Chicago History | Spring–Summer 1974

Chicago History SPRING-SUMMER 1974

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The Chicago Stock Exchange Building shortly after its construction in 1894. The structure, executed in the grand style of Dankmar Adler and Louis H. Sullivan, was celebrated in contemporary accounts for its innovative caisson foundation.

Chicaqo Historical Soc iety

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE 0 F THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

The grimier the neighborhood, the poorer its people, the more likely that one will be surprised by a sudden splash of colors on an abandoned wall, on the outside of a building, on an El underpass. These are Chicago's murals, telling us something about the lives and aspirations of the people of the community who painted them.

Such messages have a history, an artistic tradition. In this issue, Roger Eric Hoyt takes us back to the Mexican Revolution, to the American regionalists, and to the days of the Federal Arts Project, as he unearths the antecedents of a suddenly resurgent art form.

Howlin' Wolf, Chicago bluesman, at Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago H istorical Society

SPRING-SUMMER 1974 Volume 111, Number 1

Cover : Th e Wall of Cho ices , a dra m a tic presen t atio n o f t he a ltern a t iv es ope n t o a ci t y ne ig h b orhood, i n t h e courtyard o f th e Ch r isto pher Ho u se Settl em en t.

CONTENTS

THE BLUES, CHICAGO STYLE / 4

by Ralph M etcalfe, Jr .

Courtesy Bert Phillips

CHICAGO RADIO : THE GLORY DAYS / 14

by Lester A. W einrott THE CHICAGO STOCK EXCHANGE BUILDING / 23

by John Vinci

I sabel Grossner, Editor Ell en Skerrett, Editorial A ssistant

THE EXPLOSION OF A DORMANT ART FORM: CH ICAGO 'S MURALS / 28

by Roger Eric Hoyt THE ANNA POTTERY / 36

by James K. Felts, Sr.

Editorial Advisory Committee Paul M. Angle, Chairman Emmett Dedmon James R . Getz Oliver Jensen R obert W. Johannsen Herman Kogan

CHICAGO : CENTER OF THE SILENT FILM INDUSTRY / 45

by Charles A. Jahant Fl FTY YEARS AGO / 54 BOOK REVIEWS : INTERESTING WOMEN / 60

by Mary Lynn M cCree

NEW LOOKS AT CHICAGO 'S ARCHITECTURE / 61

Will Leonard

by Nory Miller

Clement M. Silvestro

BRIEF REPORTS / 6 2 by the staff

Robert M. Sutton

Printed by R. R. Donnelley and Sons Company Chicago , Illinois Designed by Doug Lang Copy r ight, 197 4 by the Chicago H istorica l Society Clark St reet at North Av en u e Chicago, Il linoi s 60614

The Blues, Chicago Style

BY RALPH METCALFE, JR.

Anywhere in the worldyou hear a Chicago bluesman play) it's a Chicago sound, born and bred.

1s A MYTH that Chicago's distinctively black music is jazz. True, Louis Armstrong played here and so did Jelly Roll Morton and a host of others. But they came from New Orleans with a highly developed musical style and, when they moved on, that style was still intact. Not so the bluesmen. They also came from the South, but their music developed in Chicago-from a country idiom to an urban and, later, an amplified sound. The bluesmen stayed and gave birth to the Chicago blues, which ha,·c influenced not only Afro-American music, but popular music the world o,·er. One of the Beatles' earliest and most direct influences was the music of Chuck Berry. The Rolli ng Stones took their name from Muddy \\'aters' blues of the same name. Elvis Presley's body movements hark back to J. B. Lenoir and h is first h it was It's All Right, Mama,

by Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup.

The blues as performed in Chicago today arc hard -dri,·ing, loud, and electrically amplified.

Performances sometimes take place in concert halls or at large festivals. But whatever the size of the audience, the music remains a form of direct communication between the performers and the listeners, a particular form of communication with a long history.

The ancient fo rerunners of the Chicago bluesmen were the African griots, a large caste of minstrels who tra,·eled from ,·illagc to village, singing and playing stringed instruments. The African singer does not describe a mood; neither does the blues singer. Rather, they both create THERE

Adapted from Chicago Blues Tradition by Ralph Metcalfe, Jr., to be published by Third World Press. \,Vhen the author isn't \\Ti ting about music or managing his father's campaigns, you can find him at Queen Bee, a blues spot at 7401 South Chicago Avenue.

4

Chicago Hi story

a mood and put their audience into that same frame of mind. Unlike vVcstern musicians, whose tradition is one of precise intonation, the black musician plays from "beneath" a note, through the note, and "above" the note, passing through the arbitrary point on the Western scale known as a note and playing instead a whole range of sound. The Bantu tradition of sliding from tone to tone survives in the blues, as docs the African technique of falsetto singing.

Black musicians in America early discovered the inexpensive, easily transported harmonica and guitar. Both instruments allow the performer to slide through notes, and thus fit the African csthetic better than, say, a trumpet. To further increase the guitar's flexibility, bluesmen developed the "slide" technique. A steak bone was carved and polished, p laced on the little or ring finger of the fretting hand, and passed over the strings, producing the whining ranges of sound that are blues notes. The technique has been developed since, of course. The steak bone was used primarily with the acoustic guitar. Its successor, the bottleneck-a bottle is broken an inch or two below its mouth and then the edge is smoothed by fire-can be used with either acoustic or electric guitar. The most popular version of the slide is now the metal slide, a length of metal tubing used almost exclusively for electric guitar.

Not only the musical technique of the bluesman, but the very structure of his songs derives from an ancient tradition. During slavery, American slavemasters maintained a ban on music, and especially singing, whereby it was thought messages intelligible only to the slaves cou ld be broadcast. The work song, however, was tolerated.

In most \ Vest-African work songs the leader sings a line, sometimes two, and is then answered

Charley Patton, the founder of the Delta blues.

Courtesy Yazoo Records

Chicago History

5

Blues

Muddy Waters . He got the Cold Weather Blues in Chicago, but stayed anyway to develop a new style of guitar playing.

by the chorus with a second or third lin e or with a refrain that remains constant throughout the song. This is the origin of the twelve-bar format of most blues verses, which arc composed of three lines of four bars each. The first line is repeated, adding emphasis to the statement and deepening the mood. The third line is the punch line, explaining the significance of the first two lines and completing the thought of the Yerse.

Although there has been some departure from the twelve-bar format (the late Magic Sam, a Chicago guitarist, wrote several sixteen-bar blues), it is still the characteristic form.

The twelve-bar work song, the musical techniques of the griot as adapted to Western instruments, and the conditions of the time were all fused into the blues, a rural musical expression that has its deepest roots in the Missi ssippi Delta region.

The founder of the Delta blues, Charley Patton, was born in 1885 on a farm near Edwards, Mississippi . Patton was a versatile vocalist, guitarist, and composer; his repertoire includ ed such recognizable tunes as Spoonful Blues, Frankie and Albert, Shake It and Break It, and R evenue ]\,fan Blues. Between r 895 and r 9 r o, Mississippi saw the birth of many bluesme n-to-be. Between 1 9 r o and 1920 over 60,000 Blacks moved to Chicago from the South, more than doubling the city's black population, and among them were bluesmcn.

Their experience soon began to be refl ected in their lyrics. The glitter of city life was sometimes taken as an indication that the Korth was indeed the promised land. Kew doors seemed to open to the black man, and he walked in smiling.

In 1935, Little Brother Montgomery, in his Lake Front Blues, sang of the happin ess he had found in Chicago: Green Diamond 's blowin' her whistle, train's comin' round the trail, Green Diamond's blowin' her whistle, train's comin ' round the trail, I can't ride Pullman , guess I'll have to rid e the rail.

6

Chicago History

Cou rt esy Sco:t A. Cameron Organ izati on , Inc.

Chicago, Chicago, that is the town for me, Chicago, Chicago, that is the town for me, Drop me off by the lakefront, that's "¡here I 'll be contented to be.

Ooooey, hoooey ... I 'm just drcamin' dreams.

Ooooey, hoooey .. . I 'm just dreamin' dreams, The whole round world is mine, things arc not like they seem.

Cow Cow Davenport also dreamed of Chicago, and wrote the Jim Crow Blues: I'm tired of this Jim Crow, gonna leave this town, Doggone my black soul, I'm sweet Chicago bound, Yes, I'm leavin' here, from this old Jim Crow town.

Some, of course, were disappointed. The increased expense often overshadowed increased earning power, and some Blacks found life in the city more difficult than it had been at home.

Mudd y Waters sang M. Morganficld 's Cold Weather Blues:

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, whose music gave Elvis Presley his sta rt.

l Photo by George Wilkinson Courtesy Del mark Records

Oh well I'm leaving Chicago, and I sure hate to go, Yes I'm leavin' Chicago, and people I sure do hate to

go, Well I'm going back down South, where the weather suits my clothes.

An article which appeared in the Chicago Defender in 1929 reflects the increasing popularity of the blues: The day of the blues singer, which dawned a few short years ago, seems destined to shine brightly for some time to come. Time was when folks who carried the name of " blues singer" were classified decidedly below the "standing" of a prima donna ... Many a singer has sorrowfully cast aside the dignity of her calling and resigned herself to the hot stuff craze which they hopefully predict will fade out like all fads.

Blues musicians were playing in intimate clubs and taverns, and they were also cutting records.

The decades between r 920 and 1 940 saw the

rise of several record labels that specialized in blues-race records, they were called at the time. The Paramount, Vocalion, and Bluebird (RCA) companies recorded in Chicago, beginning around 1930, and the potential economic success they offered combined with other social causes of migration to draw blues musicians to the city.

Among the earliest of the successful recording artists was Tampa Red Whittaker. Tampa Red was born Hudson Whittaker in Smithville, Georgia, in r goo. He came to Chicago in 1928 and recorded It's Tight Like That, an instant success that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

In 1930, he started the famous Tampa Red's Hokum Jug Band, with Big Bill Broonzy on lead guitar and Georgia Tom Dorsey on piano.

Tampa was perhaps the first Chicago bluesman to use the "slide" guitar style of which we spoke earlier.

Signing a recording contract was by no means a guarantee of financial success, however. "Race record" companies were notorious for exploiting their black artists, even to the extent of getting a blues musician drunk, recording six or eight of his tunes, paying him $40 or so, and keeping all profits from sales. As the blues gained popularity in Europe, it became a common practice for companies to release records overseas without telling the artist who had cut the tune. Ethics in the industry have improved considerably since then, but most record companies still exercise a tremendous degree of control over the artistic creations of their musicians. The techniques of sound engineering and the packaging and promotion of a record often obscure or destroy the message that the artist is trying to communicate. Even now, not even the most successful bluesmen in Chicago are safe from such reinterpretations of their music.

As the Defender had predicted, the "fad" d id not die out. Dui:ing the 1930s and' 40s, the musical traditions of the Mississippi Delta were reinforced in Chicago by a larger group, includ ing John Lee Williamson, Big Bi ll Broonzy, Lonnie Ch icago H istory

7

DON'T TAMPA WITH THE BLUES

Tampa Red, whose It's Tight Like That earned him some prosperity.

Photo from Prestige Records album

Blues

Johnson, Roosevelt Sykes, Sunnyland Slim, and Howlin' Wolf. Their music began to undergo a transformation-from the country idiom, which was usually played before a relatively small audience, to a harder-driving sound which was ready to be amplified for audibility in the larger taverns and bars. It was during this period that Chicago became the capital of the blues. As Otis Spann later explained: See Chicago was known to be the mother of the blues for years and still is. Every good musician that ever left the South, he stopped in Chicago. That's where you can find them all at. The peoples was so enthusiastic over listening to the blues there ... they know what they're [the musicians] going to do just about before they do it.

By the mid- 1 940s, the era of the neighborhood blues bar had begun. In dozens of taverns on the South and West sides, the black community joined the bluesmen, to share in a musical expression of their daily existence. One of the earliest of these bars was Sylvio's, at Lake Street and Kinzie Avenue. Other well-known blues bars include Theresa's, Pepper's, and the Checkerboard Lounge.

Northern images gradually supplanted the rural images of the earlier blues, and new themes were expressed-the musician's life on the road, social protest. But mostly the songs were about the same old thing, as Willie Dixon calls it:

Even lyrics about traveling and loneliness, the experience of being on the road that is so familiar to musicians, often had something to do with a woman. Key to the Highway, popularized by Big Bill Broonzy in the I 930s, is a classic expression of this combination: I've got the key to the highway, yes, I'm billed out and bound to go.

I'm gonna leave here runnin' because walking is much too slow.

I'm goin' back to the border, where I 'm better known, Because you haven't done nothing but drive a good man from home.

Now when the moon peeks over the mountain, yeah you know I'll be on my way I'm gonna walk, walk this old highway deep until the break of day.

Now gimme one more kiss baby yes, just before I go.

'Cause when I leave you this time now baby, I declare I won't be back no more.

So long and goodbye, yes, I had to say goodbye.

'Cause I'm gonna walk, walk this ol' highway deep until the day I die.

Big Bill Broonzy knew a lot about traveling.

He was one of the first blues singers to tour Europe, and his travels broadened his perspective on the condition of his own people. His Black, Brown and White Blues was an early protest, controversial among black audiences in the I 930s because it spoke of the inferior status of black people:

What make you feel so good when your baby get a evenin' gown?

What make you feel so good when your baby get a even in' gown?

Must be the same old thing that made a preacher lay his Bible down.

This little song that I'm singing about People you know is true If you're black and got to work for a living This is what they will say to you

Refrain:

Refrain:

Oh that same thing, that same thing, Tell me who's to blame, The whole world's fightin' about that same thing.

They say if you's white, you's all right If you's brown, stick around But if you're black Mmm, mmm, Brother, git back, git back, git back.

Me and a man was working side by side This is what it meant They was paying him a dollar an hour And they was paying me fifty cents.

Chicago History

9

Blues

Refrain I helped win sweet victory With my little plow and how Now I want you to tell me brother What you gonna do 'bout th e old Jim Crow?

Refrain I helped build the country And I fought for it too Tow I guess you can see What a black man has to do.

Big Bill himself thought that his critics were lacking in racial pride. As he explained in his book, Big Bill Blues, "I do think that the reason why the T\egroes don't like the song Black, Brown and White is because they don ' t want to be a egro and they try not to look like one. They fix their hair, wear their clothes, talk and act like the American white man." He also knew, from personal experience, th e hardship of which he sang. Despite his international tours and his successful recordings on the Bluebird label, Broonzy could not make a living from the blues in Chicago. He worked as a molder, cook, piano mover, and porter at various times. T\othing exceptional about this in the r 930s and even the '40s.

Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup, another bluesrnan, lived in an abandoned packing crate under the 39th Street El station when he arrived in the rnid-193os, and was forced to play on the street for tips as well as working as a porter in a West Side liquor store. Crudup was probably the first Chicago bluesman to amplify his guitar, in 1942. Although the electric guitar had been invented in the late r 930s, it didn't really catch on until after \ Vorld \\'ar II, when it became the dominant Chicago blues instrument.

The transition is exemplified by the career of Muddy Waters. Muddy played a country-style guitar when he arrived in Chicago in 1942.

Broonzy took him under his wing for a while, and by the time h is first records appeared, in 195 r, he had developed a fierce, steel-rai l, electric sound . He not only had phenomena l in10

Chicago History

Photo by Hal A. Franklin, 11 Courtesy Ebony magazine

Theresa, at her place. The a uthor says it's "on the corner, in the basement, 480 1 So. Indiana Ave."

flucnc' on the blues scene in Chicago; his authorship of the song from whi h England's Rolling Stones took their name represented the emergence of the Chicago blues tradition as the source of American and British "rock" music.

But years before Muddy Waters' first records appeared, others were experimenting with the electric guitar. J.B. Lenoir, for one. Lenoir was deeply religious and expressed his faith in many of his songs. He was unique a111ong blucsmcn in that he didn't drink, didn't s111okc, and never "horscd around" in the neighborhood bars.

Lenoir's long ¡st-lasting contribution to the blues was Lhc way he moved his body while he sang.

As he described it, "l ciscd to go movin' on the flo' there, rockin' and wcavin' .... That's really my own particular style and now this Chuck Berry and this while boy Elvis Presley and everybody got it."

And in the late 1940s, Elmore James took the newly electrified guitar, added a slide, and establish ,ct one of the most powerful and widely imitated strains of blues. In blues circles, James is generally regarded as the great SL slide guitarist ever Lo have touched finger lo string. The shi111111cring tones characteristic of his style have yet to find their 111usical equal. Today, his techniques arc rcflccLcd in the 111usic of such Chicago blucsmcn as llound Dog Taylor, John Littlejohn, and J. B. Hutto.

Between 1940 and 1950, the black population of hicago grew from nearly 400,000 to 645,000, and the blues market increased proportionately. In 1949, when Big Bill Hill, the popular disc jockey, arrived in Lown, he increased it even further. Hill began broadcasting live jam sessions, direct from the neighborhood bars, over station \\'OPA. Indeed, his radio coverage helped bring about the sessions he wanted to record, sessions which have been vital in the development of Chicago blues. There is not a blues musician in Chicago who doesn't owe a sizable part of his success to Bill Hill.

The greatest surge, however, came in the 1950s, when the brothers Chess, Phil and Leon-

ard, began to record Chicago's top blues musicians for their Aristocrat label. Aristocrat eventually grew into the Chess Record Company which, until the family sold out in 1970, dominated Chicago blues recording. The Chess brothers were always cager to record talented blucsmcn, and musicians who recorded for Chess oft 'n told them about other 111usicians. Chuck Berry, for example, came lo Chess' attention through Muddy Waters.

Chess Records flourished along with the blues.

The hard-driving amplified blues sound had caught on, and black people couldn't seem to hear enough of it. Chess strengthened its compcti Livc position in 1963 with the purchase of radio station WHFC, which was rechristened \VVO and became the most popular blackoricn tcd station in Chicago. Artists, guaranteed a hearing in the influential Chicago market, stuck with Chess.

One of the most talented bluesmcn at Chess is Willie Dixon. Ile plays the acoustic bass, has sung with most of the bcsl b luc-smcn, and is a prolific composer. He has toured Africa, Israel, Europe, and India, and he was the inspirer and organizer of Chicago's first annual Blues Festival, held on August 30, 1969. (Big Bill Hill was the master of ceremonies.) No current blucsman has a better right lo proclaim, I Am the Blues: Refrain: I am the blues, I am the blues Well the whole world knows I been mistreated, The whole world knows I been misused.

I am the moan of suffering women,

I am the groan of dying men, I am the last one to start, But I'm the first one to end.

Refrain I am the salvation of people Who bled and died, I am the last one hired, But I'm the first dne fired.

Chicago History

11

Photo by Oanlel Vittet Courtesy Delmark Records

Rice Miller, getting in a lick on the amplified harmonica on a bus in Paris.

Hound Dog Taylor playing at Florence's, a blues spot at 54th St. and Shields Ave., Chicago.

Pholo by Hal A. Franklin, II Courtesy Ebony magazine

12 Chicago History

Blues

Refrain

I am the many generations, Of poverty and starvation, I am the underdog, friend, Of the United Nations.

Refrain

Willie Dixon's travels abroad have been more extensive than most, but travel, even abroad, occurred with some frequency after the expansion of interest in the blues during World War II. ow, successful artists find they have to travel, have to back up their nationally distributed records with appearances across the country, if they are going to move up finan cially. One of the founding fathers of Chicago blues, Sunnyland Slim, says he can no longer support his family in Chicago. "It's no money in Chicago the way Chicago used to be. . . .

Chicago ain't hip no more."

Maybe Chicago "ain't hip no more." Maybe not. The number of neighborhood blues bars has been declining in recent years. Jam sessions are becoming rarer. And yet there is new life on Maxwell Street which, in the late 1940s, became a gathering place for musicians such as Hound Dog Taylor, Walter Horton, and Sonny Boy II. In those days, line cords were passed into apartments through the front windows so the musicians' amplifiers could be plugged in inside, and the musicians occasionally got tips from passersby. The major innovator of amplified harmonica playing, Little Walter Jacobs,

got his start on Maxwell Street. For a long time, the street was quiet, but now one can again hear the sound of outdoor jam sessions livening up the neighborhood.

The musicians I know still find something special in Chicago that they do not find on the road. Chicago blues have always been innovative. In the neighborhood taverns, though there are fewer than there were, musicians and patrons still meet as people, and the music is a result of the dialog between them. After the set, the artist is just another person in the club.

Guitarist Buddy Guy expresses it thus: You can't take it away from Chicago. You can go in Theresa's and get with it I mean you can hit one note there, or should I say just play that note, and get everybody upset and then they just won't forget that note for the next week .... So whenever I am in Chicago and you can't find me you know what to do.

You just stop at Theresa's .... She'll just put a little sign outside, "Buddy Will Be Here Friday," and I'll just walk in the door and they'll all be there. You just can't take that away from Chicago. Just that whole atmosphere or something is still there.

Chicago's atmosphere still belongs to the bluesmen, but not its money. Most of the profits from the blues' popularity have gone to white "rock" musicians. Although it is difficult to find a popular tune which is not derived from the blues form, it is impossible to identify a song written by a Chicago bluesman that has earned nearly as much as the blues-derived "rock" songs. That is the blues.

The editor would like to thank Arc Music Corp. for permission to quote the lyrics of Cold Weather Blues, The Same Thing, and I Am the Blues; Duchess Music Corp., for permission to quote Key to the Highway; and Yannick Bruynoghe for permission to quote Black, Brown and White. So far as she could determine, using a discography prepared by Paul O liver (in Blues Fell This Morning, Cassell & Company Ltd ., 1960), the other lyrics quoted are no t under copyright.

Chicago History

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Chicago Radio: The Glory Days

BY LESTER A. WEINROTT

Comedy, melodrama, plays, dance orchestras, and variety showsall were broadcast" live from Chicago)) in the Glory Days of radio. to feed the unemployed; World vVar I veterans selling apples; men wrapped in newspapers to ward off the cold, huddling under Wacker Drive; movie theatres offering two, sometimes three, feature pictures at bargain prices to attract patrons: these were the unhappy facts of the Depression of the 1930s, yet Chicago rad io was alive and well and flourishing, the wellspring of the new entertainment form that was sweeping America.

Chicago radio stations were originating and broadcasting dramas, children's shows, soap operas, musical-and -variety programs, and quiz shows. There was work for actors and writers and directors-and they flocked to Chicago.

From motion pictures came stars like Francis X. Bushman and Irene Rich; from the legitimate theatre, Edith (Mrs . Loyal) Davis and Frank Dane; from Chautauqua, Jesse Pugh; from vaudevil le, Ben Bernie; and from the colleges and universities, young hopefuls Louise Fitch, E loise Kummer, and Virginia Dwyer. Even the Royal Academy of London offered one of its girl graduates, Elizabeth Reller, born in Richmond, I ndiana, and armed with a letter of introduction from Lloyd L ewis, then drama critic for the Chicago Daily News.

Tom Post had been a player in tent and tab shows, Michael Romano was a practising attorney. A former banker became a sought-after delineator of villains and English gentlemen.

There were monologists and opera singers, doorto-door salesmen and sidewalk pitchmen; in short, those who could sight-read a radio script SOUP KITCHENS

Lester A. Weinrott was in at the beginning of Chicago's radio broadcasting and made the switch to television at just the right time . He is now a consultant.

14

Ch icago History

trekked to Chicago in hopes that their voices would bring them the work on radio which would guarantee food and shelter during those Depression days.

At the very beginning of radio broadcasting, it was not uncommon for an ordinary citizen to come off the streets into the radio station and offer his services as an entertainer. I made my first broadcast in i922 in Davenport, Iowa.

I volunteered to recite one of the then-popular doggerels of Thomas Augustin Daly, "Guiseppe, Da Barber." In retrospect, neither talent, nor selection of material, seemed important.

It certainly was not the best of times, yet it was not the worst for people who talked and sang and whistled and barked and made babycries into the microphones during the decade from 1930 to 1940, the G lory Days of Chicago radio.

The phenomcnom of the loudspeaker that brought free entertainment into the American home was barely twenty years old, for it was on Election Day, ::'\ovembcr 2, 1920, that Dr. Frank Conrad of radio station KD K.A, Pittsburgh, broadcast the returns of the Harding-Cox presidential election, the first scheduled and advertised radio program in the United States. Two years later, there were 30 standard radio broadcasting stations; in 1925, 530; in 1928, 677; and, by 1940, 765.

Meanwhile, radio sets in use had grown from 3,000 in 1925 to the point where 77 percent of homes were equipped with sets in 1940. The early primitive "cat's whisker" sets, many made or assembled at home, ga,¡e way to the manu factured uni ts, housed in o,¡crsizcd cabinets, that became part of the home decor of the period. The makers of these receivers advertised their products aggressively. Buyers could choose Atwater Kent, Radak, Magnavox, De Forest,

N.8.C. photo

Chi cago H istorical Society

Paul Rhymer, creator of "Vic and Sade," at work at home in 1934.

Radiola, Crosley, Lyradion, Mu-rad, or Thermiodyne, among others.

What prompted the national craze for radio listening? Consider that mechanical instruments for reproducing sound had been limited to the player piano (ca. I 842) and the phonograph (ca. 1877) and that each of these instruments required not only the purchase of material to be reproduced, rolls and records, but also necessitated some function by the operator to make them run. Contrasted with those devices, the joys of free sound from free radio became most appealing. Besides, radio was new. It was the marvel of the twentieth century, along with the automobile, the a irplane, and "talking" motion pictures.

Above all, it gave the listener a way of escape from the grim realities of the Depression-an unlimited range of imaginary people, places, and situations. It took his mind off his everyday worries and transported him to never-neverland.

Radio was the right medium, born at the right time.

Of all the programs that filled the air waves, musical, dramatic, variety, quiz, discussion, and ethnic, perhaps the one species responsible for Chicago's preeminence in the Thirties was the fifteen-minute serial, broadcast each day, Monday through Friday, somewhere between nine o'clock in the morning and five in the afternoon.

In the decade from 1930 to 1940, listeners had their choice of some fifty to sixty "soap operas" or "sudsers." These continuing programs about continuing characters were called soaps, some argue, because the first advertisers who sponsored them were manufacturers of soap. Other critics, less beneficent, attribute the names they were called to the soapy content they purveyed .

Nevertheless, the soap opera was the staple of Chicago radio, a vehicle that supported hundreds of actors, dozens of writers and directors, and staffs of technicians.

Testimony to their durability exists in the tenure that soine of them occupied. "Ma Perkins" began in Chicago in 1933 and continued Ch icago History

15

Radio

Chl~t=!~~/~~ Freeman F. Gosden and Charles J. Correll, better known as Amos and Andy.

16 Chicago History

on the air for 27 years. Virginia Payne was America's own beloved Ma for every one of those years, playing the role in a total of 7,065 broadcasts, most of which originated in the Chicago studios of NBC. The program finished its latter years in New York, but retained its Chicago flavor to the end.

Another serial, "Painted Dreams," made its debut over \\'GN in 1931, featuring a young woman by the name of Erna Phillips, who portrayed lovable, adorable, Mother Moynahan. Miss Phillips also scripted the show.

Through the years, the same Miss Phillips (later "Irna") remained the most successful writer of soaps in the annals of the genre. She was still a rcsidcn t of Chicago and still writing serials, but for television, until her death last December.

Among the many soaps created by Miss Phillips was "The Guiding Light," the story of kindly Reverend Ruthledge, who devoted his life to pointing out the path to happiness through patience and understanding. "The Road of Life" was another Phillips' epic. This serial began as "the story of an Irish-American mother and her troubles raising her children," but wound up as a drama concerned with doctors and nurses, thus competing with another of Miss Phillips' efforts entitled "The Woman in \Vhite," which concerned itself with the romance between a nurse and a surgeon.

Still another long-lived serial was "The Story of Mary Marlin," created and written by Jane Crusinberry. Mary Marlin was a woman senator, immersed in politics, who was successively portrayed on the air by actresses Joan Blaine, Anne Seymour (twice: during the Chicago run and when the show transferred to New York), Betty Lou Gerson, Muriel Kirkland, Eloise Kummer, and Linda Carlon. Such casting changes were not unusual in soap operas, although a more convenient way to dispose of a player in a drama was to kill the character off by writing an accident, an illness, or a mysterious disappearance into the script.

Follows now a partial list of the dramatic

Chester Lauck and Norris Goff, better known as Lum and Abner, literally put Pine Ridge, Ark., on the map.

N.B.C. photo Chicago Historical Society

serials available to housewives, shut-ins, and the unemployed during the Thirties: Arnold Grimm's Daughter; Attorney at Law; Bachelor's Chi ldren; Betty and Bob; Carters of Elm Street; Clara, Lu and Em; The Couple Next Door; Dan Harding's Wife; Girl Alone; The Right to Happiness; Houseboat Hannah; Working Wife; Kitty Keene; Manhattan Mother; Midstream; Myrl and Marge; The Romance of Helen Trent; Scattergood Baines; Stepmother; A Tale of Today; Today's Children; Valiant Lady; and \Ve Arc Four.

All of these were "talk" shows, in that they began with a recapitulation of the plot lin e by the announcer, followed by a musical bridge by an organist, and then the dramatic enactment of the episode by the actors. Abortive attempts were made to create enduring musical serials, notably "Modern Cinderella" and "Lovesong of the Night," but they were unsuccessful and had brief lives on the air.

A study of the cast lists of the va rious soaps reveals that many actors and actresses played different roles on the same show. Before the days of the actors' union, the American Federation of Radio Artists, it was not unusual for a producer or director to hire one actor to portray four or five different roles in one fifteen-minute episode. One such protean performer was Marvin Miller, an outstanding announcer and dialectician, who played leading men, "heavies," young men, old men-any character the scripts called for.

A typical plot-outline of the day may be found in the cover story of R adio Guide, a leading publication of the Thirties. The lead story for the week of December 17, , 938, concerns itself with the dramatic serial, "Stepmother." This is how the show is described: Another woman, politics, gossip, racketeers, murder -all combine to complicate a young woman's struggle to prove that a stepmother can, with devotion and affection, successfully hold together a home with another woman's chi ldren. Kay Fairchild (played

by Suncla Love) is the stepmother who tries clesper-

Radio

ately to hold the love of her husband, John Fairchild (Francis X. Bushman,) and of John's two children by a former marriage, Bud and Peggy. The "other woman," Adella Winston, a wealthy divorcee, interferes and causes John to lose his job at the Walnut Grove Bank, forcing Kay to open a dress shop in partnership with her friend, Genevieve ...

The press release continues to pile complication upon complication, dastardly deed upon unbearable vicissitude. It describes a plot-line typical of the genre and too painful for this writer to continue (for he was the writerproducer-director-and-chef of this verbal olla podrida).

Ifthc daytime soap operas offered an opiate to the housewives of the Depression, two Chicagoborn programs were totally unique in that they gave all of America joy and laughter: "Vic and Sade" and "Amos 'n' Andy."

Paul Rhymer, creater-writer of "Vic and Sade," was an American humorist, as contrasted to the gag-writers, jokesters, and contrivers of the so-called comedy shows of radio. Rhymer's comedic talents, like Fred Allen's, shone out amidst the false glitter of the fool's gold that passed for humor in radio's salad days.

Rhymer wrote "about" the characters that peopled his shows. The cast of "Vic and Sade" was small: Vic Gook, played by Art Van Harvey; Sade, his -wife, acted by Bernadine Flynn; and Rush, their son, portrayed by Billy Idelson.

Four or five other characters appeared from time to time, the most memorable being Uncle Fletcher, acted by Clarence Hartzell. It was the group of characters who never appeared on the show, but were only talked about, that created the happy, small-town flavor of the opus. For instance: Ishigan Fishigan of Shishigan, Michigan, who called Vic and Sade, long distance.

The audience never heard Ishigan 's voice, but he was a fully fleshed-out character when the principals finished talking with him. Harry Dean, who hung around the interurban train station, was another familiar, as were Jake Gump ox, the garbage man, Smelly C lark, Blue-Tooth John18

Ch icago History

son, and Sade's friend, Ruthie Stembottom, who never missed a washrag sale at Yamelton's Department Store.

Vic and Sade were played with a downstate twang, but as with everything else in the show, the accented speech was understated. A characteristic gambit was Vic's penchant for sending postcards from "exotic places" which were actually only a few miles away. This exercise was apparently drawn from life by Paul Rhymer, who was known to have written and posted strange messages to his friends. One such postcard was much talked about by actors who sat in the lounges of NBC and CBS, awaiting calls for rehearsals. It was said that Rhymer found an old postcard depicting the porch of a "Pleasure Palace" of the Old West. On the porch were the occupants of that ancient disorderly house. He addressed the card to iles Trammel, vicepresident and general manager of WMAQ, the BC station in Chicago. The message, so the story goes, was something like this: "Dear Niles: \Ve sure miss you, since you quit your regular Saturday night visit. The little boy is just fine,

"The Three Doctors" (of Com edy): Russell Pratt, Ransome Sherm an, and Joseph Rudolph.

Part of the cast of "Jack Armstrong, A ll-Am erican Boy" working o ut a problem at the studio: Sarajane We ll s, John Gannon, J am es Goss, with (far r ight) director , Ed M or se.

but he could use a warm, winter overcoat, as the weather up here sure gets cold. Hope you are over your 'little illness.' Signed ... The Girls."

I t was said that the postcard tra,·eled for weeks from office to office, where it was relished by every reader. Finally, Trammel received it.

His reactions are unknown since he is dead .

Gone, too is the whimsical Paul Rhymer, so the authenticity of this talc cannot be verified-but it is really too typical to be apocryphal.

Another of Rhymer's postcards was addressed to this writer when he was casting a comedy program, "Meet Mr. Meek." Auditions were being held for the part of Meek's boss, the irascible Mr. Barker whose motto was "Big Business-Quick Decisions!' ' Through the mail came a cabinet photo of \\"illiam .Jennings Bryan. The message on the back was " I am a young orator, well regarded in Platte. Have tailcoat-will travel." Only Rhymer's zany sense of humor could ha,·e prompted that.

Of all the programs that Chicago contributed to radio, the one that most completely and immediately captured all of America was "Amos 'n' Andy," which was first broadcast on March 19, 1928, and which was to become a na tiona 1 institution. Dcsen·cdly, because the team of Freeman Gosden (Amos Jones) and Charles Correll (Andrew H. Brown) was the result of fine polish acquired when the two performers broadcast over station \\'G::---; for five years as principals of a show entitled "Salll 'n' Henry."

Unlike many other entertainers in the early years of radio, Correll and Gosden, who met in Chicago, were gifted and trained performers. A memorandum from \\'G)l' in 1925 stated: "Charl ie Correll and Freeman Gosden comprise a harmony team that is becoming one of the most popular in the country." Their singing span was short-lived when Ben McGanna, the Chicago Tribune executive assigned to the radio station, conceived the idea of a "talking comic strip." Thus was born the team of Sam 'n' Henry, two white men who played Black characters whose adventures captivated and delighted the listeners. The ir first broadcast was on January 12, 1926. W ithin two years they were the hottest property in the new med i urn. I n 1928, the l'\ationa l Broadcasting Company signed them to a contract for $100,000 per year and the team became Amos 'n' Andy, proprietors of the Fresh Air Taxi Company, socalled because its one and only cab was a topless, beat-up old automobile.

To illustrate the hold the program had upon its listeners, departmcn t stores tuned in the broadcasts and dissem inated t hem over loud speakers so shoppers would not m iss an episode; movie houses timed their films so that patrons could listen to their fa,·ori tcs between 7 :oo and 7: 1 5 P.~1.; politicians inserted references to the program into the Congressional Record; 30,000 cards were mailed to Amos 'n' Andy one Christmas by grateful and affectionate listeners; and the man on the street aped Andy as he said, "Check and Double Check," and Amos, whose "Holy Mackerel, Andy!" became a part of the American speech pattern. The program was broadcast six nights a week at the start, but soon resolved itself into a Monday-throughFriday series. It continued to run into the 1950 , when it became a half-hour series entitled "The Amos 'n' Andy Music Hall." \ \·hen Correll and Gosden first began playing their blackfacc characters, there still was an occasional minstr-cl show playing in the sma ll towns of America. The ~cgro was p layed to be Chi c a go History

19

Radio

Cliff Soubier, who played the vi ll ains in the dramas b roa d cast by the cast of "First Nighter."

laughed at, if not derided. No voice was heard to protest. Yet, the program was as, if not more, popu lar among Blacks than it was among white listeners. It was only after "Amos 'n' Andy" was translated into television, (with Black actors playing the parts), that concerted efforts by Black organizations caused its cancellation.

Another comedic contribution from Chicago was "Fibber McGee and Molly," written by the gifted Don Quinn and acted by Marion and J im Jordan. The husband-and-wife team had begun broadcasting a five-day-a-week, fifteenm in u te comedy program ca ll ed "The Smackouts" in 1931 . This modest effort consisted main ly of Jim Jordan's exaggerated yarns. It, too, was scripted by Don Quinn. In 1935, "Fibber McGee and Molly" began its eighteen year career in the )l'BC studios of Chicago.

I t had an all-Chicago cast which included Bill Thompson, master dialectician who played a half dozen roles; Hugh Studebaker, who portrayed Sill y Watson, a Negro character; I sabel R a ndolph, w ho was Mrs. Uppington; and Harlow \Nilcox, who was the first announcer to read com.rnercials that were part of the script.

Beu lah, the Black maid, was actually Marlin Hurt, a male singer, later to be starred in his own show.

Fibber's cluttered closet, from which tumbled a thousand things (courtesy of the sound effects man), becarne as famous as Jack Benny's vault; and Fibber's fo r m of swearing, "Dat-rat the dad-ratted rat!" was a feature of every pro20

Chicago History

gram, as were hen-pecked \ Vallace \Vimpole's (Bill Thompson) remarks about his wife, a lways preceded by "Swecty-Face, my big fat wife."

Another character, Throckmorton P. G ildersleeve, played by Hall Peary, was also good for a laugh with his line, "You're a hard man, McGee!" Rounding out the city's major comedy offerings was "Lum and Abner," a rural effort by two youngsters just out of college, Chester Lauck and Norris Goff. At the start of the show in 1931, all parts were played by the two principals, Lauck playing Lum, Grandpappy Spears, and Snake Hogan, and Goff tripl ing as Abner, Doc Miller, and Squire Skimp. So popu lar did "Lum and Abner" become that the town of \ Vaters, Arkansas, changed its name to Pinc Ridge, the name of the fictitious town that housed the Jot 'Em Down store where the two rurals conducted their business.

And there were the "Laugh Doctors," an unsung, unheralded fill-in program, one of the tru ly mad and original comedies to originate in Chicago. The Doctors (of comedy, it is to be presumed) were Russell Pratt, Ransome Sherman, and Joseph Rudolph.

Chicago's contribution of dramatic shows was significant. Perhaps the foremost of these in audience appeal, if not in literary merit, was "The First l'\ightcr." Presumably broadcast from The Little Theatre off Times Square, it was completely a Chicago production, offering a threeact play each week. It was from this program that Don Amechc went on to Hollywood and motion pictures. Les Tremayne, a leading man in the soap opera, succeeded Amcche on the program and he, too, went into films, although to lesser roles. Other shows of this genre were "Curtain Time," "Two on the Aisle," "Grand Marquee,'' and "Grand Hotel."

An outstanding dramatic program which thri ll ed and frightened listeners was "Lights Out," a horror-cum-science fiction half-hour series conceived and written by \ Vyll is Cooper and, later, by Arch Oboler. This series com-

The " Breakfast Club" celebrates its 25th anniversary.

Left to right: Dick Noel, Caro l Richards, Don McNeill, Fran A llison , Sam Cowlin g.

A.B.C. radio network photo Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History

21

Radio

bincd some of the most literate scripting and deft direction to emanate from Chicago.

Among the variety shows Chicago fed to the network were the long-runnin g "Kational Barn Dance," a country and \Vestcrn music offering that was the first radio program in the city to charge admission at the Eighth Street Theatre; another was the long-lived "Breakfast Club," starring Don Mc:\'eill, with Fran Allison and many other Chicago performers. Both of these programs began in the early Thirties and continued to be broadcast from Chicago for the duration of their run. "Club Matinee" must be includ ed in this roster, for it sent Garry Moore and Durward Kirby on their way to fame and it cradled the zany genius of Ransome Sherman, Doctor of Comedy.

Chicago was the spawning ground for kid shows, too. The list included Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy; Little Orphan Annie; Captain Midnight; Tom Mix and his StraightShooters (without the real Tom Mix); L'il Abner, which starred John Hodiak, a young man who was to become a film star; Skippy; Don \Vinslow of the Navy; and many more. All had a similar theme, the child pitted against adult villains, with the child triumphant. It was this school which contributed the giveaways to radio-magic decoding rings, club memberships, and other such goodies. Announcers for these junior soap operas were chosen for staccato delivery as well as for their ability to speak rapidly.

Rapidity of speech was important because the giveaway commercials were very long and many words had to be crowded into the alloted time.

Night clubs proliferated during the Thirties, and band "remotes" were popular in Chicago.

Every major station had a telephone line to the various night spots. In addition, the network stations had large house bands of their own and originated many musical programs.

Perhaps the most memorable of the musical offerings was "The Lady Esther Serenade," sponsored by a Chicago cosmetic manufacturer and featuring the \\'ayne King Orchestra, actress 22

Chicago History

Bess Johnson as Lady Esther, and Phil Stewart, an announcer with a markedly unctuous delivery.

The story of the Glory Days of Chicago must necessarily make note of the two radio magnates who presided over \VG~ and WBBM. Col. R obert H. McCormick ruled \\'G K from the Chicago Tribune Tower, and H. Leslie Atlass reigned from the \\'rigley Building, directly across Michigan Avenue. An apt description of the Colonel's technique may be gleaned from rt'GN: A Pictorial Histo,y, by John Fink: Re,·olutiona ry battles were fitting subjec ts for the Colonel's rhetorica l style. Thus, as the Continental Army crossed the ice filled Delaware on Christmas E\'e, he de sc ribed the hushed commands, the perilous foray, the hated Hessians reve ling in rude wassail.

And then:1\[usic S\\'ept in. "~ext week," the Colonel an nounced, ' 'next \\'eek we'll learn ho\\' this battle came out!''

Bass player Demitri SchmoklO\·ski addressed first violinist 1ichacl \Vilkome rski in an anguished \\'hisper: ·· \Ve're citizens. \Vc'"e got our papers. \\' ho wins? He's got to tell us! "

And from the Wrigley Building which housed WBBM comes this story: A staff writer had written a documentary on Chicago housing.

Apparently, the second broadcast in the series had displeased the then mayor of Chicago, Edward Kelly. Mr. Atlass sent for a free-lance writer.

Take O\'er this damned housing thing. Straighten it out. Fix it up so's the J\1ayor cools off. Be careful \\'hat you write, and for God's sa ke, if you're going to write contro,·ersy-make it safe contrO\·ersy.

Although there is much more to tell of Chicago when it was a creative force in radio-before the advertisers moved the programs to Kew York and Hollywood in the Forties and before television became paramount-it is fitting for us to conclude by remembering the opening words of \\'MAQ's "~ational Home and Farm Hour." For more than three decades, e,·ery broadcast began this way: ·'The Stars and Stripes Fore\'er" (Everett Mitchell) " It's a beautiful day in

MUSICAL THEME: OPENING:

Chicago!"

The Chicago Stock Exchange Building

BY JOHN VINCI

In the three years since the Chicago Stock Exchange Building shuddered under the wrecking ball, we have been made increasing{y aware of what was lost.

On{y fragments and photographs remain.

Photo by Richard Nlc\.;el

The terracotta cornice at the top of the building.

The white lines are cal king which was invisible from the street. More than 100 feet of this cornice have been saved and will be installed at the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle Campus.

John Vinci, a Chicago architect, is currently making drawings for the reconstruction of the Exchange Room in the new wing of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1971, he was retained to coordinate the removal of the room so it could later be reassembled; his associate at that time was Richard Nickel, who was later killed while photographing the further demolition of the Stock Exchange Building.

Stock Exchange Building

Chicago Historical Society

A half-tone from Harper's Weekly showing the elegant floor of the Stock Exchange Room in 1895, considered one of the finest in the country. The room and its associated foyers subsequently underwent major alterations: When the Stock Exchange organization moved to larger quarters in 1908, the room was remodeled for the Foreman Brothers Bank; in 1929, they moved out and the room remained vacant until 1939, when Bell Savings and Loan rented it and added a false ceiling, reducing the room's height from 27 to 10 feet.

24

Chicago History

During the dismantling of the room, the false ceiling was removed and the skylights with tinted glass which originally surrounded and lit the room (along with small electric bulbs) were again revealed . Four large columns, one of which is shown here, supported box girders that spanned 50 feet. The visible surfaces were covered with stenciled canvas . The damage done the original structure during the installation and removal of the false ceiling is evident.

Stock Exchange Building

Photo by Richard Nickel

A typical staircase inside the Stock Exchange Building.

Two flights of staircase have been purchased by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for reconstruction in their new American Wing.

Photo by Richard Nickel

The Stock Exchange Building was itself built on the site of an historic structure: the first brick house of any size and quality in the city, the home of P. F. W. Peck, built in 1837. The architects sought to immortalize the vanished house in a plaque set into the arch which framed the main entrance of the new building- a gesture that now seems stunningly ironic.

Photo by Richard Nickel

A detail of an arch in the third-floor arcade.

Fragments of the arcade are still available for purchase.

26

Chicago History

The Stock Exchange's ground-floor elevator grilles as they now look, reinstalled in the Art Institute of Chicago. In Richard Nickel's opinion, they were among the most beautiful of the ornaments which Sullivan lavished upon the building.

The Explosion of a Dormant Art Form: Chicago's Murals

BY ROGER ERIC HOYT

One could view Chicago's murals as a series ef beautification projects, but there's more to them than meets the eye.

in the U nited States can boast that they have commissioned public murals to improve the environment. Some of these displays, especially in I\ew York and Los Angeles, even carry the artist's message about elim inating urban eyesores. But in Chicago, which is also not without artistic comment on its environment, the mural mo\·emcnt leaves other cities far behind . Here, large numbers of citizens have joined their artists in a vast movement to unveil their political and social grievances on neighborhood walls.

The civic artist, and his public a rt, have only recently emerged from a long period of dormancy. It was already 1967 when \\' illiam \Valker saw a way to promote pride and unity among Chicago's Blacks with his W all of R espect. Walker's extraordinary project, located at 43rd Street and Langley Avenue and sponsored by the Organization for Black American Culture (OBAC, pronounced o-bah-see), was the first of a series of community, foundation and organization-sponsored street art projects which now dot the city-murals which range in size from the limited space of an El underpass to the height and breadth of a two or three-story building and which display a stunning variety of style, meaning, and degree of public participation. They ce lebrate heroes, protest the uprooting of urban renewal, appeal for better education, argue for peace, brotherhood, and unity. Rounding out this spectrum of public statements are murals directed at beautification, such as Sachio Yamashita 's multicolored enMANY MAJOR CITIES

Roger Eric Hoyt, a public relatio ns copywriter and free lance, is currently gathering material for a book on the history of murals in· the United States.

28

Chicago History

\·iron mental mural beneath \\'acker Drive, Buffy Zcllman 's Tl'all of E vents, which contains a mixture of the artist's passing thoughts and personal messages, and Urban Progress. The profundity of Chicago's murals cannot be understood , howC\·cr, unless one understands the foundation upon which this art form rests.

Public art as a form of protest began in Mexico during the r 920s, following the Mexican R evo luti on and the adoption of a new constitution in 1917. It was in that period that a group comprised mostly of artists who had been rebels formed the Syndicate of Mexican Painters and Scu lptors, or the Congress of Soldier Artists.

The Congress and its leader, David Alfaro Siqueiros, sought a way of gi \·ing the l\1cxican working class a dignified but outspoken way to protest their grievances. An exchange of ideas among members of the Congress prO\·idcd a new soluti on to the problem of how the people could communicate with their gO\·crnmcnt: public a rt. Thus was born the M exican civic artist and the l\Icxican mural 1110\·emcnt, dedicated to supplyin g the popular voice that had heretofore been lacking.

In 191 g, Siqueiros went to Paris as an art student and apprentice, and there he met another l\1cxican artist, Diego Rivera. Together, Siqueiros and Rivera developed the id eas which were to burgeon into the new political, public, and government paintings of M exico, and which were to lay the foundation for public art in the United States. They began by studying the art of the I talian Renaissan ce, nearly a lways commissioned by gO\·crnmcn t and religious leaders, who ordered only landscapes, nude pagans, still lifes - at any rate, who never ordered anything controversia l. Art, they concluded, had become a commodity, its supply dictated by the

wealthy ยงInd powerful, and doomed to be confined in museums and private collections. In 192 1, Siqueiros published, from Barcelona, American Life, appealing within its pages "To the plastic artists of America-to build a monu mental and heroic art. To be the new citizen artist fighting for all the causes of the people, land and world, in contrast to tradition." He urged artists to bring back three-dimensional effects in murals and prints and to emphasize ideological and philosophical content.

The following year, Siqueiros and Rivera returned to Mexico and began work on a series of murals for government buildings, academies, and public places . At first, the Mexican muralists used cncaustic coloring, burning wax in with hot irons. They also undertook an intensive study of the ancient art of fresco painting. It was their frescoes that won international recognition, not only for Rivera and Siqueiros, but for several other muralists of the Mexican Renaissance, among them Jose Clemente Orozco. Later, these three introduced many innovations now considered standard: the use of architectural space for murals, instead of canvas; a cc men t-and-sand base, called modern fresco, instead of a limestone-and-sand base; a spray gun containing the cement-base mixture; and a silicon mixture for outdoor murals. ;\'orth of the border, in the United States, there were also muralists, though not yet anything that could be called a mural movement.

During the early i 92os, three artists- Thomas Hart Benton, Grant \\'ood, and John Stuart Curry-became interested in the medium. Benton, indeed, had decided to embark upon a mural series entitled 1-listo,y of America, and between i 923 and i 925, he completed two of the five "chapters,'' Discovery and Settlement and Colonial Expansion, which were exhibited in Kew York. (Benton had also become interested in the work of the Mexican trio and was studying their techniques.) In the ensuing years, he traveled the United States, painting, writing, and exhibiting in various- New York galleries.

Benton and Orozco, whose work he admired, became friends when Alma Recd, who was exhibiting Orozco's easel paintings in her Delphic Gallery in New York, dccidcd to represent Benton also. Still, Benton, \Vood, and Curry all believed that the influence of the Mexican muralists could never be so profound that it would basically alter the character of their murals. They felt there were distinct differences in the political and religious life of the two countries and that their own murals would serve a democratic, rather than a socialist, function.

Many of their goals were, however, the same: the murals had a humanistic function, were painted for a large public, prescn tcd the national heritage, and embodied an ideological content to which the masses would, or should, be able to relate. The differences in the work of the two groups became even clearer over the years in which they refined and developed their techniques. These were the years in which Benton, Wood, and Curry began to achieve national attention as regionalists; though Benton never admitted to a singular admiration of any one region of the country, he was most noted for his depictions of the Midwest, his home.

By 1931, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression. Unemployment had been rising steadily and millions of Americans were on relief or working on projects which had been created by the \Vorks Progress Administration to provide jobs for the needy and employable.

This national situation, which bore a likeness to the l\1cxican situation years earlier, was the scene that confronted Diego Rivera when he arrived for an exhibition of his work at the Museum of Modern Art. After the exhibition, he received numerous commissions from American industrialists. At the beginning, at least, it seemed that both his patrons and his audiences were amused by his style, by his use of controversial subject matter, by his violations of taboos, and even by his direct criticism, in his murals, of those who had commissioned his work. Bu t Chicago History

29

Chicago's Murals

when he painted a mural in the patio of the Art Institute of Detroit in which he depicted the industries of the city, used symbols of the Nativity, and showed science inoculating a child, he scandalized the community and its religious leaders and found his work the subject of loud and indignant protests. evertheless, in I 933, Nelson Rockefeller commissioned him to paint a mural in New York's Radio City. Rivera and his staff worked quietly on the mural with little or no contact with Rockefeller until a newspaperman came to see the progress of the work. He was appalled.

The center of the mural contained a worker at the controls of a machine. To his left was an opulent nightclub scene, a battlefield with men at war, and a demonstration of unemployed being clubbed by the police. On the worker's right side was a portrait of Lenin clasping the hands of a Black and of a Russian soldier and worker. Back in his office, the newspaperman wrote that Rockefeller had been duped and called for the destruction of the mural. Shortly thereafter, Rockefeller asked Rivera to paint over the face of Lenin and replace it with an unknown. Rivera refused: " R ather than mutilate the conception, I should prefer the physical destruction of the conception in its entirety."

And that is what happened. The private Radio City police covered the mural, sealed off the area, presented Rivera with his entire fee, and dismissed him from the premises. Shortly thereafter, Rivera broadcast a statement over the radio: " In human creation this is something which belongs to humanity at large, and ... no individual owner has the right to destroy it or keep it solely for his own enjoyment." Rivera then returned to Mexico to reconstruct the mural, which still stands in the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City.

The Radio City incident was a perfect example of what Benton and other regionalists meant when they said that the difference in politics and religion in the two countries would serve to differentiate their art. But there was 30

Chicago History

another important difference: the American people were not ready even for Benton. They simply did not recognize art as a medium of public expression. I t was therefore no wonder that Benton's Social History of the State of Indiana, shown at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, drew brickbats. Undaunted, Benton kept lashing out at the treatment of the common man in his regional histories; he became even more intense, saying he was underoing his final development as an artist. In this phase he completed his important Social Histo,y of Missouri. Like I ndiana, Missouri was an airing of those aspects of history which people want to bury with their ancestors, forever. Benton dug them up . Huck Finn was there, but so were Nigger Jim, Frankie and Johnny, and all the madness of earlier generations reenacted under the seeing eye of Boss Pendergast. People wanted, indeed expected, a monument. Instead they received a slap in the face from Benton's special gauntlet. They did not want to believe that they were the "common life" he portrayed. But they were soon to understand the significance of Ben ton's portrayals, and of public art in general, as the Federal Arts Proj ects, involving the largest participation of artists and audiences in history, got under way.

Unemployment had reached the incredible figure of nine million by r 93 7. Relief and work projects were an accepted fact. Individuals who were prominent in the arts, such as George Biddle, were working hard to convince the government that artists were as entitled as any other occupational group to pursue their work under the auspices of the W.P.A. Biddle, a painter and sculptor as well as a member of an old and important American family, had also been one of the first Americans to study the Mexican murals. He finally persuaded President Franklin D. Roosevelt to authorize an arts program which included mural painting. Biddle himself helped to launch the program by painting five frescoes in the Justice Department.

In Chicago, four floors in a building at 433

East Erie Street became a Federal Arts center.

Each artist who participated in the program was paid $94 a month, and the fine arts flourished.

Any school or public institution could have its own mural by paying for the materials ($5 to $10 for a landscape) and by providing the space. Rudolph \\liesenborn's Building Construction mural in Crane High School, Community without W a/er by Edward Millman in City Hall, Ben Shahn's mural in the County Building and his mural of children playing on the walls of the Cook County Hospital, were but a few of the mural projects produced during the period.

In that cold climate, Americans were groping for rehabilitation after long years of financial displacement and low morale. There arose a need to understand how things had been in the past and what had caused the existing situation. \\Tho are the people; what arc thcy 1 These questions, which the Mexican mural movement and the American regionalists had been answering for years, were finally being asked by millions who found themselves with a need to know.

The mural thus became the vehicle by which they became aware of their cultural life.

W.P.A.'s director of fine arts, Holger Cahill, expressed the new movement toward public art this way: "Art is not a matter of rare occasional masterpieces. The emphasis upon masterpieces is a nineteenth-ceIHury phenomenon. It is primarily a collector's idea and has little relation to an art movement." Oddly enough, Mr. Cahill had been the director of );°ew York's first Municipal Art Exhibition, held at Radio City in January 1934, shortly after the Rivera mural was ordered destroyed and therefore boycotted by the American Society of Painters, Sculptors and Engravers and many individuals, including George Biddle.

In the decades that followed the Depression, which were characterized by war and a national preoccupation with material affairs, American mural art, inasmuch as it scn·ed a ci\·ic function, fell by the wayside, and artists submerged into the comfort of private st1Jdios. But in the 1960s,

new civic issues reared their heads. \\"ar-wcarincss, sexual revolution, liberation fronts, and racial inequality started the country rocking from side to side. The civic voice became embodied in protest movements, sometimes violent. The louder the voice and the larger the group, the greater the attention gained for issues which had remained static over the previous decades.

In Chicago, \\'illiam \\'alkcr, a black artist, was occupied with the problem which seemed to him the major concern of the time-how to achieve equality for the Black. Walker concluded that before a Black would be accepted as an equal by others, he must first think of himself as equal. The first step, then, was to transmit pride and self-esteem to the black community.

Just as the regional is ts of the 1920s and '30s knew that the United States could not imitate the Mexican mural rnm·cmcnt but. rather, could only uphold the same basic \·alucs in a different way, so Walker reached for a special message to the black community. Blacks could not, must not, imitate the white world and white art; they must have their own \·a lucs, stemming from their own lives and experiences.

Black artists were in general barred from exhibiting in white galleries; at the same time, Blacks had not been supporting the arts because they were busy survi\·ing. \\. alkcr fcl t that his race had been deprived not only materially, but esthetically also. He, as an artist, was prepared to enter into an intimate esthetic relationship with his own people. \\'alkcr's racial identity formed the background for his understanding of how to com·cy self-respect to other Blacks in the Chicago community. The result was The Trail of ResJ;ect.

The project, directed by \\·alker and com pleted in 1967, was the cooperative effort not only of black artists, but of black writers, musicians, and educators as well. As a re ult, a host of black heroes was mirrored in the wall's many frames. The wall was not intended as a tourist attraction: and was not public in the Chicago Hi story

31

Chicago's Murals

At the Salon de la Raza, 17th St. and Blue Island Ave., Ray Patlan's mural provides an echo of Diego Rivera's voice. Here, a detail.

Photo by Berl Phillips

A detail from the Wall of Respect, the opening statement of Chicago's mural movement.

Urban Progress beautifies the Urban Progress Center at 19th and Halsted streets.

32

Chicago History

Ph oto by Berl Phillips

The Wall of Respect. It paid the community's respect to its black heroes, and was itself respected: "there was not one instance of defacement" of this mural while it existed.

Courtesy Les I ie Orear

A detail from Bill Walker's Wall of Black Love, 515 W. Oak St. "Love of the family must be a reality if blacks are to survive."

-

Courtesy Les I le Orear

At the Casa Atzlan C.enter, 1831 So. Racin e Ave., a central th em e of Chicago' s Latin-Am erica n mu ra ls : Res pect for others is p eace.

Chica go History

33

Chicago's Murals

usual sense. TVall of Respect was by the black community, for the black community, and of the black community; if no one outside that community ever saw the mural, that would have been quite all right.

This wall of black heroes became the backdrop for civic functions in the black community.

Many of the celebrities pictured on the wall came to speak to the community, standing before the wall that glorified black accomplishment. And the wall which stood for self-respect was itself respected. Located in an area where violent crime was away of life, the wall wi tncssed many a criminal act-stabbings, murders, and robberies-but there was not one single incident of defacement, not one inscription of graffito.

It remained intact until 1969, when, despite the efforts of the Reverend Jesse Jackson and others to preserve it, it was pronounced unsafe and destroyed.

The vt'all of Respect was envisioned as a singular accomplishment, but it left a legacy, not only in the proliferation of mural art in the city but also of the meaning of such art. "A wall's message must be meaningful," VValker declared.

"The message on a wall projects a permanent statement. Therefore it must educate the public and he] p people to accept rather than reject the truth." the confines of the courtyard at Chicago's Christopher House, there exists a prime example of such a permanent statement, Wall of Choices. Choices, created by John Weber, a black artist who is a graduate of Harvard cum Laude, looks at first glance like a statement of the end of the world . Upon closer examination, one sees the rhythm of the doors and windows which contain the choices facing the predominantly white neighborhood surrounding Christopher House. It occurs to the viewer that this is the city neighborhood and that the alternatives available to it are really quite plain: will we unite toward brotherly coexistence or will we continue along the path of discrimination and prejudice? The beautiful colors, design, and 34

Chica go History

content seem appropriate to the environment, but the wall forecasts the disaster that will follow if we do not heed its warning.

More recently, murals have become the expressive form of Chicago's Latin and Chicano populace. These groups took over the artistic reins from the black mural movement because they also lacked a civic voice and a means of exhibition. Their chief concern was not to promote their heroes or their self-esteem, although this theme is also expressed, but rather to make everyone aware of their everyday struggle. There is, therefore, more immediate content in their murals, which call upon the community to solve its more pressing problems.

One of the students who worked on the Bored of Education mural, directed by St. Mary Center for Learning art teacher Marie Burton, explained the project as an expression of concern for the Spanish-speaking students in schools that refuse to teach subjects dealing with the Latin peoples' history and cultural heritage. Basically, the mural states a need for changes in the overall educational system, and was designed to promote conversations among city groups who, it was hoped, would organize to do something about the city's educational problems.

Mark Rogovin, an artist who has studied with Siqueiros, has directed numerous Latin-oriented murals throughout the city. His project, Protect the Peoples' Homes, was painted on the side of a medical clinic for Spanish-speaking people at Sheridan and Irving Park roads. It depicted cranes gulping away at peoples' homes, while those people reached out toward them, appealing for a halt to the urban renewals which had displaced them. Eventually, Homes, which was painted on the most conspicuous side of the clinic, was painted over in a less profound but equally conspicuous reddish-orange. On the other side of the clinic there remained a somewhat muted continuation of the same theme, El Respecto al D erecho Ajeno es la Pa?:,. This theme, "To Respect the Rights of Your Neighbor is Peace," has become one of the important state-

ments of modern-day city murals. Respecto was sponsored by the Board of the Sheridan Center.

Most of the city's street art projects have been commissioned or sponsored by commun ity groups. Un like the Renaissance painters and Diego Rivera at Radio City, the artists have been free to set forth any ideology or doctrine that suited them. Unfortunately, or maybe even purposely, many of the most outspoken murals have been destroyed.

The techniques used in painting our murals is sometimes far from perfect, the subject matter often only scratches the surface of the problem and, un like Mexico's murals, Chicago's fail to offer solutions to the controversies they portray.

For the most part, the part1c1pants are not Harvard graduates, like Mr. Weber, but members of the community who happen along in "sidewalk superintendent" fashion-to watch, think about what they see and, finally, pick up a brush and add a bit of themselves, just as they did with Ms. Caryl Yasko's Under City Stone at Lake Park Avenue and 55th Street.

Yet the basic function of Chicago's murals remains, as in Mexico, the provocation of social involvement, the extension of democratic action.

As Siqueiros wrote, "To the democratic state corresponds an art of a physically democratic nature." Such an art, which he d id so much to develop, is al ive and well in C hicago.

Chicago History

35

The Anna Pottery

BY JAMES K. FELTS, SR .

For almost forty years, in the small city of Anna, Illinois, there worked two master potters who rivaled Palissy .

930s, the r eputation of Corn wall and \Vallace K irkpatrick, master potters, had been largely forgotten . Yet their work continued to speak for them and, in , 933, when one of their jugs was found in Pennsyh·a nia, Antiques magazine published a picture of it. On this stoneware j ug, the artist had portrayed a number of humans overwhelmed by a tangle of rattlesnakes, and on its bottom he had inscribed "Anna Pottery 1884." I n the accompany ing story, titled " Pennsy lvania Laocoon," the editor of the magazine made some educated guesses:

BY THE

,

Just how this was done we need not particularly inquire. But it is fair to assume that, for the nonce, potter turned snake hunter and went forth to slay in the name of temperance and art. Once home with his inert and dangl ing trophies, he devised means of taking from the plaster casts into which he later pressed soft clay until it accepted the impression of very harsh scale, and assumed all the subtle modulations of once vibrant bodies. No simple and easy task, this, for a country potter; nor was that of assembling and composing the sections thus formed less fraught " ·ith d ifficu lties. Palissy himself might have been proud of this feat, which the Attic ha no he itation in classing among the most remarkable known exploits in the realm· of American rural pottery.

In deciding where the jug was made, "The Editor's Attic" concluded that: . .. the character of the stoneware, the combination of grotesque humo r and Stygian imagination in the design , and the ingenuity and ski ll shown in its development, mark the piece unmista kably a Pennsyl vanian German product. But where the t\nna Pottery was located and who was its presiding genius, the Attic has been unable to disco,·e r. Indeed, it has expended no serious effort in that direction , since the jug speaks sufficiently for itself.

Antiques d id not pursue the question of author-

ship of the jug, having decided there was no mystery about it at al l, and it was not until 1938 that the identity of the artist bcca,nc known.

That year, a more fully inscribed jug, closely akin to the one pictured in , 933, was found among the collections of the :\"cw York Historical Soc iety. In this , ·c rsion, the squirming reptiles were endowed with human heads, and "sc ratched on a panel near the base of the piece" appeared "From Kirkpatrick, Anna, Ill s to TH ::\"ast ::\".Y. " I nvcst igating, the cdi tor learned that the name of the genius who had made the jugs wa"S \ \'a ll acc \ ". K irkpatrick (i t wasn ' t; it was \\"il liarn \ \"allacc Kirkpatrick ), and that he and his brother Cornwall had owned and operated a pottery in the small town of Anna (it was a city) in southern I llinois. There, it turned out, their reputation had remained undi1rnncd. " I am positive that no man in this broad land could do with clay what Kirkpatrick could do," the editor of Anna's newspaper told Antiques.

The jug is an important example of the brothers' work. I t had been made in , 87 r for Thomas ::\" ast, the ce lebrated political cartoonist, and presented to the :\"cw York Historical Society by his widow. The snakes with human heads represented :\"cw York's Boss Tweed and his political gang trying to climb into the money pot. The catalog card now names Cornwall E. Ki rkpatrick as the maker.

The third object from the Anna Pottery reported by Antiques was found the following year in ::\" orth Dakota. I t was a red ware pig, and "The Editor's Attic" described it as one of the many humorous creations of \ \·al lace Kirkpatrick. Its label read LATEST & MOST RELIABLE RAILROAD & RIVER GUIDE

James K. Felts, Sr., of Monticello, Illinois, has long been interested in regiona l pottery.

36

Chicago History

COMPLIMENTS OF ANNA POTTERY WITH A LITTLE GOOD OLD RYE

Courtesy New York Historical Society

New York's Boss Tweed and his political gang trying to climb into the "money" pot, made by Cornwall Kirkpatrick for Thomas Nast.

Illinois Slate Museum

Cornwall Kirkpatrick

Pottery

A whiskey bottle in the shape of a pig, it measured eight and one-half inches from upturned snout to curly tail, with a cork located just under the tail. Down the spine of the little pig, in sgraffito, flows the mighty Mississippi.

The towns that appear on the body are labeled Chicago, the Corn City; Cincinnati, the Pork City; Louisville, the Falls City; Cairo; Vincennes; Centralia; Carbondale; Mound City; Grand Tower, Iron City; and Anna, Jug Town.

The railroads are labelled I.C.R.R. (for Illinois Central), C. & St. Louis Narrow Gauge (Cairo & St. Louis), C. & V .R.R. (Cairo & Vincennes), and 0. & M. (Ohio and Mississippi).

The information, just as legible as the day it was artistically scratched into the pig, enabled an antiques lover who was also a railroad buff to establish for Antiques that it had been made between 1875 and 1881. As this author has since discovered, thousands of such pigs were made at the Anna Pottery over the years and given as Christmas presents by liquor store owners throughout the country.

The briefest look at the family history, all that space permits, explains why the editor of Antiques judged the work of an Illinois potter, whose forebears had probably emigrated from Dubli n, to be the work of a Pennsylvania German. Cornwall's father was born in Pennsylvania in 1788, and it was there that he learned pottery making, an art he taught his elder children and which Cornwall later taught his younger brother vVallace. Three more brothers and a brother-in-law also became potters.

The guess about the Kirkpatricks' method of working was more accurate. Margaret Kirkpatrick, Cornwall 's granddaughter, who still lives in Anna, across the street from her grandfather's former house and only a few blocks from her great-uncle \,Vallace's home, told me that "Uncle \'\'al was a snake hunter. I remember going over to play and seeing a snake skin on the clothesline."

Further evidence is provided by an ad in the

Jonesboro Ga;:,etle: 38

Chicago History

SNAKES! SNAKES!!

I will pay a liberal price for all kinds of Live Snakes over 3 feet long.

Also a premium of $5 on the Longest Rattlesnake with nine or more rattles.

To be delivered to the Anna Pottery any time between now and September 1, 1 878.

The Anna Pottery itself was not the grandest a potter could own in the mid-nineteenth century; il was probably like many others the brothers had worked in or operated during the course of a career that had taken them from place to place in the Midwest. The truth is that despite Cornwall's long experience-he was 44and his previous successes, the brothers were far from prosperous when they arrived in Anna.

They came by way of Emporium City, a misbegotten venture that died aborning nine miles from Cairo, Illinois, on the Ohio River. There, Cornwall had been supervising the construction of a three-story brick building which he and \\'allace were to operate. It was to hold ten

Court esy Cobden Mu seum Photo by M ike Coles

The Ann a Pottery's l ittle b rown j ug, 1 in. tall and a maxi m um of% in. wide. This one is fitted with a m agnifying g lass through which can b e r ead the Ten Co mm andm ents.

Ch ica go Hi storical Society

Another of "Kirk's tricks," a pottery mug with an impish frog at the bottom who looks as if he is about to jump into the drinker's mouth as the cup is emptied.

potter's wheels propelled by steam-a dream come true. Emporium City had been well promoted; their father, and at least one other brother, had also invested in it, along with hundreds of others. When, in June 1858, it became clear that the enterprise was worthless, the family was hard hit. The brothers needed, not a dream pottery which they could no longer afford, anyway, but a pottery from which to make a living. Both were married, and Cornwall had four children.

They bought in Anna, which had become an incorporated village in 1855, on reaching a population of three hundred. There was clay in the vicinity, some of it very fine, there was wood for firing the kilns, and there was a railroad to transport the finished ware. Lots in the best locations were within their means, and they selected a site facing Cobden Road and just north and west of the newly built Illinois Central Railroad station.

Before the close of 1859, a wooden building

fifty feet long, twenty-five feet wide, and three stories high had been thrown up to house six potter's wheels and the grinder (similar to a grist mill) which was used to prepare the clay. The power was not steam, but hand and horse. A team of horses turned the mill stone that did the grinding, and each potter furnished the power by operating the kick wheel. The first clay was brought via Cairo from Grand Chain-the same site from which Cornwall had obtained clay for his prize-winning exhibits at the State Fair at Centralia while he was manager of the Steam Pottery at Mound City.

The Anna Pottery was the immediate success the brothers needed it to be. Cornwall supervised the pottery and kept the books. The C & W Kirkpatrick Company tried to cover all the towns within a hundred miles of the pottery, and vVallace, its amiable traveling salesman, was a welcome visitor in all the towns of Little Egypt. The brothers also tried to show their wares at as many county fairs as possible, usually exhibiting in a tent, and they seem to have won prizes wherever they went.

We know they were at their hometown fair in Union County in 1877, for they made what may have been their first commemorative jug for the occasion. It is the earliest we know of. On this brown earthenware jug they inscribed the names of the officers of the fair, the committee members, the officers of Union County and, for good measure, the officers of the cities of Jonesboro and Anna. The very next year they made a gray stoneware jug with sgraffito in blue, produced by cobalt, for the Interstate Industrial Exposition held at Chicago in 1878. In 1880, they exhibited at the first Southern Illinois Fair, held in their hometown, Anna, and in 1884 they were at the Carbondale District Fair, as their commemorative jugs attest. They were also at national or international expositions in St. Louis, New Orleans, and Cincinnati. And it is quite likely that the Anna Pottery made commemorative pieces of both redware and stoneware for other fairs and expositions.

Chicago History

39

Pottery

Photo by Wiggs Sl ud io

A grave m ark er m ad e for a m emb er of the K irkpatrick f am ily. T he bottom is a simul at ed tree t ru nk.

40

Chicago History

The commemorative jug for the Carbondale District Fair is literally covered with incised facts about the city of Carbondale, Jackson County, Illinois, and the United States of America. \\'hen I first inquired about the jug, the cataloger at the Southern Illinois University Museum informed me that "every businessman of that period in Carbondale and his type of business arc listed, as well as all the churches and the pastors thereof, all the schools," adding that members of the Veterans of the Civil \ \"ar Association, officers of the Fair Association, the faculty of Southern Illinois i\'onnal U nivcrsity, lodges such as the Masons and Odd Fellows, Jackson County officers, a list of attorneys and physicians in Carbondale, the Board of Education, and three railroads arc named on the jug. The names of the candidates for governor as well as the Republican and Democrat choices for the presidency also appeared on this jug.

Finally, Cornwall Kirkpatrick is listed as the donor of the jug, and the provisions of the gift arc stated . The jug would remain in the custody of the mayor of Carbondale for 100 years, when it wou ld be auctioned off to the highest bidderthe money to go to whatever charity he designated. The mayor of Carbondale, :\'cal E. Eckert, was able to produce the jug for the author to photograph when he ,¡isitcd Carbondale in the fall of , 972.

Nforc than pottery and stoneware for sale and commcmorati,¡c jugs for posterity were exhibited by the Kirkpatricks. It was the era of the dime museum, and \\'allacc, showman that he was, owned his share. He even, for a brief spell, owned a snake show. More to the point was the O ld Time Farm. It was peopled with clay figures, but, unfortunately, we know little more about it. It is likely that it was laid out on a table and depicted life in pioneer days. All we know for certain is that \ \"allacc Kirkpatrick made it, exhibited it, sold it in the fall of 1878 to a man from Marion, and intended to supplant it with a new and better exhibit.

The new exhibit must have taken \ Vallacc a

number -of years to complete, fo r there is no mention of its exhi bition unti l 1883. That year the P ioneer Farm was set up on the lawn of the European Hotel in Anna fo r the Sou thern IIJ inois Odd Fellows Anniversary Association's fourth celebration. During the summer it was shown at the U nion County Fair at Jonesboro and the Southern IIJ inois Fair at Anna; in the fall, it was shown at the Centralia Fair and the Carbondale District Fair. From The Fruit Grower and Farmer, we learn that the Pioneer Farm was a copy of the W . Kirkpatrick farm, of IIJinois, "showing the style of farming here fifty years ago. On the back of the plat is a panorama of the then unsettled prairie. Beneath the hills is a bluff showing the rocky substrata."

Mary Esther Ayres, a native of Union County, has published a more complete description:

HoLr

M

f(\n, 11,I ~lcn ,ht,l llhl '

11.1.-1

This was a complete miniature farm, twenty-five feet square, made of pottery and set up in a tent at the various exhibits. Snakes, frogs, log cabins, wagons, barns, houses, rail fences, trees, farm implements of all kind , men, women, children, houn' dogs, chickens, coon skins drying on the wall of the cabin, and Indians lurking in the tree made up a complete picture of pioneer life.

The author was able to locate two people who remembered seeing the Pioneer Farm.

One was Margaret Frank Kirkpatrick, who remembers seeing the exhibit at the Southern Ill inois Fair in 1895. According to her account, the exhibit was about five feet wide, ten feet long, and three feet high. I t was on a table, with its back aga inst the wall. he remembers a log cabin sitting by the road and a covered wagon going down the road, pulled by a pair of oxen made of pottery. A long-eared hound dog was cha ined underneath the wagon. A man and woman were sitting on the wagon seat, and a man with a musket was walking alongside.

The Pioneer Farm was exhibited at county and state fairs and at international expositions held at Chicago, St. Louis, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and other large cities in the United

Chicago Historical Society

A large urn of gray g laz ed pottery comm emorating the Intersta t e Indu stria l Exposition, Chica go, 1878.

Th e urn , h eav ily inscribed a ll around its outer surfa ce, conta in s t he ex po s ition' s list of offic ers, board of d ir ectors, executive committee, and the treas ur er's r eport.

Chicago History

41

Pottery

Chicago Historical Society

A f igur ine of b rown pottery, a n owl w ith green glass ey es p erched on a log, probably used as a whist le.

42

Ch icago History

Slates. Even afLer vVallace's death, the Pioneer Farm continued to pack in the customers. I t finally disappeared in St. Louis, at the Louisiana Exposition. If it should reappear, it is apt to be in the St. Louis area.

That the Anna Pottery throve is evident from the census figures of the time. A year after it began operation under Cornwall and \Vallace Kirkpatrick, the Union County census taker found four other potters. These were the skilled workmen who turned out Lhe jugs, jars, bowls, and other articles that were made at the pottery before the Civil \\' ar. In 1870, when the census taker visited the Anna Pottery again, he noted that a total of $7,000 was being paid to sixteen workers over fifteen years of age.

By the beginning of the 1880s, according to the State Business Ga;:,eteer Directory of r 882, the C & W Kirkpatrick Company was making stoneware, drain tile, sewer pipe, tobacco pipes, flower pots, hanging baskets, garden vases, fire brick, and Albany slip clay. The tobacco pipe bowl-they made only the bowl, and the wholesaler either furnished the cane for the stem or the smoker bought it locally and fitted it himself-was a big seller. Millions of these molded pipe bowls were shipped to wholesalers in the big cities during the 1880s; we know of a single contract for 2,000,000 pipe bowls and a single shipment to a St. Louis wholesaler of 400,000.

And on that same day, the Anna Pottery also shipped r, r oo mustard jars to another business in St. Louis. Jars for preserving fruit were also profitable items, made in quantity. Molded pottery poodles must also have been made in quantity; during a single week in Anna and Jonesboro, the author saw four.

Jugs came in all sizes, from very small to very large. The smallest were the little brown jugs, which were given away by the thousands at fairs, expositions, and to visitors at the pottery. They were so small-only an inch in diameter-that the plain ones were often threaded onto a silver or gold chain and worn as jewelry. Some of these miniatures, however, contained "scenes":

the Ten- Commandments writ at the bottom and readable through a magnifying glass placed within, or a coiled snake, poised to strike. One, especiall y prepared in Paris, contained a picture of a naked woman. Toward the other end of the scale was the popular Cairo goblet, a two-gallon jug used primarily for whiskey. Whiskey sold for around 30¢ a gallon in those days.

Much of the clay used by the C & W Kirkpatrick Company came from the nearby town of Kaolin, named for its superior white clay.

This was the clay that made the pipe bowls; indeed, in the Geological Survey of Illinois published in 1868, kaolin is referred to as "pipe clay."

Mixed with the more common clay nearer at hand, it made good stoneware. The Anna Pottery also used a certain amount of kaolin for molded articles such as flower urns, bricks, and floor tiles, although most of these articles were made of red clay.

The production of kaolin was an important part of the Kirkpatricks' business. Early on, the brothers bought land rich in kaolin and built crushers, driers, and bins along the railroad tracks in the town of Kaolin. Kaolin was in great demand-in Cincinnati for the manufacture of white granite, in Detroit for the copper works and, further east, for paper and paint makers. The clay was hauled to Kaolin's railroad siding-a busy place at the time-where it was loaded into cars destined for the Anna Pottery or, via Jonesboro, for Chicago, New Orleans, or other cities.

Business was still good in 1890, the year Cornwall Kirkpatrick died at the age of 76. Crippled with arthritis for a number of years, he had, in his younger days, been one of Anna's leading lights: its first mayor, he served three terms in all; he was a founding or active member of several lodges; and he served on various boards.

He also had the pleasure of seeing his daughter become an artist who achieved a fair measure of distinction in the Midwest.

Cornwall's widow and Wallace retained the name of C & W Kirkpatrick, and James I.

Toler became the superintendent of the Anna Pottery as well as its salesman. The association between the Tolers and the Kirkpatricks had been a long one, a number of Tolers having learned the trade of potter at the Anna Pottery.

When Wallace was preparing his exhibits or was on the road with one of his dime museums, it was usually a Toler who acted as superintendent or operated the potter's wheel at a fair or exposition. A few oldtimers still remember watching an Al Toler, who had a crippled hand, turn jugs and jars on a kick wheel. His habit of spitting tobacco juice into the clay he was turning shocked young Margaret Kirkpatrick when she visited the pottery with her father Cornwall. In 1883, a Will Toler presided over the potter's wheel at the Carbondale District Fair. A large redware grave marker in the shape of an urn bears testimony to the closeness of the two families: William Wallace Son of J. I. and Olive L. Toler Age 7 mos. 1 888

In 1893, Mrs. Cornwall Kirkpatrick sold her interest in the Anna Pottery to James I. Toler, and the firm became Kirkpatrick & Toler.

The last decade of the nineteenth century

Pottery

foreshadowed the changed fashions of the twentieth. A number of potteries were changing over to the manufacture of porcelain, particularly in the East. We know that Wallace planned to make porcelain table ware, but there is no evidence that he succeeded. At least one Ohio firm-Knowles, Taylor and Knowles-succeeded in making a thin, translucent porcelain, but they did it by bringing over an Irish potter who understood the process. The Anna Pottery, on the other hand, was being operated with the same know-how with which it began.

Three years after he became a partner, James Toler decided he had a better chance to become rich by prospecting, so he sold out to \\/allace and left for Sioux City, Iowa. The business thereupon became known as \IV. Kirkpatrick.

Wallace died that very year, and his son, William Wallace, Jr., helped his mother to run the business for four more years .

In 1 goo, J amcs Toler returned to Anna, purchased the pottery, and attempted to make an improved glazed ware that would be more acceptable to the changing taste of the American publ ic. A new kiln was imported from England, but the first batch of glazed ware burned and the expense of the undertaking proved too great. In 1903, Toler sold the pottery to J. \V. Roy, and Roy soon sold it to the Anna Ice Plant for $1250. The days of the Anna Pottery were over. At this writing, the site is occupied by a restaurant and a gasoline station.

Chicago Historical Society

Medal won by the Anna Pottery in 1871. The reverse is inscr ib ed " Awarded to C. W. Kirkpatrick/A nna Ills/ fo r best Pottery Ware at the Fair of 1871."

44

Ch ica go Histo ry

As the Anna Pottery recedes in time, its reputation grows. The new books on pottery have more on the Kirkpatrick brothers than previous works. William C. Ketchum, Jr.'s, The Pottery and Porcelain Collector's Handbook (Funk & \Vagnall, 197 r) lists three Kirkpatrick potters: John Kirkpatrick in Vermillionville; Cornwall and his redware pottery at Covington, Kentucky; and Cornwall and Wallace Kirkpatrick at Anna, Illinois, for their caricatures. The bottle collectors have discovered the pig who was called the Railroad and River Guide. Betty Madden, curator of the Illinois State Museum in Springfield, has kept her readers informed about the Anna Pottery through her writings in The Living Museum.

The surviving work of the Kirkpatrick brothers, much of it exhumed from cellars and attics, is now largely in safe hands. The author has met many proud possessors of jugs, doorstops, urns, and other objects made at the Anna Pottery, most of whom regard their Kirkpatrick artifact with an affection strengthened by the knowledge that it would now be welcomed by a museum.

Chicago: Center of the Silent Film Industry

BY CHARLES A. JAHANT

T here was a time when Chicago was Hollywoodand the Wild West as well. advertised the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company. "Our new plant is the most modern, best equipped moving picture plant in America." The year was , 9 IO, the new plant was at 435 North Clark Street. America had a major new industry, moving pictures, and Essanay, along with the Selig Polyscope Company, had made Chicago its center.

Movies had their beginnings in the Edison Kinetoscope which, according to film historian William F. Grisham, was first shown in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition of , 893. It was then that a man named George K. Spoor (later to found Essanay) became so fascinated watching the moving pictures inside Edison ' s box that someone was able to lift his wallet out of his back pocket-or so Grisham 's story goes. It then occurred to Spoor that if the picture were projected, people could view films sitting down, a more comfortable as well as more secure posture.

Whatever the exact year (others say the Kinetoscope was not shown un ti! , 894, and then in New York), Spoor, then the young manager of the \,Vaukegan Opera House, got together with a Waukegan mechanic named Edward H. Arnet to perfect a projecting apparatus. Some say that Arnet had already invented a projector, but lacked capital. At any rate, Spoor put $65 into the venture and parlayed it into a small chain of movie theatres.

Arnet, for his part, sold out to Spoor on the theory that moving pictures were just a passing fad.

Quite independently, a man named \Villiam r_ Selig was also developing a projector. Selig

"MADE IN CHICAGO,"

Charles A. Jahant is a free lance and a silent film buff.

was a mag1c1an, in which capacity he used the magic lantern which gave him the idea for his Selig Polyscope. Unlike Spoor, Selig quickly became a producer. In 1897 he bought one of Edison's cameras and opened what may have been the first commercial motion picture studio in the country, on Peck Court in Chicago's red light district.

Selig's first professional film, The Tramp and the Dog, was made in Rogers Park. For a minute and a half, a bulldog chased a tramp over a fence and took a slice out of his pants into the bargain . Selig made similar fantasies for the next seven years, plus vaudeville acts-contortionists, eccentric dancers, and trained birds, dogs, and ponies. (Animals apparently fascinated him). In 1904 he shot h is first long melodrama, Trapped by Bloodhounds, or A Lynching at Cripple Creek, which ran ten minutes.

Selig's success with T rapped was not lost upon George F. K leine who, as proprietor of the Kleine Optica l Company, had sold him his Edison camera. He joined with two New Yorkers to organize the pioneer firm of Kalem in 1905, but resigned almost immediately to become an importer of film spectacles from France and Italy. Chicago became the distribution point of these amb itious productions with casts of thousands-Quo Vadis? The Last D ays of Pompeii, and so forth-and K leine Optical ultimately became the world's largest impor ter of films.

Back East, an actor named Gilbert M. Anderson had donned chaps and a bandanna for a picture set in the Far \\'est but made in ew Jersey in 1903. The Great Train Robbery, a great success, was the first vVestcrn.

Selig followed suit, h iring some circus riders and shooting scenes in the countryside around Chicago. Many a fata l shoot-out was rui ned when a housewife in the distance began to hang Chicago History

45

Chicago Historical Society Daily N ews Collection

Shootin g on th e Selig Poly scop e lot, 1914.

Inside the Selig moving picture plant.

Chicago Hlstorlcal Society Daily News Coll ecti on

Silent Films

out her _wash or when some inquisitive tot wandered out of the surrounding shrubbery, but Selig could have taken some cold comfort in the knowledge that even more film was being ruined in the more densely populated East.

Selig was a showman, and his \\'esterns made money. He imported some Indians from Michigan and set up tepees for them on the Selig lot.

But inevitably, as moviegoers became more sophisticated, they found his flat landscapes more funny than convincing. Then a great idea occurred to Selig: why not film Westerns in the West itself? Actor Gilbert Anderson was available. Selig gave him a cameraman and a small company, and told him to go west in search of authentic background footage. In the autumn of , 906, Anderson and his crew became the first motion picture people to arrive in California. Their first three films deserve to be named: The Girl from Montana (filmed partly in that state), His First Ride, and The Bandit King.

By , 907, Anderson's films (he directed as well as starred) were already being released. And so successful were they that Selig erected a new studio at Irving Park Boulevard and \ Vestern Avenue-"The largest motion picture plant in the country," with "the largest skylight of any west of the Hudson River." , 907 also marked the founding of Essanay.

Returned from his \Vestern trek, Anderson encountered Spoor, who by then was ready to start making films but needed an experienced hand to work with him. Anderson-director, actor, and former producer for Vitagraph-was just the man. The two had originally met in the late 1890s, when Anderson was a cameraman named Max Aaronson. As competitors, they had set out to film a panoramic view of the Germania Riding Club's horse show in Jackson Park and, in a Mack Sennett type of denouement, had ended up photographing only each other. Now, as partners, they proceeded to found Essanay, named after their initials.

One might wonder, at this point, why Selig Polyscope and Essanay were established in Chi-

cago rather than ::--;-ew York. True, Tew York and its environs were the original location for film producing, but New York had no monopoly on the business. Studios sprang up in other cities, including Boston, \Vashington, Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, and Minneapolis. Selig and Spoor were natiYe Chicagoans. Most important, Chicago was as big a theatre town as New York, in the 1900s. Many plays opened here and several vaudeville circuits started from here. Trained personnel abounded: Colin Reid, casting director at Selig Polyscope, estimated that between eight and ten thousand people associated with the theatre lived in Chicago in 1914. And, of course, there was the city's geographical situation, so advantageous for distribution.

A room at 501 North \Velis Street served as the birthplace of Essanay. Their first release was An Awful Skate or The Hobo on Rollers.

Anderson directed, and Ben Turpin, Essanay's only actor-for the same $ 15 a week he also swept the floors-starred. The film consisted of half a reel of the crosseycd comedian careen ing down the streets on skates and bumping into outraged pedestrians. Spoor recalled, when he was interviewed in 1947 by Louis M. Starr, then a Chicago Sun reporter, that the pedestrians were later paid $2 each for their very real pains.

Essanay concentrated on slapstick and light domestic comedies. In spite of its Indian-head trademark, the firm advertised itself as "The Home of Comedy Hits"-at least until October 1908, when Anderson took off for Californi a again with a large troupe of actors and technicians. He established a studio near San Francisco, and made his first Western for Essanay, A Tale of the West. He played a cowboy who rustled horses to pay the mortgage on his mother's home.

Their trademark, incidentally, appeared in every frame of an Essanay film. " \\le'd stick it under a chair, or in some other inconspicuous place," Spoor to!~ Starr. "The others did it too-Vitagraph's Spread Eagle, Selig's DiaChicago History

47

Silent Films

mond S ... That was so print thieves couldn't get away with using our films."

Essanay was successful beyond its founders' wildest expectations. The first sign of prosperity was a move to an empty factory on Argyle Street. A number of Hollywood stars-to-be passed through the Argyle Street gates in those early days without impressing the management: Lenore Ulric, star of both stage and screen; the lovely Ethel Clayton, who won renown for her portrayals of the betrayed wife; Louise Glaum, who became Theda Bara's rival. They all played minor roles at Essanay and then won fame elsewhere. So did Katherine Anne Porter who, along with Gloria Swanson, served as an extra in a courtroom drama. Perhaps Spoor and Anderson's lack of ability to spot talent is best exemplified by their refusal, in 1908, to hire a young girl whose mother brought her around to the studio. Her name was Mary Pickford. Essanay prospered nevertheless.

Selig, for his part, was branching out. His skylit studio had proved to be fine in mild weather, but it became unbearable in the summer. And in winter, filming came to a complete halt. Then someone had the bright idea of sending a winter troupe to Florida, where they filmed summer romances, studies of rural life, pirate adventures, and so on. Selig's fascination with animals grew. He began to buy up circus lions and tigers and make jungle pictures. Shipping cheetahs and elephants back and forth between Chicago and Jacksonville, Selig honed his idea into a commercially viable product.

In each film, his beautiful blonde heroine, Kathlyn, played by Kathlyn Williams (in those days stars were kept anonymous lest they become known and demand more money) would find herself in dire difficulty in Africa or India, and would only at the last moment be rescued by a friendly studio chimpanzee or elephant.

These trifles eventually worked up into the first movie serial, The Adventures of Kathlyn, involving the Idol's Eye, evil maharajahs, vengeful slaves, and heroic British officers.

48

Chicago History

As the Selig Zoo grew-it acquired lions, tigers, pumas, leopards, and baboons-Selig became "Colonel" Selig and began to make hunting films. Early in 1909 he put some unemployed Japanese acrobats into Eskimo parkas and sent them to Michigan, where they killed a tame polar bear. He also arranged for exPresident Theodore Roosevelt to take a Selig camera along on an African safari, but Roosevelt left the camera behind and took a British cameraman along instead. Not to be done out of a good thing, Selig constructed an African set in a corner of his Irving Park studio, hired an actor known for his impersonations of Teddy Roosevelt, and purchased an ailing circus lion.

He then shot both Hunting Big Game in Africa and the lion. \Vhen the press announced Roosevelt's first lion kill, Selig's film moved into the nation's projection booths at a rental fee of $400, thus neatly skimming the cream off the profits of the subsequent official version.

Selig's flair for the spectacular continued to find expression. In 191,, his studio announced The Coming of Columbus. The primary reason for the choice of subject was the presence, in the Jackson Park yacht cove, of three decomposing reproductions of Columbus's original caravels, which had been sent to the 1893 'v\lorld's Columbian Exposition by the Spanish government.

When the caravels had been overhauled, Columbus (Charles Clary) and his crew boarded the three tiny ships and were towed several miles out into Lake Michigan-unfortunately in rough weather. Recovered from their seasickness, the crew set about trying to sail the caravels. It took them days to get started.

Finally, all was ready. On the palmetto-studded shore of Jackson Park, the cameras started grinding away, filming Columbus going aground on a sandbar. A tug sent to the rescue met the same fate, and further operations were hampered as hundreds of small craft, piloted by hypnotized Chicagoans, hovered around the stricken vessels. Somehow, Columbus finally made it to shore. The ambitious picture was a

Chicago Tribune

Chicago Hislorlcal Society

George K. Spoor, founder of Essanay.

Gilbert M. Anderson, founder of Essanay, as cowboy star Broncho Billy.

Cc,1rtesy David R. Phillips

Wallace Beery as "Sweedie," the star of an Essanay comedy series.

Courtesy Dav id R. Phillips

William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes;

Silent Films

great success. It was the first film to be shown in the Vatican, and the Pope conferred a medal on Colonel Selig.

With Anderson at Essanay, however, Selig's Westerns were languishing. He therefore assembled all the Western-type personnel available in the Chicago area, and sent them out into Indian territory. In April 1910, a large group of Indians, cowboys, cowgirls, rough riders, bucking bronchos, steers, work horses, and Indian ponies set out from the La Salle Street Station for an Oklahoma ranch. There they enlisted a general advisor named Tom Mix. It had not been intended that he should act but he was drawn into the first film, Ranch Life in the Great Southwest, as a trick rider. A star was born. In all, Tom Mix appeared in some two hundred Selig Westerns between 1910 and 1917. For one of these, Dune Park, east of Gary, suitably decked out with an oasis and some Bedouin tents, became the Sanara desert.

The age of the star was indeed dawning. In 191 r, Essanay also found itself a star-Francis X. Bushman, the screen's original matinee idol with the impressive profile. Bushman made four hundred films in his heyday. One of his early leading women was Beverly Bayne, a young miss fresh from Hyde Park High School, who played in some two hundred pictures with him.

Gilbert Anderson also made the grade. Filming a routine \ 1\Testern for Essana y in r 9 1 r, he created the character of Broncho Billy for a film called Broncho Billy's Christmas Dinner. The public loved Broncho Billy the minute he appeared on the screen, and the film led to a long series.

Even though some stars, like Tom Mix, wrote many of their own scripts, the producing companies were running out of material by 1909. Essanay advertised, winning Louella 0.

Parsons, who was so successful that she soon became head of the scenario department. Ring Lardner also wrote for Essanay. Frank Baum, of Oz fame, was one of Selig's writers. A literary development of another kind was the first motion picture trade publication, The Nickelodeon, 50

Chicago History

published in Chicago; it is now called Motion Picture Herald.

By r 91 1, Selig began tilting in favor of California. He had previously acquired 620 acres near Santa Monica, characteristically reserving 300 for a pretentiously laid-out zoo. But his Chicago studio remained open and busy. And the Chicago cinema scene was varied, from time to time, by new companies which came and went, or died aborning, and by visiting firemen. Among the more glamorous visitors were Anna Pavlova, who made a picture for Universal before the fire-charred arches and columns of the Frank Lloyd Wright buildings at the Sans Souci Amusement Park, and Mable Normand and Fatty Arbuckle, who stopped over with a Mack Sennett troupe and brightened the Christmas week of 1915 with a chase down Michigan Avenue.

That the two big resident Chicago companies gained clout in their city and, eventually, en tree to the highest social circles, is evident from their films. In 1912, for example, Essanay featured the Chicago Fire Department in Nepatia, the Greek Singer. That was a far cry from the day, five years earlier, when Gilbert Anderson was arrested for turning in a false alarm so he could photograph Ben Turpin running ahead of the horses. In 1915, Spoor's cameramen filmed the Prosperity Day Parade, one of "Big Bill" Thompson's favorite projects; in the fall, Spoor signed Mrs. Thompson to write scenarios. Essanay's In the Palace of the Eing, a "stupendous" six-reeler, featured 500 members of the Illinois National Guard. In Power, filmed at Starved Rock, Gov. Edward Fitzgerald Dunne appeared as a supervisor of road construction.

Essanay's The Crimson Tt'ing was written by socialite Hobart C. Chatfield-Taylor and filmed in the homes and gardens of some of Chicago's wealthiest citizens, including Harold and Cyrus McCormick, Orville Babcock, James \\'ard Thorne, Scott Duran, and Howard Shaw, most of whom played themselves. Edward S. Moore,

a vice-president of the Rock Island Railroad, donned a chauffeur's uniform to drive his own $14,000 car.

Colonel Selig, for his part, used his films to attract exhibitors and keep them loyal. Exhibitors were the frightened depositors in A Run on the Bank, the fans in The Pennant Puzzle, and, with their wives, the ballroom dancers in various films. He offered a similar service to city employees. As the Dramatic Mirror noted in 1912, "In a Selig picture to be released on March 7, entitled The Brotherhood of Man, there is a wrestling scene. The Selig producer extended a general invitation to city officials to act as the ringside audience."

Selig's genius for showmanship eventuated in what must have been the first package tour, the Selig Movie Special. For $ r 28, the traveler could board a luxurious train for a two-week trip to the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco and to Selig's California studio and zoo-and a film would be made of the expedition. Among those aboard the Selig Movie Special when it left Chicago on July 8, 1915, were exhibitors, scenarists, newsmen, and fans.

The recession of 1914 closed Selig's Chicago studios temporarily, but Essanay had the luck to begin a great new comedy series just as the recession hit. In the "Sweedie" comedies, starring Wallace Beery, Beery played a muscular, uncouth Swedish servant girl with large feet ("eloquent," one critic called them). At least forty Sweedie films were made; in one, Sweedie Goes to College, Beery was joined by Gloria Swanson, who married him shortly thereafter.

The young Beery was a dashing figure, tooling around town in a bright yellow car whose hood sported a Kewpie doll which was said to have various changes of costume, including a raincoat.

New Year's \Veek of 1915 saw the arrival in Chicago of the biggest catch of all-Charlie Chaplin, signed by Essanay for an astronomical $1250 a week. Chaplin, Spoor later recalled, had been earning less than $100 at Keystone, but Essanay was bidding against Carl Laemmle,

Sr., of Universal. Chaplin made only one film in Chicago, His New Job. He couldn't stand the climate, liked Essanay's other locations no better, and finally went over to Mutual for $ ro,ooo a week.

Carl Laemmle, Sr., whose studios were in California, was no stranger to the Chicago scene. According to \,Vi ii Leonard, this genius of a producer read about the burgeoning motion picture industry in the Chicago Tribune in 1905. He came to Chicago and opened a nickelodeon, the White Front Theatre, and within a few years was operating a string of theatres from Montreal to the Pacific Coast.

He also began "exchanging," and later renting, films to other theatres. In this business of distribution, he fell afoul of the General Film Company. In 1909, when he formed Independent Motion Pictures, he became involved in patent fights with the organization of the established producers, the Motion Picture Patents Company. He continued to battle after he established Universal Pictures in 1912.

Louella Parsons, writing in Theatre Arts in 1951, tells us that the Motion Picture Patents Company had been formed in 1908 to placate Thomas Edison, who claimed that producers everywhere were infringing on his patent rights.

To keep his lawsuits from tying up production, eight film-making companies-including Selig Polyscope, Essanay, and George Kleine-joined with him, pooled their patents, and paid royalties. The General Film Company was their distribution arm. Operating as a trust, they required license fees from exhibitors and fined them if they showed films made by nonmembers of the group. Richard Griffith, curator of films for the Museum of Modern Art, reported in his book The Movies that the $2 weekly license fee added up to $1,250,000 a year for the General Film Company. The sum is sufficiently large to explain Mrs. Parson's assertion that "Goon tactics were used to break the backs of the competition, Equipment and films were destroyed, property wrecked, and lives threatChicago History

51

Silent Films

Winnebago women, actresses in Pioneer Days, relax with a gambling game on location in Wilmette during the filming. The group watching them includes Martha Heald Johnson, dressed as her ancestor Captain Heald, whose part she played and, at the extreme right, Caroline M. Mcilvaine, librarian of the Chicago Historical Society, who served as consultant to the Selig Polyscope Company during the making of the film.

52

Chicago History

ened." in all fairness, it should also be reported that General Film tried to buy out the independent distributors and that Carl Laemmle and William Fox refused to sell.

The demise of Chicago's film making is, therefore, not entirely attributable to the superiority of California's climate. Certainly the event was hastened by the Supreme Court's decision, in 1915, that the antitrust laws applied and that the producer's organization had to disband.

Broncho Billy Anderson may have seen the handwriting on the wall: he sold out to George Spoor for $900,000 when Chaplin left.

Probably Spoor did not realize the mettle of the independent producers with whom he was now forced to compete. Even though Francis X. Bushman, Wallace Beery, and Gloria Swanson entrained for Hollywood, he moved to a larger studio in 1916 and hired Max Linder, at $5,000 a week, to replace Chaplin. He also hired two more stars: actor William Gillette and Lewis Stone, later famous as Judge Hardy in the Andy Hardy series. But Linder flopped at the box office and Chaplin was suing over Carmen, a tworeeler that Spoor had padded into four reels by introducing spurious footage and rejected scenes.

Selig Polyscope hired Tyrone Power, Sr., to act in melodramas, a good move, but gambled unsuccessfully on a Civil \Var spectacle titled Winner-take-all Carl Laemmle, Sr., as he appeared in 1916.

Chicago Hi storical Soci ety

Daily News Collection

The Crisis. Selig closed his Chicago studios, though he was to produce two final pictures here. For one, Pioneer Days, based on the Battle of Fort Dearborn, he had the authentic setting right at hand.

Essanay struggled on, but times were hard.

1917 was a war year, with shortages of coal and electricity, and a polio scare to boot. Early in 191 8, there was an epidemic of influenza. Even though they had just hired William S. Hart, the great cowboy actor, Essanay closed its doors.

In the years during which Selig Polyscope and Essanay reigned over the silent films, there were many other Chicago companies. Most, as we remarked earlier, came and went, but a few made important contributions to the industry or the art.

The industrial film was pioneered in Chicago in 1910 by the Industrial Moving Picture Company (Armour & Company was among its clients). As the Rothacker Film Manufacturing Company, it was still in business in the 19,ws.

And among the spate of new companies organized after the Supreme Court decision were Emerald Films, which produced an early Tom and Jerry series; an extraordinary company named Toyland Film, Incorporated, which made short pictures using animated toys, a technique generally thought to have originated much later; and a black company, the Kolored Komedy Korporation, producers of Trikay pictures.

And what of the Chicago titans? So far as we know, they all died rich, although Broncho Billy lost his rights to his pictures and even to his screen name in litigation. In his last film, made in 1925, he was billed as G. M. Anderson, a name with no box-office magic. Selig made some animal pictures in California as late as 1919, but finally retired. And George Spoor spent four million dollars developing "natural vision," a three-dimensional device which he exhibited in 1930-unfortunately just before the Great Depression and after the advent of sound movies. He is said, however, to have recouped his fortune in Texas oil.

Chicago History

53

Fifty Years Ago

As recorded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society 1924 Jan. r. Philadelphia's historic liberty bell rings in the New Year. The peals are broadcast in Chicago and relayed from here throughout the M idwest.

J an . 3. A long-awaited reorgan ization of the police depar tment begins. Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins says his shakeup will continue until he has fired everyone in any way involved with bootlegging.

J an. 10. A new church, to be known as the Dwight L. Moody Memorial Church and Sunday School, will be erected at Clark St. and North Ave., replacing the wooden tabernacle now on the site. The new building is to cost $800,000 .

J a n. 1 2. Fanny Butcher, reviewing Antic Hay,

calls author Aldous Huxley a smart aleck who should be taken out and publicly spanked .

Jan. 15. "\Ve have been hopelessly stupid in relation to conservation," Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis tells the Isaak Walton League. " \ Ve have stood by and seen whole states denuded of their forests. \\' e have seen industrial plants poison our streams." His address is broadcast from Chicago to 500 other celebrations of the League's second anniversary.

Jan. 30. President Coolidge nominates attorney Silas H. Strawn, a director of the First National Bank of Chicago, as specia l prosecutor in the Teapot Dome investigations now going on in Washington.

Jan. 31. Col. Robert H. Morse files suit to set aside his father's will on the ground that the taxes on his inheritance of under $2,000,000 add up to $3,246,000.

Feb. 2. A ski slide at Palos Park is dedicated to the people of Cook County. Today's competition was made possible by carefully storing away the snow from a recent storm.

Th e Dw ight L. Moody M emor ia l Church an d Su nday Schoo l, erection of wh ich was announ ced Jan. 10.

Woodcut courtesy Moody Ch urch

54

Chicago History

John G. Shedd, who gave $2,000,000 for Chicago's aquarium. He later added another $1,000,000 to fulfill the expectations announced on Feb . 11.

Feb. 3. A showing of The Birth of a Nation is halted by Judge John Rooney of the Municipal Court, who opens court in the Auditorium's foyer and finds that the film violates an Illinois statute prohibiting movies that engender race hatred.

Feb. 6. President Woodrow Wilson is buried today, and Chicago pauses for one minute in tribute. Cyrus H . McCormick, Chicago harvester magnate, is among the President's pallbearers in Washington.

Feb. 8. "We're ready to fight if Uncle Sam needs us," say two dozen students at the University of Chicago, responding to 38 undergraduates at rival Northwestern University who have vowed not to go to war under any circumstances.

Feb. 1 1. The Shedd Aquarium Society, organized today, envisions for Chicago the "finest indoor fishpond in the world." The Society will ask the South Parks commission ers for a site just east of the Field Museum.

Feb. 14. Chicago's postmaster, Arthur C. Leuder, reports that the sending of valentines

dropped conspicuously this year. He theorizes that Chicagoans are as ardent as ever but are giving more books, candy, and flowers to each other.

Eastern and Midwestern bankers subscribe to a ten-million-dollar pool to aid banks in the I\orthwest, where a long series of banks have failed. Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, attending the Chicago meeting, conveys President Calvin Coolidge's support for the undertaking.

President Coolidge withdraws his nomination of Silas H. Strawn in response to senatorial objections that the First National Bank of Chicago carries deposits of the Standard Oil Co. of Indiana, and asks the senators to suggest a suitable name themselves .

John C. Shaffer, publisher of the Chicago Evening Post and other newspapers, admits he received cash from Standard Oil and a promise of Teapot Dome oil from Harry Sinclair but declares no return favors were involved and that editorial support of oil-lease legislation was not part of the deal.

Chicago History

55

50 Years Ago

Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins started the new year right on Jan. 3, but see Mar. 17 and May 18.

Chicago Historical Society

Feb. 19. Ingenious thieves rob the People's Trust and Savings Bank on Michigan Ave. by placing a wad of chewing gum at the end of a stick and drawing certificates of deposit through an open and unattended teller's window. The robbery follows a similar theft in Indianapolis.

Feb. 20. Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism celebrates its third year of existence and Walter Dill Scott, the university's president, accepts an offer of seven more years of support from the Chicago Tribune by reiterating his response to the newspaper's original offer to set up a school named for publisher Joseph Medill. Said Scott, "I'll take your money but not your advice."

56

Ch icago History

The last big party is held at the Palmer House, soon to be torn down to make way for a modern hotel, as the Arts Club stages a costume ball.

Feb. 23. James E. Griffin is consecrated the first Catholic bishop of Springfield in a ceremony at Chicago's Holy Tame Cathedral presided over by Archbishop G. W. Mundelein.

Feb. 27. Chicago's theatres forego nudity as censors appointed by Mayor Dever begin to buy tickets. Venus rises from the sea as usual at the Apollo Theatre, but tonight she wears a union suit.

Mar. r. The Ten Commandments, a movie produced by Cecil B. DeMillc, is showing at Woods Theatre, with all seats reserved; Blossom Seeley and Bennie Fields¡ arc one of the vaudeville acts at the Palace. Also to be seen: Harry Lauder in old and new songs; Abie's Irish Rose; George \'\1hite's Scandals; Topsy and Eve; Patches, with Judith Anderson. Today's music includes violinist Fritz Kreisler at the Auditorium and an organ duct at the Chicago Theatre. Opening this week: Little Jessie James, with Paul Whiteman's orchestra in the pit; Pavlova and her Russian ballet; George M. Cohan's Silence.

Censorship is defied at the Illinois Theatre, which announces The Birth of a Nation, but "For a short time only," and apparently also at the Apollo, which advertises that Innocent Eyes, with Mistinguette, is "exactly as presented the opening night."

Mar. 4. In Evanston, home of the W.C.T.U., citizens watch gloomily as ten cases of whiskey, seized in drug stores, are poured into the sewer.

Five thousand egroes attend a huge fashion show, at the 8th Regiment Armory, which includes a pageant starring the $40,000 gown worn by Mrs. Gordon H. Jackson, nee Mae Robinson, at her society wedding last fall in Irvington-on-Hudson.

Mar. 5. A traffic signal light at Sheridan Rd. and Clarendon Ave. has been so successful

Cardinal Mundelein in his new robes on Mar. 24.

ChiCllllO Tribune

that three more like it are being installed on the north side. The new light, unlike those on Michigan Ave., is at the corner.

Mar. 7. The demands of So. Water St. property owners for increased compensation, in connection with the projected widening and double-decking of the street, do not impress Mayor Dever. "We'll see them in hell before we permit the city to be sandbagged," he declares.

Mar. 13. Mayor Dever reports that So. Water St. property owners are agreeing to the city's terms and predicts that work will begin this fall.

Mar. 17. Beer-running competition flares into open warfare on the city's streets and Chief of Police Collins pledges a complete shakeup of his department.

St. Patrick's Day is celebrated from morning till midnight, with early church services, luncheons, banquets, and dances. Among the larger partie~ are those staged by the CelticAmerican Societies of the city, the Irish Fellowship Club, the Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic, and the Ancient Order of the Hibernians.

Mar. 20. Three laboratories for making "imported" gin and scotch are found on State St. The difference between the two is explained by the caramel syrup in the scotch laboratory.

Mar. 24. A special blessing on the city and all its people is bestowed by Pope Pius XI in Rome at the behest of Archbishop Mundelein, whom he has named the first cardinal of Chicago.

Mar . 29. Fashionable 999 Lake Shore Drive is sold for $1,500,000, its 25 suites to be resold to its tenants, among whom is Ogden T . McClurg. The McClurgs live in a bungalow on the roof of the building.

Mar. 31. Gunfire breaks out in Cicero on the eve of its first local partisan election in many a year. Political control of the western suburb, and presumably of its saloons and gambling spots, has heretofore been divided by agreement between the Republicans and Demo-

Three party workers guarding the Democratic Party headquarters in Cicero on Apr. 1, shortly after it had been invaded by gunmen.

crats, but this year the Democrats are making a separate bid.

Apr. r. Chicago police, sent into Cicero to restore order, encounter a scene of wild confusion. Gunmen speed through the streets in automobiles, shooting as they go; election workers arc slugged; ballots are ripped from voters' hands and some are kidnapped to keep them from voting; polling places are raided.

As police come upon Al Capone, his brother Frank opens fire and is shot dead. When the ballots .are counted, they show a Republican victory.

Johnny Weismuller, of the Illinois Athletic Club, breaks his own 200-yard free-style swimming record.

Apr. 5. Flowers completely fill the Capone home in Cicero. Frank Capone's mourners include judges, politicians, and businessmen, as well as gang members, who form a procession which continues far into the night.

Apr. 6. Twenty of Chicago's :Kegro pastors denounce Republican Governor Len Small, who is running for renomination. The pastor of the Olivet Baptist Church, in a statement from the pulpit, explains the reasons: the governor is endorsed by the Ku Klux Klan, and "has prostituted his office for corrupt purposes."

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Chicago History

Apr. 8. Governor Small and Democratic Mayor Dever are renominated.

Apr. g. The largest budget in Chicago's history -$45,500,000-is passed by the City Council.

Apr. 27. Chicago's death rate from typhoid, once the highest in the nation, is now the lowest. The improvement is attributed to the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

May r 4. A reception is held at Hull House for the \Vomen's International League for Peace and Freedom, a pacifist organization. Among those joining Jane Addams, president of the League, to welcome the women are Judge Mary Bartelme; Mary McDowell, commissioner of public welfare ; Mrs. E. \V. Bemis, county commissioner; Mrs. Ignace Ries, president of the Council of Jewish Women of Chicago; and Mrs. Lorado Taft. The League opens a summer school at the University of Chicago tomorrow.

May r 8. The Chicago Historical Society accepts The History of the Jews of Chicago, the result of ten years of research by the Jewish Historical Society. U.S. Senator James Hamilton Lewis is speaker of the evening.

Three policemen are arrested in a Larrabee St. brewery, and a little black book contains the names of six more. Among the 3 r beer

50 Years Ago

runn.ers arrested are Johnny Torrio and Dion O'Banion.

May 21. The first subway is dug in the Chicago area, part of an extension of the Northwestern E levated Railroad from Howard St. to Niles Center. The first mile and a quarter of the extension wi ll be underground.

May 22. Robert Franks, 13-ycar-old son of millionaire Jacob Franks, retired cap italist, is found dead in a culvert on the Southeast Side. The father had been preparing to pay $10,000 in ransom money, demanded in a note which swore him to secrecy.

June , . Nathan F. Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both sons of m ill ionaires, confess to the murder of R obert Franks, revealing that the boy was dead before the ransom note was written. "We did it for the experience, through a spirit of adventure," the murderers declare. Their apprehension came quickly, through the tracing of Leopold's eyeglasses, found near the body. Clarence Darrow will defend them in an August trial.

June 2. Illin ois' Governor Frank 0. Lowden rejects the vice-presidential nomination offered him by the R epublican National Convention, and the Convention turns to Gen. Charles G. Dawes, of Evanston. Dawes will be President Coolidge's running mate.

June 23. As a violent summer storm and gale winds lash the city, reversing the current of the Calu met R iver and causing sewage to flow into Lake Michigan, Health Comm issioner Herman N. Bundesen issues an emergency warning to boil all drinkin g water.

Jun e 28. Plans for an und erground garage in Grant Park that will accommodate more than 3,000 automob il es are advanced by the Chicago Association of Commerce. The huge garage is to be built in ten sections.

June 30. Chicago's drinking water is safe again, Commissioner Bundesen reports.

Vice-presidential candidate Charles G. Dawes speaking to 20,000 of his fellow townsmen who assembled on the lawn of his Evanston mansion to welcome him home. General Dawes was nominated on Jun e 2.

Books

Interesting Women the study of American history has been a distillation of diplomatic, political, and military events in the life of the nation. In the immediate past, however, a growing awareness of the importance of social institutions and relationships has led to the recognition of social history as a major branch of the discipline. This development established a framework in which scholars could examine the contributions to history of various segments of society; thus, in the early 1960s, on the crest of the wave of the civil-rights movement, historians discovered Black history. The Black awakening and the historical inquiry it spawned were followed shortly by an upsurge of pride and awareness among other minorities. Indeed, Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique (Norton, 1963) seemed to signal the rise of a new feminist spirit and the beginning of an effort to research and verify the roles and contributions of American women to history.

An impressive literature is evolving. It serves not only as a prod and mechanism for the reexamination of American history but also, and perhaps more importantly, as a foundation for the new feminist movement, a text for consciousness-raising among both women and men. These studies reveal the myriad contributions of women as individuals and in groups; they describe a variety of female life styles, roles, and experiences, and they offer a panoply of examples from which to learn.

UNTIL RECENTLY,

Mary Harris Jones, better known as Mother Jones, was an activist, a champion of the poor and down trodden, and devoted to the cause of organized labor -especially the coal miner. Her struggles on behalf of the unions began during the 1870s. She was more than 40 years old, had lost her four children and husband to yellow fever in Memphis, Tennessee, and had suffered the loss of her dress-making business in the Chicago Fire of 1871. Until she died at the age of I oo in 1930, she marched from the coal fields of Pennsylvania and West Virginia through the mill towns of the South, and into the mining camps of the West, wherever she was needed, in support of the workers.

Mother Jones, The Miners' Angel, by Dale Fetherling, Southern Illinois Un iversity, 1973, $11.85; The Autobiography of Mother Jones, by Mary Harris Jones, Kerr, 1972, $7.50; Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition, by Daniel Levine, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 197 1, $8.50; American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, by Allen F. Davis, Oxford, 1973, $10.95; Movers and Shakers, by June Sochen, Quadrangle, 1973, $6.95.

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Chicago History

The act1v1t1es of this petite grandmotherly woman who chose to excel in a man's role are fascinatingly chronicled by journalist Dale Fetherling in Mother Jones, the Miners' Angel. In a readable and wellresearched volume, Fetherling paints a portrait of a charismatic, silver-tongued, agile-witted agitator who felt a deep personal commitment to labor. She became a symbol of hope to strikers everywhere she appeared; her legendary exploits constantly added to her stature among workers and their families.

Nowhere can one get a better idea of the enormous personality and flair of Mother Jones than from her own The Autobiography of Mother Jones, published originally in 1925 by Charles H. Kerr & Company.

Though she made little attempt to tell her story in chronological sequence and obviously had no respect for the accuracy of dates, she reveals better than anyone else her persistence and dedication, her fiery style, and her total commitment. ln his introduction to this new edition of the Autobiography, published in 1972, Fred Thompson attempts, unsucces fully, to clarify the chronology of events that Mother Jones described.

Read Mother Jones' autobiography with Fetherling's biography; you'll have the tory straight. Together, these two books provide a delightful and informative reading package in which to discover one of America's truly memorable but almost-forgotten women .

Jane Addams, founder of Hull-House, social welfare pioneer, pacifist, feminist, symbol to and of American womanhood, is not a forgotten woman. Numerous books and articles have been written about what she said and did. Yet as a person she has remained an enigma. She made her contributions to society as a woman outside the traditional role of home and family. She carved out and defined her own life style and her role as she went, neither entirely defying convention nor bowing to it.

To Daniel Levine, professor of history at Bowdoin College and author of Jane Addams and the Liberal Tradition, an intellectual biography, her major contribution to American history lay in her ability to synthesize, to articulate, and to persuade the American people of the need of such reform causes as progressive education, improved housing, child-labor legislation, labor organizing, recreation, feminism, pacifism, and more. Levine explores her activities and experiences to argue that she was the "spokesman" of a native radical tradition in twentieth-century America.

Though his book was published in 1971, Levine appears to have written it prior to the resurgence of feminism in the late 1960s, for he reveals no sensitivity to his own prejudices as a male historian relating the thoughts, actions, and deeds of a woman.

On the other hand, Allen Davis, professor of history at Temple University and author of the more recent American Heroine: The Life and Legend of Jane Addams, acknowledges that he brings a special handicap to the study of a woman and a feminist-the bias he acquired growing up male in America. Davis, also an intellectual historian, has written a comprehensive and exhaustively researched study. He develops in detail Miss Addams' early years as a child in Cedarville, Illinois, and as a young student at Rockford Fe-

male Seminary. He takes advantage of new research resources available only since 1966, resources that Levine totally ignores. Davis illuminates Addams' years at Hull -House and the importance of her writings. He examines her unpopular stand for pacifism during World War I and tries to explain her subsequent loss of stature among the American people.

While recognizing that she was important for what she did and what she wrote, Davis is more intrigued by what she symbolized for America. He therefore addresses himself to the reputation and public image of the legend of Jane Addams. He attempts to relate that legend to the facts of her life and to show how the two became intertwined, supported one another, and merged to create in her the symbol of an age and the representative of American women. He does not attempt to write a life and times of Jane Addams. He writes to clarify her life experience and in so doing he praises as well as criticizes her actions. The result, all in all, is one of the most sensitive and revealing pictures of this famous American woman anyone has ever presented. This is a book well worth reading.

June Sochen, professor of history at Tortheastern Illinois University, in Movers and Shakers has presented an uneven overview of the feminist movement in twentieth-century America based largely on already published sou1 ces. She concerns herself with what she admits is, and what in fact is, a record of the thoughts and actions of a highly selective minority: those American women who "consciously thought, wrote, and acted in an effort to elevate the status of women or to explore the dilemma of women." Sochen describes the contributions of such feminists as Henrietta Rodman, Crystal Eastman, Grace Abbott, Kate Richards O'Hare, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Emma Goldman, Zona Gale, Pearl Buck, Fannie Hurst, Mary Anderson, Agnes Nestor, and Eleanor Roosevelt, as well as leaders of the movement today. She relates all of these intellectuals and activists to the time and environment in which each lived, but only briefly; the result is a somewhat jerky but certainly compact story of their efforts. As an attempt at a popular, consciousness-raising story of feminism and of some of the women who created its philosophical base, Sochen's book almost succeeds. It deserves to be better and more carefully written.

Read all these books and you will certainly know a great deal more about the contribution of American women to American history.

Mary Lynn McCree Mary Lynn McCree, curator of Hull-House, is co-editor of Eighty Years at Hull-House and author of "The First Years of Hull-House" (Chicago History, Fall 1970), among other publications.

skyscraper, and the beginning of Chicago's reputation as America's first city of architecture. The importance of Chicago architecture has long been recognized .

But. there is a constant proce s of reevaluation and popularization that succeeds discovery. Last year's literary output includes among the best and the worst of it.

Chicago, 19ro-1929 by Carl W. Condit is among the best. It is a "technical biography" of the period which began with the civic munificence of the Burnham Plan and ended suddenly with the Great Crash on Black Friday. Condit traces the development of the transportation systems-rai lroads, rapid transit and waterways; of commercial buildings and universities; of the park and lakefront recreational system; of the museums and performance halls; of the micro-cities known as downtown hotels. It is a thorough investigation of planning, architecture, and engineering seen through the historian's perceptive and committed eyes.

Condit rescues the eclectic and art deco architecture of the 191 os and '20s from the obscurity that he himself once helped to create. Praising its variety and opulence, its visual hedon ism, and its unwavering self-assurance, he contrasts it to the featureless sterility of much contemporary work. Chicago fared better in the 1920s, says Condit, than it does today. Then the city was trying to memorialize itself. Now, after years of depression, war, and indifference to urban needs, the city is so blighted that it will need all its energy just to heal itself.

The book was written as part of a larger study covering the period from 191 o through today. The publishers chose to split the work and will release the second half later this year.

The Architecture of John Wellborn Root by Donald Hoffman is a well-researched and readable account of this important architect's life and work and a muchneeded addition to the literature. It fo llows Root from his birth in Georgia through early apprent iceship with James Renwick (the architect of the Smithsonian Institute) and P. B. Wight, through his establishment as the design partner of Burnham and Root, and to his untimely death at the height of his creative period in 189 r. Whole chapters are devoted to such masterpieces as the Monadnock Block and the Rookery; another chapter sets in order the confused reports of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition.

The text is amply illustrated and carefull y footnoted. One only wishes that Hoffman had taken more of a stand. He never quite comes to grips with just what distinguishes a Root building, what exactly

Chicago, 1910--29: Building, Planning and Urban Technology,

New Looks at Chicago' s Architecture more than a hundred years since the Great Fire which gave Chicago architecture its start by razing what went before. The need for an almost total reconstruction of the city drew forth the best from Chicago architects. It was the beginning of a truly native American architecture, the beginning of the IT IS NOW

by Carl W. Condit, University of Chicago, 1973, $12.50; The Architecture of John Wellborn Root, by Donald Hoffman, Johns Hopkins, 1973, $ 13.50; Frank Lloyd Wright: An Interpretive Biography, by Robert C. Twombly, Har per & Row, 1973, $10; American Architecture Comes of Age, by Leonard K. Eaton, MIT, 1972, $ 14.95; Chicago on Foot,

by Ira J. Bach, J. Philip O'Hara, 1973, $6.95; Space Adrift: Landmark Preservation and the Marketplace, by J ohn J. Costonis, University of Illinois, 1973, $7.50.

Chicago History

61

Books

Root contributed to the next generation of designers.

He is more content to describe than define. Yet while this may not be the definitive work on Root, it is a fully fleshed and devoted homage.

Unlike Root, Frank Lloyd Wright has been extensively studied and evaluated. Robert Twombly's Frank Lloyd Wright: An Int erpretative Biography is therefore largely redundant, although Twombly's indefatigable forays into archives have uncovered some new material and he has taken great pains to disentangle some of the more confused aspects of Wright's personal life.

But much of the book is filled with second-hand criticism. Quotations are so extensive that, at times, it seems more an anthology than a biography. The most distracting elements in the book, however, are the author's subjective diatribes against Wright's personality and his puerile but incessant attempts at ex post facto psychoanalysis.

Leonard's Eaton's American Architecture Comes of Age approaches the Chicago School architects from the point of view of their influence in Europe. By a thoughtful examination of hitherto unexamined European publications, as well as the American itineraries, recorded comments, and designs of European architects, he constructs a case for the influence of Sullivan and Richardson on the architects of England, Scandinavia, and German-speaking countries. He finds traces of Richardson in the work of Karl Moser of Germany, Adolf Loos in Vienna, and Saarinen in Finland, and elements of Sullivan in the buildings of Hendrik Berlage in Amsterdam, to name a few. He is a cautious observer but his extensively annotated research makes an impressive challenge to the widely accepted proposition that Frank Lloyd Wright was the first American to influence European architects.

He sees the process of America's influencing Europe as opposed to Europe influencing us as the outward sign of a mature native architecture, hence the phrase "comes of age" in his title. He sees his own study, therefore, as an outgrowth of the recognition that Richardson, not Wright, was the first modern American architect.

I raj. Bach's Chicago on Foot (2nd ed.) is an attempt to bring the great works of Chicago architecture (from all periods) within easy reach of tourist and native by providing do-it-yourself walking tours. Like the first edition , this version presents more than thirty separate walks supplying maps, CT A directions from the Loop, identifications and descriptions of each building, and Philip Turner's handsome photographs. The new edition has dropped some of the nonarchitectural tours in favor of adding Riverside, Northwestern University's campus, and a couple of new Loop walks.

The tour book was a !audible endeavor in 1969 (when the first edition was published) and a revised edition was much needed as Bach had left out many buildings and made more than a few errors. Un62

Chicago History

fortunately, while these revised tours have been filled out (sometimes to the extent of including quite inferior work), the errors have, if anything, increased .

Wrong addresses, dates, and architects abound, misspellings and typos, inaccurate descriptions, and even buildings which have been missing for years. (The Michigan Avenue South tour includes a building which was demolished in 1929 !) . Almost half the pages contain errors. What we need is a revision of the revision.

John Costonis' Space Adrift: Landmark Preservation and the Marketplace addresses itself to the question of how to save the landmarks of Chicago architecture for the generations to come. The problems are rarely structural-the Chicago building code being notoriously tough.

Thus Costonis has aimed his plan at solving the economic and legal problems-the pressure on the owner to discard his 10-story, marginally profitable landmark in favor of an 80-story, very profitable redevelopment and the frustration of even a sympathetic city government which could not legally prevent the owner from redeveloping except by purchasing the structure, a task for which it has no funds.

Costonis' plan, based on the transfer of development rights, was published in brief two years ago. In this book, he elaborates on the mechanics of such a program, considers a wide array of contingencies, and subjects the plan to hypothetical test cases using financial data from four Chicago downtown buildings. In addition, he compares the plan to the other city, state, and federal measures available.

The book concerns itself only with saving privately owned downtown landmarks, for their future is most precarious. But he a lso suggests tools for other landmark situations and historic districts and proposes that the concept of the transfer of rights could be adapted in defense of any low-density use of land including ecologically important areas.

Costonis' plan has received wide acclaim including the offer by the U.S. Department of the Interior of initial funding for a test project in Chicago. All this makes Space Adrift the most hopeful possibility yet and, although heavy going, it should be required reading for all preservationists and conservationists.

Nory Miller Nory Miller is managing editor of Inland Architect.

Brief Reports by the Staff Chicago: 1860- 1919

by Stephen Longstreet McKay, 1973. $10.95.

AN ACTION-PACKED BOOK, filled with racy dialog and good stories, Longstreet's history, which is highly reminiscent of earlier works, has neither the breadth nor the scholarship to make it a proper history of the city even within the time limit he sets. For a portrayal of Chicago's seamy side, which this is, we still prefer Lloyd Wendt's and Herman Kogan's Lords of the Levee (Bobbs-Merrill, 1943); for somewhat more breadth but still a light touch, Emmett Dedmon's

Fabulous Chicago (Random House, 1 953); and, for scholarsh ip, Bessie Louise Pierce's History of Chicago (vols. 1 and u , 1673- 1871, are available through the Society). Finis Farr's Chicago (1973) was broader than Longstreet's book and still not satisfactory (already out of print but available through the Society), and we are still wa iting for a good history to show up.

Chicago Negro Almanac and Reference Book

Compiled and edited by Ernest R. R ather Chicago Negro Almanac Publishing Company, I 972, $25. the "most complete compendium of egro achievement ever published on the Negro in Chicago," as claimed, but nevertheless an impressive and useful coJJ ection of data on Negroes in the city. Its current listings of Negro educators, lawyers, policemen, fire men, political office holders, and others in government, along with its biographical sketches, information on Chicago Negro Firsts, and other data, make the volume a must for libraries and for anyone with a serious interest in the history of the city's Negro people.

Should Mr. Rather publish a second edition, we hope he will add : a sorely needed index; information on Negroes now in the arts, sciences, and other endeavors; a nd more historical data (biographical, demographic, and narrative) to complement the current information and to justify the volume' s $25 sales tag.

NOT QUITE

An American Verdict

by Michael J. Arlen Doubleday, 1973. $6.95.

An American Verdict is an in-depth report on the trial of State's Attorney Edward Hanrahan for conspiracy to falsify evidence and thereby obstruct justice following the shooting of Black Panther Fred Hampton in his apartment on D ecember 4, 1969. This was a shadow trial, the real issue being whether H ampton was murdered by Chicago police. As everyone knows, Hanrahan was acquitted; just the same, Arlen wi ll have you at the edge of your chair as you listen to testimony, gaze around the courtroom, observe the witnesses, and consider the meaning of the objects placed in evidence. Arlen writes for the New Yorker: his slim book is much like one of its famous profiles in wh ich people reveal themse lves through their own words, and his literary ski ll is evident on every polished page . An absolutely gripping judgment on our city.

"That Disgraceful Affair," the Black Hawk War

by Cecil Eby Norton, 1973. $9.95. of the last Indians from Illinois in 1832 was an outright massacre of helpless and starving Indian men, women, and children by American soldiers. It was an " affair" like My Lai. We can take no pride in such aspects of our history, but we also can't learn anything from them if we bury them. This book is a recommended lesson.

THE REMOVAL

Eagle Forgotten

by H arry Barnard Lyle Stuart, 1973. $6.95. we have Bob Cromie to thank for calling this long out-of-print biography of Governor Peter Altgeld to the attention of its new publisher. We do thank him. You will, too, when this fascinating account of one of Illinois' most courageous men comes your way. A beautiful job; may it stay in print forever.

IT APPEARS

Vice Squad

by Robert H. Williams Crowell, 1973. $7 .95. is that police co rruption is recurrent (see "50 Years Ago") and that the creation of a special task force to handle victimless crimesgambling, prostitution, dependence upon alcohol and other drugs-only makes matters worse. In fact, Williams complains that the cities he chose as case studies-because they had "successfully" coped with corruption only recently-almost all exploded again as he was writing. There is a good deal of material on the Chicago experience, but what strikes one is the universality of the problem, which is well documented by the author. A serious book, worth se rious attention.

THE AUTHOR'S THESIS

Chicago and North Western Power: Modern Steam and Diesel, 1900 to 1971

by Patrick C. Dorin Superior Publishing Company, 1972. $12.95. for railroad buffs, this is a portfolio of over 400 photographs and diagrams of major types of locomotives operated by the Chicago and orth Western Railroad in this century. A capsule history of the railroad, beginning in 1848 with the Galena and Chicago Un ion's Pioneer (on view at the Chicago Historical Society), is also included.

A USEFUL COMPENDIUM

Horace White: Nineteenth Century Liberal

by Joseph Logsdon Greenwood, 1 97 r. $ 1 3. 50.

Dateline Chicago : A Veteran Newsman Recalls Its Heyday

by William T. Moore Taplinger, 1973. $7.95.

biography of Horace White-editor, bu inessman, political advisor, and historian-is also an intriguing account of the Chicago Tribune's heyday as the radical newspaper of the West. Joseph Logsdon documents the rise and fall of radical Republicanism as White experienced it, caught in the crossfire of reform movements from the Civi l War to World War I.

vou MET some of Moore's characters, if you are old enough, in Ben Hecht and Charles McArthur's The Front Page, but Moore has more of them. It seems that the old Chicago H erald & Examiner hired only characters. Not all Moore's Stories are hilarious or se nsa tional, but some are and all are interesting, including his portrait of Hearst as benevolent despot. A romp .

THIS DEF! ITIVE

Chicago History

63

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY North Avenue and Clark Street, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone : Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS

Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, I st Vice-President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Clement M. Silvestro, Secretary and Director TRUSTEES

Bowen Blair Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon James R. Getz Philip W. Hummer Willard L. King Andrew McNally III Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

MEMBERSHIP The Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by memberships. Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and dues are as follows: Annual, $15 a year; Life, $250 (one payment); Governing Life, $500 (one payment); Governing Annual, $100 (one payment) and $25 a year; and Patron, $IOoo (one payment).

Members receive the Society's magazine, Chicago History, invitations to all special functions held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions. Members and their immediate families are admitted free to the museum at all times.

Single copies of Chicago History, published semiannually, are $2.25 by mail, $2 at newsstands and bookshops. Subscriptions are $10 for 4 issues.

,.

John Kinzie consigns his family to the care of friendly Indians after the Battle of Fort Dearborn, as a Selig Polyscope cameraman films Pioneer Days on the lake shore of y,'i lmette, 111 inois.

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