Chicago History | Fall 2014

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Fall 2014 Contents

VOLUME XXXIX, NUMBER 3

4 18 34 3

“The Park is Ours” Brian Mullgardt

Up from Little Hell Lawrence J. Vale

Challenging the Medical Establishment Greta S. Nettleton

Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams

52

Yesterday’s City

68

Making History

J. Nicole Robinson

Timothy J. Gilfoyle

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Cover: Bring the Troops Home Now, 1968.

Broadside created by Nancy Coner, Student Mobilization Committee, New York City. i40060.

Gift of John S. Tris.

Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen

Copyright 2014 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 www.chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Photography Joseph Aaron Campbell Stephen Jensen

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

Sally Sprowl Samuel J. Tinaglia Ali Velshi Gail Ward Jeffrey W. Yingling

Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Paul L. Snyder

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

T. Bondurant French Chair Sharon Gist Gilliam Chairman Emeritus James L. Alexander First Vice Chair David D. Hiller Second Vice Chair Tobin E. Hopkins Treasurer Walter C. Carlson Secretary Gary T. Johnson President Russell L. Lewis Executive Vice President and Chief Historian HONORARY T R U S T E E

Rahm Emanuel Mayor, City of Chicago

TRUSTEES

Bradford L. Ballast David H. Blake Matthew Blakely Denise R. Cade Warren K. Chapman Keith L. Crandell Patrick F. Daly Patrick W. Dolan James P. Duff Paul H. Dykstra Timothy J. Gilfoyle Mary Lou Gorno Dennis H. Holtschneider Cheryl L. Hyman Nena Ivon Daniel S. Jaffee Falona Joy Randye A. Kogan Judith Konen Michael Kupetis Robert C. Lee Ralph G. Moore Michael A. Nemeroff Kelly Noll M. Bridget Reidy John W. Rowe Larry Selander Joseph Seliga

HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE

Richard M. Daley LIFE TRUSTEES

Lerone Bennett Jr. Philip D. Block III David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon Alison Campbell de Frise John W. Croghan Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner Sallie L. Gaines Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Henry W. Howell Jr. Philip W. Hummer Richard M. Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss

TRUSTEES EMERITUS

Paul J. Carbone Jonathan Fanton Thomas M. Goldstein Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Jean Haider Erica C. Meyer Robert J. Moore Eboo Patel Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Peggy Snorf Noren Ungaretti Joan Werhane

The Chicago History Museum is easily accessible via public transportation.

CTA buses nos. 22, 36, 72, 73, 151, and 156 stop nearby. For travel information, visit www.transitchicago.com.

The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chicago Park District on behalf of the people of Chicago.

FROM THE EDITORI

T

he whole world was watching Chicago in August 1968. Most of the focus, however, was on Grant Park as demonstrators faced off against law enforcement. But a few miles north, the scene in Lincoln Park and Old Town was also fraught with tension. The Festival of Life kicked off on Sunday, August 25, and participants and police officers prepared for the worst with sometimes surprising results. In a special article for this issue, historian Brian Mullgardt tells the story of the festival and its legacy of activism in the neighborhood. The article complements The 1968 Exhibit that recently opened at the Chicago History Museum and runs through January 4, 2015.

A few decades earlier, the North Side experienced tension of a different kind. Part of the area was known as “Little Hell” and had a notorious poverty level and crime rate. In this excerpt from his recent book, Lawrence J. Vale tells the story of how residents decried the loss of their homes when the city decided to raze the neighborhood to build what would become Cabrini-Green, which planners hoped would become a model for public housing.

The nickname Little Hell was applied to another area of the city—Goose Island. The author of our Yesterday’s City was curious the island’s first residents, who are remembered primarily for creating one of the city’s earliest and longest-enduring slums, an Irish shantytown called Kilgubbin.

J. Nicole Robinson’s research to learn more about these early Chicagoans took her back to the old country to discover why and how they made the move to Chicago and reveals the difficulties of uncovering the personal histories of everyday people.

Two articles in this issue tell the stories of some remarkable women in Chicago. Greta Nettleton explores the career of an early female physician who battled against government regulation of the profession. Timothy J. Gilfoyle’s “Making History” column reveals the contributions of two more recent Chicagoans: Mary Dempsey and Bernie Wong.

I hope you enjoy this issue. We’re already hard at work on the next, which will be dedicated to the Civil War in Chicago. Look for your copy in July 2015!

Rosemary K. Adams Editor-in-Chief

“The Park is Ours�

During the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention, the whole world was watching as police and demonstrators faced off near Grant Park but further north, residents of the Lincoln Park neighborhood staged their own protest.

4 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

BRIAN MULLGARDT

“The whole world is watching.

The whole world is watching. . . .”

T

he night of Wednesday, August 28, 1968, when protesters clashed with Chicago police outside of the Democratic National Convention, is infamous.

CBS television cameras rolled as nightsticks crunched down and protesters were slammed into paddy wagons.

Yippies Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, who received attention from the media and historians, share that night’s notoriety. Just out of the spotlight, however, are the everyday Chicagoans who played key roles in preparing for, and carrying out, the Yippie-inspired “Festival of Life” held in Lincoln Park to protest the convention. And while historians have assessed the national meaning of the 1968 convention, its local impact was just as important. The nation watched an antiwar demonstration on television, but to Chicagoans their protest was about access to Lincoln Park and police brutality, and it was a protest that transformed the Lincoln Park neighborhood.

Left: All eyes were on Chicago in late August 1968 during the Democratic National Convention.

Background: Aerial view of the crowd surrounding the Hilton Hotel near Grant Park. Photograph by Declan Haun. Above: Poster by Students for a Democratic Society protesting the convention.

Above: An advertisement for the Festival of Life in Lincoln Park.

Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin came up with the idea, but its main participants were Lincoln Park residents and Chicago police officers.

“The Park is Ours” | 5

Above: Old Town, the Haight-Ashbury of Chicago, was adjacent to the Lincoln Park neighborhood and the park itself; many demonstrators headed for Wells Street, (pictured here in 1970), when they were ejected from the park. Photograph by Sigmund J. Osty. Inset: Button from the group Student Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Below: The Chicago Seed published a special issue devoted to the convention, including an article on what to do if arrested.

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The idea to stage a protest during the Democratic National Convention was born in Abbie Hoffman’s New York apartment at the close of 1967 on December 31.

Neither Hoffman nor Rubin, however, knew where to hold such an event in the city, so they advertised for a local organizer in the underground newspaper the Chicago Seed, published in Old Town, the HaightAshbury of 1960s Chicago. The Yips traveled to Chicago in March, filed a permit to hold their demonstration with the city, then left town. Hoffman and Rubin would not be in Chicago together again until August acting—and acting up—elsewhere.

Over the summer, Chicagoans from the countercultural community, ministers, and ordinary citizens formed the Free City Survival Committee to secure housing and legal and medical aid and to negotiate with the city for a permit to protest. They also held a series of “be-ins” in Lincoln Park in part to help prepare both the community and the police for convention week. Throughout the summer of 1968, Free City successfully spread the word about the potential for violence, and many stayed away in August. To the relief of one minister, absent were activists from Berkeley and New York. Those who did arrive in Lincoln Park, however, found an array of resources gathered by Chicagoans. One could find churches to crash in, clothing, medical centers (including the LSD Rescue center), attorneys providing free legal aid, kitchens, and cars. The Seed’s Convention Guide issue included a map of Lincoln Park and offered guidance in articles such as “What to do in case of an arrest” and “How to Survive the Streets.”

This special insert from the Seed featured a map of Lincoln Park. “The Park is Ours� | 7

On Saturday, August 24, the day before the festival began, the Chicago police began twenty-four-hour surveillance of Lincoln Park, but there wasn’t much to survey. Demonstrators hung out around the knoll northwest of the field house, while others practiced karate moves in anticipation of police violence. Hundreds of others played music, danced, and waited for something to happen. Even the police were mostly relaxed. As the city had refused to grant a permit for the festival, those who attempted to stay in the park past 11:00 P.M. were in violation of the law. That night, however, when the curfew took effect, officers doused a bonfire and cleared the park. Hostilities did not escalate beyond the crowd chanting “Red Rover, Red Rover, send Daley right over!” and “Peace now!”

The atmosphere began to change on the next day, during the official opening of the Festival of Life, when a pattern began that would repeat over the next three days: a mellow be-in during the day, bedlam at night. During the morning and afternoon Lincoln Park residents, some with children in tow, came out to hear music and see the sights.

Teenagers, blue-collar workers, motorcycle-gang members, Left: A handbill from the convention. Below: A group of young people at North Avenue Beach, just east of Lincoln Park, met with Allan Ginsberg (center with back to camera) as a police officer watched from a squad car. Photograph by Julian Wasser.

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A newsclipping from the Chicago Sun-Times showed the arrival of protesters in Lincoln Park.

and local hippies mingled. Again, the atmosphere was calm: the police even bought hot dogs from local vendors.

That evening, however, the mood shifted as 11:00 P.M. drew near. Bongo drums still echoed in the air, demonstrators built bonfires and some police officers removed their badges to avoid being identified. One witness later said, “It was supposed to have been a festival of life, but I didn’t see any happy people.” After announcing that people should leave the park, hundreds of officers moved in, swinging nightsticks. The bongos abated, replaced by cries of “Parks belong to the people!” and “Let’s go to the streets!” Protesters ran into Old Town, jamming traffic along Clark, Wells, and Lincoln. A few laymen and clergy present passed out brochures detailing the resources they had gathered. Other demonstrators stayed in the Free Theater, home of Second City, that night.

On Monday, while the mellow daytime environment continued for some in the park who played music, napped, and read, others who felt a change in the atmosphere were determined to stay in the park that night because they began felt “that the park is ours.” The protest began to turn into one about police brutality as well as access to the park. That Chicagoans increasingly stepped into leadership positions was instrumental.

Undercover Chicago police officer Robert Pierson in Lincoln Park.

Courtroom illustration by Franklin McMahon, graphite and watercolor on paper.

“The Park is Ours” | 9

Above: Signs on Wells Street directed demonstrators to a hospital and other services. Below: A group of demonstrators. As the first day of the Festival of Life drew to a close and police cleared the park, many spent the night in the Free Theater, home of Second City.

National activists such as Tom Hayden, along with Hoffman and Rubin, were routinely followed by police and incarcerated for even suspected legal infractions and as such could provide only sporadic leadership. There were other, less dramatic, reasons Yippie leadership lacked. According to Yip founder Paul Krassner, on the weekend prior to the convention Hoffman and others worked on “Yippie cigarettes” laced with hash oil, and a more powerful, incapacitating “honey” laced with the same oil. After ingesting the latter in Lincoln Park Krassner, held “on to the grass very tightly so that I wouldn’t fall up [italics in the original].” One wonders 10 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

what kind of leadership Yips on honey (or other substances) could really provide. Seed editor Abe Peck later revealed that “when police and reporters couldn’t find key Yippies, they suspected covert activity; often, though, their disappearance was due to complete stonedness.”

Members of the Chicago clergy met at a nearby church on Monday morning to discuss what they saw Sunday night and determine their next action. They were concerned about the potential for more violence and decided to meet again that evening to discuss preventing, or at least minimizing, it. Ministers then stepped up their direct involvement in the festival by meeting with the

Demonstrators moved to the streets after being ejected from Lincoln Park. Photograph by Frank Hurley. “The Park is Ours� | 11

Abbie Hoffman addressing a crowd during the convention.

Inset: A courtroom portrait of Yip founder Paul Krassner at the Chicago Seven Trial. High-profile leaders such as Krassner and Hoffman were routinely followed and incarcerated by police and thus unavailable to provide consistent leadership, which made the participation of Chicagoans even more critical. Illustration by Franklin McMahon.

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police and protesters to discuss restraint. Some clergymen were now willing to get physically involved in melees, wanting to act as buffers between officers and demonstrators. That night ministers and laymen again distributed handouts informing people where they could find medical help and shelter. They then gathered at the Church of the Three Crosses at 9:00 P.M. and from there small groups of four to five set out to observe and aid. In the Theater on Wells, Lincoln Park residents listened to police broadcasts on a shortwave, learning how to decipher police lingo and to track where officers moved.

On Monday night, some who gathered in Lincoln Park again lit fires in trash bins but mostly things were initially calm. Some protesters began erecting additional barricades made of picnic benches and trash barrels to extend the snow fence to the Garibaldi statue. From 10:00 P.M. to 11:00 P.M. they stared at the police from behind a barricade that few thought would actually repel officers. The police demanded protesters clear the park, then fired tear gas canisters. Again people streamed into Old Town, some walking on the roofs of cars. Police officers, warned about projectiles being thrown at squad cars and that some demonstrators were armed, chased them out of the park. Ministers encouraged calm and discouraged the throwing of projectiles. Others urged people to walk, not run, in the streets. They experienced

Chicago police commander Clarence Braasch testifying at the 1969 Chicago Seven trial. He was among the officers who met with demonstrators during the convention. Illustration by Franklin McMahon.

occasional clubbings themselves, however, as they acted.

One minister, watching an officer level a shotgun at a child, later said he was “ready to kill the officer” if he failed to lower his weapon, while another later commented that “one smart word” from the police would “set him off” and that he bordered on becoming aggressive. Another later spoke of their exercise of “collar power” that night.

Clergymen tried to be peacekeepers; one minister described their influence as “collar power.” Photograph by Julian Wasser.

“The Park is Ours” | 13

Above: Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale spoke at the festival on Tuesday evening. Below: Robert Lynsky told Lincoln Park residents that the police would remain in the park during the festival. Illustration by Franklin McMahon.

Approximately one thousand protesters flowed into Old Town’s bars and restaurants, ran down alleys, and into the safety of open homes and churches. As the police moved through the neighborhood’s main streets, some in cars, protesters scrambled to find shelter.

Ministers tried to get victims to aid centers. Police fractured one minister’s skull, while another was gassed and wounded. Medics set up a hospital in the basement of the Free Theater, now filled with the injured and exhausted. According to the official report on convention week, “violence raged throughout the early morning hours and was not limited to police actions. Groups of all types, including ‘locals,’ stoned police cars, broke windows and street lights, and shouted epithets at the police.” By 2:00 A.M., the violence and confusion were largely over.

On Tuesday morning, even more residents and clergymen joined in the demonstration. The tone of the event shifted further. As the day went on a sense of anticipation lingered. Ministers decided to arrange a meeting between the community and police commander Clarence Braasch and then to hold a nighttime church service in the park. Clergymen also planned to march alongside the police as they cleared the park to aid 14 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

demonstrators who might need help. That morning about one hundred Chicagoans met with ministers to plan their next move. A diverse group of residents, now calling themselves the emergency committee, met in the afternoon with Commander Braasch. They drafted a statement asserting that demonstrators were not a threat to Old Town and that police should withdraw from the area. They also wanted an end to police harassment and

Policemen confront protesters during the Festival of Life. Photograph by Julian Wasser

to assume the responsibility of patrolling the park.

Braasch refused their demands. Officers would close the park again that night, but he allowed ministers the opportunity to ride along as observers. By Tuesday afternoon, according to one resident, “the community was welded together . . . as never before.” Chicagoans fed up with police brutality reported the beatings they witnessed, and offered food, shelter, and cars to protesters.

Others accompanied wounded demonstrators to area hospitals. At approximately 3:00 P.M. sound trucks drove down Lincoln Park streets, blaring pleas to residents to open their doors that night to demonstrators if police enforced the curfew.

On Tuesday night, citizens held a town meeting on the steps of the Academy of Sciences at which various persons spoke. Then a delegation of residents met with Deputy Superintendent Robert Lynsky. He told them the police would remain in the park. Ministers responded that they would be holding a worship service in violation of the curfew. By now tension had increased. Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale gave a brief speech, along with Jerry Rubin. As on Monday, a spotlight from a police helicopter lit up the crowd and, according to one minister, strengthened unity. Ministers learned that the

police switched to what was known as federal streamer gas that stuck to grass, skin, and clothing, burning the skin and causing vomiting. While one could sit through regular tear gas, it was impossible to tolerate federal streamer.

In spite of this intimidation, ministers held their church service. As one later noted, “If they [the police] want to gas us, the people of Chicago will realize that it isn’t just kids, but respectable people” demonstrating. Between 11:30 and 12:30, around two hundred clergy and laymen entered Lincoln Park carrying the ten-foot cross from the Church of the Three Crosses, joined by about two thousand people. Some onlookers wondered if death for these ministers was imminent. One minister read from Paul’s Letters to the Colossians. In it, Paul reminds the reader that Christ died for humanity’s sin but also warns, “See to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit.” Others made public statements and sang hymns, but those present were mainly waiting for the police to clear the park again. Officers prepared to advance and special mace-spraying trucks moved into position.

Protesters built a barricade of picnic tables and trash cans.

Clergymen advised those who would listen to “sit or split”: if you didn’t want to get “hit, jailed or gassed,” they “The Park is Ours” | 15

Signs of police and military force: Jeeps covered in barbed wire. Photograph by Charles Roland. Below: Riot helmet worn by Max O. Ziegler during the convention.

should sit down and lock arms. Other protesters rubbed petroleum jelly on their faces as tear-gas protection and sang “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

Additional police officers arrived via bus, singing “Hi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go” and whistling the theme from The Bridge on the River Kwai as they moved into position. Once ready, police made two announcements to clear the park. As the gas rolled in shortly after 12:30, one minister vowed, “This is our Park. We will not be moved.” Some protesters took the cross and a Vietcong flag and marched towards the police. One minister told those assembled, “We are not going to run. Our strength is our common cause.” Gas-mask–clad officers, informed via intelligence reports that some demonstrators were armed and dangerous, then entered the park, swinging clubs and knocking one minister unconscious. Police scattered the crowd into Old Town.

Some demonstrators made their way to the Church of the Three Crosses, where cars waited to drive them to homes 16 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

on the North Side for the night. The police repeated that the park was to be cleared, and they chased down demonstrators who screamed, “The park belongs to the people!” and “The streets belong to the people!” while pelting police cars with brick and rock missiles.

Ministers continued to aid the wounded and observe police action throughout the night.

Clergy held a staff meeting on Wednesday morning and searched, with police help, for the remnants of the cross from the prior night’s service. In an afternoon meeting, Commander Braasch invited residents and community members who wished to ride along with the police that night. Many walked to Grant Park for that afternoon’s speeches by Dick Gregory and Norman Mailer. Violence broke out there in the late afternoon, foreshadowing what was to come outside the Amphitheater that evening. In Lincoln Park that night, clergy and laymen walked and rode with the police.

Other residents boarded a bus loaded with policemen and National Guardsmen and rode with them to observe.

This handbill urged demonstrators to rebel against the “dictatorship” represented by Mayor Daley and the police and directed them to march toward the Loop.

By that evening, however, activity had moved to Grant Park, so ministers traveled there to continue serving as buffers. Later on, at the downtown intersection of Michigan and Balbo, Chicago police officers clubbed and gassed protesters as television cameras rolled.

Many historians consider the “police riot” of Wednesday night a key moment for the entire nation in the 1960s. It also had a profound impact on the Lincoln Park community. Clergymen found their influence and credibility strengthened due to their actions during the Festival of Life. One resident felt that the image of the clergy was as improved by that week’s events as the police department’s was damaged. As leaders of various denominations mingled with, helped, and suffered alongside demonstrators, neighborhood residents saw ministers as a relevant force. One youth was “glad to see the church in the street.” The Christian Advocate published an editorial shortly after the convention praising the efforts of the clergy. It recognized that, thanks to media coverage, most Americans saw the “bricks, bottles, billy clubs and tear gas” surrounding the event, but were ignorant of the efforts of the clergy. The piece commended the ministers for riding in squad cars throughout the night and marching with police, “talking, explaining, being intermediaries, helping with hurt or frightened policemen.”

Additionally, the emergency committee meetings held during the festival grew into the Lincoln Park Town Meeting after convention week. More than one hundred Lincoln Park residents agreed to serve as watchdogs over the police. The group sought to educate neighbors about their legal rights, observe officers, investigate complaints, and see that action would be taken. Members also organized police observer groups to follow officers throughout the neighborhood, and a community review board heard claims made by residents. At one meeting, a Black Panther spoke and offered his group’s aid to the meeting. One minister commented, “The community itself became radicalized when people saw police chasing demonstrators. . . . People began having community meetings once a week in the old Second City building after the Democratic Convention. . . . Often two hundred people would come. . . . It was a real fellowship time.”

While Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin initiated the Festival of Life, Chicago residents made it their own and were key in the protests of August 1968. As violence escalated, they increased their roles in the festival, risking themselves to bring some order to chaos. When it was over and Yippie leaders left town, they left behind a neighborhood where activism continued. A week that was important in the history of “the sixties” was also important for, and molded by, Chicagoans.

Brian Mullgardt is assistant professor in the Department of History at Millikin University.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 4, i40032; 5, inset: i26339, right: i06437; 6, top: i67196, inset: i66792, bottom: i69408; 7, i69409; 8, top: i40028, bottom: Julian Wasser/ The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 9, top: courtesy of the Chicago Sun-Times, bottom: i53878; 10, top: i68953, bottom left: i32104, bottom right: i27035; 11, New York Daily News Archive/New York Daily News/Getty Images; 12, main: i68955, inset: i54181; 13, top: i53872, bottom: Julian Wasser/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 14, top: i68957, bottom: i53904; 15, Julian Wasser/ The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images; 16, top: i62716, bottom: i65720; 17, i68935.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | David Farber’s Chicago ’68 (University of Chicago Press, 1994) provides a more detailed account of the convention. The book The 1968 Project: A Nation Coming of Age (Minnesota Historical Society, 2011), and the blog Covering 1968 (the1968exhibit.org), further explore not only the scene in Chicago, but the many events of that iconic year. For first-hand accounts and documents of the decade as a whole, see “Takin’ it to the streets”: A Sixties Reader, edited by Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (Oxford University Press, 2010) “The Park is Ours” | 17

Up from Little Hell From their inception in the early twentieth century, Chicago’s public housing projects invited controversy as entire neighborhoods were destroyed to pave the way for new homes for the poor.

L AW R E N C E J . VA L E

Reprinted with permission from Purging the Poorest: Public Housing and the Design Politics of Twice-Cleared Communities by Lawrence J. Vale, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2013 University of Chicago Press. All rights reserved.

I

n 1929 a treatise by sociologist Harvey Zorbaugh famously depicted Chicago’s Near North Side as divided into The Gold Coast and the Slum. Chicago’s Cabrini-Green public housing development, built in several stages between the early 1940s and the early 1960s, replaced that slum in a double sense. Initially, the projects served as a clean and modern alternative to the horrific conditions of the “Little Hell” slum; but subsequently, after a protracted period of decline, Cabrini-Green itself became as vilified as the slum it had been meant to cure.

Some of the poor housing conditions that prompted slum clearance in mid-twentieth-century Chicago can be traced to an earlier calamity: the Great Fire of 1871.

Although the fire burned less than one-fourth of the city’s built-up districts, including the downtown, it decimated the North Side east of the Chicago River. Much of pre-fire Chicago had suffered from shoddy construction and lax regulation; after the fire, debates raged over whether the right to rebuild private property should be tempered by consideration of a broader “public interest” to have a less risky city of masonry that would be more reassuring to future investors. Because the Great Fire had devastated thousands of worker-owned pine cottages that had served 18 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

as the basis for much of Chicago’s low-cost housing, sorting out how to rebuild the city forced engagement with the highly diversified financial circumstances of the populace. For working-class Chicagoans of limited means, the vagaries of the insurance industry, especially when coupled with the loss of their workplaces, meant that their only viable alternative entailed construction of a temporary wooden shanty on their property.

By contrast, the city’s newly elected leadership pushed for “fire limits” within which new wooden structures would be prohibited. Working-class Chicagoans viewed the proposed restrictions as something imposed by a cadre of downtown property owners who, already once burned, wished to protect their investments by insisting that lowerincome people should not build “firetraps” anywhere else in the city. Moreover, as Karen Sawislak argues, some ethnic groups viewed the restrictions as designed by nativist proponents as a means to undermine their ability to rebuild as an ethnic enclave. Violent protesters disrupted a city council meeting in January 1872, largely fomented by immigrant groups seeking to protect the value of investment in their wooden homes and neighborhoods. A month later, the council passed a heavily compromised fire protection bill that stopped short of extending the restrictions citywide. In particular, the area east of the Chicago River, west of Clark Street, and north of Chicago Avenue—in short, the site of the future Little Hell slum—was one of the few burned areas to be left outside the fire limits. Within a year after the fire, the “Great Rebuilding”—much of it deploying inferior materials—

A three-story apartment house and a one-story dwelling in Little Hell on the Near North Side, as captured by the Chicago Daily News in 1902. As early as 1875, the area had a reputation for substandard living conditions and crime.

Up from Little Hell | 19

20 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

transformed the city with mind-boggling speed. Framed in Zorbaugh’s terms, the fire limits underscored the boundary line between the Gold Coast and the Slum; because “cheap wooden structures” could be erected in the western part of the district, while the city required “more substantial ones to the east,” the design politics of construction materials “perpetuated this division.”

Moreover, “the streets in the west district were elevated four to eight feet, leaving the buildings with dark, damp basements, a situation favorable to tenement conditions.”

The term “Little Hell” first came into use as early as 1873, just after the post-fire rebuilding. The name itself was not wholly original; Chicago police explicitly borrowed it from a notorious neighborhood in Cow Cross, London. In Chicago, it initially referred to the precise area—north of Division Street and west of Larrabee— that would house the William Green Homes nine decades later. Later, the Little Hell nickname would spread southward and eastward to encompass other parts of the land that would become home to other parts of the future Cabrini-Green project. Much of this initial area had been free of structures at the time of the fire, so when the relief work began this low-lying tract near the river was judged a good place for erecting low-cost cottages. Soon after, everything really did go downhill.

As the Chicago Tribune reported in 1875, in just two years, Little Hell had become “the plague-spot of the North Division [police area]” and had “acquired general fame by reason of the frequent rows and disturbances that occurred within its borders.”

Scarcely a day passed without a knifing or shooting scrape. As many of the men wore heavy boots, it was not infrequent to hear of noses being crushed or bones injured by way of boot-heels. Sometimes, by way of variety, ears or fingers would be bitten off.

More frequent use of the Little Hell name followed after a “horrible murder” in the winter of 1875, prompting the Tribune to disparage the district’s inhabitants as “not only poor but vicious, including some of the more turbulent characters in the city.” At the time, the neighborhood contained a “mixed” population of “Irish, Swedes, Germans, Dutch, Poles, and Italians, with a very light sprinkling of Americans.” Some of the men worked in the nearby gashouse, while others were “day laborers or loafers.”

“They are the Communists who would like nothing better than to incite an open riot and to plunder the town, on the poor pretense that they are down-trodden and oppressed,” the Tribune declared. Equally troubling, “children are abundant in ‘Little Hell,’” and “in fact, they are The CHA sought to replace Little Hell’s empty lots, haphazardlybuilt buildings, and dilapidated structures with a planned community that was up to code. Four girls in Little Hell, 1902.

Up from Little Hell | 21

Contrary to the Tribune’s lament of “ragged, hatless, saucy, dirty, noisy juveniles,” these children appear to be sufficiently tended. They are pictured in front of a business with Uncle Sam, the oldest resident of Little Hell, in 1902.

about the cheapest commodity in that market. The streets are overflowing with juveniles—ragged, hatless, saucy, dirty, noisy juveniles. As they disport themselves in little groups along the gutters, one can scarcely notice any difference among them, except as regards sex, and even then the distinction in dress is so slight as to be almost imperceptible.” More generally, the Tribune’s investigator reported, “the faces that glare and stare from these hovels are bloated and blear-eyed, telling the monotonous story of wasted lives.” In sum, as another reporter put it, “none who know [Little Hell] consider this appellation as any misnomer, unless it be in the prefix of the superfluous word ‘little.’”

For nearly a century before it was known as either Cabrini or Green, Chicagoans had descriptive and disparaging names for this “slum.” It was Kilgubbin or the Patch when occupied by the Irish in the mid-nineteenth century, Swede Town or Smoky Hollow when it housed primarily Swedes, and Little Hell, Little Italy, Little Sicily, or Black Hollow to coincide with the next round of denizens. By the late 1920s, Zorbaugh vividly described this place as “a world to itself”: 22 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Dirty and narrow streets, alleys piled with refuse and alive with dogs and rats, goats hitched to carts, bleak tenements, the smoke of industry hanging in a haze, the market along the curb, foreign names on shops, and foreign faces on the streets, the dissonant cry of the huckster and peddler, the clanging and rattling of railroads and the elevated, the pealing of the bells of the great Catholic churches, the music of marching bands and the crackling of fireworks on feast days, the occasional dull boom of a bomb or the bark of a revolver, the shouts of children at play in the street, a strange staccato speech, the taste of soot, and the smell of gas from the huge “gas house” by the river, whose belching flames make the skies lurid at night and long ago earned for the district the name Little Hell—on every hand one is met by sights and sounds and smells that are peculiar to this area, that are “foreign” and of the slum.

“As one walks from the Drake hotel and the Lake Shore Drive west along Oak Street, through the world of rooming-houses, into the slum and the streets of the

Italian colony,” Zorbaugh concluded, “one has a sense of distance as between the Gold Coast and Little Hell—distance that is not geographical but social.”

This social distance expressed itself in terms of gang violence and poverty. As Zorbaugh puts it, the “attitude of the Sicilian toward the law, and of the police toward the Sicilian, has made of Little Hell a stamping ground for criminal gangs.” The district’s Seward Park served as a locus for gang fights, chiefly organized by nationality.

The gang, Zorbaugh maintains, affords the boy “a social world in which he finds his only status and recognition.

But it is by conforming to delinquent patterns that he achieves status in the gang. And every boy in Little Hell is a member of a gang.” At the same time, this Little Sicily district exhibited the “greatest concentration of poverty in Chicago, as revealed by the giving of relief,” since 35 percent of the households fell short of what was then described as a “minimum independence budget.” And, just to complete the picture of contrast between Gold Coast and Slum, a study of “Mental Disorders in Urban Areas” found dramatically different rates of insanity between the two adjacent areas; apparently, concentrations of insanity and poverty carried a close association. As Chicago School sociologist Ernest Burgess put it, “urban areas characterized by high rates of social disorganization are also those with high rates of mental disorganization.”

Between 1910 and 1930, Chicagoans frequently referred to the heart of Little Sicily’s Little Hell as “Death Corner,” a wholly understandable moniker given that the area around the intersection of West Oak Street and Milton Avenue was the site of well over one hundred unsolved murders. For two decades, Chicago’s police remained “hampered at every turn by the silence of the Italian colony.” Typically, as one newspaper story described it, victims would be “murdered before an audience that vanished with the last pistol flash, much as a loon dives beneath the sheltering water just at the moment the hunter’s gun spits out its flame and shot.”

As Zorbaugh comments, “the American courts and police are powerless to deal with the situation. This is due in part to the nature of the American legal machinery. In Sicily the police worked secretly; an informant’s name is never known. But in America an informant must appear in court. And to inform is to invite swift reprisals. Consequently the already reserved and suspicious Sicilian shrugs his shoulders—‘And if I knew?

Would I tell?’”

As early as 1908, the Chicago Tribune reporters warned that “the ‘Black Hand,’ an organization of extortioners, blackmailers, and assassins, is at the throats of the Italian population of Chicago.” The paper observed: “Nearly every Italian who has acquired a little property lives in constant agony. He has either received or expects

In 1951, the Chicago Housing Authority published a report, “Cabrini Extension Area: Portrait of a Chicago Slum,” recalling the neighborhood that the Frances Cabrini Homes replaced.

to receive a note signed by the weird ‘Black Hand’ telling him to deposit some money behind a barn or in an alley at the peril of his life or the lives of his wife and children.” By 1915, the Tribune’s reporter described Little Italy as the “city of terror, . . . the city where life is cheaper than chaff and death is the ogre of all,” and where “dark, shifty-eyed men with inscrutable faces lounge warily in the shadows of an area way or in the murk of a corridor.” Death Corner, as the district’s “central gathering place,” had gained the “international reputation of being the site of more murders than any other territory of equal area in the world.”

By the early 1920s, murders in Little Hell continued at the rate of more than thirty per year—more than onethird of the city’s total, though Italians made up only 5 percent of the population. By this point, many Death Corner victims were casualties of the Prohibition-era “alcohol rivalries” between the bootlegging gangs of Giuseppe (“Joe”) Aiello and the infamous “Scarface” Al Capone, leader of Chicago’s most powerful mob. As notorious as Cabrini-Green would become, the violence of Little Hell may well have been even worse.

Moreover, in 1917, public health surveyors estimated 100 to 275 cases of tuberculosis infection on every block near Death Corner, thereby adding the threat from disease to the litany of the district’s ills. With one in every four residents infected, the district “posed a grave menace to the rest of the city.” Dr. Charles Caldwell, head of the Up from Little Hell | 23

city’s sanitarium board, blamed poor housing conditions for the “amazing” rates of infection and proposed several remedies: “tearing down ramshackle buildings, opening up stub end streets, and establishing a little park in the district, since many are immigrants accustomed to living in the sunshine and open air.”

As the district’s poverty and dangers mounted, its residents began to diversify. Between 1920 and 1924, the Tribune noted, Little Italy showed signs of becoming “a veritable second ‘black belt,’” as more than 10,000 blacks moved into the city’s north side, establishing “a colored church just two blocks from ‘death corner.’”

Even as efforts such as the Marshall Field Gardens limited dividend project sought to raze and replace tenements before they could be turned over to blacks, ethnic and racial change seemed inevitable. “New Negro families move in just as fast as the tenacious Italians give ground, which is day by day.”

Yet Father Luigi Giambastiani, who served the district as pastor at St. Philip Benizi Church from 1916 until 1962, made sure that the Italians would not depart easily. In 1935, joined by other neighborhood leaders and supported by a local real estate association, he called for nothing short of a wholesale purge of 4,700 black tenants. As he commented, “the Italians resented the invasion of the neighborhood by the colored people, since their neighborhood has always belonged to them. . . . The landlords were protecting their property values as they had a right to do.” For the moment, tensions deescalated since the Chicago Urban League and others thwarted the evictions. Undaunted, Father Luigi resented the aspersions cast by others. “I know what many people say of the Sicilians,” he told a Chicago newspaper reporter in 1941. “It is not true, I have seen this neighborhood at the peak of prosperity, when it was a Little Palermo. Everybody was working, the roads and railroads were being built. The women were lovely and gentle, the children were beautiful, very nice, full of mischief, but no wickedness.”

Ignoring the existence of rampant killings that had already commenced during the early 1910s, he offered another theory for the community’s turn toward violence and disorganization: “the unfortunate, silly, stupid, inhuman prohibition!”

These people never heard that you could not drink a glass of wine. For them it is a food, and of course they know how to make it. And naturally they grasp the opportunity. . . . The poor people never could While newspapers often focused on the crime and the neighborhood as squalid, an area priest remembered wistfully: “Everybody was working. . . . The women were lovely and gentle, the children were beautiful, very nice.” A woman and five children in Little Hell, 1902.

24 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Up from Little Hell | 25

As executive secretary of the CHA, Elizabeth Wood focused on slum clearance efforts in order to pave the way for public housing projects.

understand that they were doing anything wrong.

But then the trouble came because some were making more money than others . . . and they organized. . . . The ordinary people got scared. They saw their life was not safe. Many of them moved away. . . . But many stayed. The neighborhood is still 80 per cent Italian.

Notwithstanding the sentiments of Father Luigi, Zorbaugh’s harsh analysis instead depicted a district with “startlingly little of local feeling, consciousness, or action.” He saw only a “process of disintegration” characterized by a “breakdown of community life and community institutions.” Zorbaugh observed “no common culture or common body of interests out of which political action can arise. And as a matter of fact, the greater part of this area does not govern itself, but is governed by the police and the social agency.” Zorbaugh evinced little hope for the future of the area, noting that “the history of Near North Side settlements . . . demonstrates beyond the shadow of doubt the impossibility of converting local areas of the city into ‘villages’ with the neighborliness, face-to-face contacts, and emotional attitudes of the village of a generation ago.” The only sign of “anything approaching community feeling,” he presciently observed, is “the growing sentiment against the invasion by the Negro.”

26 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

The saga of Cabrini-Green begins not with the Chicago Housing Authority (CHA), founded in 1937, but with the Metropolitan Housing Council (MHC), which had commenced operations three years earlier under the leadership of Elizabeth Wood. With the MHC, Wood honed her focus on slum-clearance efforts that would remain with her when she became the newly chartered CHA’s first executive secretary. Soon after starting up, the MHC dramatically set out the challenges that confronted Chicago in the Great Depression, in a campaign that used both text and graphics. With “bricklayers, plumbers, carpenters and building material men” all “out of work,” vast areas of the city stood ready for massive transformation. Caught between the “soot, noise, and dirt” of the downtown Loop and the “dead subdivisions” of the outer suburbs, the MHC called for rebuilding “36 square miles” of a city marred by “hobo land” and “auto junk yards.”

Mayor Edward Kelly inaugurated “work relief slum clearance” on June 1, 1934. By the end of that year, the MHC proudly noted, the city had cleared 1,541 buildings, adding that “7,350 substandard buildings must be wrecked very soon in this area.” Elimination of individual substandard buildings, however, remained but a small part of the MHC’s ambition. The audacity of the larger proposed venture—36 square miles represented a substantial percentage of the entire built-up city—underscored the urgency. The MHC and some area residents supported the Public Works Administration’s (PWA) massive Blackhawk Park limited dividend project— 2,267 units of housing proposed on 80 acres—on the Near North Side. In Chicago, however, “land acquisition problems as well as opposition from property owners associations doomed plans from the start.”

In 1939, the CHA selected a portion of the Little Hell area for clearance, located just a mile north of the city’s Loop. This area would soon become known as the Frances Cabrini Homes. The Cabrini project marked a revival of the PWA’s Blackhawk Park idea, originally thwarted by neighbors. This time the new CHA was prepared to push forward more aggressively a few blocks further south. To the CHA, choosing this particular site for clearance carried many advantages. Since the area “had long been the focus of attention of civic leaders and housing experts,” the Authority knew its faults.

Moreover, CHA leaders hoped that “the surrounding communities on the North and Northwest sides would be influenced by a Housing project.” It is less than clear what mechanism of “influence” might operate on any sort of larger scale, but clearly the CHA expected the new project to set an example for immediately adjacent areas, which had similarly impoverished characteristics.

Without such intervention to remove this “core of blight,” the CHA believed that any reconstruction or

rehabilitation of the surrounding communities was “well nigh impossible.” Moreover, eliminating as much of Little Hell as possible “would remove the threat of blight to the ‘Gold Coast’ neighborhoods to the east.”

And, by halting the spread of slums to the north, the Authority hoped that “owners would have an opportunity to attempt the modernization of their properties without the fear of destructive influences moving in.”

Like some sort of urban fire break against poverty, the CHA hoped to protect homeowners from being engulfed.

“North Avenue might become the frontier of north side rehabilitation, as properties north of this boundary, inhabited by a large number of individual property owners, were characterized by wider lots, better streets,

and higher rental values than those to the south.”

Initially, the Authority targeted fifty-five acres to build a very large project stretching nearly a half-mile from Chicago Avenue north to Division Street, clearing a swath between Larrabee on the west and Sedgwick on the east. Following a community outcry, however, the CHA soon temporarily settled for a smaller sixteen-acre beachhead, characterizing the site as “a slum with a scandalous crime and health history.” The CHA found little worth saving: “Most of the dwellings which are being demolished to make room for the new row houses are about 60 years old, at least half of them being of wood-frame construction in a high state of dilapidation.”

Moreover, CHA figures showed,

The CHA’s report from 1951 highlights Little Hell’s unsafe, tumbledown buildings and sidewalks, as well as overcrowding: “You ought to be here on a hot night. You can hardly breathe. Noise all over. Can’t sleep, too tired to work right.”

Up from Little Hell | 27

Above: This CHA map shows the location of the Frances Cabrini Homes within the Cabrini Extension Area. Below: The rickety back porches of Little Hell. “Rotten timbers enclose refuse bins where rats find enough to eat to keep them healthy and prolific.� 1951

of some 700 apartments on the site, 210 had inadequate light and air because their buildings were built close to each other; 433 families had no bath-tubs at all. . . . Forty-three toilets were shared by two families each; there were 29 yard toilets and ten undersidewalk toilets; 480 families could heat their water only in tea kettles on the stove . . .; 515 of the apartments were heated with stove heat.

The Authority envisioned a stark alternative: a seemingly low-density landscape of row houses that would occupy just 30 percent of the land area. In fact, the resultant development housed families at nearly 40 units per acre, a figure that was slightly higher than the existing tenements and also not all that different from the distantly spaced high-rises of a later era.

Echoing the language of the MHC with ideas prevalent across the country, the CHA reiterated the message that

28 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Preparing a meal was a hazardous endeavor in Little Hell. The CHA fulfilled its promise to improve conditions with refrigerators, gas ranges, and hot and cold water in the Frances Cabrini Homes. 1951 Up from Little Hell | 29

In the midst of resistance from Little Hell residents, this CHA bulletin issued in June 1941 underscores the improvement that the Frances Cabrini Homes would be, as well as the CHA’s effort at transparency.

“SLUMS COST MONEY.” This held true in several senses: “Slums and substandard homes are very costly to society, to government, and to owners of property. Slums contribute heavily towards breeding disease, crime, and social ills. They prevent large portions of our population from having minimum standards of living and from becoming healthy citizens.” In Chicago, the Authority asserted, “25 per cent of 30 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

juvenile delinquency came from substandard districts occupying 6 percent of the city’s area.” And, updating the MHC figure of a fivefold deficit, the CHA now claimed that “a Chicago slum district costs the taxpayers six times as much annually as is paid back to the city in taxes.”

Whatever the CHA’s view on the balance of payments, news that the city might wish to clear a substantial portion

of the Little Italy neighborhood did not sit well with many who lived and worked there. As historian D. Bradford Hunt explains, “the CHA overestimated the extent of substandard conditions in the area and underestimated the number of resident owners, many of whom rebuffed the CHA’s purchase offers and hired lawyers.” All of this, the CHA noted, “rendered the conduct of negotiations extremely difficult.” In February 1940, a protest committee representing 160 property owners and residents confronted Alderman Arthur D. Lindell, chairman of the Chicago City Council’s housing committee. Their collective message came across loud and clear: “Our neighborhood may be known as Little Hell or Black Hollow to the federal housing authorities, but it is home to us and we want to stay there.” A. J. Lendino, a local dentist, implausibly contended that “seventy-five percent of the residents of the district are property owners.” “We did have a reputation for crime and delinquency and at one time had the name of Little Hell,” he acknowledged, “but our north side civic committee has been cleaning things up. We now have seven Boy Scout troops.”

Even worse, defenders claimed, these homeowners and Boy Scouts faced unconscionable mistreatment.

Community leaders complained to Lindell that the CHA’s agents were engaging in unfair and deceptive practices in efforts to obtain properties. Attorney Lawrence Marino, based in the area proposed for clearance, claimed: “Some of the men sent to appraise our property pose as G-men. Some of the men told our people their neighbors had already agreed to sell their property when their neighbors hadn’t.” Marino added, “We have asked the housing authority for some idea of the price they will give for our property. That might help us in planning our own future. But we have been kept in darkness.” Alderman Lindell replied that the CHA had also kept the city council in the same darkness: “We didn’t know they planned to build a project in your district any sooner than you did.”

Although the CHA agreed to reduce the site of the project, it moved forward quickly, largely rebuffing the concerns of the community. On February 17, 1941, with prominent civic leaders present, Alderman Lindell and CHA Commissioner Edgar L. Schnadig “signaled for the wrecking” of the area’s first building. As the Authority put it, demolition then “took place as fast as buildings were vacated by tenants moving from the area.” This was not easy. As the Authority understatedly admitted, “the disruption of the homes of over six hundred families was the most serious problem in the clearance of the Frances Cabrini site.”

As clearance of this part of Little Italy continued during 1941, interracial violence escalated. As historian Thomas Guglielmo comments, “a group of young men calling themselves the ‘Black Hand Gang’ (given the

Father Luigi Giambastiani stands amidst demolished homes in Little Hell, c. 1941. He served as pastor at a local church, St. Philip Benizi, from 1916 until 1962.

name, these boys were most likely Italian) terrorized their African- American neighbors by beating and even shooting people and preventing them from using neighborhood recreational facilities.” Chicago Daily News reporter Helen Cody Baker ignored the rising racial tensions but still described the site in terms that would do Harvey Zorbaugh proud: [This place is] called “Little Hell” with some reason.

Not only by its kidnappings, Black Hand and Mafia did Little Italy earn that name. Its leaky roofs damp walls and frozen sinks were cold comfort in a Chicago winter. In summer it was a stinking cesspool, where the standing water never drained away.

Baker was startled to learn, however, that, “when the Housing Authority opened an office to help the families of that neighborhood locate new homes, they found that 80 percent of them wanted to stay right in that neighborhood.” “Isn’t that queer?” she wondered.

Seeking an answer, she approached Father Luigi at St. Philip’s. Standing with him at the doorway of his church, located at the corner of Oak and Cambridge immediately adjacent to the Cabrini construction site, she watched him look out “with troubled eyes across the gutted walls and cellar pits, the piles of brick and plaster that were once the homes of his people.” Father Luigi evaded the obvious question of whether “his people” would be offered apartments in the new project, although it was clear from his tone that he believed most of the new homes would be for others. Instead, he focused on the fact that public housing would be rental housing, Up from Little Hell | 31

This aerial view looking southwest shows the Frances Cabrini Row Houses, with the Montgomery Ward Company Complex in the background. Photograph by Mildred Mead, 1951.

32 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, MSC, 1905. Father Luigi was the one to propose naming the housing project after the first American to be canonized.

whereas many homeowners had been purged from his neighborhood by the clearance. More than 50 percent of the buildings demolished for this project were occupied by their owners, he claimed, owners who had put every possible penny into a “home for [their] children, to keep them safe.” “To own the home, to own the land and house,” he opined, “that is the dream of every Italian.”

Still, Father Luigi acknowledged that homeownership has often been “a sad dream for the Italian who comes to America” since “when you die your children will sell your home for a song. . . . And so always their ambition ends in tragedy.” Even so, he insisted, “it is a good dream for all of that. We shall never build a stable city, a stable nation, until men own their homes again.”

On balance, Baker pointed out, as of July 1941 Father Luigi still supported the “new, clean homes that are coming” since the new project would offer good opportunities for children. “He has defended it, believed in it, explained it to his flock,” she explained. A year later, he even gave an optimistic invocation at the project’s dedication. In fact, up until he realized how many black people were going to move into the development, he maintained “close and friendly contact” with Elizabeth Wood. As one way to signal a stake in continued Italian ownership over the future project, Father Luigi championed the idea that it be named for Mother Cabrini. “To you she is a social worker,” he told Helen Baker, “but to us she is a Saint.”

The CHA did indeed choose to name the development after Mother Frances Xavier Cabrini, the Italianborn nun who founded the Order of the Missionary

Sisters of the Sacred Heart in 1880. Before her death in 1917, she had helped the order spread to sixty-seven cities around the world, including Chicago, establishing schools, hospitals, and orphanages. In Chicago, she founded a school for Italian immigrants, as well as two hospitals, though most of her Chicago work was not in the Little Sicily area. Then, in 1928 and 1933, a Catholic tribunal in Chicago held hearings about her “veracities and miracles,” leading to consideration of the “heroicity of her virtues” by a Vatican congregation of rites in 1936. In late 1938, just as the city’s public housing program was ramping up, Pope Pius XII led beatification rites in Rome. Finally, in 1946, credited with performing two additional miracles, she was elevated to sainthood. Since Mother Cabrini had become a US citizen several years before her death, this meant that she was the first-ever American to be designated a saint. In 1950, the pope named her “patron saint to immigrants.” Technically, then, Cabrini Homes was not initially named after a saint, though the near-sanctified standing of the city’s early public housing made the association entirely plausible. Certainly, the CHA acted as if Mother Cabrini’s namesake project would perform comparable miracles.

Lawrence J. Vale is the Ford Professor of Urban Design and Planning at MIT. His many books include three prize-winning volumes: Architecture, Power and National Identity; From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors; and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 19, DN-0000233; 20, DN-0000208; 22, DN-0000106; 23, i37468_1v; 25, DN0000234; 26, i40296; 27, i37468_1g; 28, top: i37468_1e, bottom: i37468_1h; 29, i37468_1r; 30, i37404; 31, Italian American Collection, box 7, folder 67, photo number IAC_0007_0067_91.135. University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections; 32, i67142; 33, i62483.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the history of Little Hell, see Harvey Warren Zorbaugh, The Gold Coast and the Slum: A Sociological Study of Chicago’s Near North Side (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1929, 1976). For more on the history of the CHA, see D. Bradford Hunt, Blueprint for Disaster: The Unraveling of Chicago Public Housing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009) and J. S. Fuerst, When Public Housing Was Paradise: Building Community in Chicago (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005). For more on American urban housing policy, see John F. Bauman, Roger Biles, and Kristin M. Szylvian, eds., From Tenements to the Taylor Homes: In Search of an Urban Housing Policy in TwentiethCentury America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).

Up from Little Hell | 33

Challenging the Medical Establishment In the late nineteenth century, Rebecca Keck, a successful practitioner of naturopathic medicine, challenged the state of Illinois’ newly established medical laws.

G R E TA S . N E T T L E T O N

O

n November 21, 1875, readers of the Chicago Tribune would have seen, amid advertisements for dry goods, stoves, furs, and warm clothing, the following notice: “Mrs. Dr. Keck, of Davenport, Ia, the noted Specialist in the treatment of Catarrh, is being daily thronged with patients at the rooms of the CATARRH INFIRMARY, No. 20 Dore Block, 77 Madison-st.” This small advertisement marked the first professional venture Rebecca Keck made into Chicago, as well as the state of Illinois, after two years of professional success in Dubuque, Davenport, and Cedar Rapids, Iowa. The advertisement continued: “In every instance the subject leaving her presence is delighted with the effects produced by the treatment, and entirely convinced that the Doctor can surely cure catarrh.”* At its height during the 1880s, Rebecca J. Keck’s busy, successful practice as an eclectic physician and her mailorder, patent-medicine business served an estimated twelve thousand to fifteen thousand customers by personal consultations and mail order across Iowa, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Known to the press and her patients as Mrs. Dr. Keck, she became one of the wealthiest self-made businesswomen in the Midwest, selling botanical remedies of her own formulation, running a large private clinic in Davenport, Iowa, and traveling an itinerant circuit to offer medical consultations to patients in rented rooms that she called her branch offices.

Widely slandered as “a quack,” an “ignorant and fraudulent pretender,” a “traveling cure-all,” an “ignorant doctor-woman,” and a “pretentious charlatan” by the 34 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

medical establishment, she was a person of considerable personal charisma and respectable business practices who struggled with mixed success to attain legitimate status as a doctor throughout much of her career.

Twenty years earlier, in the 1850s, the “regular” doctors had begun to organize their profession by vigorously excluding “reform” sectarian practitioners, the homeopaths, the eclectics and the botanics (mainstays of what we now call alternative medicine) from the practice of medicine, although they as yet had no legal tools at their disposal to do this besides expulsion from local medical societies. The dawn of state medical regulation came in the late 1870s, shortly after Rebecca Keck started to practice medicine at the end of the Civil War. Responding to adamant pleas from local medical associations, state governments came to see the need to license the assorted throng of practitioners offering medical care across the pioneer landscape and began requiring would-be physicians to graduate from an approved medical school or to pass examinations on basic medical topics.

Because she had already been unofficially accepted as a physician in her community by large numbers of loyal patients, Keck was among the boldest opponents of these new laws and, as a result, her name was tarnished Above: Rebecca Keck, c. 1875. *Catarrh was a general symptomatic term referring to congestion and inflamed mucous membranes, which we now link to specific causes such as bronchitis, allergies, or tuberculosis.

When in Chicago, Keck met with patients at her rented rooms on Madison Street, shown here in 1875.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 35

Advertisement for Keck’s Medical Infirmary in Davenport, Iowa, in which she noted that her offices had been established “permanently” in order to refute criticism from regular physicians that she was an itinerant healer.

36 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

with controversy. Her habit of running large, illustrated advertisements featuring her name in bold capital letters and of traveling from town to town to see her clientele violated regular medicine’s ethical standards, which banned blatant self-promotion and itinerant practices.

On top of that, as an outspoken, ambitious woman who achieved considerable financial success in the male-dominated fields of business and professional medicine, she was perceived by many as having stepped outside of her proper social role. Her self-esteem and competitive drive were extraordinarily powerful. When a group of patronizing men set their sights on squelching her, she refused to yield, and the harder they pushed, the harder she pushed back. She would not be beaten, no matter what the cost.

Yet Keck focused on hard work and avoided politics as much as she could. She was a devout Methodist and married mother of six, and demonstrated such empathetic social skills that she was able to build a busy and successful practice with a gloss of public respectability.

Thousands of poor farmers and working-class patients flocked to see her for consultation, affordable treatments, and regular follow-up. Her career lasted more than twenty-five years in four or five key locations, strong evidence that she earned acceptance by local authorities in the towns she served. No lawsuit against her for malpractice or negligence has yet turned up, and had there been such a case, her enemies would certainly have publicized it widely. She also won the support of prominent newspaper editors in Quincy, Peoria, Bloomington and Davenport, who supported her right to practice medicine. “Her medicines are sent all over the country and her name is a household word,” declared the Bloomington [Illinois] Weekly Leader in 1881. The Davenport Gazette praised her as “one of our longest established and best known physicians,” and an “energetic and able woman.” The Bloomington Pantagraph described her as a “forcible illustration of the ability of women to succeed . . . in avenues of professional or public life.” As a result, when Iowa passed its first Medical Practices Act in 1886, state health officials issued her a certificate to practice medicine in Iowa based on “satisfactory evidence” that she had been “engaged in the practice of medicine for twenty years” in the state.

Her story unfolded quite differently in Illinois.

Chicago’s booming economy played a key role in Rebecca Keck’s early success, and she made at least seven visits to the city lasting a week or more to meet with patients between 1875 and 1877. In May 1877, Illinois passed its first Medical Practices Act, well before Iowa’s and one of the early medical reform laws of its kind in the United States. A prominent Chicago public health official with a forceful personality, Dr. John H. Rauch, was appointed to lead the newly created Illinois State Board of Health. The top priority of his agency was to regulate the field of medicine, creating a “more dignified and elevated” profession. Rauch’s close colleague on the board, Dr. H. Wardner, laid out the established medical profession’s point of view, now for the first time backed by the power and authority of the Illinois government: “Your greatest danger is from ignorance and the iniquity of pretending physicians and we have sought . . . to protect the people on this point . . . by seeking to cast out ignorance, pretension, incompetence, and all manner of quackery.” Most of the board’s efforts in its first two years of activity focused on this single-minded goal.

The historical status quo for medicine in the United States had been to let patients, not the government, determine who was a competent physician. A large fraction of the country’s recognized practitioners had never graduated from medical school and lacked formal credentials, as was also true for Rebecca Keck. Regular doctors without medical school diplomas who were members of local medical societies and who had established practices of more than ten years could be grandfathered into legitimacy by the new laws, and Keck believed that her longestablished, successful practice in Iowa gave her the same right to receive a license from the state of Illinois. John Rauch disagreed, and the subsequent clash between these two determined adversaries lasted for more than a decade.

Stationery and envelope from Keck’s office.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 37

Keck’s daughters, Belle and Charlotte worked with their mother, who described them as her “competent assistants.”

Chicagoans suffering from chronic respiratory infections had hundreds of physicians to choose from in 1875. Homeopathic and eclectic practitioners were widely popular in the city and across the Midwest. Many patients dreaded the invasive and often toxic treatments offered by the regular doctors, who, according to medical historian Richard Shryock, were “responsible for at least as much promiscuous poisoning as the patent medicine vendors they attacked.” For example, the active ingredient in calomel, the nineteenth century’s universal panacea and most widely prescribed purgative drug, was mercury. Working-class and immigrant patients felt more comfortable with the backwoods expertise of women such as Rebecca Keck, who offered gentler herbal remedies and relied on their practical, empirical knowledge to cure illness, rather than on abstract theories picked up after four months of study at a medical school, the standard training available to young men at that time.

Born in 1838, Rebecca grew up on a farm near the town of Fairfield, Iowa, in relative poverty. The only local school stopped at the fourth grade. As was typical for pioneer women, she built up her earliest medical experience by nursing for her eight younger siblings through illness and injury and later successfully raising all six of her children to adulthood, a unusual feat in an era of rampant and often fatal childhood diseases. Sometime after the Civil War in around 1866, friends and neigh38 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

bors began to ask her advice, she began to charge for it, and a practice was born. She started selling her botanical remedies on a much larger scale following the national banking Panic of 1873, when her husband’s foundry and workshop went bankrupt. According to Fairfield physician James Clarke, author of a 1934 history of all the early doctors in Jefferson County Iowa, she “became a physician and began to sell her catarrh remedy door-todoor” about 1875 when she was in her late thirties. One of her earliest advertisements appeared in the Dubuque Herald in November 1873.

Unlike the well-known patent-medicine pioneer Lydia Pinkham, who explicitly signed away ownership of her company to her sons to escape her husband’s debtors, Rebecca Keck controlled her new enterprise from the start, establishing the business model herself and signing all contracts. Her two oldest daughters, Belle Alexander and Charlotte Dorn, assisted while her husband played a secondary role, devoting himself to raising their four younger children. Belle’s and Charlotte’s names appeared from time to time in her advertisements as “competent assistants” staffing her branch offices while she was traveling to other locations.

Within two years, Keck developed active practices in at least four cities that she visited every two months: Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Davenport, and Chicago. By 1876, Keck had stopped advertising her catarrh remedy as a

patent medicine and focused all attention on her expertise as a physician, putting her name, Mrs. Dr. Keck, at the top of every advertisement. In a lavishly illustrated four-page flyer published about 1894, she described herself as the “Greatest Physician to Chronic Diseases in the West. . . . My treatment is on an entirely new principle and, though discovered by a woman, and never thought of or applied by professional men, until I announced it, yet has the most essential principles and scientific truths underlying it.” She boasted of her “unbounded success” in treating many kinds of diseases and claimed to be the “great specialist for the permanent cure of Catarrh, Consumption and its Train of Evils.” Regular Victorian doctors were supposed to rely on discreet lay referrals, social networking, and short business listings to drum up business; all the regulars agreed that blatant advertising, particularly if a woodcut illustration and large typeface were involved, was “grossly unprofessional.”

As her 1875 Chicago visit wound to a close in early December, Keck’s office was “so crowded with patients,” that she found it “quite impossible to treat all who come.” She assured the latecomers that she would be back soon, but regretted that “she is obliged to be absent from her office in the city for a few weeks after the 2nd of December to make her sixth professional visit to Dubuque.” She followed an exhausting schedule throughout her career, generally traveling three weeks out of every four. Then, at the end of December, she was planning to return to Fairfield, pull up stakes, and move her family to Davenport, Iowa, where rail and water transportation routes were more convenient, patients more abundant, and several other women physicians practiced without apparent opposition. She was evidently fed up with the small-town disdain she faced from the doctors in Fairfield, who were not yet ready to accept the first woman practitioner ever to attempt to

In 1875, Keck moved her family to Davenport, Iowa, where she found better transportation systems and more patients; she also hoped that the larger city would be more accepting of a women practitioner than her hometown had been.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 39

Advertisements for Hamlin’s Wizard Oil, “the greatest pain remedy on earth,” promised relief from a wide variety of conditions, including headaches, deafness, diphtheria, and insect bites.

join their ranks. Dr. James Clarke, who would have been a boy of eleven when the Kecks left Fairfield, surely overheard his father, a respected regular physician and prosperous druggist, exchange derogatory comments about Keck with his colleagues in the Jefferson County Medical Society. Writing in 1934, many years after Keck’s death, Clarke dismissed her abilities by remarking that the sale of her catarrh remedy “made the doctor wealthy even if it did not cure her patients.” The same might have been said about the many patent medicines advertised in the Fairfield Ledger and sold at the older Clarke’s own drugstore.

Keck acquired a medical library and began to call herself an eclectic physician, although as far as is known, she never enrolled in or graduated from any medical school.

As an eclectic, her overall approach would have been founded on the first Hippocratic principle to “do no harm” to the patient. Although all her formulas have been lost, she probably provided her patients with tonics, bitters, infusions and cordials based on herbal formulas that, even if they “did nothing” as her enemies accused, probably caused less harm than many of the equally 40 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

unscientific treatments common at that time. In the 1870s, doctors still could not diagnose specific diseases, but instead categorized and treated the symptoms.

Despite recent scientific breakthroughs, no drug existed to reduce fever. Although regulars carried botanical remedies in their bags, they favored harsh, mineral-based emetics and purgatives that contained mercury (calomel and blue mass), antimony, prussic acid (hydrogen cyanide), and copper sulfate, and handed out liberal doses of opium and belladonna (a poison) to mothers and children alike. They started most treatments by loading up alarming-looking injectors called clysters in order to wring out their patients’ guts, they administered strong emetics by mouth and slapped on blistering mustard plasters to “puke, purge and sweat away” the illness.

Some of the old-timers still recommended bleeding. The Carnegie Foundation’s Abraham Flexner, writing in his

influential expose on the poor quality of American medical education in 1910, flatly declared that the regular doctors of the mid-nineteenth century had been no different than the other sectarians, in that all of them equally lacked scientific method in determining their treatments.

Although he rose to national prominence as a Chicago physician and public health official, Rebecca Keck’s great nemesis, Dr. John H. Rauch, began his medical career in Burlington, Iowa, after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania with a regular medical degree in 1846.

Rauch wrote his thesis on the medical uses of the woodland flower known as Solomon’s Seal for curing hemorrhoids. He arrived in Iowa in the middle of a cholera epidemic and soon became interested in public health.

In 1851, at the age of twenty-three, he became one of the founding members of the Iowa State Medical Society and stepped into the public eye at the society’s second annual meeting, held in Fairfield, Keck’s hometown. In

spite of the recent spate of deadly epidemics in the region, the main topic of discussion at the 1851 meeting was the professional rivalry between the competing sects; the society’s secretary, J.R. Sanford lamented the “evil influence” that resulted when “regular physicians entered into consultation with quacks of various kinds.”

In this case he was referring to eclectics and homeopaths. These regular doctors meant business when they drew their exclusionary “charmed line” in the sand, but by no means did they scorn botanical remedies.

John Rauch addressed the group with a forty-two-page report, “The Medical and Economic Botany of Iowa,” which he co-wrote with two other doctors, listing hundreds of plants by their Latin names according to scientific classification he learned from Louis Agassiz during a term of study at Harvard. Rauch closed by stressing the importance of adding botanical remedies into the practice of regular medicine in order to “be more eclectic” and “uproot that species of charlatanry, humbuggery and presumption, which seems to thrive upon the apparent remissness of the profession in this respect.” Rauch’s swipe at the “charlatanry” of the eclectics did not mean that he thought that their botanical know-how was

The makers of Rock and Rye claimed that their product cured consumption. States began regulating the practice of medicine to fight such outrageous claims.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 41

worthless; rather he meant that only regular doctors should be allowed to use this plant-based knowledge, and that they must seize control of it from their competitors.

Rauch’s high-pressure career ambitions did not allow for more plant collecting on the prairie, although this was clearly one of the few pleasures he allowed himself during his austere life of single-minded dedication to public-health measures. He was elected to a professorship in Medical Botany at Rush Medical College in Chicago in 1857; in 1858, he presented a paper on the importance of sanitary burial of cholera victims to the Chicago Historical Society, and this paper proved so influential that it became what was described as “the lever which pried loose the [infectious] cemetery and established Lincoln Park.” After serving honorably in the Civil War, Rauch returned to Chicago and brought his now considerable administrative and political force to bear on the foul and dangerous health problems still facing the rapidly growing city. In 1867, he took charge of the city’s board of health as sanitary superintendent.

At the time of the great fire of 1871, he organized and enforced sanitary measures “for the welfare of 112,000 houseless men, women and children that were suddenly thrown on his department.” He became a founding member of the American Public Health Association in 1872 and fought for improvements in the management of urban slaughterhouses as well as the burial of victims of contagious diseases. The improvements he implemented undoubtedly saved hundreds of thousands of Chicagoans from early death by infectious disease.

After he took charge of the new Illinois State Board of Health in 1877, he and his colleagues turned their attention towards the sorry state of the medical profession.

They drew up a program for its reform that was seen by most doctors as “not wide enough or sufficiently explicit” and by opponents as “an opening wedge for state medicine,” that would infringe on the freedom of individuals to choose their own practitioners. The law required all would-be doctors to register with the state board of health to receive a certificate allowing them to practice medicine. These licenses were only issued to three types of applicants: graduates from a list of approved medical schools, candidates who passed an exam on science, anatomy, and general medical topics, and established practitioners of more than ten years standing in the state of Illinois. The first letter informing Illinois physicians in every county that they had to register their certificates with the county clerk went out in November of 1877. A massive purging of quacks, con men, and untrained physicians took place the next year.

More than 1,400 left the state in 1878.

Perhaps to avoid government interference in her practice, Keck stopped advertising in Chicago in the summer of 1877 and moved the bulk of her practice south to 42 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Dr. John H. Rauch took charge of the new Illinois State Board of Health in 1877.

Left: Rauch presented this paper at the Chicago Historical Society about the sanitary internment of bodies in cities. Above: Minutes from the meeting.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 43

Before government regulation in medical practice, anyone could offer treatment and cures. Above: one entrepreneur offered dental care at a special concert.

Bloomington, Peoria, Quincy, and other towns in central Illinois, where she had the support of both her patients and local newspapers, who vocally defended her right to practice. The Peoria Journal wrote, “If she were the quack some of these unsuccessful rivals pretend she is, she must, by the laws of trade, fail and she will be forced to abandon the profession. . . . No mere quack can long remain at anything or in any place. . . . We insist, in the name of all that is decent, that she has a right so to do.”

On February 12, 1878, Bloomington’s Daily Leader announced: “A test case will probably be made of the new law governing physicians in this State. Mrs. Dr. Keck, as is well known, has for years been doing a large and constantly increasing practice in this city and vicinity, and we believe with considerable success. Today, one of our regular practitioners called on Mrs. Dr. Keck, and demanded her credentials to practice in this state.

Mrs. Doctor Keck referred the “regular” to her attorney, Mr. Winfield S. Coy. The demand being made upon the attorney he replied that when he was compelled by process of law to produce the certificate, it would be forthcoming—until then, never! The physicians communicated with the president of the state’s Board of Health 44 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

in Chicago, who replied in effect to cut loose the “dogs of war,” and compel Mrs. Keck to produce her authority.

We expect this is the beginning of a long and tedious litigation between the “regulars” and the “irregulars,” and the public will await the result with interest.”

The paper was accurate in predicting a long struggle.

The newly created regulatory environment in Illinois threatened more than half Mrs. Dr. Keck’s lucrative practice. As forgiving as it was to old-time physicians who lacked formal medical school training, the law was still against her. She had not been an established medical practitioner in Illinois for the ten years previous to 1877; at best she could only argue that she had been active for two years, because her career had begun in Iowa. She most likely did not have enough education to pass the examination given by the state board of health. She might have applied to a medical school for additional training, as entrance requirements were relatively lax and several women had already been admitted to the medical department at the University of Iowa starting in 1871, but the many for-profit medical schools that eagerly accepted semi-literate male candidates would not take women. She might well have questioned, however, why

A certificate issued by the Illinois State Board of Health.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 45

Keck’s home in Davenport also housed her busy medical practice.

46 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

she should put her profitable business on hold and go back to school since she was already accepted by thousands of patients as a competent physician. She had been excluded from the brotherhood of regular practitioners with great hostility for so long that she was unlikely to have wanted to join them.

On a wider scale, the fundamental political battle that the Illinois State Board of Health had to fight was with a widespread libertarian point of view in the Englishspeaking world that material success was a sign of legitimacy for medical practitioners, as much as scientific and educational criteria. Even in England and on the East Coast, opponents to health laws saw the powers invested in the new state-run boards of health springing up across the country as an affront to individual liberty to choose medical care from a free and unregulated marketplace, caveat emptor. Philosopher Herbert Spencer and psychiatrist William James both opposed state licensing of doctors. The Darwinian Spencer thought that if poor and ignorant people were injured by quackery, that was “the penalty nature attached to ignorance,” while James, a professor at Harvard and a devotee of psychic cures and alternative healers including Christian Science, worried that licensing would interfere with freedom of research in medicine. Surprisingly, some Illinois doctors shared this point of view. “The sweetest privilege that an American possesses is the privilege of being humbugged,” wrote Dr. W.E. Gilliland in 1881 in a “spicy” letter to the editors of the Peoria Medical Monthly that excited numerous responses.

The cash-starved Illinois Board of Health possessed few tools to enforce their new regulations or to prosecute practitioners at the state level, so it pressured regular physicians to bring suit on a county-by-county basis.

These doctors were seldom wealthy, and most preferred to spend their time treating their patients rather than pursuing quacks through the local court system.

Nevertheless, Rauch and his colleagues exerted enormous influence at the county level with remarkable success. At the sixth meeting of the Illinois State Board of Health in Champaign in December 1878, it was reported that “150 scofflaws were evading every provision of the law and suits were being brought all over the state. . . . A number of convictions [were obtained] and they established the constitutionality of the law.”

In March 1879, Keck ran full-column advertisements on the front page of the Dubuque Herald for two days denouncing statements that Rauch made against her in the Dubuque Telegraph in November 1878. A dialogue developed; as accusations against her were further published and circulated, her allies, often her patients, wrote rebuttals that appeared in the papers in newslike columns. One of the most common accusations made against her was that because she traveled, she could not

be considered trustworthy. The Medical and Surgical Reporter declared in 1880 that “a doctor …must be stationary. ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’” In response to that criticism, in June 1879, she purchased a large mansion at 611 Brady Street in Davenport, and opened a permanent infirmary that she also used as a residence for her family. She paid twelve thousand dollars in cash, “a low figure,” according to the Davenport Gazette’s admiring article about her savvy negotiations with the seller. The building became the flagship symbol for her advertising throughout much of the rest of her career.

She had two different woodcuts made of it and advertised her business as “Mrs. Dr. Keck’s Palatial Infirmary for All Chronic Diseases . . . Established Permanently Since 1865” in large ads that ran in many Iowa and Illinois papers throughout the 1880s.

In February 1880, The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on a meeting of the Illinois Board of Health being held at the Grand Pacific Hotel, the main goal of which was to hold hearings to revoke the certificates of doctors engaged in unprofessional conduct. Dr. Rauch declared to the Daily Tribune: “There are now only two itinerants in the State as far as known—G. C. Dunn and Mrs. Keck, the latter of Bloomington and Peoria . . .” He added with vitriolic intensity, “no time should be lost to get rid of these ‘blots’ and ‘stains:’ they were foul and DAMNABLE IN EVERY WAY.” Keck’s next arena in her battle with the Illinois medical establishment was Peoria. She ran her first listing in the Peoria city directory in 1880, although she apparently had been advertising her business in the city in the newspapers for some time before that. The Peoria Medical Society “viewed her with disdain,” and decided that she had to be stopped from practicing in the city. An ambitious young gynecologist from nearby Dunlap named Dr. Otho B. Will took on the responsibility of prosecuting her. As a result of his efforts, on April 15, 1880, the branch circuit court for Peoria County ordered Keck to pay a fine of two hundred dollars to the state of Illinois for practicing medicine without a license. In May, the Peoria Medical Society thanked Will for “the able manner in which he is prosecuting that itinerant charlatan, the so-called Mrs. Dr. Keck.” Stung by this setback, she countersued Will for ten thousand dollars for trespass on her lease. The countersuit was heard in October but later dismissed on technical grounds.

Ultimately, Will’s efforts proved futile. By November 1880, Keck was advertising her Iowa infirmary in Peoria, and, in 1881, she and her daughter Charlotte were once again busily providing treatment to hundreds of patients at her “branch office” at 515 Fulton Street in Peoria.

The Peoria Medical Monthly, which began publication in the spring of 1880, focused its second editorial on Dr. Will’s effort to drive Keck out of town, although no names

This advertisement features a woodcut of Keck’s home/office. Keck continued to travel on her circuit even after establishing her infirmary.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 47

were mentioned. “Why is the State Law Forbidding Quackery Not Enforced?” they complained in the lead editorial for the June 1880 issue. “The State Board of Health seems very dilatory,” they added, even as “the matter has been tried in our own city by a physician . . . yet he, with apparently all-sufficient proof, was barely able to get a hearing. It is needless to say that nothing was done in the case, and all that he received for his honest effort to have the laws enforced and to protect the community was personal abuse and vilification.” Apparently, the Peoria medical community was extremely disappointed that Keck only had to pay a fine, which she no doubt chalked up to the cost of doing business, and they feared that her court case “accomplished but little more than an extensive advertising of [this] quack.” The editors lamented that it was hard to get a grand jury to “regard the suit in any other light than that of persecution prompted by personal jealousy and instigated by pecuniary motives.”

Local newspapers sided with the grand jury. According to the Peoria Journal, “there is neither reason nor justice in prosecuting this lady and the grand jury rightly took this view of the case.” The Peoria Daily Mail gave her a ringing endorsement: “Mrs. Dr. Keck is going to fight the State Board on the question of whether she has a right to doctor people or not. She says she has beaten them four times already and she is not afraid to lock horns with them again. Our sympathies are with Sister Keck, inasmuch as she is a lone woman, fighting the world, the flesh, and the devil, and having, as her bank account shows, rather the best of the fight.”

Medical profits could be a double-edged sword for everyone involved. To her supporters in the press, Mrs. Dr. Keck’s income from practicing medicine provided proof of her credibility as a physician, but the medical establishment frowned on “excessive expenditure in living and display . . . it savors too much of quackery.” At the same time, pharmacists and regular physicians were widely ridiculed throughout the nineteenth century in popular verse, satirical songs and on stage as “pretentious” men who gave treatments “of little value,” having no visible effects “but the getting of Fees.” Meanwhile, the Peoria Medical Monthly hit back at “the public press” with accusations that they also had mercenary motives, reproaching them for denouncing “any attempt at the suppression of quackery with a vehemence and abuse that can only come from an attack upon the pocketbook. Quacks are large advertisers, and these papers are lo[a]th to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”

Keck’s gender also played a role in the medical establishment’s vendetta against her. Her supporters pointed out that “she has been the victim of malignant and unjustifiable abuse from the regular male profession,” and evidence of the marked gender bias against females that was prevalent among the regular doctors who were 48 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

her contemporaries appeared in many places, often in the form of off-hand slurs against “ignorant women.”

The Peoria Medical Monthly objected in September about the press because editors “uphold quacks…and hound reputable physicians, against whom nothing more may exist than the gossip of a lot of ignorant women.” In a similar spirit, the influential author of a manual for successful medical practice, The Physician Himself, D.W. Cathell, advised young doctors in 1881 “to be on guard against jealous midwives, and ignorant doctor-women.”

Peoria’s regular medical establishment had some success in limiting Keck’s practice. Her name disappeared from the city’s business directory after 1884, but she continued to advertise in the Peoria papers and to treat patients in that city until at least 1889. She attempted to enter other new markets in the state with varying degrees of success during the mid-1880s. Her try in Decatur ended in defeat in November 1883 after months of expensive advertising, when, to save face, she abruptly notified the public that she had to attend to a sick brother in Missouri and would “postpone Decatur engagements until further notice.” Rauch highlighted this triumph in the sixth report of the Illinois Board of Health, crowing that the community “practically boycotted her, so that it was impossible to find a patient for whom she had prescribed to be used as a witness in the necessary legal process.”

She had better luck in Champaign/Urbana, where she began to advertise in the summer of 1884. A group of local doctors mounted a legal challenge and succeeded in having her arrested in April 1884. She made bail immediately and again hired the Bloomington lawyer Winfield Coy to represent her in Champaign County.

The legal strategy they pursued was simple and effective: Keck had enough financial resources—and persistence— to draw out the case for as long as it took to grind down the prosecutors’ resolve. After five long years in and out of court, an all-male jury finally found Keck ‘not guilty’ of illegally practicing medicine without state credentials.

On October 26, 1889, just two weeks after the verdict, members of the Illinois board once again convened to consider the “matter of the application of Mrs. Keck, of Davenport, Ia., for a certificate that would entitle her to practice medicine in Illinois.” She did not appear, although her attorney was notified that her “personal presence for examination was necessary under the law.”

Keck’s medical license issued three years earlier in Iowa and her legal triumph in Champaign left the Illinois doctors unmoved, and, in the absence of proof that she had attended a medical school, they insisted that she take the state’s medical examination. The legal points her lawyer raised in her favor were referred to the board’s own counsel. Her attorney departed, nothing more was said about her application, and it was almost certainly refused. As far as Rauch was concerned, Keck would

In 1887, the state’s board of health reported on the results of its efforts to regulate medicine over the previous decade.

Challenging the Medical Establishment | 49

never be accepted as a legitimate physician in Illinois.

The rejection appears personal than political as several eclectic physicians with degrees from eclectic medical colleges, such as Dr. Anson Clark, were serving on the Illinois State Board of Health with Rauch at that time.

By the end of the 1880s, Keck and Rauch seem to have battled each other into a stalemate. Then, in July 1891, political enemies forced Rauch to resign from his position. Following his departure, the board of health seemed to adopt a policy of live and let live, and left Keck alone from that point onwards. She continued to make her professional visits to Quincy and Bloomington, but she toned down her advertising and stopped using the woodcut image of her infirmary. Gradually, the pace of her activities slowed as her health declined, and she finally retired in 1900, sold her infirmary and moved to Chicago to live out her last years near her children, who had mostly settled on the city’s South Side.

A page from the certification examination administered by the board of health.

50 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Worn out by overwork and bitterness, John Rauch retreated to his brother’s house in Pennsylvania where he died in 1894, unlamented by the general public and unappreciated by Chicago society largely due to his brusque personality. Ironically, as a physician, he undoubtedly saved far more lives with his sanitary measures in Chicago than any other of his colleagues. Yet he lived long enough to see his chosen field of public health eclipsed by the glory and prestige enjoyed by doctors who rose to the top of the profession as surgeons and leaders of the new hospitals and medical schools that would be the base of their political power.

At the same time, scientific breakthroughs from cutting-edge laboratories in France, Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire filtered over from Europe, and American doctors increasingly began to accept and apply the ideas of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch regarding germ theory, the connection between microbes and infection. By 1900, microbiology and antiseptic surgery would be fully accepted into standard American medical practice, although the American doctors vigorously resisted efforts to import the equally progressive German model of socialized medicine being set up in Prussia. This growing influence of scientific medicine and swelling political influence of the American Medical Association tended to marginalize the sectarian practitioners in this country, who failed to embrace the bacteriological revolution. Homeopathic and eclectic practitioners and their medical societies and schools faded from the American landscape after 1900. Yet the Midwest continued to be a hotbed of stubborn opposition to regular medical practice well into the twentieth century.

Two Midwestern contemporaries of Keck who lacked formal medical training and credentials, as she did, established popular schools of alternative treatment that continue today. Andrew Taylor Still created osteopathy in 1874, and, in 1892, he established the American School of Osteopathy (now the A.T. Still University of the Health Sciences) in Kirksville, Missouri. Rebecca Keck’s nephew, Melville Ilgenfritz, was among its first graduates. Based on osteopathic philosophies, Canadian Daniel David Palmer invented chiropractic medicine in a Brady Street office two blocks south Keck’s Infirmary in 1895. His son and disciple, B.J. Palmer, carried on his theories by starting the Palmer School of Chiropractic, which is still going strong on Brady Street, two blocks north of the spot where Keck’s infirmary used to stand at number 611.

A central question raised by her expensive legal dramas is why Rebecca Keck did not simply drop her quest to be recognized as a physician in Illinois and market her bottled remedies as patent medicines. The Illinois laws were still permissive, and she could have

Left: Keck with her husband and daughter, Cora, c. 1892. Above: Keck and her granddaughter.

easily have changed her ads to conform to the new regulations by removing her professional identity. But she did not do this. She evidently truly believed that she was a physician and had a right to practice as such. The state of Iowa had declared that she was a physician and issued certificate number 1212 to her in November 1886 to prove the point. Even the hostile medical historian, James F. Clarke described her as Fairfield’s first woman physician. Her peers in Iowa had recognized her as a healer; she was not willing to be transformed into a swindler simply by crossing state lines. So she fought for recognition of her legitimacy in Illinois with great tenacity despite the impact on her finances and her reputation. Measured by what it cost her, she must have valued that identity profoundly.

More than one hundred years later, her story reveals the surprisingly arbitrary nature and malleability of public perceptions of legitimate medical practices.

Where quackery is defined as cynical swindling of unsuspecting marks, few would disagree that it should be suppressed. Yet several alternative ways of healing pioneered in the Midwest, once scorned, have now entered the mainstream. Rebecca Keck’s naturopathic medical treatments might have done so too, but lacking a strong disciple to carry on them into the twentieth

century, they became casualties to the tumultuous political struggle to tighten the limits of legitimate medical practice.

Greta Nettleton is the author of The Quack’s Daughter: A True Story About the Private Life of a Victorian College Girl (2014).

She is currently at work on a biography of Rebecca Keck.

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 34, courtesy of the author; 35, i69663; 36–37, courtesy of the author; 38–39, courtesy of the author; 40, left: i69623, right: i69623a; 41, left: 69621a, right: i169621; 42, top: i52309, bottom: i69660; 43, i69661, 44, left: i69662; right: Chicago History Museum; 45, i69657; 46–47, courtesy of the author; 49, i69657; 50, Chicago History Museum; 51, courtesy of the author.

F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Paul Starr’s The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast History (Basic Books, 1984) provides an excellent analysis of U.S. medical history. For more about botanical-based practices, see John S. Haller Jr.’s A Profile in Alternative Medicine: The Eclectic Medical College of Cincinnati, 1845–1942 (Kent State Press, 1999) and Medical Protestants: The Eclectics in American Medicine, 1825–1939 (Southern Illinois University Press; 1994).

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Y E S T E R D AY ’ S C I T Y I

Goose Island’s Earliest Residents: The Irish of Kilgubbin J. NICOLE ROBINSON

52 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

W

hen asked about Goose Island, many Chicagoans will think first of beer and factories. Goose Island is, in fact, a small 160acre island surrounded by the North Branch of the Chicago River where it forks at Chicago Avenue and rejoins at North Avenue. Many are unaware of its existence, and those who do know of it may be most familiar with its more recent history, the controversy surrounding the island’s designation as a Protected Manufacturing District in 1990 or the sit-in strike at one its factories in 2008.

Grain Elevators, Goose Island by George Demont Otis, oil on canvas, c. 1905

With a few variations, scholars attribute the naming of Goose Island to the domesticated geese kept by the area’s early Irish immigrants. According to Charles Winslow, a local historian and author of the 1938 typescript, Historic Goose Island, many of the Irish who made their way to Chicago in the late 1840s became squatters near the fork in the Chicago River. These immigrants identified as having come from Kilgubbin, which became the name of their shantytown.

Winslow’s account includes a description of the “First Goose Island”: Where the North and South Branches met to form the main stream there was in those early days a little island of yellow clay, not much over twenty square yards in extent at any time and entirely covered by water in the spring floods. This was the favorite resort of the geese of Kilgubbin. On sunny days the gabbling geese fairly covered the spot. The island soon became known as Goose Island, and the name spread to the settlement of Kilgubbin close by.

Goose Island is roughly bounded by North Avenue, Halsted Street, Chicago Avenue, and the Kennedy Expressway. This view, c. 1970, shows the half-mile-long viaduct that used to carry Ogden Avenue across the island. The city removed the bridge in the early 1990s.

Later, when the squatters were pushed farther north along the river, they took the nickname with them to the stretch of land known today as Goose Island. The original tiny island where the squatters’ geese had preened was dredged out of the river around 1865.

The story of these immigrants is common in the sense that hundreds of thousands of Irish landed in America during the mid-nineteenth century as a result of the Great Famine. But, according to the accounts of two scholars, some may have received free passage to Chicago. In his typescript, Winslow notes that three landlords evicted their tenants but paid their passage to America. In 1998, Perry Duis, then professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago, provided a few additional details in his book Challenging Chicago. He Yesterday’s City | 53

states that three landlords in Kilgubbin, County Cork, records. If no connection can be made to the landlords and County Mayo evicted their tenants in 1847 and that that Winslow names, where was Kilgubbin? a labor broker paid the immigrants’ way from New York Duis states that Kilgubbin was in County Cork, and to Chicago. Who were these immigrants? What were the there is a Kilgobbin located four miles west of the seaside circumstances of their eviction, and what did they find in resort town of Kinsale, twenty-two miles southwest of Cork Chicago? Was their supposed free ride a boon or a bane? city. Kilgobbin is not a quaint Irish village but rather a Church records offer a potential source for identifying townland, the smallest recognized administrative division names and tracking down personal stories from this of land in Ireland, comprised of fields and farmhouses. anonymous group of immigrants, yet very little docuToday, as in the mid-nineteenth century, the neighboring mentation exists for Chicago’s early Irish parishes. village of Ballinadee, located about a mile to the northwest, Among the surviving records dating back to the midfunctions as a small town center for the surrounding farmnineteenth century are marriage registers for St. Mary’s lands. The population of Kilgobbin, grouped with several Cathedral and St. Patrick’s Church, but these do not other contiguous townlands in Ireland’s latest census, is include the communiapproximately two hundred. cants’ places of birth.

The idyllic Kilgobbin Another potential encompasses almost source is the 1850 1,300 acres. Its rolling United States Census. pastures are divided by Winslow states that low stone walls overwhen they first arrived grown by yellow gorse in Chicago, before and other thick shrubmoving farther north bery, creating a quilt in to present-day Goose earth tones and shades Island, these immiof green. A creek curls grants chiefly lived through the hollows, from the main branch eventually joining the of the river north to River Bandon. Winding Kinzie Street and from roads and bridle paths the North Branch east offer lovely views at each to Franklin Street. The rise, curve, and dip. The census returns for townland’s single landaddresses within these mark is the ruin of bounds should yield Kilgobbin Castle, a fivethe residents’ names. story fifteenth-century This is not as straighttower house. The castle This drawing captures the prevailing stereotype of Chicago’s early Irish forward as it sounds, is privately owned and, immigrants—barefoot, drinking, and shovel-toting. however, since the enuthough an uninhabited merators compiled results by their own system for numshell, remains a defining part of the landscape. Walking bering dwellings, not according to street name. With the peaceful, beautiful lanes of Kilgobbin today, it is diffiscant information readily available in Chicago, could a cult to imagine the scenes of poverty and devastation trip overseas offer insights into this group’s background? during the 1840s that could have resulted in a large emiIn tracing the original Goose Islanders back to Ireland, gration to Chicago. it appears that none of the three landlords mentioned by Located in the south of Ireland, County Cork was one Winslow—Lord Miltown, the Earl of Kenmare, and the of the hardest-hit areas during the nation’s Great Famine Marquis of Lansdowne—held lands in or near a place (1845–52). Touched off by a particularly virulent strain named Kilgubbin, whether a town, townland, union, of fungus that infected the Irish Lumper, the country’s barony, parish, or any close spelling variant thereof. most common potato variety, and compounded by an Perhaps some of the evictees from the cited landlords impoverished population depending solely on the culticame in the succeeding waves of Irish immigrants and vation of this potato, the famine is estimated to have cost joined the original Kilgubbin evictees in their shantytown.

Ireland a quarter of its population in less than a decade, causing the deaths of one million people and resulting in The association of the Goose Islanders with the name the emigration of at least one million more.

Kilgubbin is certainly much stronger than the association Prior to the famine, according to Ireland’s 1841 with a particular landlord: Kilgubbin is mentioned in census, the townland of Kilgobbin had a population of numerous Chicago histories, newspaper articles, and court 54 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

Kilgobbin Castle, a five-story fifteenth-century tower house, remains the defining landmark of the surrounding Irish countryside. These peaceful views provide a stark contrast to the devastation of the area in the mid-1800s. Photographs by J. Nicole Robinson, 2010

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Bridget O’Donnell and her children were among the hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken Irish peasants evicted from their homes and farms during the Great Famine. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library, picture no. 10221175

527; by 1851, its population was only 354. While the population figures from these censuses still exist, the original household returns, including family names, generally do not. A fire at Ireland’s Public Record Office destroyed almost all of the records in 1922.

The Ballinadee Way, a limited-edition book published and distributed by the local historical society in 2006, provides valuable insight into what was happening in Kilgobbin during the famine. A local flour mill, engaged in the large-scale production of foodstuffs, attracted significant numbers of people from the surrounding countryside as the famine worsened. Starving people walking, crawling, and even dying in the fields and country lanes as they traveled to the mill in hope of receiving food became commonplace and problematic.

In 1838, the Parliament of the United Kingdom had passed the Irish Poor Law Act, which created the first 56 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

system of public relief for the poor in Ireland. The system divided Ireland into 130 unions and called for the construction of a workhouse in each. While this network accommodated the influxes caused by periodic partial crop failures that were common in Ireland, it was completely inadequate for the total crop failure of the Great Famine. At full capacity, workhouses could accommodate only one percent of the Irish population.

Kilgobbin fell within the Bandon Poor Law Union. The Cork City and County Archives include collections of the minute books kept in weekly meetings of the boards of guardians who managed the county’s workhouses. The minutes from the Bandon workhouse reveal the dire circumstances that precipitated this group’s probable eviction and emigration in 1847.

In 1845, prior to the onset of the famine, the Bandon Union had a population of roughly sixteen thousand, and its workhouse held approximately three hundred inmates. By August 1846, workhouse residency had increased to five hundred. The minutes note the “general and complete failure of the potato crop in this union . . . and the consequent, alarming assemblage of unemployed labourers.”

By February 1847, the Bandon workhouse had admitted 1,235 inmates, more than three hundred past the maximum number it was designed to accommodate.

To put this overcrowding into context, it is important to understand that only the most desperately poor resorted to living in the workhouses, which were known for their harsh discipline and high mortality rates. Many small landholders were starving but still unwilling to abandon their farms. In March 1847, the board of guardians resolved that the workhouse be closed to new admissions, as fever and other contagious diseases were prevailing and the medical officer warned of “dangerous consequences” if any more persons were admitted.

Construction began on temporary sheds to allow for additional admissions, but for three months, the workhouse had to turn away those seeking aid. Unfortunately, this coincided with the government’s winding down of public works projects and preceded the introduction of soup kitchens, so the destitute of Bandon Union were truly without resources during this time.

Research revealed the identity of one landlord who might have evicted villagers in Kilgobbin but also paid their passage to America: Thomas Lucas. The Lucas family had settled in County Cork in the seventeenth century, and in 1814, Thomas Lucas by marriage became landlord of land at Kilgobbin.

After the Act of Union 1800 joined Ireland to Great Britain and dissolved the Irish Parliament effective January 1, 1801, many wealthy Irish landowners relocated to London, which was perceived as the new center of commerce. A common reason cited by the British

Above: The destitute clamor for admission to a workhouse; the artist included an anachronistic gaslight over the gate. Mary Evans Picture Library, picture no. 10015611. Below: To prevent evicted tenants from returning, many Irish landlords ordered the unroofing of whole villages, as depicted in this illustration of Moveen in County Clare. This widespread practice led to permanent pauperism. Š Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library, picture no. 10220182

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government for the general poverty in Ireland was that Irish landlords were not taking proper responsibility for their estates. While some Irish landlords indeed escaped any direct call on their resources by absenting themselves to London, many others stayed on their estates and, during the famine, served on boards of guardians, joined local relief committees, and assisted their own tenants through charity or additional employment.

Thomas Lucas falls into this second group. One can find his name among those actively involved in addressing the crisis.

In the early months of 1847 as demand for aid soared, the British government was preparing an amendment to the Irish Poor Law Act, which eventually passed in June.

The new act dramatically shifted the responsibility for funding relief away from the government and onto Irish landowners. This pushed many landlords toward bankruptcy and desperation, as seemingly impossible financial demands were placed on them as their rental income was at an all-time low. Due to the way the government assessed taxes, a landlord could pay significantly lower rates by evicting tenants who leased very small holdings.

With the convergence of these pressures, Lucas may have felt forced to evict his tenants in order to meet his own financial obligations but also made the unusual decision to pay their way to America.

Landlord-assisted emigration was a rarity in Ireland, accounting for no more than 5 percent of total overseas emigration from 1846 to 1952. Those who emigrated at their landlords’ expense had mixed reactions. Some felt that they had no choice in the matter and resented it as forced exile at best or an attempt on their lives at worst.

But many eagerly seized the opportunity. Very few of those hardest hit had their own resources to emigrate; if turned away from a full workhouse, they faced homelessness, starvation, and ultimately death. Thus, Lucas—or whoever financed the Goose Islanders’ transatlantic voyage—provided an unusual opportunity for them, quite possibly saving their lives.

Locals in Kilgobbin, Ballinadee, Kinsale, Bandon, and Cork, including historians, clergy, and Susan Lucas Griffith, a descendant of the Lucas family, are unfamiliar with a large-scale eviction in Kilgobbin during the famine. A few theories can be advanced as to why this story might have disappeared in Ireland. First, while the eviction of a village seems like a major event from today’s perspective, such occurrences were sadly common during the famine. By conservative estimates, landlords across Ireland evicted seventy thousand families and almost half of these were large clearances. The Irish constabulary did not even begin keeping statistics on the evictions that came to the knowledge of the local police

Between 1845 and 1855, scholars estimate that 2.1 million people left Ireland, almost all bound for the United States or Canada. Above: Emigrants on the quay at Cork, spring 1851. © Illustrated London News Ltd/Mary Evans Picture Library, picture no. 10014067 58 | Chicago History | Fall 2014

This 1852 telegram documents the difficulties of finding work for the influx of immigrants: “About six hundred destitute Irish laborers here & more expected tomorrow. What shall be done? They say Phelps promised employment on arriving in Chicago. Answer.”

until 1849. News of only some of the clearances reached the press, with information often supplied by local Catholic priests. Second, the famine continues to be a very sensitive subject in Ireland. The suffering was so widespread and tragic that the instinct is to block those memories rather than discuss them. Finally, it could be that there is no local knowledge of this story because the Goose Island immigrants did not hail from here, and the search for the elusive “Kilgubbin” must continue.

It is worth noting that there is also a Kilgobban, a small townland of 150 acres in northern County Cork.

During the famine, the Mallow Union, where Kilgobban is located, experienced “less pauperism than any other union the county,” according to famine scholar James S. Donnelly Jr. Despite the lack of documentation or oral tradition to confirm a group eviction in either Kilgobbin or Kilgobban, the former seems more likely to have been the hometown of the immigrants who came to Chicago and settled Goose Island, if they came from County Cork.

If the landlord of the Kilgubbin evictees financed their emigration as far as New York, how did they get to Chicago? From 1843 to 1847, Chicago experienced a period of rapid growth. Its population more than doubled—from 7,600 to 16,900—and more than two thousand new buildings were constructed. Work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal resumed in 1845 after a years-long hiatus due to a collapse in state finances.

Contractors were making the final push to complete construction by April 1848, and a huge business boom was expected to follow. A manpower shortage prompted the use of labor brokers, some of whom recruited newly arrived immigrants in New York to come work in Chicago. One such broker may have intercepted some of the Kilgubbiners and paid their passage to Chicago via steamship through the Great Lakes.

One advantage of continuing on to Chicago was the young city’s relative openness to immigrants at this time.

In 1847, New York City had a population of roughly half a million and a well-defined class structure that had developed over the course of two centuries. Resistance to the rising tide of immigrants, particularly Irish Catholics, was becoming ugly, even violent, in New York and other long-established eastern cities. In sharp contrast, 1840s Chicago was a thinly inhabited frontier town, trying to grow into a cultured city, and Chicago industrialists needed manpower for building projects, infrastructure improvements, and factory operations.

Landing in Chicago in 1847, the Kilgubbiners would have encountered a place that was bewilderingly different not only from their rural village in Ireland but also from the urban scene they had briefly encountered in New York. Although Chicago had been incorporated ten years prior, the fledgling city with a population of less than 20,000 was still a muddy backwater struggling to prove itself. As yet, it had no paved roads, sidewalks, or sewers.

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Real-estate analyst Homer Hoyt notes that the original Kilgubbin was located “at the fork of the north branch” of the Chicago River.

This map, drawn by J. S. Wright according to survey of 1834, illustrates Hoyt’s description.

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Landing in Chicago, the Kilgubbiners encountered a fledgling city surrounded by farmland and unbroken prairie. Above: A view of Chicago, 1848.

The atmosphere was closer to a maritime trading port than an urban metropolis, and the river was the primary influence on the city’s geographical development. Boats were continually entering and leaving the city’s harbor and crowding the river docks. The principal shipping and forwarding business was done on the north bank of the river, and a few fashionable residences had been constructed a few blocks farther north; beyond this were marshy woods. Most of the construction in the city, both commercial and residential, was located south of the main branch of the river to Monroe Street; south of this was unbroken prairie. The largest structures were threeto four-story brick buildings, and there were only about thirty of these; the rest were wooden structures of one or two stories. The area west of the river was the most sparsely settled, though it was growing into a manufacturing center of sawmills, machine shops, and shipyards.

Farmers from the fertile country to the south hauled produce to the city in covered wagons, supplying Chicago residents and exporting grain to the east.

Scholars estimate that seventy thousand teams entered Chicago in 1847. Even at this early stage in its development, the city was experiencing traffic jams, as wagons from the south congregated at the few drawbridges crossing the main branch and suffered lengthy delays while ship traffic plied the river.

This volume of traffic meant that the city’s unpaved thoroughfares often resembled quagmires more than

streets, particularly since Chicago was essentially built on marshland. Pedestrians shared the roads with the ubiquitous horse but also stray cows and pigs and even the occasional roaming pack of wolves. The business district crowded south of the river, mostly along Lake Street between State and Wells. The retail trade comprised a ramshackle assortment of shops hawking the wares they procured from the latest ship cargoes. These stores further obstructed walkways with advertising and cluttered outdoor displays.

By looking at the relatively primitive surroundings in which they landed, the Irish famine survivors probably did not realize that they had arrived at an auspicious time in the city’s history. Chicago was poised on the brink of a series of important changes that would rapidly transform it into one of the major cities of the world. In 1848, Chicago saw the opening of the canal, laying of its first railroad tracks, completion of its first paved roads, commencement of telegraph service, and founding of the Board of Trade.

The Kilgubbiners were part of a large Irish migration that had been ongoing since before the city was incorporated. The first wave arrived with the commencement of the construction of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1836. Many had first lived in New York, where they worked on the construction of the Erie Canal. A large Irish settlement, initially known as Hardscrabble, grew up south of the city center near the northern terminus of the canal and was later officially named Bridgeport. A Yesterday’s City | 61

Some Goose Islanders eventually found employment at the McCormick Reaper Works (pictured below, far right). Cyrus McCormick (above, 1858) built his celebrated factory in 1847 with the financial backing of William B. Ogden. As a native New Yorker with strong East Coast business connections, Ogden may have contacted the labor broker who paid the Kilgubbiners’ passage to Chicago.

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second community of Irish settled west of the city center, living and working amid the growing manufacturing district. Originally located at Randolph and Des Plaines Streets, St. Patrick’s was created in 1846 to minister to these Irish. The Kilgubbiners formed the nucleus of a third Irish community, settling along the North Branch.

In a maritime economy where waterfront access was essential to the operations of industries that employed unskilled laborers, it was logical that all three Irish settlements were located along the river.

If labor brokers in New York promised Irish immigrants high-paying work, it is clearly not what they found in Chicago. In fact, it is uncertain whether the work the brokers had promised was available by the time the immigrants arrived. In mid-1840s Chicago, those who did not own residences typically lived in hotels or boardinghouses, but these options were beyond the financial means of the famine immigrants. Instead many became squatters on unoccupied land just north of the fork in the river, the area known as Kilgubbin. Eventually, many immigrants did find work at the nearby McCormick Reaper Works, the docks along the river, the lumberyards, or with building contractors; the women often took in laundry.

Irish en route to Chicago may have been promised jobs building or repairing roads. The city’s 1837 charter included a provision that the government could order three days of roadwork from adult male citizens, but most preferred to pay a fine rather than work when summoned. Above: Clark Street between Lake and Randolph, 1857, oil painting by Lawrence C. Earle.

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As founder of the Chicago Land Company, William B. Ogden (above) was responsible for excavating the canal that created present-day Goose Island or, as it was sometimes called, Ogden’s Island.

Over the next decade, Chicago enjoyed an exciting period of astonishing growth and enrichment. Advances included the introduction of gaslights, installation of city sewers, commissioning of the city police force, creation of bus service and street railways, a huge increase in rail traffic, and the founding of a civic opera and orchestra, baseball clubs, and several higher education institutions.

The Kilgubbiners contributed their manual labor during a time when it was critically needed, yet they were unable to break out of their poverty.

During the 1850s, as more railroad companies were attracted to Chicago, the undeveloped land of Kilgubbin became a desirable place for laying track. In 1857, in response to complaints from the railroads and wealthy building owners, Mayor John Wentworth sent police to force the squatters out of the district. According to Charles Winslow, it was at this point that the Kilgubbiners, taking their geese and other livestock with them, moved farther north onto the stretch of land that we know today as Goose Island.

The Chicago Land Company, founded by William B. Ogden, owned this parcel of land. The company was engaged in digging clay for making bricks, and by 1857, workers completed excavation of the North Branch Canal, cutting off a curve in the North Branch and creating more waterfront for industry. Thus, the Goose Island community now occupied a true island, sometimes also referred to as Ogden’s Island.

A Chicago Times clipping from 1891 depicts a typical Goose Island residence—a small shanty with a garden plot and shelter for the family’s livestock—overshadowed by the local industry. Ogden, among the first to recognize the connection between railroads and waterways, ran the city’s first rail tracks to the bank of the North Branch.

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This slum scene from Chicago’s Near West Side, c. 1900, is representative of Goose Islanders at the time. In his 1938 interview with Charles Winslow, Frank Monahan recalled: “Some people got the idea that the boys on the Island were organized into tough gangs, but they weren’t.

We never caused anyone any trouble, but there were some gangs both east and west of the Island that were made up of rowdies, and that gave a reputation to the Island that we didn’t deserve.”

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By 1858, the shantytown on Goose Island had developed into one of Chicago’s first slums and had a “notorious” population of two thousand. The squatters’ homes were constructed from castoff materials and typically consisted of two or three rooms shared by the family and its livestock; plots of cabbage and potatoes surrounded the shacks. The neighborhood was semirural and semi-industrial, impoverished, overcrowded, and dirty. In 1865, John Mansir Wing, a Chicago journalist, called Kilgubbin “the largest shanty settlement” within Chicago limits. He described it as “having been the terror of constables, sherrifs [sic] and policemen in days that are past” and “a safe retreat for criminals, policemen not venturing to invade its precincts, or even cross the border, without having a strong reserve force.” He also noted that naughty children in more prosperous Chicago neighborhoods were “frightened into submission by threats of being ‘sent to the Kilgubbin.’”

The Goose Islanders had to contend with this reputation as well as the industries springing up around them, and from this point on, the island established the industrial character that it maintains to this day. Their settlement was gradually surrounded by coal companies, lumber dealers, tanneries, stone companies, distilleries, furniture manufacturers, varnish factories, and ship builders. In 1866, the city built the first substantial wooden bridge onto the island, across the North Branch at Halsted Street, adding bridges at Division and Weed Streets a few years later. East of the island, a gas plant opened in 1871, and Kilgubbin and other nearby neighborhoods were nicknamed Little Hell because of the flames and sulfur pouring from the plant. The Goose Islanders’ residences became dirtier and overcrowding worsened; unlike Chicago’s wealthier citizens, the squatters could not afford to relocate their homes beyond the industrial zone. Goose Island was untouched by the Great Fire of 1871, so at least the Kilgubbiners were spared from another tragic disaster and upheaval.

Members of the Goose Island Fire Department pictured with their horse-drawn fire engine, February 11, 1907.

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Goose Islanders helped found Immaculate Conception Church in 1859, which grew into the impressive structure pictured here in 1934.

Industry continued to grow on the island in the following decades, with Philip D. Armour erecting his famous grain elevators in 1887, 1893, and 1896. During this period, the ethnic identity of the island was also changing, as recently arrived Polish immigrants joined the Irish, finding shelter in the island’s crowded slum. Job opportunities associated with industry did bring greater stability to the Goose Island community, and the squatters eventually became renters; yet this did not lead to an improvement of the neighborhood’s character. The island maintained its reputation as a criminal district. It still lacked a proper sewer system and was without gas lines at the close of the century, during what were likely the last days of the original famine immigrants from Ireland.

Was this the grim reality to which the Irish of Kilgubbin were relegated when they were evicted? From the reputation that Goose Island developed, it seems that the majority of its residents moved from a situation where they were threatened with imminent starvation and death to one in which they could meet their basic survival needs but attain little else. Were their hopes in escaping the famine broken on the rocks of primitive urban Chicago, or could there be more to their story?

One example that points to a happier outcome for the Kilgubbiners is their involvement in founding and erecting Immaculate Conception Church and adjacent school in 1859. Clearly, not all of Goose Island’s earliest

Charles Winslow closed his 1938 typescript with this map of notable Goose Island locations. The first stop refers to William E. Dever, a skilled tannery worker by day and law school student by night. Dever became an attorney, the area’s alderman, and later mayor of Chicago (1923–27).

residents remained impoverished squatters or resorted to crime. At least some had discretionary income, were generous with their resources, and had an interest in fostering community and supporting stabilizing institutions. During the Great Chicago Fire, which destroyed the original Immaculate Conception building, nuns took refuge in the homes of parish families on Goose Island.

With further research, perhaps the family names of some of the original Goose Islanders will be uncovered, and from these, success stories will hopefully emerge, personal histories of those who worked their way out of poverty, engaged in the community in meaningful ways, and shared in Chicago’s progress in succeeding generations. If not during the lifetimes of the famine refugees, stories of redemption can surely be found in the larger picture of their descendants. By looking with interest and compassion at a people who suffered systemic oppression in their homeland followed by cataclysmic upheaval and relocation to a challenging urban environment, it is possible to understand Goose Island in a new way.

J. Nicole Robinson is freelance writer whose work has included marketing and public relations in Chicago’s architecture and engineering industry. She is currently working on a historical novel set in 1840s Chicago..

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 52–53, i37293; 53, i36164; 54, i37430; 55, courtesy of the author; 56–58, reproduced with the permission of the Mary Evans Picture Library, www.maryevans.com; 59, i30936; 60, i34590; 61, i14374; 62 top, i69793; 62–63, i00161; 63 top, i62509; 64, top: i39053, bottom: i37334; 65, [Hull-House neighbors], Jane Addams Hull-House Photographs, JAMC_0000_0190_0275. University of Illinois at Chicago Library, Special Collections; 66, top: i37314, bottom: DN-0054667; 67, i69782.

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

Serving Chicago: Interviews with Mary Dempsey and Bernie Wong T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

M

ary Dempsey and Bernarda “Bernie” Wong are part of a long and deep tradition of Chicago women engaging in transformative social and municipal services. From 1994 to 2012, Dempsey served as commissioner of the Chicago Public Library system. When she started, the city’s public library system was, in the words of the Chicago Tribune, “the runt of the litter” among local cultural institutions. Only two libraries had Internet access, numerous branches operated out of tiny storefronts or leased trailers, and the staff was demoralized. Nearly two decades later, when she resigned as commissioner, Dempsey had spearheaded the construction of forty-four new libraries, created the nationally acclaimed One Book, One Chicago citywide reading program, and initiated innovative digital-learning initiatives such as YOUmedia. In just six years after her appointment, the Chicago Public Library system was touted by the Chicago Tribune as “a national showcase” and enjoyed a reputation as a powerful educational, social, and economic force in the city.

Bernie Wong, the founder and president of the Chinese American Service League (CASL), is an equally influential force in Chicago. From 1979 to today, CASL evolved from a one–person enterprise with a budget of $30,000 to a $12 million operation with a staff and volunteer force numbering more than one thousand. By the 1990s, CASL provided a comprehensive menu of services for Chinatown residents. Wong also directed initiatives that created CASL’s $6.7 million senior housing facility (1998) and the $5.6 million Kam L. Liu Building (2004), a community service center that now anchors the Chinatown neighborhood.

Dempsey and Wong experienced vastly different childhoods. Bernie Wong was born in 1943 in Hong Kong, Mary Dempsey and Bernie Wong transformed Chicago by improving social, municipal, and educational services, as well as making them more available to the public. Photographs by Dan Rest.

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the youngest of Jorge and Virginia Lo’s seven children. Her parents originally met in Peru, but returned to Hong Kong and then moved to the province of Canton (now called Guangdong) in mainland China when Wong was a toddler. “They had a hotel, a café, and a tailoring shop,” explains Wong. “My mother was a very professional tailor.”

The Lo family operated several successful businesses and resided in the upper level of their hotel in the city of Canton (now called Guangzhou), directly across from the railroad station during her early childhood years.

But their wealth quickly vanished when the family fled mainland China during the Communist Revolution, during which her grandfather was tortured and executed.

Dempsey was born in 1953, the third of five children of Donald Joseph Dempsey and Eileen Therese Condon.

Her father was a marketing executive at Blue Cross and Blue Shield; her stay-at-home mother was trained as a nurse. Although raised in Hillside, just west of Chicago, Dempsey spent considerable time visiting both sets of grandparents, who lived on the same block of West End Avenue in Chicago’s Austin neighborhood. “I grew up thinking everybody’s grandparents lived on the same block and everybody went to see their grandparents every Sunday.”

Despite their vastly different geographic origins and family circumstances, each came from devoted Roman Catholic families. Dempsey attended St. Domitilla School in Hillside with more than one thousand students, fifty-nine of whom were in her first grade classroom. But Dempsey was not intimidated.

“My two older brothers had me all primed for school, so I was very excited to go,” she recounts. “I walked right in the door and never turned around to say good-bye to my father. He never got over it. I think he was more traumatized than anybody.”

Although Dempsey’s parents never attended college, they emphasized the value of education. “Books were very, very important, and reading was very important, learning was very important,” remembers Dempsey. “My father and mother both really stressed education, they read, and there was always music in our home.” At eighteen, Dempsey left Chicago for Winona, Minnesota, where she received a scholarship and ultimately earned a bachelor of arts degree in American studies from St. Mary’s College in 1975.

After emigrating from mainland China, Wong briefly resided at the Sacred Heart boarding school in Macau before moving to Hong Kong, where she and her siblings were educated at St. Mary’s Canossian College. “My mother was a very religious Catholic. Any time there were any priests or nuns that came to Canton on the railroad, she would go receive them and bring them and host

The Lo family in 1945. The youngest of seven children, Bernie (center, between her parents, Virginia and Jorge, and surrounded by her siblings) and her family lived in Canton until forced to flee mainland China during the Communist Revolution.

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them at our hotel,” Wong remembers. “As I grew up, I heard many, many priests and sisters who told me how much they were helped by my mother.”

Virginia Lo’s kindness was rewarded. “We grew up poor, but my mother was very determined that we all have a very good education,” explains Wong. Her mother’s relationships with the many nuns and priests who passed through Canton ultimately paid off. “All the Jesuits and the Maryknoll sisters, they just said don’t worry,” Wong remembers. “If any of your children want to come to our school, they’re welcome.” At eighteen, Wong left Hong Kong alone for Sioux City, Iowa, where she received a scholarship and earned a bachelor of arts degree in sociology from Briar Cliff College in 1966.

Wong attributes her choice of a career in social work to her mother’s influence. “My mother, on her own, was a social worker,” emphasizes Wong. “She would always, always take care of the poor. Even growing up poor, we still had people knocking on our door needing some help, whether it’s food, whether it’s training, whether it’s counseling. So I grew up watching my mom do a lot of social work from home.”

Even with their scholarships, Wong and Dempsey both worked their way through college. “With my scholarship, they gave me four years of tuition, board, and room, but I had to work for $120 a month,” Wong recounts. “I was doing two things: working in the kitchen washing big pots and pans that I could literally put myself in and then cleaning the dean of admissions’s office. So I got to know her well.” Dempsey had similar experiences. “I worked as a tutor. I worked in the cafeteria. I dished up the food. I cleaned the dishes. I waited tables.” And her work did not end after the school year.

“When I came home in the summers,” remembers Dempsey, “I either worked in offices or on the line in the factory at Motorola in Franklin Park.”

Dempsey and Wong’s undergraduate successes were rewarded with scholarships to graduate schools, the former to the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, the latter to the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. Coincidentally, both scholarships originated from the state of Illinois and required two years of public service upon graduation.

Those requirements eventually attracted both women to Chicago.

Wong first moved to Chicago in 1966 for a summer job in Chinatown.

There she met Albert Wong, a chemistry student at the University of Chicago.

Two years later they married, and Wong began her employment at the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services at the Damen Avenue and Taylor Street office working on adoption cases. Then she moved to East Chicago Heights (now Ford Heights), a south suburb then labeled as the nation’s poorest community, to oversee a Head Start program. Wong was so successful that she quickly became the director of social services for the village, developing a senior nutrition program, food pantry, homemaker program, and other social services.

Poetically, Dempsey’s first job was at a library. While attending Immaculate Heart of Mary High School in Westchester, she worked as a page at the local Hillside Public Library for seventy-five cents an hour. “My job was to shelve the books, check out the books, repair the books, and run the projector for the story times on Saturdays,” describes Dempsey. “It was great; I had a great, great, great time.” Then, after graduating from Illinois in 1976, Dempsey returned to the same Hillside Public Library as the community’s first professional librarian. The job proved instrumental later in her career. “It was a great job. I got to build a collection, run the story times, bring in financial literacy programs. It really gave me the first taste of how you can make a public library very, very meaningful. I loved it.”

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Above: Bernie Wong upon her graduation from Briar Cliff College in 1966. She would go on to graduate school at Washington University St. Louis.

Below: Bernie and Albert Wong met in Chinatown in 1966 and were married in December of 1968.

After their initial jobs, Dempsey and Wong’s career paths diverged sharply from their original directions. In 1978, the Chicago law firm of Kirkland & Ellis hired Dempsey to organize their massive antitrust cases. She quickly impressed her superiors, particularly senior partner Walter Kuhlmey, who encouraged her to enroll in law school. Within a year, she was attending DePaul University’s College of Law full-time while still working at Kirkland & Ellis. After graduating in 1982, Dempsey worked at Rubin & Proctor, Michael Reese Hospital, and Sidley Austin.

After living in Chicago for nearly a decade, Wong noticed that many social services were not being delivered to Chinese immigrants, particularly those in Chinatown. So in 1978, Wong, her husband, and ten other Chinese friends started offering basic social services on Sundays, including translating letters written in English and helping residents obtain tax rebates and public aid. A year later they formally established the Chinese American Service League (CASL) with a staff of one—Bernie Wong.

CASL had two initial challenges. First, “we had to get the confidence of community leaders,” Wong remembers. “It took us a long time to sip tea with the establishment, because they don’t know who we were. They figured that we were probably communists. And literally told us that.” Second was the lack of funding, which necessitated the onerous process of applying for external grants. “We got a seed grant from the Chicago Community Trust and United Way, $16,000 each,” Wong remembers. “We started with a budget of $32,000.”

But CASL quickly grew. “When we first started, we thought we were going to do some English classes” and provide a few resources or counseling, explains Wong. “But from day one, people wanted jobs, to be hooked up with

Mayor Richard M. Daley and Bernie Wong at the ground-breaking ceremony in 1996 for the Chinese American Service League’s senior housing building. Nearly twenty years earlier, Wong had begun to offer social service programs, including translation services and public aid assistance, for Chinese immigrants in Chicago.

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other benefits, all kinds of things.” In short time CASL became distinctive for its wide range of services, aiding community members from birth to death: multilingual and multicultural childcare services; after–school and youth outreach programming; senior citizen programs; community organizing; employment services from chef training and baking to industrial labor to computer programing and financial services; classes on dancing, health care, how to use a credit card, how to obtain a mortgage, and how to pass the US citizenship exam. Not surprisingly, the staff expanded from one in 1979 to 130 in 1994 to more than 400 in 2013 with a volunteer force of more than 700.

According to Wong, CASL is now the largest employer in Chinatown and the largest agency serving Chinese in the Midwest.

At Sidley Austin, Dempsey’s office was next to attorney Gery Chico, who was appointed chief of staff to Mayor Richard M. Daley. One day Chico called and asked Dempsey to serve as the commissioner of the Chicago Public Library system.

Despite her initial resistance, Dempsey’s husband, Philip Corboy, encouraged her to talk with the mayor. “It was my first time ever talking to this man alone, and he was rapid–fire, nonstop,” she recounts. She was enraptured by Daley’s vision of libraries as community centers serving to bring neighborhoods together. Daley told her, “Every neighborhood needs strong schools, strong parks, strong libraries.” Dempsey was impressed. “He was articulate.

He was thoughtful. He understood it. He got it completely,” recalls Dempsey.

“And I barely got a word in edgewise.”

Above: The future site of the Near North Library in 1996. During her tenure as commissioner of the Chicago Public Library, Dempsey (center) oversaw the establishment of forty–four branch libraries, which frequently transformed underserved neighborhoods, acting as magnets for other city services and businesses.

The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Near North Branch Library took place on August 6, 1997. Left to right: Mary Dempsey, Secretary of State Jesse White, Alderman Walter Burnett, Mayor Richard M. Daley, and Alderman Burt Natarus.

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Running the Chicago Public Library system was no easy task. In 1994, it was a hodgepodge of eighty-six branches, many in tiny rented storefronts and trailers with outdated and deteriorating catalog systems. Budgeting was helter-skelter. Few branches had computers, and there was no strategic plan.

Dempsey’s first task was to rebuild the library system’s human and physical infrastructure. “The plan was bring technology everywhere; develop new, clean, welcoming physical facilities; develop a strong book collection; and develop a professional program that kept people up-to-date on their skill set,” explains Dempsey. In 1995, she implemented a professional development and training program for all 1,300 employees. Then the City Council approved two bond issues that raised $170 million for neighborhood libraries. Dempsey lauds Daley: “He right away passed a bond issue to build new public libraries. He gave us more money for collections. He gave us money for technology. We received Bill Gates’s first million-dollar gift before there was even a Gates Library Foundation.”

The result was an unprecedented construction and renovation program.

Under Dempsey’s direction, forty-four new libraries were constructed in Chicago, thirteen of which were Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certified. All libraries were equipped with state-of-the-art technology including free access to the Internet, more than eighty online databases, and vast book collections. In 2012, the libraries served eleven million patrons.

Wong also recognized the importance of physical infrastructure. Demands for more affordable housing for Chinatown seniors convinced Wong and CASL to build a ninety-one-unit residential facility in 1998. Six years later, CASL’s new $5.6 million, titanium-clad Kam L. Liu Building at 2141 South Tan Court opened. Designed by visionary architect and MacArthur Fellow Jeanne Gang,

Above: Bill Gates received a Chicago library card after providing a million-dollar grant in 1996. Below: Dempsey reading to children at the opening of the Near North Branch Library.

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the architectural gem houses more than thirty of CASL’s social service programs and embodies the impact of CASL on the Chinese community. Chicago Tribune architecture critic Blair Kamin noted that “a building of this quality could not have happened without the leadership of Bernie Wong.”

In the early twenty-first century, CASL served more than fifteen thousand clients annually, an impressive number given that the Chinese population in Chinatown and neighboring Bridgeport numbers approximately eighteen thousand. Chicago’s Chinatown is still a primary point of entry for new immigrants.

“I think a lot more immigrants are coming to Chicago instead of New York or San Francisco,” believes Wong, citing high prices on the coasts as part of the reason. She estimates that 98 percent of new arrivals are ethnic Chinese from various countries, the overwhelming majority of whom speak little or no English. CASL is a critical, instrumental force for these immigrants because of the dearth of Asian, and especially Chinese, organizations. “Because of that, we tend to be much more comprehensive,” concludes Wong.

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Above: Designed by Jeanne Gang and completed in 2004, the Kam L. Liu Building serves as CASL’s home base. Below: Bernie Wong with young participants of CASL’s School Age Children program in 2012.

Above: Wong with her daughter, Jaz, and two grandchildren in August 2005. Below: Bernie and Albert Wong in 2012.

She also notes how Chinatown has changed during her time at CASL. “When we first started, a lot of Chinatown people were Cantonese,” she explains. “I remember a friend of mine who spoke only Mandarin ran into the grocery shop and wasn’t served. People either didn’t understand her or didn’t want to serve her.” But between 1980 and 2000, Chinatown’s Cantonese-speaking population dropped from 90 to 50 percent. Chinatown immigrants now speak as many as nine dialects and, according to Wong, mastering a new dialect is similar to learning an entirely new language. The most recent newcomers also display a mindset different from previous immigrants and arrive with different goals. “There are more immigrants who are ready to establish businesses,” Wong asserts.

“People are now much more financially able to start developing businesses here, so that has helped the community prosper.” She continues, “We see many young folks coming back and purchasing townhouses. And the educational level is also being boosted because it’s second, third generation coming back from college.”

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Similar to Wong, Dempsey recognized the need for new and innovative services, exemplified by the reading and digital learning initiatives developed during her tenure—particularly One Book, One Chicago and YOUmedia. For the latter program, “We took an old broom closet in [the Harold Washington Library] and turned it into their recording studio,” remembers Dempsey. “We wanted the kids to understand that there is a connection between the printed word and the online world, and we wanted them to understand that when you’re looking at a video game that may be set in medieval times, there may actually be some history behind that.

We wanted them to understand that as you are learning how to take apart a game controller and put it back together again that there’s a certain instructional value to that.”

Dempsey’s programs not only transformed Chicago’s library system but initiated the revitalization of some neighborhoods. When the private sector saw the city investing in handsome, freestanding library buildings, new businesses, restaurants, and mixed-income housing often followed. The first branch library built under Dempsey’s watch, which opened in 1997, was on Division Street between the low-income Cabrini-Green Homes and the wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood. “We bought a liquor store, got rid of it, built the branch library, and that’s exactly what happened. The Gold Coast came, Cabrini came, and that became a really marvelous branch library because it showed that this is the place where people come together to learn and to experience the joy of learning.”

The process repeated itself in numerous Chicago neighborhoods. “We recognized that public libraries are community centers in a neighborhood, that in the process of building public libraries we got rid of a lot of liquor stores and bad motels and derelict buildings,” acknowledges Dempsey. The result was “an immediate transformation in a neighborhood and a recognition that people in the neighborhoods have value and have worth and have a right to have this information at their fingertips.” In 2005, speaking at the American Library Association’s annual meeting, Dempsey proudly proclaimed: “I’ve purchased and knocked down more liquor stores, more no-tell motels, more really crummy and dilapidated, burned-out buildings in neighborhood after neighborhood and replaced them with libraries than I’d ever thought I’d do in my life.”

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Above: Mary Dempsey presented author Salman Rushdie with a library card in 2001. Below: A letter from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn commending the library’s 2006 selection of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich for One Book, One Chicago.

Tom Wolfe’s acclaimed book, The Right Stuff, was selected for One Book, One Chicago in 2008. Dempsey bestowed him with a framed catalog card for the book.

Dempsey even impressed the police. After libraries opened on Division Street and North Lincoln Avenue, new police stations followed. Chicago Police Superintendent Terry Hillard compared Dempsey and her personnel to the Marines: “You guys go in first, before the police department does. You made it safe for us to go in here.” Dempsey concurs. “We built the Near North branch in Cabrini probably a good eight years before they built a new police station in there.”

In 2010, Toni Morrison’s A Mercy was chosen for One Book, One Chicago. To mark the occasion, Dempsey presented the author with a framed catalog card for the book.

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Above: Wong visiting Adult Day Service clients in 2012. Below: Wong with US senators Dick Durbin and Barack Obama in 2006.

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By the 1990s, Wong was one of the most visible Asian Americans in Chicago. She was the first Asian American named to the boards of the Chicago Public Library and the United Way. She chaired the mayor’s Advisory Committee on Asian American Affairs, was named one of Today’s Chicago Woman magazine’s “100 Chicago Women Shaping Chicago’s Future,” and was selected United Way’s Executive of the Year for 1989.

Wong’s activism by then extended far beyond Chinatown; she served on a wide range of metropolitan, state, and national committees, including the Chicago Commission on Human Relations, the board of the National Asian Pacific Center on Aging, the board of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, the Council for the Illinois Department on Aging, and the Chinese Immigrant Services Agency Network International.

In March 2011, Wong watched as Governor Pat Quinn signed the Illinois DREAM Act, which makes scholarships, college savings, and prepaid tuition programs available to the children of immigrants.

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Since leaving the commissioner’s post, Dempsey has been active in the Philip H. Corboy Foundation, established in 1982 and named after her husband, who passed away in 2012, to support education, justice, and human dignity programs in Chicago. The foundation provides scholarships and grants to individuals and institutions that promote the core principles of social justice and equality for all. Dempsey has also chaired the boards of the Urban Libraries Council, the Mercy Home Leader Council in Ridgeland, and was the first woman to chair the DePaul University Board of Trustees (2008–11). She and Corboy made the largest single gifts ever to the law schools at DePaul University and Loyola University Chicago, creating the Mary Dempsey and Philip Corboy Endowed Scholarship at the former and the Philip H. Corboy Law Center at the latter.

Both Dempsey’s and Wong’s conceptions of a lifetime of service are rooted in the Chicago neighborhood. “The key thing with CASL is that we are very, very tied into the community,” emphasizes Wong. “We hire staff from the community. I live in the community. I make sure that I talk to many of the establishments as different organizations develop, working and partnering with them. We always tend to know what the community needs.” Dempsey’s vision also reflects her Chicago neighborhood roots. “A library was the place of lifelong learning, the place where you could have access to anything,” she emphasizes. “If we had the opportunity to give people, in their neighborhood, that access to the whole world, whether it was in print or online, then that was our responsibility, and that’s what we needed to do.”

I L L U S T R AT I O N S | 68, event photography provided by the Chicago History Museum’s Office of Institutional Advancement; 69–71, courtesy of Bernie Wong; 72, top: Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CPL Archives, Near North 1.1, bottom: Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CPL Archives, Near North 1.5; 73, top: Chicago Public Library, bottom: Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CPL Archives, Unprocessed; 74, top and bottom: courtesy of Chinese American Service League; 75, top and bottom: courtesy of Bernie Wong; 76, top: Chicago Public Library, Special Collections and Preservation Division, CPL Archives, Unprocessed, bottom: Chicago Public Library; 77, courtesy of Chicago Public Library; 78–79, courtesy of Bernie Wong; 80, Steve Leonard/Illinois Humanities Council.

FOR FURTHER READING | The careers and contributions of Mary Dempsey and Bernie Wong have been covered extensively in the Chicago and national media. On Dempsey, see James Warren, “With This Library System, Government Isn’t All Bad,” New York Times, January 27, 2012; Anne Jordan, “Loyal to the Library: But Willing to Loan out her Management Skills,” Governing, May 12, 2006; St. Mary’s University Magazine, summer 1999; and articles in Crain’s Chicago Business, March 24, 1997 and February 18, 2005. On Wong, see John Stebbins, “Activist Aims to Crack the Chinatown ‘Wall,’” Chicago Sun-Times, March 19, 1988; Bob Herguth, “Bernarda (Bernie) Wong,” Chicago Sun-Times, December 12, 1989; Delia O’Hara, “Chinatown’s Visionary: Service Group’s Leader Keeps Focus Broad,” Chicago Sun-Times, November 13, 1994; Jane Adler, “Family Ties,” Chicago Tribune, October 8, 2000; Kerrie Kennedy, “Chinatown Returns to Center Stage,” Chicago Tribune, January 20, 2002; Blair Kamin, “Chinatown Profits from a Fresh Spin on Architecture,” Chicago Tribune, July 4, 2004; and Jenniffer Weigel, “Bernarda ‘Bernie’ Wong, Chinese American Service League Founder,” Chicago Tribune, July 21, 2013.

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Mary Dempsey with husband Philip Corboy after receiving the Illinois Humanities Council’s Public Humanities Award on behalf of the Chicago Public Library System in 2006.