C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Lydia C. Carr Designer Bill Van Nimwegen Cover: In this detail from an undated postcard, people and animals alike take advantage of Chicago’s public fountains. Image courtesy of Leslie Coburn.
Photography John Alderson Shelby Silvernell
Copyright 2012 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life. Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue are available from the Chicago History Museum’s Publications Office.
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Richard M. Daley LIFE TRUSTEES
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Jonathan Fanton Sallie L. Gaines Thomas M. Goldstein Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Jean Haider Erica C. Meyer Robert J. Moore Eboo Patel Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Noren Ungaretti
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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Spring 2012 VOLUME XXXVIII, NUMBER 1
Contents
4 22 44 66
The Water Question Leslie Coburn
Crossroads for a Culture Rosalyn R. LaPier and David R. M. Beck
Departments Yesterday’s City Robert Pruter
Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
The Water Question Before the advent of soda machines, bottled beverages, and safe tap water, Chicagoans—human and animal alike—relied on public drinking fountains. LESLIE COBURN
C
hicago’s familiar drinking fountains got their start in Victorian England, where problems of the industrial city—overcrowding, inadequate clean water, and poor sewage processing—led to deadly outbreaks of water-borne diseases. In response to these problems, which affected all classes of people, a movement developed to erect public fountains that dispensed safe drinking water. Liverpool installed the first drinking fountains in 1857, followed by London on April 12, 1859. Only five weeks later, on May 18, 1859, the issue first appeared in the Chicago Tribune: We are glad to notice that our contemporaries are joining us in presenting strongly to the public and to our City Fathers the matter of a free supply of water for the people—a constant, ever accessible flow of the water of our lake to the lips of the thirsty, by means of well located, well devised street hydrants, with drinking cups attached. . . . And why may we not put in a plea for the humbler companions of man, the beasts of burden and our canine friends. . . . We believe the present city administration could not do a wiser thing, nor one more to their credit, than to inaugurate this matter of street fountains. Let no one be unwillingly driven to a bar room because he can find nothing to drink elsewhere. The subject is being agitated in other cities; let it be put on foot in Chicago, and that speedily, to secure its advantages and luxuries for the summer now close at hand. This early editorial sketches the three major themes that would become central to Chicago’s public drinking fountain debate; namely, the urgent need of men and beasts for safe water in the city’s streets; the strong desire that saloons not be the only place where water or beverages could be obtained; and the question, “Who leads the way in this matter?”
4 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
This question was never clearly resolved. Instead, a combination of public and private entities and individuals collaborated. Along the way, sanitary considerations and fountain aesthetics evolved. Chicago’s first public drinking fountain, at least as recorded in the Chicago Tribune, was installed two months after the publication of the May 18 editorial. The Tribune commented unequivocally on its upcoming installation: “A public hydrant for the thirsty million is being put up at the northeast corner of the public square. Good.” The following day it elaborated on the story: “The People’s Fountain, with drinking cups attached, adjoins the northeastern entrance to the public square.” A later article reported that “every hour in the day demonstrates its utility. It is often the centre of quite a group of the thirsty, waiting to take their turn at the cups. Better far than strychnine whisky, and cocculus indicus beer . . . the number of these hydrants should be increased.” The Tribune would continue to report on the fountain and the need to replace its tin cups, which were periodically stolen; unfortunately, no images of this drinking fountain exist, and its precise location is unknown. It was variously described as being located at the northeast corner of the “public square” or the “Court House Square.” The Court House was located at the site of the current City County Building, thus the fountain probably stood near the intersection of Randolph and Clark Streets. Between 1862 and 1890, the Tribune ran occasional columns titled “The Water Question,” which usually addressed the unacceptably foul condition of the city’s drinking water and the urgent need to devise a plan to supply the city with cleaner water. Although this was the most pressing water issue, occasionally editorials Opposite: In this detail from an undated postcard, people and animals alike take advantage of Chicago’s public fountains.
The Water Question | 5
re-addressed the issue of public drinking fountains. On July 12, 1868, for example, a column headed “What Chicago Needs” asserted that the city had no drinking fountains at the corners of our streets and no conveniences that render a resort to alleys and by-ways unnecessary. . . . Not a city in the Old World but puts Chicago to shame in some of these respects. . . . Liverpool, years ago, erected numerous drinking fountains with money donated by one humane man . . . In this country, New York has set up a few fountain stands, and Boston, which has already an excellent system of free baths, is following her example. . . . Upon those who thrive through the prosperity of Chicago rest corresponding obligations to the city which has given them fortunes. It is their duty to leave it, not only richer, but better in the highest ways . . . by giving it a public park . . . public drives . . . public libraries . . . but, first of all and above all, public baths, drinking fountains, and the conveniences necessary to cleanliness and a healthful life. Appeals like this one to the consciences and civic pride of Chicago’s wealthy would soon pay off. Meanwhile, in 1874 the city council appropriated one thousand dollars for downtown public drinking foun-
This engraving (c. 1900) illustrates the Illinois Humane Society’s design for a fountain that could be used by humans, horses, and dogs. 6 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
Illinois Humane Society president John Shortall, in an undated photograph.
tains. Although there is no evidence that extensive public funds were spent on public drinking fountains in the years immediately following—perhaps because the city was still grappling with the larger problems of improving the water supply generally, creating a better system of sewage disposal, and rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871—citizens and newly created philanthropic organizations began to respond. Two organizations in particular played an important role in the establishment of drinking fountains and watering troughs in Chicago at this time: the Illinois Humane Society and the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union. The two groups were very different, despite their similar aims. The Illinois Humane Society, initially called the Illinois Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, was created in 1869, partly in response to the manner in which animals were being treated at the recently opened Union Stock Yard. In 1877, the society expanded its mission to include the protection of neglected and abused children and changed its name to the Illinois Humane Society (IHS). The organization’s work for children contributed to the creation of the juvenile court system in Illinois and the passage of child protection and labor laws. Records left by the IHS suggest that it was an entirely secular organization; notably absent from its writings are the temperance and religious messages used so heavily by the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and many others promoting water fountains at this time. The IHS considered these fountains among their most charitable and practical city amenities. The design of the
Settlement houses advocated public fountains as a useful source of clean, safe water, as in this photograph of the McDowell Settlement House at 4630 South McDowell Street, taken around 1900.
multiuse fountains came after several years of experimentation and was, the society believed, “the best known for its cost and service.” Certainly they gave the IHS a visible presence in Chicago. A horse trough extended out in one direction, oriented toward the street, and opposite the horse trough, a faucet for people faced the sidewalk. Dog troughs beneath the horse troughs were integrated into the fountain’s flared base. An annual report explained the operating principle: “The water is carried up the service pipe, overflowing the aluminum drinking cup into the bowl beneath, from which three horses can drink at a time; thence into the troughs below for smaller animals.” In this way, three species were catered to at once. The IHS fountains were cast in Chicago at the Dearborn Foundry. The group made an effort to identify the distinctive design as its own, as in this excerpt from the 1901 annual report probably written by IHS president John Shortall: Fountains always remain the property of the Society. In explanation I will say that we own the pattern of these fountains. Of course we have no patent on the design, although it is wholly our own. . . . I might
say, as a matter of interest, that the original fountains we placed in the street were of the highest complication; they had an internal arrangement as complicated as a system of theology. These fountains would freeze on the first approach of winter. . . . fountains in the old days used to cost $40 to $50 per year, to thaw out and again to have the pipes soldered and put in order. Now I think the average cost [of annual maintenance] is not over $10 apiece. . . . The first cost is something like $50 each. The IHS occasionally erected circular concrete horse troughs. Several of these troughs stood on Market Street, between Madison and Randolph Streets, an area near the Chicago River that was dense with warehouses. One of the society’s earliest fountains, however, was unique and much more elaborate than any discussed so far. Erected in 1877 in Lincoln Park, this early IHS fountain had a large stone and concrete basin capable of watering sixty horses at once. The society also had nine smaller fountains in operation at that time, at which “15,000 people and 30,000 horses drink . . . daily, besides innumerable dogs. The cost of erecting one of these small fountains and running The Water Question | 7
Children especially loved the bubbler water faucets of the new fountains (McDowell Settlement, c. 1901). 8 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
“Miss Dennis and boys” admire the new installation at the McDowell Settlement House, c. 1901.
it one year is $135.” The majority of these IHS fountains were located on the city’s South Side. Concentrations were found between Twelfth and Fifteenth Streets, ThirtyFifth and Thirty-Ninth, and along Michigan Avenue between 103rd and 115th. The number of fountains maintained by the IHS increased steadily between 1877 and the early 1900s, reaching a high point in 1913 when sixty IHS drinking fountains operated within the city and nearby suburbs. Individuals and businesses that approached the IHS about installing a drinking fountain in front of their properties were asked to help pay for the cost of the sewer and water connections and sometimes to help with the cost of the fountain itself, even though the society retained ownership of it. If a location was very desirable, the society sometimes chose to erect a fountain at its own expense. When a spot for a new fountain first began to be contemplated, initial steps involved obtaining permission from adjoining property owners, after which the society sought permission from the city to erect the fountain, use the city water, and connect to the city’s water pipes. Occasionally fountains were removed at the request of neighboring property owners or by the city when streets were widened or otherwise changed. This became increasingly common as the years passed; the IHS annual report for 1932 noted that “two fountains . . . were taken out by the City for street widening,” and in 1945, “owing to street improvements, traffic conditions, etc., the erection of fountains has been greatly restricted.” Perhaps the greatest threat to the IHS fountains came in 1900, how-
ever, when Chicago’s commissioner of public works, Lawrence McGann, objected to the society’s fountains on the grounds that water spilled by horses and dogs was causing pavements to decay. McGann asked for a report studying the situation, with the aim of removing the fountains. John Shortall responded in the press by saying it would be an outrage to do so. “The city had much better spend a few dollars fixing the pavement occasionally, if the fountains cause any damage. . . . Some draft horses wouldn’t be watered at all if it wasn’t for them. The $10 or $12 which the society spends on each fountain every year is a small sum compared with the good they do.” The city seems to have dropped the matter, as no further mention of McGann’s report or plans to remove the IHS’s fountains subsequently appeared in the Tribune. Shortall’s comment about the society’s minor operating costs for the fountains begs a question: if the annual expenses were so minimal, why did the city not provide drinking fountains itself? A number of possible explanations come to mind. Perhaps the most obvious answer is that because individuals and philanthropic groups were already providing Chicago with drinking fountains on a fairly large scale, the city government may have felt there was no longer a need for official involve-
Prior to the widespread adoption of motor vehicles, horses and ponies occupied the roles now filled by delivery vans and trucks. The Water Question | 9
Temperance Union (WCTU) formed in Evanston, Illinois. The group was largely composed of white, middle-class, Protestant women, and the principles of their organization had strong evangelical underpinnings. It was very successful; by the late 1800s, the WCTU was the largest women’s group in the United States. The first temperance organization in the Chicago area, the Chicago Temperance Society, was established in 1833, but temperance and prohibition activities increased significantly across the United States in the years following the Civil War. In addition to its interest in temperance and prohibition, the WCTU was also active in suffrage and social services. Many local chapters provided daycare, kindergartens, and low-cost restaurants and lodging, well ahead of Hull-House and other Chicago settlement houses. Public fountains cut across many of the WCTU’s core issues. At its 1874 organizing convention in Cleveland, Ohio, the group created a sixteen-point “Plan of Work of the National WCTU.” Point fourteen was titled “Fountains.” We urge our unions everywhere to signalize the coming hundredth birthday of America by erecting in every village and town and city, fountains of water, inscribed with such mottoes as shall show what sort of drink the women of America believe in, and as shall be a sermon in their persuasiveness to our fathers, brothers and sons. The Woman’s Temple, national center of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, (shown here c. 1895) stood at the corner of South LaSalle and West Monroe Streets.
ment. Another factor was that before (and even after) the installation of street fountains downtown, many men and women preferred to slake their thirst in hotels, department stores, office buildings, saloons, and soda fountains. That solution was no doubt agreeable to downtown businesses, and required no expense on the city’s part. As the advocates of public water fountains pointed out, the poor, the teamsters who drove the delivery wagons, men laboring in the streets, newsboys, and, of course, draft horses, either could not enter these buildings or could not afford to patronize downtown businesses. Street fountains and troughs, in fact, largely served a downtrodden group without political influence. Finally, it is possible that the association of drinking fountains with temperance groups may have made some city officials uneasy about publicly funding such installations, out of fears that it might alienate constituents and businesses that produced or served alcohol. While the IHS was a secular organization, it was the exception rather than the rule in its field. In 1873, four years after the IHS was formed, the Woman’s Christian 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
Although it was begun in 1876 to commemorate America’s centennial year, the WCTU’s drinking fountain campaign became a permanent part of the organization’s work. Unlike the IHS, the WCTU did not use a unique, distinctively designed drinking fountain. Instead, local chapters ordered or designed fountains themselves. The WCTU erected stone and cast iron fountains, in styles that ranged from plain to ornate. The Union Signal, the organization’s newsletter, ran advertisements from the two leading iron works companies that catered to the WCTU’s specific needs: the Fiske Company of New York and the J. L. Mott Iron Works of New York and Chicago, the latter promising “special prices given to all Charitable and Temperance Societies.” J. L. Mott’s catalogs offered a wide array of choices. Some included statues or streetlamps, and most came equipped with horse troughs, dog troughs, “man troughs,” and drinking cups. Despite the variety of styles and materials, all WCTU drinking fountains shared a number of common elements: most included animal troughs, and nearly all were inscribed with the letters “WCTU” and its white ribbon emblem. Often Bible verses were also inscribed, such as Revelation 22:17, “Let him that is athirst come,” used on a fountain in Salem, New Jersey. Unlike the IHS, which erected dozens of drinking fountains in Chicago, chap-
Originally used at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, the WCTU’s Cold Water Girl had a useful second career outside the Woman’s Temple. In this photograph from 1911, chained cups hang from the girl’s wrist.
ters of the WCTU tended to install only a single fountain in each town, usually in a prominent location. Their erection served symbolic and promotional purposes as much as functional needs. In Chicago, the temperance movement contributed a single but quite well-known drinking fountain to the downtown area. It began as a project of the Juvenile Division of the World’s Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The organization collected abstinence pledges and donations of pennies and dimes from 350,000 children. The $3,000 thus raised was used to create a drinking fountain for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. London sculptor George Wade was commissioned to design its sculptural element: a figure of a
young girl holding an alms dish, out of which water flowed. The fountain was exhibited at the WCTU’s booth at the fair, after which it was donated to the city of Chicago. It stood outside the WCTU Woman’s Temple, at the corner of South LaSalle and West Monroe Streets, for many years. There was well-founded concern about the city’s water supply on the cusp of the 1893 fair. In 1892, in a paper titled “Typhoid Fever in Chicago,” William Sedgwick and Allen Hazen reported that “within the last two years, and especially within the last nine months, typhoid fever has been unusually prevalent in the city of Chicago.” They also evaluated the quality of the city’s water supply, and in 1893, the British medical journal the Lancet published The Water Question | 11
a further negative report on water samples collected in Lake Michigan and the Chicago River. The fair planners knew from the outset that because of the city’s dubious public water supply, the fair would need to provide its own drinking water, and a water committee was established early on to plan for this. Two main water sources were used on the fairgrounds. One was spring water from Wisconsin. One hundred miles of pipeline were laid between Waukesha County, Wisconsin, and the exposition grounds, and this “Hygeia Water” was sold on the grounds for a penny a glass. Fairgoers could also drink filtered water, dispensed free of charge from drinking fountains throughout the grounds. Bids to supply the fair with an initial two hundred fountains were opened on October 1, 1892. “The fountains are to be ornamental in character and in harmony with the general surroundings. To each fountain will be four faucets . . . so that if 300 drinking places are provided they will accommodate 1,200 people at one time. The water is to be filtered through a device approved by the Construction Department. The drinking stands will be located in various places throughout the grounds.” No record has yet emerged to indicate the exact number of fountains installed on the grounds, what design was selected, or how harmonious and ornamental they turned out to be. In the official guidebook to the fair, under the heading “Drinking Fountains,” visitors were simply told that “an abundance of drinking water is supplied free of cost. ‘Hygeia’ Waukesha water may be had at one cent per glass.” Whatever the number, it was insufficient. Exposition planners had overestimated the number of people willing to pay for the Waukesha water, and long lines developed at the free drinking fountains. Fair operators needed to quickly provide more drinking water. Luckily they were able to rebuild a water purification plant already on the grounds, previously used to provide drinking water to workers during the fair’s construction, and barrels of this water were soon produced and distributed throughout the fairgrounds via dispensers. These square boxes with faucets near their base, some clearly labeled “Drinking Water” and “Sterilized Water,” stand outside many state and country pavilions in subsequent photographs. The Illinois Humane Society, like the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, exhibited a sample drinking fountain at the World’s Columbian Exposition; one of their cast iron fountains was on display in the Liberal Arts Building in a booth the IHS shared with other anticruelty groups. The exposition’s Department of Moral and Social Reform dedicated three days of the fair to the presentation of humane work and prevention of cruelty, and the first international congress of humane workers was held concurrently at the Art Institute of Chicago. These events reflect the fairly high level of public interest in humane issues at this time. 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
These preparations for the 1893 fair brought the issue of public drinking fountains in Chicago to the fore outside its grounds as well. In August 1892, the Tribune reported on the installation of several inexpensive hydrant-style drinking fountains in the city center: While there is nothing attractive about their appearance the new free drinking fountains which the city is introducing promise to be popular. . . . The new fountains are built for service, not for adornment, and they are constructed at no great expense. The first one in operation down-town is at the northeast corner of Lake and State streets. . . . As fast as possible the fountains will be placed at the prominent corners . . . the city will be thoroughly well supplied with them by World’s Fair time, as it will cost but a comparative trifle to place them at every fire hydrant in the town. The article also observed that the fountains were “well patronized by all classes” and that “women patronized the free fountain[s], too, to an extent that noticeably decreased the income of soda-water venders further up on State street.” The Tribune makes no further mention of these hydrant drinking fountains, however, and it is not clear whether the plan to install them throughout the city before the fair was ever fully realized. Two drinking fountains that were for adornment, and cost a great deal more than these city-installed fountains, were also erected in the downtown area in 1892 and 1893. The first was a large drinking fountain given to the city by John Drake, a prominent Chicago hotelier. The Drake Fountain (and John Drake) received a great deal of attention in the Tribune, beginning with an article published in 1890 discussing the statue of Christopher Columbus that would ornament the fountain. The article reported that it was the work of sculptor R. H. Parks and it was being cast in a foundry in Florence, Italy. Later the paper reported that a model of the fountain, depicting its four drinking basins and nine-foot statue of Columbus, was going to be exhibited. News of the statue’s subsequent arrival in New York, in Chicago, its erection, and finally the fountain’s dedication—which took place on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in America—were all covered widely in the Tribune. The fountain stood prominently on West Washington Street, centered in a courtyard space between the County Building and City Hall. A large chamber for holding ice had been incorporated into its base, so that the luxury of chilled water could be dispensed during the summer months. Later in the 1890s, several articles appeared in the Chicago Tribune that described the filthy condition of the courtyard behind the fountain. One article, “City Hall a Stable,” called attention to the fact that the area between
the two buildings “has become a free hitching ground for stingy people with plenty of nerve, and consequently is filthy.” The courtyard had been a public nuisance for at least fifteen years, the article said, used as a “free hitching place for every man who visited the business district in a buggy and was too stingy to patronize a livery stable.” Free parking, deep shade, and its convenience to the city and county departments were also attractants, although the Drake Fountain’s supply of free water no doubt provided an advantage. By 1897, the situation had become intolerable for city and county officials. The area had not been swept in months, the Tribune reported. “The fumes arising from heterogeneous decaying matter are a menace to health. An inventory of the court’s main features brings to the front the bodies of dogs and cats, a winter’s accumulation of old newspapers, tin cans, cast-off clothing, and worn-out shoes.” In 1906, the Drake Fountain was moved from the courtyard to the front of the old City Hall along LaSalle Street, during construction of the new County Building. The old County Building and City Hall were being demolished in a two-step process, with the new County Building built first. The Drake Fountain stayed on
A newspaper described the area around the Drake Fountain in 1897 as a filthy public nuisance.
LaSalle Street until 1909, when it was removed for the construction of the new City Hall building. There was no room for the fountain outside the new structure, and the question of what to do with it was not easy to resolve. Some letters published in the Tribune suggest that the fountain was not universally loved: one letter referred to the way the fountain “lumbers up the west side” of city hall, and another, in a plea for more street fountains, said new fountains “need not be so cumbersome as the Drake Fountain nor so sloppy as the one at the Woman’s Temple.” The memories of the congregation of horses and wagons that had gathered in the courtyard near the Drake Fountain, and the associated problems of manure, flies, and odor, may also have left some city officials feeling the downtown area would be better off without it. The first plan was to move the fountain to Grant Park; however, this would have given ownership of the fountain to the South Parks Commission, and because the fountain had been a gift to the city, the idea was rejected. The problem of the fountain’s relocation was then given over to the Small Parks Commission to resolve. It was moved to South Chicago, creating a political brouhaha. The Knights of Columbus were unhappy that the downtown had lost its only statue of Christopher Columbus. They took it as a personal affront, and threatened the incident would “turn the Italian vote against the Republicans.” That the Knights were insulted that the statue had been moved to South Chicago was in turn insulting to South Chicagoans. The Commissioner of Public Works, who had been closely involved with the relocation, was himself from South Chicago and the South Chicago alderman further argued that “the statue and fountain are more valuable in South Chicago than anywhere else . . . there are thousands of workers in the steel mills who will be glad to utilize the fountain, and we have a splendid plaza . . . in which to give the statue a setting.” Although the Knights of Columbus argued strongly to have the fountain returned to the downtown area, they were ultimately unsuccessful. The fountain stayed in South Chicago, where it remains today. Concurrent with the building of the Drake Fountain, plans were also in the works for a drinking fountain to be erected in Grant Park. The funds for it ($10,000) were left to the city in the will of Joseph Rosenberg. As a newsboy in Chicago, he reportedly vowed that if he ever became wealthy, he would build a fountain where newsboys could drink on hot days. A statue of Hebe, goddess of youth and cup-bearer to the gods, was planned for the top of the temple-like fountain, but the initial design for the statue was rejected as too immodest and likely to incite acts of vandalism. A more “mature” and fully draped figure—“Hebe the Second”—was eventually designed and approved. The drinking fountain was built at the southern end of Grant Park near the Illinois Central The Water Question | 13
Philanthropist and local grocery magnate William Hoyt, in an undated photograph.
Terminal and officially presented to the city on October 6, 1893. The eleven-foot-high bronze statue of Hebe was created by the German artist Franz Machtl, and the circular colonnaded temple base of colored granite was designed by Chicago architects Bauer and Hill. Both the Drake and the Rosenberg Fountains, as well as the more humble hydrant drinking fountains the city was installing, were viewed as city improvements that would enhance the experience for visitors attending the upcoming world’s fair. There was one serious problem with these drinking fountains, though, which the Tribune alluded to when it commented that response to the new hydrant fountains “goes to show that lake water is popular in Chicago.” The problem with all of these new fountains was that they dispensed the city’s municipal lake water, which was still not consistently safe to drink. Although germ theory was not yet well understood, medical practitioners and city officials recognized that outbreaks of cholera and typhoid fever were related to contaminated water sources. Because of this, many Chicago residents preferred the city’s arte14 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
sian wells, which provided groundwater that was considered purer, safer, and better-tasting than municipal sources. Garfield Park and Lincoln Park had artesian wells that continued to flow for many years, and were outfitted with spigots, basins and cups; residents of Lake View and the West Side brought bottles and jugs to fill at these park fountains. Since working-class Chicago homes were commonly constructed without indoor plumbing until the 1910s and 1920s, many residents also obtained household water from street hydrants equipped with hand pumps. In 1908, the year Daniel Burnham and Edward Bennett’s Plan of Chicago was completed, William M. Hoyt, a grocer, proposed to erect at his own expense “an artesian well, fountain and horse trough” on the former site of Fort Dearborn. Concerned about the lack of watering troughs in the Loop, Hoyt urged that “at this time . . . when the boulevard connecting link is about to be consummated on lines of ‘city beautiful,’ I will suggest we add ‘city sanitary and humane.’” Hoyt considered the Fort Dearborn site ideal for this purpose because it hosted heavy teaming traffic, yet retained space to accommodate a fountain so that traffic would not be delayed. Hoyt also suggested that “a suitable building for public convenience [toilets] should be built and kept by the city authorities in perfect sanitary condition. We must not forget that Chicago is a big city, and similar provisions should be made to accommodate the public as abound in all European cities. We must have that which we need and can pay for—all worked out on lines of economy.” This language sounds like that of the plan itself, and it is interesting to note that Hoyt’s name appears on the Plan of Chicago’s list of subscribers. His amendments to the goals of the plan—that it should work toward a city “sanitary and humane” as well as beautiful—and his suggestion of a public restroom overlap with some of the ideas that had been dropped from Burnham’s original draft. It should also be noted that Hoyt dealt in real estate as well as groceries, and the site on which he proposed the fountain be built was in fact his own property. His offer to build a fountain there was contingent on the city purchasing “such part of our property as fronts on Rush street bridge on terms fair and reasonable.” Although Hoyt’s suggestion was never acted on, four other drinking fountains with horse troughs were erected in downtown Chicago in 1908. These fountains were a gift to the city from the Chicago Tribune, and their dedication coincided with the thirty-seventh anniversary of Opposite: With cities, philanthropists, and societies all interested in building drinking fountains, an industry quickly arose tailored to their specific needs. These advertisements appeared in the American City in 1912.
The Water Question | 15
the Chicago Fire. The concrete and bronze fountains were designed by the architects Holabird & Roche in an “Italian renaissance” style. Each stood six and a half feet high, had a horse trough, a smaller trough for dogs, a bowl for humans, and was topped by a street lamp. Another contemporary development was a growing awareness of the danger of incorporating shared public drinking cups, a normal feature of fountains in the period. In May 1909, under the heading “Danger in the Cup,” the Chicago Tribune wrote that “it is everywhere conceded that the common drinking cup is a prolific means for the transmission of diseases” and concluded that the “bubbling fountain cup, in all probability, would be a safe and satisfactory solution of the problem.” Two months later, the paper reported that the Kansas Board of Health was moving to bar the use of the common drinking cup on passenger trains in Kansas. As scientific studies began to be published, states and cities quickly moved to outlaw the use of public drinking cups. The state of Illinois’s prohibition against the “death cup”
One of the most successful fountain companies was J. L. Mott, patronized by the IHS. Its 1911 advertisement in Everybody’s Magazine emphasized the “self-cleaning bubbling jet,” which eliminated the infection-transmitting cups of previous designs. 16 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
went into effect on July 1, 1911. As these laws passed, new fountains with “bubbling cups”—basically the modern drinking fountain head that requires users to bend over and slurp from a spouting or arching jet of water—began to be installed, and existing fountains were retrofitted with the new style spigots. The Woman’s Temple fountain, for example, was out of commission for two weeks in the summer of 1911 while it was outfitted with new bubbling cups. The new sanitary drinking fountain laws led to a rush of quickly developed and advertised drinking fountain products, designed to eliminate the old chained cups. Several noteworthy drinking fountains were commissioned in Chicago and its suburbs in the first decades of the twentieth century, as the new design regulations went into effect. The first was a drinking fountain and horse trough erected in Oak Park in 1909. Called the “Horse Show Fountain,” it was initially proposed by Miss Ethel D. Edmunds, who donated her Oak Park horse show winnings to provide seed money for its construction. The fountain was designed by sculptor Richard Bock, although it is (perhaps apocryphally) attributed jointly to Bock and Frank Lloyd Wright. The design is certainly Prairie School–influenced. The “Horse Show” may have inspired a fountain erected in Chicago a few years later, outside the Belden Avenue Baptist Church. Located in the Lincoln Park neighborhood, this drinking fountain included combined street lamp globes and horse and dog troughs, and, like the Oak Park fountain, was important and interesting enough to merit a photograph in the Chicago Daily News. The newspaper also photographed a beautiful concrete fountain that was dedicated in the village of Glenview in September 1917. The donor for the Glenview drinking fountain was Edwin B. Jackman. Jackman lived in the neighboring town of Golf and had earned his fortune as an agent for the Firth-Sterling Steel Company. Little else is known about the man, other than he was the patron of the Glenview fountain. Two pieces of writing by Jackman do survive, which suggest that he was quite remarkable. One is his fountain dedication speech. The fountain was dedicated to Glenview’s children, and Jackman’s speech addressed them in a sentimental and somewhat idealized way. In the context of contemporary events—World War I and the recent landing of U.S. troops in Europe— that is perhaps not surprising. For example, he concludes with, “You are the little men and the little women who hold the bubbling cup of inspiration for the world.” What is more striking is Jackman’s “spaceship earth” view of our planet, his discussion of its preciousness and fragility, and his modern description of the earth, when seen from Venus or Mars, as “only a speck of light.”
The Belden Avenue Baptist Church, shown here c. 1916, was one of the many smaller organizations that provided water for thirsty animals.
The form of the Glenview drinking fountain was quite different from previous drinking fountains erected in the Chicago area. Its column was decorated with medallions depicting different examples of local flora and fauna, including an oak tree, bobcat, badger, trout, and squirrel. Each medallion was unique, linked by a geometric meander border. Atop it all sat a friendly looking bear holding a pair of dangling lanterns in its mouth. It seems
likely that these designs were meant to illustrate the philosophy of Jackman’s dedication speech: “We are on a living planet of abundant gardens, fruits and flowers; we breathe the air through which the robin flies; we share fresh waters with the trout in woodland streams! . . . Life’s best gifts are free, supreme and universal! Nature offers many volumes, printed in a common language, direct and clear.” The Water Question | 17
18 | Chicago History | Summer 2011
On a side note, the Glenview fountain is reminiscent of certain medieval fountains found in Europe, the type called market crosses in England. The city of Berne, Switzerland, is famous for its collection of fountains of this type. As the bear is the symbol of Berne, and a number of its fountains also feature bears, could Glenview’s drinking fountain have been inspired by a Swiss example? Is there a reason why a fountain from Berne might have been selected as a model for this fountain? Unfortunately, the artist is not known, and other than Jackman’s dedication speech, no historic documents discuss the fountain. That no one has tried to explain or understand this structure is surprising given that Glenview has adopted the fountain and its bear as its official village mascot and logo. Around this time it seems that a cultural shift regarding drinking fountains began to take place. Drinking fountains started to become more exclusively associated with parks and children, rather than general public use. In 1922, a large children’s drinking fountain, the work of Edward McCarten, was erected in the Lincoln Park Zoo. Like the Cold Water Girl at the World’s Columbian Exposition, this fountain was said to have been paid for by donations from children. The Cold Water Girl herself was moved to the south end of Lincoln Park when the Woman’s Temple was demolished in 1928; she was installed near an equestrian trail. During the Depression years the city of Chicago gained several thousand drinking fountains in its parks, as a result of WPA projects. New roadways, comfort stations, tennis courts, and other facilities were also added to Chicago’s parks, along with major expansions of the Burnham Plan’s lakeshore park. In the newly created Burnham Park, built on landfill along the south lakefront in the late 1920s and early 1930s, another fountain oriented toward children and animals was installed. Called the Wallach Fountain in honor of David Wallach, who had bequeathed the money to build it to the city in 1894, it was ornamented with a bronze sleeping fawn and included troughs for dogs and birds and drinking spigots for children and adults. An unusually commercial drinking fountain was installed in 1932, when the Woodlawn Laundry Company, at 1221 East Sixty-Third Street, began operation of a chilled and triple-filtered drinking fountain called the Magic Fountain. The laundry decided to establish the fountain after observing “the popularity of the filtered water at Sixty-Eighth street and South Shore drive” (the location of the Hyde Park station of the City Water Works). Ads described the new fountain as “uncanny,” “spooky,” and “mysterious.” Its grand opening was a The Glenview drinking fountain was erected in 1917, when this photograph was taken. The Water Question | 19
With the increased availability of safe tap water at home, drinking fountains eventually vanished from the streets. They remained a feature of public parks, as in this photograph taken at the Lincoln Park Zoo in 1928.
promotional masterpiece given that the main attraction was tap water. Nearly ten thousand people came to the event, which featured a beauty pageant, music, speeches, prizes, and free coupons to the White City amusement park. The “magic” aspect of the fountain was an electriceye light beam that turned the faucet on when someone approached it. A sign over the fountain instructed users, “Just whisper to the bubbler—you’ll be surprised!” It seems that there was no charge for the water; advertise20 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
ments said “you can have all you want—you can take home a jugful.” Six spigots were available for filling jugs and containers, and “a liveried attendant” was to be on duty at all times. Although the fountain was advertised as associated with the Woodlawn Laundry, the entire block took on the name Magic Fountain Block. It seems likely that local businesses were at least partially sharing the expense of operating the fountain, in hopes that it would attract customers.
Another type of fountain was about to experience a resurgence. The number of horse troughs in Chicago had diminished year by year, as the use of automobiles and trucks gradually replaced the traditional horse-drawn wagon. Between 1922 and 1942, the numbers of horses in the city was said to have decreased by about 10 percent each year. During World War II, the numbers increased temporarily, as gasoline, tires, and automobiles were less available, and the horse became an attractive alternative. This presented a problem for the Illinois Humane Society. By 1942, it was only operating thirteen horse troughs, and there were thought to be four thousand horses at work in the city. After the war ended the number of horses in Chicago diminished once again, but their urban presence persisted for a surprisingly long time. For certain uses, the horse still had advantages over engine-powered trucks. For one, they could maneuver in tight alleys. Horses were also good for making short hauls through slow or stalled traffic; unlike a gasoline engine, if they stood idle for long periods of time little energy was wasted. And horses had great advantages on regular delivery itineraries, such as a milkman’s or bakery’s route. A welltrained horse could easily learn the stops and be able to move to the next house on his own while the deliveryman carried goods up to a customer’s house. The horse thus allowed the deliveryman to work without a human assistant. Despite these advantages, the use of horses declined and eventually they were only used by the city’s “junk peddlers.” In 1959, the Tribune reported that only about twenty horses were still working in Chicago. It was at this time that the Illinois Humane Society decided to move away from its animal cruelty program and shifted its focus entirely to children and juvenile issues. Some of the remaining IHS fountains were subsequently donated to local museums. Two remain in use today near the Chicago Water Tower and Pumping Station, where they provide water for tourist carriage horses and the horses of the mounted police unit. With the end of the horse era, the street drinking fountain, which had nearly always been physically integrated with horse troughs, essentially disappeared. Outdoor drinking fountains became confined to the city’s parks, as they are for the most part today. Are drinking fountains becoming obsolete, as people’s water drinking habits change? The answer is perhaps. Vending machines that dispense water and soda are beginning to appear in some Chicago parks. Many people now carry their own bottles of water. And a look at Millennium Park suggests that the city may be making adjustments to reflect these changes, as a surprisingly small number of outdoor drinking fountains have been installed there. An even newer drinkingfountain trend, however, could turn all of this around.
This trend, like the original water fountain movement, comes from Great Britain. In response to mounting concerns about the environmental impact of disposable plastic bottles, appreciation of drinking fountains has been reawakened as people recognize them as a sustainable water delivery system. A group called FindaFountain has created an internet map showing the location of all the drinking fountains in London. And recently a trendy new fountain was installed in London’s Hyde Park specifically for refilling water bottles. It is made of stainless steel and looks like a piece of modern sculpture, but it has four practical bottle-filling spigots.
Leslie Coburn is a doctoral student in the architecture, design and urbanism program at the University of Illinois at Chicago. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 5–6 bottom left: courtesy of the author; 6, top right: i65460; 7, i65462; 8, i65461; 9, top left: i65463, bottom right: i65464; 10, i65465; 11, DN-0056947; 13, Chicago Tribune, June 26, 1897; 14, i65459; 15–6, courtesy of the author; 17, DN-0066898; 18–9, DN-0068864; 20, DN-0085478. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Philip Davies has written a general introduction in Troughs & Drinking Fountains: Fountains of Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 1989). Specific accounts of the organizations discussed are in Louis John Covotsos’s (ed.) The Illinois Humane Society, 1869 to 1979 (Lake River, IL: Rosary College, 1981) and Sarah F. Ward’s WCTU Drinking Fountains (Evanston, IL: Signal Press, 1999). An interesting view of a specific aspect of the subject is Clay McShane and Joel Tarr’s The Horse in the City: Living Machines in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011).
The Water Question | 21
Crossroads for a Culture Chicago provided a home for a diverse group of American Indians during the Progressive Era. R O S A LY N R . L A P I E R
AND
DAV I D R . M . B E C K
For many Indians, like this group waiting for a train in 1903, Chicago was a common stop when traveling by rail. 22 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
B
y the beginning of the twentieth century, Chicago had emerged as one of the largest and busiest cities in the United States. As the railroad capital of America and a rapidly growing industrial center, it appealed to immigrants and migrants alike. American Indians were no exception. Many came to Chicago seeking employment. Others traveled through the metropolis via the numerous railroads, usually going from western reservation communities to eastern cities. Some passed through in their work as entertainers, while others were on their way to Washington, DC, to meet with federal authorities. A number stayed in Chicago, either temporarily or permanently. This occurred during a time of great change in Indian country. As policy makers and reformers began to realize that American Indians were not disappearing from the American landscape, they shifted their efforts to assimilation. This was done to a large degree through the boarding school experiments that removed children from their families and community environments to inculcate them with American cultural values. While this process often proved destructive to tribal communities, it also created an educated Indian intelligentsia, who ironically worked hard to incorporate tribal values into modern life. Those who came to Chicago tried both to wrest control of what it meant to be Indian from non-Indian definition and to help carve out a place for American Indians in contemporary society, which now included the urban landscape. The city of Chicago played a central role both regionally and nationally as a place where individual American Indians during and after the Progressive Era asserted their position in modern American society. The stories of these remarkable individuals shed light on the development of a new type of experience and leadership in Indian America. Simon Pokagon Simon Pokagon, a Potawatomi leader from Michigan, did not live permanently in the city. Chicago, however, was the traditional territory of the Potawatomi, lost in a treaty in 1833. Throughout his life Pokagon spent significant time in his ancient homeland. He was among the first modern American Indian leaders to assert his convictions about the status of American Indians and the responsibilities of the U.S. government. He used his role as a traditional leader and respected orator to promote Indian issues and concerns, most publically in 1893. In that year, Chicago celebrated the four hundredth anniversary of the European “discovery” of the Americas with the World’s Columbian Exposition. As part of the fair’s educational function, American Indians and other ethnic groups considered inferior or less civilized were dis-
Simon Pokagon carried on the work of his father, Leopold, drawing attention to the plight of the Indian tribes who originated in the Chicago area. This portrait engraving appeared on a handbill he presented to the Chicago Historical Society in 1899.
played on the Midway Plaisance as part of “the illustrated history of the progress of the human race, and its development from the cave dweller to the man who is the best embodiment of the civilization of the nineteenth century.” The displays of the American Indian Village on the Midway and the American Indian school exhibited in the Ethnology Building were developed by ethnologists with the cooperation of the United States government. According to one non-Indian observer, “educated” Indians were used in these displays, and most of them had to be taught the “old” customs of music, dwelling, and dress by the ethnologists. One guidebook to the fair urged visitors to see “the almost extinct civilization if civilization it is to be called [of the] ‘noble red man’ . . . before he achieves annihilation, or at least loss of identity.” A nascent academic field in the Progressive Era, anthropology took a key role in portraying for the visiting public one of the key interpretations of the fair, “the idea of progress, especially as manifested in the assumed triumph of civilization on the North American continent.” Columbia University’s renowned anthropologist Franz Boas sent some fifty trained ethnologists into American Indian communities in the United States and Canada to collect a variety of information that could be used to porCrossroads for a Culture | 23
Simon Pokagon presented this copy of the Red Man’s Rebuke and the two birch bark books at the right to the Chicago Historical Society in 1899.
tray Indian America to fairgoers. This work included surveys conducted with fifteen thousand individuals of more than two hundred tribal backgrounds. American Indians served as physical reminders of just how far removed from civilization early (Native) Americans were and measuring sticks for how far modern (white) Americans had advanced. Despite this implicit and explicit racism, many of the Indians who attended the fair enjoyed themselves. Solomon O’Bail probably reflected the perspective of many Indians in attendance when he said, “Had good time all summer; no mad words; good time.” However, a number of American Indians also protested the ways in which the fair portrayed them to the world. One of these was Simon Pokagon, whose father, Leopold, had been among the signers of the Chicago treaty of September 26, 1833. Simon was just a young boy when the tribe gathered in its old hunting and fishing grounds in what is now the South Side of Chicago for this treatysigning. Father and son spent their lives attempting to gain fair restitution for that land from the federal government. 24 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Six decades after the treaty signing, Simon Pokagon argued against the portrayal of Indians as uncivilized savages by the fair’s organizers. A Catholic, Pokagon had studied for three years at Notre Dame, one at Oberlin College, and two at Twinsburg College in Ohio; he spoke five languages, was a good organist, and generally considered to have the best, or rather most Europeanized, education in his generation of Indians. He attended the opening of the fair, lamenting that Indians were not allowed to participate with representatives and exhibits of their own. After witnessing the opening ceremonies, the story goes, Pokagon walked through the fairgrounds with a heavy heart. A little Indian girl tried to cheer him by giving him a bunch of flowers. “This simple act,” one observer said, perhaps with some embellishment, “inspired him to write the Red Man’s Greeting.” The “greeting,” originally titled the Red Man’s Rebuke, was a bitter document of Indian–white relations printed on birch bark and widely distributed on the Midway. Pokagon began:
In behalf of my people, the American Indians, I hereby declare to you, the pale-faced race that has usurped our lands and homes, that we have no spirit to celebrate with you the great Columbian Fair now being held in this Chicago city, the wonder of the world. No; sooner would we hold high joy-day over the graves of our departed fathers, than to celebrate our own funeral, the discovery of America. Carter Harrison, Chicago’s mayor, read this moving document, as did a women’s group at the fair, and they invited Pokagon to consult with them about the representation of Indians. Harrison claimed to be descended from Pocahontas, and he was sympathetic to Indian causes. On September 25, the day before the sixtieth anniversary of the 1833 treaty, Pokagon spoke with fair representatives who were determined to include a positive portrayal of Indians at the fair. I am glad that you are making an effort, at last, to have the educated people of my race take part in the great celebration. That will be much better for the good of our people, in the hearts of the dominant race, than war-whoops and battle-dances, such as I today witnessed on Midway Plaisance. It will encourage our friends, and encourage us. . . . We wish to rejoice with you, and will accept your invitation with gratitude. The world’s people, from what they have so far seen of us on the Midway, will regard us as savages; but they shall yet know that we are human as well as they.
Pokagon disseminated his message through small brochures printed on birch bark. These two books include accounts of Algonquin legends and Christian religious texts translated into an Indian dialect.
Harrison subsequently invited Pokagon to celebrate Chicago Day in October. This day drew the largest crowds yet, and Harrison and Pokagon both made speeches calling for greater understanding between the races. Harrison also promised Pokagon that he would try to retrieve some of the money owed by the federal government to Pokagon’s band of Potawatomis for the ceding of Chicago in 1833. Pokagon had spent much of his adult life pursuing that goal: he personally visited Presidents Lincoln and Grant and even won a court case recovering a portion of the money. Harrison invited Pokagon to return at the mayor’s own expense for the fair’s closing to discuss Indian–white cooperation. But as Pokagon rode the train into Chicago that historic night, Carter Harrison was shot to death by a disgruntled would-be city employee. Pokagon lamented that Harrison was like a brother to him. At a memorial for Harrison on the fairgrounds, Pokagon said, “He alone at the fair welcomed those of my race who have climbed the heights of manhood. . . . On the natal day of his city, he bade the Pottawatomies [sic] and all progressive Indians welcome. To-day we mourn him, for every Indian has lost a friend.” Crossroads for a Culture | 25
Photographer Carlos Gentile rescued a boy named Wassaja from Pima raiders. He raised and educated the child, whom he renamed Carlos Montezuma. This undated formal photograph by Gentile shows Wassaja with Alessandro Salvini, a successful Italian American actor. 26 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
The cultured, highly educated Montezuma (shown here c. 1904) exerted his powerful personality on behalf of the Indians of Chicago and beyond.
It would be a long time before a mayor of Chicago would again extend such a welcome to the first Americans. After the fair, in the few remaining years of his life, Pokagon continued to encourage Chicagoans to view the Indian history of their city in a more sympathetic manner. In 1897 he arranged with Edward G. Mason, the president of the Chicago Historical Society, to come to Chicago and give a Potawatomi perspective of the fight at Fort Dearborn. According to one observer, Pokagon resented the fact that the battle in which Indians fought to retain their homeland was called a massacre. He was unable to make this speech because Mason died before the event could be arranged. Pokagon initiated a process that became increasingly common over the coming years, in which Indian leaders attempted to correct the American understanding of both the history of Chicago and the role Indians played in that history. He used his modern education to articulate a tribal perspective on the place of American Indians in contemporary society. He looked backward and forward at the same time, attempting to define Indian society as positively contributing to America’s past development, while asserting a relevant role for Indians as active members of modern society in Chicago and the larger nation. This process was further advanced by one of Pokagon’s good friends, a man who came to live in Chicago for almost twenty-five years at the end of Pokagon’s life: Carlos Montezuma.
Carlos Montezuma, Physician A group of skilled, educated individuals formed the core of an evolving American Indian community within Chicago, despite small numbers. The 1910 census counted only 108 American Indians within a population of more than two million, and by 1930 that number stood only at 246, yet their influence far exceeded their numbers. A number were educated in boarding schools, although the most well-known American Indian leader to live in Chicago and emerge from the Progressive Era, Dr. Carlos Montezuma, followed a different route. Montezuma, a Yavapai man given an Aztec name by his white childhood guardian, was renowned as one of the best stomach surgeons in the United States. As Montezuma tells it, his formal education began somewhat accidentally. In the year 1871 I was taken from the most warlike tribe in America and placed in the midst of civilization in Chicago. My greatest wish was to understand the paper talking, as it was interpreted to me. I often saw boys and girls go to and from the school-house. I had no idea that they all had to be taught, but I had a little suspicious idea of the house. One morning in April, the boy with whom I had associated persuaded me to come into the school-yard that morning to play marbles by saying that “I could win piles of marbles if I did!” So I consented. Crossroads for a Culture | 27
Wassaja, Montezuma’s self-named newspaper for politically active Indians, featured a changing series of drawings as its masthead. These often featured self-caricatures, as in these examples from 1916 and 1917.
That led him into the school, where an insatiable desire for knowledge propelled him eventually to graduate from the Chicago Medical School. Henceforth, he was determined to better himself professionally and to use his education to advocate on behalf of American Indian people. Montezuma took on several roles that lay firmly in the tradition of tribal leadership: those of advocating for tribal rights before entities such as the federal government; caring for less fortunate tribal members; and hosting visiting tribal members. The difference was that while traditional leaders did these things almost exclusively for and within their own tribes, Montezuma worked on behalf of a multitribal population from an urban platform. He reflected a traditional tribal role transferred to an urban setting and, in the process, established a model carried on by future tribal leaders in Chicago. Montezuma was undeniably the individual who fought most consistently for Indian rights in the first quarter of the twentieth century in Chicago. The great passion of Montezuma’s life was fighting against the policies of the federal Indian Service (also known as the Indian Bureau or Office of Indian Affairs); in fact, fighting for the abolition of the service. Like the reformers of the Progressive Era, 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Montezuma believed Indians should become fully assimilated citizens of the United States and that the major barrier to this was the service itself, which so completely controlled Indian lives. Montezuma thought Indians could and should control their own destiny. In 1911, Montezuma was a founding member of a national organization headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, the Society of American Indians (SAI). SAI membership consisted solely of American Indians, although honorary membership was extended to non-Indian supporters.
Impressed by the Indian scouts he interacted with during the Civil War, Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania in 1879.
The organization was reform oriented, representing middle-class Indians who understood that Indians were not vanishing but a people whose evolving role was defined by a complex relationship between reservation, tribal background, and society. The SAI was one of the first Indian organizations with a membership base in urban areas, away from reservations. Even though he was one of the organization’s founders, Montezuma’s relationship to the SAI was often strained, largely because his views concerning the Indian Service were so controversial. In 1915, after causing a heated debate at the SAI’s annual meeting when he distributed his essay “Let My People Go,” which called for the abolition of the federal agency in no uncertain terms, Montezuma and the SAI split formally. Montezuma then began publication of his own monthly newspaper, Wassaja, in Chicago in 1916. In the introduction to the first issue, Montezuma said “This monthly signal . . . is to be published only so long as the Indian Bureau exists. Its sole purpose is Freedom for the Indians through the abolishment of the Indian Bureau.” Reflecting this remit, the Wassaja masthead included three different drawings over the years. Two of these depicted the Indian Bureau crushing Indians. The third showed Indian people fighting back. He published the newspaper until his death in 1923.
To a significant extent Montezuma was a product of Progressive Era reformers. He believed that because Indians were stereotyped as savage and backward, traditional Indian cultural practices (including music and art) should be abandoned. He wrote articles for Chicago newspapers protesting the building of an Indian art center at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. He argued that the art offered “only evidence of that dark period in Indian life of which the best that can be said is that it ought to be forgotten in the march toward the more advanced life.” Not all Indians agreed with Montezuma; and it must be remembered that Montezuma spent almost his entire life living in urban society, maintaining a longtime friendship and alliance with Richard Henry Pratt, the assimilationist Indian fighter turned reformer who founded Carlisle. Montezuma believed the best hope for Indians to escape the state of degradation in which the government kept them lay within white American society. The dilemma is clearest in a letter from one man who disagreed with Montezuma, but who also highly respected him. Arthur C. Parker, the Seneca ethnologist, wrote in March 1913 to ask if it would be all right, in Montezuma’s view, to teach Indian folk music to Indian children—if this music was also taught in white schools. Parker was obliquely asking whether Montezuma would support the perpetuation of Indian culture if whites stopped defining that culture as savage or backward. Unfortunately, there is no record of Montezuma’s reply. Despite his belief that assimilation, as he defined it, provided the best opportunities for Indians to survive in modern American society, Montezuma never completely gave up ties to his home reservation community or to his friends. Besides his loud advocacy work on the national level, Montezuma played a lower key yet perhaps more significant role in Chicago, both within and outside his profession as a physician. When a train carrying members of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show crashed near Melrose Park in 1904, for example, he was called upon in his capacity as physician. Among the dead and injured were eighteen Indians, show members from Pine Ridge, South Dakota. The Indian Affairs agent for Pine Ridge, John R. Brennan, had collaborated with the railroad company to make a quick settlement between the railroad and survivors and families of the deceased. In it, they were awarded a much lower amount in compensation than white victims of similar situations. This was possible because Indian people, many of whom lacked U.S. citizenship, were wards of the government. Their agent had near total control over most of the important decisions in their lives. Crossroads for a Culture | 29
Carlisle was a boarding school. It removed young Indian children from reservations and educated them as Europeanized members of society. As at other industrial schools, the Carlisle curriculum emphasized training for domestic and manual labor. These photographs, and the preceding portrait of Richard Pratt, were taken by Frances Johnston at the school’s height in 1901.
While many former students were grateful for their education, Carlisle children often also felt alienated from both white and Indian society.
These girls are practicing for working lives as maidservants, as well as learning how to run their own homes in a non-Indian fashion. 30 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
This home economics class is teaching girls to prepare a standard hearty breakfast of 1901: rolled oats, beefsteak, and coffee.
In addition to the emphasis on practical training, children at Carlisle received instruction in the arts and sciences. As adults, they were expected to earn a living and help others of their race. Crossroads for a Culture | 31
One of Carlisle’s biggest successes was its football team, which nurtured celebrated athlete and Olympian Jim Thorpe (center).
The people injured in 1904 thought the decision made on their behalf unfair. A committee including Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux from South Dakota, and three others contacted Dr. Montezuma, asking him to intervene. Montezuma wrote to the Indian Service on April 19, 1904, requesting permission to attend the injured Indians. In the same letter, he also pointed out that Brennan’s brother had a connection with the Buffalo Bill show and, thus, the compensation might not have been awarded impartially. Montezuma and three others sent a letter on May 6 protesting Brennan’s handling of the case and demanding an investigation. Montezuma then sent his nine-page medical report to the Indian Bureau on May 19. It detailed the injuries, present conditions, prospects of recovery, and suffering of the fifteen survivors of the accident. Ultimately, Montezuma’s attempts to advocate on behalf of the Melrose Park victims were unsuccessful. The bureau accepted the settlement Brennan had made, despite Montezuma’s detailed case. In a final letter on May 20, the cover letter for the “Estimate of Compensation Properly Due Indians Injured in Wreck on Chicago and Northwestern Company’s Tracks Near Maywood, Illinois,” Montezuma argued that Indians should be compensated the same amount as if they were white and that the settlement should be based on circumstances, not race or prejudice. The government, in the final analysis, was not prepared to admit that Indians had the same rights as white people. 32 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Besides providing medical attention and informal legal advice for Indians in need, Montezuma served as the Chicago connection for Indians passing through the city on their way east or west and for those who got stranded here for one reason or another. If a tribal delegation changed trains in Chicago, Montezuma might meet the members at one station and help them find another. When tribal members were waylaid in Chicago, abandoned by fly-by-night wild west shows for example, he might help them find their way home or find a job locally. He seems to have made a special effort to meet children going to or from boarding school, primarily Carlisle, where he himself had worked before moving to Chicago. Children traveling to these schools from out west often needed to pass through Chicago along the way. These dual roles of advocacy and social service, which made up such a major part of Montezuma’s personal life, were needed by Indians in Chicago as times changed. Several instances of Montezuma’s helpful generosity have entered the official record, reflecting his activities large and small over the quarter-century he lived in Chicago. For example, in 1899 he wrote to Commissioner of Indian Affairs W. A. Jones, recommending Emily Peake for a job at a Chicago warehouse operated by the Indian Service where goods were held before shipment to western reservations. Peake clerked at the Oneida Indian School at the time and he considered her “the most apt pupil [ever] graduated from Carlisle.”
Carlos Montezuma recognized the interrelationship of his career as both a physician and an Indian activist early on. He believed Indians needed to be conventionally educated to succeed in American society and facilitate their escape from the grinding poverty and colonial oppression the Indian Bureau helped maintain. Montezuma saw professional, educated Indians as the key to a positive Indian future, as he wrote to the pupils at Carlisle while he was yet a student at the Chicago Medical School in 1887. “I never have doubted that the great problem of the Indian question is capable of solution if the advantages which were open to me could be extended to all Indian youth,” he told them. William Jones, Anthropologist William Jones was a Fox Indian born on the Sauk and Fox Reservation in Oklahoma in 1871, to parents of mixed Fox and European backgrounds. He was raised by his paternal grandmother Katiqua, a daughter of the Fox chief Wa shi ho wa, after his mother’s early death. After Katiqua also passed away, he attended various boarding schools: a Quaker-run Indian school in Wabash, Indiana, the Hampton Institute in Virginia, and Phillips Academy Andover. Outside of the school year, he lived as a cowboy in Oklahoma. He later earned a scholarship to Harvard. Jones originally planned to become a medical doctor, so that he could return to his home community and provide quality professional medical services. But after meeting Frederick W. Putnam, Harvard’s Peabody Professor of Archaeology and Ethnology, he found he had a gift for the incipient field of linguistics and changed the course of his career. “I am afraid my dreams of ever becoming a doctor are all thrown aside. The field he opened out to me is certainly wide, with room enough for hundreds of intelligent workers. There is an opening without any question, and so my little mind is sent drifting in another direction.” Jones’s friend and biographer Henry Rideout later observed that Jones had a new goal in life after this meeting with Putnam: “He should return to the Indians not as a healer, but as the historian of their legends, the recorder of their language, and the interpreter of their most reverent beliefs.” To accomplish his goals, Jones gained a Presidential Scholar award to study under the internationally eminent anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University in New York. There he earned a master’s degree in 1901 and a doctorate in ethnology in 1904. He was the first American Indian to earn an anthropological degree. Jones quickly became the foremost Algonquian language expert in academia. He had a knack for languages and a good understanding of the protocol needed to conduct respectful research in tribal communities. His first research had been among his relatives, and thus he learned early to use the proper manners that are critical
Anthropologist William Jones paid his way at Philips Academy Andover and Harvard by working as an Oklahoma cowboy during the summer vacations. This photograph was taken c. 1910.
when in the field. Boas himself said of Jones that he “will presumably remain our principal source of information on the Central Algonquian.” But Jones could find no permanent employment in his subject in North America, making his future uncertain. To gain funding, he had to look for research subjects abroad. Jones came to Chicago in 1906 after meeting George A. Dorsey of the Field Museum of Natural History. Dorsey offered Jones a job conducting field work abroad, with his choice of assignment. Jones selected the Philippines as his ultimate destination. In the meantime, he secured shortterm funding from the Carnegie Institute to write up the results of his previous research. He thus spent his time before leaving for the Philippines in Chicago at the Field Museum (then located in Jackson Park) working on his own research and writings. He lived nearby and enjoyed the lakefront environment. He made friends readily, as he always had; his developing friendship with Dorsey lasted to the end of his short life. Jones appreciated the natural beauty of Chicago. He portrayed his surroundings, much of which had been created for the 1893 fair, in pleasant terms. The part of the city I am in is like an inland country town with lots of open air and space; and so I never Crossroads for a Culture | 33
In 1906, Jones came to Chicago’s Field Museum (shown here in 1909), at this location in Jackson Park.
go down town into the dust, cinders, rush and noise, only when I have to. The Museum, you know, is on the Lake. There are green plots, with trees often. For example, a maple comes up to my window. To smoke I must go out of doors, which in one way is a hardship, but in quite another a recreation; for the lawns, and groves, and lagoons, and big Lake are all there. William Jones left Chicago for the Philippines in 1907, but he kept up a friendship and a professional correspondence with Dorsey. They also maintained their habit of joking with and teasing one another, especially in relation to their favorite college and professional sports teams. In 1906 the hitless wonders, the Chicago White Sox, defeated the Chicago Cubs in the World Series, and for the next two years the Cubs themselves won the series. Dorsey had bet on the Sox and Jones supported the Cubs; in October 1907 the former wrote to the faraway Jones, “You win. The Sox are anchored in third place. The fight to be concluded within a week is between Detroit and Philadelphia, the former leading. The Cubs, of course, made good. I shall bring the money to you in a wheelbarrow, as I suppose you prefer silver.” 34 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Jones’s life and career were cut tragically short when he was murdered by Ilongots in March 1909 during a freighting dispute on a collecting trip in the Filipino interior. In his last weeks, as he experienced the end of a hot southern hemisphere summer, he penned a letter to Dorsey recalling the cold Chicago winters. If I remember it, this is the time [March] that the winds sweep down State Street, the chief janitor is economical with the coal, and the pipes gurgle lazily. I hope none of you are frozen . . . One of the things that Progressive Era Indians increasingly believed to be important was to show Indian culture, lifeways, and history in a positive light. They hoped to end the stereotypical views the non-Indian world held about them and provide a source of personal pride for all Indians. Dr. William Jones’s research with his own tribe as well as other indigenous groups helped to show that Indians were not backward peoples but had developed complex cultures worthy of academic study and perpetuation. Although Jones’s field of study opposed Montezuma’s assimilationist views, his pre-eminent scholarly pursuits represented just the kind of work that Montezuma strove to validate.
Francis Cayou, Athletic Director Francis Cayou, an Omaha Indian originally from Nebraska, probably first came to Chicago when he worked as a guard at the world’s fair in the summer of 1893. It is possible that Richard Henry Pratt recruited him there, because he enrolled at Carlisle the next fall. While at Carlisle, Cayou became a football and track star. He graduated in 1896 and matriculated at the University of Illinois in the fall of 1899. Although he attended the university for more than three years, he never graduated. He instead began his career as a coach and athletic director, first at the University of Illinois as a freshman coach in 1903, then as director of athletics at Wabash College in Indiana from 1904 to 1908, and finally holding the same position at Washington University in St. Louis from 1908 to 1913. Cayou then worked for the A. G. Spalding & Bros. Company in Chicago for two years and finally took a job at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center as an athletic director. Cayou’s work reflected an important concept of the reform era, that physical fitness was a key facet in the moral development of a healthy Christian citizenry. The introduction of this “muscular Christianity” to Indian boarding schools became a prominent feature of assimilationist efforts at this time. Cayou stayed at Great Lakes Naval Training Base until he moved to Oklahoma in 1925. There he became a leader of the Native American Church, a religious group whose sacraments include the hallucinogenic peyote cactus. He may have become a devotee of this belief system when he was in Chicago and associated with resident peyotists such as Winnebago tribal member Oliver LaMere. During the twelve years he lived in the Chicago area, Cayou also served as the president of the city’s first two Indian organizations, the Indian Fellowship League (IFL) and the Grand Council Fire of American Indians (GCFAI). The IFL was created by a mixed group of American Indians and white Chicago residents on May 6, 1919, at the Chicago Historical Society. It showed the diversity of Chicago’s Indian population even at that early date; its members included American Indians from thirty-five tribes. More than one hundred people attended its first meeting, including Carlos Montezuma and the visiting Dr. Charles Eastman, president of the SAI. The presence of these nationally prominent Indian leaders at their first meeting fed the IFL’s high hopes to work effectively on behalf of all Indians. The members immediately decided that “the principal objective of [the organization] should be the abolishment of the Indian Bureau System.” This view came no doubt from Montezuma. Another hope Indians held for the organization was articulated by LaMere: the eradication of scholarly and published stereotypes of American Indians. The league remained primarily assimilationist in
When this photograph was taken in 1919, Francis Cayou was a coach at the Illinois Athletic Club.
its goals and methods, however, probably a reflection of the perspective of the white participants among the founders and perhaps Carlos Montezuma and Francis Cayou as well. In 1922, Cayou wrote, “One hundred years from now the Indian will be practically extinct. He is living in a stage of transition from his aboriginal life to one of absorption into the famous American melting pot. It is another case of survival of the fittest.” To a large extent the IFL was dominated publically by its white membership. Only one other Indian besides Cayou ever took an official leadership role in the IFL. Walter Battice, or Sheet Lightning, was a graduate of the Hampton Institute in Virginia and the secretary of the Sac and Fox tribe in Iowa. He served as vice president in 1920. The IFL existed until 1923, when it was superseded by the GCFAI. Cayou played a leadership role in that organization as well. The GCFAI had both educational and social service functions. Many Indians who moved to cities found difficulties upon their arrival. Before other relief agencies or government programs helped them, organizations like the GCFAI offered limited social services, providing relief Crossroads for a Culture | 35
The Haskell Institute’s (now the Haskell Indians Nations University) football team faced the University of Chicago on November 7, 1903. Haskell won, 17 to 11.
to Indians who were sick and helping the unemployed find work. It also maintained a loan fund, an Indian scholarship fund, a Christmas Cheer Fund, sponsored calls to hospitalized Indians, and sometimes covered funeral expenses. Cayou served as the GCFAI’s first president, or “Chief of Chiefs,” a post he held for two years. Cayou’s leadership within these organizations was perhaps premised on the belief he held while living in Chicago (and, like Montezuma, apparently changed later) that the old Indian cultural ways were dead, and Indians must Americanize in order to survive as individuals. His view, like those of Progressive Era reformers, was that assimilation represented the only way for American Indians to avoid permanent relegation to America’s past. In 1914, when he applied for a job at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (as director of athletics, a position that was ultimately discontinued), he wrote to emphasize both his ability as a coach and a leader among non-Indians and Indians alike: I have tasted the bitter and the sweets of life and have I hope & believe arrived at the age of genuine reason. I have been a leader and consulor [sic] of young men (and they have not been Indians either) these ten years, and I feel sure that not one of them have aught to say against me. Cayou was a product of the Progressive Era reform movement, a man who worked hard on behalf of Indians, 36 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
in a field that the reformers deemed of high value. He was at the helm of the first two Chicago Indian organizations as the Indian Citizenship Act became law in 1924, granting universal United States citizenship to American Indians. His efforts, like those of the reformers with whom he worked, were aimed at developing Indian citizenship in more than a simply legal sense. Scott Henry Peters, Businessman After Cayou’s tenure as president ended, Scott Henry Peters took on his key leadership role within the GCFAI. He left a stronger record of action than Cayou, and in his reign as president we can see the beginnings of the division between Indian and non-Indian members of the organization. A Chippewa Indian originally from Isabella County, Michigan, he was educated at Mount Pleasant and at Carlisle, where he learned to be a tailor. He opened up his own cleaning and tailor shop on the suburban North Shore of Chicago in about 1905 and lived in Wilmette, where he was considered a prominent businessman. After he became president of the GCFAI in 1925, Peters involved himself in numerous Indian activities in the Chicago area. His writings and speeches during his eightyear tenure illuminate his thoughts and feelings about being an Indian and the responsibilities he felt in running an Indian organization. Peters was concerned primarily with advancing Indian rights, improving the conditions under which Indians lived, and increasing public awareness of major issues regarding modern Indians both on
and off reservations. He and the GCFAI represented a new era in Indian leadership, as Indians attempted to take control of both their own future and the outside world’s definition of “Indian.” Perhaps because of the poverty and isolating family tragedies he experienced as a child, Peters felt it was the duty of all people to “encourage the young Indian to leave the reservation and . . . fight his battle of life on his [own] merits.” He believed that Indians would find a better life off their tribal lands and saw himself as a model of Indian entrepreneurship. He was living proof that Indians could adapt to modern America: “Give my people the same opportunity that I have had, and they will meet you face to face in this social and business world.” But Peters’s views went much deeper than those informing Progressive Era reformers of total Indian assimilation. Although in retrospect his actions may seem to reflect the assimilationist philosophy of the time, his opinions on the capabilities of Indians were different than the non-Indian view. He was a strong proponent of the potential of Indians. Other boarding school–educated Indians of his time, like Montezuma, felt the same way, and many increasingly began to view the history and culture of Indians as an important contribution to America. While Peters was president, the GCFAI continued the observance of Indian Day, a practice begun by the Indian Fellowship League. In 1919 the Illinois legislature passed a law recognizing the fourth Friday in September as American Indian Day, and by 1928 the GCFAI held its annual celebrations at the Chicago Historical Society for the third time. As usual several Indians attended in “ceremonial dress,” and a “peace pipe ritual” was performed. More than one hundred Indians and two hundred non-Indians attended. By most counts, half the Chicago Indian population was in attendance. There was also a strong effort to show living Indians contributing to modern American society. The evening’s speaker, William Kershaw, was a Menominee attorney who had recently won the Democratic nomination for Congress in the Wisconsin primaries and whose patriotic 1915 poem “The Indian’s Salute to His Country” became a staple text in Chicago classrooms at Indian Day celebrations for years to come. That year the GCFAI also helped stage programs of songs and stories at schools across Chicago. Peters’s initiative had begun a year earlier when “Big Bill” Thompson ran for re-election as the mayor of Chicago and accused superintendent of schools William McAndrew of promoting pro-British “propaganda” in public school history books. Thompson proposed that the books be rewritten from an “America First” viewpoint. After the election, in response to this nativistic movement, Peters headed a committee of Indians who presented their point of view to the mayor.
We do not know if school histories are pro-British, but we do know that they are unjust to the life of our people—the American Indians. . . . White men call Indians savages. What is civilization? Its marks are a noble religion and philosophy, original arts, stirring music, rich story and legend. We had these. Then we were not savages, but a civilized race. . . . Peters saw the textbook debate as an opportunity to advance his views on the bias of American history and a chance to change the way non-Indians viewed Indians of the past. He insisted not only was the historical Indian a man, but that Indians of the present were men and women capable of making important decisions regarding their own futures. In his speech at the Indian Day celebrations of 1929, Peters continued his appeal to Indians to move off reservations. He insisted that the federal government should stop imposing farming on Indians, who should become managers of their own affairs. In that speech he also proposed a convention of all the tribes in Chicago in September 1930 to discuss self-determination. This gathering is to insure that the voice of our people shall be heard in determining our own destiny. Within the last year much light has been thrown on the conditions prevailing among the Indian people, principally through the efforts of non-Indian people. It is necessary that the Indians themselves discuss their own affairs and set forth their views, that justice may be obtained. All tribes were asked to send a representative, and important Indian leaders were asked to attend individually. Despite this political slant, most of Indian Day was set aside for entertainment. Indians appeared in full regalia, “demonstrating the primitive lore of the deep forest and wide plains” in the Art Institute’s Fullerton Hall. These demonstrations, strongly supported by the GCFAI’s nonIndian membership, tended to undercut the strength of Peters’s message of modernity. The latter also made better copy for general newspapers such as the Chicago Daily Tribune, which circulated among the larger population and thus helped shape public perceptions. Peters became increasingly ambivalent about the role that non-Indians should play in what he referred to as “the movement.” He insisted that it should be up to Indians to control their destiny. Regulating image was an important part of controlling the place of Indians in American society. The early urban alliances of Indians and non-Indians were becoming strained as leaders like Peters pushed for Indian rights, while non-Indian members continued to participate in activities and meetings that fulfilled their romantic views of Indians as ecologists Crossroads for a Culture | 37
As an opera singer, Tsianina Blackstone (above in an undated portrait) used her fame to support tribal women’s interests. 38 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
who could help establish a forest preserve movement or craftsmen who sold bead and leather work. Indian leaders also faced discouragement when they followed the rules established by white society. Their efforts at assimilation were often met with racial prejudice, either through individuals or within institutions. By 1934 Peters shifted his efforts to government work, taking a job with John Collier’s Office of Indian Affairs as a relocation officer who found jobs for Indians in both rural and urban areas away from reservation communities. Tsianina Blackstone, Opera Singer Women’s clubs in America organized their membership as college clubs, ethnic clubs, professional and civic clubs, or clubs to work on specific issues. By the 1930s Illinois and local women’s clubs had supported the work of American Indians for a number of years. In March 1930, American Indian women organized their own club, the First Daughters of America. The two key founders were Tsianina Blackstone, a well-known Cherokee Creek operatic mezzo-soprano, and Anna Fitzgerald, a Chippewa woman whose husband Charles, an attorney, helped with the legal work of the organization’s establishment. The club had several purposes according to its charter. It was formed to contest prevailing stereotypes perpetuated by wild west shows, Hollywood, and school books; to support Indian art and culture; and “to emulate the supreme qualities of American Indian womanhood.” The First Daughters consisted entirely of American Indians, although non-Indians were occasionally given honorary membership for providing aid to the club. It also sponsored an affiliated junior club of “white girls who are interested in the welfare work.” The First Daughters numbered some ten members when counts were provided in newspaper reports. Like most women’s clubs, they held meetings and events at the homes of members or at stylish tearooms or restaurants such as the Narcissus Club at Marshall Field and Company. Blackstone, the founding president of the First Daughters, was also referred to as Princess Tsianina, which she found amusing. “I’m not really an Indian princess,” she once laughingly told a Chicago Tribune reporter. “You see, there is no such thing as an Indian princess. My father was a Cherokee Creek chief, and for that reason the white man conferred the title upon me and it has always remained.” Prominent Indian women had long been referred to as princesses, in sources dating back to Pocahontas’s time, just as prominent Indian men had long been referred to as chiefs by members of the larger society. Blackstone was a popular performer who “outfitted herself in a buckskin beaded dress of her own design that fairly typified the public’s expectations of a typical ‘Indian princess.’” She worked together on stage with Charles
Wakefield Cadman, a non-Indian composer, and first performed in Chicago as early as 1916 and 1917 at the Ziegfeld Theater. She served as president of the First Daughters from 1930 until approximately 1934. To the press Blackstone emphasized the role the First Daughters played in promoting Indian social welfare. All of its members were involved in welfare work, which formed the basis of the organization’s purposes. They raised funds to support higher education efforts of Indian women and to send much-needed aid to reservation communities. She stated: Our greatest piece of work . . . has been the opening of a shop to help the Indian people market their wares directly to the public without a middleman. This not only stimulates them to greater effort but develops the arts to a higher degree of perfection. The shop that Blackstone established, referred to in the press as an “American Indian emporium,” was located at 540 North Michigan Avenue. The shop purchased goods, such as Navajo rugs from tribal members in reservation communities, to sell to wealthy Chicagoans, such as John L. Kraft. Blackstone observed that the shop served several purposes: it provided economic opportunity for Indian artisans, it encouraged the perpetuation of Indian arts, and by displaying intricately made artwork, it helped combat stereotypes that Indians were lazy and their arts primitive. Although she used her Indian identity onstage in a way that cemented stereotypical American views of Native women, Blackstone also used her identity and fame to benefit impoverished tribal people. Through her club work, she helped the First Daughters and other women’s clubs provide support for individuals in tribal communities and opportunities for Indian individuals to begin to make a professional or financial life in modern America. Though Blackstone moved away from Chicago in the mid-1930s, the First Daughters continued their work into the 1950s. Charles Albert Bender, Baseball Player Charles Albert Bender was an Ojibwe Indian, originally from Minnesota. His father Albert was GermanAmerican, and his mother Mary of the Mississippi Band of Chippewa in central Minnesota. He attended Carlisle, where he played sports before graduating. He stayed in Pennsylvania after he was hired by famed owner Connie Mack to pitch for the Philadelphia Athletics, with whom he played from 1903 to 1914. Mack referred to Bender, who played most of his hall-of-fame career for Mack’s team, as “the greatest money pitcher the game has ever known.” Bender excelled in an age when racism in baseball was prevalent. While baseball teams did not hire African American players, they did hire American Crossroads for a Culture | 39
In a racist era, Charles Bender (here warming up with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1909) was no pushover. When fans derisively greeted him with war whoops, he called them “foreigners.”
Indians. Bender was pragmatic about his choices. “The reason I went into baseball as a profession was that when I left school baseball offered me the best opportunity both for money and advancement.” Bender ended up in Chicago after he had been in baseball for more than twenty years. He interrupted his baseball career after the United States became involved in World War I, but after the war, he worked as a coach, manager, or scout in both the major and minor leagues. In the summer of 1925, White Sox manager Eddie Collins brought him to Chicago to coach the team’s young pitchers. Bender was already well known in Chicago for his marvelous pitching against the Cubs in the 1910 World Series. As one of baseball’s most famous pitchers, Bender was surely the best known American Indian in Chicago during his stay. He worked so well with Ted Blankenship in particular (who had the best seasons of his career under Bender’s tutelage) that Collins brought him back the next season. Bender coached for the White Sox from 1925 to 1926 and even pitched one inning for them in 1925, eight years after his pitching career officially ended. 40 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
In the words of his biographer Tom Swift, Bender “was a success according to Pratt’s benchmarks,” the type of American Indian reformers were attempting to mold. “He had a lovely wife, steady income, and a middle-class row home far away from the reservation.” Even though Bender had a lifelong career in baseball, he regularly experienced discrimination. Publicly known as “Chief,” he faced racial taunting throughout his career as a player and coach. His stardom failed to shield him from racial epithets; in fact, it might have intensified them. Bender was no pushover. When fans derisively greeted him with war whoops, he was known to respond by calling them “foreigners.” According to Swift, Bender once said, “I do not want my name to be presented to the public as an Indian, but as a pitcher.” Bender was admitted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953. In analyzing whether Bender deserved that honor, Swift comments that his statistical numbers marginally justify it. There are other considerations, though, as Swift also points out. “But if the Hall of Fame is supposed to be a record of the great human achievements in the game’s history . . . it’s hard to fathom a shrine that excludes Charles Albert Bender.” Bender came through the boarding-school system to succeed at the top of his chosen profession. He longed to be recognized on white terms but found what other Indians learned as well—that America’s racial hierarchy and attitudes during the Progressive Era did not shield him from discriminatory behavior, even if he followed the dominant society’s rules. Evelyn Frechette, Entertainer Evelyn “Billie” Frechette was a Menominee Indian from Wisconsin. Chicago was an exciting place for a young Indian woman from a small rural reservation community. Frechette arrived in the city in approximately 1927, as an eighteen year old who simply “wanted to come to Chicago . . . I hadn’t been any place in my life . . . [and] Chicago was a big and wonderful place to me.” Billie, who took her nickname from her Menominee father, arrived in the city two months pregnant and bereft of any support. She visited two hospitals, including the Salvation Army hospital, before being sent to the Beulah Home for Unwed Mothers on the 2100 block of North Clark Street. The home was rundown and filthy, run by shysters who preyed on its inhabitants. Frechette gave birth to a son, who was taken from her and died within a few months. She did not learn of his death until much later. Unlike American Indians who came to the city from eastern boarding schools, individuals like Frechette had little formal education and few marketable skills. Without an education or skills it was difficult to find permanent employment. Frechette, a beautiful young woman, found a variety of positions in Chicago, as a saleswoman, nurse,
In this 1913 image, Bender stands ready for action against the White Sox at Comiskey Park. He later coached the Chicago team and even pitched a special inning for them in 1925. Crossroads for a Culture | 41
In June 1936, Evelyn Frechette returned to Chicago after the death of John Dillinger. Smiling brightly and fashionably dressed, she told reporters it was “the straight and narrow for her from now on.� 42 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
waitress, and “dress maid.” She also participated in the conventional rituals of urban American life, hanging out in ice cream parlors and drinking in speakeasies. During her off-work hours, Frechette helped the Indian entertainers who performed for non-Indian citizens of Chicago. She joined her sister Patsy and others when the Indian Players sponsored entertainment and events at local churches or civic groups. The Indian Players was a theater group established by the Grand Council Fire in 1929 whose members put on performances throughout the city. The actors were all Indian people, and they produced plays of Indian legends in “full native garb.” Frechette remembered “they put on plays called ‘Little Fire Face’ and ‘The Elm Tree.’ They got all dressed up in their feathers and beads and painted their faces and danced the way we used to on the Indian reservation.” Frechette admitted that she “wasn’t a very good actress” herself. She also helped out cooking wild rice and parched corn and washing dishes. Serving traditional Indian food was apparently part of the Indian Players program, just as it was during festive occasions back home on the reservation. In 1932, Frechette married Welton “Walter” Spark, a local small-time crook, at Cook County Jail in a double wedding in which a friend of hers married Spark’s partner in crime. It was perhaps at a speakeasy that she met her first husband. Spark eventually broke parole and was sent to the U.S. Penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas. After that, his wife got a job as a club’s hat check girl. Soon thereafter, she took up with the notorious gangster John Dillinger. Dillinger, the most infamous criminal of his time, was dubbed “Public Enemy Number One” by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Once Billie started spending time with him, she also became a target for federal authorities. She was picked up by federal agents in 1934 at a Chicago tavern, and when Dillinger learned of her arrest he burst out “crying like a baby.” Frechette chronicled her experiences in a True Confessions magazine article, “My Love Life with Dillinger.” The popularity of this magazine cannot be overstated. As a result, after Charles Bender, Frechette was doubtless the best known American Indian in Chicago at the time, and her story gained renewed interest via her portrayal by the French actress Marion Cotillard in the 2009 film Public Enemies. Frechette served time as Dillinger’s accomplice in a federal prison facility in Milan, Michigan, until 1936. Afterward, she capitalized on her association with Dillinger as part of a traveling carnival-like anticrime show. Despite this, and her feature in True Confessions magazine, she eventually faded from the public’s eye—until Public Enemies brought her back into the national consciousness.
The Indian leaders and individuals discussed here are representative of many others who worked hard to educate the non-Indian world about American Indians both in past and present terms during the Progressive Era. In doing so, they successfully created a relatively safe and comfortable haven for tribal people far from home and laid the basis for a new kind of urban Indian community. Their efforts to define Chicago’s perceptions of American Indians in a positive way proved difficult to sustain in the long term. But Tsianina Blackstone, Carlos Montezuma, Scott Henry Peters, and others still voiced powerful new Indian understandings of their world and provided the organizational basis for future generations to continue their efforts. David R. M. Beck, professor and department chair of Native American Studies at the University of Montana, is author of several books on American Indian history. Rosalyn R. LaPier is a member of the faculty of Environmental Studies at the University of Montana. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 22, DN-003173; 23, i65246; 24, i65466; 25, top: i65247, bottom: i65467; 26, i51311; 27, DN-0001054; 28, top: i65457, center: i65456; 29–31, all courtesy of the Library of Congress: 29, LC-USZ6226798; 30, top: LC-USZ62-55420, middle: LC-USZ62-72437, bottom: LC-USZ62-54032; 31, top: LC-USZ62-55456, bottom: LC-USZ62-26787; 32, SDN-053616; 33, frontispiece, Henry Rideout, William Jones (1912); 34, DN-052479; 35, detail, SDN061734; 36, detail, SDN-002118; 38, courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-B2-5179-14; 40, detail, SDN-054923; 41, SDN058734; 42, courtesy of and © Corbis. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | General treatments can be found in Frederick J. Dockstader’s Great North American Indians (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1977) and Hazel W. Hertzberg, The Search for an American Indian Identity (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1971). For an examination of the American Indian at the World’s Columbian Exposition, see Raymond D. Fogelson, “The Red Man in the White City,” in David Hurst Thomas, ed., Columbian Consequences (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). Simon Pokagon’s own works include O-Gi-Maw-Kwe Mit-I-Gwa-Ki (Queen of the Woods) (Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1899), and the pamphlet “The Red Man’s Greeting” (Hartford, MI: C. H. Engle, 1893). For two perspectives of Montezuma, see Peter Iverson, Carlos Montezuma and the Changing World of American Indians (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982) and Leon Speroff, Carlos Montezuma, M.D.—A Yavapai American Hero (Portland, OR: Arnica Publishing, 2003). Henry Milner Rideout’s biography William Jones: Indian, Cowboy, American Scholar, and Anthropologist in the Field (New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1912) deserves to be better known. Tom Swift examines Chief Bender’s Burden (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Crossroads for a Culture | 43
Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y I
Chicago’s Other Coliseum R O B E RT P R U T E R
C
hicago is one of the youngest major cities in the world, exploding from a population of a mere 150 in 1833, when it incorporated as a town, to become one of the world’s great cities by the 1890s, when it reached more than one million inhabitants as a thriving industrial, commercial, and cultural giant. No other major city in the world in the nineteenth century grew from nothing into a great metropolis, which is why historian Phillip Johnson has rightly called Chicago the “city of the century.” Chicago signaled to the world its coming of age by hosting the spectacular World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. While Chicago was leading the world in urban architecture by developing the modern skyscraper, however, the “White City” recalled the classical design of the ancients, as the nineteenth century was still under the thrall of Greece and Rome. Millions flocked to Chicago during the fair. When it closed, civic leaders decided to sustain Chicago as an attraction by constructing an immense indoor arena called the Coliseum, evoking the great structure of ancient Rome. The planned structure would host political conventions, entertainments, sporting events, and trade shows, all on a massive scale befitting the great metropolis. Hailed as the world’s largest indoor arena, the Coliseum represented Chicago at full maturity, a flourishing city of a country rapidly becoming the richest and most powerful on earth. It rose in the South Side community of Woodlawn, on Sixty-Third Street, between Harper and Blackstone Streets, a block from the entrance of the former fairgrounds. The site sat at the terminus of the Jackson Park elevated line, which three years earlier had brought tens of thousands of visitors to the fair. Top: Wolf’s Point 1833, home to the area’s early settlers, as painted by Justin Herriott, c. 1902. The city’s growth was explosive; by 1885, it boasted the world’s first skyscraper (right), the Home Insurance Building, shown here in 1926. 44 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
The 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition awed visitors from around the world. Above: The construction of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building gave little clue of the splendor that arose. Below: View looking east from the central Court of Honor; photograph by C. D. Arnold.
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Chicago has had three Coliseums in its history, all indoor facilities. The first Coliseum briefly made an appearance in the late 1860s at State and Washington Streets in Chicago’s downtown, hosting horse shows, boxing matches, and circus acts. This arena was a rowdy place, serving the city’s bachelor subculture. Its history is nebulous, as we know neither what year it was built nor when it disappeared from the city’s landscape. The third Coliseum was built in 1900 and lasted until the 1980s, when it was torn down. The Woodlawn facility, the second Coliseum, had a difficult history. A great indoor arena was immediately planned for construction by the Chicago Exhibition Company at the close of the world’s fair on the grounds where Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show had been held on Sixty-Third Street. The nationwide recession that had engulfed the country at the time, however, delayed the financing and the start of the construction. Work on the structure finally began in the summer of 1895. The building, designed in Italianate Renaissance style by the S. S. Bemen architectural firm, was an immense edifice, 770 feet in length and 300 feet wide, covering nearly five and a half acres. The structure included a 240-foot-high tower, plus mezzanine stories and a roof garden. The central area of the structure was 692 feet long, 225 feet wide, and 70 feet high, with lower seating boxes and upper boxes set on a 38-foot-wide gallery rounding the area. The optimum seating capacity was estimated at forty thousand. The Coliseum neared completion on August 25, 1896, as six hundred workers worked feverishly on finishing the roof with green lumber so that the venue would be ready for the grand opening on September 2 with the Barnum & Bailey Circus. That night, at around 11:30 P.M., after the workers had left, the building completely and mysteriously collapsed in a pile of timber, bricks, and metal beams. The exact cause of the collapse was never determined, but strong speculation assumed several factors, beginning with a pile of lumber weighing close to 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
seventy-five tons concentrated on top of just one of the fourteen 218-by-60-foot arch trusses. This, plus the lack of connection of the arches and a flaw in the fastening of one arches to the foundation likely brought the building down. The owners and architect Bemen immediately began work creating a new building, somewhat reduced in length but wider and taller than its ill-fated predecessor In the summer of 1895, the Chicago Exhibition Company began constructing the city’s second Coliseum. Materials from the following summer’s National Democratic Convention depict the structure in two different ways, probably as it originally appeared (left) and as it was rebuilt after its collapse (below).
and more spartan, without a tower (planned but never built), mezzanine stories, and a roof garden. The construction of the 727-by-300-foot building ultimately entailed the use of 2.5 million pounds of steel, 3.2 million feet of lumber, and 3 million bricks and was completed in late May 1896. The building was impressive for its day, twice as large as Madison Square Garden; its interior supported by twelve massive steel trusses, 100 feet high, with a span of 230 feet. Visitors entered the Coliseum via one of three vestibules—one on the south end, facing Sixty-Third Street, 144 feet wide and 50 feet deep, and on the east side, two smaller ones. The vestibules led into the grand interior hall, which was 676 feet in length, nearly 200 feet wide, and 100 feet high. It
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Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World made its mark in Chicago outside the grounds of the 1893 world’s fair. Cody brought the show to the Coliseum in 1896 and 1897. 48 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
featured two elevated seating areas—a balcony 25 feet above the floor and 40 feet wide, fully encircling the arena, and a gallery 40 feet above the floor and 12 feet wide. Together the interior and vestibules provided seven acres of interior floor space. One hundred arc lights illuminated the interior, each of which were “reinforced by a powerful reflector,” which a reporter described as the “most brilliant illumination” ever found in any building interior. Chicago was now ready to host one of the biggest and splashiest entertainment shows of the nineteenth century, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World opened the Coliseum on June 1, 1896. The show, first established in 1883, was at the height of its popularity at this time. William F. Cody, through his reputation as a scout, guide, and buffalo hunter, built his celebrity via dime novels as a Western hero, beginning with Ned Budline’s Buffalo Bill, the King of Border Men in 1869. In 1872, he began performing on Eastern stages as himself in melodramatic Western-themed plays, alternating theater with his work in the West. In 1883, Cody presented his first Wild West Show in Omaha, Nebraska, and the following year added one of his most popular acts, Annie Oakley, who soon became the most famous female sharpshooter of all time. Using genuine cowboys and Indians, the show presented several reenactments of the storied Wild West, such as an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage, plus demonstrations of riding, roping, and buffalo hunting. In 1887, Cody became an international celebrity when his Wild West Show was presented as part of the American exhibition at Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in London. In 1893, the Wild West Show had a long run in Chicago outside the grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition (it was not an official part of the fair, but attracted thousands of visitors nonetheless). The show was greatly expanded with a large variety of horse units from around the world, called the “Congress of Rough Riders of the World.” These acts included military units from Germany, England, and France, who did fancy drilling, plus a variety of more exotic units that included Mexican vaqueros, Syrian and Arabian horsemen, Russian Cossacks, and Argentine gauchos, who did fancy and trick riding. Buffalo Bill also introduced his most famous western reenactment, “The Battle of Little Big Horn,” in which real Indians recreated the massacre of General George Custer and his troops, some of whom were played by real soldiers. The set up for the Buffalo Bill show in the Coliseum provided for an arena 600 feet long and 160 feet wide. On one end of the hall was draped a huge panoramic backdrop, 100 feet high and 200 feet long, showing a western scene with mountains in the background to better illustrate the reenactments. The audience surely
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody pictured on August 23, 1916, at the old Cubs Park. His showmanship made him an international celebrity. Among his achievements: introducing sharpshooter Annie Oakley to the world.
experienced an exciting show as the various horse units did wild racing down the six hundred–foot arena; the Cossacks charging down upon the audience with drawn swords must have set the blood rushing. Indians on horses attacked the racing Deadwood Stagecoach, but the audience did not get the Battle of Little Big Horn. The somewhat jaded Chicago Tribune reporter was full of wry comments, writing, “Five buffalo allowed themselves to be hunted around the ring without any fatalities,” and remarking that when Buffalo Bill came riding to the rescue of some settlers, the Indians “seemed struck by the fear that he was going to reduce their salaries, and they immediately retired.” Spectators of such shows in 1896, unlike the audience of today, had not been exposed to western images on television, nor to photographs in newspapers of the day (crude ink drawings were the rule). Only a rare book or magazine featured a photo. So to merely gaze on living breathing Indians, cowboys, and buffalo—as well as exotic Cossacks and Arab horsemen—was in itself a thrill, let alone the reenactments and the riding, roping, and shooting. The Buffalo Bill Wild West Show returned to the Coliseum a second time in September 1897 for a two-week stay. The show was modified from the previous year’s visit, becoming “more American,” in the words of Buffalo Bill, perhaps reflecting a growing nationalism of America in the Gilded Age. A larger percentage of the show was given over to United States cavalry units. Newspapers were taken with Yesterday’s City | 49
how large the show was, noting the fourteen acres of tents in the vacant lots surrounding the Coliseum housing the show, and the forty-three sixty-foot box cars used to bring the show to Chicago. The Coliseum next hosted what had been anticipated the previous year when the building was being erected, the 1896 Democratic Convention, held July 7 through 11. This hugely contentious convention was bitterly divided between the largely eastern industrial elite, who wanted to maintain what they called a “sound” money policy with the gold standard, and the agricultural forces in the South and West, who wanted a bimetallic money standard of silver and gold (expressed as “Free Silver Coinage” at a 16 to 1—silver to gold valuation). The arrivals for the convention were no doubt in awe of the immense indoor structure. A book published later in the year on the convention said of the Coliseum: There had lately been erected in Chicago a vast structure known as the Coliseum, intended for the accommodation of such great gatherings as this, and the incoming multitude of delegates and alternates found the most complete arrangements for the reception and for holding a convention on a grand scale ever known in the political history of the country.
The Coliseum accommodated 906 delegates, who were organized in a 125-by-80-foot area before a center stage, and a multitude of nondelegate attendees, who numbered on some days up to 25,000. These included, according to historians R. Craig Sautter and Edward W. Burke, “spectators, political operatives, dignitaries from the city, party officials, and all those diverse interests looking to gain political power or spoils” spread out over hundreds of yards of floor seating, plus hundreds of reporters located at tables below the rostrum. To late nineteenth-century attendees who were unaccustomed to viewing huge crowds inside such large arenas, one reporter explained: The one feature of the hall which impressed upon every spectator was its immensity. . . . To a person in the center of the hall the scene looked like nothing so much as it did like a big war panorama. The people in the gallery were so far away they seemed painted against the canvas or bunting at their backs, and the peculiar light from overhead and the iron girders rising at the sides all carried out the impression of being in the center of a panorama. For political excitement, the attendees had to wait until the third day of the convention, July 9, which featured
The Coliseum’s promoters envisioned the site as a host for political conventions. The National Democratic Convention of 1896 was among the most contentious. It included William Jennings Bryan’s legendary “Cross of Gold” speech and, ultimately, his nomination for president. 50 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Top: This diagram of the interior of the Coliseum describes it as the largest permanent convention hall in the world and illustrates the setup for the 1896 National Democratic Convention. Above: The seating arrangement for delegates. Yesterday’s City | 51
P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth played for two glorious weeks at the Coliseum in 1896. Above: Inside the 1881 program, Barnum boasted that his circus gave “the public an opportunity to see such an entertainment as they have never seen before.” 52 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
the fight over the platform between the gold-standard advocates and the silver advocates, and a former two-time Congressman from Nebraska, William Jennings Bryan, made one of the most famous and rousing orations in American history with his “Cross of Gold” speech. With impassioned oratory in a clear sonorous voice that resonated across the huge chamber, Bryan inspired and moved the crowd with his moral fervor. He closed with these immortal words: “We shall answer their demands for a gold standard by saying to them, ‘You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns.’” He then touched his temples, extended his arms Christlike, and roared, “You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.” According to Sautter and Burke, the crowd was “electrified . . . first into stunned silence and then into an ecstatic rapture that was deafening and chilling . . . The floor broke into pandemonium as bands played, delegates marched, men cried, and foot stomping spread like an earthquake through the immense hall.” The speech propelled Bryan into winning the Democratic Party nomination two days later. After the convention, the Coliseum continued to serve as a venue for political rallies. In October 1896, Republican vice presidential candidate Theodore Roosevelt came to the Coliseum to deliver a campaign address to the Republican College League and attracted 13,000; and on Election Day, November 4, the Chicago Tribune hosted a rally for “largely a McKinley crowd” to get reports of elections results for some 25,000 attendees. As the election bulletins came in, they were projected on a huge screen at the end of the hall. In October 1896, the Coliseum hosted the biggest and most spectacular three-ring circus of the nineteenth century, the Barnum & Bailey Circus, “The Greatest Show on Earth” as it proudly billed itself well before its merger with the Ringling Brothers Circus. P. T. Barnum founded his circus in 1871, started promoting his show as the greatest on earth in 1877, and merged with the Cooper and Bailey Circus to form the Barnum & Bailey Circus in 1881. With the merger, Barnum & Bailey introduced the first three-ring show, establishing itself as the preeminent circus in North America during the 1880s and 1890s. It drew customers with such legendary acts as Tom Thumb (a midget who had joined Barnum in 1842) and Jumbo (advertised as the world’s largest elephant). The circus had been scheduled to open in the earlier incarnation of the Coliseum in September 1895 before it came crashing down only weeks before completion. A year later, Barnum & Bailey was back. In the northern part of the Coliseum’s great hall, a hippodrome track was constructed, within which three circus rings and an elevated platform were erected. The seats that encircled the track were designed to hold twenty thousand viewers. Seating was also arranged around the southern end of the
In 1882, the circus trumpeted its newest celebrity, Jumbo, “the largest elephant that ever lived,” recently acquired from the London Zoo. Sadly, circus-goers to the second Coliseum missed seeing the pachyderm marvel, as he died only a few years after his arrival in North America.
hall for the menagerie and the Oriental India sideshow. A hanging bandstand midway between the southern and northern ends was constructed for an orchestra. For the two-week engagement, the circus shows were held twice a day, at 2:00 P.M. and 8:00 P.M. The circus began with a grand parade that snaked its way around Chicago’s South Side avenues and boulevards for twentytwo miles before reaching the Coliseum. A Chicago Tribune reporter contrasted the opening of the circus with the well-known politicians that appeared in the Coliseum three months earlier: “The great arches of the Coliseum, which once echoed the eloquence of Chauncey Depew, the magnetic tones of Bourke Cockran, and the words of William Jennings Bryan, resounded last night with the whoops of Hindee [sic] fakirs, the mellow trumpeting of trick elephants, and the jabbering of monkeys.” The reporter also gave a full account of the three-ring acts, opening with: “the three rings, the platforms, and the air above became filled with sliding, jumping, turning, twisting, running, riding men and women, horses, elephants, and pigs.” The paper reported that the circus brought four hundred horses. Some were used for a Yesterday’s City | 53
The Coliseum’s lifespan coincided with America’s bicycling craze. Above: Mae Sawyer Stibgen (right) and a friend ride with the Lincoln Cycling Camera Club in Half Day, Illinois, in September 1896. Right: A bicycle parade on South Michigan Avenue (looking north) in May 1897.
parade of faux monarchs, such as Queen Victoria and the Emperor of Germany, surrounded by cavalry detachments, and fifty were used in a horse show. The Coliseum operated in the midst of a great bicycle craze. Millions of Americans took to the roads to tour and travel while whistling the Tin Pan Alley tune, “Daisy Bell (Bicycle Built for Two).” Bicycle racing became a spectator sport, and bicycle manufacturing and marketing became a major industry. In mid-July 1896, the Chicago Cycling Club announced that it would conduct races in the Coliseum on ten dates in October and eight in November. Later in the month, the National Cycle Exhibition Company announced a full schedule of races for the remainder of the year at the Coliseum. Each month, a meet lasting from two to six days would be held in the arena. The company promised all kinds of races—short and long distance, twenty-four-hour races, six-day races, and more—and said that it had secured the Coliseum for a “number of years.” The first races were held on August 7 and 8, 1896, when 5,000 spectators flocked to the Coliseum the first day to see an all-day schedule of quarter-mile to mile races from novices to top professionals from around the world. The races were held on the longest indoor track in the world, a quarter-mile plank surface so smooth that several world records were broken. Soon the track built a reputation of “being the fastest indoor track in the world.” A reporter commented, “The spectators who sat in the great building howled themselves hoarse at the finishes and applauded to the echo when the globe trotters [foreign racers] appeared.” 54 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
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The Associated Cycling Clubs of Chicago sponsored road races for several years. 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
Cyclists J. A. Spenks (from left), C. G. Starsch, Dick Strutz, and an unidentified rider position their bicycles in front of the Water Tower on North Michigan Avenue for the start of a race in 1901.
The records continued apace in September, when a Chicago racer, C. W. Miller, set an American record for 100 miles, before an audience described by the Tribune as “one of the largest crowds which have yet attended the races.” The reporter provided no exact numbers, but one suspects a bit of exaggeration; because several days later, the National Cycle Exhibition Company announced that it had lost money on the racing dates and abandoned the season. The now world-famous track was taken up in sections and put into storage. After the failure of the late fall season, bicycle racing moved to Tattersall’s on Sixteenth Street for much of 1897. Bicycle racing briefly returned to the Coliseum for two days in 1897, November 12 and 13, for two big match races involving three racing stars of the day, augmented each night by a full program of racing, which attracted what the Chicago Tribune described an enormous crowd of more than 10,000 people each night. In the 1890s, the major collegiate football powers were building their programs into commercial enterprises, bringing their contests into major urban centers to sell
their games to big crowds. Especially popular were Thanksgiving Day games. Venues were college stadiums in metropolitan areas and major league baseball parks, notably the Polo Grounds in Manhattan. Chicago produced the most exciting experiment for its Thanksgiving Day games with its indoor college games at the Coliseum. The Coliseum owners had alerted college football teams to the feasibility of playing indoor games in their building, and in early July, talks had already begun regarding a Thanksgiving game between the University of Michigan and University of Chicago, a contest fought for “supremacy in the West.” As in New York, where Thanksgiving games were society events, expectations were that all the social bigwigs would appear and that a huge crowd would attend. To refit the stadium for football, the bicycle track was disassembled and stowed away, and the floor removed. This left a playing surface of natural clay, which was sprinkled with water and packed down by a steamroller. Stands were erected on the sides and both ends of the field; with the balcony and gallery, the total seating capacity was 14,000. Yesterday’s City | 57
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team on October 14, 1899. The team played against the University of Wisconsin at the Coliseum in December 1896. Before the game, some newspapers crudely referred to the Indian players as “savages” and suggested that they would “scalp” their opponents, but the team simply played well and won. 58 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
The Chicago Tribune predicted a “Shakespearean drama” with the yelling from the stands “roaring down to the gridiron beneath” and the seats so near to the game as though they were “nearest the stage in a theater.” The newspaper predicted that “the place will reverberate with the assembled thousands until it will be impossible to think, much less talk . . . since all the available supply of tin horns and other means of producing noise are being secured in advance.” The Michigan–Chicago game pitted two different styles of play. Michigan players relied on offense and worked to advance the ball with a hard running game that plowed through the line, while the Chicago players relied on defense, using their great kicker Clarence Herschberger to advance the ball down the field with long punts. Game day, November 27, at 1:42 P.M., saw the Chicago style prevail in upsetting Michigan, 7–6, behind the long punts of Herschberger that kept Michigan deep in their own territory. His drop-kick goal from forty yards scored five points, and a safety got the clinching score. The Chicago Tribune reported that the game attracted 8,000 fans of college football and “society people of the type who came to be seen.” This turnout was a disappointment, as local papers had predicted a sellout, if the Tribune report is accurate. Two rival papers, the Chicago Times-Herald and Inter Ocean, claimed that 15,000 fans or more came to see the game. When the game was planned, organizers had expected that the bad elements would be snow and frigid cold. Instead, the weather outside brought a continuous downpour, and the Chicago Tribune commented, “the comfort of the audience . . . was certainly greater than if they had sat the game through outside in a drizzling, driving rain.” The Coliseum featured plenty of natural lighting, but the windows were made opaque to keep out heat and blinding sunlight, so when the rain was at its heaviest at 3:00 P.M., it was so dark that the interior arc electric lights were turned on, “which illuminated a scene at once brilliant and unique,” a dubious assertion as it turned out. All parties concerned expressed some dissatisfaction with the indoor experience. The stadium was indeed noisy as predicted, and many fans did not like it. They unhappily found that their cheering “echoed about [so] that the noise united into one continuous roar without rhyme or reason.” On the field, players complained about the packed clay surface, which turned slippery, much to the disgust of the Michigan side, which relied on their running game to advance the ball. Plus, the illumination was deemed poor and the air heavy. Both teams considered the $1,000 rental price “extortionate.” The next indoor game arranged for the Coliseum featured a contest between the Carlisle Indians and the University of Wisconsin, for a night game on December 19. Yesterday’s City | 59
The lighting was upgraded from the Michigan–Chicago game, and the Inter Ocean reported, “No discomforts are promised with the novelty of a game under electric lights.” The Tribune mistakenly reported that this would be the first football game ever played under lights. Already forgotten were five games played at night under lights at the Stock Pavilion in 1893 at the world’s fair. The Carlisle Indians had become a sensation in the East with their spectacular play against the most powerful college teams, losing two close games to Harvard and Yale. The Chicago Press Club made the Carlisle Indians a nice financial offer that lured the team west. The team was essentially impoverished and found the money a godsend for much-needed uniforms and equipment. Their record coming into the game was 4–5. Carlisle would be making its first trip west, and Chicago fans clamored to see them. The consensus opinion deemed Wisconsin the strongest team in the West. The write up by the Chicago Tribune of the game, won by Carlisle, 18–8, was typical of the era in its crude stereotyping: “Scions of the aborigines, representing eight tribes of North American Indians, left the Coliseum last night, after one of the most hotly contested games of football ever witnessed.” The Inter Ocean reported in a similar vein, “Many [fans] had evidently come to the game expecting to see Indians wearing war paint and eagle feathers in their head guards. They did not. . . . They played football and they played it well.” The game was hard fought, and early in the second half Wisconsin had an 8–6 lead. The Wisconsin players began to tire, however, and the Carlisle team asserted itself driving for two touchdowns that sealed the deal. The Tribune reported that more than 8,000 people watched the game, while the Inter Ocean reported an astonishing figure of 16,000. After football, bicycles returned to the Coliseum. In January 1897, the National Cycle Board of Trade sponsored an immense seven-day trade show of bicycle manufactures. Once again, newspaper reporters engaged in superlatives: “It will be a great show—the greatest Chicago has ever seen, and will eclipse anything of its kind which has ever been attempted. The exhibitors do not hesitate to say the building is the best that could be selected for such an affair and say the New York show cannot compare with it. . . . when the lights are turned on tonight the effect from a spectacular point of view will be magnificent.” Visitors not only got to look at the latest bicycles but also enjoyed a variety of entertainments, including musical concerts, from classical standards, operatic arias, and Irish airs to the latest Tin Pan Alley tunes. Each night was designated for one or more of Chicago’s cycle clubs. On the evening of January 26, for example, the Lake Cycling Club, the Englewood Wheelmen, and the Thistle Cycling Club attended. The National Cycle Board 60 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
In addition to bicycle races, the Coliseum hosted trade shows in which manufacturers of bicycles and related materials displayed their wares. In this 1897 advertisement, the Thistle Company promoted the “lightest, fastest, strongest” wheel.
of Trade put on a good face concerning the financial aspects of the show, but the Chicago Tribune reported that overall attendance had been disappointing. During the 1890s, indoor track contests, usually sponsored by a U.S. Army National Guard regiment in one of the Chicago’s several armories, became a popular winter sporting event. In 1897, the indoor season included the largest indoor track meet ever seen, the Military and Athletic Carnival, and planners decided the Coliseum was the most appropriate venue. Originally planned to be a military carnival only, sponsored by the Regular Army and National Guard units, according to the Chicago Tribune, the size of the Coliseum made it possible to include a large track and field meet that would also welcome high schools, colleges, and amateur organizations. The military part of the show would include drills, maneuvers, broadsword fighting, escalade (a scaling contest), tugs-of-war, and something called “military evolutions.” In addition, the Coliseum was large
Purdue University jumper Raymond Ewry (shown center at the 1904 Olympic Games in St. Louis) broke a record at the 1897 Military and Athletic Carnival.
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enough to include the discus throw in the track and field portion of the show, an event not normally feasible for indoor meets. The Central Division of the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) sponsored the track part of the meet. It was open to all competitors and included contestants from military units, amateur clubs, colleges, and high schools. The high schools participated in their own competitions, providing one of the meet’s largest programs. The Chicago Athletic Association sent the largest local contingent, while New York’s Knickerbocker Club boasted the largest out-of-town team. Although invited, no colleges and universities sent full teams, but instead sent individuals and relay teams. The Military and Athletic Carnival, scheduled for six days, opened on May 10 with a parade, before a crowd estimated at three to five thousand. The first day featured military drills and local high-school track contests. The third day featured most of the important open track and field contests, in which three world records were broken, one of them by Purdue University jumper Ray Ewry. The last day featured largely military track events, but the AAU national indoor title was determined when the Chicago Athletic Association bested the Knickerbocker Club in the last event, a relay race. The turnout disappointed the organizers of the meet, however, and they never attempted another one. The meet was too big, too unwieldy, a case of too many athletes chasing after too few paying customers. In Chicago, the Gilded Age version of the twenty-first century auto show at McCormick Place was the horse show, and in 1897 the great Chicago Horse Show began a week’s run on October 31. The Coliseum hosted a show competition (like dog show competitions) and trade show. Newspapers promised Chicago’s “first great horse show.” Competitions were provided in a variety of classes (“more numerous than in any other American show”)—harness, single, tandem, four in hand, runabout, single brougham, and high cart. Manufacturers had booths for their wares and extensive stables and exercising rings that allowed the public to view all varieties of the best horse stock. Right after the horse show, the Coliseum temporarily installed a track for bicycle racing and then removed it and all flooring for the return of football. Football returned to the Coliseum with two contests, a Carlisle Indians–University of Illinois game on November 20 and a return Michigan–Chicago matchup on November 27.
In 1897, the Coliseum hosted what was promised to be the city’s “first great horse show.” Opposite: A decorative program from a later horse show, held at Chicago’s third and best-known Coliseum building after the second Coliseum was destroyed in a fire.
The Coliseum proved to be a popular addition to the city landscape, providing a forum that enhanced Chicago’s status as a world center of culture, commerce, and manufacturing. Trade shows significantly helped sustain the Coliseum in its second year, and the greatest was the Manufacturers’ Carnival and Winter Trade Fair, which opened on December 18 and was scheduled to continue through May 15, 1898. The Coliseum owners were directly involved in the show. Instead of taking rent, they took 35 percent of the share while the Western Attraction Company, which was conducting the fair, held the remaining 65 percent. The “trade fair” portion of the show featured long arrays of booths where some two hundred manufacturers and other vendors displayed their wares. The carnival portion provided an immense roller-skating rink in the center of the hall, plus merrygo-rounds and gravity roads “in every spare corner of the building,” band concerts, and, on the galleries, sideshow- and Midway-style shows. But all this would soon end. Around 6:00 P.M. on December 24, 1897, as many visitors left the exhibit for supper, a fire broke out from faulty electrical wiring and swept through the building. Hundreds of people occupied the building at the time, but they all fortuitously escaped, racing out the exits as the fire rapidly grew and turned the interior into a raging inferno. In a short twenty minutes, the fire completely consumed the building. It came crashing to earth, when one of the twelve arches supporting the roof fell over, bringing down all the other arches like a row of dominoes. One fireman died in the blaze. Although the building was advertised as fireproof because of its iron and steel frame and brick walls, it was not, resulting in a terrible conflagration. The massive Coliseum, the greatest indoor facility in nineteenth-century America, survived only nineteen months. The Inter Ocean ruefully commented: “The Coliseum from its very inception seems to have been pursued by an evil destiny. Its promoters, when they first attempted to give realization to the project of giving Chicago a mammoth forum and meeting place, found their efforts retarded by the effects of the financial panic of a few years ago. At last . . . they got the big building underway, but to only see it tumble to the ground again. And now when the great hall might be said to have taken its place among the institutions of the city it . . . goes up in flames.” The Chicago Exhibition Company chose not to rebuild a third time on the Sixty-Third Street site, instead joining in the dialogue about constructing an “exposition building” on the lakefront near the city’s downtown. While discussion centered on the construction of such a building as being imminent, a lakefront exposition hall would not come to reality until decades later, in 1960, when the first McCormick Place rose under the administration of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Yesterday’s City | 63
Many Chicagoans are familiar with the Coliseum at 1513 South Wabash Avenue, shown here in an undated photograph. It was built around the remains of the Confederate Libby Prison.
The Coliseum, rather than taking place among the great structures of Chicago, has been largely forgotten. Instead, three years after the Woodlawn Coliseum went up in flames, in lieu of a lakefront exposition hall, another Coliseum rose on the near South Side, and it is this facility that is the often-remembered arena. This structure, at Fifteenth and Wabash, was built on the ruins of Libby Prison, a Confederate prison brought brick by brick to Chicago and rebuilt as a Civil War museum in 1889. When this museum failed in 1898, planners decided to build a new Coliseum within its walls. This structure was completed in August 1900, but not without the usual difficulties. Construction began in 64 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
1899, but in August of that year, the new imposing structure came crashing down, delaying completion for a year. As with its predecessor, a great variety of events were held in this building—political conventions, circuses, trade shows, and sporting events. The new Coliseum closed in 1971 for fire violations and, after continued deterioration, was demolished in 1982. Robert Pruter is a librarian at Lewis University in Illinois.
Like its predecessor, the Wabash Street Coliseum (shown here in 1902) hosted political conventions, circuses, trade shows, and sporting events. The city eventually closed it for various building and fire code violations, and it was finally demolished in 1982. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | All illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 44, top: i05946, bottom: i37731; 45, top: i25072, bottom: i02526; 46–7, top left: i65578, center: i65572; 48, i65550; 49, DN-0066930; 50, i65576; 51, top: i65577, bottom: i65573; 52, i65580; 53, i65579; 54–5, top left: detail, i20570, center: i65581; 56, i65574; 57, SDN-000522; 58–9, courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-125089; 60, i65575; 61, detail, SDN002631B; 62, i65551; 64, i20784; 65, i61870. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Past issues of the Chicago Tribune contain a wealth of material on events held at the city’s second Coliseum; see particularly July 1896 to December 1897.
For more on Chicago’s dramatic growth from the 1830s to 1900, see Donald L. Miller’s compelling City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1996). Joy S. Kasson’s richly illustrated Buffalo Bill’s Wild West: Celebrity, Memory, and Popular History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000) traces William F. Cody’s rise from a scout to an international celebrity. In The Real Americans: The Team that Changed a Game, a People, a Nation (New York: Doubleday, 2007), Sally Jenkins brings to life the Carlisle Indians, an unlikely football powerhouse. R. Craig Sautter and Edward M. Burke’s Inside the Wigwam: Chicago Presidential Conventions 1860–1996 (Chicago: Wild Onion Books, 1996) is a timely history of national conventions held in Chicago since the Civil War era. Yesterday’s City | 65
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
The Making of Millennial Banks: Interviews with Norman R. Bobins and William A. Osborn T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
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orman R. Bobins and William A. Osborn personify the dramatic changes in American and international banking in the second half of the twentieth century. From 1995 to 2009, Osborn transformed the Northern Trust Corporation from a largely domestic business into a global enterprise, serving wealthy individuals and providing asset management and services to worldwide corporations. Bobins, during his twenty-six-year tenure at LaSalle Bank and its predecessor Exchange National Bank, adopted strategies and policies that enabled LaSalle to grow from a $575 million bank to a $217 billion business unit. When he retired from LaSalle in 2007, he was described as “the city’s highest-profile banker and dean of the local industry.�
Norman R. Bobins 66 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
William A. Osborn
Osborn is a native of Indiana, the son of Robert and Dorothy Osborn. “I was born and raised in Culver, Indiana, which is a small town in north-central Indiana. Its population is about 1,200 people,” he explains. “I was the second of four boys.” Osborn’s immediate and extended family was heavily involved in agriculture, which included a family farm that originated in the 1830s and the Osborn Seed Company. “They’ve always been in the seed business,” he recounts. “What that means is they grow corn, wheat, soy beans—those are the three main crops—and then they get registered seed from the state that they have planted, which they then harvest, clean, treat, bag, and sell to farmers for their normal crop.” The Osborns sold seeds throughout Indiana. “One time my grandfather had actually contracted-out and ran the largest corn field, I think either in the state or maybe even in the Midwest,” Osborn remembers. “Farming is basically the background of the family, and I grew up in that, and I grew up working in all aspects of the business.” Osborn’s brothers continued running the family business into the twenty-first century. By contrast, Bobins is a native Chicagoan. “I was born in the old Michael Reese Hospital on the South Side of Chicago,” he proudly announces. The only son of Haskell and Frances Bobins, he grew up at 5529 South Hyde Park Boulevard, “in the shadow of the Museum of Science and Industry,” and attended Bret Harte Elementary School at the northern end of Stony Island Avenue on Fifty-Sixth Street. Bobins’s parents divorced when he was about ten years old, and he moved to Los Angeles where he attended Emerson Junior High and then University High in Westwood. “My mother [then] remarried and we moved to Wisconsin,” he explains. “So I spent my last two years of high school in a little town called Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee.” Osborn spent his entire youth in Indiana, attending Culver public schools and then Culver Military Academy. He went on to Northwestern University, like his mother and father. After graduating with his bachelor’s degree in 1969, Osborn served in an airborne-ranger national guard unit stationed in Fort Benning, Georgia. Upon completing his military service, Osborn returned to Chicago and began applying for jobs. “I got a number of job offers, and I started at Northern [Trust] because I liked the job they were going to put me in,” Osborn remembers. Banking and corporate services—dealing with the cash-management requirements of corporations—was a new area at Northern Trust when Osborn was first hired. According to Osborn, the new division addressed a host of corporate issues: “how they bill, how they collect receivables faster, how they control their disbursements, how they manage their money, how many bank accounts do they have, how many do they need, how do they move money around.” Osborn admits in retrospect that “I didn’t really know what I wanted to do, but it seemed like a good job to at least get me into understanding what business was all about.” Northern Trust has been a Chicago bank since its beginnings in 1889, when founder Byron Laflin Smith opened a one-room office in the Rookery Building with approximately $1 million from a number of leading Chicago businessmen. The bank gained publicity with the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, and by the mid-1890s its deposits stood at $10 million. Northern Trust was one of the few banks whose deposits grew during the Great Depression, increasing from about $50 million in 1929 to $300 million in 1935 and nearly $1 billion in 1960. As a result, Northern Trust entered the second half of the twentieth century as Chicago’s fourthlargest bank. Making History | 67
Osborn’s arrival at Northern proved fortunate. “Bank and corporate services started to really grow. There were a few of us, and I got in just as it was starting to take off.” Although he was only twenty-two years old, he quickly began working with important companies like Union Pacific and Standard Oil of Illinois (later Amaco and today BP), providing banking advice and cash management seminars. “They moved me along, promoted me, made me an officer relatively quickly, and actually over the course of a couple years, I was overseeing, when I was twenty-three—not even twenty-four—I was managing probably fifteen to twenty people.” Most importantly, during that period Northern “developed a big national reputation,” according to Osborn. “A lot of the corporate business we have today goes back to how we got involved with many of these companies— because you can lend money, people can borrow money from a lot of places, but who can give them and help them in terms of how they can manage their cash better? We really developed a great reputation there.” In the meantime, Bobins stayed in-state to attend the University of Wisconsin, graduating with a degree in history in 1964. Bobins had considered majoring in business, but his accounting was “terribly poor.” He stayed up all night studying for his final exam. “I knew I hadn’t done well. So I went in to see [my instructor] . . . a young professor teaching . . . Accounting 101.” The teacher told him, “You’re right. You didn’t do very well. I don’t really think you have a great affinity for business.” Bobins admitted that he did not enjoy accounting. The professor responded with an offer: he promised to pass Bobins if he dropped out of the Business School. “He kept his part of the bargain and I kept mine,” Bobins laughs. “So it was sort of ironic that later I went back to graduate school in business.” Bobins followed a different path to Osborn’s into banking. “My father was an entrepreneur,” he explains. “He ran . . . a very successful business, started by my grandfather in the ’30s. They manufactured men’s belt buckles, men’s costume jewelry, tie clips, tie tacks, and money clips.” From 1964 to 1966, Bobins worked at the family plant at 1757 North Paulina Street while he attended business school in the evenings at the University of Chicago. “But it was getting very difficult for me to continue working days and I was traveling quite a bit and keeping up with my school.” Bobins stopped working and completed his MBA as a full-time student. At the time, “the master plan was always for me to go back into the family business but I think my master’s degree in business made my father a little nervous,” Bobins says in retrospect. “He was afraid I might be a little too theoretical and not practical enough, and so he wanted me to get some experience elsewhere.” Haskell Bobins was right. “As I came close to graduating, I started interviewing [with] different banks that came on campus,” Norman Bobins explains. He accepted an offer from the American National Bank and Trust Company in 1967, two weeks after graduating from business school. “The problem was that from the day I started in banking, I enjoyed banking and I wanted to stay in the business. And so my father waited about ten years and finally said to me, ‘Norm, if you’re not coming back in this business, tell me and I’m going to sell it.’” Bobins conceeded: “Dad, I really like being in the banking business.” Haskell Bobins sold the business and retired in 1981, by which point his son was senior vice president at American National Bank. Meanwhile, Osborn’s financial acumen attracted notice, within and outside of Northern Trust. He quickly moved up the ranks, turning down a number of offers from competing financial institutions. During the 1970s, he was promoted to the Southwest Division which dealt with clients in that region of the 68 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
United States. From there, he was transferred to the Metropolitan Division serving Chicago companies, and he eventually became head of that division in 1979. At that point, “We decided to set up our structure a little differently,” Osborn explains. “I headed what was then a division that dealt with just the larger corporations in Chicago, the biggest ones, and we were able to grow that pretty dramatically.” In 1982, Penn Square Bank in Oklahoma went bankrupt, an event that affected several Chicago banks. One, Continental Bank, eventually collapsed. Osborn was asked to run Northern Trust’s natural resources and energy division, which had been affected by the demise of Penn Square. His lack of experience in energy was considered an advantage. “We don’t want you to be inhibited by what other people have done; go in and clean this up,” one executive told him. Osborn’s success in addressing Northern Trust’s bad and problematic loans led to his promotion to executive vice president in 1987. He was soon called upon to address another crisis. This time, Less Developed Country loans (LDC) had generated an international banking crisis. “We had a number of them out of our international area,” Osborn remembers. “So having done Penn Square on the energy side, I then had to deal with some of this, which was fine, and we worked through that.” In 1981, Bobins moved to the Exchange National Bank of Chicago as senior executive vice president and chief lending officer. After that date, he never really left Exchange National Bank; in 1990, ABN AMRO (which already owned LaSalle National Bank) bought the Exchange National Bank for close to half a billion dollars. Shortly thereafter ABN AMRO merged Exchange National and LaSalle. “When we completed the merger of the Exchange National Bank with the LaSalle Bank, it made us about a $6 billion bank,” Bobins explains. The expansion did not stop there. By the end of the millennium, LaSalle had $72.2 billion in assets and $46.8 billion in deposits. Bobins adopted a banking philosophy of “think global, act local.” He explains that it “was a product of being part of an international bank . . . We were able to only not offer them capabilities in the United States—credit capabilities, treasury management capabilities—but we could offer some of those same services abroad, whether it was in Spain or Holland or Japan. It was a real advantage.” As Illinois banking experienced this massive transformation, LaSalle worked to establish lasting personal and business relationships with customers. “Midwest companies were growing,” Bobins points out. “They didn’t leave the banks they started with, but very often they would expand the number of banks they did business with. And these kind of capabilities gave us an opportunity to become part of growing Midwestern companies in their expansion plans.” Bobins attributes his success at LaSalle to relationships. “The secret to doing business in the middle market is getting to know the people that make management decisions and banking decisions, finding out what their needs are, finding out what they’re getting from their present bank,” he insists emphatically. “You find out what it is they need, what service you can provide that they’re not getting. And then you work to provide that service and build a relationship with that client. . . . We went from a rather modest bank here in Chicago to being the fourteenth or fifteenth largest bank in the United States. . . . When ABN sold the LaSalle Bank to Bank of America in 2007, we were a $125 billion bank of which half the growth had come through acquisition and roughly half . . . through just natural growth.” Making History | 69
As LaSalle Bank was growing under Bobins’s leadership, Northern Trust was expanding under the guidance of Osborn. Once he resolved the LDC crisis, Osborn was invited to oversee all of Northern Trust’s private banking and personal trust business in 1988. “I sat over on the other side of the floor, outside of where our personal trust area is, and I would get the people there to come in and teach me the business.” At the time, Northern Trust was expanding into markets outside of Chicago, especially in Florida, Texas, and California. “I got involved with strategically growing this business, which we did, and I started to combine pieces of this together, and then I formed what we called our wealth-management business,” he remembers. Osborn believed that if Northern Trust focused on a more exclusive clientele, the firm would grow more effectively. “We had pieces of it before on our institutional side, but we moved it in and set it up as a stand-alone entity within our personal business.” The results proved dramatic, according to Osborn. “Now we have over 20 percent of the Forbes 400 wealthiest people in the United States business [as clients], plus others outside the United States.” After becoming president in 1993 and CEO and chairman in 1995, Osborn pursued this attentive strategy. “Because we had had success in this personal business by merging the banking and trust business, I wanted to do the same thing with the institutional side and make it a client-focused business as opposed to a product-focused.” Osborn concluded that most financial institutions were set up with stand-alone divisions organized around savings, trusts, investment banking, retail banking, and other services. “I figured, why don’t we focus on the client?” Osborn asked. “The client doesn’t care how we’re structured—they care about what we’re doing for them, whether it’s an institution or a high net-worth client.” Over the ensuing fifteen years, Northern Trust concentrated on two key parts of its financial services: the master trust and custody business on one hand, and corporate and institutional services on the other. “We’re not in the retail banking business, we’re not in investment banking, we’re not in mortgage banking or credit cards or any of that stuff that others are doing today,” he explains. “That’s why we have much more focus, and that comes from the strategy we put together in the ’80s.” By the time Osborn retired as chairman in 2009, Northern Trust had eighty-five offices in eighteen states. “We reach half of the millionaire population in the U.S. today, and we’re by far the preeminent private bank in the United States,” he proudly admits. The impact on Chicago was significant. As the new millennium began, Northern had more than $1.3 trillion in assets under custody, with more than 9,300 employees worldwide and almost 6,000 in the Chicago area alone. Even with a national clientele of more than 20 percent of the nation’s wealthiest families, 50 percent of Northern Trust’s millionaire household clientele still resided within a forty-five-minute drive of one of their eighty-five offices. “So we’ve been able to do an awful lot from our Chicago base in order to really profile and present ourselves,” Osborn concludes. The importance Bobins placed on building relationships at LaSalle was partly the result of its position as a commercial bank. “Inherent in investment banking are transaction-oriented events; investment bankers tend to only get paid when the event occurs.” By contrast, “commercial banks live in a sort of legacy world. Once you start doing business with a company, once they do their annual borrowing with you, they borrow every year. It doesn’t go away. So you have a constant relationship and a constant flow of business and contact because of it.” Bobins looks back fondly on this period of his career with LaSalle. “It was a fun time in banking, a very satisfying time. The companies you did business 70 | Chicago History | Spring 2012
with relied on their bankers. You had relationships that were very personal with your clients. They knew you and knew what you could provide and you knew them, and you knew if you could trust them or not. I think it’s a little harder today. It’s a little more distant but I think that was a fundamental basis for which banks succeeded.” In Northern Trust’s office, and despite the company’s considerable growth in the 1990s, Osborn believed it needed to do more. Beginning in 1997, Osborn began aggressively building Northern Trust’s asset-management business. “We were known for what we did, but we wanted to get more worldclass with it.” Northern Trust began making acquisitions. “We wanted to grow our business not only domestically but globally,” Osborn explains. In 2005, Northern Trust purchased the financial-services arm of London’s Baring Asset Management’s Financial Services Group for $500 million. That same year, the firm opened an office in Beijing and became the world’s ninth-largest money manager, custodian of more than $1 trillion in overseas pension, government, and other institutional funds. By 2007, it managed total assets of approximately $770 billion and held assets under custody of $3.5 trillion. Osborn transformed Northern Trust from a quiet Midwestern firm to a global financial company, a multibank holding company based in Chicago but serving wealthy individuals and corporations worldwide. In 1992, a mere 7 percent of Northern Trust’s earnings originated from international sources. But by 2007, as Osborn pointed out at the time, “Between 35 and 40 percent of Northern Trust’s net income is generated by our global businesses today, outside the U.S., and that’s been growing at a compound growth rate of over 30 percent a year.” With offices in Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Singapore, Tokyo, Beijing, and Hong Kong, approximately 30 percent of Northern Trust employees now work in Europe, Asia, and the Pacific. Paralleling their business successes, Osborn and Bobins make strong efforts to help others with their wealth. Both have been highly engaged, personally and financially, in the civic and philanthropic culture of Chicago. Locally, Osborn has served on the boards of the Museum of Science and Industry, Northwestern University, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Lyric Opera, Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, the Chicago Urban League, the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago, and the United Way of Metropolitan Chicago. Bobins has chaired the board at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce and remains on the boards of WTTW Communications, the Field Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Perhaps in a nod to their own educations, Osborn and Bobins have also been active in recent attempts to revive Chicago public schools. In 2005, Northern Trust granted a record $3 million gift to the Chicago Public Schools to develop and plan charter schools as part of Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Renaissance 2010 Neighborhood Schools Program. Bobins served on the Chicago Board of Education from 1995 to 2011; at the time of his retirement, he was the oldest sitting board member. Both see their volunteer and philanthropic contributions as a direct outgrowth of their business philosophies. Bobins emphasized relationship-building at LaSalle Bank, which ultimately extended to the communities in which the bank operated. “We genuinely believed that doing more for our communities is the right thing . . . as well as a key part of serving our clients,” claims Bobins. He adds that “the success of any company—whether a bank or real-estate development concern—is only as good as the success of the community in which it lives.” Similarly, in 2006 Northern Trust adopted a global corporate philanthropy program that awarded $15.4 million in cash contributions to numerous nonprofit organizations worldwide. With a goal of donating approxMaking History | 71
imately 1.5 percent of its pretax profits to charities every year, Osborn announced, “Since 1889, we have reinvested in the communities where we live and do business. . . . I can say with sincere pride that philanthropy is not just a strategic priority for Northern Trust but part of our corporate culture.” In 2006, Northern Trust was named one of the “100 Best Corporate Citizens” by Business Ethics magazine. Bobins and Osborn recognize Chicago’s distinctiveness in attracting such a broad range of philanthropic support from corporate institutions. “We’ve got so many great The recipients of the 2007 Making History Awards: (from left) William A. Osborn, parts of Chicago and fortunately, the busiDennis FitzSimons (accepting on behalf of the Tribune Company), Dr. Margaret ness community and private individuals Burroughs, Jerry Reinsdorf, and Marshall Field V. Not present: Norman R. Bobins. have stepped up to invest in the city, and it’s a much better city because of that,” believes Osborn. “I think there’s a history of it and an interest in it. People here really feel that it’s not just about giving back because it’s the right thing to do. It’s good business. Because these are your employees that you’re helping, these are your clients you’re helping, and that can’t help but be, over time, good for your organization.” Bobins agrees. Visiting executives frequently comment on how Chicago “is a much more civicminded community, a much more unified community than many that they come from.” Osborn and Bobins consider institution-building in banking and public services to be their most significant accomplishments. Both took charge of primarily local banks and transformed them into national and international institutions. “That was one of the most satisfying things I’ve done,” Bobins acknowledges. He remains grateful to many “people for giving me the opportunity because I was probably not . . . the natural choice.” Similarly, Osborn says that he is “proud of what we’ve done to turn our organization into a global enterprise, and the fact that we are a caring organization, not only for the employees but the communities that we serve.” But he is quick to add that, “In the end, it’s not about any one person. It’s about the team and the way they think. I hope people recognize that and pick up on that and it encourages others to do the same.”
Timothy J. Gilfoyle is the author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of NineteenthCentury New York (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Millennium Park: Creating a Chicago Landmark (University of Chicago Press, 2006). He teaches American history at Loyola University Chicago. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The best introductions to Norman R. Bobins and William A. Osborn appear on the websites of the Illinois Business Roundtable and the Northern Trust Corporation. F. Cyril James, The Growth of Chicago Banks (New York: Harper, 1938), two volumes, is a good introduction to the early history of Chicago banking. On Osborn’s contributions to Northern Trust, see Adrienne Carter, “Northern Trust’s New Wanderlust,” Business Week On-Line, 11 April 2005, available at: www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_15/b3928118_mz020.htm. 72 | Chicago History | Spring 2012