” Butkus was inducted into the Professional Football Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility. The Bears retired his number (51) in 1994. Butkus’s college coach Pete Elliott later remarked that his star player possessed unsurpassed tackling ability and football instincts. “But the thing that sets him apart from every other athlete I have ever known is his great, great intensity,” proclaimed Elliott. “Dick Butkus played all out, all the time, every game, every practice. He is the yardstick for all linebackers for all time.” Elliott was right. In 1985, the NCAA’s annual award for the outstanding college linebacker was renamed in honor of Butkus. 52 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Led by Butkus (51), the Monsters of the Midway storm down the field.
Making History | 53
Connelly, pictured here with Lucy, has spent her career caring for and improving the lives of the developmentally disabled. 54 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
While Butkus realized his dreams, Connelly achieved her own. In 1976, she moved Misericordia to a shuttered orphanage at Ridge and Devon Avenues. “It happened so accidentally,” she remarks. During a conversation with Catholic Charities administrator Monsignor Thomas J. Holbrook, she reiterated her belief that the children at Misericordia South were not ill and should not be treated as such. She remembers Holbrook responding: “You think you have problems? I’m trying to close a whole big orphanage up at Angel Guardian.” Connelly instantly recognized the opportunity. “Well, maybe we could share that problem together,” she suggested. “What if we took over part of Angel Guardian?” John Cardinal Cody and Catholic Charities jumped at Connelly’s suggestion. They initially permitted her to develop seven acres of the thirty-one-acre site. Over time, Misericordia South closed and the newer campus expanded into the remaining twenty-four acres, which Connelly still refers to as “a tremendous gift.” In Rogers Park, Connelly initiated innovative programming. Instead of providing merely housing, she gave residents the opportunity to develop skills. Connelly established an on-site art studio where residents learned sculpting and painting and eventually sold their artwork. Other residents received training that enabled them to work in Misericordia’s restaurant (Greenhouse Inn), bakery (Hearts and Flour Bakery), and greenhouse (Greco Greenhouse), all three of which operate storefronts and are open to the public. Connelly also worked with local businesses to secure additional employment opportunities for residents.
After successfully relocating Misericordia to the North Side, Connelly initiated innovative programming to improve the lives of residents. Below: Connelly pictured with employees of one of the community’s businesses.
Making History | 55
For several decades, Connelly has directed a wide range of programs to meet the diverse needs of persons with developmental disabilities, and in doing so, she has made Misericordia a worldwide model. Today, Misericordia supports approximately 550 children and adults with mild to profound developmental disabilities from all racial, religious, and socioeconomic backgrounds. Not surprisingly, the community-oriented atmosphere is desirable to families of residents; more than five hundred individuals are on the waiting list. In 2003, with an operating budget of $45 million, Misericordia was one of Chicago’s largest charity organizations. In 1973, shortly before Connelly moved Misericordia to the North Side, injuries forced Butkus into retirement. Doctors informed the young Butkus that he had the knees of a seventy year old. His willingness to quietly endure physical pain transformed Butkus into a symbol of strength and of the city. In the 1976 movie Rocky, Sylvester Stallone’s character had a bulldog named Butkus. In a recurring Saturday Night Live skit a few years later, three beer-drinking Chicagoans frequently toasted a picture of Butkus that hung above the bar. 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
The staff of Misericordia is “committed to making each day the best day” for the residents. Above: Connelly pictured with Joseph Cardinal Bernardin. Below: Connelly with her friend Carolyn.
Connelly collects donations for Misericordia. With the help of such donations, Misericordia is able to fulfill its mission to “support individuals with developmental disabilities in maximizing their level of independence and self-determination within an environment that fosters spirituality, dignity, respect, and enhancement of quality of life.� Making History | 57
Butkus’s “bear hug” maneuver, developed while he was a student at Chicago Vocational High School, proved to be a signature tactic in his career with the Bears. His website describes his “style of tackling [as] worthy of a grizzly bear.” 58 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
While preparing for his retirement from football, Butkus moved his family briefly to Florida and then to California, where he began to pursue an acting career. Some questioned his judgment. He remembers one fan remonstrating him: “What’d you move away from this city for, man? You would’ve owned that town.” Butkus’s response was simple: “That’s exactly why I left. I don’t want to be ‘Hey there’s Dick, the ex-football player.’” Skeptics aside, Butkus threw himself with characteristic dedication into his new career. In three decades, he appeared in numerous movies and television series. Butkus debuted in the television movie Brian’s Song (1971), in which he played himself, and then went on to play Abraham “Brom Bones” Van Brunt in an adaptation of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1980). Butkus expanded his repertoire by starring in many television sitcoms and miniseries, including Rich Man, Poor Man (1976), Half-Nelson (1985), and My Two Dads (1987–89). His motion picture credits include Johnny Dangerously (1984), Spontaneous Combustion (1990), and Necessary Roughness (1991). In Gremlins 2 (1990) and The Last Boy Scout (1991), he again played himself. In addition to acting, Butkus has also worked as a broadcaster for WGN radio and NFL Today on CBS. Despite these numerous roles, Butkus will probably be best remembered for his performances alongside former, fellow football player Bubba Smith in the Miller Lite beer advertisements of the 1980s. He admits, “I’d [never] ever even dreamed about it . . . [I] just kind of stumbled in.” Miller advertising writers showed him a script “jagging Bubba and giving the looks,” and the rest is history. In all, Butkus has made more than two hundred television appearances. Connelly’s ideas regarding treatment of the developmentally disabled were shaped by Jean Vanier, a prominent advocate of creating communities for individuals with developmental disabilities and the founder of L’Arche. “Vanier was the most influential person that I can think of over these years,” she acknowledges. Part of the Misericordia philosophy is that “we are a community of people, that you get as much as you give, because the residents, they can’t create a world for themselves, but once that environment is theirs, we hold strongly [that] they become the gift givers.” Connelly also credits her achievements to Vatican II’s transformation of the Catholic Church and influence on the Sisters of Mercy. “Before 1969, every
Described by some as the heart and soul of the Chicago Bears, Butkus’s tremendous efforts on the field (above) set him up for a successful second career after injuries forced him to retire from football.
Making History | 59
August, a book would come out, and your name would be on it, where you would go for that year or stay in the place that you were. So that book was eliminated in 1969,” she explains. “Our lives changed radically, and I think we became much more self-directed.” Thereafter, sisters enjoyed more flexibility in their ministries and choices in their pastoral assignments. Connelly now believes that the changes instituted at Misericordia “probably could never have happened within the structure before Vatican II.” Connelly’s family also proved to be a critical inspiration. “I had a nephew who was born normal, but he had a preclosing of the soft spot [on his head] that caused pressure on his brain, and he became disabled because of that,” she recounts. “I was sensitive to my sister’s need for services that weren’t out there.” The world of the developmentally disabled has changed dramatically since Connelly took the helm at Misericordia. In 1960, sixty-nine infant residents were diagnosed with Down syndrome. “In those days, parents were being told, ‘Place them. Get on with your life. They’re never going to amount to anything anyway, so don’t bother. Don’t let the other kids in the family be affected by it,’” remembers Connelly. “Today, we have no baby Down syndrome children.” Butkus was also inspired by his family. “I was raised to follow a certain Catholic, blue-collar ethic,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The one that prohibits even the slightest show of self-satisfaction, the idea that the greater your accomplishments the softer you go. I believe in that ethic, though sometimes it is very hard to follow. Whenever the adulation gets too high to handle gracefully, I remember my father going softly through a life of service to his family, and I usually get quiet, too.” Butkus is still quick to emphasize the influence of his parents. “I always was worried about getting complacent and always looked for where I could have done something else so I didn’t get complacent, year after year,” he explains. “I guess that’s probably from the way they were, the way my old man worked. You know, we all worked, she worked, everybody worked.” Looking back, Butkus thinks that this attitude “carried over on the field with me.” This influence is illustrated in Butkus’s charity work. The former linebacker has raised support for the Serra Retreat Center in California and hosted a national golf tournament to benefit the treatment of cystic fibrosis. More recently, with the help of his son Matt and doctors Lawrence J. Santora and Steven A. Armentrout, he organized Team Butkus to develop wellness programs and attack the growing popularity of steroid use among teenagers and young adults. In tribute to his efforts off the field, Butkus was presented with the Life Achievement Award from Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los 60 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
Connelly celebrates her thirtieth anniversary at Misericordia with the help of her friends, colleagues, and the residents of the community.
Angeles. He was also a recipient of the Pope John Award, which recognizes outstanding achievement toward humanity. Connelly has similarly been recognized with numerous awards, among them the Shield of St. Xavier (1999) by St. Xavier University; the Unsung Heroine Award (2000) of the Thirteenth District of the Cook County Board; the Order of Lincoln Medallion (2003), Illinois’s highest award for lifetime achievement; the 2005 Humanitarian of the Year Award by Northwest Side Irish; and honorary degrees from Lewis University, St. Xavier University, and the University of Notre Dame. Connelly considers herself fortunate: “I think the greatest gift God gave me was surrounding myself with some of the most compassionate, competent, caring people, both inside the walls of Misericordia and outside.” She continues, “I’m proud to have walked this journey with so many wonderful people. We are making a difference, and the world is more compassionate and loving because there is a Misericordia.” The careers and lives of Connelly and Butkus resonate with many Chicagoans. Butkus epitomizes the City of Big Shoulders leitmotiv: work hard, remain loyal, and don’t complain. Connelly embodies traditions of silent caring and compassion and generates comparisons with Mother Teresa. In their own distinct ways, both have become symbols of Chicago. Timothy J. Gilfoyle is the author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of NineteenthCentury New York (W.W. Norton, 2006) and Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 46, CHM, detail of photograph by Dan Rest; 47, courtesy of Timothy J. Gilfoyle; 48, courtesy of Sister Rosemary Connelly, Misericordia; 49, HB23980-A; 50, courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; 51 left, Chicago Daily Defender, 24 Dec. 1963, used with the permission of the Chicago Defender; 51 right, courtesy of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; 52, HB-TR-33.17; 52–53, courtesy of the Chicago Bears Football Club; 54–57, courtesy of Sister Rosemary Connelly, Misericordia; 58, detail, courtesy of the Chicago Bears Football Club; 59 left, Chicago Daily Defender, 28 Nov. 1972, used with the permission of the Chicago Defender; 59 right, Chicago Daily Defender, 24 Oct. 1973, used with the permission of the Chicago Defender; 60, courtesy of Sister Rosemary Connelly, Misericordia. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Dick Butkus has written two autobiographies. The first Stop-Action (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1972) focuses on the 1971 football season. The second Butkus: Flesh and Blood by Dick Butkus and Pat Smith (New York: Doubleday, 1997) covers most of Butkus’s life. The OC Heart Diet: A Lifestyle Program to Detect and Prevent Heart Disease, co-authored with Lawrence J. Santora and Steven A. Armentrout (LM Publishers, 2004), details his recent involvement in wellness programs. Sister Rosemary Connelly awaits her biographer. Information on Misericordia is available on its website at www.misericordia.com/about. A PBS interview with Connelly appears at www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week636/feature.html
Making History | 61
Index to Volume 35 This index includes author, title, and subject entries. In each page reference, the issue number comes first, followed by a colon and the page number(s) on which the reference appears. Illustrations are indicated in italics. If a subject is illustrated and discussed on the same page, the illustration is not separately indicated.
A
Addams Hull-House, and hired nurses, 3:21 Ade, George, Doc’ Horne, 1/2:55 Adolphus, James, 3:36 Adulterated foods, 3:25 Alarm (newspaper), 3:33, 36 Alter, Peter T., “Rolling Low in Chicago,” 1/2:30–43 American Council on Education, 1/2:23 American Public Health Association, 3:14, 21 Amistad Car Club, 1/2:30–43 Angel Guardian orphanage, 3:55 Angell, George, 3:25, 26 Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family (Hartfield), 1/2:78 Antioch College, 1/2:8 Appalachia, and folk music, 3:32 Architects Jahn, Helmut, 1/2:64–80 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1/2:65 Summers, Gene, 1/2:65 Architecture, 1/2:65, 68–69, 74, 75, 79 Argonne Program Support Facility, 1/2:69 Armentrout, Steven A., 3:60 Armour, J. Ogden estate, 1/2:14–15 Arroyo, Sergio “Tank,” 1/2:37 Art Institute of Chicago, 1/2:64, 70, 71, 76 Arthur Somerville Reid Memorial Library, 1/2:20, 22 Association for the Advancement of Science, British, 3:17 Association for the Suppression of Food Adulteration, 3:26 “Auld Lang Syne,” 3:39 Automobiles See also Car Clubs Amistad Car Club, 1/2:30–43 Buick Regal, 1/2:42 Chevrolet Fleetline (1947), 1/2:37 Chevrolet Impala (1966), 1/2:43 Chevrolet Monte Carlo (1978), 1/2:30, 31, 35, 40, 42 Hollywood Kustoms, 1/2:39 Pontiac, 1/2:36 “Rolling Low in Chicago,” article by Peter T. Alter, 1/2:30–43 Avila, Sanjuanita, 1/2:36 Aztlan Bike Club, 1/2:38 62 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
B
Bacteriology, and public health measures, 3:18 Bank advertisement, with Miss Chicago, 1/2:46 Barber shop, Lake Forest, 1/2:13 Barmore, Jennie, 3:22 Barrett, J. O. “Home Rule for Ireland, 3:43 “The Labor Battle Song,” 3:39 Benchley, Robert, 1/2:62 Bernardin, Cardinal Joseph, 3:56 Bismarck’s law of 1878, 3:39–40 Blaine, James G., 3:33 Bliss, Philip P., “Hold the Fort,” 3:33 Board of Health (Chicago), 3:9, 13, 14 (See also Chicago Health Department) Board of Trustees (Lake Forest College), 1/2:18, 20, 22–23, 28 Bohemian immigrants, 3:23 “Bomb No. 29,” 1/2:48 “The Bondholder and the Soldier,” 3:39 “Boycott Armour,” 3:32 Bradley, Luther D., 1/2:50–51, 55 Bragg, Billy, 3:32 Brian’s Song (movie), 3:59 Briggs, Asa, on Chicago, 1/2:15 British Association for the Advancement of Science, 3:17 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 1/2:76 “Bruce’s Address,” 3:39 Bubbly Creek (Chicago River), 3:12 Buick Regal, 1/2:42 Building regulations, 3:5–6, 20 Busse, Fred A., 1/2:48, 50 Butkus, Dick, 3:46–60 Butkus, Emma, 3:47 Butkus, Helen Essenhart, 3:51 Butkus, John, 3:47 Butkus, Matt, 3:60
C
“A Campaign Song” (Jackson), 3:33 Capen, Samuel P., 1/2:23, 26 Carleton College, 1/2:8, 15, 28
Car Clubs Amistad Car Club, 1/2:30–43 Majestics Car Club, 1/2:39 Solitos Car Club, 1/2:37 Somosuno Lowrider Car Club, 1/2:37, 42 South Side Cruisers Car Club, 1/2:42 Cars. See Automobiles Cartoons “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla, 1/2:44–63 War Cartoons: Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, December 7, 1941–September 28, 1942, 1/2:58 Cartoons by Bradley, 1/2:51 Casey, P. W. (Mrs.), “Honor’s Test,” 3:32 Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Life Achievement Award, 3:60–61 Center for Arts in Education, 1/2:64 Century of Progress poster, 1/2:61 Chaidez, David, 1/2:32–33 Chaplin, Ralph, “Solidarity Forever,” 3:39 Cheney, Mamah Borthwick, 1/2:49 Chevrolet Fleetline (1947), 1/2:37 Chevrolet Impala (1966), 1/2:43 Chevrolet Monte Carlo (1978), 1/2:30, 31, 35, 40, 42 Chicago, Illinois architecture, 1/2:65, 68–69, 74, 79 Art Institute of Chicago, 1/2:64, 70, 71, 76 Board of Health, 3:9, 13, 14 (See also Chicago Health Department) “Bomb No. 29,” 1/2:48 city physician, 3:13 Common Council, 3:13, 14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29 crime and criminals, 1/2:55 diseases, and tenement living, 3:4–29 flag, 1/2:60 foreign-born in, 1/2:8 (See also Immigrants) Great Fire of 1871, affect on housing, 3:5, 18, 25 History Museum, 1/2:30–31 housing, 3:4–29 as important center for songwriters, 3:32–34 industrial waste in, 3:12–13 mayors, 1/2:40, 47–48, 50, 55, 62 Mexican American community, 1/2:31 newspapers (See specific name, e.g., Chicago Daily News) North Shore, 1/2:13 packinghouses, 3:13, 25–26, 28 police, 1/2:69, 3:13, 14, 17, 21, 22, 23, 47 political cartoons (See “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla) population growth, 1/2:15 printing industry in, 3:36 prohibition, 1/2:55 river pollution, 3:12 Union Stock Yard, 3:25–28 urban sanitation movement, 3:13–15 World’s Columbian Exposition, 1/2:44–46 Xerox Centre, 1/2:69 Chicago’s Area 2 Police Headquarters, 1/2:69 Chicago Bears, 3:46, 52, 58, 59 Chicago Children’s Choir, 1/2:66
Chicago Daily News, 1/2:50, 51, 55, 58 Chicago Daily Tribune, packinghouse series, 3:25–26 Chicago Health Department, 3:4–29 Chicago History Museum, 1/2:30–31 Chicago Inter Ocean, 1/2:45, 46, 49 Chicago Master Plumbers Association, 3:20 Chicago Record, 1/2:49 Chicago River, 3:12, 26 Chicago Tribune, 1/2:27, 45, 46, 48, 49, 55, 58 (See also Chicago Daily Tribune) report on tenement living, 3:5–6, 9 Chicago Truck Drivers Union, 3:44 Chicago Vocational High School, 3:49 Children, Chicago Children’s Choir, 1/2:66 Cholera, 3:6, 18 Christianity, social message of, 3:43, 45 Churches First Presbyterian Church (Lake Forest), 1/2:8 Holt Memorial Chapel (Lake Forest College), 1/2:5 Cisneros, Pedro, III, 1/2:31, 32–33, 42 Cisneros, Pedro, IV, 1/2:32–33 Citicorp Center, 1/2:69 Citizens Association of Chicago, 3:24 Civic reform organizations, 3:24 Civil War, as source of labor music, 3:39 Club house, Onwentsia Country Club, 1/2:11 Coeducational undergraduate education, 1/2:8, 23 Coffeen, H. A., “Labor’s Emancipation,” 3:43 Cole, William Graham, 1/2:27 Colleges, coeducational, 1/2:8 Columbian Exposition (See World’s Columbian Exposition) Common Council, 3:13, 14, 18, 21, 23, 25, 28, 29 Commonwealth Edison Headquarters, 1/2:69 “Company Store” (Hanna), 3:34 Conjunto music, 1/2:40 Connelly, Bridget Moran, 3:46 Connelly, Peter, 3:46 Connelly, Sister Rosemary, 3:46–61 Contaminated foods, 3:25 Cooper, Peter, 3:38 Coughlin, “Bathhouse” John, 1/2:46 Coulter, John Merle, 1/2:18 Country club (Lake Forest), 1/2:8, 10–11 Courts, and packinghouse owners, 3:25–26 Creech, William, 3:32, 36, 39–40 “Eight Hours A Day,” 3:41 “Good News,” 3:41 “Help One Another,” 3:41–43 “The Socialists Are Coming,” 3:40–41 Cregier, DeWitt C., 3:28
D
Dad Dearborn “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla, 1/2:45–63 Daley, Richard J., 1/2:62 Dare, Ellen, 3:32 DeForest, Robert W., 3:20 De la Garza Career Center, 1/2:69 Index | 63
De Wolf, Oscar Coleman, 3:13, 15, 16–18, 20–29 De Wolf, Thaddeus K., 3:16 Dearborn, Henry, 1/2:55 DeKoven, Anna Farwell, 1/2:8, 26, 27 Department of Health (See Chicago Health Department) Developmentally disabled persons (See Misericordia) Diphtheria, 3:6, 18 Disabled children and adults, home for, 3:46 (See also Misericordia) Diseases, 3:4–29 Cholera, 3:6, 18 Diphtheria, 3:6, 18 Scarlet fever, 3:21 Smallpox, 3:6, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21 Yellow fever, 3:6 and tenement living, 3:6, 9, 13, 25 “Do What’s Right” (Shelton), 3:32 Doc’ Horne (Ade), 1/2:55 Donnelley, Elliot, 1/2:28 “Don’t Take my Papa away from me” (Hill), 3:42 Down syndrome, 3:60 Dreiser, Theodore, Sister Carrie, 1/2:15 Dunne, Edward, 1/2:50, 57
E
Eastern European immigrants, 3:22 Ebner, Michael H., “North Shore Town and Gown,” 1/2:4–29 Education, undergraduate, 1/2:4–29 “Eight Hours A Day” (Creech), 3:41 “Eight Hour Song,” (Haynes) 3:31 Elliott, Pete, 3:51, 52 Espinoza, Martin, 1/2:42 Essenhart, Helen, 3:51 Ethnicity, and housing conditions, 3:9, 23, 29 Evangelical hymns, as source of labor songs, 3:38–39
F
Farwell, Anna, 1/2:8, 26, 27 Farwell, Charles B., 1/2:6, 18, 20, 28 Farwell, Francis, 1/2:27 Farwell, Francis C. II, 1/2:28, 29 Farwell, Henry (Mrs.), 1/2:9 Farwell, John V., 1/2:6, 9, 20, 28 estate, 1/2:8 Farwell, John V., Jr., 1/2:26, 27 Farwell, Mary Eveline Smith, 1/2:4, 6, 18–20, 28 Farwell Field, 1/2:6, 7 Father Dearborn “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla, 1/2:45–63 Fernwood Elementary School, 3:48 Ferry, Abby Farwell, 1/2:9 Fincher’s Trades’ Review, 3:31 First Presbyterian Church (Lake Forest), 1/2:8, 12 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 1/2:13 Folk music revival, 3:32 Foods, adulterated, 3:25 Football, 3:46, 49, 50–52, 59 64 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
G
Gapp, Paul, 1/2:74 Garb, Margaret, “Regulating Urban Living,” 3:4–29 Garcia, Mike, 1/2:32–34, 42 German immigrants, 3:23 Germans, in Chicago, 3:32, 33, 40 G.I. Bill, and Lake Forest College, 1/2:27 Gilfoyle, Timothy J. “Making History: Interviews with Ronne Hartfield and Helmut Jahn,” 1/2:64–80 “The Linebacker and the Nun: Interviews with Dick Butkus and Sister Rosemary Connelly,” 3:46–61 Golden Gloves, 1/2:62 “Good News” (Creech), 3:41 Goodoff, Emma Ramona, 3:47 Great Depression, songwriters during, 3:32, 36 Great Fire of 1871, affect on housing, 3:5 The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 1/2:15 Greco Greenhouse, 3:55 Greek immigrants, 3:22 Greenback Party presidential campaign, 3:38 Greenebaum Sons Bank and Trust Company, 1/2:46 Greenhouse Inn, 3:55 Gregory, Daniel S., 1/2:15 Gremlins 2 (movie), 3:59 Grinnell College, 1/2:22 Gruenhut, Joseph, 3:24 Guthrie, Woody, 3:32
H
“Hail Milwaukee” (Thompson), 3:33 Halas, George, 3:46 Half-Nelson (television show), 3:59 Halker, Bucky, “Solidarity Forever,” 3:30–45 HA-LO Headquarters, 1/2:69 Hanna, Isaac, 3:36 “Company Store,” 3:34 Harlan, John M., 1/2:48 Harlan, Richard Davenport, 1/2:20 Harrison, Carter Henry, 3:22 Harrison, Carter Henry II, 1/2:48, 54, 57 Hartfield, Ronne, 1/2:64–80 Another Way Home: The Tangled Roots of Race in One Chicago Family, 1/2:78 Haymarket Affair, 3:32–33 Haynes, Charles, “Eight Hour Song,” 3:31–32 Health Association, 3:14 Health departments See Chicago Health Department New York’s health department, 3:17 Hearst, William Randolph, 1/2:50 Hearts and Flour Bakery, 3:55 Heath, Monroe, 3:15 Heaton, Harold R., 1/2:46–49 “Help One Another” (Creech), 3:41–43 Hepburn, Katherine, 1/2:28 Hernandez, Javier, 1/2:32–33 Hernandez, Rolando, 1/2:40
Hesing, Washington, 1/2:48 Highland Park, population, 1/2:15 Hill, Joe, 3:45 “Don’t Take my Papa away from me,” 3:42 Historic Sites, Market Square, 1/2:10 Holbrook, Monsignor Thomas J., 3:55 “Hold the Fort” (Bliss), 3:33 “Hold the Fort” (Tallmadge), 3:38 Holland, Ed, 1/2:55, 62 Holloway, Charles, 1/2:45 Hollywood Kustoms, 1/2:39 Holt Memorial Chapel (Lake Forest College), 1/2:5 Holy Family Catholic Church, 1/2:37 “Home Rule for Ireland” (Barrett), 3:43 “Honor’s Test” (Casey), 3:32 Hopkins, John Patrick, 1/2:47 Hotchkiss, Almerin, 1/2:16 Hotchkiss, Eugene, 1/2:27–28 Housing conditions, and race, 3:9, 23, 29 Housing conditions, effects of poverty on, 3:9 Housing regulations, 3:5–29 Howe, J. W., 3:36 Humanitarian of the Year Award, 3:61 Hygiene, and sanitation, 3:16 Hymns, as source of labor songs, 3:38–39
I
I. W. W. (Industrial Workers of the World), 3:45 I. W. W. Songs; To Fan the Flames of Discontent, 3:43 Illinois Association of Architects, 3:20 Illinois Municipal Voting Act (1913), 1/2:52 Illinois State Board of Health, 3:14 Immigrants bohemian, 3:23 Eastern European, 3:22 German, 3:23 Greek, 3:22 and housing conditions, 3:9, 23, 29 Irish, 3:22 Italian, 3:9, 22, 23 Jews, 3:9 Polish, 3:9, 22, 23 “In Memory of Karl Marx” (Schwab), 3:32 Industrial Workers of the World, 3:45 Irish immigrants, 3:22 as police, 3:23 Iron Molders Journal (newspaper), 3:41 Italian immigrants, 3:23
J
Jackson, J. W., “A Campaign Song,” 3:33 Jahn, Deborah, 1/2:69 Jahn, Helmut, 1/2:64–80 Jahn, Karolina Wirth, 1/2:64 Jahn, Wilhelm Anton, 1/2:64 James, Henry, 1/2:10 James, John, 3:32, 36
James R. Thompson Center, 1/2:74 Jewish immigrants, 3:9 “John Brown’s Body,” 3:39 John Q. Public, 1/2:58 Johnny Dangerously (movie), 3:59 Johnson, Ernest, 1/2:27
K
Kahn, Si, 3:32 Kenna, Michael “Hinky Dink,” 1/2:46 Kesson, Thomas, 3:36 King, Charles Garfield, 1/2:13 King, Ginevra, 1/2:13 Kingdom Come Farm, 1/2:13 Kirk’s American Family Soap, 1/2:46 Knights of Labor, 3:23, 32, 33, 36, 38, 43 Knights of Labor (newspaper), 3:33, 40 Knox College, 1/2:8, 15 Koch, Robert, 3:18 Kohlsaat, Herman, 1/2:45
L
Labor, organized, and tenement housing, 3:10, 23–24 “The Labor Battle Song” (Barrett), 3:39, 43 Labor movement eight-hour day, 3:31 and music, 3:31–45 and poetry, 3:31–45 urban, 3:32 Labor songs, typical accompaniments for, 3:38 Labor Songs Dedicated to the Knights of Labor (Tallmadge), 3:43 “Labor’s Emancipation” (Coffeen), 3:45 “Labor’s Ninety and Nine” (Smith), 3:38, 43 Lake Forest, Illinois barber shop, 1/2:13 First Presbyterian Church, 1/2:8, 12 Market Square, 1/2:13 “North Shore Town and Gown,” article by Michael H. Ebner, 1/2:4–29 Onwentsia Country Club, 1/2:8, 10–11 planned shopping center, 1/2:13 population, 1/2:15 social prestige, declining, 1/2:27 town plan, 1/2:16 Lake Forest College alumni association, 1/2:23 Arthur Somerville Reid Memorial Library, 1/2:20, 22 Board of Trustees, 1/2:18, 20, 22–23, 28 campus plan, 1/2:17 chapel, 1/2:5 coeducational undergraduate education, 1/2:8, 23 College Hall (Young Hall), 1/2:6 controversies, 1/2:22–23, 26 degrees awarded, 1/2:4 Dixon Science Center, 1/2:28 Donnelley and Lee Library, 1/2:28 Farwell Field, 1/2:7 Index | 65
graduating class, 1/2:17 Hotchkiss Hall, 1/2:6 library, 1/2:20, 22 Mohr Student Center, 1/2:28 North Hall, 1/2:6, 7 post–World War I era, 1/2:22–23 presidents, 1/2:15, 18, 20, 22, 26, 27 Stuart Commons, 1/2:28 and University of Chicago, 1/2:18 Young Hall, 1/2:6 Landlords, and housing quality, 3:9, 12, 24, 29 The Last Boy Scout (movie), 3:59 Latinos. See Mexican American community Lawrence University, 1/2:8, 28 Lawson, Victor, 1/2:49 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (movie), 3:59 Library, at Lake Forest College, 1/2:20, 22 Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel, 1/2:5 “The Linebacker and the Nun: Interviews with Dick Butkus and Sister Rosemary Connelly,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 3:46–61 “Little Man” (character), 1/2:58, 62 Little Red Songbook, 3:43–45 Lowriding (automobiles), “Rolling Low in Chicago,” article by Peter T. Alter, 1/2:30–43 Lyman, Dr. Henry M., 3:21 Lyser, Gustav, 3:36
Mexican American community, 1/2:31 (See also Conjunto music) Michigan City Public Library, 1/2:68 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig, 1/2:65 Miller Lite beer advertisements, 3:59 Misericordia, 3:46, 51, 55–56, 60–61 “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla, 1/2:44–63 Moody, Dwight, 3:39 Moore, Herbert McComb, 1/2:26 Moran, George, 3:49 Movies Brian’s Song, 3:59 Gremlins 2, 3:59 Johnny Dangerously, 3:59 The Last Boy Scout, 3:59 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, 3:59 Necessary Roughness, 3:59 Rocky (movie), 3:56 Spontaneous Combustion, 3:59 Municipal government, police authority and housing inspection, 3:17, 21–23 Murphy Associates, C. F., 1/2:65 My Two Dads (television show), 3:59
M
National Railroad Strike (1877), 3:40 National Register of Historic Sites, Market Square, Lake Forest, 1/2:10, 12 Necessary Roughness (movie), 3:59 Newspapers (See also specific papers, e.g., Chicago Tribune) as venue for labor songs and poems, 3:33, 36 NFL Today, 3:59 “The Ninety and Nine,” 3:38 Nollen, John Scholte, 1/2:20 North Shore, of Chicago, 1/2:13 “North Shore Town and Gown,” article by Michael H. Ebner, 1/2:4–29 Northwestern Atrium Center, 1/2:69
Mackay, Charles, 3:36 Majestics Car Club, 1/2:39 Making History “Interviews with Ronne Hartfield and Helmut Jahn,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 1/2:64–80 “The Linebacker and the Nun: Interviews with Dick Butkus and Sister Rosemary Connelly,” article by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, 3:46–61 Making History Award Winners Butkus, Dick, 3:46–61 Connelly, Sister Rosemary, 3:46–61 Hartfield, Ronne, 1/2:64–80 Jahn, Helmut, 1/2:64–80 Weisberg, Lois, 1/2:80 “Marching Through Georgia,” 3:39 Market Square (Lake Forest), 1/2:10, 12 Massey, Gerald, 3:36 McClure, James Glore King, 1/2:20 McCormick, Cyrus, Jr., 1/2:20 McCormick, Robert R., 1/2:55 McCormick Place Convention Center, 1/2:65 McCutcheon, John T., 1/2:45, 49–54, 55 McVicker, Brockholst L., 3:14–15 Meat Inspection Act, 3:26 Meat inspectors, 3:17 Meatpacking regulations, 3:25–29 Meats, controversy re confiscated/diseased, 3:28 Medical practices, during the Civil War, 3:16 Merriam, Charles E., 1/2:54 Merriam, Robert E., 1/2:62 66 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
N
O
Oberlin College, 1/2:8, 15, 28 O’Brien, Bernie, 3:49 O’Connor, James J., 1/2:79 Old Cook County Hospital, 3:18 Old St. Patrick’s Academy, 3:48 Olvera, Mario, 1/2:32–33 Olvera, Robert, 1/2:32–33 One South Wacker office building, 1/2:69 Onwentsia Country Club, 1/2:8, 10–11 Order of Lincoln Medallion award, 3:61 Organized labor, and tenement housing, 3:10, 23–24 O’Rourke, Thomas, 3:36 Orr, Carey, 1/2:45, 55, 57–58, 62 Orta, Eddie, 1/2:42 Owner-occupied homes, 3:18–25
P
Packinghouses, 3:25–26, 28 Parrish, Joseph, 1/2:45, 55, 58, 62 Parsons, Albert, 3:32–33 Pasteur, Louis, 3:18 Paulsen, Charlie, 1/2:13 Phi Beta Kappa Honor Society, 1/2:27 Phillips, Utah, 3:32 The Plumber and Sanitary Engineers (journal), 3:10 Plumbing inspectors, 3:18, 20 Poetry of protest (See “Solidarity Forever,” article by Bucky Halker) Police Chicago’s Area 2 Police Headquarters, 1/2:69 courts, and packinghouse owners, 3:26 as housing/sanitary inspectors, 3:13, 14, 17, 20, 21, 22 Irish as, 3:23 Polish immigrants, 3:9, 22, 23 Political cartoons (See “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” article by Guy Szuberla) The Political Cartoon (Press), 1/2:55 Pollution, South Branch of the Chicago River, 3:12 Pontiac (1933), 1/2:36 Pope John Award, 3:61 Population growth, 1/2:15 Poverty, affect on housing conditions, 3:9 Press, Charles, The Political Cartoon, 1/2:55 Printing industry, in Chicago, 3:36 Private property rights v. tenement inspections, 3:18, 20 Professional Football Hall of Fame, 3:51 Progressive Age (newspaper), 3:10–12 Prohibition, 1/2:55 Property rights v. tenement inspections, 3:18, 20 Protest songs (See “Solidarity Forever,” article by Bucky Halker) Protestant evangelical hymn tradition, 3:39 Public health movement, 3:17–18 Pullman, George, residential community, 3:24 Pure Food and Drug Act, 3:36
Quarantines, 3:15
Q R
Race, and housing conditions, 3:9, 23, 29 Racism, 3:9 Radio, and labor songs, 3:32 Railroad Strike (1877), 3:40 “Rally Round the Flag,” 3:39 Rauch, John Henry, 3:14–15 “Regulating Urban Living,” article by Margaret Garb, 3:4–29 Reid Memorial Library, 1/2:20 Religion, and social protest songs, 3:43, 45 Resurrection Catholic Church, 3:47, 48 Rich Man, Poor Man (television show), 3:59 Rios, Denise, 1/2:43 Rios, Pedro, 1/2:32–33, 43 Rios, Pedro, Jr., 1/2:32–33 Roberts, William C., 1/2:18
Rocky (movie), 3:56 “Rolling Low in Chicago,” article by Peter T. Alter, 1/2:30–48 Rones, John Drayton, 1/2:65 Rones, Thelma Shepherd, 1/2:65, 78 Roosevelt, Theodore, 1/2:23 Root, George F., “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp,” 3:31, 37, 39, 45 Rubey, Reverend Charles T., 3:46 Rust-Oleum Corporation Headquarters, 1/2:69
S
Sanitary inspectors, 3:13, 14, 17, 20–23 Sanitary inspections, of single-family homes, 3:23 Sanitation, 9, 12, 14, 16, 18, 19 and hygiene, 3:16 and tenements, 3:9 urban sanitation movement, 3:13–15 Sankey, Ira, 3:39 Santora, Lawrence J., 3:61 Scarlet fever, 3:21 Schneirov, Richard, 3:22 School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 1/2:71 Schutt, Stephen D., 1/2:28 Schwab, Michael, “In Memory of Karl Marx,” 3:32 Science, British Association for the Advancement of, 3:17 Science Research Associates, 1/2:66 Seeger, Pete, 3:32 Serbantez, David, 1/2:38 Serra Retreat Center, 3:60 Shaw, Howard Van Doren, 1/2:10, 13 Shelton, John, “Do What’s Right,” 3:32 Shield of St. Xavier Award, 3:61 Shoemaker, Vaughan, 1/2:55, 58 Shopping center, Lake Forest, 1/2:10, 12 Shure Building, 1/2:69 Siena High School, 3:48 Sister Carrie (Dreiser), 1/2:15 Sisters of Mercy, 3:48, 59 “Sixteen Tons” (Travis), 3:34 Slaughterhouses, 3:25–26 Slim, T-Bone, 3:45 Smallpox, 3:6, 13, 15, 16, 17, 18, 21 Smith, Bubba, 3:59 Smith, S. M. (Mrs.), “Labor’s Ninety and Nine,” 3:38 “The Socialists Are Coming” (Creech), 3:40–41 “Solidarity Forever” (Chaplin), 3:39 “Solidarity Forever,” article by Bucky Halker, 3:30–45 Solitos Car Club, 1/2:37 Somdal, Carl, 1/2:58 Somosuno Lowrider Car Club, 1/2:37 Songs, and unions, 3:31–45 Songwriters, in Chicago, 3:32–34 Sony Center (Berlin), 1/2:75, 78 Sound recording, 3:32 South Branch of the Chicago River, pollution in, 3:12 “South Halsted Street Strike,” 3:32 South Side Cruisers Car Club, 1/2:42 Spadafora, David, 1/2:27 Spencer, Alexander, 3:36 Spontaneous Combustion (movie), 3:59 Index | 67
St. Mary’s Athletic Facility (South Bend, Ind.), 1/2:69 St. Xavier University, 3:48, 61 State of Illinois Building, 1/2:74 Stoves, Samuel, “Take Your Choice,” 3:33 Strikes, National Railroad Strike (1877), 3:40 Suffrage Movement, 1/2:52 Summers, Gene, 1/2:65 “Susannah,” 3:39 Swarthmore College, 1/2:8, 15, 28 Swift, George Bell, 1/2:47 Swift, Louis F., 1/2:13, 20 Szuberla, Guy, “Miss Chicago and Dad Dearborn,” 1/2:44–63
T
“Take Your Choice” (Stoves), 3:33 Tallmadge, James and Emily, 3:36, 38, 43 “Hold the Fort,” 3:38 Labor Songs Dedicated to the Knights of Labor, 3:43 Team Butkus, 3:60 Television shows Half-Nelson, 3:59 My Two Dads, 3:59 Rich Man, Poor Man, 3:59 Tenants, common views of, 3:5 Tenement and factory ordinance (state), 3:18 Tenement inspectors, 3:18, 20, 22 (See also Sanitary inspectors) Tenements, 3:4–29 Thompson, John, 3:36 “Hail Milwaukee,” 3:33 Thompson, William Hale “Big Bill,” 1/2:55, 57 Thurber, James, 1/2:62 Town plan, Lake Forest, 1/2:16 Trades and Labor Assembly, 3:10, 23 “Tramp, Tramp, Tramp” (Root), 3:31, 37, 39, 43 Travis, Merle, “Sixteen Tons,” 3:34 Tribune Tower, 3:35 Typhoid, 3:6, 22
U
Undergraduate education, 1/2:4–29 Union Army, music, 3:31, 37, 39 Union Stock Yard, 3:25–28 United Airlines Terminal (O’Hare), 1/2:68, 69 United Mine Workers Journal (newspaper), 3:36 United States Sanitary Commission, 3:17 University of Chicago, and Lake Forest College, 1/2:18 Unsung Heroine Award, 3:61 Urban explorers, 3:6 Urban Gateways, 1/2:64, 70, 71, 76 programs, 1/2:72–73 Urban labor movement, 3:32 Urban sanitation movement, 3:13–15 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2008
V
Vaccination, 3:14–15 Vanier, Jean, 3:59 Vatican II, transformation from, 3:59–60 Vehicles (See Automobiles) Villanueva, Mikey, 1/2:36 von Bismarck, Otto, 3:39 Vorbote (newspaper), 3:36 Voting Act, 1/2:52 Suffrage Movement, 1/2:52
W
Wagner, Bob “Hollywood,” 1/2:39 “Wait for the Wagon,” 3:39 War Cartoons: Reprinted from the Chicago Tribune, December 7, 1941–September 28, 1942, 1/2:58 Wayman, John E., 1/2:48 “The Wearing of the Green,” 3:39 Weisberg, Lois, 1/2:80 Wells, H. G., on Chicago, 1/2:15 Wentworth, Daniel S., 1/2:23 WGN Radio, 3:59 White, James H., 3:38 Wilson, Woodrow, 1/2:23 Winnetka, population, 1/2:15 Winter, Ruth, 1/2:28 Wobblies, 3:45 Women, songwriters, 3:34–36 Women’s Gymnasium (Lake Forest College), 1/2:6 Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1/2:52 Workingman’s Advocate (newspaper), 3:36 “Workingmen’s Marseillaise,” 3:43 World War II, 1/2:27, 58 World’s Columbian Exposition, 1/2:44–46 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 1/2:49 Wright, Henry Wilkes, 1/2:22, 23, 26
Xerox Centre, 1/2:69
“Yankee Doodle,” 3:39 Yellow fever, 3:6
X Y