Chicago History | Summer 2011

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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Summer 2011 VOLUME XXXVII, NUMBER 2

Contents

4 20 40 56

Striking Out on its Own: Labor and the Modern Church Heath W. Carter

Lincoln’s Chicago Olivia Mahoney

A Most Unfortunate and Evil Day Derryn E. Moten

Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

Striking Out on its Own: Labor and the Modern Church In 1894, labor leaders and trade activists, disillusioned by the customs of the Protestant establishment, formed a church for the working classes.

H E AT H W. C A RT E R

W

orry creased the wind-whipped faces of many who braved Chicago’s streets the evening of January 22, 1894. A fierce winter storm was on the way, and already the city was locked in the most trying season in memory. The failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad the previous February had sent a shock wave through financial markets, and by early May the reverberations had become all too real. As hundreds of corporations collapsed, a tidal wave of unemployment engulfed the nation, leaving destitution in its wake. In Chicago alone, tens of thousands waited in blocks-long bread lines and slept on stone floors inside City Hall.

From their vantage, the future appeared as bleak as the gray skies looming over Lake Michigan.

But inside the Grand Pacific Hotel—a monument to opulence, even in the best of times—the world seemed as genial as ever, and it was there, at the corner of State Street and Jackson Boulevard, just across from the Board of Trade, that the Congregational Club of Chicago convened this night. Hundreds of men in their finest attire sauntered in, looking forward to a feast. In years past the menu had featured Blue Point oysters and cream of farina to start; Boston baked beans, steamed brown bread, chicken salad, and potatoes anglaise to accompany tenderloin of beef jardinière and small patties a la Toulouse (puff pasta shells filled with calves’ brains, chicken, and mushrooms); and a panoply of after-dinner treats, including pumpkin pie and vanilla ice cream, as well as cakes, doughnuts, fruit, crackers, cheese, and coffee. This crowd demanded nothing less.

The Congregationalists boasted several of the most impressive church edifices in the entire city, including the New England Congregational Church at Dearborn Avenue and Delaware Street and Plymouth Congregational on South Michigan Avenue between Twenty-fifth and Twentysixth streets. Such buildings projected the power and pres4 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

tige of those who worshiped in them, men like Major E. D. Reddington, the vice president of the Chicago Life Underwriters’ Association, who as the meeting got underway was elected club president. Joining him as new officers were a newspaper executive, a venture capitalist, a publishing agent, and two high-ranking bankers.

This slate showcased the broader ties between Chicago’s Protestant establishment and economic elite, which had been so dense for so long that the two groups were almost indistinguishable. Consider, for example, the early history of St. James Episcopal Church, a still-active congregation that was renamed the Cathedral Church of

The stately buildings of St. James Episcopal Church (above, drawn in 1919) and the New England Congregational Church (opposite, 1908) reflected the prestige and social power of their parishioners.

Labor and the Modern Church | 5

The Workingman’s Advocate was one of the more prominent labor newspapers of its time. This edition from 1876 includes a poetic rallying cry in support of the eight-hour workday.

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St. James in 1921. Founded in 1834, its first generation of parishioners included the likes of William Butler Ogden, John H. Kinzie, Gurdon S. Hubbard, and Walter L. Newberry, names emblazoned on the street signs of twenty-first-century Chicago. Within a generation the church had become an anchor of the elegant Pine Street district, to which many of the city’s wealthiest residents flocked. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 decimated the neighborhood, but the St. James congregation had no trouble raising the seventy-three thousand dollars—equal to roughly $1.36 million today—it took to rebuild in style at the corner of Cass Avenue (now Wabash) and Huron Street. Meanwhile, its parishioners set about constructing even grander homes in the vicinity and by the late 1870s had reestablished themselves on the stately surrounding streets: Rush, Dearborn, and Superior, to name a few. By this time the church had become one of the most exclusive hubs in one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city, which explains why, as one contemporary observed, “It was a well-known saying that no one was ‘in society’ unless he or she belonged to St. James.”

The coziness of the relationship between the local churches and the elite had long irked Chicago’s Protestant wage earners, many of whom believed that true Christianity was consonant with the spirit of the labor movement. The editor of the Workingman’s Advocate, Andrew Cameron, proclaimed in one 1867 column, “[that] the Gospel of Christ sustains us in our every demand.” Yet in that same article he lampooned the churches’ compromising ways, writing that, “in claiming to be the followers of the Prince of Peace, while they actually abet the robbery of the widow and the orphan, they are guilty of a fraud which even an atheist would scorn to commit.” This tension between belief and disaffection grew only more entrenched as the industrial battles of the late nineteenth century intensified. In the wake of the 1877 railroad riots, one struggling worker, after attending the Second Baptist Church’s prayer meeting, wrote to the Daily News, “I am trying to live the life of a Christian, but when I look at my bosses, who are members of the Christian denomination, I shudder and wonder how they can impose upon us poor miserable creatures through the week; and Sunday you will see them out with their coachman and fine span of horses, going to church, while thousands like myself are plodding along foot sore and hungry.” Not until the early 1890s did the city’s leading Protestants take such long-

simmering discontent seriously, and then many worried it might be too late: were the churches destined to lose their foothold among the people?

Not yet resigned to that fate, the Congregational Club devoted the 1894 annual meeting to a discussion of the “relation of the church to the laboring world.” It went so far as to invite two prominent working-class leaders to speak on the theme: Louis W. Rogers, the editor of the Railway Times, and L. T. O’Brien, the president of the retail clerks’ union. Rogers and O’Brien seemed relatively safe choices. During the previous year, O’Brien had worked with local ministers to rally support for a proposed Sunday-closing ordinance and had helped found the

respectable Civic Federation of Chicago. Both men had close ties to the Trade and Labor Assembly (TLA), which represented the roughly 20 percent of Chicago’s workforce that most closely resembled—ethnoculturally, at least— the Congregational Club members. The TLA tended to attract skilled Anglo-American workers, who sought to reform the existing economic system, not overthrow it.

From the perspective of the Protestant elite, any rapprochement with the working classes would have to begin with this group. Those affiliated with the more ethnically and religiously diverse Central Labor Union (CLU), which harbored revolutionary ambitions, seemed already too far beyond the pale.

L. T. O’Brien was among the founding members of the Civic Federation of Chicago. Above: The minutes from the first meeting. Right: The organization’s certificate of incorporation. An 1889 letter (above right) from the Chicago Typographical Union to the Trade and Labor Assembly appoints a delegate to act on its behalf.

7

Within moments of Rogers taking the podium, however, the organizers’ strategy looked more like a strategic miscalculation. “What, your committee asks, does [the class known as ‘the laboring people’] want?” he began.

“It wants an honest share of the wealth it creates. It wants such conditions as shall permit a fair distribution of what is produced. It wants to abolish the conditions that enforce idleness. It wants free access to the resources of nature.” Rogers’s litany went on. “It wants the abandonment of our wretched inequalities. It wants a place at nature’s banquet. It wants an equal chance.”

In the halls of the Grand Pacific and in front of this crowd, these were fighting words, and Rogers was nowhere near finished. Construing the struggle between capital and labor as the decisive issue of the times, he forged ahead through mounting tension, asking, “Where on this question does the Church stand?”

Rogers paused here to contrast “the ideal Church” with “the Church as it is,” a distinction that structured the remainder of his speech. With the former he had no grievance: “I know where Christ stood,” he declared.

“He was for the poor. He warned the rich, he denounced force and wealth and usury. He toadied to no monopolist, he preached from no palaces, he sold no pews! He was of and for the people.” Rogers’s enthusiasm for Christianity’s founding vision, however, was exceeded only by his outrage at its present state. “The spirit of Jesus is absent from the modern Church,” he proclaimed. Instead of siding with the poor, it had befriended the rich. Its close ties to “the Carnegies and Rockefellers” had financed a charitable empire, but this amounted to “the pouring of a little balm on the surface, while the cancer eats at the heart.” What the nation really needed was a wholesale renovation of the economic system, Rogers contended, yet this the church would never support: “it is not for labor, and cannot be for labor because it is a pensioner on the system from which labor suffers,” he avowed. By the time he resumed his seat, an icy silence prevailed.

Undaunted, O’Brien picked up where his colleague left off, rattling off a list of reasons why laborers found themselves increasingly estranged from local churches.

In the first place, low wages prevented them from keeping up with the fashions of the church-going crowd.

Additionally, they were tired of hearing about how their poverty stemmed from drinking. As O’Brien went on it became clear that in his view wage earners’ alienation sprung from social more than doctrinal roots. He referenced a recent gathering where workers had cheered the name of Jesus but hissed at the very mention of the church, and he recounted at length the testimony of a clerk he had interviewed, who rued: “‘When I go to church I see in the front pew a man who snatched the bed from under a widow, and in another pew a man 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

whose real estate is used for immoral purposes. If the church bore any resemblance to Jesus I would be a church-goer [sic], but it does not.’” Building on this last point, O’Brien jested that local churches should post the Ten Commandments in their sanctuaries so that their members might familiarize themselves with them. The Congregational Club members were not amused.

If Rogers and O’Brien had struck a nerve, it was because they were on the mark on a number of key points. It was certainly true that leading Protestants’ antipathy toward the labor movement had material roots. As much as they tried to frame their opposition in intellectual terms—with reference to economic laws and sacrosanct contracts— there remained the undeniable fact that the Anglo-

The labor movement championed economic stability for the working classes. At the turn of the twentieth century, unemployed men, such as the street sweepers shown above, often took whatever work they could find.

Labor and the Modern Church | 9

Labor spokesmen openly criticized prominent organizations, such as the McCormick Theological Seminary, for their dependence on the city’s wellto-do. Above: The seminary’s Virginia Library on Belden Avenue in 1909.

Americans who crowded into Chicago’s fashionable churches maintained a veritable stranglehold on local wealth. The labor spokesmen were also accurate in painting the churches as deeply dependent upon patrician benefactors, who bankrolled major infrastructural projects. The First and Second Presbyterian churches owed their majestic buildings to the Prairie Avenue elite, while McCormick Theological Seminary owed its existence to the largesse of manufacturing tycoon Cyrus H. McCormick, for whom it was named. The well-to-do also underwrote the churches’ day-to-day operations. Pew rents were a crucial dimension of nineteenth-century ecclesial financing; bidding wars for the best seats ran easily into the hundreds of dollars. Such ample contributions facilitated a lavish lifestyle for Chicago’s most indemand preachers. Over the course of his nineteen-year tenure at the Central Church, the Reverend David Swing commanded an average yearly salary of nine thousand dollars, roughly twenty times the average American income during this era. Surely Rogers and O’Brien were right to insist that such monies came with strings attached.

10 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

If they did not make friends at the Congregational Club meeting, Rogers and O’Brien at least earned some notoriety. As far away as New York City the editor of the Christian Intelligencer, a Dutch Reformed weekly, sneered that their accusations amounted to “the fruit of ignorance and thoughtlessness.” Closer to home, the Presbyterian Interior issued a withering retort: “According to labor,” an anonymous editorialist observed, “the Christianity of Christendom is not the Christianity of Christ.” He went on, “Labor does not know what it is talking about.” Rogers and O’Brien fundamentally misunderstood Jesus’s identity and mission, the writer argued. “The Carpenter of Nazareth” had not come to bring “safety from poverty” but rather “salvation from sin.” The kingdom of which Jesus spoke “is not material but spiritual, not bread and meat but righteousness and peace and joy in the Spirit.” For evidence one need look no further than the fact that “Christ found himself environed by economic and political and social conditions infinitely worse than those that beset labor at the end of the nineteenth Christian century” yet “never said a word

In this issue of the Interior, a Presbyterian publication, the editors denounced the labor church movement as lacking a fundamental understanding of Christianity.

Labor and the Modern Church | 11

against institutional or material conditions.” Driving to the heart of the matter, he continued, “[Christ] warned rich men against the dangers of wealth, but he said not one word against wealth itself.” If “modern thinkers, Christian and sociological” were to take this example seriously, the writer concluded, “[they] may well ask themselves whether they are right and wise in demanding that the church champion any economic scheme and broach projects for remaking society.”

So went the theological argument in defense of the economic status quo.

The anonymous exponent was almost certainly William Cunningham Gray, who had been the driving editorial force behind the Interior ever since the Great Fire. The sixty-four-year-old Ohio native had studied law before making his way into journalism and was one of the few laymen of the period to exercise exclusive editorial control over a leading Protestant paper. He excelled at the job.

Over the course of his twenty-three-year tenure, the Interior had grown from a locally circulated, financially insolvent weekly to the most widely read Presbyterian

Eugene Debs (pictured in May 1920) founded the American Railway Union and later the International Labor Union.

12 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

periodical in the nation. Gray’s editorial savvy helped spark this turnaround, as his substantial coverage of current events and staunch support of evangelical causes won the hearts of a wider Protestant public. But equally transformative was the financial backing of McCormick, who poured tens of thousands of dollars into the Interior after purchasing it in 1873. The industrialist’s investment would have seriously constrained Gray’s ability to champion labor had Gray been so inclined. He was not. In fact, Gray’s own loyalties to the financial elite ran as thick as blood: in 1879 his only daughter, Anna, had married Charles A. Purcell, a prominent member of the Chicago Board of Trade. Little wonder, then, that the Interior had no patience for labor’s critique. But nor would it have the last word.

A week later, Rogers returned Gray’s volley in the pages of the Railway Times, the new beacon of Eugene V. Debs’s fledgling American Railway Union. Rogers had already discussed the Congregational Club meeting at length in the paper’s February 1 edition, recounting in rich detail the “viands” and “diamond shirt studs” that belied the church’s purported sympathy for the laboring poor. Now, in the wake of the Interior’s salvo, he fired back, writing, “The soul of its article is that Jesus tolerated the extremely rich and insufferably poor, so the Church has no right to meddle with fixed institutions. It says the foe of Labor is Labor itself, and flaunts the old insult and falsehood that drinking is the cause of Labor’s misfortune.” Indignant, he asked, “Why does the Church do this?” and answered, “Because it instinctively feels the shame of its silence on the wrongs of Labor and hastens to throw the responsibility upon an alleged fault of the workingmen.” It was this view of the churches—as both corrupted by and complicit in economic injustice—that led Rogers and other working-class believers to the conclusion that it was time to strike out on their own.

On the afternoon of Sunday, February 11, 1894, with the temperature in the twenties, a variety of freethinkers, trade unionists, and curiosity seekers—not to mention four choirboys from the Moody Bible Institute—headed toward Bricklayers’ Hall, traversing along the way the streets of the rapidly evolving West Side. In the years leading up to the Great Fire, many of the city’s well-todo had flocked to the area bounded by the Chicago River on the east and Ogden Avenue on the west, Randolph Street on the north and Congress Boulevard on the south. Stretching across the northern section of this fashionable district, Washington Boulevard became during these years home to some of Chicago’s most upscale churches, including the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul (1861) at Peoria Street, First Congregational (1870) at Ann Street (now Racine Avenue), and Union Park Congregational (1871) at Ashland Avenue. But as early as the mid-1880s, with the

Bricklayers’ Hall on the 900 block of West Monroe Street (above, 1930) served as a meeting place for pro-labor groups, including the Modern Church. The setting contrasts with that of the First Congregational Church in Union Park (below, 1911).

Labor and the Modern Church | 13

Labor unrest exploded in May 1886 at Haymarket Square (above, in a print of a contemporary painting). At the time, HullHouse (right) was one of the few safety nets for workers, many of whom were poor immigrants who had only recently come to the United States.

city’s strapping industrial core bursting through the seams of the Loop, single-family homes began to give way to sprawling warehouses and factories. By the time the bomb exploded on May 4, 1886, in the West Side’s Haymarket Square, it was clear that the district’s future belonged not to the landed aristocracy but to the working poor—the Germans, Bohemians, Irish, and Eastern European Jews who increasingly called it home.

Bricklayers’ Hall showcased the fruits of their labors.

Completed in 1889, the same year Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr commenced their settlement house work, the three-story brick structure sat at the corner of Peoria and Monroe streets, roughly a mile due north of Hull-House. The building’s fifty-thousand-dollar price tag—approximately $1.18 million today—testified to the rising power of the city’s construction trades. So did its magnificent cupola and impressive third-floor auditorium outfitted with lofty ceilings, fine woodwork, and seats for eight hundred persons; in the Chicago Tribune’s estimation, the auditorium seemed “finer than any of its kind in the country.” The city’s Trade and Labor Assembly held its meetings there every other week on Sundays, but this wintry February afternoon happened to fall on an off week.

14 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

Those who braved the elements had come, instead, for the first-ever service of the Modern Church—a church by and for Chicago’s working classes. The impetus for this new organization sprung from the question-and-answer session following Rogers’s and O’Brien’s speeches to the Congregational Club. Among those in the audience was William Rainey Harper, the young president of the University of Chicago, who by that point in the program had heard quite enough. Turning dourly to Rogers and O’Brien, he asked, “Why not found a church of your own?” Following several weeks of intense conversation and planning with other working-class leaders, they were prepared to call his bluff. The new organization broke with the customs of the Protestant establishment on several key points: it was to be entirely funded by the TLA, with no weekly collection or auctioning of pews; its executive board was to be chaired not by an attorney or financier but instead by William C. Pomeroy, the TLA’s vice president; and it would have no set creed, serving instead as a platform from which practitioners of all different traditions could proclaim the truths of “pure religion.” In these ways Chicago’s trade unionists sought to spring Christ from the corrupting confines of the contemporary church.

They were not the first to try. A Unitarian minister by the name of John Trevor had founded the inaugural labor church in Manchester, England, in 1891; within three years there were at least twenty-four sprinkled throughout the industrializing cities of Great Britain. Meanwhile, the movement was gaining steam on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1892 William Dwight Porter Bliss, an Episcopal priest, founded the Church of the Carpenter in Boston as “an effort to carry out, in church life, the principles of Christian Socialism.” Bliss’s ministry resonated with an upstart twenty-five-year-old minister named Herbert N. Casson, who had become disillusioned with the Methodist Church’s lack of outreach to the working classes and left the denomination. In 1894 in Lynn, Massachusetts, Casson founded the Labor Church, which like its Chicago counterpart spurned the weekly collection and curried to wage earners, proclaiming “the more unfortunate a man is, the warmer will be his welcome.”

There was, however, at least one major distinction between these efforts and the Modern Church: it emerged not from the mind of a sympathetic cleric but from the initiative of labor itself.

The inaugural service was a smashing success. The audience at Bricklayers’ Hall, which included representatives from all of Chicago’s leading trade unions, heard a sermon from Jenkin Lloyd Jones, organizing spirit of the previous year’s World’s Parliament of Religions and pastor of All Souls’ Unitarian Church. Jones’s usual parish sat a few blocks northeast of Michigan Avenue’s 3400 block—known to locals as the “Avenue of

The founding of a labor church, described here in an 1894 newspaper article, was not without controversy. Most members of the Congregational Club did not agree with the principles set forth by the guest speakers—L. W. Rogers of the Railroad Times and L. T. O’Brien of the Retail Clerks’ Association—at their January meeting.

Labor and the Modern Church | 15

The Modern Church received attention from the popular press in 1894 (above and far right). Mainstream printed media often noted the conflict between it and the established Chicago churches.

16 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

Mansions”—and at first it appeared he had not recalibrated his message. His exhortation to “welcome to your reading and thinking the lives and thoughts of Lincoln, Newton, Agassiz, Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, and Bryant” would have fared better with the well-heeled residents of the South Side. But when he proclaimed, “You can build a church where the millionaire and tramp may worship together,” he was greeted by rousing cheers; and as he unleashed several more applause-worthy lines in succession, the audience forgave his awkward start.

Indeed, about the only people dismayed by the meeting’s end were the four Moody choirboys, who felt they had been hoodwinked into singing Unitarian hymns.

The reactions of the press were mixed. While the Railway Times gushed that the Modern Church would be a bellwether for labor-church relations, the German-language socialist paper Die Fackel observed dubiously that it “will come up against many that believe there is absolutely no need for it.” These contrasting responses reflected the fractures within Chicago’s working classes.

As much as those in the TLA might welcome the advent of a workingmen’s church, it had little appeal to the Catholics and freethinkers who comprised the base of the Central Labor Union. The leading Protestant papers were also predictably negative. Responding to the news of the church’s founding, the Congregationalist Advance opined, “[the members] will very quickly develop more sympathy with the other churches in their attempts to overcome the imperfections so freely criticized.”

Despite its vocal detractors, the Modern Church continued to build on its auspicious start. On February 25, nearly a thousand people came to watch Pomeroy debate local Methodist preacher William A. Burch. The topic: Pomeroy’s recent address at an American Federation of Labor convention in which he roasted “the church which has strayed from the paths marked out for it by its twelve immortal walking delegates, under the supervision of the Grand Master Mechanic of the universe.”

William T. Stead, a muckraking English journalist, moderated the debate. His support for labor and notorious flair for the dramatic made him, for the TLA at least, a natural choice. Just two months previously, in a speech before the Women’s Club, Stead had accused the city’s elite matrons of being “more disreputable than the worst harlot.”

Reverend Jenkin Lloyd Jones, pictured at left with his wife in 1916, was a key supporter of the Modern Church. He spoke at the church’s inaugural service and was one of few ordained clergy to openly endorse the ideals of the movement.

Labor and the Modern Church | 17

Professor Graham Taylor (above, 1909) spoke at the last recorded meeting of the Modern Church on March 11, 1894.

Reveling in the charged atmosphere inside Bricklayers’ Hall, Stead set the proceedings in motion. Reverend Burch declared at the outset his sympathy for laboring people. Much to the audience’s chagrin, however, he went on to denounce wage earners’ “hostile attitude” toward the church as “a fearful mistake.” Pomeroy, meanwhile, relished the home-crowd advantage, quipping, “In order to get good out of wheat we thrash it. In order to get good out of the Church we must thrash it.”

The Tribune characterized the conversation as “bold, honest, and at times almost bitter.” The Advance resented the bitterness. Reprimanding all those who would “kick and cuff the church up and down all the streets,” it declared, “It is all fun for the critics. But it is about as unlike Christianity, in whose name it indulges itself, as anything could well be.”

Those who sympathized with the Advance could take heart: this trade-union church did not last. In fact, all traces of the organization disappear from the historical record within a month of its founding. On March 11, during its last recorded gathering, social reformer Graham Taylor lectured on “society” and L. T. O’Brien announced a new Sunday-school program geared toward inculcating trade-union principles in children. The church may have met several more times or not at all, but either way its lifespan was short and in this way representative. Labor churches rarely survived more than a year. In most cases this was because, lacking the support of greater institutions, they depended heavily upon the time and talents of 18 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

a charismatic leader. When sickness, weariness, or the allure of other opportunities drew the founder away, the organization floundered. Casson’s congregation in Massachusetts survived for six years—an exceptional tenure to be sure—but, in keeping with the trend, his resignation in 1900 hastened the church’s decline.

The abrupt demise of Chicago’s Modern Church’s had less to do with overdependence on a single individual, however, than with the deteriorating industrial situation.

As winter turned into spring and there remained no end in sight to the working classes’ deprivation, unrest mounted across the nation. By March 1894 “industrial armies”—ragged bands of the unemployed—were tramping across the countryside, and then in April, 180,000 bituminous coal miners across five states laid down their picks, demanding that their wages be restored to pre-Panic levels. During these same months, Chicago convulsed, as nearly two dozen strikes erupted in industries ranging from upholstery to canal digging, iron molding to cloak cutting. Most disruptive of all was the brawl between the Central Building League and the Building Trades Council, which prompted bricklayers,

Labor unrest facilitated the abrupt end of the Modern Church. In the aftermath of the 1894 strike at the Pullman Palace Car Company, the company issued this formal statement.

In contrast to the Modern Church, the Congregational Club sustained itself for decades. This booklet commemorates the club’s first fifty years.

carpenters, plasterers, gas fitters, plumbers, painters, hoisting engineers, tile layers, and roofers to leave their posts. The widening scope of these conflicts stretched the TLA’s resources to a breaking point; and the bitter conclusion to the strike and boycott against the Pullman Palace Car Company, which began in May and extended through the summer, left the city’s working classes only more depleted. By autumn, when the dust began to settle, the TLA lacked the will to resurrect its church.

Despite its short life span, the Modern Church sheds light on an enduring and often-overlooked dimension of working-class life in late-nineteenth-century Chicago. To be sure, many wage earners despised the city’s religious establishment. But some who had been raised within the Protestant tradition found ongoing inspiration in the life of Jesus, a carpenter, and the words of the gospels, which avowed that “he has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted the lowly” (Luke 1:52); and moreover, that “the laborer is worthy of his hire” (Matthew 10:10). During an era in which the Protestant churches often marched in lockstep with the captains of industry, these working-class believers cultivated a dissenting faith that emboldened them in their fight against the likes of Rockefeller, Pullman, and Gould. Viewed in this wider lens, the tragic irony is that the native-born men who were the most powerful stewards of this tradition serially flouted its leveling implications, barring women, immigrants, and African Americans from full partnership in industrial battles. But however fraught with contradictions, the story of labor’s struggle against Gilded Age Christianities compromised by wealth remains poignant still in the twenty-first century.

Heath W. Carter is a PhD candidate in United States history at the University of Notre Dame and in 2011–12 will be a Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellow. His dissertation is entitled “Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago.”

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum. 4, DN-0071321; 5, DN-0053478; 6, top: i63017, left: i63016; 7, left: i63022, right: i63023, bottom: i63021, 8–9, i03914; 10, DN-0055283; 11, i62566, inset: i62567; 12, i63020; 13, top: i26197 (detail), bottom: DN0008981; 14, top: i03659aa, right: i01542 (detail); 15, Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1894; 16, Chicago Tribune, February 12, 1894; 16–17, DN-0065869; 17, Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1894; 18, top: DN-0007479 (detail), bottom: i62911; 19, right: i63018, left: i63019.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | William T. Stead’s impassioned If Christ Came to Chicago (Chicago: Laird and Lee, 1894) remains an important contemporary text, and is widely available online. Modern treatments include Jackson Lears’ Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1870–1920 (New York: Harper, 2009), and Eric L. Hirsch’s Urban Revolt: Ethnic Politics in the Nineteenth-Century Chicago Labor Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). Rima Lunin Schultz’s The Church and the City: A Social History of 150 Years at Saint James, Chicago (Chicago: The Cathedral of Saint James, 1986) discusses the upper–class church in Chicago, while Charles Howard Hopkins’s The Rise of the Social Gospel in American Protestantism, 1865–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940) provides an introduction to its eponymous subject.

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LINCOLN’S CHICAGO Olivia Mahoney

Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) Henry M. Colcord, oil on canvas, 1896 Based on an 1860 photograph by Alexander Hessler of Chicago.

X.199 Between 1847 and 1860, Abraham Lincoln visited Chicago at least twenty-five times. He came to practice law and engage in politics, making the city a launching pad to the presidency.

Olivia Mahoney is senior curator at the Chicago History Museum. Her recent exhibitions include Lincoln’s Chicago, which inspired this article.

O

n November 8, 1860, two days after being elected president, Abraham Lincoln wrote to vice president–elect Senator Hannibal Hamlin of Maine: “I am anxious for a personal interview with you . . . Can you, without much inconvenience, meet me at Chicago?” It would be Hamlin’s first visit to Chicago, but Lincoln knew the city well, having been here many times to practice law and engage in politics. Lincoln, who then lived in Springfield, often stayed days, even weeks, at a time in Chicago, which became a second home and political headquarters during his rise to prominence.

Lincoln’s Chicago was a vibrant young metropolis on the verge of greatness. From its humble beginnings as a frontier outpost in the 1830s, Chicago grew at an astonishing rate.

Superior transportation networks and a booming economy attracted thousands of newcomers, making it Illinois’s largest city by the time Lincoln first arrived in July 1847. He came to attend the River and Harbor Convention as a delegate and Whig Congressman-elect from Sangamon County. The gathering, held to promote western waterways, put Lincoln in contact with leading businessmen and politicians from across the country. Lincoln spoke briefly at the convention but gained little notice. He attracted considerably more attention during his second visit. In October 1848, Congressman Lincoln spoke to an overflow crowd at the Court House in support of Zachary Taylor, the Whig candidate for president.

Lincoln’s speech, claimed the Chicago Daily Journal, was “one of the very best we have heard or read, since the opening of the campaign.”

After serving a single term in Congress, Lincoln returned to his Springfield law practice. From July 7 to 26, 1850, he was in Chicago, arguing a lengthy case before the United States District Court; during the visit, he also delivered a eulogy for the deceased President Taylor. Court work brought Lincoln back to Chicago in December 1852, but he did not make another public appearance until October 1854. On that occasion, he addressed a rally for the reelection of Whig Congressman Richard Yates, who had opposed passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. The act, authored by Stephen A. Douglas, Democratic senator from Illinois, opened the western territories to slavery and created a firestorm of controversy throughout the county.

Shortly afterward, Lincoln tossed his own hat into the ring with a late but successful bid for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. He quickly resigned, however, to run for the United States Senate. Lincoln’s subsequent defeat was a major disappointment followed by the collapse of the Whig Party.

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Tremont House Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt ICHi-61955 When Lincoln visited Chicago, he usually stayed at the Tremont House.

The popular hotel witnessed several critical moments in his political career.

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In 1856, Lincoln joined the new, antislavery Republican Party and strove to establish its network throughout the state. Once again, he hit the campaign trail, this time for John C. Frémont, the party’s first presidential candidate. Lincoln’s speaking tour included an appearance at Chicago’s Dearborn Park. In June 1858, Republican party officials, led by Joseph Medill, editor and part-owner of the Chicago Tribune, rewarded Lincoln’s efforts by nominating him to run for the United States Senate against Douglas, the formidable incumbent.

On July 9 and 10, the candidates made back-to-back evening speeches in Chicago. Each spoke from the balcony of the Tremont House hotel to thousands of people gathered below. Douglas, who spoke first, defended the Kansas-Nebraska Act, reiterating his position that western settlers had the right to decide if they wanted slavery or not. The next evening, Lincoln argued forcefully against the measure. Midway through his speech, he boldly declared, “I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any abolitionist.” Lincoln was no abolitionist, but he knew his audience, for Chicago was considered a hot bed of abolitionism. The movement took root in Chicago during the mid-1840s, and its leadership ranks included John and Mary Jones, free blacks who worked with other activists, both black and white, to end slavery on a national level while making the city a safe haven for fugitive slaves escaping to Canada.

The Tremont speeches led to a series of famous debates between Lincoln and Douglas. They crisscrossed the state through late summer and into early fall, drawing huge crowds and a cadre of newspaper reporters from across the country. Their ranks included Andrew Shuman, a twenty-eight-year-old editor at the Chicago Daily Journal. Shuman got to know Lincoln personally and formed a deep admiration for the Republican candidate. His favorable coverage boosted Lincoln’s chances, but Douglas ultimately won the election. Lincoln’s strong performance, however, elevated him to a potential Republican nominee for president.

On May 16, 1860, the Republican Party convened in Chicago, now a major metropolis with more than one hundred thousand people. They met at the Wigwam, a large, wooden structure on Lake Street and Market Street (now Wacker Drive). Lincoln, following the custom of the time, did not attend, but his campaign team, led by Medill, engineered his nomination over several better-known candidates. In the national election on November 6, Lincoln defeated three other candidates, including his archrival Douglas. Chicago Republicans staged a wild, twoday celebration, ignoring for a moment the ominous talk of Southern secession.

A few weeks later, Lincoln and Hamlin met “at Chicago.” They stayed for four days at the Tremont House, often joined by Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull to discuss future plans. With Lincoln’s wife, Mary, in attendance, they hosted a festive reception for thousands of well-wishers and office-seekers in the hotel’s suite of parlors. Lincoln and Hamlin also toured the city, stopping at the Wigwam, site of their nominations, and the Custom House, Chicago’s new federal building that housed the post office, courts, and custom offices. Seeking privacy to discuss cabinet appointments, Lincoln and Hamlin adjourned to the home of Judge Ebenezer Peck, a personal friend of Lincoln’s, who lived north of the city limits in rural Lake View.

Lincoln departed Chicago on November 26, 1860, and never visited again. But his ties to the city remained strong, as Chicago played an active role in the Civil War. It sent legions of men to fight in the Union army, including a colorful unit of Zouaves and Colonel Mulligan’s Irish Brigade. Thousands of local recruits trained on the South Side at Camp Douglas before it became one of the North’s largest prisoner-of-war camps. Chicago’s industries provided an avalanche of supplies to the army, including uniforms, boots, saddles, tents, flags, bullets, lumber, and canned meat. Civic leaders, organized by Mary Rice Livermore, staged two major fairs that together raised $800,000 to aid wounded soldiers and build a home for their care.

On May 1, 1865, Lincoln returned to Chicago for the last time as his somber funeral train arrived. Two weeks before, he had been assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, a famous actor who previously performed in Chicago to rave reviews.

Now, a solemn procession accompanied Lincoln’s remains to the Court House as its massive bell tolled the news. Lincoln’s body lay in state until the next evening, drawing more than 125,000 mourners who wished to pay their last respects to a fallen leader and, for many, a familiar friend.

Various artists working in the city captured the people and places of Lincoln’s Chicago. They included George P. A. Healy, the well-known portraitist; Aaron E. Darling, a lesser-known artisan; and Albert E. Myers, a Union army soldier and naïve painter. The Chicago Lithography Company, established by Otto Jevne and Peter Almini, published a series of city views drawn by Louis Kurz. Although somewhat romanticized, the lithographs are rich in detail and diversity. Men, women, children, white, black, rich, poor, and in-between are all present, as are the physical sites and landmarks of a city soon swept away by the Great Fire of 1871.

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Stephen Arnold Douglas Louis O. Lussier, oil on canvas, c. 1860 X.104

The Little Giant

Michigan Avenue from the Lake Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Miss Charlotte M. Jennings, ICHi-62074

The most powerful politician of his time, Stephen A. Douglas (1813–61) boosted Chicago’s fortunes while enhancing his own. Douglas, a Democrat, moved to Chicago in the summer of 1847, shortly after his election to the United States Senate.

Seizing new opportunities, he invested in local real estate and sponsored the Illinois Central Railroad Act (1850), which made Chicago a national transportation hub. Known as the “Little Giant,” Douglas defeated his archrival, Abraham Lincoln, in the senatorial race of 1858 but lost to him in the 1860 presidential election. Douglas died in Chicago on June 3, 1861, and is buried on the South Side.

This view (left) depicts the Illinois Central tracks adjacent to Lake Michigan.

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A Friendly Critic

Joseph Medill (1823–99), chief editor of the Chicago Tribune, played a critical role in Lincoln’s rise to the presidency. A leading Republican and opponent of slavery, Medill supported Lincoln’s senatorial bid in 1858.

Two years later, at the Chicago Wigwam (below), he helped engineer Lincoln’s presidential nomination. Medill remained a loyal, if critical, Lincoln supporter during the Civil War. He chastised Lincoln for his cabinet appointments, military strategy, and initial reluctance to attack slavery. At a White House meeting in 1864, he objected to the Illinois draft quotas, which he considered too high. Medill later recalled that Lincoln sternly rebuked him for “acting like a coward” and told him to “go home and send us those men.”

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Joseph M. Medill Unknown artist, oil on canvas, c. 1880 Gift of Mrs. Felicia Gizycka, 1950.151

View of the Republican Wigwam, located at Lake Street and Water Street (now Wacker Drive) William Thomas Law, watercolor on paper, 1860 Museum purchase, ICHi-52653

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John Jones

Mary Richardson Jones

Aaron E. Darling, oil on canvas, c. 1865 Gift of Mrs. L. Jones Lee, 1904.18

Aaron E. Darling, oil on canvas, c. 1865 Gift of Mrs. Theodora Lee Purnell, 1955.197

Chicago Freedom Fighters

John Jones (c. 1817–79) and Mary Richardson Jones (1819–1910) were free blacks from the South who moved to Chicago in 1845 and joined the fight to end slavery. Their home served as an abolitionist meeting place and a stop on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves. John Jones ran a successful tailor shop on Dearborn Street near the intersection (right).

The Joneses prospered, becoming leaders of the city’s small but growing African American community. John waged a long battle against Illinois’s restrictive Black Laws until their repeal in 1865.

He also served as an honorary pallbearer at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral in Chicago. After the Civil War, John became one of the first blacks elected in the North, winning a seat on the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Mary aided her husband’s successful efforts to repeal Illinois’s Black Laws, which severely restricted the rights of African Americans. After the Civil War, she joined the suffrage movement to secure equal voting rights for women.

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Custom House, located at Dearborn and Monroe Streets Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt, ICHi-61956

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Corner State & Washington Streets Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Miss Charlotte M. Jennings, ICHi-61957

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A Lincoln Loyalist

Originally from rural Pennsylvania, Andrew Shuman (1830–90) moved to Chicago in 1856 to become assistant editor of the Chicago Evening Journal. Two years later, he followed the Lincoln–Douglas debates and got to know Lincoln on a personal basis. Shuman enjoyed Lincoln’s sense of humor, and they formed a close friendship. After becoming the Journal’s chief editor, Shuman endorsed Lincoln for president and remained loyal to him throughout the Civil War, even during the darkest moments. He also supported Chicago’s homefront activities, producing a daily newspaper to promote the 1865 Sanitary Fair. Shuman lived on Monroe Street and worked on Dearborn, not far from this busy intersection (left).

Portrait of Andrew Shuman George P. A. Healy, oil on canvas, 1864 Gift of Mrs. F. M. Elliott, 1920.128

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Briggs House Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt, ICHi-61958

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Chicago’s Finest

The Chicago Zouaves, a military drill team led by Elmer Ellsworth, toured twenty eastern cities in the summer of 1860, showcasing their dazzling skill and precision. They returned home to a hero’s welcome, replete with a torchlight parade, a rousing rally at the Wigwam, and a lavish midnight supper at the Briggs House (left). The Zouaves soon disbanded but reorganized in 1861 to serve with the Nineteenth Illinois Infantry during the Civil War. Their leader, Ellsworth, also joined the Union army, but died early in the war— the first Northern officer to be killed.

Chicago Zouaves at Utica, New York J. Graff, oil on panel, 1860 Museum purchase, 1980.227

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An Irish Hero

James Adelbert Mulligan (1830–64) was Chicago’s most famous Civil War hero. Born in Utica, New York, he moved to Chicago at age six.

Mulligan later pursued journalism and the law, and actively campaigned for Stephen A. Douglas in the 1860 presidential election.

Shortly after the Civil War broke out, Mulligan raised the Twenty-Third Illinois Volunteer Infantry, better known as the Irish Brigade. He briefly commanded Chicago’s Camp Douglas before serving on the front lines. On July 23, 1864, Mulligan suffered a fatal wound at the Battle of Winchester in Virginia; President Lincoln posthumously promoted him to brevet general for his “meritorious service.” Mulligan’s monument (opposite) bears his likeness above his famous last command, “Lay me down and save the flag.”

Colonel James Adelbert Mulligan George P. A. Healy, oil on canvas, 1864 Gift of James Mulligan Carroll, John Charles Carroll Jr., Marian Mulligan Carroll, Adele Mulligan Whitgreave, 1920.189

Colonel Mulligan’s monument, Calvary Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois Vasile Bouleanu, 2010 Courtesy of the photographer

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Members of Morgan’s Raiders, Camp Douglas, Chicago, 1864 ICHi-01805

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The War Comes Home

Built on land donated by the Stephen A. Douglas Estate and named in his honor, Camp Douglas opened in September 1861. It occupied sixty acres on the South Side and trained more than 25,000 Union soldiers before becoming a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in February 1862. A Union guard painted this view, looking west from the tower of a nearby hotel.

At the time, Camp Douglas housed a group of Morgan’s Raiders (left), daring rebels who repeatedly tried to escape by tunneling out or jumping over the wall. By war’s end, Camp Douglas had detained 26,000 men; more than 4,000 died from disease, starvation, and harsh conditions.

Camp Douglas Private Albert E. Myers, oil on canvas, 1864 Gift of George S. Hamilton, 1918.5

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A Northern Patriot

During the Civil War, Mary Rice Livermore (1820–1905) led Chicago’s home-front efforts. Originally from Massachusetts, she moved to Chicago in 1857. Livermore belonged to the abolitionist movement and actively campaigned for Lincoln in the 1860 presidential race. After the Civil War began, she joined the United States Sanitary Commission, which oversaw the medical care of Union soldiers. She visited the front lines, personally tending to the injured and dying. Back home in Chicago, Livermore organized two Sanitary Fairs, which raised about $800,000 to aid Union soldiers. For the first, she secured Lincoln’s personal copy of the Emancipation Proclamation; it brought $3,000 at auction. Most of the proceeds from the fairs went toward building the Soldiers’ Home (right), which cared for more than seven hundred wounded veterans between 1863 and 1871. It is one of the few buildings from Lincoln’s Chicago that remains standing.

Soldiers Home, located at Thirty-Fifth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue Lithograph by Jevne & Almini, 1866 Gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt, ICHi-61959

Mary Rice Livermore Veeder, albumen photograph, c. 1880 Gift of Gerald Grant, ICHi-22144

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For Further Reading To read more on this topic, see Theodore J. Karamanski, Rally ‘Round the Flag: Chicago and the Civil War (Chicago: Nelson Hall Publishers, 1993); A. T. Andreas, History of Chicago, Volume II (Chicago: The A. T. Andreas Company, 1885); Chicago Illustrated: 1830–1866, literary descriptions

by James W. Sheahan, Esq., illustrations by the Chicago Lithographing Company (Chicago: Jevne & Almini, 1866–1867); Paul M. Angle, Lincoln in Chicago (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1959); Tom Campbell, Fighting Slavery in Chicago (Chicago: Amp&Rsand, Inc., 2009); Olivia Mahoney, Black Abolitionists, (Chicago History, Spring–Summer 1991); David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); Roy P. Basler, The Collected Works of Lincoln (Rutgers University Press, 1953); and The Lincoln Log: A Daily Chronology of the Life of Abraham Lincoln, available at www.thelincolnlog.org. All of the printed resources are available in the Research Center of the Chicago History Museum.

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A Most Unfortunate and Evil Day As a young African American woman faced the death penalty in Virginia, Chicago women’s clubs fought to save her life.

D E R RY N E . M O T E N

A

t 7:26 A.M., Friday, August 16, 1912, a day astrologers called a “most unfortunate and evil day,” Virginia Christian, a seventeen-year-old black girl from Hampton, Virginia, became the first and last woman to die in the Virginia Commonwealth’s electric chair. Five months earlier, on April 9, 1912, twelve white male jurors in the Elizabeth City County Circuit Court convicted her of the premeditated murder of Ida Virginia Belote, an elderly white woman for whom Christian had worked as a teenage washerwoman.

Many outside of the Commonwealth assailed Virginia Governor William Hodges Mann for Christian’s execution; and an unlikely city eight hundred miles away led the largest charge to save the girl. The case galvanized Chicagoans of varied stations, involving business leaders, politicians, club women, journalists, settlement activists, and socialists who responded with an intense, week-long campaign of letters, petitions, and editorials. It is uncertain when and how Chicagoans first learned of Virginia Christian’s plight, but most likely from the concerted efforts of two national organizations for blacks.

Three weeks before the execution, the country’s most prominent African American women convened at the eighth biennial meeting of the National Association of Colored Women on the campus of Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute in Virginia. At the alma mater of Booker T. Washington, the NACW elected his wife, Margaret J. Murray Washington, its national president and elected Chicago’s Elizabeth Lindsay Davis its national organizer. Fellow Chicagoan Mrs. Eva Jenifer was elected parliamentarian.

As the largest African American women’s organization in 1912, the NACW had 10,908 members among 800 local chapters. Organized in 1896 as a result of a merger Governor Mann (above) in an undated photograph. The site of the Virginia Christian trial was the Elizabeth City County Courthouse (right), shown here in 1913. Opposite: Before her execution, Virginia Christian was photographed while in the Virginia penitentiary system.

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Above: Elizabeth Lindsay Davis saw the Christian case as key to galvanizing activism within women’s clubs and among cultured, wealthy women like Mary Church Terrell (opposite), and Hallie Q. Brown (right).

moved that “a ‘special committee’ be appointed to draw up a petition imploring the governor of Virginia to commute the sentence of the seventeen-year-old girl condemned to hang [euphemism used for all forms of legal execution].” Years afterward, Elizabeth Lindsay Davis, official NACW historian, wrote, “The most important event of the meeting was the effort of the women to stay the sentence of . . . Virginia Christian.”

The day after Brooks’s announcement, Terrell traveled alone to Richmond and met Governor Mann at his office, whom she said “received me very kindly and listened with interest.” At exactly the hour Terrell met with Mann, Hallie Q. Brown suspended convention business for a “silent prayer.” With Mann’s permission, Terrell also visited Virginia Christian in prison. Although he refused to commute her sentence, Mann gave Christian a two-week reprieve to allow private detectives hired by the NACW an opportunity to produce exculpatory evidence. The information gathered only convinced the NACW that Christian did not commit premeditated murder. The delegates gave Terrell a standing ovation for her “zealous efforts” and sent reinforcements.

Hallie Q. Brown and Mrs. M. C. Lawson became the second leg of the association’s envoy to Richmond. There they met with some of the city’s leading citizens. Brown presented a petition to Governor Mann signed by approximately all four hundred NACW delegates attending the meeting in Hampton. The document

between the National Federation of Afro-American Women and the National League of Colored Women, the NACW adopted “Lifting as We Climb” as its official motto, becoming what honorary president Mary Church Terrell once noted, “obliged in the troubles and trials of others.”

The national club movement answered a critical need within the black community for philanthropy, charity, education, and social uplift. The safety and care of black youth occupied much of the work and attention of club women, resulting in the establishment of such facilities as the Louise Children’s Home for Dependent Children in Chicago. Reporting on the eighth biennial meeting, William Aery noted, “The subject of juvenile courts and their relations to delinquent boys and girls was ably handled by Mrs. Joanna Snowden, Chicago, Ill. . . . Support of reformatories, working girls’ homes, and social settlements . . . [have] been worked out with rare thoughtfulness . . . by colored women in all parts of the country.”

On the first day of the NACW’s meeting, the afternoon session opened with delegate Virginia Lawson leading the assemblage in singing “Rescue the Perishing,” appropriate for the next topic of discussion. Lucy Brooks of Richmond informed the women about the case of Virginia Christian, prompting considerable agitation. Mary Church Terrell An Evil Day | 43

asserted Virginia Christian’s youth and “lack of training during her childhood . . . justifies mercy for this unfortunate girl . . . and her . . . electrocution . . . would be repugnant to the Christian womanhood and manhood of not only the United States but of the whole civilized world.” The signed petition was a who’s who among the African American women elite and intelligentsia. Chief among these women was Janie Porter Barrett, president of the Virginia Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs and future superintendent of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Wayward Girls. Other prominent signers included Florida’s Mary McLeod Bethune, founder of the historically black Bethune-Cookman College and founder of the state’s first African American girls’ reformatory in 1921. In addition, Nannie Helen Burroughs of the National Training School for Women, Maggie Lena Walker, president of St. Luke’s Penny Savings and Loan in Richmond, and Madame C. J. Walker all attended the eighth biennial meeting. The Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs had fiftynine signatories, including Theresa G. Macon, president of the Chicago City Federation. Twenty-five Chicago members signed the petition, becoming the Windy City’s vanguard to save Christian.

The work of the NACW did not go unnoticed. The Washington Post reported, “The . . . colored women in session a few days ago at Hampton, petitioned the governor [William Hodges Mann] for clemency . . . All the letters and petitions received by the governor . . . were

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Above: Janie Porter Barrett was the president of the Virginia Federation of Women’s Clubs at the time of the trial. Later in her career, she became superintendant of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Wayward Girls. The school’s Federation Cottage (below in 1935) was a dormitory for exemplary students.

Chicago pioneered the first juvenile courts and settlement houses. Above: The city’s Juvenile Court Building at Ewing Avenue and Halsted Street, 1907.

sentimental, and none contained facts relative to the case . . . Virginia Christian will be the first of her sex to die in the electric chair in Virginia.”

The NACW informed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People about Christian’s case in a letter on August 1, 1912. The NAACP dispatched board secretary Mary Childs Nerney to Virginia who arrived on August 5 and reported, “public sentiment was absolutely necessary [and urged] white and colored people of prominence” to write Governor Mann. And that is exactly what happened in Chicago. NAACP board members William English Walling and Mary White Ovington were well-known socialists who both wrote for various newspapers, Walling under his own byline in the city’s largest daily, the Chicago Daily World. It was perhaps they, and Illinois members of the NACW, who approached this paper in particular, which began an aggressive plea to its readers on Christian’s behalf.

It is important to look for reasons that fueled Chicagoans’ interest in Virginia Christian. Chicago pioneered the first juvenile courts and settlement houses.

Progressive “child savers” sought to protect children from influence of hardened adult criminals. The Chicago Women’s Club created schools within the city jails for

women and children. Club women established a state girls’ reformatory in 1893. City mothers and fathers created the John Worthy School, the state reformatory for boys. Chicago politicians, lawyers, judges, club women, and settlement advocates were progenitors of juvenile justice in America.

The Daily World’s opening salvo on Governor Mann occurred the morning of August 8, a full eight days before Christian’s execution date. Editor E. Val Putnam sent Mann a postal telegraph noting the paper’s devotion to human progress. The editor decried, “The law of an eye for an eye . . . is not the law of the twentieth century.”

Putnam did not obviate Christian’s crime, calling it heinous. But he also did not mince words as to the Commonwealth’s culpability: “Is not the state of Virginia herself in part responsible? This child was left without training or education. The picture of her . . . unable to wile [sic] away her last hours even by reading is an indictment against society.” The next day, the morning edition of the paper published the entire NACW petition and mentioned NACW president emeritus Mary Church Terrell. The evening edition reprinted Putnam’s own letter.

Governor Mann wasted no time in his refutation. In a letter dated August 9, 1912, Mann begged to differ An Evil Day | 45

asserting he “carefully investigated” Christian’s case and that while young, she in fact was an adult, according to the “opinions of prison officers,” including the prison surgeon, the nephew of Mann’s wife. “It is true,” Mann noted, “she is ignorant, but the state placed public schools within her reach and she failed to avail herself of them . . . I have not taken into consideration sex or color, as the laws of Virginia make no distinctions.”

Mann had no legal obligations to entertain Putnam’s entreaties. However, given the political acumen of Chicago, it behooved Virginia’s chief executive to at least maintain an official decorum. The Chicago campaign put Mann and his administration on the spot so that Christian’s guilt was mitigated by whether the Commonwealth fostered Christian’s presumed ignorance. The inequities resulting in Christian’s death penalty were a microcosm of racial inequities that existed for blacks and women in Virginia society. Putnam made this point, “Jim Crow is inexorable in Virginia. A negro dare not even sit in a forward seat in a street car. Imagine what the schools for negroes are.” Mann found himself not only defending his decision to allow Christian’s execution but his state’s culpability for the circumscribed lives of many black Virginians. Putnam had plenty of support from readers and reporters.

One day after her paper telegrammed Governor Mann, Daily World columnist Margaret O’Reily professed: Until the crime was committed, the state of Virginia had not noticed the little black criminal. Then, under the influence of the horror inspired by the crime, her death was demanded. I have drawn this as an indictment against the state of Virginia. The same indictment might be drawn against any state which kills its neglected children rather than face its own responsibility. It is the state which is on trial. It is the state which will bear the burden of this deed and suffering.

Chicagoans worked to make the case more about what the Commonwealth of Virginia failed to do than about what Virginia Christian did.

The Chicago Daily World had the largest circulation of any city paper. Formerly the Daily Socialist, the city’s only English language Socialist newspaper in 1906, the Daily Socialist morphed into the Daily World when the former became insolvent as a result of the Chicago pressmen’s strike. The Daily Socialist had a reputation for tenacious reporting exposing city scandals and corrupt public officials. This penchant would display itself during the Daily World’s coverage of the Christian case. In 1912, the American Socialist Party boasted a membership of 100,000 and nearly 350 Socialist papers and magazines.

As national secretary J. Mahlon Barnes quipped, “The spread of the printed word [is] the most important means of propaganda.”

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The John Worthy Manual Training School (pictured in 1908) was a Chicago boy’s reformatory that modeled the practical education of at-risk children.

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Chicago leaders crossed racial and political lines to condemn the verdict. Clockwise from top left: Senator Samuel A. Ettelson, Chicago Board of Trade member James A. Patten, Reverend Father P. J. O’Callaghan, United States Congressman Martin B. Madden, and Cook County Superior Court Judge John Barton Payne.

The Daily World had much support from its readers.

Chicagoans took umbrage with Governor Mann’s contention that Christian’s race, gender, youth, and class were irrelevant to her case. Chicagoans’ condemnation of the Commonwealth cut across racial, political, gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic boundaries. Among those vocalizing their concerns were Illinois State Senator Samuel Ettelson, Cook County Superior Court Judge John Payne, Chicago Board of Trade member James Patten, Reformed Episcopal Church Bishop Samuel Fallows, Rev. Father P. J. O’Callaghan, Jane Addams’ Hull-House and U.S. Congressman Martin Madden.

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Christian’s interlocutors emphasized that her race and gender conflated Christian’s case and life. In their article titled “A Gruesome Warning to Young Girls—Especially Black Ones,” Louis Post and Alice Thacher Post of Chicago, wrote: “Doubtless everyone would like to believe—but isn’t it somewhat difficult?—that the official killing of this girl of less than seventeen was not because she happened to be of the servant class and black, and the person she killed of the mistress class and white . . . Would a white girl of seventeen or less be officially killed anywhere for any crime?” In the same vein, the Chicago Evening World alleged: “Governor Mann would likely not have acted in the case but for certain Virginian people who insist the girl should die. He realizes that if she were white she never would have occupied a death cell.” Mann’s reluctance further spurred Chicagoans’ ire.

Among Chicago’s black professional class, lawyers figured prominently. Perhaps there was no better representative of the colored bar than William G. ‘Habeas Corpus’ Anderson, an emissary in Chicago’s campaign to save Virginia Christian. The Chicago American reported:

This 1918 election ad for William G. Anderson emphasizes his political ambitions in Chicago. He was a successful black lawyer and among the last to plead with Governor Mann for clemency.

James Greenebaum, president of Greenebaum Sons Bank and Trust Company, wrote Governor Mann, “[While] I favor enforcement of laws, I feel that in this instance deep consideration should be given to the fact that the girl [Virginia Christian] is but 17 years old, no doubt illiterate and probably of weak mind.” Fellow banker William Rathje of the Mid-City Trust and Savings Bank concurred, “I wish to add my expression to those who are opposed to the execution of this young woman . . . I believe that women should be spared the extreme penalty.” Chicago Second Ward Alderman, George F. Harding Jr. informed Governor Mann of his “great opposition to the electrocution of any woman, however atrocious her crime.” The officers of Chicago’s Esther Falkenstein Settlement were emphatic, “We believe in equality. We believe that a jury should consist of as many women as men, especially when the life of a woman is at stake.” Contractor George Scheuermann and Idella Scheuermann sent Governor Mann a petition signed by 354 Chicago citizens “crying out . . . in the name and honor of our American Citizenship . . . that our banner be not soiled by the legal spilling of this youthful blood.”

Armed with letters from women, capitalists, lawmakers and others, W. G. Anderson, the noted criminal lawyer is on his way to Virginia to appeal to Governor William Hodges Mann to commute the death penalty of Virginia Christian. Mr. Anderson, who has earned the title of ‘Habeas Corpus’ Anderson through his ability to have saved more than one condemned criminal, is traveling on the Baltimore and Ohio Road and is expected to arrive in Richmond in time to consult Governor Mann before he closes his executive office for the day.

The cache of letters Anderson delivered to Mann was not limited to African Americans. The Richmond Virginian reported that Anderson and John Pollard, “a local negro lawyer,” met privately with Mann. The two lawyers are the last known persons to have pleaded for Christian’s life. Anderson, claimed the Virginia capital paper, “betrayed an entire lack of knowledge of the merits of the case or the circumstances of the atrocious murder.”

Mann wrote in his diary for Thursday, August 15, 1912, “Received Anderson of Chicago and Pollard…who talked about Virginia Christian case but knew nothing about it and gave no reason for executive clemency.” The governor wrote no entry for August 16, 1912, the day of Christian’s execution. Conversely, the Chicago Defender, the city’s largest African American newspaper, reported Anderson “pleaded eloquently for two hours and had the time permitted, he would have saved her life.” Anderson was a legal virtuoso and epitomized the “exceptional men” W. E. B. Du Bois believed would save the race.

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Seldom remembered is that Du Bois also argued that this talented tenth was only obligated to save those worthy of being saved. For the Chicago socialist, the question of Virginia Christian’s worthiness was moot.

Chicago socialists hoped to use Virginia Christian’s case to expose extremism and racism within southern patriarchy. It is difficult to know whether the Chicago Daily World’s endeavors came at the behest of the Chicago Socialist Party or whether they were merely the political wrangling of a rogue newspaper and maverick editorial staff. Maybe E. Val Putnam attempted to legitimize Socialism in the minds of African Americans and hoped to make inroads in Chicago’s African American community.

The Chicago Evening World covered the trial and appeals in detail, tying the case to its own socialist ideas. Here, it highlights the role of prominent women involved in the clemency campaign.

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After all, as one historian surmised, “The Socialist Party of the United States made no concerted effort to capitalize on the discontent found among Negroes. There were no Negro socialist in Chicago who arose as leaders of the unemployed masses.” Indeed, although some socialist argued that class not race accounted for black oppression, not a single Daily World article or editorial discussed Virginia Christian as a laborer. Historian Anthony Platt makes the same point about Chicago child savers, “The concern of middle-class rescuers to protect working-class women frequently ignored the economic and sexual realities of working-class life.”

Chicago’s social reformers were “socialist at heart,” but their reform programs were neither altruistic nor an attempt to alter fundamental economic conditions. The Chicago and Illinois Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, like the larger NACW, saw the protection of black children as tantamount to the protection of the black community.

Black club women’s noblesse oblige seemed necessary in a society where middle-class African Americans were judged by the behavior of their “weaker” kinfolk. As Mary Church Terrell observed, “the dominant race . . . insists upon gauging the Negro’s worth by his most illiterate and vicious representative. . . . Colored women of education and culture know that they cannot escape altogether the consequences of the acts of their most depraved sisters. Both policy and self-preservation demand that they go down among the lowly, the illiterate and even the vicious, to whom they are they are bound by ties of race and sex.” The NAACP refuted such claims noting, “Virginia Christian was a product of Virginia far more than of the colored race. The state pushed her down into poverty. . . . The state refused to educate her. . . . The State put her as a servant.”

The Chicago Daily World even raised questions about Christian’s mental competency. It reported, “Prison officials consider her half-witted and it would be an outrage to send her to the death chair.” Putnam offered to pay for a Chicago alienist, a person engaged in the scientific study or treatment of mental diseases. His telegrams and newspaper articles prompted the Richmond Virginian to complain about the “Chicago newspaper which has worked itself into a condition bordering on hysteria . . . shedding crocodile tears over the prospect of a woman suffering capital punishment.” Mann dismissed Putnam’s concerns surmising, “The girl’s sanity has never been brought into question.”

Two days before Christian’s execution, the Evening World implored its readers, “Write or telegraph Governor Mann telling him your protest against his acting as a selfappointed alienist. . . . Since when is a governor merely to ‘take a look’ at a girl to determine whether she is sane?”

Fellow newspaper, the Cleveland, Ohio Gazette praised its Midwestern counterpart, “the Chicago Daily World . . . is entitled to great credit for the tremendous efforts it put

The Evening World (above) encouraged its readers to personally contact Governor Mann by letter or telegram. Following their own advice, the editors telegraphed him (right) under the name of the daily edition.

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The editorial page of the Chicago Evening World compared Virginia Christian’s sentence to the execution by poison (“the hemlock cup”) of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates. The allusion would have appealed to the highly educated women fighting for a stay of execution.

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forth in recent weeks to save Virginia Christian. . . . The girl’s mental condition . . . makes her execution a crime . . which Virginia cannot afford to have laid at its door.”

Mann never interviewed Christian. The press statement read by Mann following her execution indirectly paid tribute to Chicago and his own assessment of Christian’s mental competence: I am deeply impressed with the interest manifested in the Virginia Christian case, especially outside of the State. . . .I carefully considered the age of the condemned, her physical development and her mental capacity. . . . State officials of unquestioned intelligence and character . . . reported that . . . she was well-developed and looked like a woman of eighteen or twenty. They assured me that no mental weakness could be detected . . . and assured me that she wrote a good letter while there.

Christian’s ability to write a “good letter” made her literate enough to be executed and sane enough to have known that murder was wrong. Christian’s lack of restraint in her murder of Ida Belote precluded any lack of restraint the Commonwealth, otherwise, might have shown Virginia Christian as a juvenile felon. This point was underscored in two letters to Mann by the NAACP Board Chairman Oswald Garrison Villard. First he reasoned, “This convict is of a race, not only in the South, but in every State of the Union, is [sic] particularly subject to unfairness in trials by white juries for offenses against white persons, especially when the question . . . is not whether a criminal act was done but whether it was done with criminal intent.”

Another letter to Mann by Villard reiterated the findings of behavioral scientist Herbert Hovenkamp who argued one’s mental competency was not a simple matter of scientific inquiry. “Questions about insanity were questions about social standards—hegemony—and those standards determined who was responsible and who was not.” It is doubtful that being found insane would have saved Virginia Christian. After all, as one African American Socialist wryly remarked, “If you want to kill a dog, call it mad.”

The Chicago Daily World worked assiduously to keep Virginia Christian’s plight before its readers. During its eight-day blitz, the newspaper became Governor Mann’s chief gadfly. By withstanding Chicago’s onslaught, Mann proved that he would not be deterred or have the business of his state interfered with by northern interlopers.

In her diary entry for August 16, 1912, Etta Donnan Mann, the governor’s wife lamented: This has been a trying day for my dear husband.

Virginia Christian, a young colored woman, eighteen years old, charged with the murder of an old white

woman, had to be electrocuted . . . This is the first woman to be electrocuted in Virginia. This is the hardest duty a Governor has to perform. There are so many unthinking people in the world and there is getting to be such a false idea, or sentiment, against capital punishment that, when anything of this kind occurs, the Governor is deluged with letters and telegrams from every quarter. They don’t consider justice, only mercy. What would become of our commonwealth and our country if the laws were not executed and crime and murder left unpunished? It would mean universal lynching and anarchy and the good people could not live here.

Chicagoans pointed out the difficulty in ignoring Christian’s wretched life and the Commonwealth’s responsibility for it. Chicagoans identified the impact of Jim Crow in Commonwealth society and why it was necessary to weigh these factors when considering Christian’s crime. The ethos of separate-but-unequal demarcated Christian’s life. All attempts by Chicagoans to shame Mann for his state’s failure to protect Christian before she committed murder or to rehabilitate her after she murdered, failed. Mann placed white retribution over reason and complete child welfare. A Florida newspaper praised Mann’s steely reserve, Governor Mann of Virginia refused to heed the appeals from Chicago and the negro girl convicted of murder will be executed. It seems that neither race nor sex can command immunity from the grim executive of the sane old Commonwealth, the mother of presidents and statesmen.

Chicagoans inveighed any such notions. Robert Abbott of the Chicago Defender reiterated this point, “If Governor Mann fails to keep up the good reputation his state has gained . . . he will at least know the sentiment of Chicago, the second largest city in the world, regarding capital punishment.”

The month following Christian’s execution, the NAACP held its fourth annual convention in Chicago. Delegates loyal to the philosophy of Booker T. Washington worried that the NAACP was “too outspoken in its demands for civil, political, and economic rights of Negroes.” In his keynote speech, Oswald Garrison Villard reflected, The society [NAACP] exists in order to combat the spirit of persecution and prejudice which confront the colored people of this land. We ask no favors, no privileges, no special advantages. . . . We merely ask equality of opportunity, equality at the ballot box, [and] equality in the courts.

Doubtless his audience had forgotten the inequality Virginia Christian received in the Commonwealth of An Evil Day | 53

This pamphlet featured residents and staff of the Phyllis Wheatley Home in 1920. The home was established as a safe haven for young working girls in Chicago. It provided living space as well as opportunities for education and self-improvement.

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Chicago’s campaign to save Virginia Christian spurred the Commonwealth’s first juvenile court (1914) and colored girls’ reformatory (1915). The second stanza from the IFCW song said it best, When there’s work that must be done, Illinois, Illinois When there’s a need to raise a fund, Illinois, Illinois To the women’s clubs we go In 1925, a juvenile court judge in Richmond praised the efforts of the state federation of colored women and its president, Janie Porter Barrett, “When I came upon the bench, there was no place but jails for colored girls. . . . The problem had not solution until the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls came into existence. . . . I cannot commend too highly the work being done.”

Derryn E. Moten is professor of humanities at Alabama State University, where he has taught since 1996. He received his PhD from the University of Iowa, where his dissertation was titled “ ‘A Gruesome Warning to Black Girls’: The August 16, 1912 execution of Virginia Christian.”

Above: The New York Times for August 16, 1912, featured a special report on Virginia Christian’s death. People across the country followed the story closely.

Virginia courts. An annual association assessment of racial progress in 1912 was bifurcated under the categories “Credit” and “Debit,” in which the NAACP reported, “the hanging of a colored girl” in the debit column.

In September 1912, Crisis asked rhetorically, “Why has not Virginia a reformatory for colored girls?” The Virginia State Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs reported in 1912–1913, “The great object for which we . . . are working is the establishment of a reformatory for our wayward girls.”

Two decades later, the events of 1912 continued to impress Mary White Ovington: To those of us who were working for the Negro’s full status as a citizen, the period directly before the World War held little encouragement. Just when one thought that the public was becoming educated, was learning to regard the Negro with some degree of justice, some frightful lynching would occur or some especially heinous example of legal justice would come to the NAACP office. This happened in the Virginia Christian case, brought to our attention by the National Association of Colored Women.

In a subsequent work, Ovington opined, “The NACW felt Christian’s execution keenly. It had been raising money for a reformatory and had it moved faster, it might have saved Virginia’s life.” But the new institution did save other girls from Christian’s fate.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 40–41, courtesy of the Library of Virginia; 42, courtesy of the Library of Congress, digital ID: cph 3b47842; 43, top: i63063a, bottom: courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society; 44, courtesy of the Peabody Collection, Hampton University’s Archival and Museum Collection, Hampton University, Hampton, Virginia; 45, DN-0005149; 47, DN-006849; 48, clockwise from top left: DN-060239, DN007259, DN-006190, DN-066555, DN-006755; 49, i63062a; 50, the Chicago Evening World, August 9, 1912; 51, the Chicago Evening World, August 15, 1912; 52, the Chicago Evening World, August 12, 1912; 54, top: i64244, bottom: i64245; 55, the New York Times, August 16, 1912.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | In her autobiography, A Colored Woman in a White World (Washington, DC: Ransdell Inc., 1940), Mary Church Terrell describes her life and work vividly. It can be contrasted with Etta Donnan Mann’s memoirs, Four Years in the Governor’s Mansion of Virginia, 1910–1914 (Richmond: Dietz Press, 1937). Many of the other women who engaged with the case are discussed in Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia (Darlene Clark Hine, Elsa Barkley Brown, Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, editors, New York: Carlson, 1993) and in Dorothy Salem’s To Better Our World: Black Women in Organized Reform, 1890–1920 (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1990).

Specific subjects drawn into the case are examined in Harold F. Gosnell’s Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1935); in Anthony M. Platt’s The Child Savers: The Invention of Delinquency (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969); and in Ira Kipnis’s The American Socialist Movement, 1897–1912 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1952).

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M A K I N G H I S T O RY I

University of Chicago Luminaries: Making History Interviews with Hanna Gray and Janet Rowley T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

T

The careers of Hanna Gray and Janet Rowley share many common elements. Both women entered academic professions dominated by men. At different times, each experienced gender discrimination.

Their intellectual lives flourished at the University of Chicago, and their ultimate paths proved unplanned, even accidental. Gray, trained as a European historian, was well on her way to a successful teaching and writing career when her administrative talents catapulted her out of the classroom and archive. She served in high-level administrative positions at Northwestern and Yale Universities before returning to the University of Chicago in 1978 to become the first female president of a major university in the United States.

Her fifteen-year tenure was the university’s third longest and one of its most productive. Rowley’s early medical career was devoted to pediatrics and neurology.

Her curiosity, however, led her into cytogenetics. She was one of the first to identify chromosomal translocation as the cause of leukemia and other cancers. Her pathbreaking research enabled scientists to identify chromosomal abnormalities in leukemias and lymphomas and transformed the way physicians diagnose and treat such diseases. In recognition of their many accomplishments, both Gray and Rowley were rewarded with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.

Some say that Hanna Holborn Gray was destined for an academic career.

Born in Heidelberg, Germany, on October 25, 1930, she is the daughter of Hajo Holborn and Annemarie Bettman. Her mother received a PhD in classical philology and was instrumental in supporting Gray’s academic aspirations. Her father, a prominent professor of European history, was exiled from 56 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

Above: The University of Chicago’s Cobb Gate.

In 2010, Hanna Gray (above, left) presented Janet Davison Rowley with the Enrico Fermi History Maker Award for Distinction in Science at the Chicago History Museum’s Making History Awards ceremony.

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The University of Chicago’s campus.

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Nazi Germany and later taught at Yale for thirty-five years. He was the one of the first immigrants elected president of the American Historical Association.

“My father was a professor at what was called the Deutsche Hochschule füür Politik at the University of Berlin, which was thought to be a very liberal establishment, filled with Social Democrats,” recounts Gray. “He was writing a history of the Weimar constitution, which was not a popular thing to be writing at the moment when the Nazis came to power.” Within months of the Nazi ascendancy, Holborn was dismissed from his university appointment.

After a brief period in London, he migrated to the United States.

Gray arrived with her family in New York City at the age of four. She spent most of her childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, attending the Hamden Hall Country Day School and then the Foote School with other Yale faculty children. She briefly lived in Washington, DC during World War II. There she attended Sidwell Friends School while her father worked for the Office of Strategic Services as special assistant to the chief of its Research and Analysis Branch, William L. Langer. In retrospect, Gray describes herself as a “somewhat rebellious younger child and somebody who kind of liked to talk back and to try things out on her own.”

Janet Davison Rowley’s career intertwined with Chicago much earlier than Gray’s. Rowley was born in New York City on April 5, 1925, the only child of Hurford and Ethel Ballantyne Davison. “I came to Chicago when I was two,” Rowley explains. “My father was in retail store management and moved from being at Lord & Taylor’s, which is where he started when my parents were first married. He was then recruited to Mandel Brothers in Chicago, and since my mother had been born and grown up in Chicago, she was quite delighted to return here.”

Rowley’s parents, like Gray’s, were well educated: her father held a master of business administration degree from Harvard Business School and her mother a master's degree in education from Columbia University. Ethel Davison worked as a teacher and a high-school librarian; she taught senior and honor’s English in a variety of Chicago high schools, including Hirsch, Calumet, and South Shore. “She was always an outstanding highschool English teacher,” remembers Rowley.

Rowley’s childhood coincided with the Great Depression, which forced her parents to move around Chicago. Consequently, she attended several Chicago public schools: Ruggles, Vanderpool, Dickson, and eventually Mercy High School. In 1940, at fifteen years of age, she received a scholarship to a special program at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins had established the “Four Year College” for talented high school students. “My mother was aware of the development of the Four Year College and the availability of scholarships,” Rowley explains. “So I took a scholarship exam and passed it and took an oral interview and passed that.” She was one of thirty students in the program, which allowed her to complete high school and college at an accelerated pace. She earned a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1944, a bachelor of science degree in 1946, and doctor of medicine degree in 1948, all from the University of Chicago. Rowley was only twenty-three years old when she was awarded her medical degree.

The Laboratory Schools of the University of Chicago (top, in 1961) nurtured students such as Rowley with accelerated programs and excellent technical facilities (above).

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The Four Year College emphasized small class sizes and discussion between students and faculty. Rowley remembers that she was encouraged to learn independently, think on her own, and defend particular ideas, traits critical to her later development as a research scientist and teacher. “I think the Four Year College was notable because it was expected that you were there to learn, and that you were given a great deal of freedom and responsibility,” she emphasizes. “Fortunately, I enjoyed that.”

Gray is also the product of a challenging undergraduate experience, in her case at Bryn Mawr College. Several factors encouraged her to attend the allwomen’s college outside Philadelphia. “One was that I was only fifteen when I went to college and not every college would take an application from me,” Gray explains. She was also influenced by Margaret Hitchcock, a Bryn Mawr alumna who Gray describes as “everybody’s greatest English teacher,” and her parents’ knowledge of several German refugees who taught at Bryn Mawr.

The latter, according to Gray, “gave them the sense that this was an intellectually very serious place, and they wanted me to go to an intellectually very serious place.”

History was not Gray’s first academic interest. “I thought I was going to be an English major and I was going to be a writer, maybe a journalist,” she remembers. “I realized at about the same time that the way I thought was sort of historical.” She went on to study with the famed Bryn Mawr historian Felix Gilbert and then with Myron Gilmore at Harvard University, where she received her PhD in 1957. Her parents never actively encouraged Gray to

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The University of Chicago.

As she assumed the university presidency in 1978, Gray (pictured c. 1982) knew her tenure would be watched closely. She was the first woman to fully lead a major American educational institution.

study history, “but my father was the most intelligent person I knew,” she says. “As a model of thinking and a way of relating knowledge to deeper analysis, he certainly was very important in my own intellectual formation.”

Gray taught at Harvard for several years and was promoted to assistant professor in 1959.

Gray met and married her husband, Charles Montgomery Gray, while both were graduate students at Harvard. In 1960, when her husband received his appointment at the University of Chicago, she chose to move with him and obtained a fellowship at the Newberry Library. “We came here in 1960 and that was the first time I’d ever been in Chicago,” Gray remembers. “I didn’t know what it was going to be like to leave the East where I’d always lived, looking also toward Europe.” More disconcerting was her employment picture. “I had no job and assumed I probably never would have because this was not a time when husbands and wives were appointed at the same institution, let alone in the same department.” But in 1961, she was offered and accepted an assistant professorship in the college at the University of Chicago.

While Gray narrowed her academic interests over time, Rowley was predisposed to science early in her professional life. “I like things that are intellectually orderly, so in seventh and eighth grade, I started taking Latin and I thought Latin was wonderful. It was a most orderly language.” As a sophomore at Mercy High School, Rowley remembers that her Latin teacher devoted most of the class to learning the Linnaean systems of classification.

“We didn’t spend much time on plants, but I do remember arthropoda and the insects and then on up to mammals, and I thought that was fascinating.”

When the time came to begin medical school, Rowley was forced to delay her entrance. In 1944 the University of Chicago allowed only three or four women in a class of sixty-five medical students. The year’s quota was filled when she was admitted, so her medical school matriculation was postponed for almost a year. While the delay was inconvenient, Rowley did not consider it a hardship because she was only twenty years old when she began her Making History | 61

medical training. Over the course of her medical studies, she met Donald Adams Rowley, also a physician and later a professor of pathology. They married the day after she graduated from medical school.

Over the next two decades, Rowley balanced her family life with her medical and research interests by working part time as she raised four sons born between 1952 and 1963. “I wanted to be in a position to have more time to spend with my family,” she explains. One of her earliest appointments was as an attending physician for the infant and prenatal clinics operated by the Montgomery County Department of Public Health in Maryland. Rowley worked there in 1953 and 1954. “When Donald went to the NIH [National Institute of Health in Bethesda, MD], I got a license to practice in Maryland, but also found out about baby clinics and prenatal clinics,” she reiterates. “I chose two afternoons a week.” When the Rowleys returned to in Chicago in 1955, she acquired a similar research position at the Levinson Foundation at the Cook County Hospital, a clinic for children with developmental disabilities. Rowley remained affiliated with Levinson until 1961, while also teaching neurology at the University of Illinois’s School of Medicine.

Around the time Rowley was researching with the Levinson Foundation, Gray began teaching at the University of Chicago. When she began, she was one of the few female professors in the university. “I kept being put on committees and also ran the college history program,” Gray recounts. “I also thought that I had to do whatever I was asked to do because, to some degree, I felt that [as a woman] I was lucky to be doing it at all.”Gray soon realized that she enjoyed the challenges of academic administration. “I really found something enormously interesting in dealing with the kind of very complex questions and the very different kinds of temperament and outlook that were involved in doing that kind of thing, trying to tease out the central points, 62 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

In 1962, Rowley’s mentor Dr. Leon Jacobson offered her a part-time position at the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital. Above: Rowley in her lab at the University of Chicago.

trying to work with people to formulate some kind of consensus. . . . [I]t wasn’t the easiest environment. But it was a fascinating process.”

Gray's administrative acumen led to significant committee assignments within the university and eventually attracted outside attention and interest.

In 1972 she was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, one of numerous appointments in which she was the first woman to occupy the position. “By that time, I had been approached about college presidencies,” Gray explains. “I think there were so few women, that even though I was too young, I was approached early because there just weren’t that many visible women at that time.” Gray admits that when Northwestern offered her the deanship, “I still didn’t know that I wanted to do that as a permanent career, but I was intrigued by the opportunity.”

As Gray was building her administrative resume, Rowley embarked on a new research interest. In 1961 Rowley and her husband went to England: he on sabbatical and she as a fellow at Oxford University. There, influenced by her clinical work with children suffering from developmental disabilities, Rowley began studying chromosomes. Then-recent discoveries regarding Down syndrome indicated that chromosomes played an important yet unclear role in such genetic conditions. While at Oxford she worked under the guidance of Dr. Laszlo Lajtha, a research hematologist studying the replication of bone marrow cells. Lajtha allowed Rowley to apply his work to the replication of chromosomes.

Human chromosome study was a new field in the early 1960s. “There weren’t many people in it,” Rowley admits. “It was very fortunate for me because down the street from where Dr. Lajtha had his laboratory was an institute for genetics.” There she met and began working with Dr. Marco Fraccaro, an early cytogeneticist. Less than two years later, Rowley published

The results of Rowley’s careful research into abnormal chromosomes led to charts like the one she holds in this photograph.

Making History | 63

two papers in the international science journal Nature describing the application of radioactive labeling techniques to track deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) replication cells with chromosomal defects.

Rowley was particularly interested in understanding if and how chromosomal abnormalities were related to the onset of leukemia. Upon returning to Chicago in 1962, she approached her mentor Dr. Leon Jacobson, then the chair of hematology and director of the Argonne Cancer Research Hospital at the University of Chicago. “I don’t want to go back to the clinic,” she told Jacobson. “I want to work on analyzing these slides.” Jacobson offered her a part-time position with a microscope, three feet of bench space, and a $5,000 annual salary. In retrospect, Rowley admits that “when I approached Dr. Jacobson about coming back to have a position, I didn’t care what the title was. That was irrelevant.”

Jacobson occasionally asked Rowley to examine the chromosomes of his patients. Prior to the onset of leukemia, Jacobson’s patients often had anemia, a low white cell count, or a low platelet count. Three to twelve months later, they developed acute leukemia. “I would do chromosome studies on those patients, and some of them had consistent chromosome abnormalities, namely gains or losses of chromosomes in most of their cells,” Rowley explains. “This was before chromosome banding, so you couldn’t tell one chromosome from another.” In the 1960s few scientists suspected that chromosomal aberrations caused tumors. Most scientists believed that abnormal chromosomes were a reflection of the “generalized chaos” within leukemia and lymphoma cells. Rowley, however, had other suspicions. “I expanded from looking at the X chromosome to looking at other chromosomes.”

While Rowley was engaged in her little-understood, pathbreaking research, Gray was ascending the academic ladder. Her Northwestern appointment proved to be short lived; her success and reputation generated an invitation to serve as provost at Yale University in 1974 and then as acting president of Yale in 1977 and 1978.

Gray’s tenure at Yale was brief but instrumental in her development and reputation. “The 1970s were very tough times,” she explains. Virtually all research universities engaged in difficult budget cutting and hiring freezes.

“There was the very high inflation and lowered market values,” Gray recollects. “There was the immense rise in energy costs, which of course had a tremendous effect. There was a slowing and some real decline in government funding. Those things all came together at the same time and had a huge effect on all universities. They certainly had an effect on Yale.”

Further complicating matters for Gray was that in 1978 she was simultaneously considered for presidential positions at Yale and the University of Chicago. At that point, no woman had ever served as president of an Ivy League university (Judith Rodin at the University of Pennsylvania in 1993 would be the first), so some critics charged Yale with discrimination when Gray was not named president. “In terms of being passed over, I pretty much knew that I was not about to be the next president of Yale,” Gray recollects, “and that had a little bit to do with being a woman, certainly. I don’t think they felt that Yale was ready for that.” But she recognizes that other factors were involved: “I think a lot of it also had to do with my very close association with Kingman [Brewster, Yale’s immediate past president]. They wanted somebody who would be a fresh face and take a new tack and, in some ways, have the strengths and take direction that might build on what Kingman had done but obviously be different.” Gray harbors no resentment. “I felt, at the time, that Chicago was the place for me . . . I can still remember after [a] conversation with the three trustees going in my husband’s study and saying, 64 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

Gray’s investiture was an occasion for formal pomp and circumstance and an opportunity for the university’s faculty to publically declare their support for her.

Making History | 65

In her inaugural address, Gray made it clear she wanted to keep the university from engaging “in a . . . principled descent to decent mediocrity� in the face of a changing undergraduate population.

66 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

‘Would you like to go back to Chicago?’ And he said, ‘You know, I would.’ So I thought, and I was right, that this is the right place for me.”

Rowley’s career was also gaining momentum. In 1971 she returned to England for a second Oxford fellowship, where she first learned about chromosome banding. A year later, while sitting at her dining-room table analyzing leukemia cells of patients, she noticed that two chromosomes were breaking off and trading places, or “translocating,” in each patient. At that moment, Rowley had discovered a link between genetics and cancer.

Rowley’s research revealed leukemia was the result of somatic mutation, and that in some leukemias, specific translocations (which occur in about 20 percent of all leukemias) cause specific subtypes or varieties of leukemia.

Her conclusions challenged the established view that the cause of cancer had little to do with chromosomal abnormalities. Simply put: “It’s not something you’re born with.” She quickly wrote up her findings and sent the paper to the New England Journal of Medicine. Pathbreaking research, however, often meets resistance. Rowley’s discovery was no exception: the editors rejected the article. Almost an entire decade passed before scientists recognized Rowley’s evidence that genetic changes cause cancer.

Rowley demonstrated that there was a correlation between specific translocations and certain types of leukemia. A particular chromosomal change pointed to a specific malignancy. What had been largely a hobby for Rowley quickly became a full-time occupation and intellectual obsession. Over the next decade, she made a number of remarkable discoveries, including identifying more than ten unique recurring translocations.

She was responsible for the “landmark finding that an abnormally short chromosome associated with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) was not a chromosome deletion, as many scientists had thought, but an exchange or translocation of segments between two chromosomes.” After twenty years of research, Rowley and her team discovered more than seventy translocations associated with different cancers. The unique conditions and unconventional circumstances of Rowley’s research were noted by President Barack Obama when he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009: “All of us have been touched in some way by cancer, including my family, and so we can all be thankful that what began as a hobby became a life’s work for Janet.”

When Gray assumed the presidency at Chicago in 1978, higher education was at a crossroads. One concern was the continued impact of conflicts from the 1960s: The “period of troubles after the occupation of the administration building here [in 1969] had an effect,” Gray remembers. “There were some bad feelings leftover from the students of that generation, not all of them, but a significant group of them.” At the same time, the declining college-aged population convinced some “that the whole enterprise of higher education might be seriously affected.” In 1978 the University of Chicago admitted 60 percent of all undergraduate applicants (compared to the average of 29 percent for the graduating classes of 2010 to 2014). Gray had to address the decline in the undergraduate population and “figure out how to maintain a really excellent student body.” To further complicate matters, the university had long defined itself by its graduate schools and programs, and, Gray admits, there was a lot of “soul searching about whether people

Janet Rowley at the height of her career.

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ought to be reducing graduate programs, whether it was even ethical to encourage students to go to graduate school.” Worse was the temptation, as she said in her inaugural address, “to engage in an apparently principled descent to decent mediocrity.”

Gray’s response was a mixture of the philosophical and the pragmatic. “I thought the first thing that we needed to do was to look at the university and decide what we wanted the balance of this university to be,” she recalls.

“That meant to look at graduate programs and what we were doing in a graduate program, whether we wanted to reaffirm our stance as a graduate university.” She also insisted that the university reexamine undergraduate education. “I thought we needed to look at the college and to explore how it might have a still more central role as one of three equal legs on the stool, that is, graduate education, professional education, and undergraduate education.” More so than budgetary, economic, or fundraising issues, Gray insists, “I thought that the single most important issue before us was how we would define ourselves and our goal as a university in terms of these educational components.”

To tackle the task of self-definition for the university, Gray adopted a twopronged approach. First, she believed Chicago had “to strengthen the undergraduate enterprise and not have undergraduates feel that they’re some little group in a great big graduate place but an equal group.” The second strategy was to reevaluate all graduate programs, “and think about how [they] could strengthen graduate education while recommitting [themselves] to that weight of graduate education, even in an unfavorable environment.” With the assistance and support of the Commission on Graduate Education, chaired by historian Keith Baker, the university ultimately adopted more flexible requirements, increased financial aid, improved teaching preparation, created workshops to facilitate interdisciplinary research, and addressed the isolation felt by students writing dissertations.

These and other policy changes proved transformative. After 1982, enrollment in the graduate divisions climbed. Other new initiatives undertaken by 68 | Chicago History | Summer 2011

Gray oversaw a number of important innovations at the University of Chicago, including the renovation of many historic buildings, ambitious new policy programs, and fundraising drives. Above: Gray at the Rockefeller dedication, 1988.

During her tenure, Gray saw enrollment and standards rise at the university (shown here in 1983) as her efforts strengthened undergraduate programs and enhanced research departments.

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Gray’s administration included the creation of the Irving B. Harris Graduate School of Public Policy Studies, the Department of Computer Science, and the Chicago Humanities Institute. Applications to the undergraduate college increased, and enrollment grew by 25 percent between 1977 and 1986 (from 2,450 to 3,070). The university renovated recreational facilities, created new student housing, joined a new athletic league with other rigorously academic institutions, and promoted activities such as the popular “Kuviasungnerk” winter festival, which began in 1983. The college reinvigorated its “common core” program, a mandatory two-year class sequence which had been its trademark.

Gray also embarked on a series of ambitious building and fundraising programs. A new science quadrangle was constructed, which included the Kersten Physics Teaching Center and the John Crerar Library, while merging the collections of the Crerar with the university’s science holdings. The fifty-year-old Billings Hospital was replaced by the Bernard Mitchell Hospital and the Arthur Rubloff Intensive Care Tower. Ida Noyes Hall and several older buildings were renovated, while the Law School and Court Theater constructed new facilities.

In 1987 the five-year “Campaign for the Arts and Sciences” surpassed its goal of $150 million, while other fundraising campaigns raised additional support for the business, medical, and law schools. Gray’s success generated an even more ambitious $500 million campaign in celebration of the university’s centennial in 1991. At the very moment many universities were complaining of declining enrollments and decreasing funds, Gray reported that the University of Chicago was in a “position of great strength.”

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Today, as a professor emerita, Gray remains active at the University of Chicago, teaching advanced undergraduate and graduate students.

While Gray’s leadership reinvigorated the University of Chicago, Rowley’s “part-time” scientific research revolutionized cancer research and treatment and laid the foundation for a new paradigm.

Scientists replicated Rowley’s findings, which convinced others to follow her conclusion that specific translocations defined specific forms of cancer.

Researchers around the world began searching for chromosomes that either exchanged genetic material (translocation) or lost it altogether (deletion). Some discovered that they could employ translocations as road maps to identify specific genes disrupted by chromosome damage. In the end, Rowley’s discoveries resulted in a new era of cancer genetics.

Rowley’s discoveries eventually brought widespread professional and public acclaim. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1984), the Institute of Medicine (1985), the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1991), American Philosophical Society (1993), and the American Academy of Achievement (1999). She has received seven honorary degrees, including one from Oxford University (2000) where she conducted some of her initial and most important research. The American Cancer Society awarded her their Medal of Honor in 1996. Two years later, she was one of three scientists awarded the prestigious Lasker Award for their work on translocation; a year later, she received the National Medal of Science. In 2009 Rowley received both the Genetics Prize from the Peter and Patricia Gruber Foundation and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Ultimately, Gray believes she had an obligation to speak out in defense of higher education and the importance of the research university. “University presidents have some responsibility to represent higher education to a larger public,” she insists, especially “if you happen to have the position you do and some of the resources that come with it.” Gray’s success in redefining and reasserting the University of Chicago’s mission attracted national attention. A 1986 study of educational administration ranked her as one of the five most effective college presidents in the United States, along with the Reverend Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Derek Bok of Harvard, the Reverend Timothy Healy of Georgetown, and William Friday of the University of North Carolina.

Both Gray and Rowley remain modest about their successes. Rowley recognizes that her greatest contribution was the discovery of translocations and making the role of genetics in cancer more obvious and unmistakable.

“When I go on trips now to various places, I try my best to make contact with former students because I think, at the end of the day, for me personally, to be able to look back on the students who have worked with me and whom now are going on in many different areas, here at the university but elsewhere, in Japan, in Germany, in China—that’s a treasure you can’t take away.

And that’s very important.”

Gray takes little of the credit for how she transformed the University of Chicago. “You don’t ever do anything just by yourself,” she says. “Part of it is

Rowley remains an active researcher. Her awards include the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. She finds her greatest reward in the work of her former students, who have gone on to conduct their own research across the globe.

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trying to persuade others, part of it is learning from others. You modify what you start out with, in the light of good advice and further thought and new ideas. You never do any of it by yourself.” She is gratified that she protected and enhanced the basic ethos of the University of Chicago. “There are always going to be new fields, new intellectual opportunities, and so on,” she admits. “But you want to maintain your greatest strength and be willing not just to be like everybody else. And I think, I hope, that I helped do that.”

Timothy J. Gilfoyle is the author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century 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 | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 56, i64235; 58, i64236; 59, top: HB-24639a, bottom: HB-24639b; 60, i64238; 61–68, courtesy of the University of Chicago News Office; 69, i64237; 70–71, courtesy of the University of Chicago News Office.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For Hanna Gray’s research on Renaissance humanism, see “Valla’s Encomium of St. Thomas Aquinas and the Humanist Conception of Christian Antiquity,” in Heinz Bluhm, ed., Essays in History and Literature (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1965), 37–52; and Three Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

Her influence in and ideas regarding higher education are available in Presidential Task Force on the Humanities, Hanna Gray, co-chair, with Charlton Heston and Daniel Terra, Report to the President by the Presidential Task Force on the Arts and Humanities (Washington, DC: The Task Force, 1981); Higher Learning and the New Consumerism, Francis Boyer Lectures on Public Policy (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, c. 1983); and “On the History of Giants,” in William G. Bowen and Harold T. Shapiro, eds., Universities and Their Leadership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), 101–18. Janet Rowley is profiled in Nature Medicine (January 2006), vol. 12, issue 1, page 10; Women in the Biological Sciences: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook, edited by Louise S. Grinstein, Carol A. Biermann, and Rose K. Rose (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1997); and the Imprint: A Publication of the BSD Graduate Programs, Summer 2007, available at http://gradprograms.bsd.uchicago.edu/files/ 2007_imprint_summer.pdf. For another interview with Janet Rowley, see the National Institute of Health website at www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_282.html

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Gray has collected many prestigious awards, including a 2008 Making History Award from the Chicago History Museum (above, presented by James S. Crown), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom.