Chicago
H I STORY
CHICAG O HISTORY | SUMMER 201 9
S U M M E R 2 0 1 9 | $10.00
This issue of Chicago History is dedicated to the memory of
R USSELL L. L EWIS J R . CHM Staff Member, 1982–2019 Assistant Editor, 1982–84 Associate Editor, 1984–86 Director of Publications and Editor, 1986–93
Chicago
H I STORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Summer 2019 VOLUME XLIII, NUMBER 2
Contents
6 30 44
“No Use for Men” Robert Pruter
Pioneering Social Justice Lynn Y. Weiner
A Shift in Power: South Side Elevated Car 1 Norman Carlson
Departments
5
From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams
56
Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor in Chief Rosemary K. Adams Editors Esther D. Wang Heidi A. Samuelson Designer Bill Van Nimwegen
On the cover: Ethel Lackie and her sister Jane in 1929.
Photography Timothy Paton Jr.
Copyright 2019 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.
C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS
Walter C. Carlson Chair David D. Hiller Chairman Emeritus Daniel S. Jaffee First Vice Chair Mary Lou Gorno Second Vice Chair Tobin E. Hopkins Treasurer Denise R. Cade Secretary Gary T. Johnson Edgar D. and Deborah R. Jannotta President HONORARY T R U S T E E
The Honorable Lori Lightfoot Mayor, City of Chicago
TRUSTEES
James L. Alexander Catherine Arias Gregory J. Besio Michelle Bibergal Matthew J. Blakely Denise R. Cade Paul Carlisle Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Rita Sola Cook Keith L. Crandell Patrick F. Daly James P. Duff Gabriel Estaban (Amado) Lafayette Ford T. Bondurant French Timothy J. Gilfoyle Gregory L. Goldner Mary Lou Gorno David A. Gupta Brad Henderson David D. Hiller Tobin E. Hopkins Philip Isom Daniel S. Jaffee Gary T. Johnson Ronald G. Kaminski Randye A. Kogan Judith H. Konen Michael J. Kupetis Robert C. Lee Ralph G. Moore Michael A. Nemeroff Kelly Noll
M. Bridget Reidy Joseph Seliga Samuel J. Tinaglia Mark D. Trembacki Ali Velshi Gail D. Ward Jeffrey W. Yingling Robert Yohanan HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE
The Honorable Richard M. Daley The Honorable Rahm Emanuel
Fred A. Krehbiel Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Timothy P. Moen Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Larry C. Selander Paul L. Snyder
TRUSTEES EMERITUS LIFE TRUSTEES
David P. Bolger Laurence O. Booth Stanley J. Calderon John W. Croghan Patrick W. Dolan Paul H. Dykstra Michael H. Ebner Sallie L. Gaines Sharon Gist Gilliam Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Dennis H. Holtschneider Henry W. Howell, Jr. Philip W. Hummer Edgar D. Jannotta Falona Joy Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss
Bradford L. Ballast Paul J. Carbone, Jr. Jonathan Fanton Cynthia Greenleaf Courtney Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Nena Ivon Douglas Levy Erica C. Meyer Eboo Patel James Reynolds, Jr. Elizabeth Richter Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Jeff Semenchuk Kristin Noelle Smith Margaret Snorf Sarah D. Sprowl Noren Ungaretti Joan Werhane
The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chicago Park District on behalf of the people of Chicago.
FROM THE EDITORI
ou may have heard that Russell Lewis retired in March after thirty-six years of service to the Chicago History Museum (CHM). Sadly, Russell passed away on April 19, 2019. He had been the Museum’s executive vice president and chief historian since 2005, and in those roles he oversaw the day-to-day implementation of our mission to share Chicago stories. What you may not know is that Russell began his CHM career in the Publications Department as an assistant editor in 1982. In 1986, he became director of the department and editor of Chicago History. In his first Editor’s Page, he mused “What Isn’t History?” Russell always asked the unexpected, sometimes subversive questions, challenged the status quo, or pursued unorthodox lines of inquiry in order to shed new light on the city’s history. In 1990, writing about urban planning, he added a personal reflection, confessing that he was “Janus-faced about city streets. In my car I rule the road, paying little heed to pedestrians; when I am walking, I defy all traffic rules and assert my right to the street, confronting every vehicle I meet.” Under his leadership, Chicago History featured scholarly, accessible articles that offered fresh perspectives on a variety of topics. Before Hollywood portrayed the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in A League of Their Own (1992), Russell published historian Susan Cahn’s manuscript, “No Freaks, No Amazons, No Boyish Bobs.” He encouraged his editors to cultivate meaningful and cordial collaborations with authors in order to publish the best possible articles on urban history. Russell also believed in the power of both verbal and visual storytelling. Chicago History articles are lavishly illustrated, providing increased access to objects, documents, and images from the Museum’s collection of more than 23 million items. Finally, Russell himself was a Chicago History author. In 1983, he published the article “Everything Under One Roof: World’s Fairs and Department Stores in Paris and Chicago.” In 1996, he contributed an important piece titled “Abraham Lincoln: Honorary Member.” His final article, published in 2017, explored how the first-of-its-kind Ferris wheel represented not just innovative technology, but what it revealed about urban life in the United States and around the world. Russell’s responsibilities in the Publications Department extended beyond the magazine; among his most important projects was editing exhibition labels. Teamed with a curator who may have spent several years researching and creating content for an exhibition, label editors are tasked with reviewing and revising perhaps the most tangible—and treasured—evidence of a curator’s work. Russell gently yet firmly conveyed that the editorial process could help make the writer’s prose sing. Russell hired me as an assistant editor in 1990; in 1995, I was promoted to director of publications. In my earliest years at the Museum, Russell was not just a boss but a teacher and mentor. He helped me to develop confidence in my writing and editing, assigned me increasingly challenging projects, and encouraged me to embrace digital publishing back when museums and historians were just beginning to explore the possibilities of this new thing called the web. He similarly mentored and encouraged countless staff, interns, volunteers, and others over his thirty-six-year career. Russell is missed in innumerable ways among staff throughout the Museum. In the Publications Department, we miss his words of editorial wisdom, his suggestions for article subjects, his on-going battle against the misuse of the ampersand, and his zealous support of the magazine long after he had moved on to other responsibilities. His legacy, however, lives on, and we will continue to be inspired by his passion for sharing Chicago stories.
Y
RKA |5
After some controversy in 1919, Bertha Severin stepped down as IWAC president, a story featured in the Chicago Tribune in March 1919. Left: Progressive Republican women such as Severin and other founders of the club worked for women’s suffrage. Button and postcard, c. 1910.
6 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
“No Use for Men” The Illinois Women’s Athletic Club established a sports program that championed women’s efforts to win local, national, and Olympic competitions. R O B E RT P R U T E R or a seven-year period from its opening in October 1926 to its demise in the summer of 1933, the Illinois Women’s Athletic Club (IWAC) played the preeminent role in the country in the sponsorship of women’s sports competitions, primarily in track and field, swimming, and basketball. Founded by Progressive Republican women who were involved in civic improvement, women’s suffrage, and expansion of women’s rights and opportunities, the club exemplified the most modern aspects of American society, particularly in the advancement of women in the world of business and government, but more particularly in the world of sports. The IWAC founders were extraordinarily advanced in their thinking, exhibiting feminist sensibilities decades before the birth of the movement known as feminism. In its origins, philosophies, and activities, the club, with its impressive seventeen-story redbrick building on the Near North Side of Chicago, represented the energy and modernism of Chicago of the 1920s. By 1920s Chicago standards, the building ranked as a small skyscraper, but for a club building it was immense. When the IWAC opened its clubhouse in 1926, Chicago already had an athletic club for women, the Women’s Athletic Club (WAC), founded in 1898 by the upper crust of Chicago society. The women who founded the IWAC sought an athletic club that reflected modern democratic women. The WAC, founded by Paulina Harriette Lyon and based in a townhouse at 150 N. Michigan Avenue, featured a white marble swimming pool, a two-story gymnasium, and a bowling alley. The society women were unaccustomed to exercising in the gymnasium or swimming in the pool, and they had rarely seen a bowling ball. As a result, the club did not evolve into much of an athletic club—at least compared to men’s athletic clubs. Athletics appeared to play second fiddle to arts, social events, entertainment shows, and lectures for the members of the WAC. The club never imagined or considered sponsoring competitive teams of younger athletes, as did the two major men’s athletic clubs in the city, the Chicago Athletic Association and the Illinois Athletic Club.2
F
By World War I the city needed a club for modern women, those women who participated and even competed in sports, a club that more broadly represented Chicago’s female population. The Illinois Women’s Athletic Club was founded on October 24, 1918, by Chicago society women involved in Republican and suffrage politics, notably Mrs. Waller Borden, Mrs. Robert McCormick, and Mrs. William Severin. They gathered in a residence that was on the land on which they later built their seventeen-story clubhouse. The club’s formation was primarily the result of the vision of Progressive Republican Bertha Severin, who became its first president. Although she was the wife of a Chicago alderman, William Severin, she was far better known than her husband. The 125 founding members took out a display advertisement in December 1918, in which they described themselves as “women from every walk of life, which is typical of the democratic membership. The list includes many prominent women active in suffrage, civic and state affairs, home women, lawyers, physicians, teachers,
This advertisement for the IWAC boasted more than 700 members and the projected completion of a “commodious clubhouse” full of amenities for women. “No Use for Men” | 7
Throughout 1919, the Chicago Tribune covered the on-going conflict over Severin’s handling of IWAC finances and her desire to remove men from handling its accounts.
artists, musicians, authors, advertising women, inventors, secretaries, stenographers, designers, buyers, managers and proprietors of various lines of business.” The advertisement made its appeal for membership to women who are “interested in women’s progress,” and the original members saw the formation of the IWAC as an advance in the “broader history of the women’s movement.”4 The launch of the IWAC did not go smoothly, mostly because of conflict between President Severin’s supporters and those women concerned with Severin’s selfinterested approach. They believed she sought to build membership so that the club could build a clubhouse and also for her own profit. Under a contract secretly drawn up with two other directors in alliance with her, the president received a 40 percent commission on every membership sold. In early 1919, the club’s membership conflicts erupted into a war. By March 1919, 284 memberships had sold, for a total of $52,100. Severin would have received $20,840 of that total, once all the memberships had been paid for. She had already received $9,573. The anti-Severin board members retained lawyers for the club to try to oust Severin. They argued that the club as founded was not to be run for profit, that it was purely a philanthropic organization. Severin and her allies fought back. One of Severin’s defenders made light of the whole issue, “What is this little fuss, anyway, over Mrs. Severin’s little compensation . . . isn’t she entitled to it? I’m sure it’s none of my business, or any other members, if she made a million out of it.” Astonishingly, the defenders of Severin’s contract argued in equal rights terms, saying, “We will stand for the rights of women to equal pay for equal time. They are as competent to make money as men.”5 8 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
President Severin saved her position when her allies prevailed in the annual election. The anti-Severin forces on the board of directors and in the club membership soon left the IWAC. Severin, who resented the interference of the male lawyers hired by her enemies, said that henceforth the IWAC would be “a women’s organization for and by women.” The Chicago Tribune in reporting on the story, headlined it: “Women in this Club Have Just No Use for Men.”6 By November 1919, the IWAC claimed a membership of “nearly 1,000” and had purchased the land at Pearson and Tower Court, just off Michigan Avenue and just west of the Old Water Tower. The club commissioned an architect for the building, which was expected to cost $800,000. In the next few years, construction of the club building was delayed, and the IWAC stopped reporting on membership growth.7 After the 1919 war of factions, Severin sued the club to claim $3,000 owed her on commissions, but then settled out of court for one thousand dollars. At the urging of her former allies, she gave up her position of president and promised to no longer take an active part in club affairs. By the 1921 meeting, membership had risen to more than eight hundred members, probably an accurate figure compared to the 1919 membership claim.8 By 1924, membership had risen to “close to 1,000,” and the IWAC decided to build the long-delayed clubhouse. They announced an aggressive campaign to bring membership up to two thousand and construct much larger club facilities. The new seventeen-story building would cost $3.5 million and would be, as the IWAC claimed, “the largest and finest ever erected by a woman’s organization” in the United States. Severin attended the groundbreaking ceremony in November 1924 along with the current president and the all-important membership campaign chairman. The club, in anticipation of becoming a different kind of club, less of a recreation and fitness club and more of a sports club, changed the bylaws during 1924 to admit two new classes of membership, girls under fifteen years old and girls aged fifteen to eighteen. The new bylaws broadened the pool for potential memberships and supplied candidates for sponsored athletic teams. By the mid-1920s, through its parks and playgrounds program, Chicago had produced many national and even world-class female athletes in their teen years, and the bylaws recognized that fact.9
Portrait of Bertha Severin, taken in Chicago on November 10, 1919. “No Use for Men” | 9
Construction of the IWAC building in 1926. The building still stands today at 111 E. Pearson Street.
After the groundbreaking, however, construction of the building halted for more than six months until the club was able to obtain a $1.76 million loan in July 1925. Construction then resumed. On December 30, the cornerstone was laid in the building. Illinois senator William B. McKinley, speaking at the groundbreaking, praised the organization for planning and financing a building by women only, becoming the only women’s athletic organization to own its own building. Four past presidents of the IWAC also spoke at the cornerstone ceremony, including Bertha Severin. Enthusiasm for the new building sparked increased interest in membership, and, at a February 1926 meeting of the members, as the building was scheduled to open in July, the club enrolled 550 new members in two days. Membership numbered 2,370; the goal was to reach 3,000.10 The July opening of the club did not happen, as the project was again delayed. In October 1926, the IWAC held its formal opening. The final cost of the building had risen to four million dollars, and the club could boast of “having given Chicago the largest and most costly women’s athletic club in the world.” The membership of 3,500 was surely needed to pay for the building. The IWAC, representing the proto-feminist philosophy as laid down by Bertha Severin, made it known that the clubhouse was “no man’s land, except at the invitation and with reservations of the club members.” This strikingly modern assertion prefigures the language of feminism decades later.11
During her visit to Chicago in November 1926, Queen Marie of Romania (surrounded by club members) visited the newly open clubhouse. 10 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
On its ground floor, the building featured various shops for women while ninety residential apartments occupied three of the lower floors. The seventeenth floor featured a jade-colored swimming pool, and the basement housed billiard rooms and a bowling alley. Between the basement and top floor, facilities included an imposing ballroom, a main dining room, a gymnasium, exercise rooms, cabinet baths, Turkish baths, steam rooms, and showers. The club opened on Wednesday, October 20, with five days of celebration—a housewarming on the first day for members only, dinners for the membership the next two days, a dinner-dance for members and their escorts on Saturday, and a Founders Day reception on Sunday. Severin, described as first vice president and apparently in the good graces of the membership at this time, organized the reception. In November, Queen Marie of Romania visited Chicago for four days, and she included a visit to the IWAC, where its members proudly showed off their magnificent new clubhouse.12 In its first six months after opening the clubhouse in October 1926, the IWAC built competitive sports teams in swimming, track and field, and basketball, and soon dominated those sports in the local championships. The club also competed in speed skating, although not as vigorously. The IWAC immediately made a huge impact on local amateur women’s sports, and it soon developed a national reputation as the country’s leading athletic club for women. In the first years after the opening of the clubhouse, competition swimming became the most visible sport sponsored by the organization; a meet in December 1926 involved one hundred girls. The swim team was built on a strong program of swimming development—with senior, junior, intermediate, and midget training divisions, which today would be called age-group divisions. In keeping with the philosophy of the club being by and for women, the director of the program and coach of the competitive swim teams was Lillian Reilly. Until the IWAC paved the way, no amateur female swimming team in Chicago was coached by a woman, although the Chicago city high schools had women coaches. The top women’s swimming club in the nation—the Women’s Swimming Association of New York (WSA)—was headed by a woman, but its swimming team was coached and trained by a man, Louis deBreda Handley.13 The IWAC senior swim team in its debut indoor season competition was a new kid on the block, competing in a series of Central States Amateur Athletic Union District (or simply Central AAU) meets from January through April 1927. The team had at this time only one star, diver Jane Fauntz, whom they recruited to join the team. Still a high school student at Hyde Park High, Fauntz had won the Central AAU outdoor diving championship the previous year. The IWAC competed
(From left to right) Helen Filkey and Jane Fauntz sit with visiting opera singer Mary Garden in front of a viewing area near an indoor swimming pool, c. 1930.
against three other teams during the winter—the Illinois Athletic Club (IAC), with 1924 Olympic star Ethel Lackie; the Milwaukee Athletic Club (AC); and the Hirsch Center. The IAC still dominated the men’s competition with Johnny Weismuller, but its women’s team was in decline. At the end of its first season, the IWAC’s success in building a competitive team was evident when its swimmers overwhelmingly won the Central AAU title with forty-six points over Milwaukee AC at nineteen points, the IAC at ten points, and Hirsch Center at six points. The outdoor season also ended triumphantly, with the IWAC overwhelming the competition in Aurora with thirty-seven points, and second place Hirsch Center and Milwaukee AC far behind. Fauntz won the Central AAU diving competition for the IWAC. The club founders probably were most proud that the swim team of a club wholly owned and operated by women beat out teams from clubs with male-coached swimming teams.14 The IWAC, however, did not measure up next to competition from New York City’s powerful WSA, with such star swimmers as Martha Norelius and Eleanor Holm. During September, the WSA brought their swimmers to Chicago to compete in both an indoor competition in the IWAC pool and an outdoor long-distance “No Use for Men” | 11
12 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Left: Olympic champion Ethel Lackie practicing in an indoor pool in 1925. Above: Lackie at a swimming event in 1922.
swim in Waukegan. The New Yorkers prevailed in every nonhandicapped event (the IWAC won the one-hundred-meter with a four-second head start handicap). In spite of the loss to the WSA, the IWAC could look back on its first year of swim competition with considerable satisfaction.15 The IWAC strengthened its team for the 1928 season. In February, Ethel Lackie, a 1924 Olympic one-hundredmeter champion, had to find a new home after the IAC disbanded its women’s team. With Lackie on the team, the IWAC easily repeated their victory as the Central AAU indoor champions in April 1928.16 In June 1928, in anticipation of representing the United States in the Olympic Games that summer, the IWAC strengthened its team again by adding 1924 Olympic high-diving champion Carol Smith Chapman. After qualifying competitions, the IWAC sent four members to the Olympic trials—Jane Fauntz in diving and two-hundred-meter breaststroke, Ethel Lackie and Mary Lou Quinn in the one-hundred-meter freestyle stroke, and Carol Smith Chapman in diving. In the trials, however, only Jane Fauntz did well enough, and she was selected for the two-hundred-meter Olympic competition. She failed to medal in Amsterdam, however, taking fifth place.17 In the 1929 winter season the IWAC swimming team, while still lagging behind New York, improved from the “No Use for Men” | 13
previous season with the spectacular improvement in Jane Fauntz. At the nationals in March, she beat the best in the country in both low-board diving and one-hundred-yard breaststroke, showing that she was apparently one year too early for Olympic glory.18 The IWAC utterly dominated competition in Illinois at the end of 1929. The club hosted a Middle States Swimming Championships at its own pool in December 1929 and, in most of the events, the IWAC took first, second, and third place. In the three-hundred-yard medley race, the team set a new national record, beating the old record set by a New York team. The IWAC protofeminist approach was evident by the precedent-setting employment of women in all three judge positions— Ethel Lackie, Caroline Smith, and Ethelda Bleibtrey—all former Olympic champions. The IWAC expanded this all-women approach in 1930, when the club established a new policy that in all its swimming competitions all officials, from timers to judges, must be women.19 In the 1931–32 swim season, the IWAC found that its team was in decline, in need of “rehabilitation,” as the Chicago Tribune expressed. Some of their key swimmers and divers had left, some to coach at other institutions and others to attend college, such as ace diver Jane Fauntz. The club was concerned that it would not have competitive swimmers for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Therefore, the IWAC decided to increase its developmental program to identify young swimming and diving talent from among Chicago-area girls and bring 14 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Often traveling for competitions, a group of eight IWAC swimmers, including Mary Lou Quinn (second from left), pose at a railroad station in Chicago in 1930. Below: Ethel Lackie and her sister Jane in 1929.
them into the IWAC where they could receive proper training. These efforts began when the IWAC doubled the number of entrants for its fifth annual novices meet in November 1931. More than 150 “prospective Olympic stars” participated.20 By the time of the Olympic trials in July 1932, however, the IWAC found it only had a couple of genuine prospects. The club was looking for an Olympic medal from diver Evelyn Kennedy, who had taken third in the National AAU low board in 1930. The IWAC did not have any diving candidates in high dive, as its pool was not equipped with a high-diving platform. The IWAC also had hopes with their veteran, Jane Fauntz, who had returned from her studies at the University of Illinois to compete at the trials. On competition day, Fauntz emerged as the only representative from the IWAC for selection in the Olympics. American divers at the Los Angeles Olympics, as expected, dominated the competition, and the three American women in the springboard diving swept, with Fauntz getting the bronze, behind silver medalist Katherine Rawls and gold medalist Georgia Coleman.21 After the Olympic Games, the IWAC swimming team continued into the 1932–33 season with a full program of events, but star diver Jane Fauntz did not return to the club. In the Central AAU winter indoor season the IWAC won most of the events—notably Evelyn Kennedy on low-board dive, Dorothy Schiller in the one-hundred-yard breaststroke, Marlyn Lapin in the five-hundred-yard freestyle, and the IWAC team in the four-hundred-yard relay. With the end of the indoor swim season came the end of the IWAC swim team, as the club closed its doors in June 1933.22 In December 1926, within weeks of the clubhouse opening, the IWAC introduced a competitive basketball team called the IWAC Brownies. In the amateur basketball world for women in Chicago, many of the teams competed for years, but frequently changed sponsorship, often almost annually. Instead of forming a new basketball team, the IWAC took over sponsorship of one of the top teams in Chicago, the veteran Brownies. The team traced its roots to the IAC Girls, formed in 1919. The IAC women wore brown uniforms and became popularly known as the Brownies, but the uniforms caused an uproar over the lack of cloth. The team’s captain, Elsie Schreiber, designed the uniforms to mimic men’s briefs and shirts. The style did not immediately catch on with other female teams, and they continued to wear loose middies and bloomers. After the IAC Girls won the Central AAU tournament title in 1920, however, the IAC inexplicably dropped its sponsorship of the Brownies.23 The team disbanded, but within a year, in 1921, a group of girls at the Butler Community House came together to form a team, with some former members of
the IAC Girls, notably Elsie Schreiber and Madge Kennedy, who formed the nucleus of the team. They took the name Brownies and recruited a top player, Marie McDonough, who had led Hamlin Park to the Central AAU title game in 1919. These key players were still members of the team when the IWAC adopted the Brownies in late 1926.24
At a Chicago train station in 1930, swimmers Mary Lou Quinn and Betty Quinn with Alderman Dorsey Crowe. Below: Crystal Dietz and Dorothy Schiller at an indoor pool in 1934.
“No Use for Men” | 15
Above: The Brownies team photograph from 1925 includes: (seated, left to right) Edna Karstens, Lillian Siegal, captain Elsie Schreiber, Marie McDonough, and Marge Coreoran; (standing, left to right) Marie Wagner, Virginia Harrington, coach John Rouzan, Mildred Barron, and manager Lillian Gallagher. Below: Members from the Brownies’ competitors, the Taylor Trunks, in 1926. The player on the right wears a traditional uniform.
The Brownies, under variations of its name, notably the Uptown Brownies, ranked among the top three women’s amateur basketball teams in the city along with the Taylor Trunks and the Jewish People’s Institute Girls during the next eight years. In both 1922 and 1923, as the Uptown Brownies, the team won the Central AAU tournament championship, and in 1924 the team won the Central AAU league championship. In a five-year period, the Brownies lost only six Central AAU league and tournament games and won 160 games. When the Brownies joined the IWAC, however, the team was coming off a down season, the winter of 1926.25 The IWAC had adopted a top team to represent the club, and they had to find some way to include the team’s longtime male coach, John Rouzan. Virtually all female basketball teams in the amateur ranks were directed by male coaches at this time, and the IWAC 16 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
acceded to the situation by insisting that the team was always accompanied by a female club representative, Marie Wagner. Team practices involving its coach undoubtedly were not held in the IWAC facilities. The club’s official photo of the team shows Wagner with the team, but not Rouzan.26 Under IWAC sponsorship in the 1926–27 season, the Brownies experienced a revival in their fortunes. Led by their captain and star, Elsie Schreiber, the Brownies participated in a new women’s league, the Middle States Girls Basketball League. In one league match, the Brownies beat the Finnish-American Athletic Club team 76–0, demonstrating how dominant the Brownies could be but also showing the lack of sportsmanship at that time. The Brownies played top teams in the Broadway Armory, the premier basketball arena in the city. As indicative of how big women’s basketball was to Chicagoans, in one contest against Toronto’s Young Women’s Hebrew Association at Broadway, the Brownies’ game against the eastern Canadian champions was at the top of the bill, while a men’s professional game was billed below. The IWAC Brownies capped their season by winning the 1927 Central AAU tournament, beating the Kenwood Girls, 27–9.27 At the end of the 1928–29 season, in April, the IWAC Brownies competed for a Midwest championship, at Beloit, Wisconsin, which hosted a tournament of top teams, one each from Wisconsin, Michigan, Missouri, and Illinois. The Brownies defeated the Beloit Fairies, 15–11, for the title.28 The IWAC Brownies reorganized for the 1929–30 season. The longtime male coach was no longer with the team, and the team’s longtime captain and star, Elsie Schreiber, became the pioneering female coach for the team, a development that no doubt was applauded by the IWAC hierarchy. Schreiber proceeded to recruit a whole new lineup of young inexperienced girls, forgoing the usual practice of raiding other teams for their top players. Some of the veterans of the old team-—notably Emma Jacob, Marie McDonough, and Edna Karstens— helped the new Brownies by playing as a scrub team opponent for practices. The elevation of Schreiber to coach fit in well with the mission of the IWAC, that women would be in charge, and Schreiber as coach was something that amateur women’s basketball simply did not see during the 1920s and 1930s.29 Remaking the team with nonelite players was not successful, and the IWAC Brownies had a poor record in the following seasons. The team had one top player, Carolyn Pechron, their six-foot center who also competed on the IWAC track-and-field team in javelin. In February 1931, the team lost to the Jewish People’s Institute Girls, 24–21, the first time in nine years that the Brownies had lost to that team. The IWAC Brownies
were eliminated in the semifinals of the Central AAU tournament in 1932 to a new team, May and Malone Girls. The following year at the huge American Tournament, the Brownies lost to eventual champion Six Point Co-eds in the semifinals, by an embarrassing score of 38–12; and at the Central AAU 1933 tournament the Brownies were eliminated early. The team disbanded with the closing of the club later in the year. Unlike the club’s track-and-field and swim teams the basketball team did not end its history triumphantly.30 The IWAC formed its first track-and-field team in March 1927. As it did in swimming and basketball, the club recruited some of the top track talent in Chicago to build its team from the athletes who had trained and competed for Tom Eck in the Midwest Athletic Club. This club, which included the top track talent in Chicago—Mildred Horrocks, Dorothy Smith, Nellie Todd, Norma Zilk, and Helen Filkey—was located on the West Side and was open to men and women members. At the National AAU meet in Philadelphia in July, Helen Filkey, the biggest star in Chicago at the time, who had long competed independently, joined the Midwest AC girls to take the team to second place at the meet. At the end of the season, after the Midwest AC dropped women’s track sponsorship, Filkey and the team were orphans and welcomed their new home at the IWAC.31
Mildred Horrocks, one of the IWAC’s top athletes, c.1921. “No Use for Men” | 17
A group of IWAC runners pose in starting position inside a Chicago gymnasium in 1927. From left: Helen Filkey, Lillian Siegal, Nellie Todd, Catherine Hoppe, Dorothy Smith, and Ruth Smith.
In some of the other clubs, the women competitors usually had outside coaches, such as Tom Eck at the Midwest AC. But the women who competed initially for the IWAC practiced and trained in the short races and jumps in the IWAC’s own gymnasium, and since the club was male-free, their coach was a woman, Elizabeth Waterman. She was an experienced track competitor who served as physical director of the club and worked as nutritionist, trainer, and official coach of the track-andfield team. In later years, when the IWAC recruited shot putters, discus throwers, and baseball throwers, the women used men coaches, some from DePaul University, and practiced and trained in the parks.32 18 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
In their first year sponsoring a track-and-field team the IWAC only recruited sprinters, in part because Tom Eck only worked with sprinters, and because the IWAC did not have an outdoor facility to allow for throwing events. The IWAC showed off its star runner, Helen Filkey, in the National AAU meet held in Eureka, California, in September. She won the sixty-yard hurdles by winning the event in world-record time with a fouryard lead. The Central AAU outdoor meet, held relatively late in the season on September 17, featured more IWAC achievements, notably Nellie Todd’s world record in the broad jump and Helen Filkey tying her world record in the sixty-yard dash.33 At the beginning of 1928, the IWAC had great plans for producing competitors for the Olympic Games in Amsterdam in August and entered its team in all the important meets. The Amsterdam Olympics would feature women’s track-and-field events for the first time.
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Above: Betty Robinson and Helen Filkey hold their winning trophies. Below: Helen Filkey and Lillian Siegal in 1927.
The Bankers indoor meet (sponsored by Chicago’s local banking association) in late March featured two open women’s events, the sixty-yard low hurdles and the sixtyyard dash, both won by Helen Filkey. The banner headline in the Chicago Tribune proclaimed the setting of a new world hurdles mark by Filkey, but the real significance of the meet was the debut of two future track-andfield stars. Second to Filkey in the hurdles was new IWAC recruit Evelyne Butler, who four years later as Evelyne Hall would be a silver medalist in the 1932 Olympics. And the sixty-yard dash featured newly discovered sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Robinson (soon to be regularly called Betty), who ran her event unattached. Filkey barely beat her, and Robinson immediately afterwards joined the IWAC. Success in the Olympics looked promising for the IWAC.34 The most significant development in Chicago for women’s track was the all-women June meet jointly sponsored by William Randolph Hearst’s afternoon daily, the Chicago American, and the Central AAU. With close to nine hundred entries, mostly from the parks and playgrounds, and full participation of the AAU competitors, the meet doubled as the Central AAU outdoor championship. The meet also served as a trial for sending Chicago women to the Olympic qualifying meet in Newark, New Jersey. The big star of the meet was Betty Robinson who, in only her second competition, set a world record in the one-hundred-meter race in beating Helen Filkey.35 In the National AAU meet in Newark, New Jersey, in early July, which doubled as a qualifying meet for selecting the American Olympic team for August, only “No Use for Men” | 19
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Above: Betty Robinson (in the hat) stands amid a crowd in 1928, the year she won Olympic track-and-field gold. Below: Runners Helen Filkey and Nellie Todd in 1927.
one Chicago competitor qualified for the Olympics, Betty Robinson, who won the national title in the one-hundred-meter race. Helen Filkey won a national title in her specialty, the sixty-yard hurdles, but the International Olympic Committee approved only five events for its inaugural women’s program, and hurdles was not one of them. At Amsterdam, Robinson became one of the stars of the 1928 Games by winning the one-hundred-meter 20 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
in world-record time over a strong field—and therefore the first woman to win a track-and-field event in the Olympic Games. In addition to Robinson in track and field, the IWAC could also boast of Jane Fauntz’s participation in the Olympic swimming events, although she did not medal.36 Several of the top IWAC athletes, such as Nellie Todd and Mildred Horrocks, never advanced far enough to enter the Olympic Games. IWAC had an even better year in 1929. The club, which had missed or underrepresented itself in previous National AAU meets (notably because it could not finance the trips)—such as the national indoor in Boston in March—was able to be fully represented in the National AAU outdoor meet in late July at Soldier Field in Chicago. The advantage of fielding a full IWAC team was so great that for the first time in the history of women’s track and field a Chicago team won the National AAU meet. (In this era, team championships were usually won by clubs that could enter their full complement of qualifying team members, and travel distance often determined how many competitors a club could financially enter.) The IWAC received much of its winning score from the first-place points from Nellie Todd in broad jump, Betty Robinson in the fifty-yard and one-hundred-yard dashes, and the now-married Helen Filkey Warren in eighty-yard hurdles. World records were set by Filkey Warren in the hurdles and by Robinson in both the fifty- and one-hundred-yard dashes.37 IWAC continued its domination of women’s track and field in 1930. At the end of June, the Chicago American sponsored its third annual Central AAU outdoor championship for women, drawing a field of thirteen hundred competitors. The meet drew ten thousand spectators at Ogden Park on the South Side. Highlights of the meet were the records set by IWAC performers—notably Betty Robinson, who tied her one-hundred-yard world record in the first heat, and Helen Filkey, who bettered her own American record in the eighty-yard hurdles.38 The 1930 National AAU outdoor meet was held on July 4 at Southern Methodist University, in Dallas. The Chicago American paid the travel expenses for the full IWAC qualifying team, and the club easily repeated as the national champion with thirty points, ahead of the nineteen points of the Employers’ Casualty team. The IWAC won the eighty-yard hurdles, although not by favorite Helen Filkey, who stumbled twice, but by Evelyne Hall. Other IWAC points came from second-place participants in the 440-yard relay and shot put (Evelyn Ferrara).39 The 1931 indoor schedule was fuller than in recent years, featuring a new meet, the Illinois National Guard indoor meet, held at the 124th Field Artillery Armory. The women’s one-hundred-yard dash drew a crowd; the race became a showdown between the top two sprinters in the United States since 1930—Betty Robinson and
Catherine Rutherford Fellmeth was a multisport athlete, competing in basketball, softball, bowling, bicycle racing, volleyball, and speed skating. She was also an award-winning thrower in baseball throw, shot put, and discus for the IWAC and later the ICCW, seen here at a Central AAU meet in 1936. “No Use for Men” | 21
Mildred Ella Didrikson, commonly known as Babe Didrikson, boards a plane, July 10, 1947. Didrikson was a multi-sport athlete, who gained world fame as a track-and-field star and later golfer, and competed against IWAC women at AAU events in the 1930s. 22 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Stella Walsh. Robinson defeated Walsh, revenge for her 1930 defeat by Walsh in Dallas. At the National AAU indoor meet in Newark, New Jersey, in March, Evelyne Hall, the lone competitor for the IWAC at the National AAU indoor meet, set a new national indoor record in the fifty-yard dash. At two other indoor meets in March—the Bankers meet and the Central AAU indoor meet—Betty Robinson continued to set world records.40 At the end of July the IWAC, with the Chicago American financing the travel expenses for five Chicago female athletes, enabled its team to run off with its third consecutive National AAU outdoor championship in Jersey City, New Jersey. The IWAC team scored twentysix points, besting the virtually one-woman track team of Employers’ Casualty Company of Dallas, Texas, namely Mildred “Babe” Didrikson, second with nineteen points. The IWAC team garnered first-place points from its nowstellar relay team (Annette Rogers, Evelyne Hall, Nellie Todd, Ethel Harrington) and tosser Evelyn Ferrara, who beat the great Lillian Copeland in the discus throw. The IWAC’s balanced team of track, field, and relay events proved itself the best in the land.41 As in swimming, the IWAC was most conscious of getting its track team ready for the 1932 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. The IWAC featured a much fuller team than it had in 1928, with the addition of top-flight field competitors. Missing, however, was Betty Robinson, who suffered a crippling airplane crash in June 1931. Suffering from a broken arm and leg and a cracked hip, she was told she would never run again. She eventually did, but her healing and recuperation was long, and she was far from ready to run again in 1932. In June, IWAC competitors dominated the Central AAU meet once again with record-setting performances, taking first place in nine of the eleven events. The local sportswriters found the meet results highly promising for Chicago chances in the Olympics, one headline reporting, “Chicago Girls Loom as Olympic Prospects.”42 Even without Betty Robinson, the IWAC expected to do well in the nationals in July in Chicago. The meet doubled as a qualifying trial for the Olympic Games in August. The IWAC would have easily won the team championship, but the organizers allowed the phenomenal Babe Didrikson to compete in six events, a clear violation of the three-event limit for women athletes. As a result, the one-person team of Didrikson won the team championship for Employers’ Casualty Company of Dallas. The IWAC had mixed results, but they managed to send four athletes to the Games: jumper and sprinter Annette Rogers, sprinter Ethel Harrington, hurdler Evelyne Hall, and javelin thrower Nan Gindele. In the Olympic Games in Los Angeles, two IWAC women won medals: Annette Rogers (who won gold on the four-hundred-meter relay team) and Evelyne Hall (who won silver
in the eighty-meter hurdles). As timed, Hall and Didrikson were tied, but the judges decided the winner based on whose body visually first crossed the finish line, and they gave first to the Texas phenom. Many observers, however, believed that Hall had finished first.43 The IWAC track team continued to rack up victories on the national stage in 1933. At the women’s indoor nationals in New York City in February, the IWAC won four of eight events, and took the national title with ease, its first national indoor title. Nan Gindele set a new world record to win the baseball throw, Evelyne Hall won the fifty-meter hurdles, and Annette Rogers won both the two-hundred-meter dash and the high jump. The 1933 outdoor season for the IWAC was equally spectacular, but it came after the demise of the IWAC.44 Speed skating was a popular winter sport in Chicago by the late 1920s. The IWAC established a speed-skating program around December 1926, but there did not seem to be much interest in the project. The club recruited the top female skater in Chicago, Lois Littlejohn, from the Northwest Skating Club. She had won the prestigious Silver Skates senior derby and the national woman’s title the previous year. Littlejohn made an immediate impact as an IWAC member, and won a number of derby titles in 1927. But most clubs would have four or five women on their skating team, and the IWAC appeared to have only Littlejohn. After the 1926–27 skating season, the IWAC dropped speed skating from its athletic program.45 While the IWAC was quickly building its reputation in amateur competitive sports, it maintained the broad cultural focus of its original mission. In November 1927, for example, the club presented an art show of paintings by women, members of the National Association of Women Painters. In February 1928, the IWAC opened an exhibition limited to women artists from Illinois. The Chicago Tribune reporter, Eleanor Jewett, noted that the paintings were mostly “conservative” and representational. The sensibilities of the IWAC members, while modern in the treatment of women, were less than modern in the realm of art, it appears.46 Through the first years of the Depression the IWAC continued a robust involvement in various broader cultural activities, in the arts, politics, and social issues, but also in froufrou events for its upper-class members. In 1930, the IWAC introduced its own radio station, WCHI, which promoted club activities and women’s issues. In recognition of the many Chicagoans suffering in the early 1930s, the club hosted a benefit performance in April 1932 for the Hungry School Children’s Fund by the Barnum players of WGN. The performance consisted of three one-act plays. In 1933, the IWAC held a luncheon and featured its winter fashion show in January; the glamour and glitz of that show, however, was a mere cover for a dying institution.48 “No Use for Men” | 23
24 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
On July 31, 1928, Betty Robinson (second from left) crossed the finish line, matching her own world record time, to win the first Olympic gold medal in the women’s one-hundred-meter sprint.
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With the onset of the Depression in the early 1930s, the IWAC found itself in a dire financial situation as its membership decreased and it struggled to keep up with the taxes on its expensive high-rise structure. The IWAC fell behind in paying taxes in 1928, 1929, and 1930, and in paying off their mortgage to the Prudence Company of New York. The club, which had an announced membership of thirty-five hundred when its impressive clubhouse building was opened in late 1926, was down to around two thousand by the summer of 1930. In “The President’s Message” in the club’s magazine, The Woman Athlete, President Bessie Bragg Pierson figuratively screamed to the membership: We need ONE THOUSAND MORE MEMBERS. If we had a membership made up of even 50% more workers, we could fill the membership inside a month. Until we have 3,000 active dues-paying members, we will be eternally faced with deficits, such as have been caused by the present financial depression. Then she urged current members to bring in new members. The IWAC was not the only club in the city to face financial difficulties. Most of the urban clubs and country clubs in Chicago and across the country were in similar predicaments due to the Depression. The Lake Shore Athletic Club (LSAC), a men’s club opened around the same time as the IWAC, made a similar plea in late 1933 to its members to recruit new members to stave off economic collapse. Although the club had gone into receivership in 1931, the LSAC managed to survive the Depression. A similar happy outcome did not occur with the IWAC, although until its demise the club continued with robust support of its competitive athletic teams in basketball, swimming, and track and field.49 The beginning of the end for the IWAC came in March 1932 with foreclosure proceedings against the club, which was in default on its $1.6 million mortgage. A federal district court placed the club into receivership. The receivers of the organization’s assets were IWAC president Bessie Brad Pierson and George F. Getz. In December 1932, the receivers arranged for the IWAC to pay a monthly $2,500 rent on a six-month lease for nine floors of the building. When the lease was up on May 1, 1933, the receivers quit, and a new receiver selected by the judge refused to renew the lease. The Superior Court judge ordered the IWAC to vacate the club within a month. The members were required to leave the furnishings in all the rooms as a condition of the mortgage. After the members of the club were forced to vacate the building on June 5, former president Pierson promised that the club would find new quarters. That never happened, however, and during the summer, the IWAC continued its swimming and track-and-field competitions before finally terminating itself.50 26 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
In the two months after the IWAC was ousted from their building, Lillian Reilly kept the IWAC swim team together, but the team swam under the name of Tower Town Club. On August 14, Reilly called her team together for the last time and disbanded the team. She distributed the team’s many cups and trophies to the women based on the point totals each had amassed during their time in the IWAC. Most of the former swim members found a new home at the large men’s athletic club, the LSAC, which formed their first female team by adopting the IWAC refugees. In September, the former IWAC swimmers, competing under the LSAC banner, won the Central AAU outdoor meet. A few years later, under LSAC sponsorship, the women’s swim team achieved something that no Chicago women’s swim team had ever achieved, winning an AAU indoor national title in 1936.51 The track-and-field team did remarkably well in the last months of the club. Two weeks after the IWAC was expelled from their club building in early June, the IWAC easily took the team title at the annual Central AAU out-
IWAC athlete Annette Rogers later joined the Illinois Club for Catholic Women. At a 1936 meet, she competed for the club in the high jump.
door track-and-field meet, winning ten out of the eleven events and spearheaded by Catherine Rutherford’s three wins in baseball throw, shot put, and discus. The Chicago Herald and Examiner estimated that fifteen thousand spectators witnessed the event. Then at Soldier Field in July, the team took its third consecutive National AAU outdoor title and fourth overall, garnering fortyseven points to take five of eleven events. The IWAC winners were Annette Rogers in the one-hundred-meter, the IWAC relay squad in the 440, Nan Gindele in javelin, and Catherine Rutherford in shot put and in baseball throw. The work of the IWAC track team in its final year was probably the best in the club’s existence, a bittersweet victory.52 Without a private club’s support, the IWAC talent became members of the Chicago Park District team the following year, and went on to win the National AAU indoor championships for the next three years. In 1936, two former athletes of the IWAC—Betty Robinson and Annette Rogers—competed and won medals in the 1936 Olympics as members of the Illinois Club for Catholic Women (ICCW), which had taken over the seventeenstory building of the IWAC.53 The IWAC was decades ahead of its time in its extraordinary program of athletics and recreation—under the guidance and direction of women only—to lift their general physical and emotional health and to advance them competitively in various athletic fields. The club succeeded spectacularly, producing a number of Olympic champions, many individual and team championships, and achievements of world records one after another. Its demise left a decades-long void not only in Chicago but nationally. The IWAC footprint remains in Chicago, with its stillexisting high-rise clubhouse. In 1945, the building was purchased from the Illinois Club for Catholic Women by Loyola University. It was renamed Lewis Tower, after Frank Lewis, a wealthy benefactor, who purchased the building and then gifted it to Loyola. The Lewis Tower, located at the university’s Water Tower Campus, houses classrooms and offices of various colleges, schools, and institutes of Loyola.54 Robert Pruter is a retired Lewis University librarian and an independent historian of Chicago sports and music. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago SunTimes/Chicago Daily News, Chicago History Museum collection, unless otherwise noted. Page 6, top: Chicago Daily Tribune, March 27, 1919; postcard: ICHi-014323; button: ICHi-061939. 7, Chicago Daily Tribune, January 4, 1920. 8, top: Chicago Daily Tribune, May 10, 1919; bottom: Chicago Daily Tribune, March 29, 1919. 9, DN-0067244. 10, top: ICHi-052295; bottom: DN0082278. 11, SDN-069622. 12–13, SDN-065376. 13, SDN063877. 14, top: SDN-069716; bottom: SDN-069017. 15, top:
The end came for the IWAC when they had to vacate their building in 1933. Six floors of the building were rented by the ICCW in 1935. The ICCW would later purchase the building.
SDN-069715; bottom: SDN-075971. 16: top: SDN-065293; bottom: SDN-065801. 17, SDN-062855. 18–19: SDN-066484. 19: top: ICHi-061541; bottom: SDN-066481. 20, top: SDN067743; bottom: SDN-066482. 21, https://historyofsport.wordpress.com. 22, ICHi-068471. 24–25, www.olympic.org. 26, International News. 27, Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1935. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on private social clubs in Chicago like the IWAC, see Lisa Holton, For Members Only: A History and Guide to Chicago’s Oldest Private Clubs (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2008). On women who participated in the 1932 Olympics, see Doris H. Pieroth, Their Day in the Sun: Women of the 1932 Olympics (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996). On women’s basketball during the Great Depression, see Lydia Reeder, Dust Bowl Girls: A Team's Quest for Basketball Glory (Waterville, ME: Thorndike Press, 2017). For more on Title IX and the changes it brought to women’s athletics, see Diane LeBlanc and Allys Swanson, Playing for Equality: Oral Histories of Women Leaders in the Early Years of Title IX (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2016).
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1 “Women’s Athletic Club Lease,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1898; Lisa Holton, For Members Only: A History and Guide to Chicago’s Oldest Private Clubs (Chicago: Lake Claremont Press, 2008), 200–2. 2 Holton, For Members Only, 206. 3 “Oust Women’s Athletic Club from Building,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1933; “Death Notices, Severin,” Chicago Tribune, July 10, 1934. 4 “Women Brave Rain and Wind for Reception,” Chicago Tribune, June 9, 1916; Display advertisement for Illinois Women’s Athletic Club, Chicago Tribune, December 8, 1918. 5 “Club Plan Put Over on Sly, Say Directors,” Chicago Daily News, March 29, 1919; “Women Are Like Flock of Geese, Sighs Dr. Behnke,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, April 13, 1919. 6 “Women in This Club Have Just No Use for Men,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1919; “Severin Forces Win Election in Woman’s Club,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1919. 7 “350,000 Flats to Replace Old Ballard Home,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1919. 8 “‘Traitor,’ Shouts Beaten Nominee in Women’s Club,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1921. 9 “I.W.A.C. Gets Big Boom in New Home Plan,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1924; “I.W.A.C. Changes By-laws,” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1924; “I.W.A.C. Breaks Ground for New $3,000,000 Home,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1924. 10 “Work Is Resumed on Clubhouse of Illinois W.A.C.,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1925; “Corner Stone Laid by Illinois Women’s A.C.,” Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1925; “Woman’s Club Raises $58,000,” Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1926. 11 “I.W.A.C. to Hold Opening of Its New Club Today,” Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1926. 12 “I.W.A.C. to Hold Opening”; “News of Chicago Society: Speculating about the Queen’s Visit,” Chicago Tribune, October 17, 1926. 13 “Twin Star in I.W.A.C. Swim Meet for
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Girls,” Chicago Tribune, December 12, 1926. 14 “I.W.A.C. Girls Swim to Title as Records Fall,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1927; Walter Eckersall, “I.W.A.C. Wins Indoor Swim Championship,” Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1927; “I.W.A.C. Wins Swim Crown in A.A.U. Meet,” Chicago Tribune, August 8, 1927. 15 “Gotham Girl Tankers Set New Records,” Chicago Tribune, September 2, 1927; “New York Team Wins in Girls’ Swimming Race,” Chicago Tribune, September 5, 1927. Eleanor Holm became one of the country’s outstanding female swimmers during the 1930s, but is best known for being expelled from the 1936 Olympic team for drinking and carousing. 16 “Ethel Lackie to Join I.W.A.C. Swimming Team,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1928; “New York Girls Set World Mark in Swim Relay,” Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1928; “I.W.A.C. Team Wins Central Swim Title,” Chicago Tribune, April 21, 1928. 17 “I.W.A.C. Adds New Members to Swimming Teams,” Chicago Tribune, June 8, 1928; “Four I.W.A.C. Swimmers Qualify for the Olympic Trials,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1928. 18 French Lane, “Jane Fauntz Wins Two U.S. Swim Titles,” Chicago Tribune, March 1, 1929. 19 “C.A.A. Swimmers Win State Meet at Medinah A.C.” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1929; “I.W.A.C. Swimmers Lower 300 Yard Relay Record,” Chicago Tribune, December 14, 1929; Betty Eckersall, “I.W.A.C. Will Hold 5th Swim Meet Tonight,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 1931. 20 “Winter No Obstacle to This Future Olympic Girl Diver,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1932; Doris H. Pieroth, Their Day in the Sun: Women of the 1932 Olympics (Seattle, WA; University of Washington Press, 1996), 121, 127. 21 “I.W.C.A. Seeks New Swimmers for Tank Team,” Chicago Tribune, November 11, 1931; “Girls Shatter Two Records in I.W.A.C. Meet,” Chicago Tribune, November 21, 1931; “What Olympic Judge Wouldn’t Vote for Them?” [caption], Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1932.
22 “Evelyn Kennedy Retains A.A.U. Low Board Title,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 1933; “Greene Retains Central A.A.U. Crown,” Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1933; “Horn Breaks A.A.U, Mark in Backstroke,” Chicago Tribune, April 13, 1933; “Maryls Lapin Lowers 500 Mark Free Style Mark,” Chicago Tribune, May 27, 1933. 23 “Illinois Athletic Club’s Basket Tossers” [caption], Chicago Tribune, November 30, 1919; “New Londoners Take A.A.U. Basket Title in Great Game, 30–24,” Chicago Tribune, March 6, 1920; “Brownies Roll Up 156 Points in First Two Basket Games,” Chicago Tribune, December 29, 1926. 24 “New London Five Puts Out I.A.C. in Basket Meet,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1919; “Brownies Roll Up 156 Points,” Chicago Tribune. 25 “Armour Square Cornells Annex Basket Crown,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1923; “Girls Basket Title to Uptown Brownies,” Chicago Tribune, February 20, 1924; “L.V. Girls and Cornells Win C.A.A.U. Titles,” Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1924. 26 Marie Wagner, “Club Carries Champion Basket Ball Team,” The Woman Athlete, March 1927, 28. 27 “I.W.A.C. Girls Ready for Five from Toronto,” Chicago Tribune, March 16, 1927; “I.W.A.C. Cagers Down Detroit Girls by 16 to 10,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1927; “Briggs Beats Joyce, 18 to 15, for AAU Title,” Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1927. 28 “Brownies Defeat Fairies for Beloit Basket Title,” Chicago Tribune, April 5, 1929. 29 Harlan Rohn, “Mum’s the Rule on I.W.A.C. Girls’ Five—No Foolin’,” Chicago Tribune, December 10, 1929. 30 Rohn, “Mum’s the Rule”; Betty Eckersall, “J.P.I. Girls’ Five Defeats I.W.A.C. Brownie, 24 to 21,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1931; Betty Eckersall, “Women in Sports,” Chicago Tribune, June 14, 1931; “Green A.C. Five Beats Champs in A.A.U. Meet,” 1312, Chicago Tribune, April 7, 1932; Leo Fischer, “3 More Semifinals Tonight in American Cage Meet,” Chicago American, March 14, 1933; “Spencer Coals,”
Chicago American, April 22, 1933. 31 “Tom Eck, Coach at Chicago for 11 Years, Dies,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1926; Robert F. Kelley, “2 More Records Set in Women’s Meet.” New York Times, July 11, 1926; “Chicago Girls Who Won Second Place” [caption], Chicago Tribune, July 25, 1926. 32 Leo Fischer, “American to Give Girls Track Hints: I.W.A.C. Coach to Write,” Chicago American, June 24, 1931; Betty Eckersall, “Diet Helps Girl Athletes Train for Olympics,” Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1932. 33 “Miss Filkey Sets 3 World Records,” New York Times, July 12, 1925; “Helen Filkey Shatters Two World Marks,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1925; “Nellie Todd Sets World’s Record in Broad Jump,” Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1927. 34 Walter Eckersall, “Helen Filkey Sets World Hurdle Mark,” Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1928; Eric L. Cowe, Early Women’s Athletics: Statistics and History, VolumeTwo (Crossflats, UK: privately published, 2005), 27. 35 Jimmy Corcoran, “Record Crowd Will Witness Girls’ Track Meet,” Chicago American, May 31, 1928; Jimmy Corcoran, “World’s Marks Fall in Girl’s Track Meet,” Chicago American, June 2, 1928; Jimmy Corcoran, “16-Year-Old Girl Star of Meet,” Chicago American, June 4, 1928; “Miss Cartwright Wins Three Titles,” New York Times, July 5, 1928; Cowe, Early Women’s Athletics, 72. 36 “Miss Cartwright Wins Three Titles,” New York Times, July 5, 1928; Cowe, Early Women’s Athletics, 73. 37 “Women Set Five New World’s Records in National Title Track Meet in Chicago,” New York Times, July 28, 1929; “Chicago Girls Breaks World Records in A.A.U Meet,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1929; “Women Set Five New World’s Records in National Title Track Meet in Chicago,” New York Times, July 28, 1929. 38 “Seek New Honors”[caption], Chicago American, June 27, 1930; Leo Fischer, “Girls Set 3 World’s Records,” Chicago American, June 28, 1930; Leo Fischer, “9 Girl Track Stars Earn Trip to Dallas,” Chicago American, June 30, 1930; “Miss Robinson and Miss Filkey Break Two World Track Marks,” New York Times,
June 29, 1930; Cowe, Early Women’s Athletics, 99. 39 Louise Mead Tricard, American Women’s Track and Field (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 1996), 161–63. 40 Betty Eckersall, “Miss Robinson Is Victor Over Stella Walsh,” Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1931; “I.W.A.C. Runner Sets Record in National Meet,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 1931; Cowe, Early Women’s Athletics, 31. 41 “I.W.A.C. Wins Team Title in National Meet,” Chicago Tribune, July 26, 1931; “Name Chicago for ’32 Olympic Women’s Trials,” Chicago Tribune, July 28, 1931. 42 Betty Eckersall, “Six Marks Fall in Central A.A.U. Meet for Girls,” Chicago Tribune, June 19, 1932; Leo Fischer, “Chicago Girls Loom As Olympic Prospects,” Chicago American, June 20, 1932. 43 Tricard, American Women’s Track and Field, 177–85. 44 “U.S. Track Honors to Chicago Women,” New York Times, February 26, 1933. 45 Frank Schreiber, “Tuning Up for the Silver Skates Derbies,” Chicago Tribune, January 3, 1928; “Barrett Skates Win Sleipner Derby,” Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1928; Frank Schreiber, “N. Y. Rangers Give Hawks Another Defeat, 6 to 1,” Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1928.
50 “Federal Judge Appoints 2 Receivers for I.W.A.C.,” Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1932; “County Orders Winston to Bare Tax Suit Record,” Chicago Tribune, December 17, 1932; “Oust Women’s Athletic Club from Building,” Chicago Tribune, June 6, 1933. 51 Wilfred Smith, “One Week Remains to Send Entries for Tribune Swim,” Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1933; “Shawnee Men’s Swim Team Wins A.A.U. Title,” Chicago Tribune, September 17, 1933; James S. Kearns, “Swimming Championships,” The Discus vol. X, no. 4 (April 1936), 6–8. 52 Oscar Bloom, “Illinois W.A.C.—Scores on Track with 84 Points,” Chicago Times, June 18, 1933; ”Miss Rogers Sets 50Meter Run Record,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, June 18, 1933; “I.W.A.C. Takes Women’s Title with 42 Points,” Chicago Tribune, July 1, 1933; Wilfred Smith, “Berlinger Wins Decathlon with 7,597.19 Total,” Chicago Tribune, July 2, 1933; Tricard, American Women’s Track and Field, 212–13. 53 Pieroth, Their Day in the Sun, 134–35. 54 Caitlin Wilson, “Namesakes of Campus Buildings Highlight Loyola’s Long History,” Loyola Phoenix, October 31, 2012.
46 Eleanor Jewett, “Clever Paintings by Women Artists on View at I.W.A.C.,” Chicago Tribune, November 12, 1927; Eleanor Jewett, “Exhibit of Paintings Opened at I.W.A.C. by Illinois Women,” Chicago Tribune, February 14, 1928. 47 “I.W.A.C. to Open Radio Station on Friday,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1930; “Stars of W-G-N to Appear at School Lunch Fund Benefit,” Chicago Tribune, April 27, 1932. 48 “Striking Evening Gowns at I.W.A.C. Style Show” [caption], Chicago Tribune, January 28, 1933. 49 Bessie Bragg Pierson, “The President’s Message,” The Woman Athlete, August 1930, 7; “Open Letters to All Members,” The Discus, vol. VII, no. 10 (October 1933), 12.
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Pioneering Social Justice Established after a mass faculty resignation, Roosevelt College became a model of democracy in higher education. LY N N Y. W E I N E R he founding of Roosevelt University is a story of courage, democracy, and human rights. In 1945, faculty, staff, and students, led by President Edward J. Sparling, walked out of Chicago’s Central YMCA College to protest restrictive admissions quotas based on race and religion. With no endowment, payroll, or campus, they created Roosevelt College. Roosevelt College emerged at a time when racial and religious segregation dominated Chicago’s education, housing, social clubs, and employment. Admissions quotas crafted to restrict the number of “socially undesirable students” characterized Chicago’s leading universities in the 1940s, in line with legal and widespread national practices instituted a generation earlier at elite private colleges.1 The University of Chicago application requested a photograph and information on race and religion; the school’s policy was to match the number of Jewish students to the percentage of Jews in the city. A 1939 letter from Loyola University to Jewish students stating that “no more Jews were allowed admission” was cited in a report on anti-Semitism.2 Northwestern University had a long history of racial and religious discrimination. By the 1940s, Northwestern admission forms required a photograph and information on race, citizenship, religion, parents’ names, parents’ birthplace, and the language spoken at home. The Anti-Defamation League reported a series of complaints by prospective applicants who charged Northwestern with discrimination from 1948 through 1964. Northwestern admitted no more than five black students a year in the 1940s and barred these students from campus housing until 1947.3 A notable exception to these discriminatory admissions practices was the Central YMCA College in Chicago, opened in 1919. By 1941 it enrolled an unusually diverse group of 2,240 men and women. The college identified itself as “Christian in character and liberal in spirit.”4 The president of the college from 1936 until 1945 was Edward Sparling. Born on a California farm in 1896, he studied at Stanford University, served in the Army Air Service during World War I, and earned a doctorate at Columbia University.
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Edward James Sparling, an integral figure in the founding of Roosevelt University, served as president of the institution from 1945 to 1963. Photograph by Helen Balfour Morrison.
Soon after beginning his presidency, Sparling was approached by a black student who complained that he was charged a student activities fee but was not allowed to use the gymnasium or swimming pool. “That doesn’t sound right,” Sparling said, and proceeded to investigate. Central YMCA College director William Parker confirmed that “the Negro students are supposed to go down to the Wabash YMCA,” which was five miles away, because “white people won’t stay on the floor with them.” Sparling refunded the fee to every black student. He suspended all physical education and sports until the college could serve everyone on an equal basis. He abolished other activities that were unequal, such as student dances held at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, where black students were denied admission.5 In 1942, the college’s board of directors turned its attention to the future, noting possible changes in the racial mix of students after the war. An internal investigation found that the percentage of black students had increased from 4 percent in 1940 to 13 percent in 1942.
Originally built in 1893, the Central YMCA Building at 19 S. LaSalle Street served as home to Central YMCA College from around 1922 until the college closed in 1945, following the resignations of Sparling and a majority of the faculty. Jenney & Mundie, architect. Pioneering Social Justice | 31
Twenty-five percent of the students were Jewish, and 29 percent were Catholic. For YMCA leaders who believed the college had been formed to serve white, Protestant young men, these numbers were troubling.6 The next year, a survey commissioned by the YMCA board of managers suggested that the YMCA withdraw from the field of higher education. The proposal was rejected.7 Throughout his presidency, Sparling battled with the board of directors, composed mostly of leading bankers and business leaders. The directors were uneasy about Sparling’s participation in progressive civic causes, and they were especially upset at his public support in 1944 for striking workers at Montgomery Ward.8 Sparling was active in a number of progressive organizations including the Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, the Free World Association, and the Independent Voters of Illinois. Sparling and the faculty also challenged the directors with curricular and political decisions. In 1944 the faculty executive committee, on Sparling’s recommendation, published a pamphlet on racial prejudice titled ABC’s of Scapegoating. The publication disgruntled YMCA leaders, but no action was taken because of the high volume of positive publicity.9 In the spring of 1944, the board of directors debated a personnel issue centered on differences between Sparling and the dean of arts and sciences, William Cramer. Ultimately Cramer resigned, but the case caused bitterness between Cramer’s supporters and opponents, and led the directors to seek stricter oversight over the college. They considered limiting the teaching of “controversial, partisan, and faction breeding issues,” particularly those focused on race, religion, and labor studies, and proposed a committee to periodically audit classes and report what was being taught.10 The board of directors, anticipating an influx of veterans seeking a college education supported by the 1944 GI Bill of Rights, feared that white Protestants would be deterred by the number of minority students in the college. Furthermore, some YMCA members complained about “Negro students entering the Y building to go to the College upstairs.”11 When the board ordered President Sparling in November 1944 to update the racial and religious census of the student body, he resisted, saying, “We don’t count that way.” Such statistics, he explained, were not available “since every student in the College is regarded as a human being and not put into a racial category.” Over Sparling’s objections, the board of directors demanded that he survey the race and religion of 2,500 students. He finally agreed to do so only if the information was not used to discriminate in student admissions. The results showed that the proportion of students who were black had risen to about 26 percent, and the proportion of students who were Jewish had risen to 32 percent. In addition, despite the directors’ strong objection to the admis32 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
sion of Japanese Americans, Sparling’s outreach to that community had resulted in an increase of Japanese American students to 5 percent of the college.12 Thinking he could raise funds and placate the board, Sparling visited the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations, seeking support for a democratic experiment in education. Both advised him to compromise and accept quotas. “I would not have democracy if I compromised,” he responded. He then approached department store entrepreneur Morris Goldblatt, who offered to fund a building that could house the college. The board refused the offer.13 Agitated board members asked Sparling to “cut down the number of Negroes.” He told them that was impossible, as he would not “under any circumstance cut down on the Negroes or any other group.”14 In February 1945, Sparling was informed that his “qualifications were no longer compatible with the requirements of the position of President” and the board asked him to resign. Sparling responded that the college would have to fire him. Board member Newton Farr was widely known for his support of racially segregated housing in Chicago, particularly his advocacy of restrictive covenants in real estate. He tried to convince Sparling that “Negroes can have more brotherhood among themselves than they can with white people.”15 Sparling suggested “a friendly separation” where the college would be independent of the governance of the YMCA, in an institution to be called Thomas Jefferson College, but the board deemed the proposal unacceptable. After internal discussions, on April 9, 1945, the Central YMCA College faculty approved separation with a vote of 62 to 1. Meanwhile Sparling had earlier applied to the state of Illinois for articles of incorporation for Thomas Jefferson College, and the papers arrived on April 17. But five days earlier, on April 12, President Franklin Roosevelt died. As a result, the new school was renamed Roosevelt College in his honor. Edward Sparling resigned from the presidency of the YMCA College on April 17, after learning that he was about to be fired. In a letter to William Wiseman, chairman of the board of directors, Sparling stated that he stood with the faculty and staff “for academic freedom, and equal educational opportunities, regardless of race, color, or creed.”16 Sparling’s former assistant, Walter Gilliland, was named acting president. On April 23 the faculty passed a resolution of no confidence in the board of directors. The next day, in a walkout unique in American higher education, sixty-eight professors and staff members, about two-thirds of the total, resigned from the YMCA College in support of Sparling, and they condemned the “illiberal and discriminatory purposes” of the board. Seventy percent of the full-time faculty and 58 percent of the part-time faculty signed the resignation document. While most agreed strongly with Sparling’s posi-
The resignation letter signed by the faculty of Central YMCA College expressed both their opposition to discriminatory practices and their support of the new institution built on a foundation of equal access to education.
tion, others worried that jobs and salaries would be lost and students abandoned. A third group “waited to see what would happen.” As one faculty member’s wife remembered, “We had mortgage payments to make; we had a nine-month-old baby. How would this crisis affect our lives?”17 At a mass meeting on April 25, the Central YMCA students enthusiastically voted 448 to 2 to follow the president and faculty to the new college. Lily Sachs Rose, a student who was a refugee from Nazi Germany, was at that meeting and remembered being “totally caught up in the idea of what was possible in this country. To have this experiment in education—it didn’t matter what color you were, your religion, the shape of your eyes. I can’t imagine anything else in my life that was so exciting, so large.”18 The Central YMCA College closed its doors four months later, as the new Roosevelt College opened to all men and women “of good character who, through an entrance
examination demonstrate ability to benefit from college training.”19 The new Roosevelt board of trustees was the first college board in the country to mandate representation from labor, capital, management, cooperatives, the press, and the faculty, and was integrated by gender, race, and religion. Founding trustees included the chair, Edwin Embree, a friend of Franklin Roosevelt and head of the Rosenwald Foundation. Pioneering African American chemist Percy Julian was named vice-chair, becoming one of the first African American trustees of a majority white college in the United States. The college now had a name, trustees, and a motto—Aditus Omnibus Patet (“Access to All”)—but no campus and little funding.20 It took the trustees until mid-July to acquire a home, an eleven-story office building near the elevated tracks at 231 South Wells Street and a second building for the music school. They had just two months to remodel the Pioneering Social Justice | 33
Marshall Field III (left), pictured here with then Vice President Alben W. Barkley (right) at Roosevelt College’s fifth anniversary celebration.
buildings and plan for fall classes. They purchased chairs from Standard Oil, lab equipment from Illinois Technical College and the Illinois Institute of Technology, desks, and blackboards. They acquired the Central YMCA College library. Faculty, staff, and students pushed carts piled high with books and supplies through city streets and worked alongside painters and carpenters to ready the classrooms for the fall semester. It was a daunting task. Wayne Leys, the first dean of faculties, wrote to the board of trustees in 1945: If it is foolhardy for 68 men (and women) to resign their jobs without assurance of future security, the faculty of Roosevelt was foolhardy. If it is impossible to remodel an 11-story building in 33 days, equipping it with classrooms, library, laboratories and offices, Roosevelt College was an impossibility. . . . I am proud to say that Roosevelt College is . . . foolhardy, impossible, absurd, radical and impractical.21 In March 1946, the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools approved Roosevelt College six months after it opened. They reported that “it would be difficult for any believer in equality of opportunity who saw Roosevelt College in operation to resist the feeling that there is something admirable in the democratic purposes exemplified in its program.” It was the first time that a college less than a year old received accreditation.22 The founders of Roosevelt College believed that “knowledge is essentially democratic and universal. It knows no borders, boundaries, color, creeds or cultures.”23 They were desperate for money to support the college that was based on these ideals. Some faculty even offered to mortgage their homes.24 But Chicagoans stepped up. Fund-raising appeals stressed Roosevelt 34 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
College’s identity as “a practical expression of democracy.”25 The founders quickly raised $500,000 (a little over $7 million in 2019 dollars) with support from Marshall Field III and the Marshall Field Foundation, the Julius Rosenwald Fund, the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union, the Pritzker Foundation, Arthur Rubloff, and many more. Five hundred donations ranged from one dollar to seventy-five thousand dollars.26 The college, created with no endowment, relied for years on tuition and donations, and in the first decades endured continual financial crisis. Leo Lerner, a newspaper publisher, trustee, and later board chair, remembered the importance of Marshall Field, heir to the Marshall Field Department Store. “Roosevelt could not have been founded without his support,” he said, stating: “I will never forget the day we had our first board meeting. . . . We needed $50,000 to meet our first faculty payroll. Very quietly, Mr. Field said, ‘Go ahead. Sign the contract. I’ll give you the money.’”27 In addition to the trustees, there was a symbolic board of advisors, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, that included, during the early years, physicist Albert Einstein, author Thomas Mann, labor leader Phillip Murray, singer Marian Anderson, Swedish economist Gunner Myrdal, Nobel laureate Ralph Bunche, author Pearl Buck, humanist Albert Schweitzer, and others.28 Eleanor Roosevelt visited the campus several times, met with students, held tea receptions, and spoke at fund-raising events. She donated personal funds and promoted the college in her newspaper column and radio speeches. On November 15, 1945, a Founder’s Day celebration was held at the Stevens Hotel, where Eleanor Roosevelt told the crowd of over one thousand:
Former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt attended Roosevelt University’s tenth-anniversary dinner with Percy Lavon Julian (left) and Edward Sparling (right).
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John Gibbs St. Clair Drake, seen here giving a lecture in 1952, was one of the college’s most distinguished scholars and worked there as a sociology and anthropology professor from 1946 to 1968.
Here in this great city you have many, many races, many religions and in Roosevelt College those races and those religions will meet. They will work together, and it will be an example of what can be achieved by cooperation.
Rose Hum Lee (left), with guests at a faculty tea, became the first woman to chair a sociology department in the United States in 1956.
Roosevelt College’s purpose, she added, would be to provide “a teaching faculty . . . which shall be both free and responsible in the discovery and dissemination of truth and to provide educational opportunities to the persons of both sexes of the various races on equal terms.” She then dedicated the new college “to the enlightenment of the human spirit through the constant search for truth, and to the growth of the human spirit through knowledge, understanding, and good will.”29 Roosevelt College leaders created one of the most diverse faculties in the United States. In an era when most American professors were white male Protestants, Roosevelt hired men, women, African Americans, Jewish and Catholic academics, and teachers from India, China, and Latin America. Faculty in the first years included political scientist Tarini Prasad Sinha, sociologist Rose Hum Lee, economist Abba Lerner, philosopher Estelle De Lacey, language professor Dalai Brenes, and distinguished black scholars such as sociologist St. Clair Drake, chemist Edward Chandler, and linguist Lorenzo Turner. Edwin Turner, the director of physical education and athletics, coached soccer, track, bowling, softball, touch football, basketball, tennis, and golf, although as the nation’s first black coach of an integrated school he was not allowed on private golf courses when his team played.30 Pioneering Social Justice | 35
The Chicago Defender (left) showed support for the appointment of Lorenzo D. Turner, known for his research on the Gullah dialect spoken by an African American population in coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The inaugural issue of Roosevelt College News (above right) was published the first week of classes, and the first student assembly (right) revealed the diversity of the student body.
The faculty vigorously debated governance and academic traditions. (Was the title “doctor” too elitist? Were academic robes democratic?) The college constitution prompted heated discussions. Although faculty organized a liberal caucus and a conservative caucus, they were united in support of the mission of the college.31 Economics professor Sara Landau wrote in 1948 that at Roosevelt: There is a sense of living in a free world which can be matched by few schools in this or any other country . . . there is no sense of fear. There is assurance that your colleagues who are different also respect you as an individual and as a fellow citizen. Students too differ with 36 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
each other and with some of us from time to time. But freedom from fear is here, and freedom of speech is here and freedom of assembly is here.32 The faculty grew to seventy-one full-time and ninety parttime professors by 1946. An additional one thousand professors from around the country sent applications hoping to work at this pioneering college, even if it meant a cut in pay. Twelve hundred students from forty states and fifteen countries began classes on September 24, 1945. The student body was even more diverse than the faculty, described by one newspaper as “Chinese, Japanese,
Negroes, Levantines, Jews, Catholics, and Down East Yankees.”33 Many students later remembered the importance of Roosevelt College as a school with no admissions quotas. Alumnus William Sarnoff wrote: “Can you imagine the Godsend Roosevelt College was for me after Northwestern advised the Jewish student quota had been filled?”34 By 1946, the Wells Street building was too small to accommodate the rapidly growing number of students seeking admission. Realtors told college leaders that they would never get a building for an interracial organization. Joseph Creanza, chairman of the Department of Modern Languages and later director of the School of Music, suggested that Roosevelt acquire Chicago’s Auditorium Building, located at 430 S. Michigan Avenue overlooking Grant Park.35 A landmark building created by architect
Louis Sullivan and engineer Dankmar Adler in 1889, it was the first multiple-use structure in the country and had been a celebrated ten-story hotel with an eight-story business tower and a magnificent 4,200-seat theatre. The theater originally hosted political conventions, the Chicago Symphony, opera, and performers from around the world. The hotel lobby featured a grand staircase, a bar on Congress Parkway, and a women’s café. But financial woes left the hotel derelict and bankrupt, and it closed in 1939. During World War II, the building was transformed into a serviceman’s center, providing recreation and housing for more than a million military men and women. The theater stage was converted into a bowling alley and the tenth-floor restaurant into a barracks. Paint covered the beautiful woodwork, stained glass, tile, and ironwork.
The corner of the Auditorium Building, located at 504 S. Michigan Avenue, in August 1950. The building, completed in 1889, included a theater and hotel, and had hosted political conventions, opera and theatrical productions, and was used as a servicemen’s center during World War II. Pioneering Social Justice | 37
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Sparling with a group of students and the door prize of two live chickens at the “chicken wire party” (left). After agreeing to sell his portion of the building, Teitelbaum ceremoniously cut his chicken wire fence (above).
Roosevelt leaders negotiated with the multiple owners of the Auditorium and purchased most of it in 1946. However, fifty-two feet of the north end of the building was owned by Abraham Teitelbaum, an attorney who had represented Al Capone. He refused Sparling’s offer and erected a chicken wire fence along his side of the lobby. In response, Sparling organized a “chicken wire party and fun fest,” and hundreds of students and faculty, dressed as farmers, danced in the grand lobby. Life magazine covered the event, and in March 1947, Teitelbaum capitulated.36 Five thousand students, from military veterans to new high school graduates, registered for classes in the Auditorium Building in the fall of 1947. The building was barely ready. “Walls were still unpainted and plaster dust was in the air,” wrote Wayne Leys. Faculty, students, staff, and their families organized a “spit and polish party” and energetically mopped, dusted, and cleaned stairways, floors, and walls.37 Roosevelt College flourished despite financial pressures and political attacks. The college initiated a labor education division, and it became the first college in the Chicago area with unionized clerical workers. Faculty organized interdisciplinary “informal education” institutes for the campus community and the public on topics including race relations, world peace, folk art, economics, and public health. Students enrolled in Schools of Arts and Sciences, Commerce, and Music; Arts and Sciences students were required to take a year of international language or culture study of a non-English-speaking country, and they were also offered classes on China, Jewish culture, and Africa.38 Roosevelt students held a variety of perspectives. The first yearbooks displayed photos of a Communist club, Republican club, Catholic club, Zionist club, Wallace for President club, and the League of Women Voters.39 School Pioneering Social Justice | 39
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Student leaders from colleges around the country met at Roosevelt College in 1948 to form Beta Sigma Tau, the nation’s first interracial and intercreedal fraternity (above). From left to right (sitting): Harry Walker, Russell Jones, and Henry Rosenwald; (standing) Norman Leebron, Fred King, and Kenneth Woodward. Roosevelt College students joined with protestors at the White City Roller Rink (right) to demonstrate against racial discrimination in 1949.
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dances were racially integrated. Many students vigorously pursued social activism. They voted not to allow a chapter of the American Red Cross on campus because the Red Cross segregated blood “so that those receiving transfusions will be given plasma from blood of their own race.”40 Students joined with faculty to organize a campaign against restrictive real estate covenants in 1947. In 1948, Roosevelt College hosted the formation of Beta Sigma Tau, the nation’s first fraternity without racial or religious restrictions; its motto was “Equality, Understanding, and Brotherhood.” Students formed a Social Action Training group, picketing the White City Roller Rink on Chicago’s South Side in 1949 for barring African American skaters and boycotting downtown restaurants and retail stores for discriminating against black customers.41 In 1949 the college was investigated, along with the University of Chicago, by the Seditious Activities Commission of the Illinois legislature for “communist activity.”42 A 300,000word report found no evidence of communism, but Roosevelt College was known for some time as “the little red schoolhouse,” which had an unfortunate impact on fund-raising from the business community. Alumni recalled the excitement of being part of a progressive educational experiment. Early graduates included
Harold Washington, elected Chicago’s mayor in 1983; Ray Clevenger, who served as a member of the US Congress; Paul Silverman, pioneering human genome scientist; and Dorothy Moscowitz Petak, a future Chicago public school principal and member of the first graduating class in 1949, who was featured in Life magazine.43
Shown here in 1947, future mayor Harold Washington majored in political science at Roosevelt. Above: The university in 1971. Pioneering Social Justice | 41
Roosevelt College became a university in 1954, and as it nears its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2020, the institution is still guided by its long legacy of inclusivity and the development of civic leadership. And so, in 1945 a new college began. Reporters from around the country marveled at Chicago’s “equality lab.” A remarkable act of courage by Edward Sparling, an idealistic man with a lifetime devotion to human rights, led to the creation of an institution pioneering in social justice long before it became common practice. Roosevelt College was, one journalist wrote, nothing less than “a model of democracy in higher education.”44 Lynn Y. Weiner is professor of history emerita at Roosevelt University, where she also served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and university historian. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are courtesy of the Roosevelt University Archives unless otherwise noted. Page 30, courtesy of Morrison-Shearer Foundation. 31, Inland Architect, vol.20. Ryerson and Burnham Libraries, The Art Institute of
Chicago. Digital File #IA2OXX_1015. 34, bottom: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-036343. 36, top left: The Chicago Defender, May 25, 1946. 37, Chicago History Museum, ICHi093172. 39, right: Chicago Daily Tribune, February 27, 1947. 40, bottom: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-019601. 41, top: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-093174. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the history of Roosevelt University written by former university presidents, see Rolf A. Weil, Through These Portals: From Immigrant to University President (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 1991) and Theodore L. Gross, Roosevelt University: From Vision to Reality (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 2002). For the history of the Auditorium Building, see Joseph M. Siry, The Chicago Auditorium Building: Adler and Sullivan's Architecture and the City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002) and Jay Pridmore, The Auditorium Building: A Building Book from the Chicago Architecture Foundation (San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2003). On the history of exclusionary college admissions practices, see Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005).
ENDNOTES 1 See, for example, Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2005) and Daniel Greene, The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011). 2 Homer Jack, Discrimination at the University of Chicago (Chicago: Committee of Racial Equality, 1944), cited in Thomas Charles Lelon, “The Emergence of Roosevelt College of Chicago: A Search for an Ideal” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1973), 358–59; Andrew Charles Thompson, “Ivy League Mimicry, Selectivity Pressures, and Opaque Admissions Policy: The Jewish Admissions Quota at Northwestern” (Senior thesis, Northwestern University, 2009), 29, Northwestern University Archives. 3 “Summary of Information Received by the Anti-Defamation League Alleging Limitations on the Admission of Students to Northwestern University because of Race or Religion” (1964), Northwestern University Archives; Northwestern University application
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forms, 1940–50, Offices of Admission, Financial Aid, and Students Records files, Northwestern University Archives. 4 Catalog, Central YMCA College (1942–43), 1, Roosevelt University Archives. 5 Edward Sparling, interview by Betty Balanoff, November 20, 1970, transcript, 36–38, Roosevelt University Archives. 6 Lelon, “Emergence of Roosevelt College,” 352. 7 Homer A. Jack, “President Sparling’s Sin: Practical Christianity,” Chicago Council Against Racial and Religious Discrimination, May 9, 1945, 3, Roosevelt Archives. 8 Sparling, interview, 34–35. 9 Sparling, interview, 52–53; Jack, “President Sparling’s Sin,” 2; Gordan Allport and H. A. Murray, ABC’s of Scapegoating (Chicago: Central YMCA College, 1944). 10 “Report of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of the Central YMCA College,” (Spring 1945), 13–14, Central YMCA files, Roosevelt Archives. 11 Ben Segal, “Color and the Chicago YMCA,” The Crisis, July 1945, 197.
12 Lelon, “Emergence of Roosevelt College,” 402, 407–8; Sparling, interview, 40–42. 13 Sparling, interview, 45–46. 14 Sparling, interview, 54–55. 15 Sparling, interview, 43. 16 Edward Sparling to William Wiseman, April 17, 1945, Central YMCA collection, Roosevelt Archives. 17 Report of the Executive Committee of the Faculty of Central YMCA College, 16; Alice Creanza, “A Personal Memoir,” December 1993, 5, Roosevelt Archives; Lelon, “Emergence of Roosevelt College,” 435–44, 458–59. 18 Lily Rose, interview with Lynn Weiner, October 2, 2013. Lily Rose later became the director of admissions at Roosevelt. Lelon, “Emergence of Roosevelt College,” 459–60. 19 Roosevelt College Catalog, 1945–46, 13, Roosevelt Archives. 20 Grace Miller, “Roosevelt College at Chicago Fosters Educational Equality,” Christian Science Monitor, Nov. 20, 1945; Sparling, interview, 74–79; Daniel Perlman, “Faculty Trusteeship: Concept
and Experience,” September 1971, Roosevelt Archives; Democracy in Education fundraising brochure, 1945, Roosevelt Archives. Over the years there have been other mottos; the first catalogs for example, featured images of a torch with the motto “Lux Lucet in Tenebris” (“Light in Darkness”). 21 Wayne Leys, “Report to the Board,” Minutes of the Roosevelt College Board of Directors, December 17, 1945, cited in Theodore Gross, Roosevelt University: From Vision to Reality (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 2002), 4–5. 22 “Roosevelt College Accredited Early,” Chicago Sun, March 28, 1946; North Central Association Examiners, Report on Roosevelt College, March 27, 1946, 32, Roosevelt Archives. 23 Democracy in Education, inside cover, 3. 24 Creanza, “A Personal Memoir,” 7.
31 Rolf Weil, “Roosevelt University ‘Confidential’: Tid-bits of the Past,” pamphlet, 2002, 11–12, Roosevelt Archives; Weil, Through These Portals: From Immigrant to University President (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 1991), 31–42. Faculty published a magazine to present competing viewpoints on governance in “order to contribute to the stability and maturity of our College.” Issues, November 6, 1947, Roosevelt Archives. 32 Sara Landau, “This School Bars No One,” cited in Gross, Roosevelt University, 8–9. 33 Howard Vincent O’Brien, “An Edifice Devoted to Truth,” Chicago Daily News, October 25, 1945.
26 Arthur Hepner, “The College Without a Racial Quota System,” St. Louis PostDispatch, December 15, 1946; Stephen Becker, Marshall Field III (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964), 364–67; Sparling, interview, 63; Stanford Clinton to Josephine McKee, November 13, 1945, Roosevelt Archives.
37 Wayne Leys and Willard Abraham, “Roosevelt, A College Dedicated to Equality,” in College Programs in Intergroup Relations, ed. Lloyd Allen Cook (Washington, DC: American Council on Education, 1950); chap. 9; Weil, Through These Portals, 50.
29 Eleanor Roosevelt, “Address by Mrs. F. D. Roosevelt, Founder’s Day Dinner, Roosevelt College,” November 16, 1945, 2, Roosevelt Archives; Sparling, interview, 71. The Roosevelt family was long associated with the college. Eleanor Roosevelt’s son John Roosevelt served on the board of trustees, as did her granddaughter Anna Eleanor Roosevelt. In 1959 Roosevelt University was rededicated to honor Eleanor as well as Franklin Roosevelt. 30 Rolf Weil, “The Founding Faculty of Roosevelt College,” pamphlet, 2009, Roosevelt Archives.
44 Fred M. Hechinger, “Chicago’s ‘Equality Lab’ Thrives,” Washington Post, March 30, 1947; Thomas L. Stokes, “Roosevelt College a Model of Democracy in Higher Education,” United Features Syndicate, September 28, 1946.
35 Creanza, “A Personal Memoir,” 9–11. 36 Gross, Roosevelt University, 13. Weil, Through These Portals, 49; “College Fence,” Life, December 2, 1946, 38–39.
28 Sparling, interview, 79–81. Some of the advisory board visited the Roosevelt campus. Gunner Myrdal spoke about the United Nations in 1948, Thomas Mann lectured on “Goethe and Democracy” in 1949, and Marian Anderson performed at a benefit concert in 1964.
43 “Some Outstanding College Graduates of ’49,” Life, June 13, 1949; see also Memories of the First 60 Years: A Festschrift in Honor of Roosevelt University (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 2005).
34 William Sarnoff, email message to author, May 30, 2013.
25 Edwin Embree, fundraising appeal letter, April 15, 1946, Roosevelt Archives.
27 Gross, Roosevelt University, 5.
42 Gross, Roosevelt University, 29; Farber, “Roosevelt College: A Short History,” 21; Bill Hansing, “House Demands Probe,” Roosevelt Torch, March 7, 1949, 1.
38 Sparling, interview, 82–92; Daniel Perlman, “A Brief History of Roosevelt University,” 1976, Roosevelt Archives; Roosevelt University Catalog, 1947–48, Roosevelt Archives. In 1954 the Chicago Musical College, founded in 1867 by Florenz Ziegfeld, merged with Roosevelt. 39 Roosevelt University, Vanguard, yearbook (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 1948). 40 Edward Sparling, Untitled mimeographed statement on the Red Cross, Roosevelt Archives, Biographical Collection, Sparling, File 1. 41 “Racial Tolerance Fraternity Formed,” United Press, May 3, 1948; Interview with Lois Kahan by Lynn Weiner, May 14, 2013; Bernard Farber, “Roosevelt College: A Short History,” Roosevelt Torch, September 15, 1969; “Organizations to Fight Restrictive Covenants,” Roosevelt Torch, December 8, 1947; Leys and Abraham, “Roosevelt, A College Dedicated to Equality,” 165.
Pioneering Social Justice | 43
A Shift in Power: South Side Elevated Car 1 NORMAN CARLSON With research assistance from Graham Garfield, Walter R. Keevil, Frederick D. Lonnes, Bruce G. Moffat, and William G. Schwartz esiding on Chicago History Museum’s second floor, in the exhibition Chicago: Crossroads of America, is South Side Elevated Car Number 1. This artifact was initially sought by the museum to represent the first series of elevated railcars in Chicago’s rich transportation history. The technology of Multiple Unit (MU) control that was first applied in 1897 to Car 1 and 149 other cars in the series had worldwide significance. This innovation was developed from the control technology for building elevators. Since the demise of steam locomotives, virtually all trains worldwide are propelled by electricity. In most locomotives, the diesel engine drives a generator that sends electricity to the motors, which are connected to the axles that propel the train. Functionally, a locomotive is an electrified self-propelled vehicle. The difference between
R
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an electrified rail car and a diesel locomotive, at its most basic level, is simply onboard generation of electricity (diesel locomotives) versus centrally generated electricity transmitted to and distributed across the length of an electrified railroad. The system that allows many diesel locomotives or electric railcars to function as one from a single control point with a single operator is known as MU control, developed by Frank Julian Sprague. Over a hundred years ago, Sprague was a well-known pioneer in the industrial development of electrical applications. Born on July 25, 1857, Sprague graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1878. Midshipman Frank J. Sprague (c. 1874). Below: Frank Sprague at the controls of a South Side Rapid Transit car during a test of MU control in 1898.
One of Sprague’s patents for his Multiple Unit control system.
He resigned from the Navy in 1883 to join Thomas Edison. One year later, Sprague, at heart an inventor and entrepreneur, left Edison to form Sprague Electric Railway and Motor Company because Edison was not then interested in the emerging electric railway industry. Sprague’s ties with Thomas Edison and Edison’s colleagues paved the way in the 1890s to introduce his innovation to Chicago’s transit system, on what is today the southern portion of Chicago Transit Authority’s Green Line. Sprague, Frederick Sargent, Ayres Lundy, and Samuel Insull all had business affiliations with Thomas Edison and his company, Edison Electric. Insull, who was Edison’s secretary, was sent to Chicago to advance the cause of central generation of electricity as the most cost-effective way to electrify urban and rural areas. Insull merged two competing Chicago entities, Commonwealth Electric and Chicago Edison, to create Commonwealth Edison, known today as ComEd, the electric utility in northern Illinois. Lundy worked with Edison for a year and then with Sprague on the Richmond project, later joining him in Chicago as an engineer in the Sprague Equipment Company. In 1891 he joined Fred Sargent to form the engineering consulting firm of Sargent & Lundy, a firm of architects and engineers designing electric power generating, transmission, and distribution facilities. Lundy gained considerable railway electrification experience as the consulting engineer on the Columbian Intramural Railway at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago’s Jackson
In Philadelphia (below) on May 19, 1915, Thomas Edison received the first Franklin Medal. Throughout most of their business careers Edison, Insull, and Sprague were affiliated. (Back row) R. Tait McKenzie, William Stanley, Frank Sprague, John J. Carty, Robert Bowie Owens; (front row) Chevalier Van Rappard, Mina Miller Edison, Edison, Walton Clark, Samuel Insull. A Shift in Power | 45
Above: The Columbian Intramural Railway was operated by an electric third rail system and featured at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition. Below: Testing was done on the MU control system at the General Electric facility in Schenectady, New York, on July 26, 1897.
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Sprague developed streetcars with electric motors under the car body like the one in this drawing from 1888 designed for the Richmond Union Passenger Railway, which paved the way for electric street railway systems.
Park in 1893, and on the Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad (today’s Blue Line), in addition to the South Side and a number of other projects. The consulting firm of Sargent & Lundy continues today in Chicago more than 127 years since its founding. Sprague’s first major contract in the electric railway field was awarded to him in 1887. It was to build a complete and entirely new electric street railway system in Richmond, Virginia, within the space of only a few months. This contract, which Sprague later admitted “[was one] a prudent businessman would not ordinarily assume,” obligated the inventor to furnish and install overhead trolley wire on twelve miles of track, install an electric generating plant, and equip forty cars with motors and the required electrical apparatus. Further, the system had to be capable of operating thirty cars at once on a system with grades of at least 8 percent. Sprague’s company had little experience and had never equipped an entire street railway for electric operation. After many setbacks, redesigning of components, and reworking of the cars to improve reliability, Sprague was able to operate the required thirty cars at once to satisfy the contract in May 1888. (He actually surpassed the requirement by operating forty cars.) With this project he proved that electric traction could revolutionize public transportation. The Richmond contract was quickly followed by 110 other electric railway–related contracts before Sprague sold his company to the Edison General Electric Company in 1890.
This South Side Rapid Transit locomotive parked on the train tracks just north of Thirty-Ninth Street in 1892 was used on the first elevated train line in Chicago.
In 1892, Sprague organized the Sprague Electric Elevator Company. His newest enterprise specialized in the design and construction of the actual elevator and in the master control technology that allowed multiple elevators to be controlled and coordinated from a single panel. This breakthrough provided the basis for Sprague’s development and installation of the first MU control system for self-propelled electric railway cars on Chicago’s South Side Elevated Railroad in 1897 and 1898. On January 14, 1897, the South Side Elevated Railroad was incorporated to purchase the assets of Chicago’s first elevated railway, the steam-powered A Shift in Power | 47
Chicago & South Side Rapid Transit Railroad Company, commonly referred to as the Alley “L.” The property primarily consisted of a double-track elevated railroad extending from a stub terminal near the southeastern edge of the downtown area at Holden Court and Congress Street. The track extended south and east to a terminal on the edge of Jackson Park at Sixty-Third Street and Stony Island Avenue. At the time, the company had forty-six steam locomotives and 180 passenger cars in operation. Trains of up to five cars were operated as frequently as every three minutes, making the Alley “L” a busy steam railroad. The maintenance and operation of the steam locomotives represented a significant cost to the new company. The new company’s president saw electrification as a way to improve service and reduce operating costs. Advances in electric motor and power distribution technology had been significant in the years following the 1893 demonstration of the electrically powered Columbian Intramural Railway at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and the opening of the Liverpool Overhead Railway in England earlier that same year. By 1897 Chicago’s two other elevated railways were already operating electrically. (The Metropolitan West Side Elevated Railroad opened as an electric railroad in 1895, while the Lake Street Elevated Railway converted from steam the following year.) At this point in his career, Sprague was more interested in elevators than in electric railways. In an address made by Sprague at the celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday in New York City on July 25, 1932, the wellregarded innovator remarked: Just as I was about to sail for London on elevator business again came an old opportunity, in a call to act as a consultant for the South Side Elevated Railroad in Chicago. I was crippled at the time, having nearly been killed by stepping backwards from a construction platform, and was still on crutches. I had never heard of the South Side and I tried to stall the engagement by quoting a fee that would eliminate me because I wanted to get to Europe. Suddenly two of my friends came on here. I found that they were the directing engineers of the road, Fred Sargent and A. D. Lundy. In the meantime, I had opportunity to talk This map (above) from 1897 shows the lines operated by the South Side Elevated Railroad Company. That year, the change from steam locomotives to electric operation was featured in the Chicago Daily Tribune (below). Left: Tokens for the Chicago & South Side Transit Railroad Company, which operated the Alley “L” between 1892 and 1897. 48 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Early Sprague cars with MU control on the South Side Elevated Railroad tracks in Chicago, April 17, 1898. Sprague is likely the man standing on the far left in front of the first car.
to the talented commercial engineer, William J. Clark, of the General Electric Company and his able assistant, Frank Shepard. They sensed the possibilities of the new system, and when the matter came up in Chicago I received active support. That was a personal contact, later shifted to a new corporation— the Sprague Electric Company. In his book, The Birth of Electric Traction, which focuses on Sprague’s life, Frank Rowsome Jr. notes that Sprague’s elevator company was failing. The financial panic of 1893 had virtually eliminated investors’ desire to fund new technology and Sprague’s efforts to interest the owners of the New York City elevated railway system in electrification were receiving no response. Yet, Sprague had “an idea in search of a railroad.” Sprague had used elevator motors to create a “controller of controllers.” Rowsome goes on to explain the advantages of electric-powered over steam-powered trains (and to some extent diesel-powered trains). A MU control system would eliminate the “heavy structure-racking locomotive [on elevated railways]. Every single wheel on the entire [rapid transit] train could be powered, which meant that the total weight of the train and its load was available for traction without wheel spinning. [Thus] the train would start up far faster than a locomotive-drawn one.” With
frequent stop-start cycles at closely spaced stations, this technology yields faster running times and the ability to operate more trains within a given period of time over the same rail line. Was the South Side Elevated the railroad that Sprague was seeking? The initial request of Sprague from the Chicago company was to review the specifications prepared by Sargent and Lundy for the electrification of the South Side Elevated. In their wonderful biography of Sprague, Frank Julian Sprague Electrical Inventor & Engineer, the two William D. Middletons (father and son) document Sprague’s review: Sprague’s review of the specifications, completed on April 7, 1897, had a number of suggestions for modifications to the electrical plant, but his most significant recommendations concerned the railway’s motor equipment. ‘This is the most serious problem, and my recommendation is radical’ wrote Sprague. The two generally accepted types of electrification were then confined either to the use of individual car equipment, which could not be operated in trains, or the locomotive train system, in which a steam or electric locomotive pulled a train of cars. The locomotive system, said Sprague, was the only one which had been considered. The third, said A Shift in Power | 49
Sprague is ‘individual equipment with combination control, which is the system I most strongly advise.’ Sprague proceeded to enumerate the many arguments for MU control: Without further argument, I recommend on your road the absolute abolishment of the locomotive system, tentatively condemned by your engineers by the uncertain and varied suggestions they have made, and the individual equipment of the cars with one or more motors, so controlled that one or any number of cars without regards to sequence or position can be coupled together indiscriminately, and from the leading end of any car the train system can be operated. The long friendship and professional association between Sargent, Lundy, and Sprague resulted in Sprague taking on the project to electrify the South Side Elevated and equip its cars with his MU control system that, at the time, existed only on paper. Sprague needed to be convinced to take the assignment. He was eager to get to London, where he had a chance to win a big elevator installation contract for the Central London Railway, which was then boring a subway. Sprague was not in the mood to accept any more risk, personally or professionally. Leslie Carter, the newly installed president of the South Side Elevated, contacted him by letter. Carter had been appointed by the receivers in bankruptcy of the predecessor company. Carter’s assistant, an engineer named Frank Shepard, was very interested in MU control. This system would require many more motors and control units, which General Electric would supply, than the locomotive concept that initially was being recommended. William J. Clark, an old friend of Sprague’s, now an engineering salesman for General Electric, called on Sprague. The pressure was building. Sprague’s friends could not understand why he would be unwilling to discuss a potential opportunity for the initial application of MU control. While it has been generally reported that it was Lundy who convinced the reluctant Sprague to take the business risk and accept the assignment, Rowsome reports that it may have been Fred Sargent. According to Rowsome, Sargent made a quick trip to New York City to visit with Sprague, and he was able to convince Sprague to delay his trip to London and accept the assignment in Chicago. Rowsome reports, “It was a week that changed Sprague’s life, because during that week Fred Sargent had discovered Sprague’s MU work. He was so impressed that he wired his partner [Lundy] to come at once to New York, bringing along all existing prints on the forthcoming Alley L electrification.” The ties between Sprague and Lundy were even closer because of their 50 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
“wild and exhausting months in Richmond [Virginia] one decade before.” After accepting the challenge of the Chicago “L” and postponing his departure for London, Sprague dispatched subordinates to London while he worked to persuade Carter to reject the locomotive concept and accept the MU concept that was now supported by Sargent and Lundy. With the full support of Lundy, Sprague vigorously defended his proposal against the counterattacks of the other vendors. He decided to become a principal instead and provide the material to convert 150 of the 180 locomotive-hauled coaches to self-propelled cars with MU control. (In the end, he won the $500,000 London contract as well.) In essence MU control allowed the engineer or motorman to singularly control the power (acceleration and speed) of multiple motor cars in a train. The locomotive concept required that if multiple locomotives were in a train their respective crews had to try and coordinate the operation of their locomotives; neither easy nor practical to do on passenger trains making frequent starts and stops. The locomotive concept for rapid transit operation also required the locomotive or powered car to be on the head of its train, which meant that it had to be repositioned at each end of its run. MU control removed these limitations and allowed for more rapid acceleration from a stop, which reduced running times and enabled more frequent service. Looking back on his experience with the South Side “L,” on May 16, 1899, Sprague presented a detailed paper to the Sixteenth Annual Meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Regarding his work in Richmond, Virginia, he noted that the contract he signed for that work “was not a long contract, but its terms were somewhat remarkable, being dictated by enthusiasm and self-confidence rather than by ordinary commercial rules.” With the South Side contract, Sprague experienced the opposite: “The commercial conditions were onerous, and the professional and financial risk were great, such as might well make at least the officials and engineers of the road gravely hesitate, for the multiple-unit system, absolutely untried in commercial practice, had to be reduced to practical operation on a scale of development and under conditions never before attempted in electric railroading even in Richmond.” He proceeded to provide in detail all of the technical details of the project. Sprague described the testing at General Electric’s Schenectady, New York, plant: on July 16, 1897, two cars were operated on the test track, observed by officials from General Electric and subcontractors. Sprague also wrote that on July 26, the fiftieth anniversary of Moses G. Farmer’s test of an electric car at Dover, New Hampshire, a train of six cars, operated by his ten-yearold son, Frank D’Esmonde Sprague, was tested in the
In 1899, Sprague presented his work on the South Side “L” at the annual meeting of the American Institute of Electrical Engineers. Sprague signed this program from the 1902 meeting, along with Guglielmo Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, Elihu Thomson, Michael I. Pupin, Charles P. Steinmetz, and Sir Percy Sanderson.
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Frank J. Sprague was known as the “Father of Electric Traction” and formed the Sprague Electric Elevator Company in 1892. He is pictured here with another of his inventions, the double elevator shaft, which permited the running of two elevators. Sprague’s elevator control systems influenced his invention of Multiple Unit control. Photograph by George Rinhart. 52 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Virtually every leading person in the electric industry was either gathered in New York City during the evening of July 25, 1932, to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday or had sent a letter of recollections and congratulations. In one of the letters presented to Sprague that evening, Benjamin E. Sunny, who competed against Sprague for the South Side Rapid Transit contract said: One of the directors had met a fellow in New York with a military title, who had put in an electrically appointed dumb waiter for delivering cocktails to the several floors of a big hotel, which worked perfectly, and he proposed to apply the same scheme for the operation of elevated trains. This seemed to us to be just too funny for anything and we both had a good laugh over it. Mr. Hopkins telephoned me the next day that the name of the magician was Lieutenant Sprague, and then it wasn’t so funny. Then you [Sprague] came to Chicago, and the story was that you had no shop, no organization, no installers—just a toothbrush and an idea, but Ye Gods, what an idea!
The MU control tests at General Electric were a success, and by 1903 the MU control system for electric trains was being advertised in Street Railway Journal.
presence of the officers and engineers of the South Side Elevated Railroad. He also pointed out that the tests of the equipment went on for several days. A five-car train was tested on the Metropolitan West Side Elevated and the Loop on November 17, 1897, and then continued for several weeks. The satisfactory results warranted completion of the contract. On April 15, 1898, the first car ran on the South Side Elevated. Twenty cars were placed into revenue service on April 20; however, defective rheostats caused the cars to be removed from service that evening. By July 27 locomotive operation had been completely abandoned. The success of MU control on the South Side Elevated was only one of many accomplishments that Sprague achieved. During his lifetime he was granted ninety-five patents, thirty of which were for electric traction and thirteen for train control; two were for electric toasters. He received eight distinguished industry awards and three honorary doctorate degrees. A number of his oldest associates and admirers organized a celebration of his seventy-fifth birthday “to proclaim his achievements to the world.”
Present at that same birthday celebration was Frank Hedley, then president of New York City’s Interborough Rapid Transit Company, and formerly general superintendent of the Lake Street Elevated and the Northwestern Elevated companies in Chicago. Hedley was either riding or operating the first electrified car trips on those two elevated railroads. As a member of the dinner committee, Hedley was one of the speakers. In his remarks he said that Sprague was the “Father of Electric Traction” and further noted that the locomotive engineers of the Lake Street Elevated “unanimously expected and a great many of them hoped, that the Sprague system would prove a failure.” He continued to point out that what became obvious to those who knew Frank Sprague well is that “it is not wise to say that any prediction he has made, or may make, is not practical.” Frank Julian Sprague passed away in his home on October 25, 1934. Following funeral services in New York City, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery. In his 1899 paper, Sprague spoke about his thoughts for the forthcoming contract “for replacing the operative steam equipment system on the South Side Elevated Railroad of Chicago by an electrical equipment on a new method, which if successful, was destined to mark the abolition of steam and locomotive systems of any character on urban, interurban and suburban traffic, the next great field of electric railway development.” While perhaps some thought this prediction to be grandiose at the time it was said, it proved to be an understatement. Sprague did not even consider the future electrification developments on mainline railroads around the world or the advent of diesel-electric locomoA Shift in Power | 53
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Above: In 2005, an industrial crane lifted Car 1 and placed it in a second-story opening in the museum’s south wall. Below: The car on display in Chicago: Crossroads of America at the Chicago History Museum.
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in Wilmette, the trailer would have been “high-centered” on the street due to the height of the railroad right-ofway relative to the adjoining streets. The first place where there were relatively level crossings was in Kenilworth. Can you imagine driving down Kenilworth Avenue and seeing a rapid transit car coming the opposite direction? From Kenilworth the car traveled down Sheridan Road and Clark Street to reach the museum. A large crane lifted the car and moved it through an uncompleted wall of the museum’s new addition on the following day, January 19. At the opening of the new addition and the renaming of the museum as the Chicago History Museum on October 1, Car 1 was placed on public display. Technically, the car is on loan from CTA. Given the difficulty of moving Car 1, however, the museum is likely to be its home for a long time. Frank J. Sprague’s obituary appeared in the New York Times on October 26, 1934.
tives that vanquished steam power worldwide. Today, MU control is used internationally in electric rail vehicles and diesel-powered locomotives. Yes, Frank Julian Sprague was truly was the “Father of Electric Traction.” Following its retirement in 1930, Car 1 was stored at the Sixty-Third Lower Yard until 1939, when the other cars of the same era were scrapped. The Chicago Rapid Transit Company preserved Car 1, aware of its place in transportation history. The railcar was moved to Wilson Avenue, where it remained in the Lower Yard until 1958, when that yard was closed. After Car 1 spent a little time in Wilson Upper Yard, the boards covering the side windows were removed and it was towed to Skokie, where the car was cosmetically restored in 1959. If you look at the car closely, you will find some knotholes that betray that Skokie carpenters resided the wellworn car using plywood. In 1962, Car 1 was exhibited at the opening of the Congress Rapid Transit Shop on today’s Blue Line at Des Plaines Avenue in Forest Park. Apparently not long after that event, the Chicago Transit Authority lost interest in this relic. In July 1964, it was dispatched with great media fanfare to the inactive Lincoln car barn where it would languish until 1978. At that time it was moved to the Lawndale car barn only to gather more dust. It remained there until November 1980 when it was taken to Skokie and restored again under the direction of Harold Geissenheimer. Car 1 then appeared at many events and was used on charter events, once again transporting passengers on the rapid transit system until it was delivered to the Chicago History Museum. On January 18, 2006, Car 1 was moved from Skokie Shops to the Chicago History Museum. The load was too high to pass under bridges in Chicago and Evanston, and
Norman Carlson is president and managing editor of the Shore Line Interurban Historical Society. He is a retired Arthur Andersen & Co. partner and currently serves as the chairman of the board of directors of Metra. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. Page 44, top: www.spraguelegacy.com; bottom, George Trapp Collection. 45, top: US Patent and Trademark Office; bottom: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DIG-ggbain19159. 46, top: ICHi-061790; bottom: courtesy of John L. Sprague. 47, top: IEEE History Center, History of Engineering and Technology Tumblr, https://engineeringhistory.tumblr.com; bottom: ICHi-040796. 48, top: ICHi-040397; bottom: Chicago Daily Tribune, December 26, 1897; tokens: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History. 49, courtesy of John L. Sprague. 51, IEEE History Center, History of Engineering and Technology Tumblr. 52, Corbis Historical, Getty Images. 53, History around Schenectady, http://schenectadyhistory.blogspot.com/. 54, Chicago History Museum staff. 55, New York Times, October 26, 1934. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the work of Frederick Sargent and Ayres Lundy, see The Sargent and Lundy Story (Chicago: Sargent & Lundy, 1961). For more on the life Frank J. Sprague and the history of Sprague Electric, see William D. Middleton and William D. Middleton III, Frank Julian Sprague: Electrical Inventor & Engineer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009); Frank Rowsome Jr., The Birth of Electric Traction: The Extraordinary Life of Inventor Frank J. Sprague (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014); and John L. Sprague. Sprague Electric: An Electronic Giant's Rise, Fall, and Life after Death (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015). On the history of the “L,” see Greg Borzo, The Chicago “L” (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2007) and Bruce G. Moffat, The “L”: The Development of Chicago’s Rapid Transit System, 1888–1932 (Chicago: Central Electric Railfans Association,1995). A Shift in Power | 55
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Chicago-Born and Bred: Making History Interviews with Frank M. Clark Jr. and Richard L. Duchossois TIMOTHY J. GILFOYLE
rank M. Clark Jr. and Richard L. Duchossois are homegrown Chicago success stories. Clark, a living Horatio Alger tale, started working in the mail room at the Commonwealth Edison Company (ComEd) headquarters at 72 West Adams Street in 1966.1 Thirty-five years later he was named president. By then ComEd was a $6 billion enterprise responsible for nearly half of the revenues of the Exelon Corporation, its holding company. Clark eventually went on to serve as the Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer from 2005 to 2012. In 2002, Fortune magazine identified Clark as one of the fifty Most Powerful Black Executives in America.2 Duchossois is the founder and chairman emeritus of The Duchossois Group, Inc., a private, family-owned enterprise dating back to 1916 and now in its fourth generation of leaders. A World War II veteran, Duchossois received a Purple Heart and two Bronze Stars for his military service and has guided the company for more than seventy years. As the leading owner and investor of the Arlington International Raceway and Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby, Duchossois’s leadership in thoroughbred racing has garnered him worldwide acclaim, including the American Jockey Club’s Gold Medal, the Special Sovereign Award from the Jockey Club of Canada, and the Lord Derby Award from the Horserace Writers and Reporters Association of Great Britain.3 Frank M. Clark Jr. was born on September 3, 1945, in Chicago to Frank and Silvella Clark, one of eight children. As a small child, his family resided in a series of South Side apartments, first in the Bronzeville neighborhood, then Englewood and Woodlawn at 6600
F
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Both Frank M. Clark Jr. (left) and Richard L. Duchossois have received The Marshall Field Making History Award for Distinction in Corporate Leadership and Innovation: Clark in 2016 and Duchossois in 2017. Dan Rest Photography
Frank Clark and three of his seven siblings, c. 1950.
South Kenwood. “Eventually, when I was probably a sophomore in high school,” remembers Clark, “we moved to West Chatham, and that was the first home: 8100 South Princeton.”4 Clark’s transitory childhood reflects how Chicago’s neighborhoods were transforming in the 1950s. “I went to a couple different grade schools,” remembers Clark, including James Wadsworth Elementary School at 6650 South Ellis. “I was there for three years, and we transferred to a Catholic school named St. Clara at Sixty-Fourth Street and Woodlawn Avenue.”5 It was at St. Clara that Clark met his future wife Vera in the sixth grade. “I grew up in a sheltered environment where I was essentially only around other African Americans for most of my childhood.”6 Clark eventually matriculated at Emil G. Hirsch Metropolitan High School at 7740 South Ingleside Avenue where he witnessed white flight and racial succession first hand. “When I went there in 1959, my incoming freshman class was predominantly black; the senior class at Hirsch was 90 percent white,” Clark recounts. “By the time I graduated from Hirsch in 1963, there were almost no whites left.”7 Richard “Dick” Duchossois was born on October 7, 1921, the second of four children to Alphonse “Al” and Erna Hessler Duchossois.8 Al Duchossois worked for Kline’s, a women’s clothing store, and raised his family in the Beverly neighborhood, first at 9726 South Hoyne Avenue and later, when young Dick was in high school, at 10158 South Leavitt Street. The family was active in nearby Trinity United Methodist Church. “I remember we had a very happy childhood, a very close family,” Duchossois remembers. “You knew every neighbor and you knew everyone that was in every house. There weren’t that many houses, but you knew them all. We walked to school every day.”9
Richard Duchossois (left) is the second oldest of four children, c. 1930.
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Although Duchossois’s and Clark’s childhood homes were less than five miles apart, they grew up in different, racially segregated worlds. Duchossois attended Elizabeth H. Sutherland Elementary School, followed by Morgan Park Military Academy (now Morgan Park Academy) from which he graduated in 1940. He speaks with appreciation of the education he received at Morgan Park Military Academy. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but as I go back through life, and particularly in the service, Morgan Park Academy taught you discipline, it taught responsibility, it gave you an opportunity at leadership. Competition, responsibility, and teamwork were our major things we learned.” Upon graduation, Duchossois matriculated at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.10 Duchossois and Clark admit they were mediocre students, at best. At Hirsch High School, Clark states, “my grades were atrocious.” But one teacher—Miss Caldwell— had an impact. “I remember Miss Caldwell sitting down, taking me aside, and assuring me I had potential,” Clark explains. “She based it all on my interest in English, particularly poetry. She said if I had the ability to understand poetry, I had the ability to do a lot of other things.” In retrospect, Clark concedes that “that was probably the only time, outside of my mother, of someone telling me that I had potential, that I had some talent.”11 Duchossois similarly concedes that in both high school and college, “I wasn’t a very good student.” That changed briefly after World War II when he attended night school at the University of Chicago for one semester and earned straight As. “I knew that I had matured from the war a little bit more than some of the classmates,” Duchossois states retrospectively. “But I didn’t go any farther.”12 Duchossois’s real education took place during his service in World War II. Upon being drafted into the army, he was trained and charged with leading a company of tank destroyers, a new technology introduced during the war. In 1944, Duchossois was shot by small arms fire and temporarily paralyzed after his unit crossed the Moselle River in northeast France. He recovered, received two Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, and was promoted to the rank of major at age twenty-three.13 In the months following the German surrender on May 8, 1945, Duchossois served as the military governor of the Eichstätt district in Bavaria while he awaited the arrival of the army’s occupation units to assume that mission.14 Duchossois’s experience on the frontlines of combat had a profound impact on him. “I learned that some of the people that are very quiet, and you think they aren’t very much of one thing or another, they become the heroes. The loudmouths who are talking all the time—you want to get rid of them as soon as you can,” he concludes. “Business is pretty much the same way.”15 Frank Clark shared similar battle-tested experiences. In 1967, Clark remembers, “I was drafted into the army and finished basic training and other advanced training to be a communications specialist and was shipped off to Vietnam.” Clark was stationed in the central highlands of Vietnam, near An Khê. “I was assigned to a small artillery unit, and they didn’t need a communications specialist. They needed somebody with a radio, which was not as exotic as I’d been trained to do.” The military discipline Clark experienced in Vietnam “must have done something for me,” Clark admits. “I came out, went back to Loop College (now Harold Washington College) for almost a year, and I got five As.”16 58 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Founded in 1873, Morgan Park Military Academy was a well-regarded institution that was affiliated with the University of Chicago from 1892 to 1906. American bandmaster and composer John Philip Sousa visited the school in 1928. Duchossois is pictured here as a senior in 1940.
Before serving in Vietnam, Clark briefly worked at St. Thomas More, a small Catholic bookstore at 210 West Madison Street. “I started out unloading trucks and I showed enough skills to where I became a clerk,” remembers Clark. “They were a central repository for Catholic literature. They probably employed thirty or forty people.”17 In 1966, Clark learned of a job opportunity at Commonwealth Edison, the largest electric utility in Illinois. “A friend of mine told me they had jobs, that they were looking for some people,” recounts Clark. “The only job they had open was a job in the mail room, and I promptly told my wife that I wasn’t going to take a job in the mail room.” But when he learned that the ComEd position offered a higher salary, she asked, according to Clark, “You’re going to turn down a job that pays you more from the beginning in a big company where you can work your way up versus a bookstore that you might make a little bit more money?” He accepted the offer from ComEd.18 After serving in Vietnam, Clark returned to the ComEd mail room. One day Clark’s supervisor Ralph Nord called him into his office. “He asked me about my military service,” remembers Clark. When Clark assured Nord that he had received an honorable discharge, Nord told him, “You have got a good reputation. You work hard. You come to work every day. You’re here on time. We’re going to look to see if we can do something with you.” A few months later, Clark was transferred to ComEd’s general warehouse in Stickney where he was assigned to track inventory by placing codes on all products ComEd purchased. Clark was the only African American employee in the one hundred-person facility. “Within less than a year I got a promotion to one of the highest clerical jobs at ComEd as a purchasing clerk downtown.”19 At the same time, Clark’s surprising success at Loop College convinced DePaul University admissions officers to admit him as a student-at-large. Clark remembers, “If I could do the work, they would eventually let me in. And then did. That’s how I got into DePaul.” His educational success was unexpected and unconventional. “My entire education has been in night school. I’ve never gone to college during the days, all in the evening,” Clark explains. “I ultimately finished college, got an opportunity to go in a manageFrank Clark’s first job at ComEd was in the mail room of its headquarters at Adams and Clark Streets, pictured here in 1937.
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ment training program at ComEd, because they really didn’t have very many African Americans with college degrees. I graduated from DePaul University with honors, so I was looked upon as something odd.”20 Clark’s college degree opened more doors. After four or five years as a purchasing clerk, “I was made a supervisor in the purchasing department, first African American supervisor they’d had in their history,” according to Clark. As supervisor, he was in charge of hiring. For the first time, African American and Latina women were hired, a development that generated controversy in some ComEd quarters, even though “I’d probably brought in at least twice as many white females,” remembers Clark. A supervisor informed Clark that “they’re going to make you a buyer because they’re tired of all these black people you’re hiring.” Nevertheless, “the best job I ever had at ComEd before I became CEO was being a buyer,” Clark retrospectively admits. “I learned so much about the company. I bought construction equipment, building materials and cars, the fleet. I absolutely loved it.”21 After the war, Duchossois began working for his father-in-law Arthur J. “A. J.” Thrall at the Thrall Car Manufacturing Company. The family-owned enterprise was founded in 1916 and devoted to repairing and refurbishing various types of railway cars.22 By 1946, Thrall was a small railroad equipment maker, with about thirty-five employees and $200,000 in annual sales.23 Duchossois remembers how small the enterprise was, then located at Twenty-Sixth Street and Wallace Avenue in Chicago Heights.24 “Everything was in one twenty-by-twenty office building,” laughs Duchossois. “The superintendent had the office there, then in back they were keeping track of the accounting and all the other things in there.”25 Despite the shoestring opera60 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Clark talks to ComEd employees as they assess damage after a storm in 2011.
tion, the company prospered in the postwar years, and Duchossois was named president in 1952.26 Duchossois wanted to expand the company, despite some resistance from his father-in-law. “We had bought fifty acres from the Missouri Pacific down at the end of the street at Twenty-Sixth and State Streets,” he recounts. “We didn’t have enough money to build a new plant, so I had to borrow some.”27 With a million-dollar loan from Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company, Duchossois constructed a new plant and began manufacturing a revolutionary eighty-six-foot, high-cube boxcar, at the time the world’s largest production line railroad freight car. In 1963, when the plant opened, employees increased from approximately 140 to 1,200, cars manufactured from three to three hundred, and sales from $5.5 million to $65 million.28 Duchossois relied on his military training to organize the plant. “We ran it pretty much the way our training in the army went. They had first, second, third platoons. Those are the three sections. We had our headquarters section.” Duchossois’s management team even worked on the shop floor. “We learned how to do all the riveting, welding, burning for cutting, all the machines,” he remembers.29 Duchossois’s gamble paid off; by 1979, Thrall employed 1,700 and manufactured 113,000 railcars.30 Clark continued his education while he was a buyer, attending the DePaul University College of Law in the evenings. “It was hard,” he now admits. “But my wife, my very loyal wife, she didn’t want me taking the L back and forth. We had one car. So, in the evening she’d drive downtown to get me and bring me home.”31 The sacrifices and hardships paid off. Clark claims that “once they saw I passed the bar exam and I was being admitted to the Illinois bar, the floodgates of opportunity really opened up.” He continues, “I was just given so many different opportunities by different people to demonstrate my skill sets, which were very strong in the regulatory arena. I was apparently very good at that.”32 Clark did not want to move into ComEd’s law department; he feared it would be, in his words, “a dead end.” Instead, “I ended up in a new department they created called regulatory affairs. I was the number two person in there, had the responsibility of monitoring and overseeing our rate cases.”33 Between 1996 and 2000, Clark served in the Governmental Affairs and Rate and Regulatory Affairs units of ComEd in a variety of roles: commercial manager, public affairs manager, senior staff attorney, vice president, and finally as a senior vice president.34 According to Clark, “we had extraordinary success. And extraordinary success means the company was getting adequate rate relief and a reasonable rate of return, which benefited our shareholders and the price of our stock.” During that time, Clark was instrumental in lobbying for deregulatory state legislation that, in his words “completely changed the regulatory structure in the state of Illinois, not just for ComEd, but for a whole host of other utilities.”35 Duchossois never rested on the economic success of Thrall. In the 1970s, he grew increasingly concerned that the privately held company and family were too narrowly invested in railcar manufacturing. “I was trying to put together several public companies that were major suppliers of railroad industry, so I would be controlling the supply coming in.”36 Over the objections of A. J. Thrall, he urged family and company leaders to diversify. Then in 1980, Duchossois purchased the little-known Chamberlain Manufacturing Company in Elmhurst, a conglomerate of nine businesses ranging from defense industry components to garage door openers.37 Duchossois’s decision to diversify was fortuitous. The deregulation of the railcar industry in the 1980s proved to be an economic tsunami for the Making History | 61
industry. Annual railcar production at Thrall, for example, dropped to between 5,000 and 10,000 during the 1980s, a contraction of more than 90 percent. The company was forced to cut its workforce from 1,650 to 245. The creation of the new parent company in 1983—Duchossois Industries, Inc. with Richard Duchossois as chairman and CEO—enabled the family to weather the economic downturn by purchasing the Thrall family interests, acquiring competitors, developing new railcar product lines, and expanding into electronic consumer products, radio and television stations, national defense supplies, and various capital goods. Duchossois even turned his hobby—horse breeding and thoroughbred racing—into an investment when he purchased Arlington Park, Chicagoland’s leading thoroughbred racetrack since its opening in 1927.38 Then disaster struck. In the early morning of July 31, 1985, an electrical fire broke out in the Horseman’s Lounge at Arlington Park. By the end of the day, the entire grandstand and other major administrative buildings were destroyed in what proved to be one of the largest conflagrations in Illinois history. Worse yet, the track’s premier event, the Arlington Million, was less than a month away. Many believed that was the end of Arlington.39 Duchossois, however, was undeterred. “We just said we’re going to rebuild,” proclaims Duchossois. “Everyone thought we were out of our goddamn mind.” He proved the skeptics wrong. “We built a tent city and ran the ‘Million’ on time. One of the TV broadcasters called it the ‘Miracle Million.’ 62 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Opened in 1927 as Arlington Park, the racecourse has been a popular destination for generations of Chicago-area residents. Wellheeled patrons enjoyed the exclusive Post and Paddock Club, pictured here c.1935, until it was destroyed by fire in 1985.
That name stuck.”40 Equally impressive, Duchossois and his family devoted the next four years to rebuilding the facility. In 1989, the track reopened as Arlington International Racecourse with the world’s largest cantilevered roof.41 Clark’s success in addressing regulatory issues contributed to his meteoric rise to the top of ComEd. In 2001, he was appointed to the position of senior vice president of Exelon Corporation (ComEd’s parent company) and president of ComEd, responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the company.42 Clark served as president until 2005 when he was promoted to chairman of the board and chief executive officer of ComEd. He remained in that position until 2012.43 Clark modestly attributes much of his success to former Exelon chairman and CEO John Rowe. According to Clark, Rowe recognized earlier than anyone else how the regulatory landscape in the world of utilities was changing. “He took the risk and won, won really big,” according to Clark. “He also took me as a senior vice president and eventually an executive vice president. By the time he left and I retired, I was the CEO of ComEd. So, in terms of my career, no one had more impact on advancing me than John Rowe. He really took some risks in terms of the kind of responsibilities he gave me.”44 For Dick Duchossois, another problem quickly emerged after Arlington Racecourse reopened—riverboat gambling. The legalization of riverboat casinos in Illinois in 1991 quickly siphoned money away from the horse racing business. By 1997, attendance at Arlington had dropped 36 percent.45 Duchossois explains that “we have to sell that product and it has to be a quality product.” Thoroughbred racing purse structures were based on the amount of mutual tickets sold. “So, if the casino comes in and our purses go lower because we aren’t selling the tickets, the product goes lower. And that’s what’s happened to our industry. It’s as simple as can be.”46 Duchossois was forced to close Arlington in 1998. That closure quickly convinced Illinois state legislators to pass favorable legislation that enabled Duchossois to reopen the track in 2000. Two years later, Duchossois and Arlington Racecourse hosted the Breeders’ Cup, the premier series in horseracing.47 Duchossois marvels at how horse racing has changed over the past four decades. He recognizes that when he purchased Arlington, “it was like so many of the other tracks: a bunch of old guys chomping on cigars, spitting on the floor, and cheating a little bit,” he concedes. “You almost had to take a broom because all of the things were going on.” Duchossois not only constructed a new stateof-the-art facility, but also created a new customer culture at Arlington. “Now we’re selling customer service, quality, family entertainment. In our family area, we’ve got the petting zoo, we’ve got the pony rides, we’ve got games.” Duchossois points out that Arlington “is probably the only track in the country that has more women here than men. We were built to take care of families.”48 At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Duchossois Industries, by then under the leadership of Richard’s son Craig, still employed approximately 1,500 people in the Chicago area and grossed about $1 billion in annual sales.49 But the new century also marked the
An undated photograph of Richard Duchossois and his second wife, Judi, at Arlington International Racecourse.
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beginning of significant changes in the family enterprise. First, Arlington Racecourse merged with Churchill Downs, Inc., a publicly-traded company that operates the home course for the Kentucky Derby. Duchossois Industries became Churchill’s largest stockholder, with Richard and Craig Duchossois serving on the board of directors from 2000 to 2019.50 In 2001, the Thrall Car Manufacturing Company, the original family-owned enterprise where Duchossois got his start, was purchased by the railcar manufacturer Trinity Industries of Dallas, Texas.51 In 2009, Duchossois Industries changed its name to The Duchossois Group,52 which by 2015 oversaw a $2 billion empire of businesses.53 Duchossois and Clark have been active leaders in Chicagoland philanthropy. Clark’s interest in philanthropy was influenced by the culture of ComEd. “Jim O’Connor, the former CEO of ComEd, is also the person I patterned myself after with respect to philanthropic work,” he admits. “Jim was involved in almost everything in the city of Chicago in a leadership role.”54 64 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Frank Clark with Barack Obama during the then-senator’s presidential campaign, c. 2008.
Clark has chaired the Board of Directors for the Metropolitan Family Services and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, while also serving at various times on the boards of the Governors State University Foundation, Illinois State Chamber of Commerce, Chicago Legal Clinic, Adler Planetarium, Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, DePaul University, and the University of Chicago Medical Center. He chaired the Chicago Community Trust, Chicago Commission on School Utilization, and co-chaired the capital campaign for the DuSable Museum of African American History.55 Clark has chaired the Chicago Board of Education since 2015.56 In 2007, he teamed up with John Rowe in establishing the Rowe-Clark Math & Science Academy, a charter high school in Humboldt Park on the city’s West Side.57 Clark admits his greatest source of pride originates with the academy, Metropolitan Family Services, and Jane Addams Hull-House Museum “because of what we tried to do with families, eventually putting them on stable footing so that they would have a better economic future.”58 Clark also founded the Business Leadership Council in 2011, which became a voice of black business in Chicago.59 “People will pay attention to a group quicker than they will an individual,” Clark argues. The council serves as a support group and conduit for African American advancement. “Mainly we’re a voice for the African American business community,” Clark explains. “It’s people who have finished college, people who are doing something, and taking those people and developing their leadership and making sure their businesses are being given opportunities that otherwise wouldn’t occur.” Organizations such as the Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are primarily concerned with civic issues and economic development, according to Clark. “This is really very much about the business end of it to create job opportunities that are local. Business in Chicago, the state of Illinois, and county of Cook has been declining for African American businesses. I hope to be able to turn that around.”60
An undated photograph of Frank and Vera Clark (left) with John and Jeanne Rowe (right) and two graduates of the RoweClark Math & Science Academy.
Clark spends some one-on-one time with a Clark-Rowe student.
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Richard Duchossois’s entry into Chicago philanthropy began with a family tragedy. In 1980, his wife of thirty-seven years, Beverly Thrall Duchossois, died of cancer at age fifty-seven. Four years later, Richard and his four children—Craig, Kim, Bruce, and Dayle—founded the Duchossois Family Foundation. Under the leadership of Kim Duchossois, the foundation has provided more than $100 million to health-related and other organizations, notably the Duchossois Center for Advanced Medicine (1994), Patient Navigation Services program (2004), and Duchossois Family Institute (2017), all at the University of Chicago Hospitals,61 as well as the Duchossois Food Systems Lab and Kitchen (2014) at the Loyola University Chicago Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock.62 In recent years, the Duchossois Family Foundation has funded community outreach initiatives that promote health and wellness programs, including the Greater Chicago Food Depository, The Door in New York City, and JourneyCare, the largest nonprofit provider of end-of-life care in Illinois.63 In their business and philanthropic endeavors, Duchossois and Clark share the same commitment to service. Duchossois remembers upon becoming president of Thrall in 1952, telling his fellow workers: “I don’t want to hear the word profit around here except at the end of the year. If we have the best product, the best discipline, on-time delivery, treat our customer the way we want to be treated, innovate, and save money for him, the profit’s going to catch us. So, let’s not chase the dollar.”64 Throughout their careers, Duchossois and Clark consistently believed their professional success required that they serve and benefit others. “I’ve always said that if you have responsibility and authority,” summarizes Clark, “you have a higher obligation to make sure you use it equitably and fairly.”65 66 | Chicago History | Summer 2019
Spurred by her death in 1980, Beverly Duchossois’s husband and children established the Duchossois Family Foundation in 1984, which strives to empower individuals to enhance their quality of life through wellness and education. In this undated photograph, Beverly poses with her children (from left) Craig, Dayle, Kim, and Bruce.
Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches history at Loyola University Chicago and is the author of The Urban Underworld in Late Nineteenth-Century New York: The Autobiography of George Appo (2013).
I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images courtesy of the awardees, unless otherwise noted. 58, DN-0087045, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum. 59, Chicago History Museum, ICHi-036677. 62, SDN-078817, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection, Chicago History Museum.
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Articles covering the career of Frank M. Clark Jr. include Steve Daniels, “ComEd CEO Frank Clark Sets Retirement,” Crain’s Chicago Business, September 8, 2011, and Ameet Sachdev, “Chicago School Board’s New Head Brings Business, Political Experience,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 2015. An oral history interview of Clark can be found at the HistoryMakers website: http://www.thehistorymakers.org/biography/frank-clark-40. For his involvement in Chicago education, see Commission on School Utilization, Final Report, March 6, 2013. The career of Richard Duchossois is covered in detail in Sarah Morgans, Riding the Rails: The Duchossois Group: 1916–2016 (Bainbridge Island, WA: Fenwick Publishing Group, 2016). His contributions at Arlington International Racecourse are examined in Kerry Lester, “Arlington owner Duchossois, at 90, fights cancer and for his track,” Daily Herald, October 10, 2011; Bill Christine, “International Intrigue,” Los Angeles Times, August 19, 2000; Shia Kapos, “30 years after Arlington Park fire, Richard Duchossois is still at the track,” Crain’s Chicago Business, July 2, 2015; H. Lee Murphy, “Duchossois,” Crain’s Chicago Business, October 15, 2005. Oral history interviews recounting Duchossois’s World War II experiences include: Richard Duchossois, “‘Seek, Strike, Destroy’: A Tank Destroyer Commander Rolls across Europe,” West Point Center for Oral History, March 27, 2015, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2Ucxtvi; Richard Duchossois, “Oral History Interview,” Digital Collections of the National WWII Museum, accessed April 22, 2017, https://www.ww2online.org/search-page?keyword=Richard%20Duchossois; Mark R. DePue, “Duchossois, Richard,” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Veterans Remember Oral History Project, October 19–20, 2015, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2FstzoI.
ENDNOTES 1 Frank M. Clark Jr., oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 3, 2016, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Clark, interview). 2 “Frank Clark,” Bloomberg Business, 2016, accessed March 28, 2016, https://bloom.bg/2UjG1xq; Cora Daniels and Martha Sutro, “The Most Powerful Black Executives in America,” Fortune,
3 “Richard L. Duchossois,” Wikipedia, last modified April 10, 2017, accessed April 22, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Richard_L._Duchossois; “Leadership,” The Duchossois Group, n.d., accessed January 20, 2019, http://www.duch.com/ leadership. 4 Clark, interview; “Frank Clark,” The HistoryMakers, 2016, accessed March 28, 2016, https://bit.ly/2UbMcXb. 5 Clark, interview.
July 22, 2002, vol. 146, no. 2, accessed January 19, 2019, https://bit.ly/2FBnGXG;
6 Clark, interview.
“Frank M Clark, President,” Chicago
7 Clark, interview.
Board of Education, 2019, accessed
8 Sarah Morgans, Riding the Rails: The Duchossois Group: 1916–2016
January 19, 2019, https://bit.ly/2Sxioj6.
(Bainbridge Island, WA: Fenwick Publishing Group, 2016), 28. 9 Richard L. Duchossois, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 10, 2017, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Duchossois, interview); Morgans, 28–29. 10 Duchossois, interview. 11 Clark, interview. 12 Duchossois, interview. 13 Morgans, 43–44; Mark R. DePue, “An Interview with Richard Duchossois: Title Page and Abstract,” Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Veterans Remember
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Oral History Project, October 19–20, 2015, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2Hd9BRh. 14 DePue. 15 Duchossois, interview. 16 Clark, interview. 17 Clark, interview.
ing before reverting to “Arlington Park.” Since 2013, the track has been known as “Arlington International Racecourse.” See “Arlington Park,” Wikipedia, last updated December 7, 2018, accessed January 25, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arlington_ Park.
19 Clark, interview.
42 “Frank Clark,” The HistoryMakers; Frank Clark,” ComEd, 2016, accessed March 28, 2016, https://bit.ly/2Vxtw1j.
20 Clark, interview.
43 “Frank Clark,” BloombergBusiness.
21 Clark, interview.
44 Clark, interview.
22 Morgans, 2, 7 (1916), 10 (1916), 59.
45 Morgans, 215, 222.
23 Mark R. Wilson, “Duchossois Industries Inc.,” Encyclopedia of Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 922, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2C3uDyp.
46 Duchossois, interview.
18 Clark, interview.
24 Morgans, 20, 62. 25 Duchossois, interview. 26 Morgans, 59. 27 Duchossois, interview. 28 Duchossois, interview; Morgans, 77, 92–97. 29 Duchossois, interview. 30 Morgans, 130; Wilson. 31 Clark, interview. 32 Clark, interview. 33 Clark, interview. 34 “Frank Clark,” Bloomberg Business; “Frank Clark,” The HistoryMakers. 35 Clark, interview. 36 Duchossois, interview. 37 H. Lee Murphy, “Duchossois,” Crain’s Chicago Business, October 15, 2005, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2tLawRe; “Richard L. Duchossois,” Wikipedia. 38 Morgans, 132–33 (workforce numbers), 146 (media stations, Thrall family), 156–59 (Arlington Park); Wilson. 39 Morgans, 158–61. 40 Duchossois, interview. 41 Morgans, 184 (International Racecourse), 188 (roof). Arlington briefly used the name “Arlington International Racecourse” upon reopen-
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47 Morgans, 222, 235–37. 48 Duchossois, interview. 49 Wilson. 50 Morgans, 223; “From Railcars to Investments,” Duchossois Capital Management, n.d., accessed January 22, 2019, http://www.dcmllc.com/story; “Duchossois Father and Son to Depart as Churchill Downs Inc. Directors,” Barn 6A, June 13, 2017, accessed January 22, 2019, https://bit.ly/2IMmpAJ. 51 Wilson. 52 Morgans, 247. 53 Shia Kapos, “30 years after Arlington Park fire, Richard Duchossois is still at the track,” Crain’s Chicago Business, July 2, 2015, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2SCYV0m. 54 Clark, interview. 55 Clark, interview; Steve Daniels, “ComEd CEO Frank Clark Sets Retirement,” Crain’s Chicago Business, September 8, 2011, accessed March 28, 2016, https://bit.ly/2T7yAMY; Frank Clark,” The HistoryMakers; Frank Clark,” BloombergBusiness. 56 “Frank M. Clark,” Chicago Board of Education. 57 Ameet Sachdev, “Chicago School Board’s New Head Brings Business, Political Experience,” Chicago Tribune, July 16, 2015; Daniels, “ComEd CEO Frank Clark Sets Retirement.” 58 Clark, interview.
59 Sachdev. 60 Clark, interview. 61 Morgans, 176–77, 264–65, 285; “Initiative combines genetics, immunology, microbiome, big date to create ‘new science of wellness,’” UChicago News, May 24, 2017, accessed January 2019, https://bit.ly/2SkABQP. 62 Nora Dudley, “Loyola to honor Barrington’s Dick and Judi Duchossois at Stritch Annual Awards Dinner,” Chicago Tribune, November 14, 2014, accessed January 22, 2019, https://bit.ly/2IMd0ZT; “Dick and Judi Duchossois Recipients, 2014 Sword of Loyola, Presented Nov.22, 2014,” Stritch School of Medicine, Loyola University Chicago, 2012, accessed January 22, 2019, https://bit.ly/2XTJdSq. 63 “Community Grantee Highlights,” The Duchossois Family Foundation, 2019, accessed January 22, 2019, http://thedff.org/highlights/. 64 Richard Duchossois, “‘Seek, Strike, Destroy’: A Tank Destroyer Commander Rolls across Europe,” West Point Center for Oral History, March 27, 2015, accessed April 22, 2017, https://bit.ly/2Ucxtvi. 65 Clark, interview.