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H I STORY
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Chicago
H I STORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Spring 2020 VOLUME XLIV, NUMBER 1
Contents
4 16
William Grant “Habeas Corpus” Anderson Ethelene Whitmire
Education, Politics, and Race in Chicago, 1926–67 William A. Hoisington Jr.
34
Chicago’s First Contested Mayoral Election Charles H. Cosgrove
Departments
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From the Editors 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 Photography Timothy Paton Jr.
Cover: Demonstrators carry anti-Willis signs as they march by Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park on the way to City Hall in protest of inequality and segregation in Chicago’s schools on July 26, 1965. ST-101040950018, Chicago Sun-Times collection, Chicago History Museum
Copyright © 2020 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 Mark D. Trembacki Treasurer Tobin E. Hopkins Treasurer Emeritus 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 L. Arias Gregory J. Besio Michelle W. Bibergal Denise R. Cade Paul Carlisle Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Rita S. Cook Keith L. Crandell Patrick F. Daly James P. Duff A. Gabriel Esteban Lafayette J. Ford T. Bondurant French Alejandra Garza Timothy J. Gilfoyle Gregory L. Goldner Mary Lou Gorno David A. Gupta Brad J. Henderson David D. Hiller Tobin E. Hopkins Philip J. 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 Stephen Ray Douglas P. Regan* Joseph Seliga
Steve Solomon Samuel J. Tinaglia Mark D. Trembacki Ali Velshi Gail D. Ward Monica M. Weed Jeffrey W. Yingling Robert R. Yohanan HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE
The Honorable Richard M. Daley The Honorable Rahm Emanuel 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 Barbara A. Hamel M. Hill Hammock Susan S. Higinbotham Dennis H. Holtschneider C.M. Henry W. Howell, Jr. Philip W. Hummer Edgar D. Jannotta Falona Joy Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss 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
Bradford L. Ballast Matthew J. Blakely Paul J. Carbone, Jr. Jonathan Fanton Cynthia Greenleaf Courtney Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Nena Ivon Douglas Levy Erica C. Meyer Michael A. Nemeroff Kelly Noll Eboo Patel M. Bridget Reidy 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 *As of January 2021
The Chicago History Museum gratefully acknowledges the support of the Chicago Park District on behalf of the people of Chicago.
FROM THE EDITORSI
I
t has been said that it is a curse to wish upon another to live in an interesting time. Established in 1856, the Chicago Historical Society has seen the city weather many interesting times that have affected all Chicagoans—some more than others.
In March of this year, we were first threatened by COVID-19, which was spreading in pandemic proportions. Three months later, thousands of lives have been lost in Illinois alone, millions of people are out of work across the country, and the response to the pandemic has upended life around the globe. Uncertainty hangs over all of our heads, not in terms of “returning to normal,” but with questions of how we live and how we must change to ensure equitable health and safety for everyone in our city and beyond. In the spirit of resiliency, we had to adjust to the changing situation as many of us left the Museum building—and have yet to return. This meant nimbly and quickly adapting our work and our processes. This issue of Chicago History was completed while most of the Museum staff was working from our respective homes and interacting with our colleagues through screens, phones, and email. Working away from the building, where most of the Museum’s vast collection is housed, meant limited access to the images that accompany the articles within this issue. But it is also said that necessity is the mother of invention. Not only are we adapting to new ways of working and communicating, we are finding new opportunities such as this—the first digital-only issue of Chicago History magazine. This issue is the first step in exploring how we can better integrate digital capabilities in sharing the work of our scholars and contributors. We have the opportunity to enhance their work and the history they share with contemporary storytelling tools, ultimately bringing the past into the present. For fifty years, Chicago History magazine has been sharing articles that have told our city’s stories, shedding light on well-known events, and giving voice to lesser-known people and happenings that have also shaped Chicago’s history. The magazine’s pages have covered subjects as diverse as the reshaping of Chicago’s waterways, the history of the city’s murals, Black abolitionists during the mid-nineteenth century, the songs of the labor movement, Chicago’s role in the development of streamlined design, and the activities of the mayor’s office during Prohibition. Though our pages may be electronic, we are dedicated to continuing our work, and we look forward to doing even more to connect Chicago’s interesting times of the past with the present. As we develop future issues, it remains our goal to give you a deeper look into the city’s history, to elevate its many voices, and to share objects from the Museum’s incredible collection. So, it may not be a curse after all. As chroniclers of history, we know that all times are interesting, and everyone has a story to tell. Thank you for reading.
From the Editors | 3
William Grant “Habeas Corpus” Anderson Attorney William Anderson developed a reputation for being a technical legal expert and frequently defended African American clients. ETHELENE WHITMIRE
hicago, 1900. The courtroom was packed with lawyers waiting to hear a decision. In 1895, Joseph Wyman was sentenced to life in Joliet prison for the murder of Wilhemina Dinger. Wyman appealed the decision and hired a Black attorney, William Grant Anderson, who filed a petition of habeas corpus, arguing that the mittimus (a type of warrant) did not state what crime the defendant was charged with and he should not be convicted without knowing the charge was against him. The prosecutors argued that this was a technicality. After listening to hours of arguments, the judge freed Wyman from prison even though he thought he was guilty of the crime.1 Anderson’s use of the writ of habeas corpus would become so widespread and successful that he earned the nickname, “Habeas Corpus” Anderson. The Chicago Daily Tribune published his portrait in July 1902 under the headline “Negro Lawyer Who Opens Prison Doors.” The caption under the portrait summarized his successful release of banker and embezzler Charles Warren Spalding and a long list of people he freed from prison, including murderers, robbers, and burglars. Later, a caption for a photograph in the Chicago Defender called Anderson “the man who has taken over 1,000 prisoners out of the Penitentiary on the Habeas Corpus writ.”2 Anderson was not always successful in his defense of his clients. Sometimes the loss of a case had dire consequences. On Monday, September 19, 1910, three homes in one neighborhood became crime scenes. At around 12:05 A.M., an intruder entered the bedroom window at Clarence Halsted’s home on Church Street. Awakened by a noise, Halsted grabbed at the clothing of the intruder as he made his escape through the window and ripped away a pocket. A short time later, an intruder entered the nearby McNabb home and molested Mrs. McNabb by
C
4 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Portrait of William Anderson, c. 1915.
putting “his hand under her clothes against her bare body.” Both Mrs. McNabb and her daughter, Jessie, who shared a bed with her mother, were later able to describe the intruder.
Mrs. Clarence Hiller (center) sits with her daughters Clarice and Florence after Clarence Hiller’s murder, 1910.
Anderson was profiled in the Chicago Daily Tribune in July 1902.
The Hillers lived close by in a two-story home on West 104th Street. The family consisted of father Clarence, his wife Lynda, daughters Florence, thirteen, and Clarice, fifteen, who each had their own rooms. The parents shared their bedroom with their two youngest children, including their son, Gerald. Earlier that night, Clarice noticed a man standing in her doorway but assumed it was her father, who often checked on the children during the night. Next, the intruder entered Florence’s room and molested her in a fashion similar to Mrs. McNabb’s assault. At around 2:00 A.M., Mrs. Hiller woke up and noticed that the hallway light, which normally remained on during the night, was out. She alerted her husband, who encountered an intruder when he entered the hallway. The intruder shot Clarence Hiller twice. One bullet passed through his upper left arm, shoulder, and neck while the second tore through his lung and heart before exiting his body like the other bullet. He died almost immediately. It was about 2:25 A.M. Habeas Corpus | 5
During the trial, Anderson asked one of the prosecution’s fingerprint experts, Capt. M. P. Evans, to prove that he could capture his fingerprints on a book that Anderson held. The expert sprinkled powder on the book and developed Anderson’s print impressions right in front of the jury, disproving Anderson’s argument that you could not lift fingerprints. A juror declared, “Anderson put the rope around his client’s neck.” 6 The jury retired at 3:15 P.M. and returned two hours later with a guilty verdict. The first vote was unanimous for conviction. Thomas Jennings became the first person in the United States convicted by the use of fingerprints as evidence.7 They also voted on the appropriate punishment; all but one of the jurors voted for the death penalty. The one holdout wanted life imprisonment. By the third ballot, however, the jury voted unanimously for the death sentence.8 A ball was held, likely by members of the Black community in Chicago, to raise funds for Jennings’s appeal. Renowned antilynching advocate Ida B. Wells-Barnett sought clemency for Jennings. She argued, “It is a well-known fact that when a crime is committed that the police if possible fasten the crime upon a negro.”9 The appeal was unsuccessful. In February 1912, Jennings was joined at the gallows by four men convicted of killing farmer Fred Guelzow. As Jennings walked to the gallows with a priest by his side, Thomas Jennings sits accused of murdering Clarence Hiller on September 19, 1910.
Shortly afterward, while riding a streetcar in the same neighborhood, Thomas Jennings encountered four police officers who had just gone off duty. They found a revolver on him, a torn jacket, fresh blood on his clothes, and a wound above his wrist. The officers were not aware that a murder had occurred but took him to the station where Jennings claimed the wound was an old one. A doctor disputed that, and Jennings was quickly and formally accused of Hiller’s murder after a coroner’s investigation and held without bail.3 Two months later, during Jennings’s trial, Elizabeth McNabb, her daughter Jessie, and Clarence Halsted all identified Jennings as the person who broke into their homes. The intruder lit matches in order to see, and the witnesses said the illumination allowed them to identify the defendant.4 The most controversial aspect of the trial occurred when the Judge Marcus Kavanagh allowed comparisons of fingerprints as evidence. Jennings’s attorney, William G. Anderson, fought against the introduction of this evidence, arguing that there existed “only one case on record in the world where fingerprints were attempted to be introduced in a criminal trial. That was an old English case, and it was then held that a special law would have to be passed to legalize such evidence.”5 6 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Ida B. Wells was an investigative journalist and antilynching activist who moved to Chicago in the late nineteenth century, c. 1920.
The trial of Thomas Jennings as well as his execution was front page news.
he kissed the crucifix before his face was covered and the trapdoor opened. Jennings did not share any last words. There was not a confession unless it was given privately to Father O’Brien. It was a record-setting execution—“Five Lives Forfeit to Relentless Hangman: Courts Deaf to All Pleas and Four Whites and One Negro Take Leap into Eternity From Cook County Scaffold.” The largest number of people hanged together in Chicago before this execution were four men sentenced to death in 1887 for the notorious Haymarket Affair. Two hundred people witnessed the executions; it is unknown whether or not Anderson attended. Jennings was spared the indignity of having his body placed on public display, unlike the four white murderers; more than three thousand people went
to the undertaker’s to view their bodies.10 According to The New York Times, “The five hangings caused many to discuss the abolishment of capital punishment in Illinois.”11 Jennings’s attorney William Grant Anderson was born on April 27, 1870, in New Orleans, Louisiana, and was described as a mulatto on the 1870 census recorded when he was just a few days old. Anderson’s father, Alexander, owned a barbershop. Family lore suggested that Alexander was a Swedish immigrant—but Census records listed his birthplace as Louisiana. Alexander was around forty years old and his thirty-eight-year-old wife Sarah’s occupation was listed as “keeping house.” William was then the youngest of seven siblings. In 1880, several family members lived briefly in St. Louis, Missouri. Sarah, now a widow, supported her four children by renting furnished rooms.12 Daughter Lucy was now thirteen and William, listed as “Willy,” was ten, and they were joined by two new sisters, nine-year-old Mary and four-year-old Adele.13 They moved to Chicago between 1880 and 1882. An article on the front page of the February 21, 1891, Saint Paul Appeal, “Sketch of the Life of one of our Most Promising Young Men,” described how Anderson, the only son living in Chicago, took on a variety of jobs to help support the family, but also continued his education so he could eventually move beyond physical labor.14 Anderson’s youth limited the jobs available to him when he first arrived in Illinois; he sometimes lied about his date of birth to qualify for them. He worked variously as a bootblack (or shoeshine boy) and other odd jobs that he could do after school, such as selling newspapers, running errands for a clothing company, and as a store clerk and wrapper. His daughter Regina recalled visiting Anderson in Chicago around 1942 to watch him win a court case. After court, Anderson showed her his name on “an inscription on an old stone hitching post dedicated to the newspaper boys who delivered their papers despite the famous blizzard.”15 In 1890, Anderson opened a small grocery store. An ad in the St. Paul Appeal implored readers to “Call on W. G. Anderson, 2706 State Street, for your groceries and thereby manifest your race pride. Mr. Anderson is now opened for business, having a stock of fine groceries, teas, coffees, spices, etc.” This endeavor lasted for only four months before unknown “circumstances rendered his selling out advisable.”16 After learning shorthand, he became a stenographer in a law office while he studied law.17 In 1896, at age twenty-six, he was admitted to the bar. That same year, on June 12, he married twenty-year-old Margaret Simons.18 Six hundred invitations went out for the wedding and reception that lasted nearly the entire day and spanned two states. The couple married in Margaret’s father’s church in Marion, Indiana, at 10:00 A.M. in a Habeas Corpus | 7
Clockwise from left: Anderson’s first wife, Margaret Simons, Maurice Barton Anderson, Mercedes Alice Anderson, c. 1915, Regina Anderson (later Andrews), c. 1919., was a playwright, librarian with the New York Public Library, and an important member of the Harlem Renaissance. Photographs from the Regina Andrews Photograph Collection.
wedding predicted to be the town’s “event of the season.”19 Attorney Fred W. Burrows served as Anderson’s best man. After the wedding, the couple, family, and members of the wedding party hopped on the noon train scheduled to arrive in Chicago at 5:00 P.M. The reception was from 7:00 to 10:00 P.M. in Anderson’s home on 3449 Dearborn Street. The next day the couple enjoyed a nearly two-week honeymoon visiting various 8 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Midwestern towns including Waukesha, Wisconsin, and St. Paul, Minneapolis, and Lake Minnetonka in Minnesota. The couple had four children—son Maurice and daughters Mildred (who died in infancy), Regina, and the youngest, Mercedes (who died as a teenager). The family eventually purchased a home in the Hyde Park neighborhood at 530 E. Forty-Fifth Street. Soon after his marriage, Anderson’s career began to flourish.
In 1904, Anderson took a break from murder cases and worked on a lawsuit about race and civil rights. A Chinese restaurant on South Clark Street refused to serve two African American men. The Chicago Tribune called the case a “curious spectacle” because two Black men were seeking justice against four Chinese men. The establishment told the two Black men that they were out of the dishes they requested. The men returned with constables who arrested the restaurant workers. The Black men felt that the owners had violated Illinois's civil rights act, which gave them the right to access all restaurants and theaters. Anderson asserted, “They were refused service in this restaurant because they were not white. It is high time that these defendants were impressed with the equality of colored with white men in this country.” The restaurant workers’ attorney, Thomas Milchrist, argued, “The evidence shows that these negroes elected to ask service in this restaurant because they knew they were not welcome there. My Chinese clients have a high class of patronage, and there are many white persons who are no more welcome than these colored persons. The whole prosecution has been malicious and suspicious, to say the least.” An all-white jury acquitted the restaurant workers after only a few minutes of deliberation, deciding that the Black men “had not suffered sufficient impairment of their rights to justify a fine.” The Chicago Daily Tribune headline summarized the case, “Human Colors Clash: Yellow Wins Right to Snub Black and Refuse It Chop Suey.”20 Race was also part of the focus of a 1905 trial involving a love triangle, though the trial came to an unusual end. Anderson and his client, Lee A. Lamkins, variously described in news articles as a “Negro” or “mulatto,” were the first to arrive for the court case and were standing together when they saw Robert D. Stetson enter the courthouse. Stetson, a white man, was suing Lamkins, a man of color, for alienation of affection for allegedly having an affair with his wife. Her parents and brother supported her husband, tried to persuade her to return to him, and were prepared to testify on Stetson’s behalf. Her father said, “he could not understand his daughter’s conduct, that she had been given a good education, including two years in college, and that her husband had given her a good home and was devoted to her.”21 Stetson pulled out his revolver when he saw Lamkins, who took off running through the courthouse. Stetson chased him, with both men knocking down people as they ran through the building. In one courtroom, Lamkins hid behind a judge, which did not prevent Stetson from firing a bullet that whizzed by the judge’s head. Lamkins tried to escape but got caught in a scuffle, and Stetson pressed the gun to his side and fired at least twice, filling the courtroom with gun-
powder. When the gun misfired during an attempted third shot, Stetson used the weapon to beat Lamkins, who tried to fight him off until a court clerk used a heavy docket book to knock Stetson off of Lamkins, who was then detained by two constables, with Stetson declaring, “I guess he’s got what he deserves.”22 Stetson’s wife witnessed the shooting. Mrs. Stetson said the charges were lies and reportedly “declared that her husband was guilty of cold blooded murder and that she hoped he would hang for it.” Anderson emerged unscathed physically. Meanwhile, Lee A. Lamkins appeared to be “probably fatally wounded.”23 Anderson’s career negatively influenced his marriage, which lasted sixteen years before he divorced Margaret. She accused him of having an affair with one of his clients, a woman seeking a divorce. The newspaper The Broad Ax noted, “this particular Colored lady is exceedingly good looking, and . . . most any married woman would feel a little bit uncomfortable if she would happen to get a little too close to her husband.” 24 Margaret was awarded the family home worth about $8,000 and received $90 a month for child support.25
The Minneapolis newspaper the Broad Axe covered news of Anderson’s divorce in 1911.
During this time, Anderson would meet one of his more notorious clients—self-described Captain George Wellington Streeter. On July 10, 1886, Streeter claimed his boat, the Reutan, crashed into the shoreline of Chicago near the Gold Coast neighborhood. However, the “[w]eather Bureau records failed to show a storm at the time he mentioned.”26 Streeter decided that he and his wife were settlers and claimed the land using squatters’ rights. He encouraged people to dump their debris from the Great Chicago Fire and other construction sites Habeas Corpus | 9
Cap Streeter’s boat Ma sits at the mouth of the Chicago River, c. 1925 (above). Captain O’Toole, assistant state’s attorney Evans, attorney E. G. Ballard, Mrs. Elma Streeter, Harry Deklermanker, and George W. Streeter stand in the West Chicago Avenue police court in November 1915 (below).
10 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
George Wellington “Cap” Streeter sitting with his third wife, Elma Lockwood Streeter, and a dog in front of their home in Chicago in May 1915. Streeter was embroiled in a fight to keep claim on Streeterville and stop others from building dwellings there.
around his boat in order to build up his land. Streeter claimed that his parcel was not part of the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois but part of the United States—a sovereign state that he called the Deestrict [sic] of Lake Michigan. Eventually the land expanded to 183 acres of valuable property on Chicago’s shoreline. For decades, officials battled to get Streeter off of this land, some of which he sold as shares to interested individuals. Since Streeter considered his district a sovereign state, he felt that he did not have to abide by the laws of the city of Chicago or the state of Illinois. He opened a bar that served alcohol on Sundays until it was raided by the police and torn down.27 Streeter often used boiling water and gunfire to defend his land. One incident resulted in the death of a government official; Streeter was convicted of manslaughter and put in a penitentiary with an indeterminate sentence of one year to life.28 Streeter wanted out. The Chicago Defender recorded what happened next: “after using every device known to the best criminal lawyers of Chicago, Captain Streeter, while still languishing in Joliet, secured the services of W. G. Anderson, who had at that time developed into a tech-
nical lawyers of some repute.” After Streeter was released,29 he apparently “forgot the insignificant matter of his attorney’s fee.” For ten years Anderson fought to collect $10,000 and finally succeeded.30 He used the money to purchase a new eight-room home at 3405 Forest Avenue “finished throughout in mahogany.”31,32 In 1910, Anderson, along with his partner, Edward H. Wright, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett, saved a Black man from an inevitable lynching in a case that Anderson most likely did pro bono.33 The actual crime happened in Arkansas, where twenty-seven-year-old Steve Green, a Black man, had shot at and killed his former employer, Ed Seidle, a white man. A mob chased him, most likely to lynch him, but despite being injured by gunshots to his neck, arm, and thigh, Green managed to flee to Chicago. He had put pepper in his shoes to prevent bloodhounds from tracking him, and when he came across hogs in a mud pit he joined them, rolling around in the muck, to further disguise his scent. Chicago police caught him, and after five days in custody, Green allegedly confessed to killing the Seidle over a supposed land dispute. As attorneys Anderson and Wright argued in court on a writ of habeas Habeas Corpus | 11
Portrait of lawyer Edward H. Wright, Anderson’s law partner, c. 1923. The Chicago Defender covered Steve Green’s case in 1910, noting Anderson and Wright’s use of the writ of habeas corpus in his defense.
corpus to prevent Green from being returned to Arkansas, the Chicago police actually turned the fugitive over to Arkansas officers, and they began the journey home. On that stormy night, however, filled with rain and lightning that “seemed to rent the very earth” a group of Black citizens used “[e]very method know to modern ingenuity . . . to intercept the prisoner before crossing the line of the state. Telegraph, telephone, and wireless telegraphy.” Finally, they reached the sheriff downstate in Cairo, Illinois, then a few miles from the state line, in time to inform him and the Arkansas officials that a writ of habeas corpus had been issued.34 Green exclaimed, “Thank the Lord, my prayers have been answered.”35 Anderson and Wright’s initial strategy paid off; their client was not returned to Arkansas. Anderson remarked, “Green’s fear that he will be thrown into a bonfire is not without foundation.”36 Anderson further argued that Green said he killed the man in self-defense but “if he had the best defense in the world it would not avail him in Arkansas. The many lynchings there prove it.”37 Green readily confessed to the shooting, telling the judge, “Your honor, I don’t know whether I killed the man or not, but, your honor, I won’t tell no lie; I did fire a shot, but whether I killed the man I don’t know for sure.”38 Rather than a land dispute, Green said he was offered more money to work for another man, and as soon as his contract with Seidle expired, Green left. Seidle went to Green’s home with three friends and shot Green when he refused to return to work for him. Green retrieved his 12 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
own weapon and shot at Seidle. He temporarily hid with friends until he could escape. They knew that Green would be lynched for what he had done. When the judge asked Green if he was willing to go back to Arkansas, Green replied, “No, your honor, because I knows the nature of that country.”39 African American organizations in Chicago banded together to save Green’s life. They made plans to contact Governor Deneen to prevent Green from being returned to Arkansas, where they asserted that he would not get a fair trial. A delegation met with the Governor who assured them that he would make sure Green received fair treatment. While Green was imprisoned in Chicago, the officers from Arkansas who came to retrieve him told Green he was the most important Black man “in the United States since there was a reception committee of a thousand waiting for him in Arkansas with a lighted fire.” The judge freed Green based upon the technicalities argued by his attorneys. An editorial praised the work of Green’s attorneys for “their bold effort and successful achievement.”40 The following year, Anderson took on another high-profile case. In the fall of 1912, African American boxer and heavyweight champion Jack Johnson was arrested in Chicago for the violation of the Mann Act, a law against transporting white women across state lines for illegal activities, commonly referred to as the “white-slave traffic act.” The original aim of the act was to discourage people from transporting women across state lines for prostitution.
Boxer Jack Johnson stands on the steps in front of the county jail in Joliet, Illinois, in 1925 (left). Mrs. Cameron-Falconet (seated) and her daughter Lucille Cameron on October 23, 1912. Lucille had an affair with boxer Jack Johnson. They married in December 1912.
Johnson’s arrest was widely considered payback by white prosecutors for his multiple liaisons with white women. He was indicted for “transporting Belle Schreiber of Pittsburgh from that city to Chicago for immoral purposes.”41 Johnson needed fifty thousand dollars in cash or thirty thousand dollars worth of real estate bonds to get out of jail. Anderson and Wright entered the case on the local level by fighting to obtain a bail bond for him.42 Finally, after a week in jail, Johnson was released and returned home with his mother, sisters, and Anderson.43 Against Anderson’s advice, Johnson appealed directly to the federal attorney. Johnson wanted to settle the case with a fine.44 Finally, Johnson’s case was dismissed for lack of evidence of an abduction. The Chicago Defender gave all of the credit to his African American attorneys, Wright and Anderson, noting, “for a whole week some of Chicago’s ablest white lawyers had been endeavoring to ‘land their man’ on bail.” The reporter noted that “the people are pleased that the champion selected two able race lawyers to handle this case.”45 After the dismissal, Jack Johnson wed Lucille Cameron much to the dismay of his supporters. According to Jack Johnson’s biographer, Geoffrey C. Ward, “as soon as the news of Johnson’s marriage to a second white woman broke, his two Black attorneys, Edward H. Wright and W. G. Anderson, went to court to have their names stricken from the records. They were so appalled, they assured the
New York Times, that they no longer wanted to be associated with him.” Ward surmised that Johnson had become a political liability for Wright but “Anderson’s break with Johnson was more symbolic than real. He continued to work with him on a scheme that promised to profit both men by exploiting the fears of well-to-do bigots. The story surfaced just before Christmas in 1912. Johnson had anonymously obtained an option to buy the big lakeside home . . . in the heart of one of Chicago’s most exclusive summer colonies, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. . . . The house was surrounded by the vacation homes of some of Chicago’s wealthiest families.”46 Johnson claimed the home was a gift for his new bride.47 To further alarm the residents of Lake Geneva, Anderson explained that the property was not just for Johnson but for a group of ten Black men collectively buying the property with Johnson as the leader. They intended to establish a Lincoln Social Athletic Club. Residents of Lake Geneva met to discuss how to legally prevent Johnson from acquiring the home. W. H. Harris, a real estate man, all but admitted that this proposed purchase was a scam. He said, “The purchase of this property is but part of a plan of negroes to acquire property in desirable residential districts and then sell out at a profit when the white residents learn negroes are to be their neighbors . . . Attorney Anderson was at the head of the scheme.” Anderson angrily denied this claim.48 After Habeas Corpus | 13
In the late nineteenth century, Lake Geneva, shown here in 1935, became a popular resort town for many wealthy Chicago families, including the Wrigleys.
Christmas, Anderson told the papers that he would have a dramatic announcement—he planned to “surrender his option” to buy the Sherman estate. Anderson chided the residents of Lake Geneva who had protested Jack Johnson’s proposed presence in their town. He said, “If Mr. Johnson lived there his presence would have the effect not only of attracting a large number of desirable residents of the south side [of Chicago] to the place but would make it the best advertised suburb in America.”49 Some of Anderson’s legal work was more profitable than noble. In a 1925 case, for example, Anderson argued that his client Pete Schmitz was the rightful heir to his wife’s inheritance because she died without a will, despite the fact that Schmitz stabbed her and cut off her head. A jury found Schmitz to be insane, and he served one year at the Chester State Hospital. Upon his release, he petitioned the probate court for his wife’s estate totaling $475. Anderson also wanted to set aside the jury’s verdict of insanity because then Schmitz would be able to get his own estate valued at $3,000. No doubt Anderson would get some of that money too.50 Anderson’s legal exploits likely galled prosecutors and judges; the fact that he was a successful Black professional probably added to his reputation. Anderson negotiated the release of convicted murderers and, in at least one case, a confessed murderer. In 1933, a judge sentenced Anderson, then sixty-three, to six months in jail for contempt and accused him of falsifying court records after his client, a Black man named Roy Hall, was found guilty of stealing an automobile but successfully appealed his conviction. The judge who initially found Hall guilty sentenced Anderson to jail, claiming that he provided falsified court records. Anderson said the judge did not have the jurisdiction to make that decision, and the Illinois Appellate court agreed.51 14 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Personal legal complications did not discourage Anderson from practicing law. In 1936, at age sixty-six, Anderson “discovered a technical error in [a] jury verdict and obtained his client’s release on a writ of habeas corpus.”52 In 1944, at age seventy-four, a newspaper reported that Anderson helped to win another client his freedom using a writ of habeas corpus. S. Jackson had escaped a chain gang and said he would rather die than return to Georgia, claiming he was bludgeoned into confessing to a crime.53 “Habeas Corpus Expert Dies” declared Anderson’s final headline. William Grant Anderson died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-eight in Chicago in his Vernon Avenue home purchased long before with proceeds from the Streeter case. His second wife, Sara, and daughter Regina survived Anderson.54 He had worked as an attorney for nearly fifty years. Ethelene Whitmire is a professor in the Department of AfroAmerican Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of a biography of Anderson's daughter, Regina Anderson Andrews, Harlem Renaissance Librarian (University of Illinois Press, 2014). I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. Page 4, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections, 6167ac6d-e01c-56d6-e040-e00a1806389d. 5, top: DN-0008838, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection; bottom: Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1902. 6, top: DN0008842, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection; bottom: ICHi-012867. 7, Chicago Daily Tribune, February 15, 1912. 8, clockwise from left: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections, ac6d-e026-56d6-e040e00a1806389d; 6167ac6d-e027-56d6-e040-e00a1806389d; 6167ac6d-e01e-56d6-e040-e00a1806389d; 6167ac6d-e02056d6-e040-e00a1806389d. 9, Broad Axe, September 23, 1911. 10, top: ICHi-026658; bottom: DN-0065392, Chicago SunTimes/Chicago Daily News collection. 11, DN-0064419, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 12, left: ICHi-059955; right: Chicago Defender, September 24, 1910. 13, left: SDN-065687B, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection; right: DN-0059798 Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 14, courtesy of the Curt Teich Postcard Archives Digital Collection, Newberry Library. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3rd Edition (New York: Touchstone Books, 2005); Paul D. Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012), reprint; Ian Haney López, White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition (New York: New York University Press, 2006).
ENDNOTES 1 “Joseph Wyman is Freed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 26, 1900. 2 “Steve Green Liberated,” Chicago Defender, September 24, 1910. Anderson’s practice was only six years old and he would have both Black and white clients throughout his legal career. 3 “Jury says Negro killed Hiller,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 28, 1910, p. 24; “Negro is murderer,” The Pointer (no date or page number). 4 “Three witnesses identify Negro,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 4, 1910, p. 14; “Finger Print Conviction,” Chicago Defender, December 3, 1910, p.1. 5 “Match hands to hang a man,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 6, 1910, p. 7. 6 “Print of fingers dooms murderer,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 1, 1910, p. 1. 7 Francine Uenuma, “The First Criminal Trial That Used Fingerprints as Evidence,” Smithsonian Magazine, December 5, 2018, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-case-where-fingerprints-wereused-evidence-180970883/. 8 “Fresh Paint Traps Slayer,” New York Times, November 11, 1910, p. 10. 9 “Negro must hang; fate of 4 others in balance today,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 15, 1912, p. 1; “Jennings to Die; 4 Other Slayers Hear Fate Today,” Chicago Record-Herald, February 15, 1912, p. 1, 3. 10 “Five Slayers Die; Hanging Record,” Chicago Daily Tribune, February 17, 1912, p. 3. 11 “Five Men Die on Gallows.” New York Times, February 17, 1912, p. 4. 12 Census record 1870. 13 “Sketch of the Life of one of our Most Promising Young Men,” St. Paul Appeal, February 21, 1891. 14 Ibid. 15 David Levering Lewis interview with Regina in Voices from the Renaissance Collection, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 16 “Sketch of the Life of one of our Most Promising Young Men,” St. Paul Appeal, February 21, 1891.
17 It is unclear whether Anderson attended law school or studied and passed the bar.
34 “Steve Green Liberated,” Chicago Defender, September 24, 1910, p. 1.
18 “Sketch of the Life of one of our Most Promising Young Men,” St. Paul Appeal, February 21, 1891.
35 “Chicago Police Gives Colored Man Up to Lynchers,” Chicago Defender, August 27, 1910, p. 2.
19 Regina Andrews archive materials.
36 Ibid.
20 “Human Colors Clash: Yellow Wins Right to Snub Black and Refuse It Chop Suey,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 13, 1904.
37 Ibid.
21 “Husband Shoots His Negro Rival,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 19, 1905.
38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 “Editorial,” Chicago Defender, October 8, 1910, p. 2.
22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. 24 “Mrs. Margaret Anderson Secures a Divorce from Her Husband,” Broad Axe, September 23, 1911, p. 1. 25 “Famous Habeas Corpus Attorney Gets Divorce,” Baltimore Afro American, September 30, 1911. 26 “‘Ma’ Streeter Fights for Chicago Lands,” New York Times, May 27, 1924, p. 23. 27 “Chicago’s ‘Oasis’ Raided by Police,” New York Times, November 15, 1915, p. 8. 28 “Cell Is Streeter’s Lot: Lakefront Squatter Found Guilty of Manslaughter,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 4, 1902. 29 A writ of habeas corpus was filed, arguing that the law on manslaughter is “inconsistent in regard to the time a prisoner shall serve” because the pardon board has the power to deny credit for good time. “Seeks to Release Streeter: Attorney to Plead Inconsistency in Statutes Fixing the Penalty for Manslaughter,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 9, 1903, p. 12. 30 “Attorney W. G. Anderson Wins a Notable Decision,” Chicago Defender, January 23, 1914, p. 7. 31 “Attorney Opens New Home,” Chicago Defender, July 18, 1914, p. 3. 32 “‘Cap.’ Streeter’s Land Sold Again: ‘Deestrict’ [sic] Goes Under Hammer for Second Time in Ten Years to Satisfy a Judgment of $10,000 in Favor of Attorney W. G. Anderson—Brings $2,525,” Chicago Defender, December 23, 1911. 33 Christopher Robert Reed, Black Chicago’s First Century: Volume 1, 1833-1900 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005).
41 “Jack Johnson Held in $30,000 Bonds,” New York Times, November 8, 1912, p. 3. 42 “Johnson Bail Denied Again,” New York Times, November 13, 1912, p. 7; “Fight Anew To Free Johnson,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 13, 1912, p. 5. 43 “Johnson Let Out On $30,000 Bond,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 16, 1912, p. 7. 44 “Johnson Appeals for ‘Just A Fine’,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 17, 1912, p. 5. 45 “Jack Johnson Wins Abduction Suit – L. Cameron Would Not Appear Against Him,” Chicago Defender, November 23, 1912, p. 1. 46 Geoffrey C. Ward, Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 323. 47 “Villa Which Johnson Wanted for Pleasure Club,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 28, 1912, p. 2. 48 “Johnson Deal Not Closed,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 25, 1912, p. 13. 49 “Auction for Johnson Villa,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 27, 1912, p. 2. 50 “Pete Schmitz Gets Estate of His Slain Wife,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 5, 1925. 51 “Appeals Court Frees Lawyer Of Contempt,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 11, 1933. 52 “Habeas corpus expert wins client’s freedom,” Philadelphia Tribune, October 8, 1936, p. 17. 53 “Ga. convict wins freedom in Chicago,” Atlanta Daily World, May 24, 1944, p. 1. 54 “William G. Anderson,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 9, 1950, Obituaries, A6; “Habeas Corpus Expert Dies,” Chicago Defender, January 14, 1950, p. 11.
Habeas Corpus | 15
Education, Politics, and Race in Chicago, 1926–67 Built as part of Chicago’s junior high experiment, Emil G. Hirsch School saw its share of social and political turmoil in the mid-twentieth century. W I L L I A M A . H O I S I N GT O N J R .
hicago public schools have weathered changes from the strategies of school superintendents to cronyism in city politics, from the economic effects of world wars and the Great Depression to US Supreme Court decisions. Starting in 1924, Chicago schools underwent a major change that introduced junior high schools as a three-year landing point for adolescents between elementary and high school. The junior high system ended in 1933, in part due to personnel clashing and political changes at the city level. Politics would continue to affect the structure of Chicago public schools, leading to protests and student action. At the center of many of these changes was Emil G. Hirsch Junior High School (now Emil G. Hirsch Metropolitan High School), which sits on the western boundary of historic Grand Crossing Park at 7740 South Ingleside Avenue. In August 1925, an architect’s rendering of the new junior high school appeared in the Chicago Tribune, and the school opened for classes on September 1, 1926.1 The school was as impressive as its namesake, the Rabbi Emil Gustav Hirsch, the leader for over forty years of the Chicago Sinai Congregation, a large and influential “radical” Reform
C
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Portrait of Dr. Emil G. Hirsch, a Reform movement rabbi. Emil G. Hirsch Metropolitan High School, located at South Ingleside Ave. and 78th street, opened in 1926.
William McAndrew, superintendent of schools, stands with a group of students and places letters on their jackets in 1926.
Jewish congregation on Chicago’s South Side.2 Board of Education architect Edgar D. Martin designed “a handsome red brick school with cream-colored terra cotta details,” combining “elements of the Gothic and English Tudor revival styles.” The building was “E-shaped in plan with the long side fronting onto the park.” The design apparently pleased its architect as it was used for other schools in the city, including the North Side’s Roger C. Sullivan Junior High, constructed at the same time as Hirsch.3 Touted as the “prize schools of the city,” Hirsch and Sullivan had several special features, including separate gymnasiums for boys and girls, an indoor swimming pool, a kitchen and cafeteria, a large library, and music and art studios.4 Hirsch and Sullivan were part of the junior high “system change” implemented during the four-year tenure of reform-minded Superintendent of Schools William A. McAndrew (1924–28).5 The junior highs were the key element of a “6-3-3” plan (as opposed to the existing “8-4” plan) intended to reduce overcrowding
in elementary schools, “to group the adolescent grades together,” and to act as a transitional educational institution, preparing students of diverse backgrounds, abilities, and interests for “senior” highs or, as the case may be, for specialized vocational schools or entry into the job market.6 At Hirsch, students chose courses from among five curricula: general academic, technical, commercial, practical arts, and household arts, all supplemented by homeroom activities, all-school assemblies, music and art classes, student clubs (dramatics, debating, radio, first-aid, dancing, harmonica), and physical education and sports programs. By allowing students some level of choice at this point of their schooling, educators hoped that junior high would arouse and maintain student interest, stimulate initiative and exploration, broaden their outlook on life, and, as a result, encourage students to stay in school longer (at a time when there was no compulsory education requirement in Chicago schools and drop-outs began during the elementary years), Education, Politics, and Race | 17
produce better in-school work, and contribute to the making of a good citizen. Advocates of junior high schools linked them to the educational philosophy championed at the University of Chicago and especially to the work of educational reformer John Dewey, who argued that the junior high would help the students’ social, intellectual, physical, and psychological adjustment to a fast-paced post–World War I world. Alert to progressive trends in education, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) had experimented with “pilot” junior highs since 1918.7 But there had been nothing as sweeping as McAndrew’s paradigm shift and no one as self-assured and forceful as the superintendent himself. McAndrew made the junior highs the centerpiece of his reforms, committing CPS to an extensive multiyear school building program and a lengthy transition period from the old system to the new. And since the junior highs offered an “enriched curriculum” based on student intelligence and development, McAndrew proposed something else quite novel in public education: achievement tests for all students entering the
A group of students stand at the stairs during the formal opening ceremony of Thomas J. Kelly Junior High School in 1929.
schools, then separating the students into four groups— rapid progress, normal progress, slow progress, and average pupils. After ten weeks they would be tested again and “reclassified” on the basis of what they had accomplished.8
These pages from the 1930 Hirsch Gleaner, Hirsch Junior High’s yearbook, show the variety of extracurricular activities in which students participated. 18 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
In addition to the junior high schools, McAndrew embraced educational efficiency by introducing the “platoon” teaching system to the upper grades in the elementary schools.9 He instituted tighter top-down administrative control with more powerful assistant and district superintendents. He endorsed greater cooperation with leaders of business and industry, soliciting their advice on both curriculum and organization. He also initiated a closer supervision of classroom teachers and even abolished the long-time teachers’ councils that had advised previous superintendents.10 The proposed changes fostered upset among various stakeholders. Parents were confused, and the Chicago Teachers Federation quickly denounced McAndrew’s “unholy trinity”—the junior highs, the platoon plan, and intelligence tests. Teachers balked at the notion of increased classroom supervision and resented the abolition of the teachers’ councils. McAndrew’s reforms challenged their competence, restricted their classroom freedom, and created some anxiety about the security of their jobs and salaries and the importance of their professional status and rank.11 The Chicago Federation of Labor attacked the junior highs as a betrayal of the egalitarian ideals of American education by reducing the period of common education—the eight-year elementary school—by two years and sorting out (or “tracking”) students at an early age, some for advanced study, others for vocational schools or the industrial work force. “I have tried to make it clear,” said Victor A. Olander, an eloquent spokesman for organized labor, “that what we fear most in the junior high, the so-called junior high plan, is the conscious and deliberate purpose of labeling a majority of our people as intellectual inferiors [through the use of achievement tests] because they are willing to do the productive work of the world.”12 According to Olander, the junior high would inevitably drag the class struggle in the form of strikes, already responsible for bloodshed on Chicago’s streets, into the schools. Despite the opposition, the junior high schools succeeded. Eighteen months into the new system, it seemed clear that they had stimulated students to continue their high school education at a rate nearly twice that under the old system. Assistant superintendent William J. Bogan concluded: “The remarkable holding power of the junior high school justifies its rapid expansion, and a report of costs shows that in a twenty-five-year period a change from the old type of school to the junior high type would result in a great savings.”13 But even with several significant reforms in place, McAndrew clashed with city leaders and the highly politicized Board of Education on matters of his stewardship and decision-making authority. A key issue involved teacher (and organized labor’s) discontent with him and the power this could have at the ballot box.
Victor Olander (above), secretary of the Federation of Labor, sits in his office in 1917. William J. Bogan (below), superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, speaks at an event in 1933.
Education, Politics, and Race | 19
William E. Dever (above, in 1927) was mayor of Chicago from 1923 to 1927. William Hale Thompson (below, in 1926) served as mayor of Chicago from 1915 to 1923 and again from 1927 to 1931. He was the last Republican mayor of Chicago.
20 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Also, McAndrew resisted the use of political patronage in hiring throughout the school system, from the administrators and classroom teachers to the janitors, engineers, and custodians. As a result, and even with a reformminded mayor in charge of the city—Democrat William E. Dever (1923–27)—McAndrew’s days as superintendent were numbered.14 Not surprisingly, the Republican candidate for mayor in spring 1927, William Hale Thompson, already wellknown for his politics of patronage during two earlier mayoral terms, made McAndrew’s removal a top priority. Thompson’s “America First” campaign rhetoric, pitched to ethnic voters and peppered with references to America’s foreign-born Revolutionary War heroes “with a Chicago connection”—Tadeusz Kos´ciuszko, Casimir Pulaski, and Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben among them—covered up his true reasons for his wish to fire McAndrew. Thompson denounced McAndrew, an outspoken and unapologetic pacifist, as someone who, had he lived in 1776, would have sided with the British (or worse, as Thompson put it, become “a stool pigeon for the King of England”). He accused McAndrew of lacking respect for George Washington by not requiring that his portrait be displayed in every elementary school classroom, of harboring a general indifference to the battlefield heroics of the American Revolution, and of choosing pro-British textbooks for classroom use.15 Despite McAndrew’s impeccable American credentials— he was born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, and was an early champion of teaching US civics—the anti-McAndrew clatter made progress. After Thompson’s stunning election day victory over Dever, the Thompson-appointed Board of Education suspended McAndrew for “insubordination,” then removed him from office after a sham trial that lasted six months.16 After McAndrew’s departure, the school board quickly modified or eliminated some of his reforms, but the controversy over the junior highs had subsided. At the same time, however, the enrollment success of the junior highs—a credit to McAndrew’s dramatic expansion of the school system coupled with Chicago’s population increase throughout the 1920s—contributed to overcrowding. In September 1924 the first five junior highs had enrolled 5,121 pupils; in May 1933, twenty-nine junior highs had a total enrollment of 47,065 students. Although these statistics were impressive, only one-third of Chicago’s seventh, eighth, and ninth graders could attend a junior high due to a lack of space, while the rest attended traditional elementary and high schools.17 In 1933, Hirsch began to require some ninth-grade students to be taught at “Hirsch branches” in three elementary schools (Avalon Park, Burnside, and Cornell), while seventh grade pupils at Dixon, Ruggles, and Park Manor elementaries were held back rather than being sent on to
A horse-drawn wagon carries Mayor Anton J. Cermak’s coffin during his funeral procession on March 10, 1933. Mayor Cermak was in a parade with President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami, Florida, on February 15, when he was shot by bullets believed to have been meant for the president.
Hirsch. Frustrated parents of ninth-graders (who had just graduated from Mann, Bradwell, and Bryn Mawr elementary schools and now faced a year in a Hirsch branch), demanded that Hirsch be converted to a four-year “senior” high, returning all seventh and eighth graders to their elementary schools, picking up the displaced ninth graders, and welcoming new students in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades from overcrowded Hyde Park and Bowen senior highs.18 This was a new challenge to the junior highs—and specifically to Hirsch—and it presented a new threat to the 6-3-3 system. The hastily organized South Shore Parents’ Association (SSPA), which represented the parents of the two hundred displaced ninth graders, was supported by a cluster of South Side business, professional, and community groups, including the local American Legion post. In mid-February 1933, it backed up its call for Hirsch’s conversion to a senior high with a petition carrying sixteen thousand signatures, an amazing feat of grassroots organization, and it threatened to press its own candidate for the Board of Education on the mayor. Both the
petition and the threat captured the attention (and the support) of the Democratic ward committeeman who promised to bring the petition before the Board of Education and the City Council.19 Even with such a dramatic start, the “Hirsch Plan” faced an uphill struggle. The Board of Education tabled any consideration of it, saying the plan was simply “not practicable.” The Hirsch Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) opposed it, as did various groups in the Chatham and Grand Crossing communities (including the parents of Hirsch seventh and eighth graders) who expressed indignation at being “robbed” of their junior high, which the Board of Education had called “the brightest spot in the Chicago school picture.” Even the South Shore Chamber of Commerce was lukewarm in its support, considering the plan was in no way a match for the Board of Education’s long-term building program, which projected three new schools (two junior highs and a senior high) for South Shore.20 Chicago politics suffered an unexpected jolt with the shooting of Mayor Anton J. Cermak in mid-February 1933, Education, Politics, and Race | 21
Mayor Edward J. Kelly in 1933. Kelly served as mayor of Chicago from 1933 to 1947.
which led to the swearing in of Edward J. Kelly as Cermak’s successor on April 14.21 Even with city politics uncertain during this unforeseen interlude, however, the SSPA pressed ahead, encouraged by Mayor Kelly’s appointment of five new trustees to the Board of Education, all of whom were pledged, so they said, to solving school problems and reducing costs in what could be called “corporate reform.”22 At the same time, William J. Bogan, McAndrew’s successor as superintendent of schools and a long-time champion of the junior highs (and vocational education as well) made it clear that he wanted nothing at all to do with the Hirsch Plan, insisting that it “would wreck the [6-3-3] system” that he had helped create.23 The Great Depression determined the next series of moves. In a stunning announcement in July 1933, the Board of Education adopted a sweeping economic program that sliced $5 million from the school budget and abolished the “costly” junior highs, returning the school system to its former 8-4 pattern. The Chicago Tribune’s education editor described it as, “the biggest bombshell of this most sensational upheaval in Chicago’s school history.”24 One reporter lampooned the sumptuous “club house style” that he said characterized Chicago’s junior high schools. Referring specifically to Hirsch, he added: “The observer notices upon entering the main lobby the comfortable lounging chairs and settees grouped about the wood-burning fireplace.”25 22 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Once described as the key element in school reform in Chicago, the junior highs lasted only nine years. They were now lumped among the expendable fads and frills of Chicago’s schools. Hirsch immediately became a fouryear high school, realizing the hope of the SSPA in quite an unanticipated way. For a time it would also house a branch of Martha M. Ruggles Elementary School.26 All of the four-year schools that emerged from the 1933 reform had more students and fewer programs than before. The Board of Education cut faculty, staff, curricula, and activities in all the areas that it considered of little value, including music, band, art, and physical education— even the swimming pools were closed.27 In addition, hundreds of permanent, full-time “special positions” from the top to the bottom of the school system (including patronage-heavy janitors and custodians) were eliminated and up to one thousand teachers were slated to lose their jobs. In a final blow, teaching loads increased by 40 percent, salaries reduced by 23.5 percent, and the school year shortened by one month.28 The architect of this “most sensational upheaval” was Board of Education president James B. McCahey, head of the J. J. Dunn Coal Company, which supplied coal to the school system, and one of Mayor Kelly’s key appointees to the board. Business wise and politically savvy, McCahey acted quickly, quietly, and behind closed doors (often at the members-only Skyline Club on North Michigan Avenue) to meet a school crisis that went far beyond the concerns of Hirsch parents. Years later, he recalled that in 1933 the Board of Education was in
President of the Board of Education James B. McCahey in August 1933.
This souvenir pamphlet is from the 1933–34 A Century of Progress International Exposition world’s fair, the second one to be hosted in Chicago.
“virtual bankruptcy . . . with unpaid salaries totaling $26 million and unpaid bills amounting to $5.5 million, with a treasury depleted, no market for tax warrants, and expenses far in excess of income, with scholastic standards and student morale gravely impaired.”29 Whether this was the consequence of years of poor leadership and financial mismanagement or the result of the economic
hammer of the Great Depression made little difference to McCahey. He insisted that it was necessary “to overhaul and reorganize the entire school system.”30 The news of the Board of Education’s cuts touched off energetic public protests that came in the opening days of the 1933–34 world’s fair in Chicago, the Century of Progress International Exposition, which celebrated Education, Politics, and Race | 23
Chicago’s establishment as a town one hundred years before. In spite of the fair, no one could miss the scene of angry parents and teachers (and sympathetic union members) marching in downtown streets because the city’s school system had collapsed.31 In a blistering editorial in the Herald Examiner, the University of Chicago’s president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, denounced the board’s actions, insisting they must have been based “either on a complete misunderstanding of the purpose of public education, a selfish determination that its purpose shall not be fulfilled, or an ignorant belief that a system which has been wrecked can still function. The economic and social condition of Chicago will be worse for twenty-five years,” he predicted, “because of what the Board of Education has done.”32 To find a partner in recovery, McCahey turned to Washington and the federal government’s newly empowered Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which provided loans (with the school system’s real estate as collateral) to pay the teachers and begin needed maintenance on school buildings.33 This required business talent of a high order, the political support of the mayor’s office, and a single-minded commitment to public education. McCahey apparently had all three. Yet his tolerance (some said “embrace”) of political patronage and/or cronyism in the hiring of teachers and school staff; his indifference to teacher unions; his rumored ties to wellknown gangland figures; and even his religion (he was the first Catholic to preside over the Board of Education) tempered the enthusiasm of much of the public and the press.34 Nevertheless, McCahey guided the fortunes of Chicago’s schools for the next fourteen years—a remarkable tenure by any measure—even though he was ever criticized for exercising influence in matters where he had no expertise. Yet on McCahey’s resignation from the Board of Education—at the end of Mayor Kelly’s fourth term in office—an editorialist for the Chicago Tribune concluded that he had “rendered services of the highest order to the people of Chicago.”35 Not surprisingly McCahey found time to shepherd the career of his sister, Marie A. McCahey, who became principal of Hirsch in November 1942. She began teaching in Chicago schools in 1913, first at an elementary school, then at a junior high. From 1933 to 1937, she taught at the newly created four-year Hirsch High School. After passing the 1936 principals’ exam, she was assigned the principalship of the Joseph Warren Elementary School at 9210 South Chappel Avenue. It was at this time that her brother, now in his fourth year of his Board of Education presidency, faced accusations of using his political influence to secure her place—and the places of others as well.36 Five years later, she left Warren to take over as principal of Hirsch where she remained for fifteen years, retiring in June 1957. Like her brother, she provided 24 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Robert Maynard Hutchins was president of the University of Chicago from 1929 to 1945.
direction as well as administrative continuity—that most important of skills—restoring luster to the school as it adapted to the needs of post-war United States. 37 In December 1953 Marie McCahey reflected on Hirsch’s progress and reputation to a Chicago Tribune reporter. In two decades as a four-year school she said that Hirsch had matured from “a general curriculum high school” to one with a “modern, rounded program in keeping with the times.” Although an impressive 65 percent of Hirsch graduates went on to college, she noted that the school was also well equipped to prepare students who wanted to enter the working world immediately upon graduation by offering career classes, aptitude testing, placement counseling, and vocational guidance. The reporter summed it up nicely: “Hirsch includes academic training for campus-bound students, commercial training for the business minded, and training in three general shops—print, machine, and wood—for students interested in technical subjects.”38 The Hirsch facility had also been reinterpreted. Its “handsome Tudor-Gothic structure,” once described as
This portrait of Marie A. McCahey was taken during her time as principal at Hirsch High School.
an impressive symbol for junior high students just beginning their way in the world, now was said to give high school students that “college touch.” The neo-Gothic arches, the large fireplace in a grand foyer, the paintings and statuary along wide corridors all bespoke the scholarly life. On the third floor there was even a collection of figures and plaques especially chosen for Hirsch by Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, including a statue of St. George, the patron saint of England, the sculptor’s personal gift to the school. Finally, the library featured “great stone busts of learned men and philosophers looking down from high shelves,” which recalled “some university reading room.”39 On the other hand, Eugene M. Vandenberg, who succeeded McCahey as Hirsch’s principal in fall 1957 felt that too much emphasis had been placed on college education, often for the wrong reason. “Our young people seem to have geared their educational goals for college while overlooking the excellent training offered by our high schools,” Vandenberg announced. “While many students will need university training for their future careers, others plan for college only as a means of participating in social events with class work as a secondary activity.” He counseled the latter group to concentrate on Hirsch’s rich variety of courses and save their parents some cash. To further make it clear that he brought new
Hirsch High School basketball team members at the University of Chicago, c. 1935. Education, Politics, and Race | 25
Sculptor Lorado Taft, born in Elmwood, Illinois, at work on the Fountain of the Great Lakes sculpture in his studio on South Ellis Avenue in Hyde Park on February 15, 1913. 26 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
ideas, he added that although he valued high school athletics, sportsmanship counted most of all, not how many games were won or lost.40 Vandenberg came to Hirsch during the thirteen-year tenure of General Superintendent of Schools Benjamin C. Willis, who liked to be called “a salesman of education.” Willis championed neighborhood schools, cut class size, constructed new school buildings, and secured higher salaries for teachers.41 This was also the era of court-ordered school desegregation, however, which began in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954). Willis was accused of perpetuating segregation by refusing to move black pupils into white schools. What he promised, instead, were new schools in Black neighborhoods and temporary mobile classrooms, especially on the South Side, to handle overcrowding. Not surprisingly, African American leaders rejected Willis’s separate but equal approach. In 1963, protesters burned the mobile classrooms (nicknamed “Willis Wagons”), boycotted classes, staged hunger strikes, and picketed Willis’s home. Some of the anti-Willis sentiment went national. During the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in August 1963, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, the marchers from Chicago chanted “down with Willis,” although most television viewers and radio listeners not in or from Chicago had no idea who Willis was.42 From then on Willis worked in Chicago on borrowed time. Hirsch was a part of all this. From 1955 to 1959 there was a steady change in the racial composition of the school. In 1955, the senior class was 6.5 percent African American; four years later the senior class was 31.6 percent African American. Despite the dramatic increase in Black students at Hirsch, the school lacked true racial integration. African American alumni recalled white and Black students going their separate ways, encouraged by a two-track system of schooling that consistently undervalued African American academic talent and promise. Nevertheless, a key teaching post at Hirsch was held by Emmett L. Bradbury, an African American teacher who taught the year-long course in physics to college-bound juniors and seniors. In addition to Bradbury, ROTC Cadet Major Thomas M. Ford served as battalion commander in 1957, an African American student who made the highest score in the City Staff Examinations (in which thirty-three Chicago high schools participated), 388 points out of 400.43 Vandenberg stayed at Hirsch for only six years (until 1963) and then moved to Sullivan High School, Hirsch’s architectural twin on the North Side.44 This may have been due to disappointment with his leadership or indicative of the racial demographic changes on Chicago’s South Side. According to Board of Education statistics, by 1967 Hirsch was a completely African American school.45
An August 16, 1963, Chicago Defender editorial accuses Superintendent Benjamin C. Willis of perpetuating segregation in Chicago’s schools. The flyer below promotes the Freedom Day School Boycott to protest school segregation in October 1963.
Education, Politics, and Race | 27
One incident four years after Vandenberg’s departure provides insight on the process of racial succession. In July 1967, the Board of Education decided to shift the attendance boundaries for Bowen and Hirsch high schools. The communities of Marynook and South Avalon, which occupied a triangular-shaped area bounded by Stony Island Avenue, Eighty-Seventh Street, and the New York Central Railroad tracks, were subtracted from Hirsch’s school district and added to Bowen’s. This would bring thirty-seven new students to Bowen in fall 1967. The school superintendent of High School District 17 (Bowen’s school district) and the head of Bowen’s parents’ group opposed the change. They pointed out that Bowen was operating at about 200 percent capacity and thus was severely overcrowded, whereas Hirsch was operating at 135.5 percent capacity. They felt that the attendance boundaries should remain as they were.46 Although school boundaries frequently shifted because of changing population statistics and/or the addition of new schools to a district (such as the opening of South Shore High School in 1940, which lopped off all of South Shore from the Hirsch district), this remapping was something different. Superintendent James F.
Redmond had succeeded Willis nine months earlier with the pledge of a school “integration” strategy that would fully comply with court-ordered mandates.47 He recommended the boundary change to help maintain “a stabilized racial balance” in Marynook, which had encountered difficulties in the past several years in attracting white home owners to its community. Race mattered. In fact, the thinking at the time was that once Black school enrollment reached approximately 40 percent, the movement of white families from a neighborhood (“white flight”) sped up. In 1967 Hirsch was 99.8 percent Black, while Bowen was 79.4 percent white.48 The boundary change would allow Marynook and South Avalon students to attend a school that was integrated, but not majority Black. This was consistent with Redmond’s ideas. “Chicago will become a predominately Negro city,” Redmond asserted, “unless dramatic action is taken soon. . . . The immediate short-range goal must be to anchor the whites that still reside in the city. To do this requires that school authorities quickly achieve and maintain stable racial attendance proportions in changing fringe areas. If this is not done, transitional neighborhood schools will quickly become predominantly Negro as whites will continue to flee.”49 The goal,
On July 26, 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. led thousands of demonstrators in a march from Grant Park to City Hall to protest the administration of Benjamin Willis. 28 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Demonstrators carry anti-Willis signs as they march by Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park on the way to City Hall in protest of inequality and segregation in Chicago’s schools on July 26, 1965. Education, Politics, and Race | 29
as Redmond told the Chicago Headline Club, the local chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, in 1966, was a multiracial, multicultural city: “If we are to help stabilize the existing integrated neighborhoods and make possible experiences of multi-racial, multi-cultural education, we must build ahead, not behind, the movement of people.”50 North Avalon Park had also petitioned to join the Bowen school district and for the same reason, but Redmond turned down this request. He would allow North Avalon students who did not wish to attend Hirsch to attend either Chicago Vocational High School (CVS), which was 40 percent Black, or Lindblom High School, which was 72 percent Black.51 What worried Redmond worried many white Chicagoans. Hirsch had already lost the racial balance that Redmond believed so important to real integration. The hope was now with Bowen, CVS, and even majority Black Lindblom. Parents of white students, however, refused to allow their children to attend majority Black schools. As a result, although Redmond was open to bussing Black students to majority white schools to achieve the racial balance that he (and officially the federal government) believed was the only way to give Black children an equal educational opportunity, he did not consider bussing white students to Hirsch. And there was a second challenge to Redmond’s plans. Would Black parents willingly accept keeping their children in the racial minority— which Redmond pegged at no more than 15 percent of an elementary school’s total enrollment or 25 percent of a high school’s enrollment—to guard against the possibility of white flight and keep an integrated setting?52 Hirsch had said “no,” and over time all the schools on the South Side would give the same answer. This failure of integration (or desegregation) in Chicago’s public schools was due in part to white flight to the suburbs and in part to the shift of many white students to private and parochial schools in the city.53 But it also reflected a change in African American thinking about education and community. Black leaders were no longer convinced that an integrated Black and white school provided a better education for their children, and they were lukewarm on bussing that shuttled only Black students back and forth to white schools. African Americans wanted better schools in their own neighborhoods, validating their communities—and themselves—with all-Black schools that worked. Hirsch became a part of this reshaped African American urban education goal which some saw as a matter of Black power, pride, and identity.54 Fifty years later, Hirsch continues to educate students. The school has survived system changes, endured the politics and patronage of City Hall, handled union challenges and parent protest, bounced back after local and 30 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
national political and economic crises, transitioned from an all-white to an all-Black school, and adapted (and sometimes withstood) the plans, projects, and reforms of principals, school superintendents, and the Board of Education. Would Rabbi Hirsch, who had also grappled with the challenges of change, have been surprised? Maybe not. William A. Hoisington is professor emeritus of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He graduated from Hirsch High School in 1959. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. Page 16, top: ICHi-035875, bottom: courtesy of Emil G. Hirsch Metropolitan High School. 17, DN-0080551, Chicago SunTimes/Chicago Daily News collection. 18, top: DN-0087272, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection; bottom: The Hirsch Gleaner 1930, Hirsch Junior High yearbook. 19, top: DN-0068863, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection; bottom: DN-A-2177, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News Collection. 20, top: DN-0082786, Chicago SunTimes/Chicago Daily News collection; bottom: DN-0081244, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 21, DN0010530, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 22, top: ICHi-026507; bottom: DN-A-2213, Chicago SunTimes/Chicago Daily News Collection. 23, ICHi-073745. 24, DN-A-2081, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 25, top: Maroon 1948, Hirsch High School yearbook; bottom: SDN-077171, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News collection. 26, DN-0060199, Chicago Sun-Times/Chicago Daily News Collection. 27, top: Chicago Defender, August 16, 1963; bottom, ICHi-020839. 28, ST-10104095-0027, Chicago SunTimes collection. 29, ST-10104095-0018, Chicago Sun-Times collection. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Dionne A. Danns, Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); Mary J. Herrick, The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1971); Paul E. Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
ENDNOTES 1 “New Emil G. Hirsch Junior High School,” Chicago Tribune, August 17, 1925. 2 Both the rabbi and its congregation were committed to a progressive, Modern Jewish Reform theology that challenged traditional beliefs and rituals and centered human service and social justice as its goals. During Hirsch’s tenure at Sinai, from 1880 to 1923, he promoted social action in Chicago, emphasizing the plight of immigrants, the working class, and African Americans. He inspired the wealthier members of his congregation to engage in civic philanthropy. Hirsch also served as a member of the Chicago Public Library Board from 1888 to 1897. See Tobias Brinkmann, Sundays at Sinai: A Jewish Congregation in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012) and Nancy White, “Hirsch School Named in Honor of Jewish Scholar, Rabbi,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1965. 3 See Julia S. Bachrach, “Emil G. Hirsch School,” February 12, 2013, on the Chicago’s Historic Schools website, February 12, 2013, http://chicagohistoricschools.wordpress.com. Sullivan is located at 6631 North Bosworth Avenue. 4 “Vast School Building Program Will be Continued in 1927,” Chicago Tribune, January 2, 1927, and Bachrach, “Emil G. Hirsch School.” 5 William A. McAndrew came to Chicago in 1924 after a decade as associate superintendent of the schools of New York City. Thirty years earlier he had been removed as principal of Hyde Park High School by the Chicago Board of Education for “insubordination,” refusing to issue a diploma to a student who had not yet completed the prescribed course of study even though his prominent father had already engineered his son’s admission to Dartmouth College. (See “Surprising Action Taken by the Outgoing Board of Education,” Chicago Tribune, June 25, 1891.) McAndrew’s return to the city as school superintendent, therefore, was a vindication of sorts. 6 The familiar 8-4 plan prescribed eight years of elementary school and four years of high school. The 6-3-3 plan that
McAndrew favored inserted three junior high years between six elementary years and three senior high years.
Success: Keeps Pupils in School Longer, He Finds,” Chicago Tribune, June 18, 1926.
7 On the junior high in Chicago, see Lucille Inez Redmond, “The Beginning and Growth of the Chicago Junior High School,” master’s thesis, Loyola University Chicago, January, 1932, and Ellen M. Gonnelly, “The Chicago Junior High Schools,” PhD dissertation, Loyola University Chicago, February 1956.
14 See John R. Schmidt, The Mayor Who Cleaned Up Chicago: A Political Biography of William E. Dever (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1989).
8 Arthur Evans, “More Seats My First Job, Says School Head: McAndrew Works on ‘Chicago Plan,’” Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1924, and Arthur Evans, “Junior High Is to Have Distinct Chicago Makeup: Cultural Aims Will Not Be Subordinate,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1924. 9 The platoon system “marched” upper grade-school students from class to class, teacher to teacher for instruction in specific subjects. In the 1920s it was also known as the Gary system since the schools of Gary, Indiana, had adopted it as a measure to use their teachers and school buildings more efficiently. 10 On the teachers’ councils, see George S. Counts, School and Society in Chicago (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1928), 107–30. 11 For details on McAndrew’s school plans and the growing teacher opposition to them, see Mary J. Herrick, The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills and London: Sage Publications, 1971), 143–71. On teachers’ unions, see Counts, School and Society in Chicago, 85–106. 12 Quoted in Counts, School and Society in Chicago, 190. On the Chicago Federation of Labor and the junior highs, see Counts, School and Society in Chicago, 167–77, 185, 188–90, and 204. Also see, Evans, “More Seats My First Job,” Chicago Tribune, January 13, 1924, and Evans, “Junior High Is to Have Distinct Chicago Makeup,” Chicago Tribune, May 29, 1924, the editorial “Junior High Schools,” Chicago Tribune, May 21, 1924, and Arthur Zilversmit’s essay, “Schooling for Work,” Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pa ges/1123.html. 13 “Bogan Report Shows Junior High a
15 See “Bill’s ‘When I’m Mayor’ Picture Evokes Cheers: Dever’s Schools Falling Down, He Claims,” Chicago Tribune, March 28, 1927. 16 For a glimpse of the proceedings, see “M’Andrew Out; Opens Fight on School Board: Trustees Vote 6 to 5 for Suspension,” Chicago Tribune, August 30, 1927, and “McAndrew Explains His Walkout” and “School Head Bolts His Trial: Coath defied by M’Andrew in Wild Session, Won’t Return Until ‘Burlesque’ Ends,” Chicago Tribune, November 24, 1927. J. Lewis Coath was Thompson’s choice as school board president; see “Board Ousts M’Andrew As School Rebel: Says George III War is Really Serious: McAndrew Found Guilty; Ousted by School Board,” Chicago Tribune, March 22, 1928. The judgment against McAndrew was later quashed by the courts; see “M’Andrew Is Vindicated; All Suits Dropped: McAndrew Case is Over, Court Vindicates Him,” Chicago Tribune, December 19, 1929. For a summary of the McAndrew story, see June Sawyers, “Way We Were: Campaigning for mayor with King George as enemy: A look at Chicago’s past,” Chicago Tribune, February 5, 1989. For the most thorough, thoughtful account of the issues and forces at play during McAndrew’s superintendency, including the backstory, see Counts, School and Society in Chicago. For McAndrew’s nemesis, the thrice elected mayor of Chicago, see Douglas Bukowski, Big Bill Thompson, Chicago, and the Politics of Image (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), esp. 152–56, 184, 186, and 189–90 on the McAndrew matter. 17 Gonnelly, “The Chicago Junior High Schools,” 110. 18 “Ask Conversion of Hirsch Junior High Into High School,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1933, and “Parents Carry School Fight to Sargent Group: 16,000 Ask Conversion of Hirsch to Senior
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High,” Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1933. Fred W. Sargent, president of the Chicago and North Western Railroad, headed a citizens’ committee which lobbied for major cuts in public expenditures. Many of these school buildings still exist, although their names may have changed. 19 “Demand Hirsch School Be Made a Senior High,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1933, and “Parents Carry School Fight to Sargent Group,” Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1933. Among the groups that supported the SSPA were the Chatham Chamber of Commerce, the Triangle Improvement Association, the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, East Seventy-Fifth Street Business Men’s Association, Stony Island Business Men’s Association, Bryn Mawr Improvement Association, and John J. McShane Post of the American Legion. 20 “Parents Carry School Fight to Sargent Group,” Chicago Tribune, February 26, 1933. Also see the report of the committee chaired by professor George M. Strayer of Columbia University, Strayer, et al., Report of the Survey of the Schools of Chicago, Illinois, 5 volumes (New York, 1932). 21 Cermak was mortally wounded by a deranged shooter in Miami on February 15 as he was shaking hands with President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt; he died three weeks later. On Cermak and the workings of the Chicago political system, see Alex Gottfried, Boss Cermak of Chicago: A Study of Political Leadership (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962). On Kelly, see Roger Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War: Mayor Edward J. Kelly of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984). Eclipsed by the Mayors Daley, father and son, Kelly continues to rank high in mayoral polls. Also see, Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli, eds., The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 4th edition, 2013). 22 “Ask Conversion of Grade School to Junior High: Leaders Give Impetus to Hirsch Plan, Too,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 1933, and “5 New Trustees Given O.K. By Council: Mayor Kelly’s Appointees Pledged to Economy,”
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Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1933. 23 “Parents Assail Bogan’s Refusal of Senior High: Push Fight for Conversion of Hirsch Junior,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1933. 24 William Fulton, “Cut City School Cost $5,000,000; Abolish Junior Highs; Trim Out Fads and Frills; Teachers in Daze as Board Acts,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1933. 25 “Parents Assail Bogan’s Refusal of Senior High,” Chicago Tribune, May 23, 1933. 26 “Report Shows Disposition of 29 Junior Highs: Rogers’ Recommendations Given to Board,” Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1933. Don C. Rogers was the director of the building survey for the school board. South Shore did get a high school of its own, which opened for classes in 1940. 27 Fulton, “Abolish Junior Highs,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1933. In the end the swimming pools were kept open. See Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 212. 28 The complete details of the plan are in Fulton, “Abolish Junior Highs,” Chicago Tribune, July 13, 1933. Also see, Roger Biles, “Edward J. Kelly: New Deal Machine Builder,” in The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition, eds. Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 3rd edition, 2005), 112–13. Apparently Superintendent Bogan had only been consulted on minor details of the retrenchment plan, but he accepted it and then worked hard to ease the pain on his faculty and staff, in many cases quickly rehiring the teachers who had been fired. 29 For more than a year, Chicago teachers had routinely been paid in scrip or taxanticipation warrants based on city taxes to be collected in the future. This fiscal device allowed municipal governments to find funds to operate in tough economic times. Fearing the city to be nearing bankruptcy, however, some downtown banks refused to accept them. 30 “McCahey Cites School Gains in Last Report,” Chicago Tribune, April 17, 1947. Roger Biles called the “foundering” public school system “Chicago’s white elephant.” See Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War, 25. The expansion and cost of the school system under
McAndrews was a large, yet unacknowledged factor in the deficit. See Paul E. Peterson, The Politics of School Reform, 1870–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 151, 157–60. 31 For the protest, see Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 211–15. On the world’s fair, see Cheryl R. Ganz, The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair: A Century of Progress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012). 32 Herald Examiner, July 16, 1933, quoted in Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 215. 33 Established under President Herbert C. Hoover, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation was expanded under President Franklin D. Roosevelt to become a key element of the “New Deal” economic recovery package. In July 1933 thousands of students were being taught in “unhealthy and unsafe portable buildings.” See “Mr. McCahey’s Services,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1947. 34 See Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War, 138–39. 35 “Mr. McCahey’s Services,” Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1947. See the appreciation of James B. McCahey in Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1947, and his obituary in Chicago Tribune, January 16, 1976. 36 “M’Cahey Replies to Charges of School Politics; Explains in His Refusal to Talk Before Club,” Chicago Tribune, May 22, 1937. Apparently Marie McCahey had failed previous principals’ exams, but passed this one “with help.” For more on the 1936 principals’ examination as an example of “open interference on the basis of partisan politics,” see Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 247–48 and Biles, Big City Boss in Depression and War, 140–41. 37 See “Hirsch principal retires after 44 years’ service,” Chicago Tribune, June 16, 1957, which details her career, and her obituary in Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1980. 38 “Students Find College Touch at Hirsch High,” Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1953. 39 Ibid.
40 “New Principal is Appointed at Hirsch: Vandenberg Selected for Post,” Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1957. For Vandenberg’s teaching career prior to Hirsch, see Chicago Tribune, September 15, 1957. 41 Benjamin C. Willis was general superintendent of schools from 1953 to 1966, appointed by Martin H. Kennelly (mayor, 1947–55) and reappointed by Richard J. Daley (mayor, 1955–76). For his career before Chicago, see “Willis offered job as Chicago School Chief,” Chicago Tribune, June 2, 1953. 42 For an assessment of Willis’s work in Chicago, see John L. Rury, “Race, Space, and the Politics of Chicago’s Schools: Benjamin Willis and the Tragedy of Urban Education,” History of Education Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1999): 117–42, and Roger Biles, Richard J. Daley: Politics, Race, and the Governing of Chicago (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995), 97–100. Also see Willis’s obituary in Chicago Tribune, August 30, 1988. 43 The statistics are based on The Maroon of 1956: Hirsch High School, Chicago (Chicago: The Leander Company, 1956) and Maroon 1959 (Berwyn, IL: The Norman King Company, 1959). Also see Tribune staff writer Mickey Ciokajlo’s articles on the summer 2000 reunion of Hirsch graduates from the “turbulent decade” of the 1960s, “’60s Grads, Memories Return to Hirsch High Reunion,” Chicago Tribune, August 10, 2000, and “Hirsch High’s 60s Alums Recall Different Schools,” Chicago Tribune, August 14, 2000. I graduated from Hirsch as valedictorian of the class of 1959. 44 Vandenberg was principal of Roger C. Sullivan High School in Rogers Park for only two years (from 1963 to 1965), then became principal of Carl Schurz High School on the Northwest Side, surely a career plum, until illness forced him to retire in 1969. See his obituary in Chicago Tribune, November 7, 1970. Vandenberg’s successor at Hirsch was William J. Kelleher. 45 “School Board OK’s Bowen, Hirsch Shift,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1967. 46 Ibid. A so-called cluster plan allowing permissive student transfers between
Hirsch and Bowen which James F. Redmond adopted as soon as he became superintendent in 1966 had already failed. All the movement was from Hirsch to Bowen, keeping Bowen majority white and making Hirsch “completely Negro.” See “Racial Lines Set: Redmond: Transfer Plan Integrates and Segregates,” Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1967, and “Cluster Plan Failure: Redmond: Board Asked to End Use at Bowen High,” Chicago Tribune, March 9, 1967. James H. Bowen High School is located at 2710 East Eighty-Ninth Street. An earlier “test cluster plan” under Willis involved student transfers among South Shore, Hirsch, and Bowen. See James Yuenger, “Begin School Cluster Test Plan Monday: South Shore, Hirsch, Bowen involved,” Chicago Tribune, February 9, 1965. South Shore High School is located at 7627 Constance Avenue. 47 James F. Redmond was superintendent of schools from 1966 until 1975. He had worked in Chicago from 1948 to 1953 under Herold C. Hunt. Redmond returned to Chicago in 1966 after some success in integrating the New Orleans school system. For a sympathetic view of Redmond as a “new breed” of school superintendent and his plans for integrating Chicago’s schools, see Herrick, The Chicago Schools, 340ff., and Paul E. Peterson, School Politics, Chicago Style (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976). See Redmond’s vita in “Redmond’s Career Shows Meteoric Rise,” Chicago Tribune, May 11, 1966, and his obituary in Chicago Tribune, March 23, 1993.
Desegregating Chicago’s Public Schools: Policy Implementation, Politics, and Protest, 1965–1985 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 50 Casey Banas, “School Chief Offers New 3-Point Plan,” Chicago Tribune, November 17, 1966. 51 Chicago Vocational High School (CVS) was located in the Avalon Park neighborhood at 2100 East Eighty-Seventh Street; in 1966, 40.9 percent of its students were African American. See Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1967. Robert Lindblom High School was located in the West Englewood neighborhood at 6130 South Wolcott Avenue; in 1966, 72.6 percent of its students were African American; see Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1966. 52 See Charles C. Hamilton, “Race and Education: A Search for Legitimacy,” in Restructuring American Education: Innovations and Alternatives, ed. Ray C. Rist (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1972), 156. On Redmond’s racial mixing plans, see the editorial in “Racial Mixing Plans in Chicago Schools,” Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1967. 53 See John L. Rury, “School Desegregation,” in Encyclopedia of Chicago, http://encyclopedia.chicago history.org/pages/1121.html. 54 For the several African American responses to school integration, see Elizabeth Todd-Breland, A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago since the 1960s (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018).
48 “Integration and Quality Schools,” Chicago Tribune, September 9, 1966, and “School Board OK’s Bowen, Hirsch Shift,” Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1967. See the complete “pupil racial head count” in Chicago schools in Casey Banas, “Negroes in Majority, School Count Shows; Supt. Redmond Releases Race Head Count,” Chicago Tribune, October 19, 1966. 49 See Peterson, School Politics, Chicago Style, 174, quoting directly from the Redmond plan. There is a large and important scholarship on segregation and desegregation in Chicago. For a sampling of the literature, see the endnotes in Dionne A. Danns,
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Chicago’s First Contested Mayoral Election The results of Chicago’s 1844 mayoral election came down to a margin of seven votes and became a matter for the city council to decide. C H A R L E S H. C O S G R OV E
Adapted from “The Politician,” Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago: A Dual Biography of Mayor Augustus Garrett and Seminary Founder Eliza Clark Garrett by Charles H. Cosgrove. Copyright © 2020 by the Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University. All rights reserved. ugustus Garrett was Chicago’s seventh and ninth mayor, winning elections, which occurred annually, in 1843 and 1845. He was almost its eighth, as well. And thereby hangs the tale of Chicago’s first disputed mayoral election. Garrett was a popular South Sider, a Democrat who had once been a Whig,1 a moderate and a generally pragmatic man in a nonideological, pragmatic town of some eight thousand souls on the “northwest” frontier. In his first one-year term in office—from March 1843 to March 1844—he proved himself an able executive, not a visionary but a good manager. Although boosterish in outlook, he was, in his middle age, essentially risk averse and fiscally conservative, making him well-suited to govern the fledgling city during a debt-ridden moment in its history. As 1843 drew to a close, Garrett told his New York business partner John Seaman that “the whole city” wanted him to run again. He also confessed that he was reluctant to run—public service did not appeal to him, he worried about his health, and the sole attraction was the honor of being reelected. He told Seaman that being the agent for three insurance companies in Chicago— one of their joint ventures—was better than being mayor because “they will pay and I would get as much popularity from the agencies as I would from the Mayorship.” But when the Democrats’ sixteen delegates met in February and nominated him unanimously, he accepted.2
A
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The Chicago Democrat published the nominated Democratic candidates for the upcoming city elections for mayor, city marshal, and aldermen, February 28, 1844.
This oil painting of Augustus Garrett by C. V. Bond (posthumous, 1856) is on display at Garrett–Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois. Contested Election | 35
Benjamin Wright Raymond served as mayor of Chicago 1839–40 and 1842–43. Chicago’s first newspaper, the Chicago Democrat, was sponsored by the Democratic party. This is the first issue, November 26, 1833.
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The Chicago Democrat praised him. “He has proved himself to be a faithful public officer,” the paper said, “and never before have our City Councils been more wisely conducted.” The editorial went on to enumerate a few of Garrett’s accomplishments: “the right enforcement of many ordinances of the city which have heretofore been a dead letter, the introduction of economy in all the departments, the maintenance of good order throughout the city, the payment of a part of the city debt and reduction of the rate of interest to be paid on the balance, and thereby a restoration of the public credit.” The Whig rejoinder was that anyone could have done those things, which seemed to admit that Garrett had been a good mayor.3 The argument over who achieved the best results in city government—Whigs or Democrats—reflected the fact that there was little if any difference in philosophy between the two parties at the level of city governance. The upcoming election was “more of a local than a political nature,” former mayor Benjamin Raymond said, claiming that the Whigs had chosen their candidate, George Dole, not for partisan reasons but because he was popular with both Whigs and Democrats. In fact, for the very reason that Raymond stated, candidates were chosen almost solely for
Yet a candidate’s correct position on these matters, as a Democrat or a Whig, gave him an aura of decency and good judgment in the eyes of his political party, and these same opinions lowered his stature in the eyes of the other party. Illinois Governor Thomas Ford was a Democrat through and through, yet he could see that loyalists of both parties, fueled by newspaper editorials, ended up feeling confident “that their political opponents, and particularly those of them that are elected to office, are a set
Thomas Ford was the eighth governor of Illinois (1842–46), and the first to have been raised in the state.
partisan reasons, there being no substantial differences in municipal philosophy between them.4 The reason for this homogeneity was a shared policy of boosterism and the very limited powers of the mayor’s office and the Common Council. Chicago politicians and business leaders were all advocates of city growth, and their disagreements about how much debt the city should assume and what taxes should be levied owed less to differing political philosophies than to differing judgments of the moment about how to maximize economic efficiency. Although the Chicago Democrat could warn that if Whigs were elected to state offices they would “carry out, so far as this State is concerned, their banking system, their protective tariff, their distribution act, and assumption of state debts by the General Government,” these were not municipal issues. Hence, when the Democrat declared after a Democratic victory in the municipal election that “federalism, in all its forms, is annihilated here,” it was only asserting the symbolic significance of Democratic success in the city as a harbinger of Democratic supremacy in state and national politics. Most of the populace did not see that it affected the well-being of the city what position the mayor took on the annexation of Texas, a state bank, protective tariffs, state debt, and the like.5
The Whig party was one of the two major parties in the mid-nineteenth century. Abraham Lincoln was a Whig party leader in Illinois before joining the new Republican party in 1854. This ticket is from 1846. Contested Election | 37
of insufferable rogues, bent upon the enslavement of the people or the ruin of the country.” That is why party loyalists in Chicago voted for their own candidates.6 The 1844 mayoral election started off well but ended badly for Garrett, even though he won. Activities usually regarded as acceptable or at least inconsequential became points of contention when the election results showed only a handful of votes separating the victor Garrett from his Whig rival George Dole. The day before the election, Garrett arranged for wagons to carry Norwegian voters to the polls,7 ordered at least one keg of beer for the Fifth Ward, met with fellow Democratic election judge Andrew Nielsen and Fifth Ward resident Samuel Grier, whose house near the polling place was the destination for the beer, and wrote a letter to The Express, defending himself and former mayor Raymond for having accepted municipal gifts of five-dollar burial plots for themselves and their wives in the new city cemetery, gifts that Garrett deemed it would have been discourteous to have refused.8
Garrett defeated Dole by just seven votes. On Wednesday the city’s outgoing Common Council accepted the election results, and on Thursday Garrett swore himself into office.9 By then, however, the election was under a cloud. Disappointed Whigs circulated accusations about irregularities in the Third and Fifth Wards and submitted petitions to the Common Council calling for an inquiry.10 In his inaugural address, Garrett struck a nonpartisan note, natural for a winner. Noting Whig animosity toward him, he declared, “I am totally unconscious of ever willingly having given them any cause of ill feeling.” He also referred to the controversy over the election and asked the newly elected city fathers to take action. “Gentlemen of the Common Council,” he said, “rumors having been raised that illegal proceedings and fraud had been resorted to in the recent municipal elections, I recommend you to appoint a committee to examine into the truth of such rumors and to report at as early a day as possible.” The following Tuesday, the new council
George W. Dole and two others wrote this letter to Abraham Lincoln on December 12, 1859, the year before he would be elected president. 38 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
This map shows how the six wards of Chicago were divided at the time of the 1844 election. Contested Election | 39
authorized an inquiry into the election and appointed an investigating committee, which began taking depositions. The committee permitted Garrett and Dole to be represented by lawyers, who did most of the questioning; but Garrett and Dole were also present, and from time to time Garrett interrogated witnesses as ably as either attorney. In one of the oddities of the proceeding, it was Garrett’s personal lawyer, Grant Goodrich, who represented candidate Dole.11 One issue concerned when the Fifth Ward polls were opened on election day. The polling place was Elihu Granger’s house, where ballots were handed in to the election clerks and judges through a side window that looked out on Granger’s yard. The Whigs claimed the polls had been opened early, that is, before 8:00 A.M., and that the clocks at Granger’s house had been moved forward to disguise that fact. Depositions about this revealed the quaint details of timekeeping in antebellum Chicago. Henry Clarke set his clock by E. G. Reynold’s watch, who adjusted his watch to City Time (the time on a certain clock in Smith Sherwood’s jewelry shop on Lake Street); the Tremont House went by the jeweler Isaac Speer; and John Sullivan set his clock by comparing it to Thomas Welsh’s watch, which ran eight minutes ahead of City Time. Much of this investigation of time had to do with whether one Thomas Joyce—who had awakened earlier than usual, put his kettle on the fire, and then crossed the river
to get breakfast meat from a butcher—had, on his return, voted, around 7:30; whether one Michael Kennedy, passing by the polls as votes were being received, was correct that it was too early for the polls to have been open; and whether John Sullivan, who heard Kennedy complain, correctly corroborated Kennedy’s claim. All four judges and the two clerks who conducted the election at the Fifth Ward poll said they began receiving votes only after 8:00 A.M. Granger, a candidate for alderman and the owner of the house where the poll was set up, said the same. So did his boarder, George Kirk, who fixed the time at about 8:20 by a watch set to City Time. Samuel Grier recalled Joyce coming into Granger’s yard with a skewer of meat but not stopping to vote because he said “there was time enough.” His kettle was on the stove at home, after all, and he was eager to get his breakfast cooked. Henry Clarke thought he took Joyce’s vote between 8:30 and 9:00. Joyce’s name appeared on the register as the thirty-fifth person to vote.12 Efforts to establish the time of the poll opening even led to the deposing of Joel Ellis, the butcher who sold Joyce the skewer of meat. The investigating lawyers wanted to know at what hour Joyce had opened his shop. Ellis said it was before eight and that customer Joyce did not mention whether he had yet voted. It came out that ten minutes after selling Joyce his breakfast meat, Ellis left his store and went to the Washington Coffee
(Clockwise from top) Decorative watchpaper from Speer, c. 1850. Isaac Speer was a jeweler and watchmaker first in Newark, New Jersey, then in Chicago. This undated photograph shows the Tremont House hotel at the southeast corner of Lake and Dearborn Streets before it burned during the Great Chicago Fire. Photograph by Charles R. Clark 40 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Originally located near Michigan Avenue and Seventeenth Street, this Greek Revival-style house, pictured here in 1934, was built by Henry Clarke. It has since been moved twice and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1971.
House, arriving just in time for the bell that rang in the first table dining shift. The invariable custom was to sound the bell at 8:00 A.M. or within minutes of that hour. The bell ringer went by the grandfather clock in the dining room (regulated by Speer the jeweler’s time), which stopped whenever someone sitting on the settee happened to bump one of its weights, a frequent occurrence. It was customary for the breakfast bell to be rung at about eight or not long after eight, but never before eight. Little could be deduced from this about when Joyce voted since there was no reason to doubt that Joyce got his skewer of meat from Ellis sometime before eight. The only question was whether he voted on his way to get his meat or after he ate.13 The investigation did not establish anything definitive about when the polls opened in the Fifth Ward, but it did find that two clerks, one in the Third Ward and one in the Fifth, were not eligible to vote in Chicago, which made them ineligible to serve as election clerks. Age in the one case and length of residence in the other were the disqualifiers. There was also an allegation that the judges of the Fifth Ward opened folded ballots before putting them in the box, the implication being that they did so in full view of those waiting to vote in order to intimidate them—that is, to pressure them to vote in a certain way or not vote at all. Several witnesses saw election judges open ballots. When asked about this, the judges admitted to opening some number of ballots but said it was only to ensure that certain voters had not submitted more than one vote.14
The Whigs further charged that the officials at the Fifth Ward poll received illegal votes, that is, votes from persons whose age or length of residency disqualified them from voting in the Fifth Ward. According to testimony, certain voters had been properly challenged when the clerks or judges had reason to doubt their eligibility. Some who were challenged did not contest their rejection. Others later gave sworn testimony confirming their votes, which meant that they could be prosecuted if it turned out they had voted illegally. During this part of the investigation, two names recurred—John McCarty and Daniel Driscol. Election judge George Brady said he challenged both of them and that they later swore in their votes. It was candidate Dole’s contention that eight or more additional votes had been illegal, invalidating the Fifth Ward results. This was never proven.15 Bribery, “treating” (giving out drinks), and other inducements to secure votes were expressly illegal according to Illinois law. Whigs claimed Garrett and his supporters had hired wagons to bring in voters. A keg of beer had been brought by wagon to Grier’s house, they said, and drinks were dispensed to garner votes for Garrett. The most damning accusation was that Garrett had been paying Norwegians for their votes. Whigs found one Oren Overson, who admitted that Garrett had given him a dollar and a voting ticket that was already filled in with Garrett’s name. Under questioning by Dole’s lawyer, Overson said the dollar was not for his vote, and when Garrett himself took up the questioning, Overson further explained that he could not read English, but could read the name “Garrett,” and that the dollar was for splitting rails at some previous time.16 In the end, Garrett managed to defang the charge that he transported voters to the polls, treated them, and otherwise engaged in fraud. He put Dole’s lawyer Goodrich, Dole himself, and Alderman John Murphy under oath and asked each of them whether in previous elections candidates of various parties had used their influence to get votes, whether they or their supporters had paid for transportation (“teams”) or expended money to treat, and whether they had knowledge “of any fraud or illegal proceedings on the part of myself at this last election.” Goodrich admitted that candidates in past elections had used their influence to secure votes and that they and their supporters had provided teams. As a “cold water man” (teetotaler), Goodrich said, he was unfamiliar with treating but knew of no fraud committed by Garrett. Dole agreed that candidates had typically used their influence to get votes and said he was familiar with candidates’ friends hiring teams and treating. He conceded that he, too, knew of no fraud on Garrett’s part. Alderman Murphy acknowledged that candidates and their supporters usually treated, and he admitted that he himself had once paid for a team. He, too, knew of no Contested Election | 41
This watercolor by C. E. Petford depicts the Sauganash Hotel, which was built in 1831 and regarded as the first hotel in Chicago.
instance where Garrett engaged in any fraud or other illegal activity.17 Other rumors circulated against Garrett and his supporters. One such rumor claimed that a meeting had taken place at the Sauganash Hotel or at John L. Gray’s house to plan an early opening of the Fifth Ward poll so “the Norwegians” could vote before everyone else. Garrett, Nielsen, and Grier admitted that they met together at the Sauganash the evening before the election but denied having arranged to open the polls early. George Brady, Grier, Lisle Smith, and maybe Granger were at Gray’s that night. Brady told the investigating committee that he had suggested they open the polls right at eight or just after so that the Norwegians could vote before others arrived. Grier explained that threats had been made against the Norwegians by men who wanted to prevent them from voting and that he himself had been threatened. The group at Gray’s agreed that they would open the polls right at eight, so the Norwegians could vote before other voters arrived and before men got liquored up. As for treating, Nielsen said that a “Dutchman” brought a half barrel of beer to Grier’s. He did not know who paid for it. Brady also recalled the cask and said that Grier offered him and other friends some. Grier said he paid for the keg himself with “my own good money” and that from time to time he would treat his friends.18 42 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
A cabinet photograph of Buckner S. Morris, 1836. Photograph by Charles Delevan Mosher
The Common Council referred certain legal questions to its Committee on the Judiciary, composed of two Whigs and one Democrat—Buckner S. Morris, Asher Rossiter, and George Davis. Morris and Rossiter concluded that, as a matter of law, an election conducted by ineligible clerks was null and void; the lone Democrat, Davis, argued that the clerks in question, having been appointed, had authority de facto under the legitimate authority of their superiors, the election judges. The majority also found that whether the purpose was nefarious or benign, the opening of ballots by election judges was a violation of law. If accepted by the council, the majority report was enough to vacate the results in the Third and Fifth Wards. Davis issued a minority opinion contending that there was no legal basis to set aside the election. Thus, the two Whigs on the Judiciary Committee took Dole’s side, and the sole Democrat took Garrett’s.19 On Saturday evening, March 16, the Common Council met to hear the report of the Committee on Elections and to decide what action to take. Earlier that day Garrett had heard from Samuel Hoard, a clerk of the Circuit Court, that Davis had turned against Garrett and “sold himself over to the Whigs.” Garrett went to see Davis and learned that, despite the legal opinion Davis had submitted, he was now agreeing with his two colleagues on the
Judiciary Committee that the election results in the Fifth Ward were invalid because election judges had opened some of the ballots and the clerk was not a legal voter in the ward. Garrett discounted these problems as mere technicalities and called Davis a “scoundrel” for making claims “about frauds and illegal voting.”20 In a letter to his close friend and confidant James Malony, Garrett bragged that in all the forty pages of testimony there was not one word about any fraud on his part (or Dole’s or anyone else’s). Then he made a self-damning admission. “I attended to that matter myself,” he says. “It was attended to with a little trouble and Salt.”21 Garrett may have been justified in calling the use of ineligible clerks a minor technicality, cause for a fine but not grounds for nullifying the election results. The opening of ballots was another matter. Not only was it against the law for election judges to open ballots during voting, doing so in public view might well intimidate voters, suppressing the vote of one or more candidates, whether that was intended or not. At the very least, the misbehavior of the election judges warranted a special election in the Fifth Ward. As for the testimony about fraud, Garrett’s statement that he took care of that with “salt” meant that he paid off some of those who were deposed by the investigating committee. Given the right-
Lithograph of the Saloon Building on Lake and Clark Streets, published in History of Chicago: From the Earliest Period to the Present Time, by A. T. Andreas, 1884–86. Contested Election | 43
eous indignation of his tone in narrating these events to a trusted confidant, it is possible that he used money to ensure that certain Whigs he did not trust would not make false allegations. More likely, however, he thought himself so unfairly injured by certain accusations that he felt justified in making bribes to suppress all negative testimony about himself, both the false and the factual. In addition, he probably did pay for votes, in various fashions, including giving Oren Overson a dollar.22 It was not to save his election that Garrett salted witnesses. He cared only about his reputation and quickly devised a plan to recoup his honor, the execution of which he recounted to Malony in a blow-by-blow description of the Saturday evening council meeting. The gathering was held in the Saloon Building with Garrett, still mayor, presiding. “The room was so crowded they were on top of each other to see what was to take place,” Garrett told Malony. Forty pages of depositions were read aloud, and Garrett thought this reading “had a tendency to raise me in the estimation of every person in the room.” Then Alderman Morris—a member of the majority of two on the Judiciary Committee that had already found the election to be invalid—offered a resolution that the results in the Fifth Ward be rejected. Garrett let him make a speech, after which Garrett stood and made his own short speech.23 Garrett’s speech contained a magnanimous gesture, calculated to impress, and its grandeur caused him a flush of elation. He later recalled to Malony how at that moment, when he rose to speak, he felt “as good as if I were in heaven.” As Garrett told it, after a few kind remarks about Dole, he announced, to the astonishment of the new Whig majority on the council, that “in case they wished to gain the election on those grounds after fraud had been alleged . . . I cordially and respectfully resigned my seat.” The room was stunned into silence, filled “with awe and such feeling you never saw before.” There were cries of “Don’t you do it, keep your seat. They are all a damned set of scoundrels. If you resign we will be damned if we don’t elect you again, etc., etc.” Garrett then calmly tendered his resignation. The council was in “perfect confusion,” caught completely by surprise and unsure what to do next. Garrett instructed them to appoint one of their members to chair the meeting. They chose Morris, and no sooner had Morris taken his place in the chairman’s seat than the crowd of onlookers erupted in hisses. One would have thought there were “a thousand geese in the room.” People objected to Morris taking over the meeting and cried out, “Turn him out! Pitch him out of the window! Kick him downstairs!” With the whole room in an uproar, one of the alderman moved adjournment and the rest promptly concurred.24 That same evening two citizens’ committees visited Garrett and urged him to run again. He told them he had 44 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
An undated portrait of John Putnam Chapin, a member of the Whig party who served as mayor of Chicago (1846–47).
John Wentworth was the editor of the Chicago Democrat, and later became mayor of Chicago as well as a six-term member of the US House of Representatives.
Following Garrett’s death, his wife Eliza established the Garrett Bible Institute, now the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary. This is the view from southwest of its tower, built by Holabird and Roche, c. 1930. Photograph by Raymond W. Trowbridge Contested Election | 45
no intention of doing so. Then, still in the grips of euphoria about his performance at the council meeting, he set down his account in the letter to Malony.25 The council held another special meeting a week later, on Saturday, March 23. Again the Saloon Building was crowded. The majority and minority judiciary reports were read. When it came time to vote on a resolution to accept the majority opinion, Alderman Morris objected to aldermen from the disputed wards participating in the vote. They were allowed to do so, however, and a tie resulted. The council decided that Ira Miltimore, acting as chair, could break the tie even though he had already voted as alderman. Miltimore demurred and called for another vote. Again a tie. Fourth Ward alderman John Murphy stood up and resigned; aldermen Granger, Brown, Davis, and Poussard followed suit. Miltimore then turned the chair over to Alderman John P. Chapin, who carried on with the six remaining aldermen. They declared Dole elected, but Dole refused. They then ordered a new aldermanic election in the third and fifth wards and a new general mayoral election.26 George Wentworth, managing editor of the Chicago Democrat, did not publish the story of Garrett’s resignation, which irked Garrett since he had been hoping for a newspaper account of his grand gesture. There were other perceived slights. When Garrett’s inaugural address was published, George refused to give Garrett’s clerk extra copies of the paper for Garrett to send to family and friends, asking why he needed so many and whether he had paid for them. Nor would he let Garrett see copy in advance, and he was vague about whether he would meet with Garrett to discuss business. Garrett pulled his advertising from the paper and wrote an explanation to George’s brother, John Wentworth, the paper’s founder and owner, now an Illinois congressman, and one of Garrett’s old friends.27 After his resignation, the Democrats insisted he run again against Dole. When Dole withdrew, the Whigs persuaded Alson Sherman, a Democrat, to run with their support. The Democrats had no objection to Sherman except his party disloyalty in agreeing to oppose Garrett. Fewer people voted this time, and the outcome was that Sherman, a well-liked fellow, won 51 percent of the vote; Garrett garnered 42 percent; and Henry Smith, the “abolitionist” candidate of the Liberty Party, received the remainder.28 After the special election, the Chicago Democrat praised Sherman as a man who had “arisen to his present position by honesty, perseverance, and industry.” Or was that George Wentworth’s way of implying a slap at Garrett? Garrett explained to Seaman that since he had not wanted to run again, he had persuaded some of his friends “to manage secretly against me, and Sherman is elected.” 29 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
It is conceivable that Garrett let it be known among party leaders that he would be happy for Sherman to win, but it is also possible that he made statements of that sort out of fear he might lose. When it was all over, however, he felt relief. Several months prior he had written to Seaman, “I am busy all the day long and can’t do any more,” adding that “after 3 months I will get clear of the city business which will relieve me of about one half.” Now he confided, “I have seen more real enjoyment since Sherman’s election than I have in the past 12 months.” The respite did not last. Nine months later, still out of office, he was telling Seaman, “My labors are greater than I can bear; they must not be so great hereafter for I can’t stand it.”30 Three months later he was a candidate for mayor again.
Charles H. Cosgrove is a professor of early Christian literature and the director of the PhD program at GarrettEvangelical Theological Seminary. He recently authored Fortune and Faith in Old Chicago: A Dual Biography of Mayor Augustus Garrett and Seminary Founder Eliza Clark Garrett (Southern Illinois University Press, 2020). I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. Page 34, Chicago Democrat, February 28, 1844. 35, courtesy of GarrettEvangelical Theological Seminary. 36, top: ICHi-067132; bottom: ICHi-075979. 37, top: courtesy of Church History Library, Salt Lake City; bottom: ICHi-006540. 38, left: ICHi052797; right: ICHi-052799. 39, Pierce, A History of Chicago, Volume I: The Beginning of a City 1673–1848, p. 323. 40, top: courtesy of the American Silversmiths; left: ICHi-064454; right: ICHi-036120. 41, ICHi-037071. 42, top: ICHi-059715; bottom: ICHi-069904. 43, ICHi-037030. 44, top: ICHi051261; bottom: ICHi-012875. 45, ICHi-080526. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago, Volume I: The Beginning of a City 1673–1848 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937); The Mayors: The Chicago Political Tradition 1st Edition, edited by Paul M. Green and Melvin G. Holli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987); Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847 (Chicago: Lakeside Press, 1945), reprint.
ENDNOTES 1 The national Whig Party was formed in the mid-1830s to oppose Andrew Jackson. Whigs advocated a national bank; Jackson and the Democrats opposed it. Whigs also tended to be more supportive of protective tariffs than Jacksonian Democrats were. 2 Augustus Garrett to John Seaman, December 28, 1843, AGLB I, 38; Augustus Garrett to John Seaman, February 3, 1844, AGLB I: 51–52 and 59; Garrett to Col. James Mitchell, February 18, 1844, AGLB I, 64. AGLB = Augustus Garrett Letter-Books, Northwestern University Archives, Evanston, IL. 3 Chicago Democrat, February 28, 1844 (two separate articles on Garrett’s administration of the mayoralty). 4 “The Express and the Mayorality,” Chicago Democrat, February 28, 1844. 5 “Unite! Unite!,” Chicago Democrat, February 28, 1844; “Municipal Election: Democracy Triumphant!,” Chicago Democrat, March 13, 1844. 6 Thomas Ford, A History of Illinois from Its Commencement as a State in 1818 to 1847 (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1854), 309. 7 Evidently, the Norwegians of the city were more loyal to the Democrats than to the Whigs, perhaps because of a perception, encouraged by Democrats of the era, that Whigs were anti-immigrant and favored the upper class. 8 Augustus Garrett to the editor of The Express, March 2, 1844, AGLB I, 115. Names are variously spelled in the sources, including that of Grier, sometimes rendered Greer. 9 This was unusual, as a swearing-in usually involved the officeholder swearing to another duly authorized person. 10 Chicago Democrat, March 13, 1844 (election results); Official Oath of Mayor Augustus Garrett, CCCPF doc. 1881; petition of George W. Dole, itemizing all the complaints discussed below, March 5, 1844, CCCPF 1867. CCCPF = Chicago City Council Proceedings File, Illinois Regional Archive Depository (IRAD) at Ronald Williams Library of Northeastern Illinois University,
Chicago. The city council was called “Common Council” in the early period. 11 “Mayor’s Inaugural Address,” Chicago Democrat, March 13, 1844; CCCPF doc 1867; Report of Committee on Elections of Validity of Certain Elections, 11[–16] March, CCCPF doc. 1888 (depositions). 12 Petition of Dole, CCCPF doc. 1867; depositions of Henry W. Clarke, John Sullivan, Thomas Welsh, George Kirk, Martin S. Wood, George Brady, William Sammons, Andrew Nielsen, John Campbell, Elihu Granger, Thomas Joyce, and Samuel Grier, CCCPF doc. 1888. 13 Depositions of Thomas Joyce, Joel Ellis, and Martin S. Wood, CCCPF doc. 1888. 14 Report of Majority Judiciary Committee, on legality of elections in Third and Fifth Wards, March 14, 1844, CCCPF doc. 1893; Dole petition, CCCPF doc. 1867; depositions of election judges, CCCPF doc. 1888. 15 Deposition of election judge George Brady, CCCPF doc. 1888; Dole petition claiming that there were illegal votes in the Fifth Ward, including those of McCarty and Driscol, CCCPF doc. 1867. 16 Criminal Code, sect. 140, in The Public and General Statutes of the State of Illinois (Chicago: Gale, 1839), 225; depositions, March 5, CCCPF doc. 1867; depositions, March 11, CCCPF doc. 1880; deposition of Oren Overson, CCCPF doc. 1907. 17 Depositions, CCCPF doc. 1888. 18 Depositions, CCCPF doc. 1888. 19 Report of Majority Judiciary Committee on Legality of Elections for Third and Fifth Wards, submitted to Common Council by Buckner S. Morris and Asher Rossiter, March 14, 1844, CCCPF doc. 1893; Minority Report of the Committee on the Judiciary in Relation to the Election in Fifth Ward, submitted to the Common Council by George Davis, 1844, CCCPF doc. 1859.
23 Garrett to J. R. Malony, March 16, 1844, AGLB I, 103 (spelling corrected and punctuation added for clarity). The special committee on the election submitted a report to the council in the form of a set of depositions (many of which have been cited above) on March 18 (CCCPF doc. 1896). This did not include all the depositions, for additional depositions were submitted on March 20 and 23 (CCCPF docs. 1907 and 1908). Some later accounts say that the Common Council met in Mrs. Chapman’s building from 1842 to 1848, but Garrett refers to the Saloon Building as the venue for the Common Council meeting following the contested election of 1844. In fact, the Common Council used more than one location for its meetings during these years. For the election meeting, the larger Saloon Building hall was required. 24 Garrett to J. R. Malony, March 16, 1844, AGLB I, 103–4 (spelling corrected and punctuation added for clarity). 25 Ibid., 104. 26 Garrett to John Wentworth, March 24, 1844, AGLB I, 110; Garrett to Seaman, April 4, 1844, AGLB I, 128–29. 27 Augustus Garrett to John Wentworth, no date (sometime at the end of March 1844), AGLB I, 112. 28 Garrett to Seaman, April 4, 1844, AGLB I, 128–29 (Garrett’s account of the special election that ensued); Chicago Democrat, April 10, 1844 (special election initial tallies); final vote tallies in “Chicago Mayors, 1837–2007,” Encyclopedia of Chicago. 29 Chicago Democrat, April 10, 1844; Garrett to Seaman, April 4, 1844, AGLB I, 128–29. 30 Garrett to Seaman, December 4, 1843, AGLB I, 4; Garrett to Seaman, January 25, 1845, AGLB II, 38 (spelling and punctuation altered).
20 Garrett to J. R. Malony, March 16, 1844, AGLB I,103. 21 Ibid. 22 Report of Majority Judiciary Committee on Legality of Elections for Third and Fifth Wards, March 14, 1844, CCCPF doc. 1893.
Contested Election | 47
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Cultural Production in Chicago: Making History Interviews with Barbara Gaines, Criss Henderson, and Carlos Tortolero T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
arbara Gaines, Criss Henderson, and Carlos Tortolero authored a cultural renaissance in turn-of-the-millennium Chicago. Gaines is the founder and current artistic director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, where she has directed nearly sixty productions, including more than thirty by William Shakespeare.1 Henderson, as executive director since 1990, transformed the Chicago Shakespeare Theater into one of the city’s major cultural attractions. Tortolero is the cofounder and president of the National Museum of Mexican Art, the largest Latinx cultural institution in the United States.2 The two institutions have attracted worldwide attention. Founded to display the beauty and depth of Mexican culture, to develop a Mexican art collection, and to cultivate Mexican artists, the National Museum of Mexican Art is home to one of the country’s largest Mexican art collections, including more than ten thousand seminal pieces from ancient Mexico to the present and was the first Latinx museum accredited by the American Alliance of Museums.3 Henderson and Gaines guided the development of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s $25 million purpose-built venue on Navy Pier, where
B
48 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
From left: Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson received the Theodore Thomas Making History Award for Distinction in the Performing Arts in 2019. Carlos Tortolero received the Harold Washington Making History Award for Distinction in Public Service in 2018.
Maurice Jones plays Hamlet in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Hamlet, directed by Barbara Gaines, in the Courtyard Theater, 2019. Photograph by Liz Lauren
the company moved in 1999 and evolved into a three-theater campus composed of the Courtyard Theater, Upstairs at Chicago Shakespeare, and The Yard.4 In 2016 they spearheaded the citywide, yearlong Shakespeare 400 Chicago commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death with an unprecedented mobilization of the city’s cultural and administrative resources, which was referred to as “the Olympics of Shakespeare.”5 Barbara Gaines was born to Mickey Schwarz and Rhoda Selinka Schwarz in Los Angeles. The family moved to Manhattan when Gaines was a small child, lived briefly in Rockville Center on Long Island, and finally settled in the towns of Rye and Port Chester when she was twelve years old. Mickey Schwarz was a director of television commercials, and her grandfather was an editor and producer.6 Consequently, “the arts were treasured in my family,” Gaines explains. “It wasn’t like I had to worry about telling my parents that I was going to go into the theater and they would go, ‘Oh, my God.’” In addition, “my maternal grandmother—her name was Sadie Rieger—was a great patron of the arts,” adds Gaines. “She would drag me to every opera, ballet, Carnegie Hall, and the old Metropolitan Opera as a child.”7 Family friend Joe Cohn was a New York movie director who exposed Gaines to Shakespeare. “Joe gave me my first book of Shakespeare sonnets when I was eleven or twelve. And I opened it up and it was Sonnet 29,” she recollects. “It was the first time I realized that Shakespeare understood who I was. It started out ‘when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.’”8 The rest is history. Gaines first came to Chicago for Northwestern University’s National High School Institute, an intensive study experience for students whose attendees are nicknamed “cherubs.” “Between junior and senior years, I went to the Cherub Program at Northwestern, which was for high school kids,” Gaines explains. “And I met wonderful people there, had a great time, and fell in love with Lake Michigan.” The experience convinced Gaines to matriculate to Making History | 49
Northwestern for college. “At Northwestern I really learned to appreciate liberal arts,” taking a wide range of classes, “with absolutely spectacular professors I use every day,” she remembers. The most important of these was Dr. Wallace Bacon, who taught an introductory Shakespeare class. “Senior year I discovered Dr. Bacon, and for the whole year we studied all of Shakespeare’s plays.” Fortunately for her, and Chicago, “he was the only person who saw something in me and said yes.”9 After college, Gaines moved to New York City to pursue a career in acting. “I worked a lot and I made very good money because I was successful in commercials.” But New York frustrated her. “I found it very difficult to make friends there, and I realized after three years that Chicago was calling me. I had made my money, I had conquered my fears.” More importantly, “the biggest gift of New York was to realize how I did not want to live my life. I did not want to feel like a stranger in a strange land.”10 In 1980, Gaines returned to Chicago.11 Carlos Tortolero was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and immigrated to the United States in 1957. “We came from Guadalajara to Chicago,” Tortolero explains. “Guadalajara is probably the place you would say is the heart of our family because we had people coming from different places. My father Rodolfo was born in Mazatlán, Sinaloa, on the western coast. My mother Olga was born in Tepic, Nayarit.”12 Tortolero’s extended family quickly followed. “After my father came, everybody on my mom’s side and his side came to the United States, including their parents,” he recounts. “So I only wound up with first cousins in Mexico, that’s it.”13
50 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Guests view a sculpture at the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, which would later be renamed the National Museum of Mexican Art. In addition to sculptures, its collection includes textiles, folk art, prints and drawings, photography, and paintings.
When asked why his family moved to Chicago, Tortolero responds with one word: “Jobs.” “My parents had both gone to college. They were accountants.” He adds, “My father wound up working at Hotpoint Electric [Heating] Company in Cicero, which was bought out by GE [General Electric Corp.] eventually. He made refrigerators and worked the assembly line.” Tortolero himself spent one summer working at the plant.14 The Tortolero family moved to the largely Italian Near West Side. “We were at 1437 West Taylor, at Bishop Street, right where the Joe DiMaggio statue is and almost next to the [National] Italian [American] Sports Hall of Fame,” remembers Tortolero. “The building is still there.” Tortolero attended nearby Thomas Jefferson Elementary School near Taylor and Laflin Streets, then Our Lady of Pompeii School for seventh and eighth grades, and finally Lane Technical College Prep High School on the North Side at 2501 West Addison Street. “My big brothers both went there, and hardly anybody went from the neighborhood,” Tortolero explains. “In terms of the Mexicanos, we were the first ones who went to Lane Tech from there.”15 Lane Tech was a challenging environment for minority students. “I had this teacher assistant who wore a George Wallace [for President] button in ’68,” remembers Tortolero. “And then the teacher was calling me Paco and Pancho.” Tortolero found a refuge in the library. “The library was my getaway,” he explains. “I would be the library’s aide and just run to the library.” Tortolero felt so alienated that he never even bothered to sit for his class picture. “I was in the library picture, but not as a graduating senior,” he points out. Simply put, “I just hated the school.”16 The birth of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater was accidental, more specifically the result of an accident. Barbara Gaines injured her knee after moving back to Chicago. To make a living, she began offering acting classes in her Lincoln Park West apartment. “I was really in a panic. I was on crutches, and it was winter. So, I started coaching for twenty-five bucks an hour.”17 In short time, Gaines began offering a Shakespeare class, recruiting twelve actors to the first class in 1983. “The first thing I said [to the class] was Chicago does not have a Shakespeare theater, and as a group we should just start one,” recounts Gaines. “Until that moment, I had never, ever considered starting a theater. But it popped out.”18 In 1986, Gaines staged her first major public production on the outdoor terrace of the Red Lion Pub at 2446 North Lincoln Avenue. The first performance, King Henry V, cost $3,000 and no one was paid.19 “They were all professional
In contrast to the early days, today the museum has approximately 10,000 objects in its permanent collection, making it one of the largest collections of Mexican art in the country.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater artistic director Barbara Gaines speaks at the Making History Awards in 2019, where she and executive director Criss Henderson were recognized for their work in redefining what a great American Shakespeare theater can be.
Making History | 51
actors who sacrificed two weeks of pay for something else they could have been doing,” Gaines emphasizes. “They worked hard to give Chicago a Shakespeare theater. It was about nothing else.”20 Gaines’s King Henry V was more than an artistic success. Shortly after the production closed, she received a telephone call from a Chase Manhattan Bank official. “One of our staff saw your Henry V and believes it can become a Shakespeare theater for Chicago,” recounts Gaines, “so Chase is going to give you $25,000 to help—seed money for you.”21 That was the first major donation to what became the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Despite the prejudice and xenophobia Tortolero confronted at Lane Tech, he elected to become a secondary school teacher. “I had such a bad experience, I knew I could do better than that,” he explains laughing. “Why not be a high school teacher?” Tortolero attended the University of Illinois at Chicago where he majored in history and education. There he fell under the tutelage of Chicago historian Dominic Pacyga his senior year. “No offense to Studs Terkel, but nobody knows Chicago like Dominic Pacyga,” Tortolero declares. “He knows Chicago.”22 From 1975 to 1987, Tortolero worked as a teacher, counselor, and administrator in the Chicago Public Schools.23 His first appointment was at James H. Bowen High School in southeast Chicago, where he proved to be a popular teacher with students. In 1981, he was named the Chicago Metro History Fair Teacher of the Year.24 Tortolero’s teaching experience at Bowen proved instrumental in a more significant and unexpected way. In 1982, Tortolero and a group of fellow Bowen High School teachers founded the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. With only $900, Tortolero was joined by Marty Carroll, Luis Guadarrama, Rich Kaleta, Helen Valdez, and Tortolero’s sister Olga Tortolero Kasper. They staged a series art exhibitions and cultural events in temporary spaces, envisioning a museum and cultural center that would address issues of accessibility, education, and social justice in Chicago’s Mexican and Latinx communities.25 Tortolero admits that “we all knew that the museum couldn’t happen there [in southeast Chicago], it had to happen in Pilsen.”26 And in 1987, it happened. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum found a permanent home in a refitted Chicago Park District boat repair facility in Harrison Park in Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood.27 “It was a mess,” remembers Tortolero. “There was so much sawdust.” And sometimes the sawdust moved. “Rats,” proclaims Tortolero. “It would be like a movie. The place was a mess.”28 Tortolero, by his own admission, confronted more significant challenges than rats. First, “very few people in the arts world and the museum world thought 52 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Hamlet (played by Maurice Jones) spars with Laertes (played by Paul Deo Jr.) as the court of Denmark looks on in Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s production of Hamlet, directed by Barbara Gaines, 2019. Photograph by Liz Lauren
Before it was renamed the National Museum of Mexican Art, this was the façade of the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum.
The building that today houses the National Museum of Mexican art was a Chicago Park District’s boat repair facility in Harrison Park.
that we could do it,” he admits. Why? Because “we were teachers,” answers Tortolero. “Nothing I’ve faced in my life can tell you why education is in poor shape than the way people view teachers.” The second obstacle was the location of a museum in a working-class neighborhood. Tortolero rhetorically asks: “How do you do an art museum in a working-class neighborhood?”29 His one-sentence response is: “Working-class people have a right to the arts.”30 Finally, few thought Tortolero would succeed in creating a free museum. “People to this day ask me “How are you free?,” admits Torteloro. “I made it happen.”31 In 1987, the same year that the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum opened in Pilsen, Barbara Gaines moved her renamed Chicago Shakespeare Repertory Company to the Ruth Page Theater at 1016 North Dearborn Street.32 “Chicago” in “Chicago Shakespeare Repertory Company” was deemed unwieldy and soon dropped. Gaines faced skepticism similar to what Tortolero encountered. She adopted an unusual strategy to build an audience. Most Shakespeare promoters begin with the better-known tragedies: Making History | 53
Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, or Hamlet. By contrast, the first productions Gaines produced were Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, and Cymbeline. “I’m an instinctive person, and I have always been haunted by war and the waste of war, the horror of it all,” explains Gaines. “Troilus was the first because I had to show the world that war was wrong.” Since 1987, Gaines has directed and produced Troilus and Cressida three times. “I hope to do it a fourth time,” she concedes. “We’re still in that horrible war, aren’t we?”33 In 1990, Gaines hired Criss Henderson as executive director. When asked why she hired him, Gaines’s response is short and simple: “Huge intelligence and passion.” Gaines recognized she needed administrative help. “I don’t know a ledger sheet, even now,” she confesses. “He was the one who turned the theater around from just a devoted and talented group of actors and director to a real theater and an institution.”34 Criss Henderson was an unlikely choice. The son of Edward and Donna Zinser Henderson, he was born in Monterey, California, where his father was stationed in the navy. He lived in California and the Philippines in his early childhood and finally moved to Deerfield, Illinois, when he was seven after his father took a job at Underwriter Laboratories.35 Deerfield was instrumental in stimulating Henderson’s interest in the arts. Deerfield Children’s Theater, he remembers, “was a pretty important organization back then for a lot of young people, led by Eileen Boevers, who was a famous North Shore cultural maven, and they provided a lot of opportunity.”36 Henderson attended Bradley University in downstate Peoria for one year before electing to transfer to a conservatory with a more theatrically-focused program in Chicago: the Goodman School of Drama. At that time, it was in the process of merging with DePaul University and was subsequently renamed The Theatre School at DePaul University. Henderson soon realized he did not want to be an actor. He proceeded to convince The Theatre School faculty to “let me create my own program,” he explains. “I was able to because it was a small conservatory.” The result was “an incredible undergraduate education in the theater.”37 Henderson exploited the Chicago theater scene upon graduation. “The great thing is that the entire ecology of Chicago theater is built on the fact that any kid like me can get out of college and come to Chicago and find a way to bring together actors and put on a show.” Henderson and several Deerfield friends had founded a small theater group, the Seahorse Theater Company, while in college. “It was named that because in high school we had this plastic seahorse urn that became a recurring prop in all of the shows,” he explains. In the 1980s, they rented spaces and staged productions. “We did shows at Sheffield’s Bar and in a cabaret space called Boombala. There were plenty of places to put on shows,” reminisces Henderson. “While I was directing most of these shows, I think it was at that point that I was really getting a sense that I was also producing and leading the company.”38 54 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Chicago Shakespeare Theater executive director Criss Henderson speaks at the Making History Awards in 2019.
In 1988, Henderson formed a production company with Meredith Banta and Alan Salzenstein and produced Cynthia Heimel’s A Girl’s Guide to Chaos at the Royal George Theatre.39 The three-person company went on to produce the musical Personals and the one-man show Intimacies, the latter being “a really powerful piece looking at the impact of AIDS,” according to Henderson.40 These productions attracted the interest of Barbara Gaines and the board members of the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory Company. Henderson vividly remembers his interview with Gaines. “I had one suit, the suit I graduated from college in, so I put it on and went and met Barbara with Richard Cohn, who was the chairman of the board at that time. And I still fear that nobody else applied for the job. It was a really little company.”41 He also remembers his first day of work. “We had a one-bedroom apartment at 2939 North Broadway up on the third floor.” The furnishings were modest. “In the drawer of this giant desk in this one-bedroom apartment [were] two checkbooks, a payroll checkbook, and a general operating account checkbook,” Henderson explains. “The yellow checks were the payroll checks, and the blue checks were the general operating. That was pretty much the extent of what was there.”42 The Ruth Page Theater was only marginally better. “The space was in a little bit of disrepair back then with an eighty-year-old cooling system,” remembers Henderson. “Many of the seats that we set up in the theater I had purchased at the Ace Hardware Store, so we were seating audiences on aluminum folding chairs in a room that had very little air conditioning.” And Ruth Page was primarily a dance school, Henderson points out. “Ballet was going on all around us. In the early ’90s, if you went to a Chicago Shakespeare production at 7:30 at night, for the first twenty minutes of most shows you would hear thumping—it was the dance master’s staff hitting the dance floor above until the class ended
The Chicago Shakespeare Theatre’s marquee can be seen in front of the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier at dusk, 2019. Photograph by Gautam Krishnan
Making History | 55
Patrons linger outside the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Photograph by Ali Ibrahim
at ten minutes to 8:00, and then it would stop. And the little ballerinas would run around and be hanging out in the lobby with their parents.”43 The 1993 season was pivotal for the Chicago Shakespeare Repertory Company. Suffering from debt, the company was forced to stage a single production. Cymbeline “was the miracle,” according to Gaines. “It saved us from extinction. I rented all our costumes from the Stratford Festival in Canada because we couldn’t afford to make anything.”44 In addition, King Lear in 1993 proved to be equally important because it won a Joseph Jefferson Award, whose committee recognizes both equity and nonequity theater talent in the Chicago area.45 In 1994, the company offered a three-play season, which stimulated attendance and subscriptions. By 1996, the company had an annual budget of $3.2 million, a huge leap from the $3,000 production of Henry V a decade earlier.46 Gaines and Henderson were convinced their Shakespeare Company needed a larger space.47 Henderson remembers James Riley and John Schmidt of the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority were leading the Navy Pier renovation. “They appreciated the power of culture in Chicago and understood that bringing a cultural attraction to the pier would enhance it.”48 Furthermore, adds Gaines, “Mayor Daley really wanted us because he had liked what he saw at Ruth Page, and we started having a series of meetings.”49 Henderson, Gaines, and the Shakespeare board initially balked at the idea of moving to Navy Pier. “Things sort of changed from our unanimous vote not to go to the pier,” remembers Henderson. Trips to the National Theatre in London and the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon (Shakespeare’s birthplace), however, generated new ideas and possibilities. “We had a four-month period where suddenly it felt right.”50 In 1997, the company agreed to a public-private partnership with the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority, which constructed the core of a 550-seat, $25 million venue and the Shakespeare Company finished and furnished the theater in exchange for a ninety-year lease on Navy Pier. The new Chicago Shakespeare Theater opened in 1999.51 “Shakespeare loves his new home,” proclaimed Gaines.52 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
While Gaines and Henderson were leading the physical and artistic expansion of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Tortolero was doing much the same with the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum. “We slowly began building the collection,” Tortolero explains. He and his cofounders considered the collection to be “a trust.” While much of the collection was donated, Tortolero acknowledges “we’re going to take care of these things for future generations.”53 The museum’s success was demonstrated when it tripled its physical footprint and expanded to its current 48,000-square-foot space in 2001.54 The $7 million expansion not only added exhibition space, but included new offices and on-site storage for the growing collection.55 Tortolero quickly utilized the new space. “In 2001 we had our first permanent collection exhibit,” he recounts. “We were the first organization in the country to ever do that.”56 That same year, the museum staged Frida Kahlo Unmasked, a photography exhibition celebrating the life of the famous Mexican artist.57 That show paved the way for the museum’s breakthrough exhibition Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera and 20th Century Mexican Art: The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection in 2003. The museum not only displayed the excitement, impact, and contradictions of Kahlo and Rivera, but also modernism itself in Mexican art. Attracting an unprecedented audience of more than 85,000 visitors, the event demonstrated that the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum was not just a relevant Chicago institution, but one with an international impact.58 Tortolero admits that the Frida Kahlo exhibitions were a watershed moment. Visitors and potential donors alike “figured if they can take care of Frida Kahlo, they can take care of my stuff,” Tortolero explains. “That was a big turning point for us.”59 In 2006, The African Presence in Mexico: From Yanga to the Present exhibition examined racial identity in Mexico. Unprecedented in multiple ways, Tortolero notes, the show was one of the earliest to acknowledge the diverse and sometimes unrecognized indigenous, European, African, Asian, and Jewish influences in Mexican art. The museum’s reputation was further broadened when the exhibition toured cities in both the United States and Mexico and attracted more than 100,000 visitors.60 And in 2006 the Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum adopted a new name: The National Museum of Mexican Art.61 Just as the opening of the enlarged National Museum of Mexican Art transformed that institution, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater’s move to Navy Pier
Carlos Tortolero tours the museum with then Senator Barack Obama (above). Two members of the Yollocalli Arts Reach staff, the award-winning youth initiative of the National Museum of Mexican Art, with Michelle Obama (below).
Making History | 57
did much the same. “We became the fastest growing nonprofit theater in America for those first five seasons,” Henderson points out. “Our programming expanded. Up until that moment we had never produced anything other than a play by Shakespeare.” Henderson believed that “if we’re going to sit here and look out over the whole city as we do, we should have programming that welcomes and serves audiences from across the city.”62 By 2002, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater (CST) had more than 23,000 subscribers and was the largest employer of actors in Chicago.63 Henderson and Gaines worked like flip sides of a coin. “I thought about how we were going to evolve, how we were going to engage an audience, what we were going to do, that we were going to avoid an experience with Shakespeare live on stage as being an academic experience,” explains Henderson. “I wanted to make it another great night out at the theater.” Gaines, by contrast, was interested in the classical Shakespeare. “Barbara’s aim had always been and still is to bring light into the world, to bring light to the universe through her directing of these plays; that is her life’s work,” admits Henderson. “In order to enhance that and engage a city at the level that this organization wanted to, that would always be at the center and the name of the company.”64 The result was a synergistic growth. “The big move was at the end of the first season on the Pier where we had only done Shakespeare plays until that point,” explains Henderson. Then in the 1999–2000 season, the CST staged Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. “That was a pretty clear sign that things were changing,” admits Henderson. Combined with the launching of the WorldStage Series, the CST has “brought in hundreds and hundreds of artists, and most of the great theaters in the world have now played at Chicago Shakespeare,” even as Shakespeare has remained the “standard of excellence.”65 Shakespeare 400 Chicago revealed the theater’s international reach. According to Michael Witmore, director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, Shakespeare 400 Chicago in 2016 was “a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death like no other in the world.” The Chicago Shakespeare Theater incorporated sixty cultural partners (including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the Newberry Library), 863 events, one thousandplus artists, 1.1 million participants, and thirty-eight restaurants and chefs (representing Shakespeare’s thirtyeight plays).66 The cornerstone event was a world premiere of Shakespeare’s history cycle, Tug of War, a two-part series based on his history plays that included the rarely staged Edward III, all of which was created and directed by Gaines.67 In 2017, the Chicago Shakespeare Theater opened The Yard, one of the most versatile theater venues in the world, with audience capacities ranging from 150 to 850.68 Even before Shakespeare 400 Chicago, 58 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
Phoebe Pryce (as Jessica) and Jonathan Pryce (as Shylock) in the Shakespeare’s Globe production of The Merchant of Venice, directed by Jonathan Munby, featured at Chicago Shakespeare Theater as part of Shakespeare 400 Chicago, August 2016. Photograph by Manuel Harlan
Henderson and Gaines recognized “if we were going to evolve into one of the venerable theater centers of the world, that most of those theater centers of the world have three distinct platforms, and one of them is of a larger capacity.” Henderson praises architect Gordon Gill, who designed “the beautiful curved lobby and made the pop-up nature of it so brilliantly artful, navigating the footprint.”69 The creation of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater and the National Museum of Mexican Art as local and international cultural forces has been recognized by numerous awards. Tortolero received the Bright New City Award from Mayor Harold Washington, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund Special Cultural Award, Chicago Magazine’s Chicagoan of the Year, the Chicago Tribune Arts Person of the Year, the University of Illinois at Chicago Alumni of the Year, the Illinois Humanities Council Public Humanities Award, and the Alumni Achievement Award from the University of Illinois. Most recently, he received an honorary degree from his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Chicago. In 2006, Poder named Tortolero one of the 100 Most Important Mexicans in the US.70 Henderson has garnered the Cultural Innovation Award, the Arts Administrator of the Year by Arts Management Magazine at the Kennedy Center, the Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Minister of Culture of France, a Tony Award for Outstanding Regional Theatre, as well as multiple Laurence Olivier and Joseph Jefferson Awards.71 Gaines’s productions have reaped similar success: more than thirty-five Joseph Jefferson Awards (three times for Gaines personally as Best Director for Cymbeline, King Lear, and The Comedy of Errors) and three Laurence Olivier Awards. In 2008, Chicago Shakespeare Theater was awarded the prestigious Regional Theatre Tony Award. Gaines has been named an honorary and Honorary Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in recognition of her contributions strengthening British-American cultural relations. Her other honors include honorary degrees from the University of Birmingham (UK), Dominican University, and Lake Forest College, as well as the Spirit of Loyola Award from Loyola University Chicago, the University Club of Chicago’s Cultural Award, and the Public Humanities Award from the Illinois Humanities Council.72 Gaines, Henderson, and Tortolero consider their civic contributions far more significant than their many awards. “I know we contributed to this period of the city’s cultural life,” Henderson asserts. “The number of classrooms where there are teachers that have trained with us and worked with us over the years and are engaging students in new ways, that is lasting.”73 Tortolero similarly takes great pride in the museum’s educational programs. “One third of our staff and one fourth of our budget is for youth programs and educational programs,” he says with pride. “No other museum in the United States is above ten percent.”74 For Gaines, what is “the most mean-
Tortorlero receives his Making History Award from Chicago History Museum president Gary T. Johnson (above). Henderson and Gaines pose with their Making History Awards (below).
Making History | 59
ingful is just making as many people, whether they be students, or people in the parks, or people who buy subscriptions, and introducing them to Shakespeare.” After all, “a little touch of Shakespeare in the night can soften and cushion the slings and arrows that are in all of our lives.”75
Timothy J. Gilfoyle teaches history at Loyola University Chicago and is the editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Urban History (Oxford University Press, 2019). I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Images courtesy of the awardees, unless otherwise noted. Page 48, Chicago History Museum event photography. 49, courtesy of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 51, bottom: Chicago History Museum event photography. 52, top: courtesy of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 54, Chicago History Museum event photography. 55, courtesy of Gauntam Krishnan at Unsplash. 56, courtesy of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 58, courtesy of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 59, Chicago History Museum event photography. 60, courtesy of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Carlos Tortolero has written on the Mexican American experience in Chicago. See Rita Arias Jirasek and Carlos Tortolero, Mexican Chicago (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing 2001). Insightful articles include Steve Johnson, “National Museum of Mexican Art: A vibrant scene in Pilsen,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2015, accessed February 11, 2018, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-0122-national-museum-mexican-art-20150121-column.html; and Kerry Cardoza, “Trump can’t stop the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago Reader, April 5, 2017, accessed February 11, 2018, https://www.chicagoreader.com/ chicago/national-museum-mexican-art-nmma-memoria-presente/Content?oid=26120386. Carlos Tortolero interviews can be found at “Museum Faces: Carlos Tortolero,” Great Museums Television, 2018, http://greatmuseums.org/explore/more/museum_ faces_carlos_tortolero; and Franky and José Guzmán, Carlos Tortolero: Art, Power, and Leadership, El Béisman FILMs, April 10, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= kbKLOjXBOxA; Michael Lipkin and Phil Ponce, “A Milestone for Mexican Art Museum,” Chicago Tonight, March 28, 2018, https://chicagotonight.wttw.com/ 2012/03/28/milestone-mexican-art-museum. On the early life and career of Barbara Gaines, begin with Chris Jones, “Navy Pier provides the perfect setting for Barbara Gaines to serve up Shakespeare, Chicago-style,” Chicago Tribune, September 1, 2002, accessed April 18, 2019, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-cst-tonynavy-pier-setting-story-story.html. For an insightful interview on the impact of Shakespeare 400 Chicago, see Barbara Bogaev, “Shakespeare 400 Chicago: Barbara Gaines,” Folger Shakespeare Library, April 18, 2017, accessed February 10, 2019, https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/shakespeare-400-chicago-barbaragaines. On Criss Henderson’s early career, see Jeff Borden, “Criss Henderson, 34: Executive director, Shakespeare Repertory Theater,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 1996, accessed February 11, 2019, https://www.chicagobusiness.com/node/782981; and “Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson,” Talk Theatre in Chicago, 2011, accessed February 10, 2019, https://www.theatreinchicago.com/talk/interior.php?podshowID=337 60 | Chicago History | Spring 2020
A nighttime view of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Photograph by Vito Palmisano
ENDNOTES
14 Tortolero, interview.
38 Henderson, interview.
1 “Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater, 2019, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/3bdnBHe; “Barbara Gaines,” Wikipedia, last updated October 18, 2018, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/373PZbP.
15 Tortolero, interview.
39 Sid Smith, “‘Girl’s Guide to Chaos’ Is a Cartoon of Love,” Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1988.
2 Steve Johnson, “National Museum of Mexican Art: A vibrant scene in Pilsen,” Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2015, accessed February 11, 2018, https://bit.ly/2OqRBWz.
20 Gaines, interview.
3 Kerry Cardoza, “Trump can’t stop the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago Reader, April 5, 2017, accessed February 11, 2018, https://bit.ly/381L5NM; “About the National Museum of Mexican Art,” National Museum of Mexican Art, 2011 (10,000 pieces), accessed April 29, 2018, https://bit.ly/37ZggsZ; Johnson, “National Museum of Mexican Art.” 4 “CST’s Barbara Gaines Honored,” Windy City Times, February 15, 2006, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/3bdqfNm. 5 Barbara Bogaev, “Shakespeare 400 Chicago: Barbara Gaines,” Folger Shakespeare Library, April 18, 2017, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2GWLzZm. 6 Chris Jones, “Navy Pier provides the perfect setting for Barbara Gaines to serve up Shakespeare, Chicago-style,” Chicago Tribune, September 1, 2002, accessed April 18, 2019, https://bit.ly/37UNBoO.
16 Tortolero, interview. 17 Gaines, interview. 18 Gaines, interview. 19 Jones, “Navy Pier.”
21 Gaines, interview. 22 Tortolero, interview. 23 “Carlos Tortolero,” Library of Congress, A Celebration of Mexico, undated, accessed February 1, 2018, https://bit.ly/385sDnu. 24 “Carlos Tortolero Resumé,” State of Illinois, 2009, accessed February 11, 2018, https://bit.ly/2vRTuVN. 25 Tim Markiew, “A Brief History of the National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago,” culture trip, last modified April 20, 2017, accessed April 29, 2018, https://bit.ly/399mV44. 26 Tortolero, interview. 27 Steve Johnson, “National Museum of Mexican Art.” 28 Tortolero, interview. 29 Tortolero, interview.
42 Henderson, interview. 43 Henderson, interview. 44 Gaines, interview. 45 “Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson,” Talk Theatre in Chicago. 46 Jeff Borden, “Criss Henderson, 34: Executive director, Shakespeare Repertory Theater,” Crain’s Chicago Business, 1996, accessed February 11, 2019, https://bit.ly/380th5o. 47 “Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson,” Talk Theatre in Chicago. 48 Henderson, interview. 49 Gaines, interview. 50 Henderson, interview. 51 Henderson, interview; Borden, “Criss Henderson;” “CST’s Barbara Gaines Honored,” Windy City Times. 52 Jones, “Navy Pier.”
31 Tortolero, interview.
55 Gisela Orozco, “National Museum of Mexican Art celebrates 25 years in Chicago,” Chicago Tribune and Hoy, March 21, 2012, accessed September 17, 2019, https://bit.ly/3b9weTf.
33 Gaines, interview.
8 Gaines, interview.
34 Gaines, interview.
9 Gaines, interview.
35 Criss Henderson, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 17, 2019, deposited in the collections of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Henderson, interview).
11 Jones, “Navy Pier.”
41 Henderson, interview.
30 Franky and José Guzmán, Carlos Tortolero: Art, Power, and Leadership, El Béisman FILMs, April 10, 2016, accessed February 10, 2018, https://bit.ly/2GV8jcm.
7 Barbara Gaines, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 20, 2019, deposited in the collections of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Gaines, interview).
10 Gaines, interview.
40 Henderson, interview; Jack Helbig, “Personals,” Chicago Reader, June 15, 1989; Sid Smith, “‘Intimacies,’” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1989.
32 “Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson,” Talk Theatre in Chicago, 2011, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2tzyjHi.
53 Tortolero, interview. 54 Tortolero, interview (tripled in size); Markiew, “A Brief History.”
56 Tortolero, interview. 57 “Frida Kahlo Unmasked,” National Museum of Mexican Art, undated, accessed September 17, 2019, https://bit.ly/2v7u5ak.
12 Carlos Tortolero, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 22, 2018, deposited in the collections of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Tortolero, interview).
36 Henderson, interview. Deerfield’s Theater in the Rough, an adult community theater, further stimulated Henderson’s theatrical curiosity as a teenager.
58 Orozco, “National Museum of Mexican Art celebrates 25 years in Chicago” (85,000); Janina A. Ciezadla, “Mexican Revolution,” Chicago Reader, March 6, 2003, accessed September 17, 2019, https://bit.ly/31y0VgE.
13 Tortolero, interview.
37 Henderson, interview.
59 Tortolero, interview.
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60 Orozco, “National Museum of Mexican Art celebrates 25 years in Chicago.” 61 “About the National Museum of Mexican Art,” National Museum of Mexican Art, 2011, accessed April 29, 2018, https://bit.ly/385tzZ2. 62 Henderson, interview. 63 Jones, “Navy Pier.” 64 Henderson, interview. 65 Henderson, interview. 66 Bogaev, “Shakespeare 400 Chicago;” Henderson, interview. 67 Henderson, interview; “Barbara Gaines,” Wikipedia; “Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater. 68 Blair Kamin, “Flexible, intimate and innovative, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare has its opening night,” Chicago Tribune, September 20, 2017; “The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier, 2019, accessed September 14, 2019, https://bit.ly/2RXTdsZ. 69 Henderson, interview. 70 “Carlos Tortolero Resumé,” State of Illinois; “Events: Carlos Tortolero to deliver Honorary Degree Lecture,” University of Illinois at Chicago, 2017, accessed February 11, 2018, https://bit.ly/2UsfwbM. 71 “Barbara Gaines and Criss Henderson,” Chicago Innovation, n.d., accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2ShhDwu. 72 “Barbara Gaines,” Wikipedia; “Barbara Gaines, Artistic Director,” Chicago Shakespeare Theater; “Illinois Humanities Council Honors Chicago Shakespeare Theater Artistic Director Barbara Gaines with 2007 Public Humanities Award,” Illinois Humanities, last updated 2019, accessed February 10, 2019, https://bit.ly/2Uo0SSY. 73 Henderson, interview. 74 Tortolero, interview. 75 Gaines, interview.
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