Chicago History | Winter 1976–1977

Chicago History WINTER 1976-1977

GONE FOREVER

OCTOBER 31

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Drawing pure drinking water from Lake Michigan in the early days.

Chicago History The Magaz:,£ne of the Chicago Historical Society

WINTER 1976-1977 Volume V, Number 4

Cover: Chromolithograph for A Century of Progress, 1934, by A. Raymond Katz , assistant director of posters for the fair. Katz often signed his earlier works " Sandor."

CONTENTS

THE TWENTY-EIGHTH INTERNATIONAL EUCHARISTIC CONGRESS/202

by Milton Fairman

BIG JIM O'LEARY: "GAMBLER BOSS IV TH' YARDS"/213

by Richard T. Griffin

Isabel Grossner, Editor Frederick J. Nachman, Assistant Editor

CHICAGO'S EARLY FIGHT TO "SAVE OUR LAKE" /223

by Frank]. Piehl

THE LOST CITY OF THE DEPRESSION/233

by Cathy and Richard Cahan

Editorial Advisory Committee Emmett Dedmon James R . Getz Oliver Jensen Robert W. Johannsen Herman Kogan Will Leonard Robert M. Sutton

Copyright 1976 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America : History and Life All illustrations, unless otherwise credited , are from the collections of the Chicago Historical Society.

CHICAGO'S CITY SEmES : CUBS VERSUS WHITE SOX/243

by Arthur R. Ahrens

FIFTY YEARS AGO/253 BOOK REVIEWS/258 SOCIETY NOTES/262 LETTERS/263

The Twenty-eighth International Eucharistic Congress

BY MILTON FAIRMAN

Chicago was the center of world Catholicism during the summer of 1926) when hundreds of thousands gathered for the International Eucharistic Congress.

But sometimes the pomp) the pageantry) and the cult of personality seemed to overshadow the religious aspects of a spectacular week of worship.

1976, when the Fortieth International Eucharistic Congress met in Philadelphia, thoughts necessarily turned to an event in Chicago exactly fifty years earlier-a full week of religious devotion and ecclesiastical pageantry attended by more than a million people.

Even today, the 1926 Congress stands tall in the memory of Chicagoans. Virtually everyone in the city at the time was involved to some extent, either as a participant or as a hapless hostage of the traffic jams whose grip spread outward from the Loop and lakefront.

There was little change in religious purpose between the first O:mgress, held in Lille, France, in 1881, to strengthen the devotion to Christ in the Eucharist, and the Twenty-eighth Congress in Chicago. The differences between the Chicago and the Philadelphia congresses, however, are striking. The basic purpose remains, but virtually all else responded to the tremors shaking church and society in the last half-century.

When Chicago was selected as the first site of a Eucharistic Congress in the United States, both the church itself and the world around it were enjoying peace and post-war prosperity.

The United States was a logical choice. Chi-

IN AUGUST

Milton Fairman, a retired business and public relations executive, served as assistant director of information of the Twenty-eighth International Eucharistic Congress.

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cago's archbishop, George Cardinal Mundelein, was an ideal host for the vast meeting.

The city had ample resources, a central location, a broad spectrum of ethnic groups, and a strong Catholic community. Above all, there was the cardinal's leadership and proven ability.

Cardinal Mundelein enjoyed a singular relationship with the Vatican, which had recognized his substantial gifts very early. The youngest American bishop, he became the world's youngest archbishop in 1916, on his installation in Chicago. As he left New York for his new post, one business leader commented that "Brooklyn h as lost its greatest banker."

In 1922, Pope Pius XI bestowed on him the cardinal's reel ha t, another sign of the esteem accorded "a militant prelate, courageous and clever, courteous and kindly." Actuall y, Mundelein's financial genius was lost only to Brooklyn- during the Great Depression of the 1930s, he arranged for a loan to the Vatican from La Salle Street bankers.

Cardinal Mundelein undertook the active planning of the Congress in early 1924. The Right Reverend Edward F. Hoban, auxiliary bishop of Chicago, served as honorary president, but three staff directors, assisted by a small group of aides, carried out the actual arrangements. The general secretary of the Congress was Msgr. C. J. Quille, the aggressive principal of a home for working boys in which discipline was maintained with Marine Corps toughness. Monsignor Bernard J. Sheil, chan-

Left, George Cardinal Mundelein, 1926. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises; right, Msgr.

Bernard J. Sheil, chancellor of the Chicago archdiocese, who served as treasurer of the Eucharistic Congress. Photo by Peter Fish Studios.

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Eucharistic Congress

cellor of the Chicago archdiocese, became treasurer. Joseph I. Breen, a one-time Associated Press correspondent whose news background included Washington and European war assignments, was chosen director of information.

The arrangement worked surprisingly well: Monsignor Quille got things done-cajoling, persuading and, when necessary, threatening with the finesse of a battering ram. When he failed or the situation became tense, Monsignor Sheil stepped in diplomatically. Joe Breen, another moderating force, exuded the practicality and good humor that were eventually to take him to Hollywood as the chief censor of the Hays Office.

As the invitations, couched in Latin and signed by the cardinal, were mailed to all the archbishops and bishops of the Catholic church, Monsignor Quille and his aides began the formidable task of preparing Chicago for a record number of guests. Some twenty-five committees of priests and laymen were quickly organized and made responsible for one or another phase of the Congress.

The care and feeding of a million or so pilgrims is no small undertaking. Programs had to be outlined, speakers had to be selected and solicited. Sites for a score of simultaneous meetings had to be obtained, which meant securing the use of the Coliseum, Soldier Field, Municipal Pier, and several armories, as well as scores of church properties. First-aid and security measures had to be planned and trained personnel obtained. National Guards and police had to be mobilized to control the heavy traffic expected at the meetings. Transportation experts had to work out ways of carrying many pilgrims by special trains while still providing for those who would travel on the regularly scheduled runs. Householders and pastors had to be asked to open their homes to those who could not find hotel accommodations. Hundreds of priests and prelates had to be assigned to parishes where each could say his daily mass.

Parishes also had to prepare for a visiting bish204

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op who would preach on the opening clay of the Congress. And all these plans, and many more, had to be made without knowing exactly how many visitors would actually come to Chicago.

The planning took two years, but it paid off on June 18, when for a week Chicago became the center of world Catholicism. Pilgrims streamed in by train, bus, truck, and ship, or in their own Maxwells, Jorclans, or Model T's.

Heading the pilgrimages were 300 bishops, 57 archbishops, and 12 cardinals-an assembly of ecclesiastical personages larger than any seen by Rome itself for many a year.

The cardinals quickly became the symbol of the Congress, much to their own astonishment and to the chagrin of some of the churchmen.

In their home countries, the cardinals were accustomed to polite attention or, in some cases, indifference. Things were different in America. When they arrived in New York on the S.S. Aquitania, Mayor Jimmie Walker and his official greeter, Grover Whalen, met them.

But no one could have anticipated the crowds that gathered at St. Patrick's Cathedral and City Hall, and the estimated three hundred thousand applauding New Yorkers who lined Fifth Avenue.

It was the journalists who turned the spotlight on the cardinals. Finding the religious or abstract ideas of the Congress difficult to write about, they focused on the colorful cardinals.

Photographers were eager to record their every movement. And the cardinals ¡ were, indeed, legitimate news: they were distinguished men, members of a small and august body. The churchmen were garbed in exotic clothing and they had come from distant places-for example, Archbishop Daniel Maddix and a party of fellow Australians had spent twenty-eight days traveling to Chicago from Melbourne. The ranking prelate, John Cardinal Bonzano, wasas the press emphasized-legnlus a latere, an emissary direct "from the side of the Pope."

Cardinal Bonzano, who had earlier spent ten

Members of the children's choir practicing the Mass of the Angels at the Coliseum. The arena was also used for a welcoming assembly on June 18 and for meetings of the English-speaking section. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

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years in the United States as the apostolic delegate without attracting much attention, must have found his sudden newsworthiness somewhat startling.

Enthusiasm was further heightened by the Cardinals' Special-"the red train" that brought the forty-nine members of the papal party to Chicago. The Special was actually the usual Pullman train, but its cars were painted cardinal red and its appointments had been fancied up a bit. The Pullman people gave each car a title, added an observation car, and put aboard a prize crew. The train left New York's Grand Central Station at 10 A.M., and thousands gathered at depots across the country to cheer it on to Chicago, where it arrived at 9:45 the following morning. Newspapers and radio bulletins about the train's progress stimulated the public's interest.

The cardinals also often made news as individuals. Mid1ael Cardinal von Faulhaber was "mislaid" in the confusion of the Aquitania's docking; he was located forty-eight hours later in the rectory of a humble Brooklyn parish.

Disdaining the publicity, he had planned to travel incognito to Chicago in the guise of a professor of theology.

Even the group's official titles were intriguing.

The most splendiferous came from Spain: "His Eminence, Enrique Reig y Casanova, by the grace of God and the favor of the Apostolic See Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of All Spain." A man of modest bearing, he was also something of a problem for the people concerned with protocol because he was doing double duty as an official emissary of Alfonso XIII of Spain, responsible for some crown business while in America.

Patrick Cardinal O'Donnell, the primate of Ireland, was the most popular with newspaper people. His comments, in English of course, befitted the occupant of St. Patrick's own diocese of Armagh. When he confessed an interest in baseball, he was rushed to Comiskey Park for a White Sox-Yankees game where he met Babe 206

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Ruth before a battery of cameras. "If you would go home for a good night's sleep," he told reporters, "I could get a few hours myself."

The surprising development of the cardinals' "cult of personality" could not have pleased Cardinal Mundelein, who was more interested in the spiritual goals of the Congress. Moreover, he himself had shunned publicity: since 1922, when he became cardinal, he had not granted a single press interview until the eve of the Congress, when he revealed his own hopes for the assembly.

"The Congress will have the effect of bettering Chicago life," he said. "The mass of bishops from other countries, particularly Central and South America, will take back with them a better impression of this America of ours-they will do for us what we should have done for ourselves. We just haven't cultivated the friendship of other countries as we should have."

Mundelein also voiced his hope that at least a million Catholics would receive Communion at the opening of the Congress-"something never before effected in history"-and he visualized "a great wave of prayer going up." He saw the Congress as "a demonstration of faith aiding all denominations, and bringing about a better understanding as a result of churchmen from many nations meeting." He observed that "Chicago would not have received, ten years before, so large a gathering of the Catholic hierarchy without the sounding of a single discordant note."

Indeed, there was little adverse public reaction to the Congress in any quarter, despite the deep-seated differences in dogma and ritual among religious sects. A few obscenities were painted on the Holy ame Cathedral pavement, there was a protest from an obscure chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, and a branch of the Free Thinkers Society objected, but that was about all. A decade before, when the KKK was riding high in America, it might have been different. Earlier, in London in 1908, and in Montreal in 1910, the Eucharistic congresses had

encountered bitter oppos1t10n from other religious groups. Cardinal Mundelein and the other church leaders were fully aware of this background. To encourage an atmosphere of tolerance, the cardinal included other faiths in his hopes for the Congress- an ecumenical gesture unusual in those days.

The Congress started unofficially with the arrival of the Cardinals' Special, which was greeted by a cacophony of church bells and the whistles of hundreds of steam engines and river craft, supplemented by the horns of motor vehicles. A motorcade bore the cardinals and their entourage from the Michigan Central Station along Michigan Boulevard to the Cathedral of the Holy Name, and some three hundred thousand Chicagoans lined the route.

Chicago welcomed the pilgrims in an assembly at the Coliseum on June 18. Secretary of Labor James J. Davis appeared for Pres. Calvin Coolidge. Indeed, Coolidge's friendly interest required political courage in a country with so long a history of anti-Catholicism.

Other speakers included Gov. Len Small; Mayor William E. Dever; D. F. Kelly, president of The Fair Store and a leading Roman Catholic; and utility magnate Samuel Insull, Chicago's first citizen at the time, who greeted the visitors as the spokesman for non-Catholic residents.

But the 1926 Congress took special pains to avoid embarrassing political overtones. When Gov. Al Smith of New York, the outstanding American Catholic political figure, appeared at a Congress meeting, he was speedily conducted to an inconspicuous seat in Soldier Field where neither the reporters nor his backers could locate him. Smith had been the center of a religious controversy at the 1924 Democratic ational Convention, his Chicago supporters were again promoting him for the presidency, and the Congress' organizers were anxious to avoid any political demonstration on his behalf.

The Congress itself began on Sunday, June 20, with the "great wave of prayer" wh ich Ch icago History

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Cardinal Mundelein had promised the pope. At 4 A.M ., a high mass was celebrated in each of the 361 churches in the archdiocese, followed every half hour until noon by low masses. The day closed with a "Holy Hour" service and a sermon by one of the pilgrim prelates in each of the churches. The goal of one million participants in the wave of prayer was undoubtedly met.

There were 880,000 Roman Catholic residents in Chicago at the time, and an estimated 250,000 visitors.

At high noon, the Congress was formally opened at Holy Name Cathedral with a procession which embodied the splendor of the church's ancient ritual and pageantry. Acolytes and seminarians-"the last shall be first"-led the procession; priests and members of religious orders followed, and then the papal knights, papal prothonotaries and domestic prelates, mitred abbots, bishops, archbishops, cardinals and, at the end, Cardinal Bonzano, the Pope's representative.

Thousands of spectators banked the streets around the cathedral. The more knowledgeable were able to identify, by the participants' ecclesiastical dress, the role they might play in the service. Members of religious orders were recognizable by the color of their dress or by cowls, cinctures, headdresses, and emblems. The prelates were distinguished by the colors of their robes, and the cardinals by their erminetrimmed robes of red moire. Within the cathedral, a solemn pontifical mass was celebrated, the papal brief was read, and Cardinal Mundelein formally welcomed Cardinal Bonzano, who was installed as papal legate.

From the cathedral's time-weathered precincts, the Congress turned for its other cere"monies to two areas new to the Chicago territory: the still uncompleted Soldier Field, the great stadium on Chicago's lakefront; and St. Mary of the Lake Seminary at Mundelein, some forty miles northwest of the Loop, where the Congress concluded on June 24.

Soldier Field, the site for the ceremonies from 208

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June 21 to 23, presented some problems. It was anticipated that the congregation would fill the playing field as well as the grandstands, which meant that the altar would have to be located at the north end of the stadium. Therefore, to enable those at the south end, a quarter of a mile away, to follow the services, a forty-ninestep pyramid was built. The altar was placed at its apex. A strip of red carpeting ran up the dark green steps, a rid1 contrast to the gold of the ecclesiastical vestments. Rising above the altar was a fifty-foot gilded baldachin, a replica of the structure in St. Paul outside the Walls in Rome.

The first general meeting of the Congress was held in this setting on Monday at 10 A .M. Designated Children's Day, the service featured the 62,ooo-voice children's choir, organized by Otto A. Singenberger, director of music at the Mundelein seminary. The preparation for their renditions of the Mass of the Angels was elaborate: first, the music teachers in all of the archdiocesan grammar schools were instructed.

Then they taught the pupils in each classroom.

In the next step, an entire school learned to sing together; then sectional groups combined students of many schools for further training, ensuring that the masses of children would be able to follow the director's baton.

There was drama of a kind on Tuesday, Women's Day. William Cardinal O 'Connell of Boston refused to speak because of the heat and the length of the program. Monsignor Quille, furious, complained to Cardinal Bonzano that the Boston archbishop "is spoiling my show."

Looking across the sanctuary, Cardinal Bonzano motioned to his fellow cardinal to proceed.

Cardinal O'Connell rose, bowed slightly, and resumed his seat. There was a period of indecision before the "show" went on, and few in the congregation were aware of the contest of wills that had taken place. A choir of 18,000 nuns and laywomen proceeded to sing the Rosa Mystica as scheduled.

On Tuesday night, men assembled for what

proved to be the most moving of all the Congress' events. At 8:30 sharp, a voice over the amplifiers announced, "You are now in church.

Please extinguish your cigars." The slight glow of burning tobacco died out and the hum of voices subsided. At the conclusion of the service, under a full moon, trumpets sounded the high point of the benediction and each man lit a candle, filling the stadium with 150,000 glowing tapers. Another 80,000 men north of the altar to the Field Museum joined in the display.

At this moment I was standing in the press box with John Clayton, who had just returned from covering the Riffian War in the Spanish Saraha for the Chicago Tribune. "This is the god damnedest most beautiful thing I have ever seen," said Clayton, with tears in his eyes.

Supplementing the ceremonies on the lakefront were the Sectional Meetings, organized for the most part on ethnic lines and held, when possible, in parishes with strong bonds to oldcountry culture and language. Scores of these parishes warmly welcomed pilgrims from the homeland or from kindred ethnic centers in America. The English section met in the Coli-

William Cardinal O'Connell of Boston, center, at the second general meeting of the Congress . He ref used to speak that day because of the heat and the length of the program. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

seum. Italians shared Municipal Pier with the priests' Latin section. The 131st Infantry Armory housed the French and Oriental sections, blacks met at St. Elizabeth's on South Wabash Avenue, and American Indians were assigned the Gothic splendor of Quigley Preparatory Seminary.

Because of the Congress' size, the variety of programs, and the fact that the Sectional Meetings were held simultaneously, there never was a satisfactory accounting of the really distinguished participants, laymen as well as clerics.

Attending, but generally unnoted, for example, were Justice Pierce Butler of the U.S. Supreme Court, Adm. William Shepherd Benson, Sen. Joseph E. Ransdell of Louisiana, Judge Martin T. Manton of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and Sen. David L. Walsh of Massachusetts. Some of the notables went unrecognized in the robes of the Knights of St. Gregory or Chicago History

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the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre, and others were lost in the maze of programs.

All the sectional programs were completed before June 24, the final day of the Congress, to permit the fullest possible attendance at St. Mary of the Lake, a theological seminary founded by Cardinal Mundelein and located in the lush farmlands of Lake County. All agreed that the seminary grounds were a h appy choice for the finale of the Congress. The meadows and woods were a sylvan backdrop for the Georgian chapel fronting on a small lake.

As the planning proceeded, however, it became apparent that the logistical problems of the site were considerable. Transportation, parking facilities, first aid, shelter, and water had to be provided for hundreds of thousands of worshippers. v\1eather was also a prime concern. The summer heat had been relieved only by a few brief showers. Although the threat of rain mounted all during the first four clays and became more ominous on the eve of the seminary services, the first of the special trains from Chicago was scheduled to leave at 3 A.M., and others were to follow at half-hour intervals, permitting 270,000 pilgrims to travel by rail to Mundelein, where a temporary depot had been erected.

Twenty-five hundred policemen and fourteen hundred members of the 1ational Guard were deployed on the roads to patrol the automobile and bus traffic. Early in the day, police reported that the official parking lots, which could accommodate thirty-five thousand cars, were full. There was no estimate of the numbers parked in pastures for miles around.

Just as Cardinal Bonzano began the mass, word came over the public address system that between nine hundred thousand and one million persons had entered the grounds. From the belfry of the chapel, one could view the largest Roman Catholic congregation ever assembled, a truly awesome sight. ,vhen the chapel bells tolled for the most solemn parts of the mass, the silence that followed was broken only 210

Chicago History

by the chirping of birds nesting in the woods and the clatter of typewriters and telegraph keys in the press box.

As the worshippers knelt, they seemed, to observers in the steeple, to be raising great boxes onto their shoulders. Field glasses identified these "boxes" as cars, including ambulances, which had been caught in the vise of traffic and held immobile until the crowds thinned out.

Several of the trapped ambulances had been leased by Harry Romanoff, the Chicago H era Id-Examiner's gifted police reporter. He had visualized them streaking from the grounds, sirens shrieking, with the first photos of the services.

The procession-for some forgotten reason it was headed by a detail of New York City firemen followed by a pilgrimage of North American Indians- began immediately after the mass. The line of march was to cover about three miles of winding roads, the clay was hot, and rain was clearly about to fall. The first few drops fell within minutes after the cardinals joined the encl of the procession, and suddenly the clouds burst. Rain fell in sheets, the wind bowed the wood , and puddles filled the roads, turning the lawns into swamps. The marchers, for the most part, held to their ranks-there was no other place to go. On the edge of the crowd, however, thousands 0ed to the shelter of the railway station. Panic ensued as crowds continued to press into the already crowded depot, and about a hundred persons were injured, ten badly enough to require hospitalization.

Just before the procession arrived back at the chapel, the rain let up and the sun ,returned.

The least comfortable of all the marchers were the cardinal~. As their robes soaked up the rain and increased in weight, it became impossible to trail the trains, and their wearers had to carry them. Thus, a great assembly, begun with splendor in Chicago's Holy ame Cathedral, ended as a vast rain-soaked congregation in the fields of Lake County.

How did the Eucharistic Congress of 1926 compare with its successor in Philadelphia a half-century later? While the devotional objective remained the same, the latter Congress, in virtually every detail, mirrored the intervening changes in the church and in America.

The theme of the Chicago Congress, "The Eucharist and Christian Life," stressed the role of the individual; in 1976, the theme was broadened to "The Eucharist and the Hungers of the Human Family," and keyed to broad social goals.

There were major changes in the part played by the laity. The program of both congresses provided for lay speakers, but in Philadelphia they also participated actively in the liturgy. There was a marked accent on youth, and women were prominent.

In both meetings, the press developed a cult of personality. In Chicago, in 1926, it was the cardinals who were the focus. In Philadelphia, the featured participants were Cesar Chavez, Dom Helder Camara, Mother Teresa, Princess Grace of Monaco, and other newsworthy individuals. It would have been impossible in Chicago, in 1926, to invite such controversial figures as Chavez or Dom Helder.

The advance publicity of the Philadelphia meeting was meager, compared to fifty years before. Concepts of news had changed in the interval, and both press coverage and attendance at Philadelphia seemed less than in Chicago. After all, in 1976, one could watch the show on television.

Finally, Philadelphia's Congress was marked by an informality that would have been thought unseemly in 1926. The Latin liturgy, the formality of the rites, and the processions of the Chicago meeting were absent in Philadelphia. The differences between the two events were even reflected in the predominant colors of each : Philadelphia's meeting was a cheerful white with pastel touches; Chicago's stately purple, red, and gold.

There is no exact measure of the effects of the Chicago Congress. Few Chicagoans could avoid reacting in some manner to the crowds, if nothing else. For the participants, it was a spiritual adventure that would live long in memory. Other Americans experienced the event in their daily newspapers, which provided extensive coverage. Lacking public-opinion polls, we can only assume that attitudes ranged across a wide spectrum, reflecting the predilections and biases of America in 1926.

One interesting judgment came from the Excelsior of Mexico City, which congratulated the United States on being powerful and tolerant enough to make possible "the greatest Catholic gathering in history," adding that "love of tolerance is greater than riches or military power."

The reaction of many American Protestants was probably typified by Dr. Ralph Sockman, a young clergyman who later became one of New York's most celebrated Methodist ministers.

He approved of the Congress generally, urged Protestant churches to emulate it, but added that "the pomp of services, the exaltation of 21 2

Ch icago History

The last great procession took place during a sudden downpour which indiscriminately drenched the worshippers and ruined the gorgeous costumes of the dignitaries. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

ecclesiastics may remove the thoughts of men from the humble Nazarene. " The Chicago Congress impressed the American people with the unity and size of the Catholic community. It inspired pilgrims from abroad and sent them back praising the wealth, progressiveness, and goodness of the United States, although one visiting prelate, Archbishop Raphael Roditch of Belgrade, Yugoslavia, took home a poor impression of Chicago. As befitted a Franciscan prelate, he was interested in housing for the poor, and he asked to visit Chicago's slums. After touring the worst areas in the city, he concluded that he had seen only working-cla s homes. Even a second tour of the slums left him unconvinced, and he returned home suspecting that he had been sheltered from the truth about poverty in America.

Still, a humorous, Chicagoesque note marked the cardinals' departure. Their train's observation platform was so crowded that the news photographers were unable to take any good shots. Suddenly, Tribune photographer Mike Fish-now more famous as a restaurateurcould be heard above the station's din: "Hey! Mr. Bonzano," he shouted, "come up front!"

The cardinal's eyebrows arched in surprise; then, smiling ruefully, he pushed his way to the edge of the platform. As Mike's flash gun went off, the train pulled out.

Big Jim O'Leary: "Gambler Boss iv th' Yards"

BY RICHARDT. GRIFFIN

Big Jitn O'Leary, the a Gambler Boss iv th' Yards," once lost a bet when he said a man wouldn't hang in a state outlawing capital punishment, but he won a lot of others- maybe.

The only thing that seemed to bother him was the story about his mother's cow. me JIM o ' LEARY, king of Chicago's gamblers, and Pat O 'Malley, Clark Street saloonkeeper and Democratic Party power, were having a drink at the First Ward Ball, the infamous annual fund raiser sponsored by Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin. Sipping champagne, O'Leary remarked to O'Malley, "You'd be a long time in Ireland before you'd get any of this stuff to drink." O'Malley, offended by the remark, bet O'Leary $ 1 ,ooo that within a week he could be drinking champagne in County Limerick at the home of his parents, whom he had not seen in twenty years. "Put up your thousand, " said O'Leary, and the great Chicago-to-Ballyloughran race of 1908 race was on.

It was 2: 30 on a Tuesday morning and O'M a!Jey dashed to the Loop, where he boarded the Lake Shore fast mail train to New York City. He arrived there at 7:30 Wednesday morning and sailed two-and-a-half hours later on the Lusitania. The great luxury liner was scheduled to arrive at County Cork at 5 P.M. the following Monday, but weather delayed its arrival until 11. Fortunately for O 'Malley, he had the sense to distrust the ability of Ireland's Great Southern & Western Railroad to get him to his parents' home in time, so he had cabled ahead

Richard T. Griffin is a fourth-generation Chicagoan, a student of the more lurid aspects of Chicago's history, and the business columnist of the Chicago Daily N ews.

to an automobile concern in Cork City to have a fast car at dockside in C6bh. When he stepped off the tender from the Lusitania, a sixtyhorsepower machine was waiting for him and the driver rushed across the wintry Irish countryside at top speed. It spanned the fifty-five miles to his parents' poor cottage in a breathtaking two-and-one-half hours, putting him at their door a week-less one hour-after he had left Chicago. O'Leary learned that he was $1,000 poorer from a two-word cablegram from O'MalIey. It read: "You lose."

The Chicago-to-Ballyloughran race was one of the few bets that Chicagoans ever heard of Big Jim O'Leary losing-because O'Leary liked to be known as a winner-but it was a stunt typical of the "Gambler Boss iv th' Yards," as the city's newspapers dubbed him. Big Jim bet on the horses, table games, the weather, sporting events, and political races, and he made sure the newspapers knew it. Like an early Jimmy the Greek, he sent telegrams to the newspapers with his odds on events that interested the public, and the papers regularly published them.

O 'Leary, never one to turn away a reporter, was always good for a story. As a result, the press tended to treat him as a colorful local character-who dared even to post his odds in nearby police stations-rather than a lawbreaker.

Lawbreaker? In forty years of operating some of the biggest and most notorious "gambling hells" in Chicago history, he was convicted of violating the gambling laws in Cook County only once, in 1921, just four years before his Chicago History

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death at age fifty-six. For decades, O'Leary brazenly admitted to all who asked that he had long operated illegal bookmaking establishments, roulette wheels, and dice and card games: "I've nm every kind of gambling game eighteen months ago and longer, but I ain't saying anything about now." The statute of limitations on gambling violations was eighteen months.

His two-story "palace of vice" at 4183 South Halsted Street was, he bragged, "fireproof, lightningproo(, bombproof, burglarproof, and policeproof." Three bombs left at his doorstep during the gambling wars of 1907-1909 did no appreciable damage. Nor did frequent raids under the bumbling leadership of Police Inspector William Clancy, commander of the stockyards district, who was increasingly frustrated by his inability to cope with O'Leary.

The police regularly raided O 'Leary's place, but never found what they expected. Sometimes they would encounter half a dozen men idly reading the morning newspapers. Occasionally, the invaders dashed through the maze of doors and passageways and found a roulette wheel and a few packs of cards-but no gamblers. Once they trapped two men hiding behind chimneys, but there was no law against hiding behind chimneys. For a time they were met by steelreinforced doors, so they took to carrying axes.

On one occasion, shod in "gumshoes," the axe squad of officers Smith, Mc ally, and O'Connell stealthily approached the place, then smashed at a steel door. Clouds of blinding, choking red pepper poured forth, driving the police to the street while the gamblers leisurely departed through a skylight.

Inspector Clancy was consumed with rage in 1910 when his <laughter Gertrude eloped with James Patrick O 'Leary, Jr. So was Big Jim, who disowned his son and tossed him out of the house. The youth, who was studying civil engineering at otre Dame University, had to get a job in a steel mill.

The police were not totally inept and O'Leary

was really not that lucky. He paid them off and boasted that he knew of every raid well in advance. "I've been raided a thousand times," he said in 1911, "but I've never had a real raid."

Another reason for his success was that his gambling emporium on Halsted Street, opposite the entrance to the stockyards, contained a maze of false partitions, trap doors, hidden passageways, and a phony chimney while the gambling actually took place in a seemingly vacant building next door. He also operated a Turkish bath, barber shop, bowling alley, and billiard parlor at the same address as the saloon, and the patrons of these legitimate enterprises added to the confusion. His virtual immunity was reinforced because the public-and therefore the police department-tolerated such private vices as gambling.

O'Leary's gaming rooms were filled nightly with men from the underworld-gunfighters, gamblers, yeggs, and even missing bank tellers,

according to one journalist, as well as prodigal sons, horse bettors, workingmen from the stockyards, clerks, bookkeepers, and others on the packing companies' payrolls.

In 1911, O'Leary announced plans to retire from the gambling business. He announced similar intentions in 1904, 1910, and 1913, and each time the newspapers solemnly reported his words. But in 1911 he gave an interesting reason: "Reform is here to stay and Chicago is no place for a gentleman." He offered his Halsted Street buildings to the county as a site for an "emergency hospital." But the commissioners would not pay the $60,000 asking price, so Big Jim kept the place-and stayed in the gambling business at the same spot almost until his death.

"There are three classes of people in the world-gamblers, burglars, and beggars," he said frequently. "Nearly everybody gambles.

Sometimes it's with money, sometimes it's with time, sometimes it's with jobs. Other folks make Chicago History

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Big Jim O'Leary

their living by stealing. The second-story man, the safe cracker, and the dip are not the only burglars. You'll find a lot of others in offices in the Loop. A fellow that won't gamble or steal is a beggar."

James Patrick O'Leary was born in 1869 at 137 (now 558 West) De Koven Street, the address at which the Great Chicago Fire started only two years later. He steadfastly but vainly defended his mother Catherine against charges that her cow kicked over the lantern that began the great conflagration, insisting that spontaneous combustion in some timothy hay started the blaze in the family's barn. The story about the cow, according to Big Jim, was a "monumental fake" that caused his family enormous grief over the years. After the Great Fire, the O'Learys sold their cottage, which miraculously survived the blaze, and moved to the stockyards district where nobody knew them and they could live in relative peace. Jim grew to manhood in the area. He never attended school and was all but illiterate. In the 1890s, he opened his first saloon on Halsted Street and soon added a handbook for illegal off-track betting on the horses.

He started his career as "Chicago's real and only king gambler," in the words of one newspaper, when he decided in 1892 that James J. ,!=orbett was a better fighter¡ than John L. Sullivan. Few agreed, and Jim saw the opportunity to pull off an incredible win on this heavyweight championship bout. He took every bet offered, even though Sullivan was a four-to-one favorite.

Corbett won in the twenty-first round, and so did O'Leary. He quickly expanded into other gambling enterprises and made scores of friends, including the political powerhouses of the downtown 1st Ward, Hinky Dink Kenna and Bathhouse John Coughlin. He made many enemies, too, as would be expected, especially men who lost money to him. He accused one such man, a Chicago Sanitary District trustee deep in O'Leary's debt, of causing one of his biggest headaches.

2 16

Chicago Hist ory

In 1904, during one of Chicago's brief and unconsummated flirtations with . reform, O'Leary opened a horse-race handbook in Du Page County. And what a handbook it was! He built a 150-by-120-foot frame building with a large main gambling room which took bets and posted the action at five different race tracks.

The building was surrounded by a fence interrupted by lookout houses; around all this was a 14-foot-high solid wooden fence topped with spikes. The area between the two fences was patrolled by twenty to thirty snarling dogs.

Western Union was persuaded to provide telegraph lines and reports from the race tracks, and the Santa Fe Railway agreed to run three "Gamblers' Special" trains daily, each with eight to ten cars, from the Loop to O'Leary's Stockade. Big Jim's immunity worked just as well in Du Page County, which failed to notice either the incredible structure or the huge traffic of bettors that visited it daily. Only after the Stockade had been flourishing for four months did the Chicago Daily Journal discover it. The newspaper began a crusade against the place, O'Leary personally, and Du Page County in general.

The Journal, the only Chicago paper that did not consider O'Leary amusing, stirred up such a tumult that state's attorneys and sheriffs of three counties, the Illinois attorney general, and the governor were drawn into the battle. The Journal said O'Leary was paying certain unnamed Du Page County officials $5,000 every Saturday to stay in business. And of the men who paid their 25¢ to ride the Gamblers' Special from Chicago to the Stockade, the Journal opined: "They have no money to spare, but the universal curse is on them. They are taking a chance that may lead some to the penitentiary, some to debt, and some to privation and want."

O'Leary scoffed at all this uproar, claiming that nobody could raid his place because it was built on Sanitary District land and nobody knew who had jurisdiction over it. It was then that he accused the Sanitary District trustee of

retaliating by stirring up public opmion in order to avoid paying $1,600 he had lost at O'Leary's place.

Deputy Sheriff C. B. Gorham of Du Page County, who climbed a nearby hill to study the Stockade through field glasses, later said, "If the place is to be closed by a raid, it would take a regiment of Japanese infantry with siege guns." Eventually, after weeks of such publicity, the case was brought before a Du Page County grand jury. Judge L. C. Ruth declaimed to the jury: "We are unlucky enough to be close to the great, wicked city of Chicago.

As judge ... I charge you to stamp out this nest of vipers."

Governor Charles Deneen and Attorney General v\Tilliam H. Stead found a faster way to stamp out the nest of vipers, however. They persuaded the Santa Fe to stop its rail service to the Stockade and ,vestern Union to cut its telegraph lines. O'Leary closed his place down: his patronage, he noted, had dropped from

Big Jim O'Leary's saloon on So. Halsted St. was combined with Turkish baths, bowling, and pool and billiard parlors, all legal enterprises in 1906.

Sorting out the gamblers from the legitimate customers was often a tough job. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

about fifteen hundred customers a clay to seven hundred after the furor began. He and seventeen employees were indicted on so many charges that he could have spent most of the rest of his life in jail. Nevertheless, he got off with a fine of $1,700, which he peeled off of a fat bankroll on the spot. He grinned triumphantly as he returned to Chicago, for the deal he had arranged with the friendly Du Page County authorities also included the dismissal of all charges against his employees.

In 1908, perhaps in anticipation of his somewhat reduced circumstances, O'Leary announced that he had bought Luna Park, a oneyear-olcl amusement park at 52nd and Halsted Chicago History

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Big Jim O'Leary

streets. He intended, he said, to make it one of the world's finest amusement parks. But the business soon failed, and O'Leary returned to his first love-gambling- and made book on that year's election . He refused to pay off the bets on the gubernatorial race, waiting four months while the outcome remained somewhat in question. Deneen, a Republican who helped put Big Jim out of business in Du Page County three years earlier, was seeking re-election against a strong challenge from former VicePres. Adlai E. Stevenson. When the Democratic Party's leaders refused to concede to Deneen and asked the legislature to give the election to Stevenson, O 'Leary stuck $100, 000 in bets in his hip pocket and said he would pay off when the results were final. After the legislature dismissed the Stevenson petition, O 'Leary paid off with the grand announcement, "I never owed a gambling debt in my life that I didn't pay.

I was perfectly right in holding up the Deneen bets. Suppose I had paid the Deneen tickets and there has been a recount of the ballots which showed Stevenson elected. Wouldn' t I have been a fine sucker?"

Indeed, he was never a sucker of any sort, if he could help it. During that four-month hiatus, he paid off some of the largest Deneen bettors go percent of their winnings. O'Leary, like the rest of the smart money bettors, was sure all along that Deneen had won, and managed to wipe out some of his biggest debts at a discount.

Following the failure of his amusement park, Big Jim made other plans for Luna Park in 1913 . He decided to turn the park site into a public market, where farmers and dealers in fish, poultry, clothing, and household utensils could rent stalls for as little as 50¢ a day, thus eliminating the infamous middleman, who was despised even in those days.

On opening day, "society women in automobiles, workingmen's wifes and washerwomen" eagerly bought goods and food, according to the Chicago Record-Herald. Fish swam in the pond 21 8

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formerly used by the Chute the Chutes ride, and shoppers were invited to catch their own.

Live poultry were selected, killed, and dressed on the spot. A fun house was converted to a kosher slaughterhouse. Another building became a nursery. Shoppers were charged 5¢ for a head of cabbage that cost 15¢ at nearby grocery stores; a pound of onions went for 2¢ at O 'Leary's instead of 8¢; a basket of tomatoes, 25 ¢ instead of 60¢. "We'll soon have prices down to the mark where they were fifty years ago, " boasted O'Leary. "We will give the knockout blow to the high cost of living."

Within hours, however, the grocery stores in the area started to slash their prices, and his market business diminished. O'Leary closed it after two years to return to his old love, gambling. His real contribution, as one newspaper put it, was to establish Chicago as " the national capital of the world of chance."

In 1916, another presidential year, O 'Leary held back again . In the close presidential race between Woodrow Wilson and Charles Evans Hughes, he impounded $50 ,000 and refused to release it until the election was ratified by the electoral college. When that body proclaimed Wilson the winner, O 'Leary decided against paying off until Congress confirmed Wilson's re-election. Congress did so, but O 'Leary still refused to pay. Only when Wilson was sworn in did Big Jim part with the 50,000, denying that in the meantime he had invested the money elsewhere at a handsome profit. The 1920 presidential election also cost him some money. Unwisely, he gave odds of ten to eight that Sen . Hiram Johnson of California would win the Republican nomination , and twentyfive to one that Warren Harding would not.

At about the same time, his old nemesis from the days of the great Chicago-to-Ballyloughran race, Pat O'Malley, bested him again. O'Malley and O'Leary were drinking together one day and the conversation turned to a celebrated Michigan murder case involving one Milo Piper. O 'Malley said he thought Piper was

Chicago American, photo courtesy Chicago Public Library

A drawing of the interior of O'Leary's So. Halsted St. establishment. Big Jim revealed its maze of secret rooms and the fact that his gambling operations were conducted in a supposedly vacant building next store when he announced , on Dec. 1 , 1911 , that the building was for sale and that he was retiring . O'Leary's building housed only law-abiding activities and was internally separated from the building next door by double iron doors.

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Big Jim O'Leary

guilty and Big Jim replied, "I'll make a book he'll never hang."

"What odds?" asked O'Ma-lley.

"Ten to one," said O'Leary, hooking his thumbs into the armholes of his vest. ''I'll lay a hundred at that price," said O'Malley, dropping a $100 bill on the bar.

O'Leary pocketed the money and laughed: "I've got you forty ways this time, Pat. There's no capital punishment in Michigan. They can't hang Piper even if he's found guilty."

Morose, O'Malley returned to his own saloon. Later that night, a newsboy rushed in with "extra" editions of the day's papers. Milo Piper had hanged himself in his jail cell in Muskegon. Pat called a taxi and rode over to O'Leary's place, where he laughingly displayed the newspaper to everyone in sight. O'Leary was silent. He went to the safe and returned with the $100 he had taken earlier in the day, plus the $1,000 he owed the infernally lucky O'Malley.

O'Leary himself never talked about his losses to O'Malley. O'Malley did. The stories Big Jim told always depicted himself as a big winner.

His biggest gain, he asserted, came from the 1903 American Derby at Washington Park. He claimed that he made $439,690 in an upset victory by a colt named The Picket, and one sports writer-wide-eyed at O'Leary's unsubstantiated claim-declared that the "king of the Western betting world" had handled the biggest handbook in turf history.

O'Leary's most overworked tale, however, was the one about winning on the rain. In 1908, he gathered together some friendly reporters, twisted his blonde mustache, lit a fresh cigar, and told them how he had just made $10,000 by betting that rain would fall on Chicago at least eighteen days that May. In 1922, he gathered the boys together again, his blonde hair and mustache now turned gray, and announced that he had won $1,000 by betting that it would rain twenty days in April.

This time, a brash reporter for the Chicago 220

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Daily N ews reached the weather bureau, which informed him that there had been only nineteen rainy days in April. O'Leary replied that the weather records kept in the Loop did not necessarily apply to the clouds over his South Side saloon.

"That's an old bet of mine," he added. "I've won on it six or seven times. Once I bet that it would rain twenty-six days in May. Sure I won-it rained twenty-eight days in May that year." The Daily News reporter suggested that O'Leary might be getting his rain from a sprinkling can.

The venerable U.S. District .Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis also was skeptical. A few weeks after Prohibition went into effect in 1920, federal agents raided O 'Leary's Halsted Street saloon. Big Jim insisted he was out of the saloon business. "I sell milk," O'Leary said, "I bet I sell more milk than any other saloonkeeper in Chicago." When raiders discovered a large supply of liquor in the basement, O'Leary produced a pharmacist's license that he claimed allowed him to sell whiskey under the same rules that applied to druggists.

The case was heard by Landis. When federal agents told the judge that they had found liquor in the saloon itself, O'Leary stepped forward.

"Judge, that liquor those dry agents took from my place was left there by a mysterious stranger," said O'Leary. "See, it was like this.

The stranger came in, and after buying some milk he poured out a drink from a bottle he had, and shortly afterward he left. I noticed the bottle standing there and ran out to get him, and that's when the agents pinched the place."

Landis listened, probably in amazement, then ordered O 'Leary's saloon shut down as a public nuisance. His extraordinary license as a pharmacist was revoked and his stock of liquor destroyed. A year later, agents again raided his milk emporium and hauled out thirty-five cases of Scotch whiskey. To make matters worse, at about the same time Cook County investigators

broke into O'Leary's "ancient gambling stronghold," arrested thirty men who were trying to escape through the windows, and seized a basketful of poker chips, cards, talley sheets, two pearl-inlaid roulette wheels, and other gaming equipment. As a result of the raid O'Leary was fined $100 in Cook County Criminal Court, the utmost penalty against a first offender of the state's gambling laws. His brother-in-law and employee, James Ledwell, was fined the same amount. State's Attorney Robert E. Crowe declared that his war on gambling was "on the square" and warned that every gambler in the county would be arrested and driven out of business, no matter what his political persuasion, if he did not quit voluntarily.

O'Leary was finished. He continued to suffer occasional raids by city, state, and federal authorities for gambling and Prohibition offenses and, although nothing came of them, he was by then a man from another era, an anachronism in the vicious time of Torrio, Capone, and O'Banion. Like his friends Hinky Dink and Bathhouse John, his empire was eroding and his power vanishing into the paws of the cruel and dangerous new hoodlums who had seized Chicago. He died on January 22, 1925, at his longtime home at 726 West Garfield Boulevard, after being in failing health for more than a year. John Kelley, the Tribune's veteran police reporter, wrote: As was his daily custom, he visited his office in South Ha lsted Street, where of late he operated a commission brokerage business. Not feeling able to transact business, he returned home earlier than usual. The attending physician, Dr. F. F. Fair, was called, and he informed the family that Mr. 0 Leary's condition was serious. He lapsed into unconsciousness and passed away at 5 o'clock. The decedent is survived by his widow, Anne, and five d1ildren-three daughters and two sons-all of whom are married. A sister, J\frs. J ames Ledwell, also survives.

During his thirty years' experience in marts of chance he made books on anything from a presidential candidate's chances to the possibilities of the weather. His gambling resort was the best known place of its kind in Chicago.

Hinky Dink mourned a lost friend: "He was a square shooter. 'Big Jim' never welched on a bet. He was a good loser and his patrons had confidence in him that he would pay if he lost. His home life was ideal."

Hundreds of friends from the stockyards area braved the swirling snow and frigid air to give Big Jim a proper send off. A priest friend said the requiem high mass. Years earlier, Jim had paid for a new altar railing, so the story goes, and when Jim saw it in place he said, "Doesn't that beat Hell?" and the priest replied, "That is the point."

O'Leary never mixed in politics, but leaders of both parties showed their respect to the deceased, and a long line of automobiles followed the hearse bearing the body of the old sportsman to l\lount Olivet Cemetery. He was buried alongside his parents, who died in the 1890s.

His widow died in 1948, at the age of eighty.

An impressive monument marks the burial place of Patrick and Catherine O'Leary, but their son Jim lies next to them in an unmarked grave.

What had all his money talk amounted to?

In 19u, Jim O'Leary bragged to a reporter that he had made a million dollars during the previous thirty years. However, three years before he made that remark, he was sued by Cook County for failing to pay $131.54 in personal property taxes. The following year, the water department discovered that O'Leary had bypassed the city meter to supply water to his saloon, barber shop, and bathhouse. City workers disconnected two well-hidden sets of pipe that ran unmetered into his buildings, and O'Leary had to start paying for his water like the rest of Chicago's residents .

In 1915, four women who owned the old Luna Park amusement park sued him for $5,000 in back rent and taxes-although, six years earlier, he had said he bought the place outright for $125,000 and planned to spend $300,000 more on improvements.

On one occasion, he was asked how well h ad Ch icago History

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Big Jim O'Leary

he done over the years. "How much have I cleaned up? I'm satisfied with the results. I've got enough to take a trip around the world when I sell my shop. Then I'm going to settle clown in some live little town, like French Lick."

O'Leary's tardy payoff in 1917 of the Hughes-Wilson presidential contest led to rumors that he was wiped out by the election results. His answer: "If anybody wants to know how much money I've got left, just say that I'm down to my last million and I hate to break into it. And if anybody wants to make any bets on the next election-why, you can just say for me that we'll be doing business at the same old stand.

"I own fourteen flats and seven stores besides this property [the gambling house], which is worth 100,000," he added. "I admit I am land poor, but I bet there are lots of other folks that would like to be hard up like I am. And I don't have to depend on selling booze, either.

I've got a cafeteria upstairs where I feed 1,500 people every noon. Get 'em going and comingsee? Appetizers downstairs, good meals up."

When Big Jim O'Leary died in 1925, he left no will and his entire estate went to his widow Anne.

It was valued at $10,200.

The victor, Gov. Charles Deneen, emerging from a voting booth in 1908. Although O'Leary bet on Deneen's opponent, Adlai E. Stevenson, the Gambler Boss cut his losses by not paying off for four months, while the results were unsuccessfully challenged.

Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

Chicago's Early Fight to "Save Our Lake"

BY FRANK J. PIEHL

Chicagoans drew their pure water from Lake Michigan and dumped their garbage into the Chicago River.

But the polluted river flowed right into the lake and poisoned the water) and cholera became rampant.

The solution? "The Seventh Wonder of America.))

ABOUT TEN YEARS AGO, a large number of Americans awakened to the realization that we are endangering our own survival by polluting our environment. The Chicago Tribune brought the crisis home to Chicagoans when it dramatized the grim facts of water pollution and began a crusade to "Save Our Lake." Public interest, which peaked in 1970, is now steadily declining; nevertheless, the threat to Lake Michigan and to those who dwell around it still exists, as it did in 1833, when the founding fathers of Chicago first came to grips with it.

Nature left a legacy of poor drainage where Chicago was destined to grow. For centuries, the glaciers advanced and scoured the Illinois country to a flat plain. When they melted and retreated, water at first poured southwest, following the Des Plaines and Illinois river valleys to the Mississippi River. Eventually, a new outlet was carved through the St. Lawrence River and the level of glacial Lake Chicago dropped. The future site of Chicago emerged on the flat bed of this former lake. A prairie stream flowing northeast into newly formed Lake Michigan was all that remained of the glacial river.

The ancient river outlet over the continental divide lies about twenty miles southwest of the river's mouth at present-day Summit. French

Frank J. Piehl will be remembered by readers of Chicago History for his articles on Chicago's bridges and its streetcar tunnels.

traders used the low and marshy land between as a portage over which to transport furs and the goods they traded with the Indians. Eventually, Fort Dearborn was built at the mouth of the Chicago River to control access to the portage, and the first settlement in the area grew around it.

Early settlers described the Chicago River variously as "a clear, limpid, prairie stream" or as "dead water not fit to use." Both versions were probably accurate, for the quality of the water varied with the season. By way of its North and South branches, the river drained a small area adjacent to the lake. In periods of normal flow the water in the river was clear, attracting water fowl and fresh-water fish. After heavy rains, and especially in the spring when the ice on the swampy prairies melted, the flow increased. Freshets carried the silt out of Mud Lake, as the portage was often called, into Lake Michigan via the river's South Branch. But during periods of drought, the flow in the river ceased and the water stagnated.

The water in Lake Michigan, on the other hand, was universally described as pure and clear, totally free from pollution. In 1832, when Capt. Augustus Walker brought the steamship Sheldon Thompson to Chicago with Gen. Winfield Scott and his troops to fight Black Hawk and his Indian allies, there was cholera on board. In Chicago, Captain Walker was compelled to commit sixteen victims to a watery grave_ He reported that the bodies were "anchored to the bottom in two-and-a-half fathoms [15 feet], the water being so clear that Chicago History

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Save Our Lake

their forms could be plainly seen from our decks." The sight so unnerved the crew that the vessel was moved, but the captain's desecration of the crystal-clear water of the lake proved to be a prophetic act.

With the threat of Indian uprisings ended by the defeat of Black Hawk, the settlement began a period of phenomenal growth, spurred by the glowing stories of the fertile Illinois prairies brought back by General Scott's army. And as Chicago grew, it needed both a large supply of fresh water and a convenient repository for a vast amount of refuse-needs which, as matters turned out, conflicted seriously with each other.

When the town was founded in 1833, however, the supply of pure water in the river seemed unlimited. Water for cooking was drawn in buckets and, since the site was only a few feet above the level of the lake, shallow wells sufficed for the rest. In 1834, the Board of Trustees expended $95.50 on a public well.

These expedieuts worked for the next few years.

The disposal of refuse was another matter.

Homes were provided with privies where human waste was committed to the soil, and offal was scattered wantonly in the streets. The stench of decay so permeated the town that, in 1835, the Democrat reported that "our streets would disgrace a piggery. The vacant lots abound with holes filled with green putrid water and decaying vegetable matter . . . . Our town still continues healthy, but we warn our fellow citizens that they may expect sickness and the pestilence."

The founding fathers had already acted to protect the river water from pollution. One of the first official acts of the Town Board, created in 1833, prohibited the throwing of dead animals into the river: the penalty was a fine of $3. Still, the river became the normal repository for the city's waste as it continued to grow.

Cholera and typhoid fever struck year after year, making the need to drain the city imperative. Ditches were dug, and crude sewers were 224

Ch icago History

An early wooden water main, 1840.

built in the streets, all to no avail. The fl at terrain prevented the wastes from draining into the river. Each year, the death toll from disease mounted. The worst cholera epidemic struck in 1854, when one Chicagoan out of every eighteen died.

Mayor Isaac Milliken presided at a mass meeting in December of that fateful year. A complete system of efficient sewerage was demanded, and the Illinois State Legislature responded the following February by creating the Board of Sewerage Commissioners. The city's Common Council appointed eminent men to the first board: William B. Ogden, Chicago's first mayor, leading realtor, builder of railroads, and greatest promoter; J. D. Webster, lieutenant of the Engineer Corps in charge of the work on Chicago's harbor; and Sylvester Lind, a pioneer lumber merchant and banker.

Recognizing the need for professional help, the Board sought out Ellis S. Chesbrough, Boston's city engineer, and persuaded him to become Chicago's chief engineer.

Chesbrough pioneered modern sewerage in America. Although sewers were known in antiquity, modern systems with interceptors began only in 1833, with the construction of Paris' great sewer system. Chesbrough also knew firsthand of the few sewers that had been built in eastern American cities. For Chicago, the renowned engineer proposed a grid of selfflushing sewers. His plan, accepted by the Board on December 3 1, 1855, was to place brick sewer mains-three to six feet in diameter with eight-inch thick walls--on alternate streets. These sewer mains were to empty into the river. On streets running at right angles to the mains, he proposed to build feeder systems. Construction, which began in 1856 and continued for decades, made Chicago the first

city in the United States to enjoy the benefits of an integrated sewer system.

To provide a self-flushing flow in the sewers proposed by Chesbrough, however, required a substantial grade, and the glaciers' legacy of flat terrain and a high water table challenged his imagination. Chesbrough's solution was to raise the surface of Chicago's streets, as much as twelve feet in some parts of town. An enabling ordinance was passed in March 1855, and streets, sidewalks, and whole buildings began to be raised: the consequence was that, for ten years, the city had a whimsical, humptydumpty look to it. In the end, the city emerged high and dry out of its quagmire.

As the sewers began draining the city, the importance of protecting the water supply became dramatically clear. The residents had long ago spumed their polluted wells and river and had turned to Lake Michigan. The pure lake water was first delivered in muledrawn carts and peddled door-to-door by the bucket but, in 1842, the Chicago Hydraulic Company, a privately owned corporation, had begun to distribute it more efficiently. The water was drawn from a point 150 feet offshore to a pumping station and storage tanks at Lake Street and Michigan Avenue, whence it was distributed by gravity through several thousand feet of wooden water pipes. The water was pure at first, protecting the company's customers from cholera, but its quality gradually deteriorated as raw sewage from the river, which was polluting the lake, spread out to the water intake.

In 1851, the city took over and improved this system. The state legislature, by special act, created a new institution, the Chicago City Hydraulic Company, and provided for a Board of Water Commissioners. Under the direction of Chief Engineer William McAlpine, the new intake was extended about six hundred feet into the lake and new water works were constructed at Chicago Avenue, further from the river's mouth. The system was completed in

Ellis S. Chesbrough, chief engineer of Chicago, 1868.

Photo by John Garbutt.

1854, and once more pure lake water was distributed to Chicago's citizens, this time through new cast-iron pipes. The new water works cost the city 400,000---a bargain.

Ironically, only shortly after their completion, the new sewers, which flowed into the river, threatened the new supply of pure water from the lake. Chesbrough had recognized the danger, but he had hoped to dilute the river water enough to prevent any serious contamination of the lake. His hope proved to be forlorn. Chicago's packing houses, distilleries, and tanneries mindlessly dumped their refuse directly into the river along with the human wastes. As a result, the river stagnated and became repugnant in the dry summer months.

The editor of the Democrat, writing under the pseudonym "Pro Bono Publico," reported, in 1858, that "on examining the water along the banks of the river, I found it to be a mass of blood, grease, animal entrails, etc., the color being so dark as to be almost opaque when poured into a glass vessel." The writer further decried the unscrupulous icemen who cut blocks of this "frozen filthy stuff" in winter, stored it, and sold it in summer to an unwary public as "Lake Michigan ice."

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225

By 1861, the quality of the water supplied by the new water works had become intolerable. William Bross, later to become lieutenant governor, recalled that "when the wind blew strongly from the south, the water from the river, made from the sewage mixed with it into an abominably filthy soup, was pumped up and distributed through the pipes to the poorest street gami!1 and to the nabobs of the city." The water often tasted of creosote from the gas works on the river. It also carried disease: typhoid fever, dysentery, and cholera again plagued the city.

Desperate citizens organized committees and debated proposals. A bold, two-pronged attack was finally worked out. The water intake would be extended further out into the lake, and the lake would be protected from the filth in the Chicago River by reversing the river's flow.

The water commissioners again turned to Chesbrough for what appeared to be the ultimate solution to the water-supply problem. He proposed a tunnel five feet in diameter, sixty feet below the bottom of the lake, and extending almost two miles out to an intake. This plan was considered impractical, but the chief engineer finally convinced the skeptics, and work on the land shaft began in March 1864.

In July 1865, a wooden crib was anchored two miles out in the lake. After the crib was pumped out;an intake shaft was sunk inside it.

Crews tunneling from that shaft and the in226

Ch icago History

During the late 1850s and early 1860s, much of Chicago was raised out of the mud to provide an adequate grade for self-flushing sewers. The entire block of Lake St. between Clark and La Salle sis. was lilted four feet. Lithograph published by Edward Mendel, 1860.

shore shaft met under the lake in November 1866, with the two approaches out of alignment by only seven inches-quite an engineering feat for the time.

The tunnel was completed the following March. New pumping works and the landmark Water Tower were erected at Chicago Avenue and Pine Street (now Michigan Avenue) and placed in service in 1869. The tunnel's construction was of interest to the cities of the world , for it was the first of its kind. The city's appreciation was expressed eloquently in a now-rare volume which described the tunnel in 1874: it was dedicated " to E. S. Chesbrough, Esq., whose genius and scientific knowledge gave 400,000 people of Chicago the matchless blessing of pure water."

The second half of the plan- to insure that the lake water remained pure- involved reversing the flow of the Chicago River, an even more amazing idea. Chesbrough's plan was to deepen the Illinois & Michigan Canal enough to induce a natural flow of water from the lake through the canal to the Illinois River.

Such a canal had sparked the imagination of dreamers ever since Louis Jolliet had first proposed it two hundred years before. When the

The Illinois & Michigan Canal. Engraving from Frank Leslie's lflustrated Newspaper, April 30, 1859.

first spade of dirt was turned in 1836, the plan involved a canal a hundred miles long, running from the South Branch of the Chicago River across Mud Lake, over the continental divide at Summit, and parallel with the Des Plaines River to La Salle. The canal was to have been six feet deep at Summit, deep enough to restore the flow of water to the southwest that had existed in glacial times. But the plan had to be abandoned during the Panic of 1837, which brought the state to the brink of bankruptcy. When the work was resumed years later, the canal had turned into a less ambitious undertaking. To save the cost¡ of cutting through the limestone at Summit, the canal was cut only four feet instead of six-the socalled "sha!Iow cut." In 18,18, nevertheless, when the Illinois & l\fichigan Canal was formally opened, the products of Chicago's vast agricultural hinterland finally began to move through it into the city, along the same path once used by the glacial thaw of Lake Chicago as it funneled through the Des Plaines outlet.

The shallow-cut canal, however, was not deep enough to admit the waters of Lake Michigan. To provide enough water for barges to navigate the canal, it was necessary to dig .a supplementary feeder canal: its function was to drain the waters of the Calumet Sag at Blue Island into the Illinois & Michigan Canal. In dry weather, when this Calumet feeder became only a trickle, paddle-wheel pumps, located at the entrance to the canal on the South Branch at Bridgeport, provided additional assistance.

The pumping unfortunately induced only a slight current in the South Branch, drawing only some of the black river water southward into the canal and away from the lake. The Tribune, optimistically reporting on the starting up of these pumps in May 1862, suggested that "all those who are desirous of taking a parting sniff of the Chicago River perfume, would do well to visit Bridgeport, as at the present rate of progress, all the filth of the river will in a few days be on its way to the rebels."

But the rebels had the last laugh, for the capacity of the pumps was wholly inadequate to Ch icago History

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Save Our Lake

Pushboat and six barges moving through the downstream gates of a lock at Lockport in 1955, long after many of the other locks on the Illinois & Michigan Canal had been closed down. Photo by C. J . Horecky.

228

Chicago History

cleanse the river, and the stench grew worse every year.

Commercial and sanitary interests finally joined hands in the winter of 1864- 1865 and, in February 1865, the state legislature authorized the city to deepen the canal to six feetthe original proposal. The Common Council then appointed a commission, including Chesbrough and l\,[ayor Francis Sherman, to work out the engineering and financial details. The commission's plan was promptly approved by the Council, and later that year the first contracts were let.

The construction proved more difficult than anticipated, and the long-sought relief of the rancid river and the polluted lake was delayed for months and, finally, years. It was not until July 15, 1871, that a dam across the canal at Bridgeport was removed, and the black water of the South Branch was turned into the deepened canal. Once again, as in glacial times, the water of Lake Michigan coursed through the Des Plaines outlet to the l\fississippi-the Chicago River had again been reversed.

At long last, the city breathed a sigh of relief. The river was, in fact, cleansed. Journalist Grace Greenwood described it vividly: "The great deeps of mud and slime and unimaginabl~ filth, the breeding-beds of miasms and death-fogs, are being slowly broken up, are passing away." A year later, the city's investment of over three million dollars still looked sound. Chesbrough stated triumphantly that "the water of Lake Michigan enters the mouth of the river, flows up it and the South Branch to feed the canal, thus completely deodorizing what was so offensive and unbearable a year ago." The pure water reaching homes from the new water tunnel seemed protected for all time.

The death rate from typhoid fever began to fall. The confident city sold the pumps at Bridgeport in 1873.

Chicagoans, however, were not yet destined to quench their thirsts from their faucets without concern. With public attent ion focused on

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the successes of the tunnel and canal, some ominous news passed unnoticed. Chicago real-estate investors who o,,¡ned Mud Lake, the huge swamp on the Southwest Side, saw in the newly deepened canal a cheap way to drain their land and increase its value. They dug a drainage ditch north of the canal, paralleling it from the Des Plaines River at Harlem Avenue to the West Fork of the South Branch at about Kedzie Avenue. The ditch was about twenty feet wide, and its depth was slightly below the bed of the Des Plaines River.

When the contracts were let in February 187 1, the Tribune warned that "the level of the Aux Plaine [Des Plaines] being ten feet above that of the canal, a current, strong enough to set in toward the South Branch, will have the effect to drain that pe tilential pool" and, of more import, that it might "have a tendency to render the South Branch shallow by sedi-

The new water crib , two miles out in Lake Michigan, Harper's Weekly, April 20, 1867. The water works on Chicago Ave. went into operation two years later.

ment swept from the Aux Plaine." The warning went unheeded, and the Ogden Canal, as it was called, was completed in 1872. The land was largely controlled by V1Tilliam B. Ogden; Samuel Nickerson, president of the First National Bank; and ex-mayor and congressman John " ' entworth. "They assert confidently," the Tribune reported, "that the new canal will not lessen the depth of the water in the river by the deposit of sediment but will cleanse the stream."

The entrepreneurs' land was drained, but their benign promises about the river were not fulfilled. In the winter of 1872, the current in the South Branch diminished and eventually stopped. The following April, Mayor Joseph Chicago History

229

Save Our Lake

Medill and members of the Board of Public Works inspected the Ogden Canal. They found a current of three miles an hour in the water flowing from the Des Plaines River, through the drainage ditch, and into the Illinois & Michigan Canal via the South Branch. Medill's Tribune reported that "considerable quantities of sand have already been carried into the canal where it was deposited to the depth of six inches. The result is, there is no current in the South Branch." The reversal of the Chicago River had been negated: the canal had been filled to its original shallow-cut depth, and the intervening years of planning had been brought to naught.

In 1874, City Engineer Chesbrough therefore proposed that a dam be built across the Ogden Canal at its connection to the Des

Plaines River. The plan was a compromisethe Ogden Canal would continue to drain the land, but the silt would be kept out of the canal. The land owners resisted, and the legal wrangling went on until 1877, when the clam was finally built. But the damage had been done. The canal had, by then , been so filled with deposits that the flow of lake water had been stopped sufficiently to impede navigation.

Nor did the city have the heart to deepen the canal again.

And so Chicago turned up its nose at its again-stagnating river. After all, the water supply from the lake remained pure, thanks to Chesbrough's tunnel. But not the water in the canal. Dr. John Rauch, secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health, studied the water in the canal at Joliet and found it "most odorous and

Mud Lake, 1908. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

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filthy." In one period of low water in 1878, the odor on the bridge at Joliet was arlually nauseating, and the people of that city set out to force Chicago to end the pollution of their water. Secretary Rauch recommended that the pumping works be rebuilt at Bridgeport to purge the canal, but Chi cago took no action.

In 1881, as conditions worsened, the state legi ·lature passed a resolution requiring the cana l commissioners to rebuild the pumps and mandating the city to operate and maintain them. The new pumps were complete~! in 188-1 at a cost of about a quarter of a million dollars, which also paid for a lock and a dam at Bridgeport at the entrance to the canal. The meager current sufficed to cleanse the canal, but it had 1i ttle effect on the foul Chicago River.

The Citizens' Association of Chicago now assumed a dominant role. Founded in 1874 by leading citizens, the association was dedicated to civil reform. Its River and Sewage Investi-

gat in g Committee was chaired by Ossian Guthrie, chief engineer of the Illinois & Michigan Canal, and included Lyman E. Cooley, an eminent hydraulic engineer, industrialist J. J. Glessner, and physician and sanitarian F. W. Reilly. Their penetrating investigations and reports kept the growing menace before the mayor, the Council, and the public.

Nature brought the threat of pollution to a crisis on August 2 and 3, 1885, when a cloudburst clumped more than six inches of rain on the city, causing widespread flooding of streets, basements, and stores in the Loop. Water poured over the Ogden Dam from the Des Plaines River through the Ogden Ditch into the South Branch. The pumps at Bridgeport had to be turned off to keep the water low enough in the flooded Illinois & Michigan Canal to permit barges to pass below the bridges. And the entire Southwest Side of the city stagnated in a putrid pool of pollution.

Chicago History

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Save Our Lake

The committee of the Citizens' Association, awake to the threat to the lake, was finally able to force the mayor, his commissioner of public works, and the Council to act. On August 6, they took these city officials to the crib off Chicago Avenue and demonstrated that the water "resembled nothing so much as a sheet of dirty sky." On August 11, they showed them that the water in the South Branch had a "dark color, greasy look, and vile stench." Subsequent chemical and biological analyses confirmed that a pall of raw sewage was slowly spreading into the lake and had reached far enough to threaten the intake area two miles from shore.

The Citizens' Association's committee made a preliminary report to the city on August 13 and provided a more detailed account on August 27. As an immediate measure, it recommended rebuilding the Ogden Dam to a highei. level and reactivating the pumps at Bridgeport.

It also proposed that a commission of experts select a route for a deep channel to carry the pollution from the South Branch to the Illinois River, a more far-reaching solution.

On September 26, a special committee of the City Council met in special session to consider the recommendations. Rebuilding the dam and reactivating the pumps were authorized without delay, but the politicians wrangled for two months about the details of the expert commission, fighting over the number of political appointment and salaries. Mayor Carter H. Harrison's executive skill saved the day when he vetoed the Council's poorly conceived ordinance and submitted his own, the model upon which the Sanitary District was ultimately based. Harrison's ordinance won the support of the Citizens' Association and even of the Chicago Tribune, normally critical of his efforts.

His revised ordinance, as finally passed on January 25, 1886, provided that the mayor appoint one full-time, salaried engineer, two consulting engineers, and other staff as needed. As 232

Chicago History

chief engineer, Harrison chose Rudolph Hering, a noted expert on sanitary and hydraulic engineering who had just completed the design of a new water supply for Philadelphia.

Benezette Williams and Samuel Artingstall were named consultants. All discharged their formidable task with the highest professional skill, and their report to the mayor, submitted in January 1887, was the foundation of the state law enacted in 1889, the law creating the Chicago Sanitary District.

The District was organized in 1890, and plans for the new canal were completed the following year. On September 3, 1892, the first shovel of dirt was turned. Volumes have been written to record for future generations the immensity of this pioneering public works project, one that employed techniques later used to dig the Panama Canal. When the waters of the South Branch were turned into the new Sanitary and Ship Canal on January 2, 1900, the Chicago River was indeed permanently reversed, and the people of Chicago were at last guaranteed a vast supply of fresh, unpolluted water. In 1955, Chicago's Sanitary and Ship Canal was named "The Seventh Wonder of America" by the American Society of Civil Engineers. Scientists and engineers now come from all over the world to study Chicago's achievements, for the city did not stop with the reversal of the Chicago River's flow. It has continued as a pioneer in sewage treatment and water purification, in a seemingly never-ending attempt to insure that Chicagoans will continue to have the finest water supply available in the world.

But although the lake has remained unpolluted by Chicago's waste, it remains endangered by neighboring communities and industries. The threat of pollution has risen again and again, and from many new sources, in the present century. All of Lake Michigan is now threatened. The pollution of the Great Lakes, and even of the oceans, has grown into a worldwide crisis.

The Lost City of the Depression

BY CATHY AND RICHARD CAHAN

During the Great Depression, when A Century of Progress was being built, the roof of a building sometimes had to wait until the money for it came in.

How the fair opened without the aid of public funds was almost as spectacular as the exhibits. are too numerous to catalog. Studs Terkel tells us about Louis Banks, a Great Lakes steamer kitchen hand who remembers that men would steal and kill for 50¢ in those days. Carl Stockholm rented Chicago Stadium and held six-day bicycle races: before the Depresssion, seal pers could charge up to $25 for a pair of seats at those races but, by 1935, even well-dressed ladies could not afford the 10¢ that Stockholm was charging. And we are told about Frank Czerwonka, who left Chicago on a freight train with 7¢ in the early Thirties: "Freight trains were amazing in them days. When a train would stop in a small town and the bums got off, the population tripled."

Most stories about the Depression are of labor strikes, bank failures, shanty towns, or outof-work men who sold apples on the cities' streets. Chicago, like the rest of the industrial world, was shocked by the New York Stock Exchange Crash of 1929 and jolted by the economic crisis that followed. In 1931, thousands were huddled along the lower levels of Michigan Avenue and the benches in Washington Park between 51st and 61st streets were covered with people who could not afford shelter. Over a hundred and fifty banks closed in the area and, by 1932, seven hundred thousand of the city's STORIES FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION

Cathy Cahan is village reporter for the Deerfield Review. Richard Cahan is a reporter for the Independent-Register in Libertyville.

people were unemployed and one hundred thirty thousand families were on public relief.

But a quite different city also evolved in Chicago during the Depression. On a narrow strip of lakefront land, just a few miles from the bread lines that circled City Hall, the gay, colorful Century of Progress was built to celebrate-of all things-Chicago's growth and achievements. Somehow, on 427 acres of borrowed park land during the summers of 1933 and 1934, the two cities came together.

Not much of A Century of Progress remains.

A walk through Burnham Park, where the fair was held, reveals almost no traces of the exposition that attracted almost forty million people from all over the world. The Adler Planetarium was built just before the fair opened, but Meigs Field and McCormick Place were built years after it closed. Only the small Balbo column, a gift from the Italian government in 1933, remains where it stood during the fair.

Most of the persons responsible for the fair are also gone now. Century of Progress Pres.

Rufus Dawes, brother of Charles Gates Dawes, vice-president of the United States, died six years after the fair closed. General Manager Lenox R . Lohr, who later became president of the National Broadcasting Company and of the Museum of Science and Industry, died in 1968.

Of the £air's managers, only Lohr's first assistant, Martha S. McGrew, is still living. At seventy-nine, she still has a few pictures and a guidebook to remind her of those days, and she still sends about four hundred Christmas cards to former fair employees. Last year, fifteen of those came back marked "deceased."

Ch icago History

233

Century of Progress

Century of Progress Gen. Mgr. Lenox R. Lohr, Pres.

Rufus C. Dawes, an d former U.S. Vice-Pres.

Ch arles G. Dawes, 1933. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

A Century of Progress was conceived, quite reasonably, during the boom years of the 1920s.

At that time, Maj. Lenox R. Lohr and Martha McGrew were the editor and the editorial assistant of Military Engineer magazine in \Vashington, D.C. Late in 1928, Vice-President Dawes invited Lohr to accompany him on a business trip to Chicago. The Dawes' family home was in Evanston, and his brother Rufus, also an Evanstonian, had recently been elected president of the fledgling committee to plan the Ch icago fair.

"When he came back, Major Lohr said, 'I have met his brother who is presiden l of the world's fair and they've asked me to leave the army and manage the fair,' " McGrew recalls.

"Well, it worked out even though l\Iajor Lohr had been very happy in the army."

McGrew says Lohr's decision had much to do with his financial situation. He was married and the father of three children, and the promotion he was finally promised involved possible reassignment to Alaska. So Lenox Lohr left the army and came to Chicago to direct the 234

Ch icago History

fair. And with him came Martha McGrew, then thirty-two.

Bringing off such a massive undertaking in the earliest years of the Depression required almost unthinkable determination and imagination. In the end, the fair brought $200,000,000 into Chicago, staving off-at least in this citythe worst of the Depression during those years.

"A lot of people thought the fair was going to fail,'' 1cGrew remembers. "People worked double shifts, some of them sometimes worked twemy-four hours straight." McGrew herself worked four hours on every shift to maintain tight control of the manager's office. "But it had to be done," she declares. "If we could build a world's fair during a time of depression, anything coulc.l be done."

The construction caused immediate problems, she recalls: "One of the big problems after the Depression struck was people who had no place to go picked up tin cans and made roofs to put over the rocks on the shore and they were living there. \Ve had to put them out.

It was often heartbreaking, but we had to remember that what we were being paid to do was build a fair, not look after every unfortunate. And if a notice came out that a new building would be constructed, we had lines hundreds long of contractors and laborers trying to get jobs. You see, the contractors had no work, no jobs to give the laborers. It was heartbreaking."

Of course, there were jobs to be had working for the fair itself. l\IcGrew says the management tried to be responsive to the problems of the time. Only one person in a family was permitted lO work for A Century of Progress. Even so, there were not enough jobs. One woman fainted when she was told there were no more jobs.

She had not eaten in three days. "But still," i\JcGrew reflects, "if the fair undertook to feed all those people, we would have had a line to feed every morning. vVe didn't have the money to do that. \!Ve were building a fair."

A Century of Progress was different from

'!.-' â&#x20AC;˘,

mosL exposiLions of Lhe Lime because it was not tax-supported. The 189:3 World's Columbian Exposition on Chicago's South Side received c,ver seven million dollars from the (ity and the federal government. The eleven milli o n dollars needed for A CenLury of Progress came from bonds, the first of which was sold one day afLer the 1929 stock market crash, from exhibitors, and from ticket sales.

"The first result of Lhe Depression was thaL we couldn't sell our bonds ," says l\lcGrcw. "We had decided on a bond issue because we still w;111ted to prove we could build a self-supporting oasis without charging the weary taxpayer.

So money was our first problem."

At the beginning, McGrew recollects: "We had hoped to raise more than eleven million dollars with the bonds, but we had Lo give up that idea . ¡r hen Major Lohr figured out that we rnuld build one building, sell the exhibit space, and then me that money to put up the next building. So we took what we had and built the Travel and Tramport Building and, before it was up, we had enough money from the railroads to put up the next building. "\,Ve almost ran out of luck with the general

exhibit buildings, though, because those had to be put up piecemeal. Time was closing in on us, too. So when we sold some exhibit space, we put the foundation in , and then we had to sell more exhibit space so we could put the walls

The ground-breaking crew for the fair in 1932 included man power, horse power, mule power, and oxen power, and a minimum of machines. Even elephants were pressed Into service for the heavy work, including uprooting and moving trees. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

up . Well, we were all ready for the roof- and it might h ave rained. Then Jpana came in and put up $19,000 to show how toothpaste was made. We took that and put the roof on."

Every nickel that was spent required approval liom I.ohr's office, and every piece of pubIi( it y had to be read and checked for accuracy.

McC1cw handled these jobs, in addition Lo the pa yro ll :.ind relations with 1he employees, who numbered 5,500 by opening clay in May 1!)~~Although money was tight and the trick ling sale of bonds dried up , J\ CenLury of Progress stayed financially sound and the revised construction plans stayed pretly much on schedu le.

By l!J!P, the (air had so ld about Lhrec million dollars worth or space to 511 exh ibitors. Big businesses chipped in another two-and-a-half million dollars for the construction of buildings for special exhibits. The fact that construction costs had fallen back to 1915 levels duri ng the Depression helped to stretch the fair's small budget. Even so, with all this jockeying aroun d for funds, it still appeared, by the end of 1932, that A Century of Progress did not have enough Ch icago History

235

Century of Progress

The Beach Midway on Northerly Island , 1933. The long, low structure behind the Ferris Wheel is the Agricultural Building. The east tower of the Sky Ride is in the rear.

236

Chicago History

Fair visitors could rent a jinrikisha, "piloted by college athletic stars from all over the country, " for 60¢ a half hour and 30¢ for each additional 15 minutes. There was competition even for these jobs.

money to open the fair. Lohr gathered together his forty department heads and told them that salaries would have to be cut, possibly as much as 75 percent. Only one of the forty left the fair. l\IcGrew explains that "People really did make sacrifices. It was patriotism. They believed in the United States, that's why." A plausible explanation, perhaps, but where would they have gone?

Most of the grandiose plans for the fair, conceived in the Twenties, were also sacrificed because of the financial crisis. In 1927, Chicago architect Edward H. Bennett had planned a fair that would be twice as large as the greatest expositions of the time, and the leading architects of America had been commissioned. Raymond Hood, the New York architect who, in 1923, had won the national contest to design Tribune Tower, wanted to construct a threemile-high mountain on Lake Michigan. An elevator would take fairgoers to the top of the mountain and they would visit the exhibits on the walk down. One engineer proposed a three million dollar steel observation tower more

than twice as tall as the Eiffel Tower, to stand near the lake at Roosevelt Road. New York architect Ralph vValker contemplated a monumental fountain rising high out of a lagoon.

The Heinz Company attempted to commission the architects to build a thousand-foot-long papier-mache pickle.

But what finally emerged out of the great plans was a realistic compromise-a lost city of the Depression. \Vindowless buildings, made to last less than half a year, were constructed out of plywood, light steel, asbestos, and gypsum board. They were colored, but not by expensive paints. Instead, bright lights were ingeniously used to create a rainbow on the lake.

A Century of Progress was a sanctuary from hard times. Entering the fair on Roosevelt Road, one could walk around the North Lagoon and see the Hall of Science, the Italian Pavilion, and the Lagoon Theater. Walking south, one could pass the Lama Temple, just south of Soldier Field. On the Midway, along the lake at 25th Street, one could ride the Flying Turns, visit a replica of Fort Dearborn, or see the Seminole Indian Village. ~fore people came to A Century of Progress than to any other fair in the nation at that time. The fair grounds stretched along almost three miles of lakefront, from the Adler Planetarium to 37th Street. Eighty-six acres of the Chicago Hist ory

237

\

â&#x20AC;˘I The assembly line at the General Motors exhibit, 1933.

lake were filled, creating lagoons and Northerly Island, a new peninsula east of Soldier Field.

By opening day, thirty-two major buildings had been constructed, everything from the "breathing" Travel and Transport Buildingwith a suspended roof that expanded and contracted as much as six feet as the temperature varied-to the 227-foot-tall Great Havoline Thermometer, hailed as a "monument to Chicago's climate."

"The morning of the fair," McGrew recalls, "we went up on the roof and looked over at the 12th Street bridge. It looked like the lines were all the way over to the Art Institute. It was the biggest thrill of all . People were coming to the fair! We h ad been worried about that, but ten thousand people came that first day.''

Lohr called the opening "a bright spot in a world of gloom," and insisted that the fair was the supreme example of Chicago's "I Will" spirit.

The people of Chicago loved the fair. They came to see cars put together on complete assembly lines at the General Motors and Ford bu ild ings. They came to see the exhibits at the eight-acre Hall of Science and take the Sky Ride, a ha lf-mi le ride in rockets suspended on 238

Chicago History

cables two hundred feet above the fair. Others came to watch shows at Enchanted Island, jugglers, ancl alligator wrestlers. And they came by the thousands to see Sally Rand strategically flip ostrich-feather fans around her body in the risquc Streets of Paris.

The fair ran from May 27 to November 1, and drew over twenty-two million paid visitors.

The staff was exhausted, and McGrew-down LO eighty-five pounds-remembers, "About the only thing I was interested in was this fair getting over so I could go to bed and get some sleep."

Although the official guide, the Booh of the Fair, declares: "Its influence in provoking thought and encouraging education was so widespread and its contributions to the nation's business upturn were so significant that civic bodies, business organizations and leading citizens, not only in Chicago but elsewhere, joined in a request to reopen the Expositiona request that could not be ignored," McGrew states that Lohr decided to continue the fair in 1934 because all of the debts were still not paid.

"At the meeting when Lohr announced it," she says, "an 'oh-my-God' went around the table. But everyone wanted back in. They weren't

Century of Progress

Th e Travel and Transport Building , May 1932. The cables attached to the building's twelve towers held a suspended dome , allowing for clear, unobstructed exhibit sp ace at a much lower cost.

Chicago History

239

that tired." Nor, it might be added, did they have jobs waiting for them elsewhere.

The number of foreign villages was greatly increased in 1934. Most notable were Germany's Black Forest Village, with its ice-skating rink and make-believe resort area, and the English, Spanish, and Swiss villages. The Midway attractions were moved to Northerly Island to make room for the villages. Transportation was improved, and numerous new restaurants were opened.

The day the fair finally closed-October 31, 1934-a record 374,127 persons attended. They began ransacking the grounds about 10: 30 P.J\r. , taking all the keepsakes they could remove and carry. McGrew remembers: "We were really more concerned as to whether our own people would be orderly. The guards and other emp loyees wouldn't have jobs the next morning.

It might hit them at the last minute. It doesn't take much to make a mob. Everyone agreed that a riot might be a probable thing. As it turned out, instead of causing a riot, the guards prevented one by their actions. Little of value was taken, even though police spent all evening rounding up customers who didn't want to leave their fair.

"The only real piece of trouble we had, a man came by with a great big package wrapped in an American flag. He was taken to the police station and, when he unwrapped it, there was 240

Ch icago Hist ory

Ceremony honoring the "George M. Pullman," the Pullman Company's first aluminum car, at A Century of Progress, May 27, 1933. Mrs. C. Phillip Miller, a granddaughter of company founder George M. Pullman , cuts the ribbon while other family members look on .

Ex-Gov. of Illinois Frank 0. Lowden , a Pullman son-in-law, is fourth from left.

a toilet seat inside. They took him to court the next day and he was fined $25 for disrespect to the flag.

"At 10: 15 that night, it was announced that money enough had been brought in to pay all the bills and have something left over. The next morning, a wire fence was placed around the fair entrance. The warning on the barricade was plain enough: KEEP OUT- AND THIS DOESN'T MEAN MEBBE."

After the fair closed, the Chicago Park District, on whose land the fair was held, was given the opportunity to decide which buildings it wanted to retain. Since most of the buildings could not be used for the park and were constructed for temporary use, the Park District chose to keep only the ÂŁair's Administration Building, the Lagoon Theater, and replicas of Fort Dearborn and the DuSable cabin.

The Century of Progress management, which had posted a $1,000,000 bond to insure that Burnham Park would be left in its nearly original condition, hired a Springfield firm to tear down the Century of Progress. The demolition

Century of Progress

Cigarette girls weren 't the main attraction of the Streets of Paris in this June 1933 scene ; neither were the make-believe gendarmes and sailors. It was Sal ly Rand and her tantalizing fans .

Century of Progress

began in February 1935, and ended almost a year later, about half the time it took to build the fair.

Most of the exposition's artifacts have vanished. Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry received many exhibits, but all have since been destroyed or given away because they became technically obsolete, according to the museum's registrar, Sterling Ruston . And much of the fair was scattered across the country, sold in salvage sales by the management and wrecking company. i\faterial from the exposition buildings was sold to many manufacturers. A Bloomington candy firm rearranged the steel of the Agriculture Building for an addition to its factory. A Cicero metal products company used parts of the Hall of Science for its factory, and the two-thousand-foot fence around the fair was bought by Kenosha, " ' isconsin, to enclose its lakefront municipal stadium.

Six of the modern homes displayed at the Home Planning Hall were put on barges and set up in Beverly Shores, Indiana. Two other homes from the exhibit, the Copper House and Glass House, were moved to residential areas in Chicago. The Armour & Company meat packing exhibit was set up at the stockyards. The forty thousand-piece model of San Francisco was dismantled the day after the fair closed and sent to California for the 1938 San Francisco Bay Exposition. Frank "Bring 'Em Back Alive" Buck packed up his jungle camp-complete with five hundred monkeys-and brought it to his home on Long Island.

The strikingly modern buildings-designed by such well-known architects as Arthur Brown, Jr., Harvey 'iV. Corbett, Paul Cret, and Chicagoans John Holabird and Hubert Burnhamwere torn down, carted away, and sold piece by piece. Almost everything else was put on the auction block. The plasterboard was cut into marketable pieces. The remainder was ground and sold for fertilizer.

The pumping equipment in the grand fountain-enough to supply the water needs of one 242

Chicago History

million people-was dismantled and sold, along with twelve million feet of lumber, eight million feet of wallboard, twenty thousand tons of steel, fifty miles of pipe, three thousand flood lights, and three thousand doorstops . Lohr even joined in the buying, purchasing, among other things, an eighteen-foot fishing boat for about $26.

So little rema ins from the fair that collectors will pay over $4 for Century of Progress hankies, $3 for guide booklets, and $7 .50 for ash trays. Two of Sally Rand's fans-although not the ones she used at the fair-were donated by her to the Chicago Historical Society in 1966.

The buildings left in Burnham Park did not survive. The Administration Building was used by the Park District as its general offices, but was destroyed when the P ark District moved into its own building just nort.h of Soldier Field during the late 1930s. The Fort Dearborn replica was ordered razed by the Park District in 1939, because of high maintenance costs. The crumbling Golden Temple of Jehol, a 60-foottall replica of a Manchu Shrine which was called the "gem of the fair," was disassembled into twenty-e ight thousand pieces by the 'i,Vorks Progress Administration in 1938. According to Lohr's 1952 history of the fair, the Lama Temple was moved to the New York 'i,Vorld's Fair of 1939. The Terrazo Promenade, a beautiful block-long mosaic which formed the approach to the Adler Planetarium, was dismantled in 1971 when the Planetarium broke up the ground near its entrance to build an AstroScience Center.

Like the Depression, A Century of Progress has best been remembered by stories. For twenty-five years after the fair closed, Martha McGrew and other fair devotees met for an annual dinner and relived old memories.

But unlike the Depression stories, the stories of A Century of Progress are of a better worldeven if it lasted for only two brief summers of those terrible years.

Chicago's City Series: Cubs Versus White Sox

BY ARTHUR R. AHRENS

The 7906 World Series wasn't the only time the Cubs and White Sox met in post-season championship competition.

After the.first of Chicago's City Series, either the Cubs or the Sox emerged with a title-no matter how dismal their performance during the regular season.

between Chicago's baseball teams, the Cubs and the White Sox, endured for three-quarters of a century, providing the city's fans with much excitement and a gold mine of anecdotes. Chicago was the pivotal city in the formation of both major leaguesthe ational League in 1876 and the American League in 1901-and, thus, the intense rivalry between the ational's Cubs and the American's ,vhite Sox was both inevitable and appropriate. Beginning in 1903 and lasting nearly four decades, until 1942, it took the form of an autumn City Series, played at the encl of the regular season. It was Chicago's local version of the World Series-one year it was the World Series.

The final test of city-wide supremacy, the playoffs often evoked as much enthusiasm as the national contest, the World Series. Excluding seasons in which the Cubs or the ,vhite Sox played in a World Series, the local struggle took pl ace every fall except in 1904, 1920, 1927, and 1934.

In 1903 , the Cubs-then more commonly known as the Colts-were an established ball club, twenty-seven years old. The ,vhite Sox were an inrant club, with only two seasons of experience. Although the American League THE

CROSS-TOWN

RIVALRY

Arthur R . Ahrens, a member of the Society for ,\merican Baseball R esearch, has written articles for B11.1e/;al/ Digest and Baseball R esearch Journal , and is the author of " How the Cubs Got Their Name" in the Spring 1976 issue of Chicago History .

began playing as a major league in 1901 , two years passed before the established National League recognized the young organization's legitimacy. The only "competition" between the Chicago teams during 1901 and 1902 was mutual suspicion and ill-feeling.

In 1903, when the differences between the two leagues were finally ironed out, the contest called the ,vor!d Series, a set of games betiveen the leading teams in each league-the pennant winners-was instituted. Almost immediately, fans in cities with a team in each league-New York, Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Chicago-demanded that their teams play each other for a city title. The numerous confrontations between the New York teams-New York had two first-rate teams in the National League and one in the American-which became known as the Subway Series, was probably the most bitter of these intra-city conflicts.

The Chicago ,vhite Sox won the American League pennant in its very first year, largely because of the ability of players they had hired away from the Cubs. The Cubs, anxious for revenge aga inst such upstarts and usurpers, felt ready for the 1903 City Series. Moreover, the Cubs played on the West Side and the Sox played within smelling distance of the stockyards-before 1910 their field was a small ball park at 39th Street and \Ventworth Avenuea circumstance which made the Cubs' fans even more contemptuous. The White Sox for their part, were more than willing to see the Cubs swallow their sneers.

For an extended brawl, there was no City Chicago History

243

After losing the 1906 World Series to the White Sox, perhaps Cubs' manager Frank Chance contemplated selling his soul to this fellow at their 1907 meeting. Right, a solemn Fielder Jones, manager of the victorious White Sox. Photo of Chance, Chicago Daily News , gift of Field Enterprises.

Series like that initial set-to in 1903. Scheduled as a series to be won by eight of fifteen games, it was fought to a finish that never came. Each team achieved seven victories, but the fifteenth and deciding contest was called off because it interfered with the wedding of the Cubs' shortstop, Joe Tinker, whose best man was Cub catcher Johnny Kling. The substitute players had already been sent home for the winter, the Cubs had no replacements for the two key men, and the series ended in a draw. Thereafter, a less cumbersome format-four winning games out of seven-became the rule.

The first series had its ugly as well as humorous aspects. Not long after it had ended, the Cubs' owner, James Hart, accused his star pitcher, Jack Taylor, of having "thrown" games to the White Sox. To be sure, Taylor's record against the seventh-place White Sox was a bit suspect, especially since he had won twenty-one games during the regular season. After beating the Sox, 11-0, in the opening game of the City Series, he lost his other three starts by scores of 10-2, 9-3, and 4-2. Chided for losing these games, the Chicago Tribune reported, Taylor responded, "Why should I have won? I got $100 from Hart for winning and $500 for losing."

The dispute went on for months. Taylor de244

Ch icago History

nied the charges, stating that Hart "tried to make me the fall guy for the failure of the Colts [Cubs] to defeat the White Sox in 1903."

He was eventually fined by the National League for misconduct, bu-t the charges of bribery were finally dropped, in March 1905, because of insufficient evidence.

In 1904, the National and American leagues had severed their uneasy truce, and there was neither a City Series nor ,vorld Series. Peace was re-established in 1905, however. The World Series has since continued without interruption, and the City Series was resumed. That October, the Cubs-now managed by their colorful first baseman, Frank Chance-demolished the White Sox, winning four games to one. But the victory, though sweet, was also short.

The season of 1906 was the first- and so far the only-year in which both the Cubs and the White Sox won pennants. To win their first flag in 20 years, the Cubs had scourged the National League with 116 victories-still the alltime record. Their closest rivals, the New York Giants, finished 20 games behind.

The White Sox, on the other hand, were surprise winners in the American League, taking the flag largely on the impetus of a nineteengame winning streak in August. Dubbed the

City Series

Hitless Wonders, they posted an anemic team batting average of .228. Their player-manager, Fielder Jones, was given most of the credit for the unforeseen victory.

In those days, the feud between Cub and Sox fans was more than just friendly kidding. As the opening day of the World Series approached, tempers flared. Saloon brawls became nightly occurrences, and paddy wagons overflowed with pugnacious fans. Youthful street gangs battled each other in defense of "their team." The Chicago Tribune reported that "A rooter for the west side is said to have attacked a crowd of White Sox supporters singlehanded."

Business in Chicago came to a near standstill on October 9, the opening day of the 1906 World Series. Alderman Bathhouse John Coughlin got City Hall closed clown so his payrollers could attend the games. For the moment, nothing else in the world mattered to baseball-minded Chicagoans.

On paper, the series appeared to be a cinch for the Cubs, especially since they had beaten the Sox so easily for the city title only a year earlier and the players on both sides were virtually the same. The West Siders were three to one favorites with the odds makers.

The White Sox surprised everyone by winning the first game, but they lost the second. In that second game, Cub pitcher Ed Reulbach held the White Sox to only one hit-a feat which remained unduplicated in World Series play until 1945, when another Cub, Claude Passeau, beat the Detroit Tigers in the same fashion. These World Series performances incidentally, remained unsurpassed until 1956.

The White Sox rebounded and won the third game. The game-winning three-base hit, as in the first contest, was delivered by substitute infielder George Rohe, normally a poor batsman.

Then the Cubs took the fourth game. The World Series was tied up, 2-2, and the fifth game took place before an overflow crowd of 23,257 at West Side Park. Several thousand

were turned away and ticket scalpers received as much as $20 for a single admission. Since neither team had yet won at its home park, Frank Chance put the Cubs into their road uniforms on their own field in hopes of breaking the jinx. To no avail: the Sox pulled ahead with an 8-6 victory, and the series stood at 3-2, with the Sox in the lead.

For the sixth game, played on October 14, the action switched back to the South Side. By now, most of the fans were hoping for a struggle to the bitter end but, for all practical purposes, the game and the series were over after the first inning.

In the second half of the first inning, the Cubs held a 1-0 lead. White Sox runners were on first and second base, and one out. George Davis then followed with a two-base hit to right field-and the hit shattered the Cubs' morale. Cub right fielder Frank Schulte's claim that he could have caught the ball, but "that a policeman in uniform came up and pushed him while he was waiting right in front of the crowd for the ball," was reported in Spalding's Base Ball Guide of 1907. Most of the newspapers carried this story, some of them substituting "tripped" for "pushed," but an obscure paragraph in the Tribune blamed the misdeed on "mute, inglorious Milton," an eight-year-old boy. Like other baseball mysteries, the full truth about Davis' double will probably never be known.

Infuriated by the decision, Frank Chance insisted on a ruling of interference and that Davis be declared "out," but the umpires turned a deaf ear. The White Sox gained the lead and went on to win, 8-3. The underdog team, the White Sox, had won the series-th e greatest upset victory in the short history of the sport. Frank Chance admitted defeat only with reluctance: The Sox played grand, game baseball and outclassed us in this series. . . . But there is one thing that I will never believe, and that is that the White Sox are better than the Cubs.

Ch icago History

245

City Series

i

l

I

Jack Pfiester of the Cubs pitching to the Wh ite Sox, sixth inning of game three of the 1906 World Series. George Rohe 's three-base hit eventually brought in all the runners for the Sox' 3-0 victory. Chicago Daily News photo , gift of Field Enterprises.

246

Chicago History

Chance's vitriolic dislike for the White Sox added plenty of fuel to the cross-town antagonism during the 1900s. Publicly, he stated that he had "the greatest respect for them and like them personally," but in reality the opposite was true. Chance commonly referred to the Sox as "pigs" and their fans as "pig stickers." In one City Series, he went so far as to refuse to let his players shower in the South Side park after the games; instead, he had them transported back to the West Side to perform their ablutions.

During one such occurrence, Chance was riding in a cab back to his home park after a Cub victory when an enthusiastic Sox [an hit him in the face with an apple core. As the driver halted the cab, the Cub manager grabbed a baseball. Shouting "You ------- pig sticker," he fired the ball, clipping the South Sider squarely across the nose.

George Davis of the White Sox and Frank Schulte of the Cubs. Davis' two-base hit was the decisive blow of the sixth and final game of the 1906 World Series. Schulte claimed that Ian interference prevented him from catching the ball. Photo of Schulte, Chicago Daily News, gilt of Field Enterprises.

Chance and his Cubs enjoyed a bit of revenge in the 1909 City Series, when they trimmed the White Sox, four games to one. But a City Series was not a World Series, much as the Cubs may have wished. Furthermore, their satisfaction was short-lived. The Sox won the 1911 series in four straight games.

The mighty Cubs faced even greater humiliation the following year. The first two games in 1912 were called because of darkness, with the scores tied. Then the Cubs gained a commanding lead with three consecutive victories and needed but one more success to regain the city title. They didn't achieve it. The White Sox proceeded to win the next four games and retained the championship. In the final game, they pummeled the Cubs, 16-0, behind the spitball pitching of Ed Walsh, who in the 1908 season had won an incredible forty games.

City Series

Chance had been having contract difficulties for some time with club president Charles Murphy, and the humiliating defeat in 1912 gave Murphy the excuse he needed to fire him.

Two days later, the Cubs' "Peerless Leader" left the scene of his greatest triumphs-four pennants and two world championships-in bitterness and recrimination.

Whether anyone realized it or not, a pattern was developing which would last until the postseason series was discontinued. Generally mediocre White Sox teams simply continued to defeat powerful Cub squads. Something special was going on. Writing of the White Sox' inspired play against the Cubs, Ring Lardner, then a Tribune sports writer, summed it up in one verse: Will someone obligingly slip me the reason They don't play like that in the regular season?

Nevertheless, the City Series continued to attract large crowds throughout the 1910s, and the fans' enthusiasm remained at a high pitch.

In 1913, for example, a youthful fan from Cleveland actually hopped a freight train to Chicago in order to witness the Cubs-Sox series.

The ¡white Sox won their sixth consecutive city championship in 1916, the year in which the Cubs moved to their present orth Side location. It was the last City Series played until 1921: the White Sox won pennants in 1917 and 1919 and were, accordingly, engaged in the World Series. The same was true of the Cubs in 1918.

There was no series in 1920, however, because of the "Black Sox" scandal in which eight Sox players-Ed Cicotte, Chick Candi!, Buck Weaver, Happy Felsch, Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullenwere accused of having deliberately lost the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. All eight were indicted in September 1920, and suspended with only a week of the playing season left. Club owner Charles Comiskey could not 248

Chicago History

obtain replacements on such short notice, so the City Series was cancelled.

Although the eight Sox players were acquitted in court, they were barred from organized baseball by Kenesaw M. Landis, a former federal judge who had recently been appointed baseball's first commissioner. The ravaged White Sox, without their leading players, finished in the second division of the American League for the next fifteen years.

The scandal gave the Cubs' fans another weapon with which to taunt South Side rooters.

As a result, the enmity between the two factions intensified during the 1920s, the "golden age" of the City Series. Of the next eight City Series, each side won four. In 1921, in line with the format of the World Series, Chicago's City Series was extended to a best five-out-of-nine games. And till, despite their decimated roster, the White Sox won five straight games.

The seven-game format was permanently reinstated the following year. The " ' orld Series made the same change and is still won by four out of seven games. In 1922, the series went its new limit-seven games-and the Cubs won their first city championship in thirteen years.

The 1923 and 1924 City Series, however, reverted to the usual pattern: the Sox won both series in six games.

But even if the Cubs looked like perennial losers, at least against their only Chicago rivals, the City Series was not without its lighter side.

Bob O'Farrell, the Cubs' regular catcher in the early 1920s, recalled that: In 1923 or '24 we were playing the White Sox in a City Series game at Comiskey Park. We had a second baseman on the Cubs named George Grantham. George asked Tony Kaufman, one of our pitchers, if he could borrow his glove. Tony agreed to it, but told him to be careful with it since it was his favorite glove. So at the end of the game, George decided to make a grandstand play for the fans by throwing them a baseball from his gloved hand.

Well, he threw the ball, all right-and the glove flew along with it into the crowd. That was the last we ever saw of Tony Kaufman's favorite glove.

ntertainment

eason Opens

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Such accidental happenings stimulated the fans and brought unprecedented crowds to both parks. In 1923, attendance at the City Series reached a new high, 142,791. The 1924 series was brought into the homes of thousands by WGN radio, in Chicago baseball's debut over the airwaves.

The eighth-place Cubs defeated the fifthplace White Sox in five games in 1925, but it was not the Cubs' unexpected victory that made the series memorable. Instead, the series is best remembered for a classic pitchers' duel which neither side won. It occurred during the opening game, October 7, in which the Cubs and the Sox battled to a 2-2 tie, called because of darkness after nineteen innings. Both sides were scoreless after five innings, and both starting pitchers-Grover Alexander of the Cubs and Ted Blankenship of the Sox-hurled the entire game. In a practice unthinkable today, the Cubs made no substitutions, while the Sox made only one.

The next two series-1926 and 1928-were seven-game thrillers, the Sox winning in 1926, the Cubs in 1928. In the 1926 series, fans who

by Dancing

Cubs' president Charles Tho mas and White Sox' owner Charles Comi skey maki ng arrangements for t he 1914 City Series at the Chicago Athletic Club. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

enjoyed superlative pitching were treated to four shutouts-two by Blankenship and one each by Charlie Root and Percy Jones of the Cubs.

Although there was no City Series in 1929 because the Cubs played (and were defeated by) the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series, the Cubs-Sox feud almost became a fig h t in the literal sense during the winter months. At the time, the Sox had a tall, blond-haired first baseman named Art Shires, who had embarked on a pugilistic career in the winter of 1929-1930, not long after he had broken the jaw of Lena Blackburne, his team's manager.

For their part, the Cubs had a center fielder and home-run slugger named Lewis "Hack" Wilson, quite a boxer himself. Hack, who joined the Cubs in 1926, had distingu ished himself by throwing punches at everyone who annoyed him-opposing players, pool-hall Chicago History

249

Six of the eight members of the infamous "Black Sox" in 1921. Seated from left are "Shoeless" Joe Jackson , Buck Weaver, Ed Cicotte, Swede Risberg , Lefty Williams, and Chick Gandil. Happy Felsch and Fred McMullen are riot pictured. Chicago Daily News photo, gift of Field Enterprises.

hoodlums, even Wrigley Field milk vendors.

Standing only five feet, six inches but possessing the muscles of a weight lifter, the heavy-hitting Wilson was also a frequent customer of North Side speakeasies. Since the White Sox' fans hated Hack as much as the Cubs' fans adored him, what could have been more exciting than a bout between ,-vilson and Shires?

When ring promoter Jim Mullen offered Hack Wilson $15,000 to fight Shires, Hack was enthused by the prospect. Heralded as the greatest fight in Chicago since the Dempsey-Tunney heavyweight championship, the upcoming bout dominated the sports pages for weeks. A sellout crowd was expected at Chicago Stadium.

But Commissioner Landis cancelled the affair, much to the fans' dismay.

Although Commissioner Landis could prevent Shires from tangling with Hack Wilson, he could not stop the W"hite Sox' fans from heckling Wilson. When Hack took his position in center field at the start of the 1930 City Se250

Chicago History

ries, Sox rooters showered him with oranges, grapefruit, tomatoes, and other similar missiles.

The Cubs' fans responded by dumping bagloads of lemons on Carl Reynolds, the White Sox star left fielder. The Chicago Tribune, covering the City Series that year, reported that: Some of the Cubs adherents must have carried lemons when they started for the south side. At any rate, quite a number were sailed at Carl Reynolds whenever he appeared at bat. This is probably in retaliation for the fashion in which \Vilson was bombarded in every game. Hack said la~t night that he was glad the series closed before his "admirer~" got around to the point of heaving watermelons.

Perhaps the Sox ' fans' retaliation provided some extra adrenalin for the Cubs: they won the City Series that year in six games. In the final contest, Wilson's home run helped to bring about a 6-4 victory. The jubilant Cub fans were confident that the future was theirs.

But 1930 was the last time the Cubs won the autumn struggle. As the decade progressed, the City Series became an exercise in masochism for the Cubs and their followers. Ted Lyons, a longtime Sox pitcher, won six consecutive games against the Cubs. The situation was especially embarrassing in 1933, when the White

Lewis "Hack" Wilson and Art Shires. The boxing match between the Cubs' slugging outfielder and the Sox' burly first baseman was cancelled by Commissioner Landis.

Sox, who had ended up in sixth place in their league, swept the series in four straight games, using (our aging pitchers-Lyons, thirty-three years old; Joe Heving, thirty-three; Sam Jones, forty-one; and Reel Faber, forty-five. The Cubs, the National League pennant winners the year before and third-place finishers this year, scored only three runs the entire series and were twice held scoreless. Faber's 2-0 victory over the Cubs' Lon ,varneke was his farewell appearance in his twenty-year career with the Sox. The four-game ,vhite Sox sweep was repeated in 1936. The Cubs sent their injured infielder, Glen Russell, to Comiskey Park to "scout" the Sox before the 1940 City Series. He reported back lo his teammates that the White Sox did not stand a chance of victory. The result? Yel another South Side triumph, this time in six contests. Only three times-in 1931, 1937, and 1939-did the " ' hite Sox have to extend the series to seven games before winning. And, in 1941, they again won in four games.

By then, however, the intra-city rivalry had dwindled lo a mere flicker o( its former intensity. Cynics joked that the While Sox spent the entire regular season practicing to beat the Cubs in the City Series. On October 6, 1942, Sox pitcher John Humpheries outlasted Warneke, 4-1, before a meager night-game assemblage of 7,599 at Comi key Park. Il was the last City Series game ever played. Since the Sox had now won eight consecutive titles, the two clubs decided lo end the now compelitionless affair before allendance became even worse.

From a peak of 184,961 in 1928, attendance at the series had declined to 45,818 in 1942.

Gate receipts had fallen from $194,944.50 to 46,328.40. In 1930, one game alone had drawn 45, 10.1 patrons and gate receipts of ,16,200-almosl as much as the entire six-game series in 19.J2. Between 1903 and 19.J2, the ,vhite Sox had won nineteen City Series, including the 1906 ,vorld Series, while the Cubs had taken only six. One series had been a tie. The Sox had won ninety-six games, the Cubs sixty-two.

City Series

Since that time, there have been several attempts to reawaken interest in the Cubs-Sox battle. The two teams played pre-season exhibition games throughout the late 1940s and 1950s, but only intermittently after 1960. They were generally played in sets of three or four games, although there were six exhibition contests in 1948. Victories were evenly divided.

That spring series, a mere echo of the City Series, also finally died. The expansion of the major leagues during the 1960s meant earlier starting dates for the regular season; there simply was not enough time left to play the crosstown spring exhibition games. Moreover, the spring games-played in the chilly weather of early April-never drew large crowds nor profitable gate receipts. In its later years, it began to resemble a traveling circus. In 1969, only one game was played in Chicago; the other three were held in Memphis, Milwaukee, and Indianapolis. The following spring, with Chicago under ten inches of snow, the games were shifted to Tulsa, Oklahoma. The last spring series was played in 1971. The Cubs won by two out of three games but, by then, this "city" series had moved to the Cubs' spring training camp in Scottsdale, Arizona.

For twenty-three years, also, the two teams played the Boys Benefit Game in mid-summer, to raise funds for the improvement of playground baseball facilities in the Chicago Park District. This annual outing was inaugurated with fanfare on July 11, 1949, when 36,459 fans gathered under the lights at Comiskey Park to witness the Cubs win, 4-2, behind the pitching of Johnny Schmitz, over Bob Kuzava of the Sox. Notable players on the field that evening included Cubs' veteran first baseman Phil Cavaretta; Luke Appling, since 1930 the White Sox' shortstop; and Hank Sauer, the Cubs' tobacco-chewing home-run slugger.

In the ensuing years, the Benefit games became just as one-sided as the City Series, but in the opposite direction. Of the eleven Boys Benefit games played between 1953 and 1963, the 252

Chicago History

Cubs won nine- including 1959, when the White Sox won their first pennant in forty years. Ironically, the positions of the Cubs and the White Sox in their own leagues were by then reversed. Whereas, during most of the 1920s and 1930s, the Cubs were the pennant contenders and the White Sox consistently the underdogs, the White Sox en joyed seventeen consecutive seasons in the first division of their league, from 1951 to 1967. The Cubs, on the other hand, languished in the second division for twenty years, from 1947 to 1966. Nevertheless, the theoretically weaker team almost consistently won the intra-city games from 1953 to 1963.

Beginning in 1964, however, the White Sox began regularly winning the Benefit games.

Although these games drew large crowds- at one game, spectators were allowed to stand in the outfield behind restraining ropes- they were brought to a premature demise in 1972 because the fans resented the tendency of the teams' managers to feature substitutes and rookies rather than the regular players whom the audience wanted to see compete against each other.

The Cubs won the final Benefit Game on August 14, 1972, and all-time Cub hero Ernie Banks-brought out of retirement for the evening-received a standing ovation when he appeared as a pinch-hitter. Over-all , the Cubs won thirteen of the Benefit games, the White Sox ten . All were night games at Comiskey Park, with the exception of the 1953 contest at Wrigley Field. Since 1972, the competition between Chicago's Cubs and White Sox has ceased.

Neither the pre-season series nor the Boys Benefit games really recaptured the spirit of the old City Series. Schoolboys will still argue as to which team is superior; as they reach adulthood they might occasionally rib each other in a friendly manner while sipping beer on their lawns or at a neighborhood tavern. But the fierce rivalry that existed fifty or more years ago is apparently long gone.

Fifty Years Ago

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trons were observed pounng their own drinks with liquor supplied by the managements and will appeal on the grounds that "observation" alone was insufficient reason for padlocking them.

Dec. 15. Gov. Len Small appoints Sen.-elect Frank L. Smith to fill the unexpired term of Sen. William B. McKinley, who died on Dec.

7, tl1 ·, p111 · 1lw l:11 I 1lt :1t .'i 111i1l1 \ 1·!1 ·1 111111 !ta, lw, ·11 , l1.,l11•11 gn l lw1 :111 ~1· 111 111 , '\ li"lt 111111 1" Ill lf11 • /\pi jf pt i111,11 y, lk, 1'7 <:ook c :,,.1111 y Sl11 ·1dl 1'1•11 ·1 1\1 l lnlf 111.111 , lr VI' 1011111·1 011111.rl,, ,111rl l11101lq;g1·1M ·11•11 y l>111gg, ,11 ;111d F1 .111kw l .. ,kc· ,111· .11q1111 11 •,I 111 litilH r y .t11cJ (1)11\f'jl,IIY 1li ,t1gn Ill 11111 111 ·11,,,11 w 11I, i.,I l.1 vor ~ g1.,1111·d 1111 ·

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g. 111g, 11·" d111111 g 1111'11 , 1i111 Ill ( :1111111 y j.11I. /\JI 11111 f f,,11111.111 , w lio , ,., vt·d :1 'I" d .1y ~1·11 l! 'IH ,. 1111 ( (llill'IIIJII 111 '(JIii i :1 ll'W 1111111111~ l,,11 k , Ir.id pt 1·v 1011,l y , rnd n,~1·d In 1111· 111 ilwr y I lt :1I J.;I'\ I )1 ·1 :i ,. S. 11111wl C:0111·11, wli11 11·« ·111 l y :i11

nounced that he would heel and hall-so le a pair of shoes for $1.19, is murdered near h is ·w oodlawn home. Police are searchi ng for Ike Sandler, president of the United Shoe Repairers Association, who recently served a ja il sentence for terrorizing independent shoe repairers and who had threatened Cohen for not charging the going rate of $2 . 20.

Ch icago History

253

50 Years Ago

Dec. 24. Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins announces a full-scale investigation of liquor dispensing in the Chicago Lawn police district after patrolmen Peter Lowerty and Edward Hayes are arrested while drinking in a So. Ashland Ave. speakeasy in full uniform.

"I have a suspicion there are other officers involved and I intend to find out," says Collins.

Dec. 26. Alice Clement Faubel, Chicago's first policewoman and a 17-year veteran of the force, dies of diabetes at 48. Mrs. Faubel became famous for her campaign against "mashers," and lectured across the country and wrote articles about her work.

Dec. 31. A Chicago Crime Commission report shows 356 murders in Cook County this year, 38 less than in 1925, probably because of a truce between the warring Drucci-vVeiss and Capone gangs. Automobile-related fatalities, however, are a record 890, up 101 from a year ago.

1927 Jan. 2. The U.S. St. Lawrence Commission, headed by Sec. of Commerce Herbert Hoover, recommends the immediate construction of the St. Lawrence Seaway. The Seaway would link Chicago to the Atlantic Ocean, bringing in maritime traffic now going through the Panama Canal.

A Chicago Tribune editorial, commending Italy's ban on women teaching high-school history, states "that women have produced no historians of the first rank and astonishingly few of the fifth," and judges them to be "without mental equipment for original or critical work in the field." The editorial claims that women's only achievements are typing, indexing, and moral support, and acids that "seldom do you see a woman's name signed to even the most perfunctory of historical book reviews."

254

Chicago History

.Jan. 3. Chief Engineer Edward J. Kelly of the Sanitary District fires another 200 workers from the maintenance and operation department, bringing the total dismissed to 1,000, mostly Republicans. Only 500 will be replaced, saving the taxpayers $1,000,000 and providing jobs for friendly Democrats. .Jan. 6. The Common-Wealth Reserve Fund, an investment securities firm, is missing $500,000 in assets, and authorities are hunting for G. M. Meeker, the Fund's recently ousted president, and treasurer C. C. Woodmansee. The company sold about 536,000 of stock to 500 investors, mostly Christian Scientists, but its present assets are only 15,000. .Jan. 7. A Joliet jury fails to reach a decision in the $100,000 "criminal mutilation" suit by taxi driver Charles Ream against Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, and the case is dismissed. Ream claimed that, some six months before the Bobby Franks murder, Leopold and Loeb forced him to drive to a desolate section of southeast Chicago, drugged him with ether, and performed "an operation." The pair testified that they were partying that night. .Jan. 11. Arthur S. Merigold, one of three realestate experts hired to make appraisals for the Chicago Beautiful program in 1920,

Richard Loeb, right, and Nathan Leopold at their "criminal mutilation" trial in Joliet. The jury failed to reach a verdict on Jan. 7 .

during Mayor William Hale Thompson's administration, consents to repay the city almost half of his fee, following a similar agreement by Ernest H. Lyons. The city paid $1,732,279 for the work, which included evaluating the cost of improving So. Water St. and Michigan Ave., but a suit instituted by the Tribune on behalf of the taxpayers claims that the job was worth only $45,000. .Jan. 12. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis rules that Swede Risberg and Chick Gandil-White Sox banned from the game for their role in the "Black Sox" scandal of 1919-lied when they testified that the White Sox paid $45 each to Detroit Tiger pitchers for losing a crucial four-game series in 1917. Sox players contend that they gave the S1, 100 to the fourth-place Tigers for defeating the Boston Red Sox in important games toward the end of that season, victories that helped the Chicago team to beat out the Red Sox for the American League pennant. The "reward," a practice not considered unusual at the time, has since been outlawed by Landis.

Chicago History

255

Sister Aimee Semple McPherson exhorting her followers at a revival meeting in Chicago. See Feb. 7.

Jan. 14. Police confiscate six nude paintings from the No Jury Art Show at Marshall Field's after a complaint from the Illinois Vigilance Society. Sponsors of the show include Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick, Mrs. Howard Linn, and Mrs. Potter Palmer.

Jan. 19. Mrs. Maria Hunter, the "other woman" in a love triangle, is exiled from Chicago for one year by Judge Herbert G. Immenhausen for violating a court order that barred her from ever again seeing her lover. Stunned, Mrs. Hunter says that she will go to Canada to live with her sister.

Jan. 20. The U.S. Senate refuses, by 48 to 33, to grant temporary seating to Frank L. Smith, whose credentials will now be investigated by the Priv ileges and Elections Committee. It appears unlikely that Smith will be able to take his elected seat in March, since many who voted to seat him temporarily based their decision on narrow technical grounds and say they will oppose later.

Jan. 27. Two mid-year high-school graduation ceremonies almost fai l to take place. At Harrison Tech, 40 girls who absented themselves in the morning to prepare for the evening's 256

Ch icago History

festivities are locked in a classroom by principal Frank Morse. Their irate parents storm the stage and halt the proceedings, forcing him Lo release their daughters . At Englewood High, a boycott by the seniors is called off al the last minute when the suspension of three students who led a snake dance through the halls is settled by compromise.

Feb. 5. Illinois' corn, suspected of being infested with corn borers, piles up as buyers in other states consider embargoing it entirely. ¡w ith their grain elevators already loaded, farmers face the grim prospect of dumping their produce at sharply reduced prices.

Feb. 6. Women are especially prominent this week in Chicago's musical and theatrical events. Galli-Curci sings at Orchestra Hall; violinist Audrey Call is soloist at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's "popular concert"; and the l\farianne Kneisel String Quartet, one of the few entirely female musical organizations in the world, comes to the Blackstone. Other music includes Beethoven and symphonic versions of \,Vagner, conducted by Frederick Stock; Bach's Concerto for Three Pianos and Srings, featuring Ernest von Dohnanyi; Chaliapin, in the Bnrber of Seville; and separate recitals by pianists Sergei Rachmaninoff and Harold Bauer and cellist Pablo Casals.

On stage, Mrs. Fiske ends her run as Mrs. Alving in Ibsen's Ghosts, Ina Claire stars in The Last of Mrs. Cheyney, Jeannette MacDonald plays in Yes, Yes, Yvette, and Chrystal Herne appears in Craig's Wife. At the movies, one can see Delores Costello in The Third Degree and hear Mary Lewis, a Metropolitan Opera star, and Vincent Lopez and his band on "Vitaphone"-the new sound film. Lopez, this time with baritone Giovanni Marinelli, can also be heard on "Vitaphone" at Johnny Get Your Hair Cut, with Jackie Coogan.

Other movies include Tell It to the Marines, with Lon Chaney; It, with Clara Bow and Antonio Moreno; Beau Geste, with Ronald Colman and Noah Beery; We're in the Navy Now, with Wallace Beery; Th e Silent Lover, with Milton Sills; Stage Madness, with Virginia Valli; New York, with Ricardo Cortez and Estelle Taylor; Hot el Imperial, with Pola Negri; and the "First Shown Anywhere" film o( the Tunney-Dempsey heavyweight championship fight.

Feb. 7. Shouts of "praise the Lord" and "hallelujah" ring throughout the Coliseum as over 5,000 devotees hear Sister Aimee Semple McPherson call for a return to the old-time religion . Sister Aimee, seemingly unperturbed by the recent scandal involving her "kidnapping" and her week's stay with her church's radio operator, evokes an older memory-the time when there were "no suppers in the supper room but more spiritual food in the upper room ... less pie and more piety; less fire in the cook stove, but more fire in the pulpit."

Feb. 12. Owners of houseboats lining the North Branch of the Chicago River near Belmont and ,vestern aves., many too poor to afford rents on land, refuse to accept eviction notices. They also deny that their property is the scene of moonshining, bootlegging, and gambling. The boats are ordered to move on under the 1897 shanty boat act prohibiting

Owners of these houseboats jamming the North Branch of the Chicago River disregarded eviction notices on Feb. 12.

the blocking of channels and requiring a city license.

Feb. 22. William Hale Thompson, overwhelms Edward Litsinger in the Republican mayoral primary and will face Mayor William E. Dever in the general election on April 5.

Police arrest 200 gunmen, sluggers, and vote repeaters, but there is only one shooting and kidnappings are fewer than customary. Two ballot boxes are stolen at gunpoint-by henchmen of John "Dingbat" Oberta of the Saltis gang, an unsuccessful candidate for alderman of the 13th Ward.

F.

Chicago History

J.

N.

257

Yesterday's Chicago

by Herman Kogan and Rick Kogan E. A. Seemann, 1976. $12.95.

KOGAN pere et fils have compiled a robust history of Chicago in pictures. The illustrations, many of which are little known, come from many sources, including Herman Kogan's own extensive collection.

Some are memorable; others lack interest. Portraits abound. Myra Bradwell, crusading publisher of Chicago Legal News, Robert Hutchins as the thirtyyear-old president of the University of Chicago, a smiling Al Capone, and Sally Rand. We watch the city change from swamp town to sprawling metropolis.

The photographs, grouped into five sections representing periods of Chicago's growth, are accompanied by lengthy captions. Key themes are threaded through each section-ard1itecture, politics, labor struggles, sports, entertainment. The photo selection is broad, though I would have liked to see more about the blacks in Chicago. There is a photo of Benny Goodman with his clarinet, but I miss the Austin High Scl10ol gang, Bix Beiderbecke, and the Prohibition hot spots. I also miss the Chicago blues, a major influence on young rock performers.

What could have been a tasteful and visually exciting book is laid out in mediocre fashion. Photographs bleed off the pages. Some are blurred. Their sizes could be more varied, and some should have been cropped to highlight significant details. Many are grouped by themes bm more could have been done with magazine-style spreads and with juxtapositions to show contrasts and contradictions. More memorabilia would have helped to convey the visual Gestalt of ead1-caricatures, drawings, posters, ads, film stills.

Yesterday's Chicago is a fairly well-rounded view of Chicago's past. It is a stimulating book but not a memorable one, although it might have been.

VICTOR MARGOLIN

Introductory Guide to Midwest Antiques

by Marlene Semple Greatlakes Living Press, 1976, $5.95.

ANTIQUING is an adventure. If you have never experienced the thrill of weaving in and out of little shops and poking around in dusty corners to discover trinkets and treasures, it is best to learn some basic facts before you get started.

Marlene Semple's Introductory Guide to Midwest Antiques is just the guide to show you the way. The book is loaded with listings of Midwest antique 258

Chicago History

shops; with illustrations of early, mid, and lateVictorian furniture and their current values; with information about where to find particular antiques including bargains; and with all sorts of other helpful hints and information. There are also chapters on "How to Act in Antique Shops and at Auctions and Other Sales" and "How to Restore Old Furniture." This is an honest, no-nonsense, down-to-earth, informative guide, a good "friend" to take along on those intriguing adventures that we call "antiquing."

ANITA GOU>

Vic and Sade: The Best Plays of Paul Rhymer ed. Mary Frances Rhymer Seabury, 1976. 12.95.

PAUL RHYMER'S wmow has lovingly selected some of his vignettes of life in downstate Illinois in the 1930s for this book. Readers who were fortunate enough to have heard "Vic and Sade" during the halcyon days of radio will experience a double delight; others who must imagine how they sounded will settle for a lesser pleasure. Nevertheless, the d1aracters and the happenings, which could only have come from the fertile and outrageous imagination of the author, are all delightful.

Too bad that the publisher did not produce the book more carefully. The pages are crowded, the type is unrelieved, there are no photographs of the principals, and the price is really a bit mud1. Vic never used the modern term "rip-off." I shall.

LESTER A. WEINROTT

Children of Circumstance: A History of the First 125 Years (1849-1974) of Chicago Child Care Society

by Clare L. McCausland Chicago Child Care Society, 1976. 3.95.

Children of Circum~tance addresses an extremely important issue which has generally received little attention from historians: the transformation of a nineteenth-century custodial institution into a twentieth-century social-welfare agency. The Chicago Orphan Asylum was founded at the peak of the cholera epidemic which swept Chicago in 1849. A response to an emergency situation, it was also part of a more general movement which David Rothman has termed The Discovery of the Asylum. In the 1840s alone, thirty orphanages were established in American cities. But when turn-of-the-century childcare reformers began to stress adoption and fosterhome care, the Chicago Orphan Asylum turned a

deaf ear, ii1sulated from the winds of change by a substantial endowment. During the 1920s, however, several factors combined to force a reassessment of its goals. By the outset o[ the Great Depression, the institution was rapidly evolving into a foster-care agency: in 1936 the asylum closed. The final tie with custodial care was severed when the name was changed to the Chicago Child Care Society.

Professor McCausland depicts these changes with an insider's eye, having served on the board of manager for five years. Her primary theme is the agency's flexibility, whid1 has enabled it to render 125 years of active service under changing urban conditions. She also writes with an insider's bias: some of the newer programs, like foster-home care, can have serious drawbacks, and McCausland never critically assesses them. or does she portray the internal workings of the orphanage. Rothman painted a grim picture of the plight of the orphan in the nineteenth centurythe militaristic routines, uniforms, and barrackslike living arrangements. \Vere conditions more humane in Chicago than in Eastern cities? If so, why? Aside from some tantalizing photographs of tiny inmates at huge trestle tables or peering mutely over the rims of infirmary cribs, we learn little about the evolution of the institution's actual practices.

Despite these shortcomings and the surprising absence of documentation, the book merits attention.

1t is well written, the story is interesting, and the photographs afford a rare glimpse into a forgotten aspect of urban life.

KATHLEEN D. MCCARTHY

Jewish Grandmothers

by Sydelle Kramer and Jenny Masur Beacon, 1976. 7.95.

IN TIIIS EXTRAORDI ARILY INTERESTING BOOK, Jewish grandmothers, mostly Chicagoans, tell the story of their li\'es to two young Chicago women, themselves in sea, ch of their heritage. The book is offered partly a an antidote and answer to the Portno)"s Complaint stereotype, but it is far more than that. You will find here no self-pity, though the stories are of struggle for limited achievement, of love and accommodation, of war and anti-Semitism, of good and bad times here and in the old country-in short, of life itself. The grandmothers differ in place of origin, social class, experiences, financial status, education, and even the degree-including the absence-of religious belief or orthodoxy, but all are, by birth, self-definition, and shared cultural experi-

ences, Jewish women and, thus, a special group of women. All are interesting and well worth listening to, although none is a well-known person. Indeed, that is pan of the fascination of the book: that the lives of "ordinary" women should be so well worth telling.

The story is told "in their own words" and in small type, so the book is not what we call "speedy reading" even though it is not a big book. Verbal language differs from written, being less well-structured and grammatical, and English is the second or third language for these women, whid1 adds to the difficulty-and at the same time lends a special rhythm and flavor-to their speech . And it is a Studs Terkel type of oral history we have here: no questions are recorded, we do not know how much has been edited out, and there is obvious condensation. The interviewers were after information, and we learn plenty. They supply good explanatory notes, placed at the back of the book but conveniently organized, which clarify the background or meaning of some of the words, comments, or attitudes of some of the grandmothers.

Edited out, unfortunately, is the famous Jewish humor whid1 athan Ausubel has called "laughter through tears"-the ability to tell an appropriate side-splitting, droll, or wry story even when things are at their worst. It is not possible to believe that all these older women take themselves as seriously as their young interviewers. For this reason, the book is best read as a series of histories and not gobbled up all at once.

One wishes for more such books-Italian grandmothers, Polish grandmothers, German grandmothers, and so forth-before too much more women's history is forever lost. One also hopes that the original interviews have been transcribed and placed in a library of oral history materials for the benefit of future researchers.

ISABEL S. GROSSNER

Ch icago History

259

Books

The Germans of Chicago

by Rudolph A. Hofmeister Stipes, 1976. , 0.80.

A Checklist of 19th Century Illinois Gunsmiths: An Introduction to Illinois Gunsmithing

TIIE GERMAN POPULATION in Chicago is a difficult one on which to get a handle, coming as it did from diverse areas and settling all over the area. Hofmeister undertook a formidable task: "to present a general history of the Chicago Germans from 1825 ... to the present time," without its being "an exhaustive treatment."

The author deals with the Germans in politics, industry, and the work force. He shows them as journalists, educators, and doctors. He discusses their religious institutions, cultural activities, politics, and relations with other ethnic groups.

There are several things, however, that need illumination. Anton Hesing, owner of the Illinois Staats-Zeitung, engineered the "Revolution of 1873."

He organized a coalition of Germans and Irish into the Peoples' Party that won a smashing victory over the temperance forces in the city, yet this important event is not dealt with. Co-operative efforts between the Germans, Swedes, and Bohemians in the socialist movement are also not mentioned. Although the Germans led the socialist movement in the city, the author, save for a section on the Haymarket Affair, did not write about that development. It would have been worth observing, in the chapter on poli tics, that Gov. John Altgeld appointed George Schilling, a Chicago socialist and German, as the secretary of the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

A few m inor points: Dr. Ernst Schmidt was elected coroner in 1862, not in 1864; Hofmeister refers to the Industrial Workers of the ¡world as the International Workers of the World; and the difficulty in seating Frank Stauber as alderman occurred in 1880, and not, as in the material Hofmeister quotes, in 1877.

Hofmeister, nonetheless, has done a rather decent job of showing the complexity of German society in Chicago and his book will interest those concerned with th is national group.

VIRGINIA NEAL HINZE

Geo. Shumway, 1974. $1.

by Curtis L. Johnson AN AD\!IRAULE ATTEMPT; such a list is sorely needed.

But Johnson should have researched more thoroughly: most of the Chicago gunsmiths' dates are incorrect. George Abbey, for example, is listed as working until 1872 although he died in 1867. Frederick \Vynsauer, a Chicago gunsmith from 1858 to 1862, is omitted entirely. Such errors could have been corrected merely by checking the city's directories.

Even so, Johnson's checklist is very useful for collectors and fanciers of antique arms.

HERUERT G. HOUZE

Cooking Plain

by Helen Walker Linsenmqer Southern Illinois, 1976. $12.50.

THIS TREASURY-and that is just the word-of old southern Illinois cooking will interest the social historian, the cook, the natural-food buff, and just about everyone else, for sprinkled in among the "plain" recipes are some fascinating descriptions of techniques, ingredients, people, and ways of living.

Although the most startling of the recipes are to be found in the section on wild game and fish (fried rattlesnake or squirrel, anyone?), more conservative cooks will be impressed with the gentle treatment of fresh vegetables and the many traditional and old-fashioned recipes for cakes, cookies, breads, soups, stews, brews, and drying foods. The list seems endless, and some of the best are heirlooms. The unusual "helpful household hints" with which the book closes are, just by themselves, a joy. Examples: add a sprig of mint to applesauce as you cook it, to improve the flavor; arrange cut sweet peas in a vase with moistened sand to keep them fresh mud1 longer. Linsenmeyer also offers a simple test for ascertaining whether mushrooms are poisonous and tells you how to crack a cocoanut. But this book is not for those who would live off the land's wild plants; instead, it is for those who want to cook the produce "plain"-with no substitutes, iliank you, or convenience foods.

I. S. G.

260

Ch icago History

School Politics, Chicago Style

by Paul E. Peterson University of Chicago, 1976. S15.

PROFESSOR PETERSON'S in-depth study explores the factors that determine decisions about the Chicago public schools. He finds that issues were decided by either ideological or pluralistic considerations; that is, there were instances where school board members found personal beliefs more important than political circumstances, and vice versa. Race, union membership, religion , and whether a member was reform-minded or loyal to the Daley machine most often influenced the school board's votes.

Case studies of three important issues-desegregation, collective bargaining, and decentralizationshow, for instance, that union members always voted for collective bargaining for teachers while nonunion members opposed it. Blacks and reformers supported desegregation while Daley loyalists, many of them Catholic, fought it.

School Politics is a political-science book, loaded with the jargon of Banfield and Wilson and the pluralistic ideology of Robert Dahl. Peterson has limited himself to the discussion of bargaining models; what actually takes place inside the schools or what is done in other cities is rarely mentioned.

Although Peterson is aware of and acknowledges the critici ms of his method , he still believes that the study of policy formation is of great importance.

There is also much of great importance that his discussion cannot encompass. For example, a consideration of the numerous clashes between adjacent neighborhoods would tell us much more about why many Chicagoans opposed school integration, even though a school on double shifts might be only a mile away from a half-empty building.

This is not a book for the reader who wants to find out what is going on in the Chicago public schools, but for academics and scholars. School Politics reminds me of the books I read in introductory Political Science, the same type that led me to change my major to American Studies.

FREDERICK J. NACHMAN

Illinois Country Canoe Trails: Des Plaines River Illinois Country Outdoor Guides, 1976. S1.35.

Illinois Country Canoe Trails: Du Page River, Kankakee River, Aux Sable Creek, Des Plaines River Illinois Country Outdoor Guides, 1975. $1 .25.

by Philip E. Vierling 1673, the rivers of northern Illinois have served as highways for explorers, traders, and settlers. Today, canoeists still follow these old routes.

One of the most traveled of modern-day voyageurs, Philip E. Vierling shares an intimate knowledge of these rivers in his canoe-trail booklets.

Vierling's latest edition covers the Des Plaines River, from just across the Wisconsin state line to Riverside. The seventy-two-page booklet is crammed with maps and data of value to both the first-time paddler and the experienced canoeist. The maps list riffies, rapids, rocks, dams, hazards, and sights along the banks. There are forty-nine landings listed , directions to them and the parking areas, and their distances from the water. A separate chapter covers the nine clams between Libertyville and Riverside, including illustrations and information on the "killer" clams which have claimed the lives of unwary paddlers even on this relatively placid stream.

The 1975 booklet includes maps and data on the Du Page and Kankakee rivers and Aux Sable Creek, as well as a section on the Des Plaines, from Riverside south to Joliet.

In short, Vierling's booklets contain virtually everything you wanted to know about paddling a certain stream, but did not know whom to ask.

THOMAS J. JUDGE SINCE

Mobil Travel Guide, Great Lakes Area: Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin Rand McNally, 1976. S3.95.

ANOTHER GUIDEBOOK, careful and informative, but not much help in deciding what kind of trip to take.

For planning a trip, it is far better to consult other guidebooks such as Illinois, one of the American Guide Series, originally published in 1939 and most recently updated in 1974. Use the Mobile guide for choosing where to sleep and eat, and for its supplemental information on new and seasonal events, county fairs, and the like.

GRANT T. DEAN

Chicago History

261

iety Notes

ciety, describes and discusses the six areas in which Chicago led the nation from 1880 to the 1920s. The soft-cover edition sells for S7.95, the limited hardcover edition for S12.50.

Rec en l Accessions New Exhibitions CIIICAGO: CREATING NEW TRADITIONS, the Society's major Bicentennial exhibit, opened to the public on October 15, and will be on view throughout 1977. c111cAco explores the city's contributions to American life in six major categories: architecture, city planning, reform, culture, merchandising, and literature. Among the highlights of the exhibit are a motion picture starring Charlie Chaplin, filmed at Chicago's Essanay studio when Chicago was a center of movie making, and a recording of Carl Sandburg reading from Chicago Poems and singing some of his American Songbag finds.

RE~tDIBER TIIE LADIES, a traveling exhibit named after Abigail Adams' famous injunction to her lmsband John, "in the new code of laws ... I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors," opens January 18 and will be on view at the Society through February 20. The exhibit portrays the forgotten story of the revolutionary women who made guns as well as flags, who became spies, scouts, and smugglers of supplies, and who even served as soldiers in the cause of American independence.

Other areas examine the domestic life and status of American Indian women, society women, working women, slaves, and indentured servants in the period from the Revolution to 1815. ,\n exhibit of children's clothing will open February 28 in the costume alcoves on the first floor.

Program Activities Two lectures on REME'.\IBER TIIE LADIES are scheduled during the exhibit's stay at the Society. On January 26, Linda Grant De Pauw, professor of history at George \Vashington University, will lecture on 'The Changing Role of American \Vomen: 17601815." Conover Hunt, former director of tl:e Daughters of the American Revolution Museum 111 Washington, D.C., will speak on February g. Both lectures are at 7:30 P.'.\r.

The American Biography Film Series continues through March. Among the movies to be shown are Abe Lincoln in Illinois, General Pershing, Lorraine Hansberry's To Be Young, Gifted and Blach, Grandma ,\loses, and The World of Andrew IVyeth. The film series takes place on selected Sunday afternoons. l\Iembers should consult the Society's calendar for dates; others, please call l\112-4600.

New Publication Chicago: Creating New Traditions, a lavishly illustrated book which interprets the Society's Bicentennial exhibit, is now on sale at the l\fuseum Store and at bookshops throughout the city. In Chicago, urban historian Perry Duis, now on leave from the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle to serve as a research associate of the Chicago Historical So262

Chi cago History

The Society has acquired a painting by A. Raymond Katz of the 1932 Democratic National Conven_tion, which was held at Chicago Stadium. The oil-onmasonite painting measures 38½ by 47 inches. Katz signed his early work "Sandor," and it is his Century of Progress poster that graces o~ir co~er. ~e was born in Hungary in 1896 and received his tra111ing at Chicago's Art Institute and the Academy of Fine Arts. In addition to his work at A Century of Progress, Katz was a member of the art staff of Chicagoan magazine and director of posters for the Chicago Civic Opera during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Katz, who worked in caseins and acrylics as well as oils, died in l\fiami Beach in 1974.

The tally sheets used for the presidential and vicepresidential balloting at the Repub~ican N_ationa_l Convention in 1860, held at the Wigwam m Chicago, have been purchased by th~ Society. Abrah~m Lincoln was nominated for president on the third ballot, after trailing Sen. William H. Seward on the first two ballots.

Among the manuscripts recently acquired by the Society, all by gift, are thirty-six audio tapes of the "Problems of the City Series," produced by the Community Service Department of radio station \,VAJT in 1973 and 1974; minute books, membership records, and working files of the Chicago Typographical Union o. 16; papers of the Business and Professional People for the Public Interest concerning litigation against the Chicago Housing Authority in racial discrimination matters; records of two community organizations, the Lake View Citizens' Council and the South Shore Commission; papers of Chicago businessman Henry J. Willing and family; records of Johnny Hand and his son Armin, Chicago band and orchestra leaders; and additional materials from the Better G01ernment Association and the Alliance to End Repression.

Letters A Suggestion Being a history buff and a native, proud Chicagoan, I am always engrossed while reading your wellplanned, beautifully lai~-out mag~zine. I only have one suggeslion: more arucles on p10neenng women, such as the Woman's Building, Indian women, women's suffrage struggle (Mayor Daley's mother was one such suffragette), etc.

A. SUSAN STRAUS Chicago The editor replies: Thank you. We have published articles on Bessie Louise Pierce, Harriet fonroe, Mary Garden, Edith Wyatt, Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr, Mary Livermore, and l\Iyra Bradwell, and we have in hand a manuscript on the "\,Voman's Building at the Columbian Exposition. "\,Ve also review pertinent books about women. The size of our list reflects the relative newness o[ women's history, and we would be happy to hear from those working in the field.

l\ly mother and her good friend Alice Henderson were helpful in organiLing Poet1y magazine in 1912.

On page 39 of Vol. I of the bound edition, you will find my father's name just below that of H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, as one of the guarantors. In Vol. III, No. Vl, arc six of my mother's poems, many of which have been often reprinted.

During those early years, there were often Poetry banquets at the Cliff Dwellers Club. My mother held several Poetry rallies, as we called them, at our apartment. It was truly thrilling lo talk with Edgar Lee J\Iasters, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, Iax Bodenheim, and many others, and especially to listen to Vachel Lindsay read aloud from his "Congo" and "The Chinese Nightingale" while I sat inconspicuously back of the piano.

Early in 1916, I worked for several months in the Poetly office on Cass Street, as l\[iss l\Ionroc's secretary. l\Iy diary records that on January 31, I "sent back 78 bad poems." She had me read all the incoming contributions before showing them to her.

In February, I seem to have indexed her complete file from the beginning.

The year I entered college, l\Iiss¡ ?\Ion roe went to China to see her sister, l\frs. Calhoun. In 1925, my husband and I stayed with i\frs. Calhoun in Peking.

MRS. JOIIN T . .\IC CUTCIIEON

Lake Forest

The City News Bureau I have just read Mr. Dorn[eld's article on the City News Bureau [Summer 1976]. I feel he has left out one of the greatest graduates of the Bureau, Leroy "Buddy" J\IcHugh. Mr. l\IcHugh died in l\Iay 1975, after 55 years of reporting Chicago's news. He was the last survivor of The Front Page and received national press and magazine coverage many times.

GINGER LE FEVOUR

Oak Park, Ill. A. A. Dornfeld replies: ]\[any important and colorful newspapermen who started at the City New Bureau were omitted.

John Fink later ed ited the Chicago Tribune's Magazine and brought it to nationwide a ttention.

John Boettiger went to \,Vashington, married the daughter o[ Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and later became publisher o[ the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Arizona Times. Bruce Sagan came into a legacy and ended up owning a string of neighborhood newspapers, including the Southtown Economist. Harry Romanoff became a Hearst editor with a special genius for gathering news by phone. Two City News men became vice-presidents of broadcasting chains, another was chief press agent for the Republican National Committee. All were omitted for the same reason: lack of space.

Harriet Monroe Ellen Williams' art icle [Winter 1975-1976] brings back vivid memories.

For my last three years of high school, at the Universil) Sd1ool for Girls on Lake Shore Drive and Cedar Street, Harriet i\fonroe was my English teacher. She did a charming and efficient job, and got me safely into Bryn l\Iawr, where I continued with all the writing courses, includin g Verse Composition.

I have read l\Is. Williams' article with a great deal of interest. I learned a great deal about Harriet l\Ionroe and did not know that she was born in Chicago in 1860 at a time when my great-uncle, i\farshall Field, and my grnndfather were there from Conway, l\fass.

I knew J\Is. l\Ionroe in the 1930s and found her a charming person and a very good talker. . . . I often saw her with other members of her family in Chicago, especially when l\Irs. Calhoun came from Peking. . . .

IIENRY FIELD i\Iiami,Fla. Ellen Williams replies: Thank you for your reminiscences, Mrs. McCutcheon. It's good to learn that Harriet Monroe was a good teacher. She underplayed that part o( her life in her autob iography, and I was left with the impression that she was not very successful at it. Your memories of the Poetry office and Poetry rallies are important.

Your mother must have been Frances Shaw. I enjoyed her poems in the early issues of Poetry; some of them, like "Who Loves the Rain," were old favorites before I found them in Poetry. Was your father Howard Shaw, the arch itect?

As a Conway resident and faithful patron of the Field l\Iemorial Library, I am delighted that the Field family still remembers the town. Field Hill is still here, o( course; the haunt now of snowmobiles. A number of new houses have been built at the west end of Field Hill Road, where it meets Whately Road, and the town is becoming a rural suburb of Amherst and Northampton. Still, I think your grandfather and great-uncle would recognize it.

I wrote most of Harriet Monroe and th e Poetry Renaissance here, far from Chicago, and Marshall Field gave me a sense of relation to the Midwest.

Ch icago History

263

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

OFFICERS Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, rst Vice-President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary DIRECTOR

Harold K. Skramstad, Jr. TRUSTEES Bowen Blair Philip D. Block III Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon James R. Getz Philip W. Hummer

The Chicago Historical Society is a privately supported institution devoted to research and interpretation of the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look to its members and friends for financial support. Contributions to the Society are tax-deductible and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the director's office to discuss the Society's needs.

MEMBERSHIP

Willard L. King Andrew McNally III Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Gilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken

LIFE TRUSTEES Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley HONORARY TRUSTEES

Richard J. Daley, Mayor, City of Chicago Patrick L. O'Malley, President, Chicago Park District

Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of membership and dues are as follows: Annual, $20 a year; Governing Annual, $100 a year; Life, $500; and Patron, $1,000 or more. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events, listing Society programs; invitations to special programs; free admission to the building at all times; reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the museum store.

HOURS Exhibition galleries are open daily from g: 30 to 4: 30; Sundays, from 12:00 to 5:00. Library and museum research collections are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:30 (Monday through Friday during July and August). The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

THE EDUCATION OFFICE offers guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special programs for groups of all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen.

ADMISSION FEES FOR NON-MEMBERS Adults $1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays.

Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are $2.25 by mail; $2 at newsstands, bookshops, and the museum store.

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A Century of Progress, as the managers hoped it would look in a 1932 rendering by H. M. Petit, published

by Rand McNally & Co. The view is to the south.