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On the cover: Margaret Haley (in plumed hat) campaigns in California in support of women’s suffrage in 1911. Haley, business agent for the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, believed that without the vote women’s influence was circumscribed.
Photography John Alderson Jessica Harvey
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THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Summer 2013 VOLUME XXXIX, NUMBER 1
Contents
4 28 52 68
Sideline Suffragists Suellen Hoy
Shalom Chicago Olivia Mahoney
Protesting Hitlerism Angela Hoover
Departments Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
Sideline Suffragists Although often omitted from accounts of women’s early twentieth-century campaigns to win the vote, Chicago’s teachers and trade unionists joined the larger movement to secure that right of citizenship. S U E L L E N H OY
O
n June 26, 1913, Governor Edward F. Dunne signed the Illinois suffrage bill into law at his office in Springfield. Illinois thus became the first state east of the Mississippi River to give women the right to vote in presidential and local elections. Three leaders of the women’s lobby who had brought about this long-sought goal gathered around the governor for a photograph. Seated opposite him was a fourth woman, Margaret Haley, whose presence may have surprised many suffragists. Well known as the business agent for the Chicago Teachers’ Federation (CTF), she was in Springfield during the 1913 legislative session primarily to defend the teachers’ pension fund. When Governor Dunne noticed Haley standing on the sidelines, however, he asked her to take the chair across from him at this historic event. In remarks widely reported in the Chicago press, he explained that Haley, her coworker Catharine Goggin, and other CTF members had years earlier made him “a convert to the cause of women’s suffrage.” What Illinois did in 1913 was significant to women in the state and nation. Suffragist leader Carrie Chapman Catt remembered it in her history of the national campaign as a “turning point” since “suffrage sentiment doubled over night” as a result. “For all practical purposes,” according to historian Steven M. Buechler, “Illinois was added to the ranks of the suffrage states.” It is unlikely that this would have happened without Chicago’s schoolteachers and trade unionists, members of the CTF and the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (CWTUL), respectively. Suffrage for women became a mass movement between 1900 and 1915. Prior to these years, few if any self-supporting women were involved in it. They did not see a need to join, and many believed that God ordained women to be subservient to men, who would protect them in return. Moreover, nearly all women con4 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
sidered politics corrupt and not an appropriate place for them. Women who worked for pay also realized that their kind were not welcome. As the twentieth century began, the suffrage movement was made up almost entirely of white, Protestant women from privileged circumstances who believed in equal rights for women and men. But increasingly different sorts of women who were not invited to join the movement claimed “the vote as a political right that women deserved and needed,” according to historian Suzanne M. Marilley. Whether in want of protection at home or in the workplace, these women entered the public arena, made themselves heard through educational work and lobbying, and resolved to stay. In time, they came to see the ballot as essential to their own purposes and also as a responsibility of citizenship. Working women were generally more pragmatic than middle- and upper-class suffragists. As breadwinners, teachers and trade unionists were most concerned with day-to-day matters and practical measures that affected their well-being. A majority of them were single and still lived at home or roomed with relatives or friends. A large number had grown up in working-class families whose fathers were employed—when they had jobs—in various trades, unskilled and skilled. For the most part, these women were second-generation Irish Americans and Catholic, a group almost always portrayed in histories of women as against suffrage. But that was not the case in Chicago, where women workers were fairly well organized and often militant. The CTF and CWTUL, founded within a few years of each other at the turn of the twentieth century, were the creations of women who came together in the city’s Suffragists sold pins like this one, c. 1910, to raise funds for and encourage support of their cause.
Above: The impending passage of the Illinois suffrage bill created a media stir in Chicago in June 1913. Top: Before signing the bill, Governor Edward F. Dunne invited Margaret Haley to take the seat across from him. Mrs. Dunne stands behind her husband. Grace Wilbur Trout, president of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, who directed the successful legislative effort, is pictured in the center of the group.
reform network and shared a common cause. As employees of Chicago’s burgeoning, poorly funded elementary schools and its scattered, low-paying factories, restaurants, and laundries, they understood economic hardship and discrimination firsthand. Thus, teachers and glove makers, bookbinders and waitresses became politically active in agitating for improved working conditions, higher wages, and job security. In 1902, the CTF affiliated with the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). It was a controversial decision, one for which they were criticized, but it secured the support and
voting power of the CFL’s two hundred thousand male workers in the teachers’ fight for better salaries against tax-dodging public utility corporations. Two years later, after its inauguration at the Hull-House settlement, the CWTUL also became a CFL affiliate. In the eyes of working women, the vote had become a critical means to achieving their goals. This is not to suggest that Chicago women, including wage earners, were absent from the political arena before receiving the right to vote. Rather it is to acknowledge the significance of their struggle and achievement in 1913.
The 1913 Illinois suffrage law permitted women to vote for president and select local officials but stipulated that they use separate ballots and ballot boxes. 6 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
These self-supporting young women became leaders among Chicago’s teachers and trade unionists and advocates of women’s suffrage. Left: Katie Goggin, age sixteen in 1872, several months shy of her first teaching job. Right: Agnes Nestor, c. 1898, around the time she led a walkout at the Eisendrath Glove Company.
Educational and Political Equality: Teachers Between 1880 and 1900, Chicago’s expanding industries and an influx of hundreds of thousands of immigrants had caused the school population to more than quadruple, from sixty thousand students to some 250,000. Classrooms became overcrowded, and many buildings lacked modern plumbing and adequate ventilation. Elementary teachers, then in huge demand, regularly accepted menial pay for the low-status jobs they were offered. By 1900, their numbers had increased from less than one thousand to about five thousand, and 95 percent were women. Annual stipends for those teaching the elementary grades remained practically unchanged—between five hundred and eight hundred dollars—throughout this period. Clerical workers at the board of education received higher salaries, as did school janitors. It was generally thought that the status of teachers was higher than that of female factory workers, but in reality the conditions of their employment were remarkably similar. During these same twenty years, more than half of Chicago’s elementary schoolteachers came from working-class or lower white-collar backgrounds. Most were second-generation immigrant women, unmarried, and self-supporting or breadwinners for their families.
Approximately one-third were Irish and, in the 1890s, between 70 and 80 percent were Catholic. Most were graduates of Catholic or public schools, and some had a smattering of teacher training classes or had previously taught in rural schools. In Chicago, teachers generally found their jobs through friends or family connections; however, all were required to take an examination administered by the board of education. Chicago’s elementary teachers became advocates of suffrage in the first years of the new century. Yet, the extent of their involvement and the strength of their commitment are generally not known. Another unlikely group, locally based but nationally organized, has received far more attention and with good reason. Beginning in 1879, under the direction of the ingenious and indefatigable Frances E. Willard, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) aroused apolitical women to act collectively in its battles against the evils of alcohol and created a mass movement of 150,000 adult female members by 1890. In their quest for “home protection,” they promoted an activist state. They turned to the government with an array of social and political reforms. Among them was suffrage, which the WCTU endorsed in 1881. Willard’s exceptional talent was her Sideline Suffragists | 7
Margaret Haley (left) and Catharine Goggin (right) staunchly headed the Chicago Teachers’ Federation from 1898 until Goggin’s tragic death in a traffic accident in 1916. They also shared a commitment to women’s suffrage and organized labor.
success in tapping into a font of female resentment against men who were intemperate and irresponsible. She also perceived an undercurrent of unease and suspicion of men’s power and promises. Thus, following various failed legislative efforts, Willard persuaded WCTU members to seek the ballot as an effective way of holding elected officials accountable. There is no evidence that the WCTU inspired the Chicago Teachers’ Federation to organize in 1897 (a year before Willard’s leadership ended), yet the two groups— formed for very different purposes—acted similarly. The CTF adopted political strategies and tactics previously used by the WCTU to improve what they referred to as their “material interests” and to promote the common good. In fact, over time, the CTF would do what Catharine Goggin, one of its founders, had hoped: determine policies and actions that affected its members, both as teachers and as citizens. The CTF grew out of an enthusiastic Saturday-morning gathering of more than two thousand public school elementary teachers in early spring 1897. One of the largest gatherings of “American womanhood ever held in Chicago,” according to the Chicago Times-Herald, it 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
resulted from what Goggin described as the teachers’ “uneasiness” in the face of growing hostility among male principals toward a new pension law. In better paying positions than elementary teachers, the principals objected primarily to the requirement that everyone contribute one percent of their salaries to the fund. The state legislature had enacted the pension law in 1895, in response to a major petition drive by the teachers, and it took effect in January 1896. Fearing loss of this benefit, teachers organized to save what they had gained. For those with ten or more years of experience and those worried about leaving the system with minimal savings and no one to care for them, pensions were a protection and a right they felt they had earned. Goggin, who had called the mass meeting at Central Music Hall, was a teacher at the Jones School on the South Side and one of the pioneers of the pension movement. In 1872, she had graduated from the Normal Department at Chicago’s Central High School, passed her teacher’s examination, and obtained a position at the Clarke School. By the mid-1890s, she was forty years old, had been teaching for more than two decades, and was without family. Her Irish-born Catholic father, a
laborer with whom she had lived, died in 1878, as did her sister (also a teacher) two years later. Catharine looked to her cousin Judge James Goggin, a lawyer and former school board member, for advice and support. He had assisted her in securing her first teaching position and, until he died unexpectedly in 1898, mentored her in the workings of the public schools and municipal government. Goggin, and many like her who never married, found in teaching a career that offered the promise of an independent life. It was a vocation, but also a job. Hence, it was not helpful, in her opinion, that teachers were often categorized as akin to clergy, who were provided for in old age. The principals’ objections to the new law initiated a long-term struggle with the teachers for a stable pension. More significantly, their complaints gave rise to a much larger and more defined organizational structure whose first objective, as stated in the CTF’s constitution, was “to obtain for teachers all the rights and benefits to which they are entitled.” In addition to a pension, these included improvements in teachers’ salaries and their work environment. Margaret Haley, who would become Goggin’s colleague in directing CTF operations, taught at the Hendricks School, beginning in 1884, near the stockyards in the Town of Lake (annexed to Chicago in 1889). Five years younger than Goggin and born to Irish Catholic parents in Joliet, Illinois, Haley’s experiences
were different but equally unexceptional. She attended a Catholic high school and, after her father’s stone quarry closed, a small normal school in Morris, Illinois. Its influence proved “potent,” Haley later recalled; the teachers were “uplifting and inspiring.” Through them, at the age of sixteen, she found her vocation—along with teaching jobs in two rural schools before arriving in Chicago. While still working at Hendricks, Haley became involved in the CTF in 1898, a year after it was established. Almost immediately, as a result of a contentious election for its presidency, which Goggin won with Haley’s assistance, the two women formed an enduring partnership. Kate Rousmaniere’s biography of Haley explores with insight the nature of this “symbiotic duo of different speeds and tactics.” The women, who shared a conviction that teachers’ material interests were as important as pedagogy, were remarkably unalike in temperament and style. Goggin, self-assured and deliberate, was an expert in parliamentary law with an acute awareness of the rights of citizens and an instinctive sensitivity to any discriminatory treatment of women. She was also more measured than Haley. Charismatic and forceful, Haley was fearless, wellinformed, and eager for battle. In time, they achieved a balance in which Goggin’s role became more managerial and less visible, while Haley took on the federation’s more spectacular fieldwork and subsequently became its public face and relentless guardian.
William Rainey Harper (center), president of the University of Chicago and the teachers’ arch enemy, walks with President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in town on April 2, 1903, to receive an honorary degree. Sideline Suffragists | 9
The Haley-Goggin team believed firmly in the power of the petition. CTF members circulated petitions on various occasions, including the 1902 fight against tax-evading street railway companies.
In 1899, with Goggin and Haley in leadership positions, the CTF gave pension benefits and higher salaries top priority. Material interests, as Goggin reported in an educational journal that year, were “a powerful lever in arousing the hitherto unorganized body of grade teachers . . . to united action.” In the two years since its founding, the federation’s membership had grown from 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
several hundred to more than three thousand. Equally important as advancing the teachers’ economic security was the members’ desire to have a voice in determining educational matters that affected them and their students. Many had been influenced directly or indirectly by the ideals of Chicago’s renowned progressive educators. Francis Wayland Parker, John Dewey, and Ella Flagg
In July 1906, 1,644 teachers received thirty-dollar checks. Haley and Goggin distributed the back pay; by then, both were nationally known for their efforts on behalf of teachers.
Young, who encouraged child-centered classrooms and democratic schools, insisted that teachers have a role in making policy. Thus, as Haley asserted, they would not be relegated to “merely takers of orders.” That became abundantly clear in the battle the CTF waged against the Harper bill. William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago and head of Mayor Carter Harrison’s educational commission on school reform, issued the Report of the Educational Commission, often referred to as the “Harper Report,” early in 1899. The report proposed a more streamlined, centralized administrative structure by increasing the superintendent’s power and decreasing the size of the school board. It also advocated incorporating business principles and practices into school policies and operations. With support from the Civic Federation and other nationally prominent educators, Harper assumed that the state legislature would approve the commission’s education bill. Yet, he failed to take into account the fledgling CTF, which opposed the bill and rallied against it.
Not only were the teachers resentful that they had not been consulted, but they abhorred what they called “one man power.” If the Harper bill were enacted, the proposed restructuring would give the superintendent nearly complete control over appointments, promotions, and dismissals along with extensive authority in deciding instructional issues, including textbook selections. CTF members were also furious that to attract men to teaching they would be paid higher salaries than women. But the women were not surprised by the recommendation, since Harper was one among many who believed women teachers should remain cheap labor (as a school board member, he had opposed a salary increase in 1898). The all-out fight, which the Haley-Goggin team led, defeated the Harper bill. They personally appealed to the Chicago Federation of Labor, which pledged to work against the measure in Springfield. The Chicago Woman’s Club initially endorsed the bill but soon after reversed itself because of the many protests from teachers. A massive petition drive—during which teachers, with the help Sideline Suffragists | 11
of their family members and friends, obtained fifty thousand signatures—persuaded the legislators not to act on the bill before hearing from the opposition. When given that opportunity, Haley stated the teachers’ objections and cleverly linked Harper and his “one man power” bill to Standard Oil’s John D. Rockefeller, who founded the elite University of Chicago. Both men, she asserted, represented national business interests in contrast to local teachers’ personal and educational concerns. The CTF’s victory, although hard-won and exhausting, had a positive effect on women’s suffrage. The movement advanced “further . . . than it had gone in fifty years in Illinois” because of Harper who, according to Haley, “scorned women.” The federation, for its part, pledged no official allegiance to suffrage, a logical position for a group of largely Catholic, wage-earning women whose relationship with the church was complicated. The Catholic hierarchy, though it generally opposed women working outside the home as well as suffrage, took pride in the substantial number of Catholic teachers in the “Protestant” public schools and their defeat of the
Harper bill. Church leaders feared the possibility that the public schools might fall under the University of Chicago’s control. The federation’s confidence grew as a result of its success: its ranks expanded and its sense of purpose heightened. Haley and Goggin, while reassured, became more suspicious of “masculine economics,” a term one senator had used against the Harper bill as reported in the Chicago Tribune on February 23, 1899. At year’s end, when the board of education reneged on a promised salary increase due to lack of funds, Haley and Goggin decided to investigate a newspaper story that numerous corporations were not paying taxes on properties worth millions of dollars. They soon collected enough evidence to show that the Illinois State Board of Equalization routinely underassessed corporations; hence, the public schools were chronically underfunded. To continue their investigation, both women took several short-term leaves from teaching (eventually trading the classroom altogether for the CTF). They examined a handful of public utilities and discovered that the board of equalization had allowed the companies
CFL president John Fitzpatrick (seated, second from right, with fellow labor organizers in 1907) was respected for his integrity and commitment to democracy. Fitzpatrick, whose wife was a Chicago schoolteacher, was an early advocate of unions for female workers and women’s suffrage. 12 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
to pay taxes on their physical properties only and not on their “intangibles” (capital stock). To compel the board to assess the utilities their full value for the year 1900, Haley and Goggin went to court and won. The companies appealed; but the Illinois Supreme Court upheld the teachers’ suit in 1901, and six years later the United States Supreme Court did likewise. By 1901, five utilities had paid Cook County nearly $600,000 in back taxes, of which $250,000 went to the board of education and the remainder to the police and firemen. In an act of arrogant contempt in July 1902, when school was not in session, the board chose to spend its award on building maintenance rather than on teachers’ salaries. The Haley-Goggin team again took court action and won in 1904, when Judge Edward F. Dunne (later mayor of Chicago and then Illinois governor) ruled in their favor. Haley believed that the board of education’s disregard in 1902 “converted many a teacher to the cause of woman’s suffrage.” In an unpublished version of her autobiography, which she dictated in January 1912,
Haley recalled the CTF meeting that September where “the wrath of the teachers broke forth.” The audience was astounded and angry that the board had again denied them a salary increase, especially after their hardfought struggle and ultimate success. “Fuel was added to the flames,” said Haley, when the group learned from another teacher that the police and firemen had received their back pay. At that point, it was Goggin, already “a suffragist,” again according to Haley, who “brought home to the teachers in her unique, forceful way the revelation of their disadvantage as non voters.” She underscored her point by asking: “Why shouldn’t the City Council give our money to firemen and policemen? Haven’t they got the votes?” The CTF’s position on suffrage evolved gradually, and 1902 marked an important turning point. On March 2, the Chicago Tribune reported that a club of women highschool principals had “voted to ally itself with the [suffrage] movement.” But the federation’s elementary schoolteachers did not follow suit. Haley and Goggin, then in the CTF’s employ as business agent and financial
Following the 1911 National Education Association conference in San Francisco, Margaret Haley (standing, wearing plumed hat) remained in California, campaigning extensively in support of women’s suffrage. In the special election, held on October 10, the measure passed by a small margin. Sideline Suffragists | 13
At a massive voter registration rally on February 1, 1914, Superintendent of Schools Ella Flagg Young (above in 1909) encouraged women, as citizens, to register and vote.
secretary, respectively, said their members retained “a great deal of hope” for “working through the suffrage of men.” By early October, that hope had largely evaporated, as evidenced by both the CTF’s endorsement of a partial suffrage measure giving Chicago’s tax-paying women the right to vote and its initiation of discussions on the need to amend Illinois’s only suffrage law. Passed in 1891, it permitted women in rural areas and unincorporated cities to vote in school elections. Federation members now held that Chicago women should have the same right. Most also agreed with Goggin and Haley that the ballot, while not an end in itself, could be a powerful instrument against men determined to operate the schools as businesses and dismiss their pragmatic economic concerns about pensions, salaries, and tenure. As 1902 neared its close, CTF members made a startlingly bold decision that clearly revealed their instrumental view of suffrage. On November 7, they accepted organizer John Fitzpatrick’s invitation to affiliate with the Chicago Federation of Labor, one of the strongest local labor organizations in the country. The members of these two federations were in many ways similar. They shared a class and political perspective, with relatives and friends in both groups; Fitzpatrick’s wife, for one, was an elementary schoolteacher at Horace Mann and a CTF member. The CTF also realized the potential impact of 14 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
what Fitzpatrick promised: the active support of “200,000 affiliated workingmen and voters,” a good number of whom had children in the public schools. Feeling “their weakness as non-voters,” the teachers concluded that they needed the protection of a “strong body of sympathetic voters,” as Haley remarked in her unpublished autobiography. The CTF did not act hastily or, from their perspective, unwisely. Despite the criticisms it received for being thoughtless, unprofessional, or radical, most of its members (but not all) agreed with Haley and Goggin that the benefits outweighed the objections. For several years, they had been rebuffed for attempting to secure redress of their grievances and rebuked for taking on the “great corporations.” Early in the tax fight, David Shanahan, House leader in Springfield, told Haley that the teachers had forfeited their claim on men’s “care” by not having “stayed in their classrooms.” Years later, Chicago’s Ella Flagg Young, the first woman to head a major city school system and also the National Education Association (NEA), shed some light on why the CTF allied itself to an organization of laborers with voting power. Speaking at an NEA meeting in July 1916 (her remarks were later published in Addresses and Proceedings), Young confessed that she was at first among those in 1902 who thought the CTF had “made a great mistake” but changed her mind. “To get anything done,” she explained, the teachers discovered that “they must have voting power behind them . . . therefore they were compelled to go in with those who had felt the oppression and the grind of the power of riches.” Reverberations from CTF’s alliance with organized labor were felt for years. Only in 1917, after a series of failed attempts, would the board of education finally succeed in forcing the teachers to sever their connection with the CFL. By then the CTF had become recognized not only as the nation’s first teachers’ union but also its most formidable, influential, and political. Its affiliation with labor in 1902 enabled thousands of disenfranchised women to gain access to political power, helping them to win several important educational battles and keep control of their pensions. In the process, they also acquired a better understanding of how civic institutions functioned, the interconnectedness of municipal problems, and the need for political solutions. Once fully involved in Chicago politics, according to historian Georg Leidenberger, the CTF became a critical component in an emerging progressive alliance, which linked trade unionists and middle-class reformers. It lasted from 1902 until the end of Edward F. Dunne’s two-year term as mayor in 1907. Dunne, the Democratic Party’s mayoral candidate in 1905, was Irish Catholic, an attorney, and a former Cook County Circuit Court judge. Widely known as a “people’s judge,” he had ruled favorably on the teachers’
Driving down South Michigan Avenue during a 1910 Fourth of July parade, Mrs. Grace Wilber Trout heralded the first organized Suffrage Automobile Tour of Illinois to begin on July 11 and last a week.
salary suit only months before declaring his candidacy. He was also a proponent of measures associated with direct democracy, especially the popular initiation of legislation and the recall of elected officials. For these reasons and his commitment to the municipal ownership of public utilities—especially railways which, as Dunne later stated in his history of Illinois, crowded people “into street cars like herrings in a box”—he received energetic support from teachers and organized labor. Three years earlier, at Haley’s urging, the CTF had thrown its “forces into the Municipal Ownership movement,” which advocated public ownership of essential utilities and urban services. This was hardly surprising, since a lasting consequence of the federation’s battle against the tax-evading utilities was a nearly universal conviction (also held by organized labor) that these corporations were corrupt and wasteful, depriving schools of essential funds. Haley and Fitzpatrick became leaders in the Municipal Ownership League, a reform organization that included among others, Henry Demarest Lloyd (its founder), Jane Addams of Hull-House fame, and Louis Post, editor of the Public, a journal of progressive opinion. Prior to the 1902 elections, teachers and students helped circulate petitions to place municipal ownership and several other issues on referenda. Their activism subsequently resulted in the Mueller law, passed in April 1904, which empowered the city to deal
In April 1912, Chicago officials polled voters (all men) on the question of female suffrage. Despite an all-out cross-class effort by suffragists, the popular (advisory) vote failed by nearly two-to-one. Above: Ballot and ballot box from the 1912 poll. Sideline Suffragists | 15
In February 1914, more than 150,000 Chicago women registered to vote. Teachers reported to the Chicago Tribune that notices to schoolchildren asking their mothers to register were “extremely effective.” Margaret Haley said that a third-grade boy, who lived in a large apartment structure, had promised to give the notice to “all of the women in the building.” Above: A Chicago Daily News cartoon from February 3.
16 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
with the street railway interests and gave Dunne reason to target “traction buccaneers” in his campaign. Haley and Goggin, inspired by ideals of economic justice and democracy, found that their goals dovetailed with those of other progressive reformers. Thus, while promoting municipal ownership, they also advanced their ambition for a popularly elected school board. Their efforts to extend suffrage rights to women—and accord themselves more say in the school system’s educational policy—also culminated in a victory of sorts in 1902. Voters overwhelmingly favored an elected school board, but when the state legislature failed to act, the CTF felt compelled to use what Haley described as an “indirect method.” Practical and foresighted in matters political, the teachers recognized that “the election of a mayor was the only hope of securing a board of education in sympathy with their aims.” Once in office, Mayor Dunne did not disappoint the CTF, although he infuriated its enemies who represented the city’s moneyed interests and loathed Haley and the federation’s growing influence. The latter regarded labor unions as dangerous and outspoken women as impertinent. Amenable to both, Dunne
appointed a school board that included many of the reformers who had supported him. When Dunne failed to win reelection, however, the limits of reform politics became clear. The new mayor, Fred A. Busse, a Republican businessman, dismissed many of Dunne’s school board appointees and replaced them with “a capable business element,” as the Chicago Tribune approvingly reported on May 18, 1907. Six years later, when Dunne as governor signed the state suffrage bill, he understood what it meant. Years before, Haley, Goggin, and the CTF had converted Dunne to suffragism, as he publicly acknowledged. And during the two weeks between the bill’s passage and signing, Grace Wilbur Trout, who masterminded the legislative effort, spoke openly of relying on Haley to make personal calls on the governor. Haley’s years of experience as a lobbyist and her friendship with the governor made her the right go-between at a time when he was besieged by opponents of suffrage to veto the bill. On February 9, 1914, in an interview with Mary Synon, a Chicago Daily Journal reporter, Dunne explained why he had signed the bill. He said he believed in “the honesty, integrity and efficiency of women in politics.”
On November 7, 1916, Governor Edward F. Dunne, his wife, and their daughter voted together in Chicago. It was the first presidential election in which Illinois women were allowed to vote. Sideline Suffragists | 17
In 1914, President Woodrow Wilson appointed CWTUL president Agnes Nestor (above, c. 1913) to the federal Commission on Vocational Education. In the spirit of the times, Josephine Casey, a suffragist friend and colleague, wrote: “May your light shine before all men (suffrage version).” Below: Nestor’s WTUL membership card from 1908, when she was also the organization’s treasurer.
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Industrial and Political Equality: Trade Unionists Agnes Nestor, the thirty-three-year-old head of the women’s glove makers’ union and incoming president of the Chicago Women’s Trade Union League (CWTUL), stood among the spectators in the governor’s office on June 26, 1913. She saw Dunne invite Haley to take part in the occasion’s historic photograph and heard his tribute. Having spent long days in the capitol that spring lobbying for a fifty-four-hour work week for Illinois women, Nestor must have been aware of Haley’s onsite contributions to the suffrage victory. Despite legislative defeat of her efforts, Nestor delighted in the suffrage bill’s passage, telling the Chicago Daily Journal that it was “the most important thing the women of Illinois could get from the legislature.” She was likely pleased as well by the governor’s thoughtful public gesture toward Haley. Nestor was relatively new at lobbying, but she understood its challenges. Twenty years Haley’s junior and less well known to Governor Dunne, Nestor shared many of Haley’s leadership qualities. More cautious and less confrontational, Nestor was as resourceful, able, and doggedly determined to improve the economic security and working conditions of women wage earners. She was also firmly committed to a more inclusive democracy through trade unionism—one that included female voices. They had a right, she often
argued, to have a say about what wages they should receive and under what conditions they should work. Nestor’s background was strikingly similar to Haley’s. She had grown up working-class in an Irish Catholic family to whom she remained closely attached. Nestor did not marry and lived at home with her parents until they died. She began working as a teenager after her father lost his job as a machinist in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Having been politically active and a loyal member of the Knights of Labor, Nestor’s father acquainted his daughter with labor’s struggles and workers’ rights. However, again like Haley, whose father had also been a Knights member, Nestor’s political consciousness as a woman and a worker resulted from her experiences in Chicago. In 1906, at age twenty-six, she accepted a full-time position as secretary-treasurer of the International Glove Workers of America and subsequently served the CWTUL as its treasurer and organizer. In 1909, Nestor and waitress Elizabeth Maloney successfully led the campaign for a ten-hour day for working women in Illinois. Although not as widely recognized by Chicagoans as Haley and Goggin, they had made names for themselves and their cause. And, like them, Nestor and Maloney had come to regard suffrage as critically important to
self-supporting women’s economic security and their full rights of citizenship. Similar to the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, the Women’s Trade Union League was born of a need: to organize and protect working women. Founded in Boston in 1903, the league was national in scope but active locally through its branches. In unique fashion, it brought together trade unionists, its core constituency, with middle-class women, known as “allies.” Although few workers were among its founders, the league’s ultimate success depended primarily on them, first as members and then as leaders. Yet organizing working women was an arduous task since many were young, inexperienced, and had been lured to factory jobs out of need rather than choice. Responding to the rising demand for cheap labor so essential to America’s extraordinary industrial growth, there were nearly six million female wage earners by 1900. Most filled the lowest, poorestpaying positions and worked long hours, frequently at piece rates. And, as employers readily admitted, women were more temperate, reliable, and less inclined to strike than men. But lacking men’s organizational experience and political influence, they were hardly equals, even though many of their fathers and brothers belonged to unions.
Young trade unionists pictured in Milwaukee in 1909. Seated: Mame Butler (left) and Rosa McGovern; standing, from left: Mary Nestor, Elisabeth Christman, Margaret Blake, and Agnes Nestor. Christman, a glove maker, would serve on the CWTUL executive board from 1910 to 1929 and move to the league’s new headquarters in Washington, DC, in 1930. Sideline Suffragists | 19
Local 183 served as the foundation for the CWTUL. Above: The union’s leadership in 1902. Seated, from left: Mollie Daly, president; Mary McDowell, advisor; and Maggie Condon, vice president; standing: Michael Donnelly, president of the Amalgamated Meat Cutters, and Nellie Brown, treasurer.
Chicago had a long tradition of labor activism in the 1880s and early 1890s, in which women played a part. At the end of the severe economic depression of the 1890s, union organizing revived among men and also women. In 1902, in the stockyards, Hannah O’Day and Maggie Condon set up the first women’s union, Local 183, with support from Mary McDowell, head of the neighborhood’s University Settlement and a friend of Jane Addams. Two years later, Local 183 served as the foundation for the CWTUL, with McDowell its first president. The CWTUL attracted Nestor, a glove maker from the North Side, who had organized women factory workers (also in 1902) at the Eisendrath Glove Company into a local. Numerous others of similar backgrounds, experiences, and aspirations followed suit, including Josephine Casey of the Elevated Railway Employees’ Union, Maloney of the Waitresses’ Union, and Mary McEnerney of the Bindery Women’s Union. Not all active members were Irish Catholic, although most of its leaders were Christian and white. 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
The CWTUL owed much of its success to the city’s network of women reformers. In fact, it was no accident that the league’s first three branches were established in Boston, Chicago, and New York, where settlement movements were strong. Chicago’s pioneering Hull-House (1889) on the West Side and the University Settlement (1894) in the Stockyard District were led by progressive, influential women known for their commitment to economic and political justice. They were also outspoken advocates of suffrage for all women. In 1897, Addams gave a much publicized address before a meeting of the Chicago Political Equality League, an elite organization of prominent clubwomen, on working women’s need for suffrage. McDowell’s resolve dated back to her decadelong affiliation in the 1880s with Willard’s innovative WCTU. When McDowell later headed the CWTUL, she reminded members of her “altogether principle”—selfsupporting women stood together in unions and at the ballot box. Despite the sentiments from Addams and McDowell, women’s groups—suffragist or otherwise—did not readily accept the CWTUL. The Illinois Federation of Women’s Clubs, which in 1904 represented more than two hundred organizations feared that workers might attend its meetings. Thus, only reluctantly, did it amend its constitution to allow the CWTUL to affiliate. This stood in sharp contrast to the Chicago Federation of Labor, whose progressive organizer, Fitzpatrick welcomed the CWTUL as enthusiastically as he had the teachers’ union two years before. At McDowell’s insistence, Nestor received an invitation in 1905 to speak at the Illinois Federation’s annual meeting. In her autobiography, Nestor recalled that at that time asking a working woman “to give a talk on trade unionism” was considered “a bold step.” The next year, again at McDowell’s urging, the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, invited Nestor and Casey, a ticket seller at Chicago’s Lake Street elevated train stration, to speak at its annual meeting in Saint Paul, Minnesota. For the first time, “the toilers themselves appeared on the [federation’s] platform,” according to the Chicago Tribune on June 5, 1906. The Illinois Equal Suffrage Association, however, was less accommodating a year later. On November 2, 1907, Margaret Dreier Robins, CWTUL and national league president, complained in a letter to her sister that working women were treated with “indifference” by Illinois suffrage women; at its annual meeting, they would “let neither Margaret Haley nor Josephine Casey speak.” Robins believed that “the suffrage movement must identify with the labor movement if it would win.” She was not alone in this opinion. In 1906, Florence Kelley (formerly of Hull-House, then living at the Henry Street Settlement in New York) had encouraged an audience at the National American
Woman Suffrage Association’s convention to be more broad-minded, especially in dealings with working-class women and also with men who “have the power we need,” as quoted in the Woman’s Journal on March 3. Through repeated appeals and admonitions, particularly from settlement house residents, the suffrage movement gradually became more tolerant. By 1909, suffragists in Illinois had begun including working women in their mobilization efforts, but the alliance was never easy or comfortable. Although they found “issues of common concern,” as historian Robin Miller Jacoby pointed out, suffragists were hardly ever “active, sensitive, or supportive” of female workers in “their struggles for better working conditions.” On September 23, 1912, Leonora O’Reilly, a member of New York’s WTUL, lamented in a letter to Robins that suffragists typically “use the W. W. [working women] and then throw them over.” As a result, the CWTUL situated itself within the city’s labor movement and cooperated with suffrage organizations when necessary. In 1906, for example, local trade
The CWTUL emblem depicted Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war, reaching to clasp the hand of a young mother, who stands before the smokestacks of a factory.
An estimated three thousand workers took part in Chicago’s 1909 Labor Day parade. The two CWTUL floats, one of which showcased the league’s motto, attracted special attention. Sideline Suffragists | 21
Elizabeth Maloney (1880–1921) Born in Joliet, Illinois, Elizabeth Maloney was one of working women’s most loyal and spirited friends. Her lifelong commitment to labor included service as business agent of the Waitresses’ Union (Local 484), of which she was a founder, and also as an elected official of both the CWTUL and Chicago Federation of Labor. She led the unionists’ opposition to the city’s proposed charter, supported Nestor’s lobbying efforts in Springfield, and organized the strike against Henrici’s Restaurant in 1914. She died of breast cancer in 1921 at age forty-one. Despite inclement weather, attendance at her funeral was unusually large. According to Ellen Gates Starr, a labor activist and cofounder of Hull-House, people “stood in the street in double line” waiting to enter Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church. In her letter of October 30, 1921, Starr also observed that Maloney was “a very remarkable woman; simple, dignified, able & unaffected. She did wonderful work with the legislature of this wretched state. I loved to hear her state a case, wasting no words or time, clear, straight forward & without self-consciousness.”
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unionists and teachers joined a broad coalition of progressive women’s groups organized by suffragists to defeat Chicago’s new charter. The charter reform movement had begun as an attempt to transform an outmoded municipal government into one that would function more effectively and efficiently. This was not a task easily accomplished, as Maureen A. Flanagan has shown in her history of the movement, since Chicagoans thought very differently about “what kind of urban environment they wanted to create for the city as a whole.” Women who had become more involved in public affairs desired, above all, to be heard and realized that a new charter offered them the possibility of securing the ballot. When their hopes were dashed, they complained that women had not been appointed to take part in drafting the document, protested its failure to include municipal suffrage for women, and organized against it. Opposition from trade unionists and teachers, while centered on suffrage, also reflected their special interests. CWTUL members expressed concern that the charter lacked workday and wage protections for women workers; the teachers’ federation protested the absence of a provision for electing members to the school board; but, aligned with the Chicago Federation of Labor, both groups of female unionists shared a basic distrust of the proposal. They were convinced that it was another attempt to curb working-class democracy, largely because of the overwhelming support it had garnered from professional and business groups. Unable to agree on how a modernized municipal government should function, Chicago voters (all male) defeated the new charter in September 1907. The long public debate over the charter had not ended successfully, but Chicago suffragists were heartened by widening support for their cause. A case in point was the national WTUL, which at its first interstate conference, held in the summer of 1907, had unanimously endorsed suffrage for women. And in the fall, Casey organized a group of self-supporting trade unionists in Chicago to work more forcefully for political equality in their organizations. The league’s working-class constituency strengthened its ties to suffragism, but it did not alter its perception of suffrage. Members continued to view it as a device empowering them to secure better conditions in the workplace and decent wages for their labor in all trades. Without the vote, they remained too dependent on others to act for them. In 1908, again meeting in conference, the CWTUL underscored its commitment to the ballot by resolving “to bring about a closer relationship between the equal suffrage movement and the labor movement.” No less important was their resolution, as published in the Union Labor Advocate, “to stand for the eight-hour-workday and urge its establishment through legislation as well as through trade organizations.” Less
Josephine Casey (above, c. 1912) grew up on Chicago’s West Side and had a peripatetic career as a railway cashier, labor organizer, and suffragist. Her staunch commitment to equality and opposition to protective legislation led her to the National Woman’s Party in the 1920s. Margaret Dreier Robins (right, during the 1912 Republication Convention in Chicago) fought for education, higher pay, better working conditions, and voting rights for women.
than a year later, in March 1909, the CWTUL acted on its priorities and presented the Illinois state legislature with an eight-hour bill. The four trade unionists who lobbied the legislature to limit working women’s hours scored a significant, although incomplete, victory. That spring, Governor Charles S. Deneen signed a ten-hour law that, for the most part, benefited factory workers who often labored between twelve and fourteen hours a day. Nestor had led the CWTUL team of Maloney, Anna Willard, and Lulu Holley, who surprisingly confounded the Illinois Manufacturers’ Association’s strenuous opposition. In 1911, when they returned to Springfield, the legislators broadened the 1909 law to include women in mercantile and service work (not until 1937 would they pass the long-sought eight-hour law). Of the 1909 team, only Nestor, still CWTUL president, witnessed that event. She remembered 1909 as more exciting; the “girls,” as the press had referred to them, were young, inexperienced lobbyists and widely considered unlikely to succeed.
Already a popular and impressive spokesperson for women in industry, Nestor’s reputation as politically shrewd rose dramatically after the “girls’” success in Springfield. Schooled by her father in the principles of trade unionism, she believed firmly that union membership and collective bargaining were the roads to workers’ equality. Diminutive in size and reserved in manner, her youth and physical appearance belied her natural ability. Nestor was well-informed and extraordinarily effective in discussing how the league’s organizational and legislative goals would benefit working women. And, following Casey’s move to Boston in 1908, Nestor took up the slack and became more adept at explaining how suffrage would give them a greater voice in forging a more equitable industrial democracy. In 1909, largely as a result of the press attention Nestor received during her legislative stint on behalf of a shorter workday, she was invited almost weekly to address women’s groups in Chicago and elsewhere. That spring, traveling to Springfield to lobby for the eight-hour Sideline Suffragists | 23
Nestor, Maloney, Willard, and Holley received widespread media attention for their lobbying efforts during the 1909 legislative session in Springfield. While the team was hardly as powerful or alluring as depicted in this newspaper cartoon from July 25, they successfully secured a ten-hour-day law for Illinois’s women workers. 24 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
bill, she was among a large number of Chicago suffragists on its “Suffrage Special” train tour, which made whistle stops in towns en route to the capitol. In Joliet, Nestor stressed the ballot’s benefits to workers, both women and men. It was “a need,” she liked to say, as well as “a right.” The suffragists, who had failed in 1907 to win municipal suffrage through a new charter, appealed to the state legislature for that right and were again denied. The trade unionists were more fortunate, but their satisfaction over the ten-hour law turned to indignation three months later. In September 1909, Judge Richard S. Tuthill of Cook County’s Circuit Court issued an injunction prohibiting further enforcement of the new law. Until the Illinois Supreme Court reviewed it, he argued, women workers should be free to make contracts and work as many hours as they wished. His action resulted from a bill of complaint that the manufacturers’ association had filed on behalf of a Chicago-based firm. The fight was on, and Casey, who had returned from Boston, told her CWTUL friends that she was glad to be back for it.
Nestor, c. 1912, stands on the steps of the Illinois State Capitol, where she had “outwitted” her opponents to secure a ten-hour day for Illinois women. Never far from her side, as friends remarked, was her “bag of documents.”
Convinced that the court of public opinion would determine the final outcome, the CWTUL organized a speaking tour with Judge Tuthill’s injunction as its focus. On and off the tour, reactions to his decision were many and mostly critical. The Public, for instance, ridiculed the idea that anyone would freely agree to work exceedingly long hours for bare wages. On September 13, 1909, the Chicago Record-Herald carried statements from several women directly involved. Anna Willard, one of the waitresses who had lobbied at Nestor’s side in Springfield, expressed her bafflement, wondering how a single judge could stop “the state’s attorney from prosecuting violators of the law.” If he could, she and others believed they “might be able to get along well enough with fewer judges of the Tuthill stripe.” Robins, the league’s president, supported Willard, stating that if women “had the ballot perhaps [they] would have more just laws and fewer decisions of the kind given by Judge Tuthill.” In April 1910, the state’s Supreme Court upheld the ten-hour law in its entirety. Suffragists All Judge Tuthill, unbeknownst to himself, made one of the most compelling demonstrations of why suffrage was a necessary tool for working women. By 1910, there were few trade unionists or teachers in Chicago who did not support “votes for women,” yet they remained as wary of middle-class suffragists as they did of laissez-faire judges. Nevertheless, working women became a crucial component in the fragile suffrage coalition of 1913 that succeeded in empowering Illinois women to vote for president and in select local elections seven years before passage of the federal amendment. With partial suffrage secured, the CWTUL immediately established its own Wage Earners’ Suffrage League. Its main purpose was to ready members for the 1914 spring elections by educating them on legislative matters important to labor and later on “political affairs” in general. Almost immediately, however, the CWTUL found itself embroiled in an unpleasant dispute with the leaders of the Illinois Equal Suffrage Association (IESA) and the Chicago Political Equality League (CPEL). The unfortunate incident not only underscored the difficulty of maintaining cross-class alliances but also the reluctance of working women to rely on their middle-class allies. After their suffrage victory in Springfield, IESA and CPEL leaders accepted William Randolph Hearst’s offer to publish a special suffrage edition of the Chicago Examiner. Hearst, who routinely engaged in unfair practices that undermined unions, was no friend of labor. Unionists, female and male, vociferously objected to the deal. But IESA’s Grace Wilbur Trout, who was most responsible for the suffragists’ recent success, ignored the protests and later explained that the only purpose had been to obtain funds for the cause. Sideline Suffragists | 25
Since WTUL members prioritized economic freedom as well as political, they remained cautious of the larger suffrage movement. Thus, they established the Wage Earners’ Suffrage League. Above: A resolution from the 1913 national convention. Below: An announcement from the WTUL’s Bulletin, July 1913.
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Dismayed by this lack of regard, the CWTUL pledged to have nothing to do with the project, and the Chicago Federation of Labor unanimously passed a resolution against it: neither action had any effect. The special edition appeared in August 1913 and included contributions from leading suffragists. Notably absent were trade unionists, teachers, and most settlement house residents. A distressed Mary O’Reilly, a teacher at the Darwin School and a labor activist, wrote in the Chicago Day Book on August 12: “Our sisters of the suffrage movement who worked so splendidly for us BECAUSE WE ARE WOMEN failed to understand the struggle we must make BECAUSE WE ARE WORKERS.” Although misunderstood, they would vote. In the August issue of Life and Labor, Mary McEnerney, an officer of the Bindery Women’s Union and CWTUL, quipped: “It doesn’t take as much strength to cast a ballot as it does to run a machine ten hours a day.” Labor’s female suffragists worked for wages in regular jobs. As such, they were a “New Woman” of a different sort. They bore a resemblance to several generations of educated, ambitious, middle-class, Protestant women who were politically active from the 1890s to the end of the 1920s, but their experiences in the trades and the schools set them apart from more privileged suffragists. Marginalized by religion as well as class, a goodly number of Chicago’s trade unionists and teachers were Catholic, from cradle to grave. Hence, they frequently encountered tensions between their religious attachments and labor commitments, but most of them, as historian James R. Barrett observed in The Irish Way, “fused their progressive views of working-class organization and politics with fairly traditional Catholic attitudes about marriage and family.” In turning to unionism for protection and education, they also distinguished themselves from middle-class Catholic women who remained removed from public life and largely rejected the appeals of suffragists. From 1913 until full enfranchisement in 1920, the involvement of Chicago’s working women in the suffrage campaign was more sporadic. As the nationwide movement split over strategies and personalities, trade unionists and teachers involved themselves in matters more pressing, pragmatic, and local. On occasion, the CWTUL and CTF responded cooperatively, as when they joined together to prevent the establishment of a separate system of vocational schools that they believed would have heightened class divisions in Chicago. Struggles at home for fairness and justice in schools and industry, however, did not signify any change of heart regarding their belief in the urgency of the vote. Years of lobbying in Springfield had made union leaders like Margaret Haley and Agnes Nestor acutely aware of the power of the ballot. Without that “weapon,” as Haley sometimes
In June 1915, CWTUL delegates, returning from the league’s national convention in New York City, met briefly at the White House with President Woodrow Wilson, who accepted the WTUL’s peace and disarmament resolutions. Nestor (sixth from left) led the delegation.
referred to it, all women’s influence was circumscribed. While other priorities and pressures may have sidelined Chicago teachers and trade unionists as suffragists, it would be a mistake to conclude one hundred years later that working-class women, including Catholics, were opposed to giving women the right to vote or did not fight for it. Suellen Hoy is guest professor of history at the University of Notre Dame and currently engaged in research on working women’s activism in Chicago. She is author of Ellen Gates Starr: Her Later Years (2010) and three previous articles in Chicago History. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 4, i61938; 5, top: i36849, bottom left: Chicago Daily Tribune, June 25, 1913, bottom right: Chicago Record-Herald, June 26, 1913; 6, i67695; 7, left: i65722, right: i67687; 8, left: i23302, right: i16195; 9, DN0000387; 10, i67686; 11, Chicago Record-Herald, July 20, 1906; 12, DN-0005317; 13, i10601; 14, DN-0007580; 15, top: DN0008359, middle: i14325, bottom: i32106; 16, Chicago Daily News, February 3, 1914; 17, DN-0067281; 18, top: i67688, bottom: i67684; 19, i27206; 20, i67689; 21, top: i67680 (detail from letterhead); bottom: Chicago Record-Herald, September 7, 1909; 22, i67690; 23, left: American Magazine, August 1912, right: DN-0059234; 24, Chicago Daily Tribune, July 25, 1909; 25, i67681; 26, top: broadside from the Papers of the WTUL and its Principal Leaders, Leonora O’Reilly, reel 12 (available on microfilm at the Chicago History Museum), bottom: Women’s Trade Union League Bulletin, July 1913 (detail); 27, i14400.
F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The Chicago History Museum holds the papers of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, Agnes Nestor, and Mary McDowell; the papers of the Women’s Trade Union League on microfilm; and both Woman’s Labor Leader: Autobiography of Agnes Nestor (Bellevue Books, 1954) and Battleground: The Autobiography of Margaret A. Haley, ed. Robert L. Reid (University of Illinois Press, 1982). Also insightful is Kate Rousmaniere, Citizen Teacher: The Life and Leadership of Margaret Haley (State University of New York Press, 2005). On suffrage in Illinois, see especially Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States (Harvard University Press, 1996) and Steven M. Buechler, The Transformation of the Woman Suffrage Movement: The Case of Illinois (Rutgers University Press, 1986). On Chicago, see Julie Wrigley, Class Politics and Public Schools (Rutgers University Press, 1982); Elizabeth Anne Payne, Reform, Labor, and Feminism: Margaret Dreier Robins and the Women’s Trade Union League (University of Illinois Press, 1988); Robin Miller Jacoby, “The Women’s Trade Union League and American Feminism,” Feminist Studies 3 (fall 1975), 126–40; Suellen Hoy, “The Irish Girls’ Rising: Building the Women’s Labor Movement in Progressive-Era Chicago,” Labor 9 (spring 2012), 77–100; Maureen A. Flanagan, Seeing with Their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City (Princeton University Press, 2002) and Charter Reform in Chicago (Southern Illinois Press, 1987); Georg Leidenberger, Chicago’s Progressive Alliance: Labor and the Bid for Public Streetcars (Northern Illinois University Press, 2006); and James R. Barrett, The Irish Way: Becoming American in the Multiethnic City (Penguin Press, 2012). Sideline Suffragists | 27
OLIVIA MAHONEY
Clockwise from top left: Jenna Gavrielle Cohen with her parents, Linda and Joel, at her bat mitzvah, May 2005. Courtesy of Haase-Cohen Family, photograph © Robert Kusel 2012. • The famous Maxwell Street Market, c. 1925, served Chicago’s West Side Jewish community for many years. Chicago History Museum, DN-0091668 • Children congregate in front of the Chicago Hebrew Institute gymnasium, c. 1920. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-17310 • Amiel Robicsek celebrates Israel Solidarity Day sponsored by the Jewish United Fund, Chicago, April 2011. Courtesy of the Segal/Robicsek Family • Holocaust survivors light Hanukkah candles in Skokie, Illinois, December 2010. Courtesy of the Jewish United Fund
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S TAR
OF
D AVID
STAINED GLASS WINDOW, C .
1917
Maker unknown Glass, metal cames, wooden frame Chicago History Museum purchase, ICHi-65997 The Star of David is a powerful symbol of Jewish identity. In Hebrew it is called the Magen David, or Shield of David. The biblical King David ruled the people of Israel between approximately 1010 and 970 BCE and is considered one of the most important figures in Jewish history. This window is from Temple Emanuel when it stood on Buckingham Place.
T
Editor’s note: The Chicago History Museum’s Shalom Chicago exhibition explores the history of the city’s Jewish community through a series of compelling personal stories that connect visitors to the past. Each story illuminates a larger history, revealing how immigrant Jews and their descendants successfully adapted to American society while retaining a distinct identity. Shalom Chicago opened on October 21, 2012, and will close September 2, 2013. Olivia Mahoney is senior curator at the Chicago History Museum. Her most recent exhibition is Shalom Chicago.
he history of Jewsh Chicago is deeply rooted in the city’s past. German-speaking Jews first arrived in Chicago during the early 1840s. They came from central Europe, specifically present-day Germany, Austria, and Poland. Jews had lived in these areas for centuries, but economic and political difficulties, along with growing anti-Semitism, prompted them to seek a new life in America. The early immigrants found a young city with few social barriers and generally accepting of Jews. They settled in the downtown area, forming a cohesive community of homes, businesses, and institutions that helped them adapt to American society while retaining their Jewish identity. As the community grew, however, tensions arose over religious differences, and internal discord led to the creation of new congregations and organizations.
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By 1865, about two thousand Jews lived in Chicago, a bustling metropolis of nearly three hundred thousand. They became part of the social milieu and made significant contributions to the city’s rapid growth and development. While anti-Semitism undoubtedly existed, it was not in a virulent form, thus allowing Jews to prosper and assume leadership roles far beyond what they had experienced in Europe. After the Great Fire of 1871 destroyed their physical community, Chicago’s German Jews relocated to other parts of the city. Most moved to the near South Side, although a smaller group settled on the North Side. Surviving the fire helped solidify their identity as Chicagoans, as it did for others who experienced the devastating conflagration. Indeed, German Jews took an active role in rebuilding their adopted city, just as they did their own community. The history of Jewish Chicago grew more complex during the post-fire period. As German Jews formed a close-knit community on the South Side, a flood of new Jewish immigrants began to arrive. Between the late 1870s and early 1920s, when new laws imposed strict quotas on immigration, approximately one hundred thousand eastern European Jews came to Chicago. They belonged to a much larger wave of nearly two million Jews who fled grinding poverty and often-brutal antiSemitism in their homelands to seek greater freedom and opportunity in America. Most of the new arrivals were Ashkenazi Jews from present-day Russia, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova, Crimea, and Romania. A much small number of Sephardi Jews also came from Turkey, the Balkans, Egypt, Syria, and Iran. 30 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
As eastern European Jews poured into Chicago, they settled on the near West Side in the area surrounding Maxwell Street. They were much poorer and less welleducated than German Jews, but they too formed a dynamic community of families, small businesses, and institutions that helped them become American while remaining Jewish. Many worked as peddlers or shopkeepers on Maxwell Street. Others found employment in Chicago’s manufacturing sector, particularly its garment industry. Hundreds of small Orthodox synagogues sprang up as did the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI), a settlement house founded by and for Jewish immigrants. CHI, later known as the Jewish People’s Institute (JPI), served the community for many years with an extensive array of educational, social, and cultural programs. As they climbed the economic ladder, eastern European Jews moved away from the Maxwell Street area to Lawndale, Logan Square, Albany Park, and other city neighborhoods. But the deep social, cultural, and economic differences that had initially separated them from Chicago’s German Jews remained in place. Indeed, the two communities occupied different spheres of the same city, living in separate neighborhoods, working in different occupations, and establishing their own unique institutions and social organizations. Beginning in the early 1930s, Chicago Jews faced new opportunities—and challenges. The rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany prompted many to take action. Members of both the German and eastern European Jewish communities participated in mass boycotts and rallies to demonstrate their solidarity with European Jews. Their efforts drew national attention, while less publicly, the city’s German Jewish community helped approximately ten thousand German Jews escape to Chicago before and during the Holocaust. The outbreak of World War II drew more than forty-five thousand Chicago Jews into military service; nearly a thousand were killed and another thousand wounded.
Clockwise from top left: Louis Plotznik (left) and Chaim Solewitz at work at a kosher bakery in Rogers Park, 1960. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-67048 • Paul Blumberg blesses his daughter Naomi on her wedding day, September 14, 2008. Courtesy of Naomi Blumberg, photograph by Belen Aquino for Gerber+Scarpelli Photography • Young boys carry Sabbath pots on Chicago’s West Side, October 20, 1903. Chicago History Museum, DN-0001468 • The Sephardic Congregation on Howard Street in Evanston dedicates a new Torah, August 2012. Chicago History Museum, photograph by Julie Katz, ICHi-68014
After the war, Chicago Jews began moving away from their old neighborhoods. They joined thousands of other city residents in a “white flight” from Chicago’s changing inner core. Most moved north to the lakefront, Rogers Park–West Ridge, and suburban Skokie, Lincolnwood, Glencoe, and Highland Park. In addition, approximately six thousand Holocaust survivors moved to the city after the war, but they also migrated to the suburbs during the 1960s and 1970s. Their presence in Skokie sparked an attempted neo-Nazi demonstration in 1977 as well as the subsequent, successful effort to establish a museum dedicated to the Holocaust. Beginning in the early 1980s, local Jewish activists, many located in the suburbs, launched a spirited campaign to rescue Soviet Jews from oppression behind the Iron Curtain. Several groups, operating under the Chicago Jewish Federation/Jewish United Fund, helped about thirty-six thousand Soviet Jews relocate to
Chicago, the second largest American destination after New York. The local chapter of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) helped these refugees make new homes in the city. Most lived in Albany Park and Rogers Park–West Ridge before moving to Skokie and more distant suburbs, such as Buffalo Grove. As one of the nation’s largest Jewish communities, Chicago Jews have helped define the Jewish American experience. Today, about three hundred thousand Jews live in the Chicago area. More than 60 percent live in the suburbs. The rest are in the city, primarily on the North Side and in a smaller community in Hyde Park. Although the close-knit communities of the South and West Sides are a thing of the past, Chicago Jews retain a strong sense of themselves as a distinct people, defined and connected by an ancient Jewish heritage and, more recently, shared experiences in Chicago.
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A BRAHAM KOHN , C . 1860 Courtesy of KAM Isaiah Israel Synagogue, Chicago “Oh God, give us favorable winds, so that this week we may put our feet on American soil,” wrote twenty-three-year-old Abraham Kohn (1819–71) as he and his brother Moses traveled from Bavaria to America. They arrived in New York City on September 5, 1842, and initially worked as peddlers in New England, an occupation Kohn described as “my slavery.” The brothers soon sought better opportunities in Chicago, where they opened a small clothing store on Lake Street. 32 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
Kohn quickly became a leader of the local Jewish community. In 1847, he helped establish Chicago’s first Jewish congregation, Kehilath Anshe Mayriv (KAM), or Congregation of the Men of the West, and served as its first president. He also joined the abolitionist movement to end slavery, supported Abraham Lincoln for president, and served as city clerk from 1860 to 1861. Kohn spent his later years trying to establish an Orthodox rabbinical school but died before realizing his dream.
D ILAH KOHN , C . 1848 Unknown artist Oil on canvas on board Chicago History Museum, gift of Joan Weil Saltzstein, ICHi-65993 Dilah Kohn, Abraham’s beloved mother, arrived in Chicago as a widow in 1847 and played a pivotal role in the history of the city. Her strict observance of Jewish dietary laws meant that she ate little, as kosher meat was not available. Dilah’s weakening condition soon prompted Abraham and other community members to establish KAM congregation and bring Rabbi Ignatz Kunreuther from New York, who also served as a shochet (ritual meat slaughterer). In this portrait, Dilah wears a white head covering, a mark of Jewish piety, and holds a small Hebrew Bible. Sadly, she and many other Chicagoans died in the cholera epidemic of 1849.
L AKE
AND
W ELLS S TREETS , 1865
Lithograph by Jevne & Almini Chicago History Museum, ICHi-40005 Chicago’s early Jewish community lived and worked in the downtown area. Abraham Kohn operated a clothing shop on Lake Street for twenty years before moving to Michigan Avenue in 1866.
Shalom Chicago | 33
H ENRY G REENEBAUM , C . 1875 John Phillips Oil on canvas Chicago History Museum, gift of the Estate of Henry Greenebaum through Mrs. Alexander Bergman, ICHi-65995 Henry Greenebaum (1833–1914) left Germany at age fifteen in 1848 to join two older brothers living in Chicago. He worked in a hardware store and as a bank clerk before establishing his own bank with his brother Elias in 1854. Greenebaum, who reaped a fortune, fulfilled a central tenet of Judaism by giving back to his community. He helped establish Sinai Reform Congregation and organized the United Hebrew Relief Association to unify competing Jewish charities; at the founding of the latter, he reminded his fellow Jews, “Charity is the characteristic of every Israelite.” In 1856, voters of the Sixth Ward elected Greenebaum, a Democrat, as their alderman, making him the first Jew to sit on the Chicago City Council, and he later raised the Concordia Guards, an all-Jewish company that served in the Civil War. In 1877, a worldwide recession and failed real-estate investments caused his bank to collapse. Greenebaum repaid all of his creditors but never recovered his financial standing.
C HICAGO H ISTORICAL S OCIETY M ARCH 17, 1870
LIFE MEMBER CARD ,
Chicago History Museum, gift of the Estate of Henry Greenebaum through Mrs. Alexander Bergman, ICHi-65561 Greenebaum purchased a lifetime membership to the Chicago Historical Society for three hundred dollars, affirming his new identity as a Chicagoan.
I NVESTMENT
BROADSIDE ,
N OVEMBER 15, 1871
Chicago History Museum, gift of the Estate of Henry Greenebaum through Mrs. Alexander Bergman, ICHi-65560 After the Great Fire of 1871, Greenebaum sold bonds to European capitalists to aid the rebuilding of Chicago. The bonds sold for a thousand dollars, payable in ten years at the rate of 7 percent in gold on a semiannual basis. Greenebaum’s ability to raise money from outside investors prompted some to suggest that he run from mayor that year, but he failed to receive the Republican Party’s nomination. Originally a Democrat, Greenebaum had switched parties after the Civil War.
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T HE M ANDEL
FAMILY, C .
1900
Seated: Emanuel and Babette with their grandson, Frank Jr. Standing: Carrie and Frank Mandel. Chicago History Museum, ICHi-31721 The Mandel family personified the South Side Jewish community at the turn of the twentieth century. Emanuel Mandel (c. 1844–1908) and Babette Frank Mandel (1848–1945) both emigrated from Bavaria as young children and grew up in Chicago. Emanuel prospered as part owner of Mandel Brothers department store and married Babette in 1871. After the Great Fire, the couple moved to the South Side, where they lived near other German Jews in a small, close-knit, and increasingly affluent community. The Mandels attended nearby Sinai Temple and raised three children according to its progressive teachings. As Emanuel continued to rise in Chicago business circles, Babette devoted herself to her family and increasingly numerous philanthropic activities. She directed most of her energies toward helping poor West Side Jewish immigrants, thus fulfilling the Jewish law of tzedakah (charity). After Emanuel’s death, Babette continued her charity work and eventually moved to Highland Park, where she lived until her death at age ninety-seven.
M ICHIGAN AVENUE , C . 1890 Looking north from Twenty-Sixth Street Chicago History Museum, ICHi-65615 South Side German Jews lived in a comfortable, residential neighborhood with wide tree-lined streets and large singlefamily homes. Several Jewish families, including the Mandels, lived along Michigan Avenue.
S INAI T EMPLE , C . 1900 Twenty-First Street and Indiana Avenue Chicago History Museum, ICHi-19296 The Mandels attended Sinai Temple, then under the direction of Rabbi Emil G. Hirsch, a noted leader of the liberal Reform movement. Chicago German Jewish architect Dankmar Adler and his first business partner, Edward Burling, designed the Moorish-style structure in 1875. The congregation remained here until moving to a new temple at Forty-Seventh Street and Grand Avenue in 1912. Shalom Chicago | 37
T HE N OVICK
FAMILY, C .
1912
Chicago History Museum, ICHi-15578 Falick Novick (1878–1958), a trained metalsmith from Russia, immigrated to New York at age twenty-one in 1900. Finding no market for his skills, he worked as a plumber’s assistant and in the coal business before moving to Chicago in 1907. Two years later, Novick opened a metalwork shop on Twelfth Street (now Roosevelt Road) in the heart of the West Side Jewish commu-
V IEW
OF
J EFFERSON S TREET, 1905
Photograph by Barnes-Crosby Chicago History Museum, ICHi-14059 Upon arriving in Chicago, Novick lived and worked in the Maxwell Street area, home to nearly fifty thousand immigrant Jews by 1900. The neighborhood’s large open-air market on Jefferson and Maxwell Streets recalled Jewish life in eastern Europe. Kosher meat and fresh produce were readily available as were fish, beer, textiles, tobacco, and dry goods. Advertisements in Yiddish, a unique German-based blended language written using modified Hebrew characters, peppered the area, as Yiddish was the common language among Jews of eastern European origin. 38 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
nity. In typical immigrant fashion, he lived above the shop with his Polish-born Jewish wife, Tillie, and their young son, Mitchell. Novick gained a reputation for fine craftsmanship and soon moved his shop and family to East Forty-Third Street to be nearer to his many affluent German Jewish customers. Although he stayed there for nearly forty years, the deeply rooted class and cultural differences between eastern and central European Jews prevented Novick from joining the German Jewish community.
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B ESSIE A BRAMOWITZ , C . 1915 Chicago History Museum, ICHi-65998 Similar to thousands of West Side Jews, Bessie Abramowitz (1889–1970) worked in Chicago’s garment industry. She sewed buttons at Hart, Schaffner & Marx, a leading men’s clothing manufacturer owned by local German Jews. On September 22, 1910, she helped lead several female coworkers in a spontaneous walkout over a cut in pay and poor working conditions. At a breakfast given by the Women’s Trade Union League the following week, Abramowitz said, “These girls cannot make a lot of money because they are reducing the prices from month to month.” The walkout quickly mushroomed into a massive strike involving more than forty thousand garment workers. Strikes in New York and other cities inspired Abramowitz, as did Jewish teachings about social justice; radical socialist thought; and local reformers, particularly Jane Addams. During the strike, Abramowitz spoke at rallies and enlisted other workers for the cause. She marched in the middle of the strikers, occasionally leaving her spot to stick a hatpin into the hindquarters of a policeman’s horse, an act of defiance that earned her the nickname “Hatpin Bessie.”
B ESSIE A BRAMOWITZ AND S IDNEY H ILLMAN WITH C HICAGO GARMENT WORKERS , O CTOBER 1915 Chicago History Museum, DN-0065308 During the 1910 strike, Bessie Abramowitz met Sidney Hillman, a Lithuanian Jew and labor activist. She and Hillman formed the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (ACWA) in 1914 and led a successful strike in 1915 for better pay and working conditions. They married in 1916 and became national leaders of the American labor movement. Here, Abramowitz (center, holding an American flag) and Hillman (standing to her left) are surrounded by celebrating ACWA workers after the 1915 strike. Shalom Chicago | 41
S ELF
PORTRAIT,
1937
Todros Geller Oil on canvas Courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago “Every Jew lives in two streets,” said Todros Geller in 1938, “one is the background in which he grew up, the other his present-day life.” Geller (1889–1949) immigrated to Canada in 1906 to escape the violent pogroms in Ukraine. He lived in Montreal, where he studied art, before moving to Chicago in 1918. Geller attended the School of the Art Institute while
42 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
teaching at the Chicago Hebrew Institute (CHI), later known as the Jewish People’s Institute (JPI), on the West Side. He developed an extensive program of instructional art classes and exhibitions but left in 1927 to pursue his own career. A talented and prolific artist who worked in many different mediums, Geller emerged as a leading figure of Chicago modernism. He helped found Around the Palette, a young Jewish artists’ group known for its radical views. Although Geller’s own views moderated over time, he remained committed to depicting traditional Jewish motifs in modern forms.
T ODROS G ELLER WITH STUDENTS AT THE C HICAGO H EBREW I NSTITUTE , C . 1920 Chicago History Museum, gift of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago, ICHi-17308 Geller developed a wide array of art classes at CHI, including pottery. In this photograph, he stands at the back of the room, showing a small pot to one of his students. Geller continued teaching at CHI/JPI until leaving in 1927 to pursue his own career.
E NGLISH CLASS GRADUATION , C HICAGO H EBREW I NSTITUTE , 1920 Chicago History Museum, gift of the Jewish Community Centers of Chicago, ICHi-17313 Geller taught at CHI/JPI under the direction of Philip L. Seman (seated, fourth from left). The innovative and tireless Seman developed programs that helped Jewish immigrants and their children adapt to American society while retaining their Jewish identity. He once described the organization as “frankly Jewish and staunchly American.”
Shalom Chicago | 43
R ABBI S AUL S ILBER , 1927 Courtesy of Hebrew Theological College, Skokie, Illinois Born in Lithuania, Saul Silber (1879–1946) studied to be an Orthodox rabbi before immigrating to America in 1900. Ten years later, he accepted a position at Ohave Shalom Mariampol on the West Side of Chicago, where he gained a wide following for developing a more contemporary form of Orthodox Judaism and challenging the liberal Reform movement. Rabbi Silber led the effort to establish Hebrew Theological College in 1922 and served as its president for twenty-four years. The school trained modern Orthodox rabbis for American synagogues and attracted students from across the country. In 1942, on the occasion of the school’s twentieth anniversary, Silber reflected on the effects of World War II on the Jewish people, writing, “We must see to preserve the eternal values of the Torah without which our people will never be saved.” A committed Zionist, he also strove to establish a Jewish state, a cause supported by the majority of West Side Jews, but died shortly before the birth of modern Israel.
P RESIDENT C OOLIDGE GREETS THE M IZRACHI C ONVENTION , 1926
TWELF TH ANNUAL
Courtesy of Hebrew Theological College, Skokie, Illinois On November 8, 1926, Rabbi Silber and a large group from the Mizrachi movement met with President Calvin Coolidge at the White House to discuss the creation of a Jewish state. Mizrachi, or religious Zionists, worked to promote their cause among Orthodox Jews. In the photograph, Silber stands slightly behind and to the right of the president.
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Shalom Chicago | 45
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J EROME KATZ
AND HIS MOTHER ,
S ARAH , 1943
Courtesy of the Jerome Katz family Born to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants, Jerome Katz (1925–97) grew up in Hegewisch on Chicago’s far South Side. After graduating from Bowen High School, Katz worked in the steel mills and attended Wilson Junior College before enlisting in the army on his eighteenth birthday in August 1943. He fought on the front line in Germany and later in the Philippines, experiences that inspired his desire to become a doctor. Katz, similar to many World War II veterans, attended college on the GI Bill. As an undergraduate, he wrote an essay on his wartime experiences, reflecting, “There are times when a man yearns for his home and the companionship of his friends.” Katz graduated from the University of Illinois in 1949 and obtained a medical degree from the same institution five years later. Beginning with a residency at the West Side VA Hospital, he practiced psychiatry in the Chicago area for the rest of his life. Katz and his wife, Irene, lived in West Rogers Park, where they raised four children according to Jewish tradition.
J EROME
AND I RENE
KATZ ’ S
WEDDING CEREMONY,
1959
Courtesy of the Jerome Katz family In December 1959, Jerome married Irene Frieder at her parents’ home in the South Shore neighborhood. Following Jewish tradition, their rabbi conducted the ceremony under a chuppah, a symbol of the home the couple would build together, and Katz wore a yarmulke, a Jewish skullcap. In this photograph, Katz’s mother, Sarah, is seated next to the fireplace, near his brother Hyman, the best man.
Shalom Chicago | 47
L ISA
AND
A RON D ERMAN
EN ROUTE TO
A MERICA , 1947
Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, gift of the Derman family During World War II, Aron Derman (1922–2005) and his future wife, Lisa Nussbaum Derman (1926–2002), escaped from a Jewish ghetto in Poland. They joined an underground resistance group in the Naroch forest and fought with the partisans until Soviet troops liberated the area in 1944. Fifty years later, during an interview for the United States Holocaust Museum, Aron remarked, “I wasn’t a hero, but I was part of the underground.” After the war, the Dermans immigrated to Chicago and settled on the far South Side. Aron ran a men’s clothing shop, while Lisa raised their three sons. The family moved to Skokie in the late 1970s, around the time of the attempted neo-Nazi march. The Dermans responded to the crisis by helping establish the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois. Their efforts resulted in a small storefront museum that later became the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Both Lisa and Aron passed away before the center opened in 2009, but their story and related artifacts are treasured parts of the museum’s collection. 48 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
D EMONSTRATORS MARCH , 1977
AGAINST PROPOSED NEO -N AZI
Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center On April 30, 1977, the thirty-second anniversary of Hitler’s death, American Nazis, led by Frank Collin, planned to demonstrate in front of the Skokie Village Hall. Thousands of Jewish residents turned out in protest, demanding the right to live without intimidation. A last-minute court order banned the march, but the Illinois Supreme Court later ruled in favor of the Nazis’ right to free speech (the group eventually marched in Marquette Park, not Skokie). The event made national headlines and sparked a community-based effort to commemorate the Holocaust.
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“M Y PASSOVER ,” 1989 Courtesy of Isaac Malis Isaac Malis (b. 1945) grew up in a traditional Jewish family in the Russian city of Gorky and graduated from the ArchitecturalConstruction Institute. In 1976, he moved to Moscow and began working as a mosaic and stained glass artisan. He also began to study Hebrew and Kabbalah, a system of Jewish mysticism. In 1986, Malis joined the Zionist movement, then banned by Soviet authorities. His activities included printing Zionist pamphlets in his apartment, not far from the office of the KGB, a national security agency. With the assistance of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Malis left the USSR in 1988 and came to Chicago. Shortly after arriving, he celebrated the Jewish festival of Passover, later recalling that it was a “very strange feeling when you take Torah and [are] not afraid if you will be arrested or not.” He found employment with a stained glass studio in Wisconsin but later returned to Chicago, opening his own studio on Milwaukee Avenue. Today, Malis lives and works in Humboldt Park. During an interview for the Museum in 2012, he said, “Judaism is not only for Jewish people. It’s for everybody.”
R OSH H ASHANAH , 1994–95 Isaac Malis Chicago History Museum, gift of Isaac Malis, ICHi-66001 Malis donated this stained glass window to the Museum as a way to thank Chicago for helping him escape the Soviet Union. He designed the window to commemorate the Jewish New Year, studying the Torah to find “the way to present the original Menorah . . . and the Ten Commandments.” He used about five hundred pieces of glass and a small sandblaster to etch Hebrew text on the Ten Commandments and the scroll, which contains a passage from the book of Exodus with God’s promise to bring the Jewish people out of Egyptian slavery and into a land flowing with milk and honey.
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Protesting Hitlerism As the Nazi Party began its terror campaign in 1930s Germany, Chicagoans tried to stem the tide. A N G E L A H O OV E R
The Jews of Chicago were among the first Americans to openly protest Hitler, as in this demonstration on May 10, 1933.
A
t the end of World War II, people around the world were horrified to learn about the extent of the Nazi regime’s atrocities against Jews. From the beginning of Hitler’s political career in the early 1930s, however, Americans recognized the danger he represented. In Chicago, both Jewish and non-Jewish citizens participated in the fight against anti-Semitism. As part of an international effort, Chicago Jews responded in various ways to the rise of Hitler and his anti-Semitic politics in Germany during the 1930s. Not only did Chicago Jews participate in the larger efforts to
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publicize their indignations and rescue overseas Jewish refugees, they also found unique ways to contribute to the protest. Trying to find a focus for the movement created tensions within an already divided community; while some felt that Hitler could and should be overthrown, others saw any public protest as potentially detrimental to German Jews struggling to leave the country, particularly as the movement was not unified, locally or nationally. Catastrophic events in Germany softened these tensions, however, and forced unity in the name of saving Jewish refugees. As no one national
leader or organization of the movement materialized, Chicago’s activities provide a microcosm of how individuals and organizations worked together to boycott German goods, hold mass meetings and demonstrations, publicize resolutions and petitions, and raise funds to rescue German Jews. Despite differing viewpoints, their motivations to fight reveal that they viewed the struggle as a collective one. Participation in the international movement came in large part from the United States. Out of the estimated fifteen million Jews living in the world, more than four million lived in the United States around 1930. Due to the size of their Jewish communities, New York and Chicago were arguably the most visible within the movement. New York boasted the largest Jewish population with almost two million. Chicago came in second with around 350,000, followed by smaller pockets in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and Los Angeles. Almost half the world’s population of Jews resided in Central Europe, the epicenter of Hitler’s terror campaign in the 1930s. Chicago’s Jewish community comprised two sharply divided enclaves expelled from their homelands by war, anti-Semitism, and poverty, issues echoed in the era of
The Adler and Sullivan–designed KAM Reform temple at ThirtyThird Street and Indiana Avenue, c. 1890.
Nazism. German Jews trickled in during Chicago’s earliest years, starting out as humble peddlers and soon establishing businesses and institutions that helped lay the city’s foundation. After the city’s devastating fire in 1871, the group migrated to the South Side and established a small middle- to upper-class community. At the turn of the twentieth century, Chicago’s Jewish population exploded from almost 10,000 to 225,000, as the result of a large wave of eastern European immigrants
At the demonstration on May 10, 1933, protestors were particularly incensed by Hitler’s appointment of Joseph Goebbels to represent Germany at Chicago’s A Century of Progress International Exposition. Protesting Hitlerism | 53
Illinois’s first Jewish governor Henry Horner (above in his Chicago office in 1933) served at the height of the arguments over the appropriate level of Jewish and American involvement in German politics. 54 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
that settled on the city’s West Side and joined its ethnically diverse working class. Though the wealthier South Side German Jews and the working-class West Side eastern European Jews remained divided, they also kept a profound sense of community reflective of a shared Jewish identity. Neighborhoods, institutions, synagogues and temples, businesses, and charities helped maintain this identity. Chicago’s Jews read of the rise of Hitler and his antiSemitic politics in the city’s foremost Jewish newspapers. Hitler’s fiery anti-Semitic speeches as chairman of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (or Nazi Party) in the early 1920s drew attention from many Germans who desired new leadership in the economic upheaval following World War I. Writing about his attempted coup, trial, and subsequent jail time in 1924, during which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf, the Sentinel quoted Hitler as boasting that he was “too mild an Anti-Semite.” After his release from prison, Hitler set about reorganizing the Nazi Party, condemning the Jews in several public speeches and rallies, setting off anti-Jewish riots in major cities, and spreading his propaganda. It seemed at first that Germany would not allow these anti-Semitic policies to take hold—newspapers reported that Berlin officials ordered the removal of swastikas and antiSemitic propaganda from the city’s streets and “called for a dissolution of the anti-Semitic Party in Berlin.” Furthermore, the papers informed readers of German Jewish physicist Albert Einstein’s visit to America in 1931, when he asserted, “When Germany’s stomach is full—that is when her economic condition improves— Hitler will no longer have any standing there.” Yet massive unemployment and political upheaval actually provided a foothold for Hitler’s regime. In the throes of the Great Depression, Americans saw new hope as Franklin Delano Roosevelt took his oath of office in 1933 and subsequently enacted New Deal policies that promised to bring the country back to its feet. Hitler had lost the presidential election of 1932 to Paul von Hindenburg, who later appointed him as chancellor, a position that held little power at that time. Hitler, however, drastically altered the role of the chancellor after the Reichstag (German parliament) gave him full legislative control in March 1933. Enacting several anti-Jewish policies, including the burning of “un-German” books, quotas on the number of Jews allowed in schools, and removal of Jewish artistic and cultural works, Hitler’s Nazi Party began its terror campaign in Germany. According to the Tribune, Chicagoans expressed their astonishment that “Hitler had reached and passed the zenith of his popularity and that German Fascism . . . would henceforth decline.” Indeed, it was labeled “the Tragic Year” by the American Jewish Yearbook, where author Harry Schneiderman asserted: “The world
shocking catastrophe which has befallen the Jews of Germany during the past five months is of such momentous significance to Jews everywhere, that all other events affecting our people appear to be of comparatively slight importance.” In what became a national debate lasting until the war, some Chicago Jews started to boycott German goods in response to the first of the Nazis’ many national anti-Semitic policies—a boycott of Jewish businesses that began on April 1, 1933. Though Hitler’s reign came unexpectedly, the call for communal action came quickly, sparking a decadelong, intense struggle against Nazism. Not all Jewish organizations agreed on their method of action, but the international community quickly publicized statements condemning Hitler’s regime and appealing for a unified response. A week before Hitler enacted the boycott of Jewish businesses, Zionist leader Louis Lipsky spoke to Chicago’s Covenant Club, imploring for communal action on behalf of German and American Jews, who were “treated like dogs,” asserting that “this is an infection . . . It may spread further and the whole position of Jewish life may become endangered.” Two days later, at a meeting to plan a formal protest against Nazi Germany, Anshe Emet Synagogue’s Rabbi Solomon Goldman echoed Lipsky’s cry for unified action, commenting that “No decent self-respecting Jew can remain silent at this moment.” At the biennial convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, an organization supporting Reform congregations, chairman Ludwig
Rabbi Solomon Goldman served the Conservative Anshe Emet Synagogue from 1929 until his death in 1953. Protesting Hitlerism | 55
Anshe Emet Synagogue, c. 1911
Vogelstein urged the Synagogue Council of America to act as “the mouthpiece of American Jews.” Vogelstein maintained that the agency, which represented the religion’s three branches (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform), embodied “the supreme tie which holds us together”—the tie of Judaism. Lipsky, Goldman, and Vogelstein all stressed the need for unified action. Although not all Chicago Jews agreed on this approach, leaders held mass meetings and demonstrations to publicize and discuss the worsening conditions in Germany. In March 1933 at the Auditorium, thousands of the city’s Jews listened to speakers denounce Hitler, concluding, “It is the unanimous opinion of this meeting that the anti-Semitic policy of the Nazi government is repugnant to the moral instincts of the civilized mankind.” On May 10, twenty-five thousand Chicagoans, Jews and non-Jews alike, marched downtown in response to both the Nazis’ massive book burnings, including those of Jewish authors, and to Joseph Goebbels’ appointment as ambassador to the upcoming world’s fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition. Gathering on the West Side near Roosevelt Road and Ashland Avenue, they carried signs and banners that read “Hitler’s Henchman Goebbels Must Not 56 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
Meet the Century of Progress” and “Down With Inquisition and Brutality in Hitler Germany.” The massive crowd walked to Grant Park where speeches by Jacob Siegel, Chicago editor of the Jewish Daily Forward; Morris Seskind of Jewish Trade Unions; Rabbi Benjamin Morris; Benjamin Good; and Rubin Horowitz spoke to the masses. In the end, Goebbels was not sent to represent Germany at the world’s fair. These mass demonstrations drew speakers from across the country who expressed concern that Hitler would prolong centuries of persecution despite their strength and perseverance. On December 3, 1933, at another mass meeting at the Auditorium, Rabbi Hillel Silver of Cleveland announced, “In Germany there has taken place a throwback; that which we already achieved through blood and struggle has been again wrested from us.” Morris Seskind compared the book burnings to “what happened when Catholics burned the books of heretics. Hitler should be destroyed.” In a speech to thousands of Chicagoans, Indiana governor Paul McNutt hoped to inspire the masses by stating, “The faith of Israel has made the Jews a people whom forty centuries could not destroy and who another forty centuries cannot destroy.”
Chicago newspapers covered Jewish protests and boycotts in detail. Protesting Hitlerism | 57
Though the pageant captured a moment of unity, Chicago’s Jewish community still struggled to find their focus in the movement. In August, the American Jewish Congress (AJC) passed a resolution to officially support the international boycott of German goods. Heading the initial movement in Chicago, AJC member Max Korshak and a group of Jewish leaders formed a boycott committee. Proponents of the ban held mass meetings to discuss support for the concept. On December 4, 1933, under the auspices of the newly formed Chicago Committee For the Defense of Human Rights Against Naziism (CCDHRAN), fifteen thousand supporters gathered at the Chicago Stadium. The crowd passed a resolu-
A broadside advertising a meeting in December 1933.
One of the city’s most visible responses to Hitler’s activities was the pageant The Romance of A People at Soldier Field on July 3, 1933, Jewish Day at the world’s fair. Intended to help raise funds for the resettlement of German Jews in Palestine and serve as an emotional demonstration against Hitler, the powerful program appealed to viewers’ emotions. One of several days dedicated to immigrant communities in Chicago, Jewish Day brought together the city’s diverse community to celebrate the four-thousand-year history of Jews, culminating with the pageant at Soldier Field. Conceived by Zionist activist Meyer Weisgal and directed by Isaac Van Grove, a cast of 3,500 performed what the Tribune described as “a magnificent and moving blend of drama, oratorio, and spectacle” embellishing the history of Jews in front of an audience of 125,000. The Tribune took particular interest in the pageant, publishing several days of articles leading up to the event as well as an eloquent front-page review the day after. The pageant awed attendees, so much so that the Tribune sponsored an additional performance at Soldier Field three days after the main event, as well as dozens of encores throughout the country in the following year. 58 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
The 1933 pageant The Romance of A People provided a dramatic, emotional celebration of Jewish culture.
The Romance of A People was first staged as part of Jewish Day at the world’s fair, but it was so well received that the Chicago Tribune arranged for the pageant to be presented again. Above: The Sentinel’s coverage of the event. Protesting Hitlerism | 59
tion introduced by Nobel prize winner Salmon O. Levinson, denouncing Hitler’s actions and agreeing to “pledge ourselves to refrain from buying or dealing in any or all German materials, goods, and products, and to refuse to patronize or ride in German-owned or -controlled steamships or other means of transportation until the stigma and curse of Naziism are weeded out of the German government.” Still, Rabbi Felix Mendelsohn, Reform leader of Chicago’s Temple Beth Israel, professed
Leon Mandel, owner of Mandel Brothers (above, c. 1905), supported the boycott of German goods (below).
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that proclaiming a massive boycott was “inadvisable” until America’s Jewry could unite with “strong Gentile forces” and thus make a greater impact. In response, the German boycott movement burgeoned and became nonsectarian in 1934. This was a vital component in its ultimate success, according to some. Although it did not urge an official governmental boycott, the CCDHRAN “recognized [the] power of public opinion as a force and the incisive effect of the boycott as a weapon” according to the Sentinel. At the initial meeting to discuss a formal protest in March 1933, Philip Sachs, son of department store owner Morris B. Sachs, stated that a boycott headed by Jews would “not have much effect on Hitler and his gang, not a hundredth part as much effect as a meeting by non-Jews.” Soon after, volunteers surveyed businesses in various neighborhoods, inquiring about their official policy regarding the sale of German goods and requesting an interview with a manager if no policy was in place. Publicizing their support for a boycott movement, Jewish-owned department stores such as Mandel Brothers and Maurice L. Rothschild, in connection with CCDHRAN, refused to buy German goods “until such time as Germany is humanized.” The boycott also attracted labor organizations such as the Chicago chapter of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union and the Chicago Federation of Labor, who wrote letters to local unions and businesses urging them to “Buy American” and published a newsletter to create awareness. Although he was an ardent antiwar activist, as chairman of CCDHRAN Levinson also became a spokesperson for the protest and its main objective of economically defeating Hitler. He justified his somewhat surprising proboycott stance in a letter to Jacob Arvey, stating that he recognized the exceptionality of the situation in Germany required drastic measures. Later in his letter, Levinson emphasized that fundraising efforts for German refugees were a “solemn humanitarian task,” but he questioned if their focus should be to concede to Hitler and facilitate Jewish departure from Germany or defeat the dictator via an economic boycott. This question became all-important early in the movement as conditions worsened overseas. Despite the attempts of boycott supporters to unify and organize their position, according to James Yard, executive secretary of CCDHRAN, the opposition remained unorganized for a variety of reasons. Although strikes and boycotts were not a new form of resistance in Chicago, some Jews felt that it went against their desire to maintain traditional Jewish theology. The Sentinel’s writer Joseph Salmark remarked that “a boycott is an unJewish concept” and an “economic form of war.” Pointing out that “not for nearly 2,000 years have Jews departed from a policy of non-resistance,” Judge Harry M. Fisher cautioned attendees at a boycott meeting against acting rashly.
The Chicago Committe For the Defense of Human Rights Against Naziism also supported the boycott of German goods. Protesting Hitlerism | 61
In March 1934, Mayor Edward J. Kelly banned screenings of a violently anti-Hitler film.
Justifiably, fear that existing anti-Semitism would overtake America if they supported the ban plagued others. In analyzing how America responded to information regarding events in Germany in the 1930s, author Robert H. Abzug affirms that the majority of Americans viewed Jews “with varying degrees of fear and mistrust,” intensified by unemployment levels during Great Depression. At the Midwestern Conference for the CCDHRAN, Copeland Smith spoke against the boycott, asserting that “you are extinguishing the fire in the barn while the house is burning . . . this organization was founded to fight Hitlerism but Hitlerism is Here.” Chicago reporter and prominent German American Julius Klein resigned as leader of the German-American Citizens League of Chicago after the organization passed a resolution to protest the boycott but refused to submit a protest with the German ambassador regarding the anti-Semitic actions of Hitler. The Sentinel reported on worries that, as in New York, “alien Nazi-leaders” might more easily take control of Chicago’s German organizations if members were incensed by a boycott. In American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941, author Moshe Gottlieb points out that members of both the American Jewish Committee and B’nai B’rith initially refused to support the boycott movement because they had relatives in Germany, but later joined the movement as conditions worsened overseas. Struggling to legitimize resistance to the boycott, Bernard Horwich, founding father of Chicago Zionism, wrote that “the ‘Jewish-led’ 62 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
boycott has hurt our people a thousand times more than it has hurt our enemies.” Horwich, who had traveled to Germany and spoken with German Jews, reported them saying, “The boycotters retort, ‘What would you have us do—take it ‘lying down’—allow them to trample on us?’ The answer is that it is not ‘us’ but the Jews of Germany who are prostrate and being trampled on.” Horwich went on to argue that German Jews desired financial help but refused to accept other aid, as it would only cause retaliation by the government. Another example of Chicago Jews’ struggle to respond to Hitler, as well as evidence that many were ambivalent to his regime in the early 1930s, shows in the controversy that erupted in March 1934 after Mayor Kelly banned the showing of an anti-Hitler film. Based on millionaire journalist Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr.’s experiences, the movie chronicled the shocking horrors Jews faced in Nazi Germany. Writing in the Jewish Daily Forward, managing editor Jacob Siegel believed the movie had “a great inestimable value for the Jews” and expressed frustration that Mayor Kelly had ordered its ban on the morning of its opening in response to complaints made by the German consul. Siegel wondered, “Is the freedom and independence of Chicago as a city in the American Republic so insecure and weak that Hitler’s consul can overthrow it with a threat?” Siegel also attacked Alderman Arvey, Mayor Kelly’s counsel, along with representatives of B’nai B’rith and the AntiDefamation League. Arvey defended his position, stating, “I think that those Jews of Chicago who are anxious for peace and tranquility in our relations with our fellowmen . . . should view with great satisfaction the conduct of a public official who, when a Jewish problem is before him, consults Jews.” Yet Arvey admitted that personally he did not see any benefit in showing the film, as he was “fearful that it sets a precedent which will haunt us, and cause much suffering in the years to come.” Mayor Kelly eventually released the film under the title Hitler’s Reign as opposed to Hitler’s Reign of Terror, a move designed to appease both sides. By 1935, the severity of the situation in Germany became evident and calls for unity among American Jews increased. In September, the Nazi Party passed the first of the Nuremberg Laws, barring marriage between Jews and non-Jews and revoking the citizenship of German Jews. German refugee Professor Fritz Bamberger said later that what “became perfectly clear certainly by 1935, was that all the young people should leave Germany. . . . If there was a chance for them to live out their lives without being oppressed, then fine.” In response to these worsening conditions, Chicago Jews stressed their shared faith as a unifying element. On April 15, 1935, the Tribune reported that two hundred of Chicago’s three hundred Jewish organizations had met “toward consoli-
As Nazi Germany’s power increased, refugees from Europe began to pour into the United States. These Jewish children arrived in Chicago on October 10, 1940.
dation of all organized Jewish action.” Urging this meeting to promote a “brother’s keeper” attitude toward European Jewry, Rabbi Solomon Goldman pointed out that anti-Semitism overseas had promoted unity in the American Jewish community. In July, one thousand representatives from Jewish organizations in Chicago passed resolutions renewing boycott efforts and pledging cooperation with intrafaith and interfaith organizations. At Sinai’s Rosh Hashanah service, in front of his congregation and more than five hundred Jewish refugees, Rabbi Louis L. Mann iterated that despite the seemingly endless thread of events overseas “one thing . . . remains constant—the Kingdom of God.” The unity of emotion in the late 1930s is well described in The Sentinel’s History of Chicago Jewry, 1911–1986: “In the blackness of the nazi era Jews living in Chicago had thrust upon them a role of rescue and relief, without parallel in human history. . . . This was their finest hour. Obliteration of petty rivalries and geographic curtains of separation brought moral grandeur to Chicago Jewry.” In particular, in 1938 Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass) marked a turning point in the movement as focus shifted from Hitler as the enemy to German Jews as vic-
tims and collective action became a priority among their American coreligionists. This shift in focus was not necessarily shaped by the United States government. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, about ninety thousand Jews immigrated to America from Germany from 1933 until 1940, a relatively small number of those who wished to immigrate. Several factors created difficulties for Americans who wanted to help. In the United States, immigration laws, strict quotas, reductions in visas granted, and ever-growing paperwork requirements created headaches for organizations. Abroad, a reduction in the number of exit permits, poor transportation, and currency issues prevented immigrants from making the journey overseas. Discussing America’s lack of effort in rescuing refugees, historian David Wyman attributes it to the United States quota laws that allowed in only 2 percent of every nationality. Both Wyman and author Robert Divine agree that the economic pressures of the Great Depression played a large role in limiting the number of immigrants the government felt the nation could absorb. Some agencies, like Chicago’s National Council for Jewish Women (NCJW), could not legally provide money Protesting Hitlerism | 63
to those seeking financial help in bringing over friends and relatives. According to the NCJW’s Department of Service to the Foreign Born (DSFB), Chicagoans who wanted to help, whether because they had relatives abroad or for more abstract reasons, “had to learn that the present gate to America is a documentary one, which necessitates securing innumerable documents, credentials, and letters of reference.” The DSFB sought to aid the immigration of European refugees, especially Jews. Its slogan, “Faith and Humanity,” was meant to serve “as a beacon” for those struggling to leave their countries. Organizations such as the NCJW and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HAIS) put aside their differences to overcome logistical difficulties in rescuing refugees. At the NCJW board meeting on November 22, 1937, in response to a motion to move the DSFB from Hull-House to the NCJW headquarters, Mrs. Kenneth Rich of the Immigrants’ Protective League commented that “this is not the time to create division.” In 1935, to coordinate the efforts of several Jewish organizations including the NCJW, HAIS, DSFB, Jewish Children’s Bureau, and Jewish Vocational Service, a group of Jewish organizations formed the Chicago Committee for Jewish Refugees. Its director Marion Schaar stated that “the objective of this Department since January, 1939 at least, has been to provide the Jewish community of the Chicago area with a unified immigration and naturalization service.” A Chicago Sun-Times article drove home the point: This cooperation of the whole Jewish community in a concerted program prevents duplication of effort, makes use of existing facilities, and offers to the refugees the kind of constructive service they need in order to help them quickly and most effectively find their places as self-supporting American citizens. Furthermore, the Jewish Welfare Fund in Chicago initiated a national campaign to raise two million dollars for refugee support, doling out financial aid for relief efforts to several of other Jewish organizations. Alongside the organizational efforts to assist refugees, individuals played a large role in the rescue effort. Schaar discussed her experience in reorganizing the DSFB in 1939, stating, “Within a few days it had become apparent that we were dealing with a group who having borne the brunt of their own bitter experiences, were suddenly faced with the responsibility of giving aid to others in a like predicament.” According to the immigration laws, only individuals could provide refugees with affidavits. Many Chicagoans did so. Max Adler, brotherin-law of Sears president and noted philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, established a fund with the Rosenwald family to sponsor Jews in Nazi-ruled countries for emigration. Adler received one letter from Gitla-Matla Szalet of Berlin in 1938 that implored him to provide an affi64 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
Bernard Kronthal’s Austrian-German passport, issued on July 25, 1938. In Chicago, he met and married fellow refugee Trude Heimann.
davit supporting her move to the United States “as it is becoming more and more unpossible [sic] for us. Our ship is sinking rapidly, and we shall soon perish, unless someone will hear our cry for S.O.S. very soon.” Adler’s son Robert responded on his behalf, stating, “I will be very happy to do what I can to arrange for an affidavit for you.” The two kept in contact for the three years it took to bring Szalet and her father to the United States. In May 1938, the Nazis entered Austria, declaring a union between the two countries and launching a terror campaign against Austrian Jews. On May 6, the Tribune reported that Hitler planned to force a yearlong mass exodus of thirty thousand Austrian Jews, with more expulsions in the years to follow. Edith Strauss recalls how her father, “along with probably thousands of other Jews,” scanned American phone books for their last name, hoping to find distant relatives or sympathetic strangers. Ultimately, Raymond E. Law, president of Chicago’s Exchange National Bank, chose their letter from a large pile at the NCJW headquarters and provided affidavits for the family. Leonard Fuchs, a resident of Chicago’s North Side along with many other Chicago Jews, received distressing letters of appeal from four different Austrian Jewish families with the surname Fuchs between November 1938 and February 1939. Heinrich Fuchs wrote in imperfect English, “Hoping and believing you may be one of my relatives in U.S.A. . . . believe me it’s a mere question of life for us two. . . . I beg you to help us as soon as possible.” Oskar Fuchs stated that, “In my great distress it occurred to me to turn to you with the request to overtake the part of a relative and warrantee as you are bearing the same name as I.” Leonard, who probably did not personally have the funds to sponsor refugees, replied to Oskar that he would seek the aid of organizations in hopes of helping the family. Though we do not know the fates of
America’s immigration laws required refugees to fulfill many steps. Trude Heimann’s passport (right) and an affidavit from an American relative (above) were required to prove she had financial support and family waiting in the United States. Protesting Hitlerism | 65
Many European Jews without known relatives in the United States wrote to American Jews who shared their surnames, desperately requesting immigration support. Above: Oskar Fuchs and his family. Below: Joseph Fuchs.
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Charitable organizations such as the Jewish People’s Institute (right) offered vocational classes, children’s programs, and social mixers to help immigrants fit into American culture while retaining their Jewish identity. Above: Boys preparing for a class in the JPI locker room (undated).
these Jews who wrote to Leonard, they represent the thousands who desperately sought a way out. As refugees came to the city, Chicagoans worked to help them adjust to their new life in America. Organizations such as the Jewish People’s Institute (JPI) offered English classes and a New Home Club to facilitate social interaction with other refugees. The goal was to help new American Jews “learn English as quickly as possible, to undergo vocation training . . . and to give him an opportunity to meet those who are already Americanized so that he can make friends . . . and achieve a feeling of ‘at-home-ness’ and of self-confidence in his new environment.” Professor Bamberger said openly that “the Jews in Chicago felt that refugees should become Americanized as quickly as possible.” And Americanize they did. According to Donald P. Kent’s The Refugee Intellectual: The Americanization of the Immigrants of 1933–1941, “No other large group has ever attained citizenship so soon after arrival.” Efforts continued during the war and beyond to aid refugees. Scholars approximate the number of refugees that arrived in Chicago during the 1930s between ten thousand and fifteen thousand—the numbers aren’t precise because, as refugee Walter Roth said, “our emigration was not an organized effort.” True, the movement did not succeed in achieving true organization and cohesiveness, but it is vital to acknowledge and understand the efforts put forth by the Jewish community in the midst of the challenges they faced. With no true cohesion, it is difficult to quantify and compare Chicago’s response to that of New York and other American cities; yet we can remember and appreciate the efforts of those individuals and organizations that led the local movement to save friends, family, and strangers abroad.
Angela Hoover served as curatorial assistant for the Chicago History Museum’s exhibition Shalom Chicago. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum collection unless otherwise noted. 52, 53, bottom: CriticalPast; 53, top: i66999; 54: DN-0103510; 55: i66000; 56: i65631; 57: Chicago Daily News, March 28, 1933; 58, left: i67551; 58, right: JC-359, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 58, lower right: JC-563, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 59: Sentinel, July 6, 1933; 60, upper: i65626; 60, lower: JC-100, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 61: i66990; 62: i26507; 63: i67552; 64: JC-471, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 65, upper: JC-682, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 65, lower: JC-470, courtesy of Spertus Institute, Chicago; 66, upper left: i67548; 66, upper right: i67547; 66, lower left: i67550; 66, lower right: i67569; 67, left: i66960; 67, right: i66958. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For accounts of these events in the general history of Chicago Jews, see Irving Cutler’s The Jews of Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), Bernard Horwich’s My First Eighty Years (Chicago: Argus Books, 1939), and Olivia Mahoney’s Shalom Chicago (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2013). For more on the national response, see Moshe R. Gottlieb’s American Anti-Nazi Resistance, 1933–1941: An Historical Analysis (New York: Ktav Publishing House, 1982) and Richard Breitman and Alan M. Kraut’s American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987). A large collection of interviews with German Jewish refugees, many of whom settled in Chicago, can be found in the oral history collection of the Research Foundation for Jewish Immigration, located at the Center for Jewish History, New York. Protesting Hitlerism | 67
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Advocates for the Hopeless: Interviews with George Leighton and Barbara Bowman T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
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arbara Taylor Bowman and George N. Leighton have left indelible marks on their professions in Chicago and the nation. Throughout their careers, each has defended society’s underdogs. Bowman is a pathbreaking early childhood education advocate, professor, and author. Cofounder of Chicago’s Erikson Institute, she not only pioneered new approaches to child learning and child care but became a national proponent of educational equity for minority and low-income children. Leighton served as a United States Army captain during World War II before moving to Chicago. He became a leading criminal and civil rights attorney, the first person of color to serve as a judge on the First District Appellate Court of Illinois, and eventually served as a justice on the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois. The Chicago American ran a front-page article one Sunday with his picture and the caption: “The lawyer for hopeless cases.” Leighton was born George Neves Leitao in 1912 in New Bedford, Massachusetts. His parents were Cape Verdean immigrants from the coast of Africa and itinerant agricultural workers. His mother, Anna Silva Garcia, arrived in 1909, the child of an upper-middle-class ship-owning family. His father, Antonio Neves Leitao, the son of a black Cape Verde woman and a white Portuguese man, arrived in the late nineteenth century. George Leitao became “Leighton” in the fourth grade, when his teacher claimed she could not (or perhaps did not want to) properly pronounce his surname. His parents, unable to speak English and eager to avoid problems, agreed. “Cape Verdean people are peculiar people,” remembers Leighton. “They’re self-segregating. They don’t commingle much. I don’tremember ever visiting the home of an African American person while living in New Bedford or anywhere else in Massachusetts.” 68 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
George N. Leighton (left) and Barbara Taylor Bowman (right) have spent their lives in the service of others in Chicago and elsewhere.
He also recollects that “from the time I was born in New Bedford, I went to New Bedford public schools intermittently because the rest of the time I worked on cranberry bogs, blueberry bushes, and strawberry patches.” In 1929, Leighton’s parents took him out of the seventh grade and put him to work full-time. Eventually he found work as a mess boy on an oil tanker steaming from Providence, Rhode Island to Aruba. On another ship, he did a stint as a guitar and banjo player with the popular Duke Oliver Band. Ironically, New Bedford city officials later renamed a junior high school the George N. Leighton School to honor its former childhood resident who so inconsistently attended school. Barbara Bowman experienced a dramatically different childhood. Born Barbara Taylor and raised on the South Side of Chicago, her grandfather Robert Robinson Taylor was one of the first accredited African American architects in the United States and the designer of much of Booker T. Washington’s pre-1932 Tuskegee Institute campus. Her father, Robert Rochon Taylor, was a prominent figure in Chicago’s African American community, perhaps best remembered for chairing the board of the Chicago Housing Authority from 1943 to 1950. “I grew up in the black ghetto of the South Side, what was called the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments,” Bowman recounts. “My father was the manager of it and eventually the vice president of the corporation.” Bowman also spent the early years of her marriage to Dr. James E. Bowman there. “So I spent my entire childhood and adulthood, early adulthood, in the Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments. It was known affectionately in the community as the Rosenwald Building.” Bowman remembers a segregated but happy childhood. “My world as a child was bounded by Thirty-First Street, Sixty-Third Street, Cottage Grove, and Wentworth. That was my entire world, except I went out of it to go to school. I took courses at the Art Institute as a child. . . . But basically, I lived in that world. And that was where African Americans could live.” College was a formative experience for both Bowman and Leighton. In 1936, Leighton was awarded a two hundred dollar scholarship after winning a writing contest in New Bedford. He was determined to attend Howard University, which only accepted him conditionally as an “unclassified” student. When he received five As and two Bs in his first semester, Leighton remembers, “I followed the registrar of Howard all over the campus and showed him his letter and my grades.” The registrar quickly agreed to put him on the “classified” list. Leighton majored in history, studying with the American diplomat Ralph Bunche (who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1950) and with William Leo Hansberry, the uncle of A Raisin in the Sun author Lorraine Hansberry. He graduated magna cum laude in 1940 and was invited to join the prestigious Phi Beta Kappa Society. Bowman attended Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. She initially intended to be an artist and then a city planner. During her final year,
As a child, Bowman lived at Chicago’s Michigan Boulevard Garden Apartments, shown here in a 1951 Mildred Mead photograph.
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however, she worked at Sarah Lawrence’s nursery school and was certified to teach nursery school through third grade. Upon returning to Chicago, she visited a public school kindergarten. The experience was unforgettable: “The woman had fifty children in the morning and fifty more in the afternoon,” Bowman explains. “While I was there, she was playing the piano, looking in a mirror that was on the piano so that she could see misbehaving children in back of her. And I thought, ‘I don’t know how to do that.’ Nothing that they taught me at Sarah Lawrence would help me do that.” Bowman instead obtained a position at the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, simultaneously working toward a master’s degree from that university. Leighton’s graduate school experience was also formative. He decided he wanted to attend Harvard Law, even though he did not even know where it was located. He sought out William Hastie, a Howard professor and law school dean, leading civil rights attorney, and future federal judge. Hastie listened, but offered no advice. “About a week or two later,” recounts Leighton, “I received a handwritten note on personal stationery.” It was an invitation to visit Harvard, from law school dean James McCauley Landis. Leighton jumped on a train at once. After the meeting, remembers Leighton, “I went back to Washington and about ten days later I received a letter from the secretary of Harvard Law School, telling me that James McCauley Landis had admitted me to the class of 1943 and had given me a scholarship.” Leighton admits ironically that, “I went to Harvard Law School because I couldn’t afford to go anywhere else.” 70 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
Leighton attended Howard University in Washington, DC, one of the first African American universities in the United States. Above: The Founders Library at Howard, c. 1939.
Bowman’s alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College, c. 1941, when she was a student there.
Leighton’s studies were interrupted by World War II. During the conflict, he served in the Pacific theater as an infantry officer, saw action in the battles of Guadalcanal, Bougainville, Green Island, Finschhafen, and Moratai, and was awarded the Bronze Star for his courageous service. He immediately returned to Harvard, graduated, and passed the Massachusetts bar exam. After visiting several cities, he elected to settle in Chicago, in part because “Chicago was the only place in America in 1946 that had a person of color in the Congress of the United States. His name was William L. Dawson.” Leighton immersed himself in civic affairs. He received a job offer from Dawson’s political ally Christopher C. Wimbish, the Third Ward Committeeman and Illinois State Senator, but Wimbish promised no salary. According to Leighton, Wimbish gave him the following instructions: “I’m busy. I can’t go to court. But every morning [my office] is filled with people looking for a lawyer. You come here before 8:00. Somebody will come here to find a lawyer to represent her husband who shot somebody or somebody who mugged somebody. I’ll talk with the client. I’ll recommend you and you go to court with them. I’ll charge the fee. I’ll collect the fee. Then when the case is over with, I’ll decide what part of the fee you will get.” In no time, Leighton was in court at Twenty-Sixth Street and California Avenue representing many of Wimbish’s clients. The courthouse was renamed the George N. Leighton Criminal Court Building in 2012. Within a short time, Leighton had allied himself with leaders in the African American community such as Earl B. Dickerson, general counsel of the Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company; Truman Gibson Sr., who was later instrumental in desegregating the United States military; and the Olympian and future congressman Ralph Metcalf. Bowman’s career was also interrupted by war. James Bowman enlisted for the Korean War and was sent to Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Denver, where Barbara taught at Colorado Women’s College. In 1955, an acquaintance offered James the chance to help establish a hospital in southern Iran. Their planned two years abroad turned into six, during which time their daughter (Valerie Jarrett, former chair of the Chicago Transit Authority and currently a senior advisor to President Barack Obama) was born. James was employed as the director of pathology at Nemazee Hospital in Shiraz and also helped Making History | 71
found a medical school at the local university. Barbara taught social sciences in the medical school and at the Nemazee School of Nursing. The experience was transformative: “A lot of tribal children passed through Shiraz once a year,” explains Bowman. “They were like African American kids who would come up from the south to a northern school. They didn’t have any of the same skills and knowledge. And so [I was] trying to help them figure out how to handle these tribal kids in an urban school setting.” Bowman did not realize it at the time, but the experience “was wonderful preparation for when I came home because it was very much the same kind of a problem. [When] we added low-income kids to the early childhood population, nobody knew anything about teaching kids who came from different social classes and who had different cultural experiences.” Perhaps the most useful Iranian lesson, Bowman says, was to pay attention to—and to value— cultural differences in raising and educating children. “I became very much aware of how, given another set of circumstances, people raise children in quite different ways and those children turn out to be human, too.” By the time the Bowmans returned to Chicago, Leighton had attracted considerable attention. In the summer of 1951, while working for the Legal Redress Committee of the Chicago branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), he advised African American bus driver Harvey Clark Jr. that he could move into a Cicero apartment after signing a lease. On July 11 and 12, 1951, the apartment building at 6139 West Nineteenth Street in Cicero was badly damaged by rioters. Leighton was subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury investigating the event. During the hearings, the foreman asked Leighton why he advised Clark to move to Cicero. Leighton responded: “Sir, because it was his apartment. The landlady had rented it to him, had taken his $50, and gave him the keys. The Constitution of the United States says that property, like liberty, shall not be taken away, except by due process of law. There’s nothing less due process of law than to take an apartment from a person merely because he’s black.” The grand jury not only rejected Leighton’s argument, they indicted him for instigating the event. Leighton (left) and his client Carl A. Hansberry in the late 1930s, during their legal challenge of racially restrictive covenants in Chicago. The case was dramatized by Hansberry’s playwright daughter Lorraine in 1959’s A Raisin in the Sun.
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Leighton also represented Harvey Clark (above, with his wife, Johnetta) during investigations of the 1951 Cicero race riots. Making History | 73
Eventually future United States Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall was recruited to successfully defend Leighton. The case proved wonderful publicity, and Leighton quickly became one of Chicago’s most prominent criminal attorneys. In 1951, he organized the law firm of Moore, Ming & Leighton, the predecessor to the firms of McCoy, Ming & Leighton and McCoy, Ming and Black. A year later, Leighton reversed the murder conviction of Heywood Pugh, one of two black men convicted by an all-white jury fourteen years earlier of a murder they did not commit. During the next decade, he represented Donald Howard in the Trumbull Park desegregation case. By 1964, Leighton had defended more than two hundred clients in bench and jury trials and handled more than 175 appeals, reviews, and civil or criminal charges in state and federal courts. He headed what many considered one of the largest predominantly black law firms in the United States. By the 1960s, Bowman was transforming early childhood education. The Great Society programs of the Lyndon Johnson administration had infused education with new kinds of federal support for the first time. Bowman envisioned teaching preschool teachers to work with young children in the new Head Start programs. She recognized that “lots of teachers would teach in this Head Start program and know nothing about poor children.” They “would certainly not know anything about African American children and would need to be taught how to work with these children.” With the support of businessman and philanthropist Irving B. Harris, child psychologist Maria Piers, and social worker Lorraine Wallach, Bowman opened the Chicago School for Early Childhood Education (renamed Erikson Institute in 1969) with sixteen students in the fall of 1966. Classes were held in the Hyde Park Bank Building. The founding of Erikson Institute coincided with Leighton’s elevation to the bench in 1966. His criminal defense success—he was described as the “successful defender of the legally downtrodden” by one newspaper— attracted the attention of Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley. Leighton became a judge of the circuit court of Cook County (1964–69) and then a judge of the appellate court for the First District (1969–76), serving as the first African American appointed to the latter. In 1976, President Gerald Ford appointed Leighton as a United States district judge, replacing the widely admired Abraham Lincoln Marovitz. Leighton remained on that court until he retired from the bench in 1987 at the age of seventy-five and became counsel to Chicago law firm Earl L. Neal and Associates. He practiced law up to 2007, when he finally retired at the age of ninety-two. 74 | Chicago History | Summer 2013
Bowman surrounded by a group of young students.
Leighton never shied away from controversy while on the bench. For example, he dismissed a major class action suit against Marshall Field & Company involving a merger. He ruled that the Chicago Park District did not discriminate against minorities in running the park system between 1970 and 1983. And he approved the largest civil rights settlement ever, valued at $10 million, between the Burlington Northern Railroad and African Americans across the country. His most disputed ruling may be his 1984 decision to suppress government evidence against four alleged Puerto Rican terrorists that was obtained through videotaped surveillance. That decision, which Leighton said resulted from a clear invasion of privacy, was later reversed by the United States Court of Appeals. After 1970, Bowman and Erikson Institute were leading advocates for a “new education of children.” Bowman is quick to remind anyone that as recently as 1965, most educators believed children followed a uniform pattern of learning and that early intervention had little impact. “We thought all children developed the same way, from the inside out,” she recounts. “Doing things too early didn’t do any good.” Instead, Bowman and her colleagues applied the ideas of psychologist and psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, which emphasized self-knowledge, avoided quick diagnoses of health or sickness, and resisted judgments of goodness or badness. Through her work, Bowman argued that child learning was complex and that the resilience of children was heavily reliant on fostering an environment of mutuality and supportive relationships. Bowman puts it bluntly: “Because kids didn’t act like middle-class kids did not mean that they had a developmental problem.” Over time, Bowman served Erikson Institute in multiple capacities: professor, director, vice president for academic programs, acting president, and president. By 2000, the Institute had eight full-time and nine part-time faculty, two hundred students, and seven hundred and fifty alumni. Graduates of the Institute have gone on to hold high-level posts at LaRabida Children's Hospital in Chicago, the Salvation Army, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, and the National Easter Seal Society. Bowman’s success made others seek her expertise. She has served on numerous boards and commissions, including as president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children (1980–82), a panelist on Day Care Policy for the National Research Council (1987–90), part of the Committee on the Prevention of Reading Difficulties in Young Children for the National Research Council, and chair of the Committee on Early Childhood Pedagogy for the National Research Council. She has received numerous honors, including honorary degrees from Bank Street College (1988), Roosevelt University (1998), Dominican University (2001), Governors State University (2002), Lewis University (2009), and Wheelock College (2005). She has also received the McGraw Hill Prize in Education and the Sargent Shriver Award for Equal Justice. Her expertise eventually led to her appointment as the chief early childhood education officer for the Chicago Public Schools from 2004 to 2012.
Bowman is a respected instructor of other teachers, sharing the pioneering educational methods that Erickson Institute advocates.
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Leighton has also been awarded many honors: the Civil Liberties Award of the Illinois Civil Liberties Union “for those deprived of due process” (1961), John Howard Award (1964), Chicagoan of the Year in Law and Judiciary (1964), and Richard E. Westbrooks Award (1964) for his “outstanding contribution to the legal profession.” Elmhurst College (1964), John Marshall Law School (1973), Loyola University Chicago (1989), Southeastern Massachusetts University (1976), and New England University School of Law (1978) have all given him honorary degrees. In 2003, the American Inns of Court gave Leighton the Professionalism Award for his lifelong service to the legal profession, and in 2008, the Center on Wrongful Convictions at Northwestern University Law School presented him with the Jenner & Block Award for his lifetime contributions to improving criminal justice. These public accolades are minor to Leighton and Bowman. When asked what she considers her greatest accomplishment, Bowman quickly responds with a laugh: “My granddaughter. I raised a good mother who raised a good child.” Leighton also goes back to his roots: “I never represented rich people. I never had people with money. . . . Representing all kinds of people and handling cases that go all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States, and in many instances, affecting the rights of people immediately involved, that is the achievement that I feel most satisfied about.”
The 2011 Making History Awards. From left: Barbara Bowman, Renée Crown, Bill Kurtis, Donna LaPietra, and David Speer. Not pictured: Marshall Field V.
The 2009 Making History Awards. From left: James Skinner, George Leighton, Carole and Gordon Segal, and Donald Perkins. Not pictured: Norman Bobins.
Timothy Gilfoyle is a professor and chair of history at Loyola University Chicago and author of A Pickpocket’s Tale: The Underworld of Nineteenth-Century New York (W. W. Norton, 2006). I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 68, right: courtesy of Erikson Institute; 69: i09273; 70: courtesy of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, HABS DC, WASH, 236-A— 1; 71: Sarah Lawrence College Archives; 72: i62451; 73: i59860; 74, 75: Erikson Institute; 76: both photographs by John Alderson. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | A good introduction to George Leighton is Robert Lovinger, “A Just Life,” New Standard, 13 June 1999, available at: http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/0699/061399/e01li149.htm. For his views on civil liberties, see his 2002 essay “National Security?” available at: http://jonathanpollard.org/ 2002/110502.htm. Coverage of his NAACP career appears in Christopher Reed, The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910–1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997). Barbara Bowman’s career is examined in Kimberly Sweet, “Behind Every Child,” University of Chicago Magazine, February 1999, available at http://magazine.uchicago.edu/9902/html/bowman.htm. Her ideas about early childhood education can be found in the co-authored publications of the multiple commissions and panels on which she served, including Eager to Learn: Educating our Preschoolers (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2000) and Love to Read: Essays in Developing and Enhancing Early Literacy Skills of African American Children (Washington, DC: National Black Child Development Institute, 2003). 76 | Chicago History | Summer 2013