Chicago History | Spring 2016 by Chicago History Museum

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM

Spring 2016 VOLUME XL, NUMBER 2

4 18 36 3 56

Contents An Industrial Spectacle Dominic A. Pacyga

Consumer City Daniel J. Story

Hope and Healing on the Battlefield Sister Betty Ann McNeil, D.C.

Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams

Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle

C H I C AG O H I S T O RY Editor-in-Chief Rosemary K. Adams Senior Editor Emily H. Nordstrom Assistant Editor Esther D. Wang Designer Bill Van Nimwegen

Cover: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and those who contributed to it embodied American hustle and ingenuity. For more information on the cover images, see Dominic A. Pacyga’s “An Industrial Spectacle,” beginning on page 4.

Copyright 2016 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 60614-6038 312.642.4600 chicagohistory.org ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Photography Joseph Aaron Campbell Stephen Jensen

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

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

The Honorable Rahm Emanuel Mayor, City of Chicago

TRUSTEES

James L. Alexander Gregory J. Besio Matthew J. Blakely Denise R. Cade Walter C. Carlson Warren K. Chapman Keith L. Crandell Patrick F. Daly Patrick W. Dolan James P. Duff Paul H. Dykstra T. Bondurant French Gregory L. Goldner Timothy J. Gilfoyle Mary Lou Gorno David D. Hiller Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M. Tobin E. Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Daniel S. Jaffee Gary T. Johnson Falona Joy Randye A. Kogan Judith H. Konen Michael J. Kupetis Robert C. Lee Douglas Levy Russell L. Lewis Ralph G. Moore Michael A. Nemeroff Kelly Noll

M. Bridget Reidy Larry Selander Joseph Seliga Jeff Semenchuk Kristin Noelle Smith Sarah D. Sprowl Samuel J. Tinaglia Ali Velshi Gail D. Ward Jeffrey W. Yingling HONORARY LIFE TRUSTEE

The Honorable Richard M. Daley

Barbara Levy Kipper W. Paul Krauss Fred A. Krehbiel Joseph H. Levy, Jr. Josephine Louis R. Eden Martin Robert Meers Josephine Baskin Minow Timothy P. Moen Robert J. Moore Potter Palmer John W. Rowe Jesse H. Ruiz Gordon I. Segal Paul L. Snyder

LIFE TRUSTEES

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

TRUSTEES EMERITUS

Bradford L. Ballast Paul J. Carbone, Jr. Jonathan Fanton Thomas M. Goldstein Cynthia Greenleaf David A. Gupta Jean Haider Nena Ivon Erica C. Meyer Eboo Patel Nancy K. Robinson April T. Schink Margaret Snorf Noren Ungaretti Joan Werhane

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

FROM THE EDITORI

or the past few years, the editors of Chicago History have been notified of spring’s imminent arrival by the mid-April appearance of a group of black-crowned night heron, rarely seen in Illinois, who nest in trees outside of the Museum. Unlike their delicate-looking brethren, this variety of heron is stockier, somehow fitting for an urban park. Also visible outside my window is Saint-Gaudens’s magnificent statue of Abraham Lincoln, holding silent vigil over the entire park, a looming sentinel for the ages. The herons are not-so-silent sentinels, announcing themselves almost defiantly as they return to their nests in an unlikely habitat. Also with spring comes a new edition of Chicago History, and happily we are able to demonstrate once again that good historical writing based on sound scholarship is not rare. Two of the articles in this issue capture the essence of city life in very different ways. Dominic A. Pacyga’s “An Industrial Spectacle” visits Chicago’s legendary stockyards and its neighborhood as only someone who grew up in its shadows could. In “Consumer City,” historian Daniel J. Story reveals how Chicago’s earliest ad men laid claim to the cityscape itself as a canvas, going so far as to claim their commercial work actually beautified Chicago. We devoted the winter 2015 issue to the Civil War in recognition of the 150th anniversary of its end. In fact, I received so many good articles in response to my call for papers that we couldn’t publish them all in one issue. Among those was “Hope and Healing on the Battlefield” by Sister Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., which explores the hard work of the sister-nurses of the Daughters of Charity, who served both Union and Confederate patients. For this issue, our regular columnist and Museum trustee Timothy J. Gilfoyle interviewed two of Chicago’s most dedicated public servants: William M. Daley grew up as part of the city’s First Family and went on to his own distinguished political career. Jesse White Jr.’s family arrived in Chicago during the Great Migration. In 1998, he was elected Illinois’s first African American secretary of state, but his name is equally familiar for the famed group the Jesse White Tumblers.

Rosemary K. Adams Editor-in-Chief

Errata: In the winter 2015 edition of Chicago History, we published an inaccurate reference to Fort Sumter. The Confederate Army fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, launching the start of the Civil War. From the Editor | 3

An Industrial Spectacle Chicago’s meat-packing district showcased the marvels of mass production and helped create modern consumer culture. D O M I N I C A . PAC Y G A Editor’s note: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard closed forty-five years ago, but its legend survives. The stockyards were more than an industrial district; they were an example of American hustle and ingenuity and, perhaps unlikely to our modern sensibilities, a popular tourist attraction for Americans and visitors from around the world. In this excerpt from his book Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made, Dominic A. Pacyga sheds light on what he describes as a “compelling if somewhat frightening window to the future.”

In 1914, Carl Sandburg dubbed Chicago “Hog Butcher for the World.” This panoramic view of the stockyards shows its massive size.

4 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

igh above Packingtown, on the very roofs of the slaughterhouses, visitors gathered to witness the modern in all of its terrible efficiency. Thousands of hogs waited in pens. Livestock handlers drove roughly a dozen hogs at a time onto the kill floor as fascinated spectators watched the beginning of a process that helped redefine American industry and changed interactions between animals and human beings, as well as workers and management. Swift’s massive plant killed thousands of hogs a day. Here animals met their fate at the hands of workers and machinery, creating a vast “disassembly” line that ended not just the lives of pigs but the age-old relationship between meat and mankind.

The “river of blood” that flowed just below the roof pen area attracted Chicagoans and tourist alike for most of the stockyard’s existence. At the turn of the twentieth century, a reported five hundred thousand people visited the Union Stock Yard annually. To modern sensibilities to take a tour of the stockyard and the packing plants—even to bring small children to the hog kill—might seem repulsive, but through most of its history the Union Stock Yard and the adjacent plants were major tourist attractions. Fascination with the new drew these visitors. Here people faced the modern head on with all its innovation and spectacle. For many people, Chicago’s vast livestock market and packinghouses presented a compelling if somewhat frightening window to the future. In Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made, I explain how the Chicago Stockyards helped drag the world into what I deem “the modern”: the industrial culture that appeared in the years after the Civil War, which eventually gave way to the postindustrial era we inhabit today. “The modern” is the frightening sense that something basic had shifted between man and nature. The modern was terrifying in that human beings seemed to be increasingly alienated from the ageold ways of creating goods. This was nowhere more explicit than in the changing relationship between man and food as seen in what Thomas Wilson, the president of Wilson and Company, almost lovingly referred to as the “Square Mile.” All of the basic themes of modern industrialization soon played out in the Square Mile;

This map shows the neighborhoods surrounding the stockyards, as well as the extensive rail lines that ran through the area.

Industrial Spectacle | 5

Thomas Wilson (center background), president of Wilson and Company, walks with fellow meat packers Louis H. Heyman and Edward Morris in Chicago during the beef antitrust hearing on December 6, 1911.

the large corporation, the factory system with its merging of human labor and machinery, the mass marketing of goods, and a transportation system that collected natural resources from a vast hinterland and distributed goods internationally. Machinery and the emerging factory system changed the essential relationship between people and food. People have killed animals for meat since the dawn of time. For centuries, the process was an everyday event on farms, in homes, and in butcher shops all over the world. But only in the nineteenth century did meatpacking emerge as a mass production industry. While this industry made meat more widely available and cheaper to purchase, its machinery, an enormous number of anonymous workers, and a massive marketing system came to stand between consumers and their food. The modern 6 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

arrived in packing plants across the country, but especially in Chicago. Instead of taking eight to ten hours to butcher a steer, Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s packinghouses took about thirty-five minutes; hogs and sheep took even less time. Armies of skilled and unskilled workers, men and women, operated machines and disassembled animals as they passed by on endless chains into huge refrigerated rooms. Here carcasses waited to be shipped across hundreds and even thousands of miles. The modern sped up time. Everything seemed to move more quickly, more efficiently, even if not more naturally. This proved to be part of the spectacle, the fascination with the process as it played out in the packinghouses. The speed and efficiency of these plants provided a startling look into the future for the men, women, and children who came to see the marvel of industrialization in perhaps its rawest form.

The Square Mile, first officially mapped as Section 5 of the Town of Lake, became Chicago’s entry point into both the new industrial economy and the modern world as it spurred the incredible growth of Chicago and the Midwest. It was here that the connection between meat and man was altered forever. If, as historian Perry Duis has pointed out, for many people Chicago represented a window to the future, then that future could be seen most explicitly on the kill floors of Packingtown, the western section of the Square Mile, which contained many of Chicago’s major packinghouses. Over the years, this would be a contested image. Some Chicagoans looked askance at the kill floors as a symbol of their city, but in the beginning the city’s boosters bragged of their speed and efficiency. Visitors agreed as they came to witness the spectacle provided by the packinghouses. The Union Stock Yard showed how ingenuity, greed, science, and industrialization created the modern world.

By the time the Union Stock Yard opened, machinery had been changing the nature of work, but mass industrialization in the form that would make over the Western world had only begun to emerge. The steam engine first altered humankind’s sense of time and distance with its application to shipping and railroads. Before long, the manufacturing of cloth and clothing, shoes, and other goods still dominated by skilled artisans and their helpers felt the shift of new technological advances. Soon large factories emerged creating massive cities as rural people migrated to the emerging urban centers to seek work. The relationship between human beings and machinery quickly changed, as did that between entrepreneur and worker. The factory system emerged as workers’ jobs were divided into smaller and more specific tasks. Large groups of individuals had always worked together, but now with machinery they could produce more goods and do so more quickly.

The slaughterhouses attracted thousands of international tourists. In 1923, Émile Coué (center with beard), a French pharmacist and clinical psychotherapist, watches as a worker cuts through a carcass. Industrial Spectacle | 7

The annual International Livestock Exposition, housed in the International Ampitheater, drew thousands of visitors, offering additional spectacle and entertainment in the stockyard district. Left: A trade card for the 1909 horse show. Below: A cattle procession in the International Amphitheater. Photograph by J. F. Abernathy Live Stock Photo Company

Technology made everything different. Mass production and the factory system became the fascination of the age and the topic of both scientific and popular inquiry. During the almost 106 years of its existence, the Chicago Stockyards epitomized the nation’s livestock industry. Even before the market reached its centennial celebration, over one billion head of livestock had passed through its pens. The massive packinghouses transformed the industry and created modern consumer culture. In those plants, man and animal not only met the modern in the form of the factory system and technological innovation that altered the process of the killing, 8 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Right: This “award of honor” granted the bearer a trip to the 1923 International Livestock Exposition.

dressing, and marketing of meat, but also shifted the relationship between worker and owner, manufacturer and consumer. The livestock market opened on Christmas Day 1865. As a tourist attraction, the stockyard defined Chicago to a fascinated public in the post–Civil War era. The rich and the poor, royalty and rubes traveled to see the maze of pens laid out across the prairie and then to be startled by the efficiency of the “disassembly” line of the packinghouses as they turned live breathing animals into hunks of pork, mutton, and beef in mere minutes. Beyond the fascination with the killing floors, other marvels attracted visitors to the stockyards. The simple gathering of tens of thousands of animals to be placed on the market first insured a captivated public. Then the phenomenon of horse racing, professional baseball, the immensely popular International Livestock Exposition, and the myriad entertainment, political, consumer, and sporting events housed in the International Amphitheater all brought sightseers to the Square Mile. These marvels did not distract from the kill floors, but rather added to the attraction of the Square Mile. The yards presented “spectacle” to a city and a kind of industrial pageantry to the nation. The first guidebook to the new Union Stock Yard appeared even before the livestock market opened. Jack Wing, an itinerant journalist, wrote a pamphlet describing the Union Stock Yard in December 1865, prior to the actual Christmas Day kickoff. For months, Chicago’s newspapers had covered the building of the stockyard, and Wing found himself a frequent visitor to the site, in the then-suburban Town of Lake. He first went down on Friday September 1, 1865, as part of a Board of Trade excursion to see the construction firsthand. Two weeks later, he returned with a group of Englishmen, including Sir Morton Petoe, the English entrepreneur, civil engineer, railroad developer, and member of Parliament. Wing wrote an article for the Chicago Times based on this visit. In November 1865, James H. Goodsell, the newspaper’s city editor, assigned Wing the task of writing a complete account of the Union Stock Yard. Wing’s relationship with Goodsell was strained, and he feared that he would be fired as soon as he handed in the article, so on November 24, he conceived of the idea of a tract that he could write to make extra money if he lost his job. The next day, he returned to the Union Stock Yard and pitched such a brochure, but to no avail. The reporter persisted, and on November 28, William Tucker, one of the owners of the Briggs House, a hotel on the corner of Wells and Randolph Streets, agreed to buy five hundred copies of the proposed booklet. Several railroad men also agreed to purchase one hundred copies each. Wing felt that if he could obtain some advertisements, he would be able to self-publish the piece.

Jack Wing’s 1865 guidebook lauded the stockyards’ great engineering feats and breathtaking views. It was published before the official opening of the yards.

The next Friday, December 1, Wing went out to the Union Stock Yard to get information on the several old stockyards that were soon to disappear. Four cattle dealers agreed to place advertisements at twenty-five dollars a piece in the proposed publication. At that point, the editor of the Chicago Republican offered Wing a job. That Saturday, he signed up two more cattlemen in the stockyards to advertise in his pamphlet. He then went back to the Times offices, took his stockyard article, and quit the newspaper. His printer delivered The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago: Their Railroad Connections, Bank, and Exchange, The Hough House, Water Supply and General Features also, A Sketch of the Live Stock Trade and the Old Yards on December 12, and Wing went about happily gathering the money promised to him by advertisers and those interested in copies. The booklet sold well, and soon another edition was needed. Colonel Rossel M. Hough, the superintendent of construction of the Union Stock Yard, said that he would take two hundred copies. Other orders poured in, and Wing put out a second edition with even more advertisements than the first edition.1 Industrial Spectacle | 9

Originally known as the Hough House, the Transit House Hotel opened with the Union Stock Yard in 1865 and hosted high-ranking visitors such as politicians, businessmen, and foreign dignitaries.

In the tradition of Chicago boosterism, Wing’s guide lauded the great engineering feats, such as pipes to drain the swampy area, the accommodations for railroads, noting that five hundred railroad cars could be unloaded at any one time. Wing also proclaimed the market’s Hough House the finest hotel in the West. The author suggested that the view from the south veranda of the guesthouse was unequaled and worthy of a landscape artist. Wing’s hyperbole would not be the last time exaggeration would be used to describe both the Union Stock Yard and Packingtown.2 News of the Union Stock Yard spread quickly, and it became a sight to see in Chicago. In the summer of 1866, delegates from the Cincinnati City Council—the city that had only recently lost the title of “Porkopolis” to Chicago—arrived. They traveled by train to the Town of Lake where P. R. Chandler, the president of the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company, welcomed them. The Cincinnatians visited the new tunnel crib and waterworks, various breweries, and grain elevators, and called Chicago a “wonder of the world.” Chandler explained the market’s facilities as the visitors toured the stockyard and dined at the hotel. The next year the Civil War hero Major General Philip H. Sheridan visited. Several notables escorted Sheridan from the Tremont House in downtown Chicago to the stockyard by carriage, where they inspected livestock along with the alleys and streets of the complex. Sheridan and his company then met with drovers and commission men in the Exchange Building. Afterward, the entourage proceeded to the Hough House for lunch before visiting Cullerton’s packinghouse on Eighteenth 10 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Street to see the butchering of hogs. Sheridan saw the modern industry being born as six hogs were butchered per minute at the plant.3 Packers were not the only promoters of such tourism. In 1869, the Chicago Tribune suggested various sightseeing drives around the city and suburbs and included the Union Stock Yard. The newspaper recommended a carriage ride down Michigan or Wentworth Avenues to Forty-Seventh Street and then over to the Dexter Park racetrack adjacent to the stockyard. The “fashionable” time for driving the route was early on a Sunday morning, in order to see the horses at Dexter Park. While the new racetrack attracted the “better” classes with a day of “sport,” or rather gambling, for many tourists the lure remained the adjacent livestock market.4 In 1871, Grand Duke Alexei Alexandrovich, the fourth son of Czar Alexander II of Russia, toured the United States. Mayor Joseph Medill, who presided over the city as it recovered from the Great Fire of 1871, called for a committee composed of Chicago’s business leaders to manage the details of the Russian visit. Chandler announced that the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company would provide lunch for the visitors at the renamed Hough House, now the Transit House. The grand duke spent New Year’s Day 1872 visiting the sights of Chicago, then the livestock market and a large packinghouse. His party arrived by carriage to the horse stables adjacent to Dexter Park. Here the general manager, John B. Sherman, met them and showed off his menagerie including finely bred livestock, Mexican hogs, and other “curiosities of the animal kingdom.” After visiting the stockyard, the Russians explored the Hutchinson Packinghouse. The new plant, located to the west of the stockyard, had the largest capacity in Chicago, and the packing process fascinated the Russian royalty. The grand duke’s entourage then visited Dexter Park and went on to the Transit House where Sherman greeted them for lunch, with abundant toasts. Mayor Medill saluted his visitors and said, “May the rivalry between Russia and America be in the future what it has long been in the past, a rivalry to feed a hungry world.” After the festivities, the party again visited Dexter Park to take part in a pigeon shoot, another stockyard tradition.5 American politicians soon saw a visit to the Union Stock Yard as a necessary campaign stop. Here they met average working people and paid homage to the modern as it transformed American society. It gave politicians a gritty populist appeal while endorsing modern industrialism and the new American economy. They witnessed the latest innovations in industrial production along with the vast market that brought the produce of the nation’s prairies and farms to the table of the public. Industrial capitalism along with crowds of possible voters provided an irresistible campaign stop for any politi-

cian. On October 23, 1894, Thomas R. Reed of Maine, a powerful Republican who served several terms as Speaker of the House and had presidential ambitions, arrived in Chicago and spoke at a noontime rally in the stockyards. Some five thousand people greeted Reed in the Exchange Building courtyard. Stenographers, clerks, and typists hung out of windows to watch the political spectacle. Men stood on the pen fences and waved as the party rode down Exchange Avenue. Gus Swift met Reed and took his party into his plant for a tour.6

Mayor Fred A. Busse touted the stockyards as one of the “Seven Wonders of Chicago,” and packers such as Swift and Company published their own guidebooks to lure visitors to view this marvel.

While Russian royalty and American politicians might get an extensive visit and lunch, others visited the stockyard in a less formal way. In 1889, an estimated fifty thousand “transient” visitors—what we would call tourists—came to Chicago annually. The Union Stock Yards attracted many of these. Packinghouse owners invited many to inspect their plants as they fought to have their chilled beef accepted in markets across the country. Members of the Pan American Congress visited the Swift, Libby, and Armour packinghouses in 1889. In 1890, a group of businessmen, disappointed because they could not visit the yards due to inclement weather, were shown instead a papier-mâché model in the dining room of the Richelieu Hotel downtown. Large groups such as the Knights of Pythias often arranged to tour the stockyards and Packingtown.7 Moreover, since the Union Stock Yard was open to the public, Chicagoans and others visited the complex daily. Many sought out the advice of “Old Man” Hildreth, the caretaker of the Chicago City Railway station in the stockyards. Over the years, he directed visitors in their search for one attraction or another. Boys often led curiosity seekers on excursions. The individuals involved determined the cost, but young guides usually charged twenty-five cents for a tour of the Union Stock Yard— fifty cents for both the stockyards and packinghouses. The packinghouse owners soon opened their plants for inspection by the public, and the larger packers organized formal tours led by trained and uniformed guides, putting the young streetwise entrepreneurs out of business. Eventually, visitors would be met in elegantly appointed lounges. The large packinghouses invested in catwalks and balconies from which guests could witness their industrial operations, explicated by signs.8 By the early 1900s, regular tours of the stockyards and packinghouses were commonplace. In 1903, to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the building of Fort Dearborn, an event that signaled the American arrival in the area, Chicagoans held citywide celebrations. By that time, Swift and Company passed out its own “Visitors Reference Book” to guests, which described nineteen stations with illustrations that visitors would stop on during their tour of the massive plant. Several years later, Swift and Company handed out a well-illustrated guide, A Visit to Swift & Company, Union Stock Yards, Chicago as a souvenir that could be mailed off to friends describing the “Clean—wholesome—efficient” characteristics of the company’s Chicago plant. The pamphlet also depicted the “system” that made the company and the industry so efficient. In addition, these souvenirs gave proof to the folks back home that one had actually made the trip and witnessed the spectacle of the modern.9 In August 1910, the packers prepared to receive the most visitors they had hosted since the 1893 Columbian Industrial Spectacle | 11

Stereopticon photographs like this one showing Armour’s plant documented the various slaughterhouse processes. Such images were popular both locally and around the world.

Exposition. Ten thousand Knights Templars, in Chicago for their annual meeting, visited on August 10. Women made up more than half of the sightseers, and guides took them through the plants in groups of one hundred. Every packinghouse opened its doors, and excursions began every ten minutes. A mounted detail of stockyard employees spread out over Packingtown and provided information to the throngs. For visitors, the spectacle contained in the Square Mile began even before reaching the main gate as the stench of the stockyards immediately affected those not accustomed to them. Chicagoans complained of “curdled” air. One description had trolley riders entering the “odor zone” and young women covering their faces with handkerchiefs as even hardened laborers attempted to protect themselves from the stench. The writer complained, “The combined smells seemed to focus in a crescendo of coagulated putridity.” Grand Duke Boris, the cousin of the Russian czar, exclaimed in 1902, “I never smelled such an awful smell, but the stockyards are greater than my imagination conceived.”10 Russian grand dukes, French journalists, Japanese businessmen and their wives, British trade unionists, Irish nationalists, Texas cattlemen, and everyday Americans all visited the Union Stock Yard and packing plants. Rudyard Kipling’s account of his visit to the Square Mile remains among the most graphic. Touring the complex in 1889, he described the hog kill and its victims, “They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then they were so excessively dead, and the man in the 12 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

dripping, clammy, hot passage did not seem to care.” The stockyards fascinated Sarah Bernhardt, the famous actress, who described it in vivid terms in her memoirs. She wrote of “an abominable smell” and of the “almost human cries of the pigs” being slaughtered. The German sociologist, Max Weber, visited in 1904 and also described the plants in vivid terms: From the moment when the unsuspecting bovine enters the slaughtering area, is hit by a hammer and collapses, whereupon it is immediately gripped by an iron clamp, is hoisted in the air, and starts on its journey, it is in constant motion—past ever-new workers who eviscerate and skin it, etc., but are always (in the rhythm of work) tied to the machine that pulls the animal past them. For Kipling and the others, this terrifying spectacle portrayed a modern world that shattered traditional relationships and pointed to a frightening future. It stank of barbarity despite the fact that it harnessed man and machine in a new industrial economy. Chicagoans often did not feel this way. They were proud of the stockyards and Packingtown. In 1908, Mayor Busse proclaimed the Union Stock Yard as one of the “Seven Wonders of Chicago” that should be visited by any tourist and certainly by all Chicagoans. The Chicago Association of Commerce, on the other hand, in contesting the views of the mayor and much of the public tried to rid the city of its cattle town image, and attempted to direct visitors away from the stockyards, but still the square mile of

packinghouses, pens, and chutes attracted tourists and Chicagoans alike. The stockyards were Chicago.11 Those who could not visit the Chicago Union Stock Yard or Packingtown in person could purchase the various illustrated guides or use a stereopticon or stereoscope to explore the area. These were a popular form of entertainment, allowing people to see the world from their living rooms. Photographers took a picture with a special camera that had two lenses and printed the photographs side by side. When viewed through a special device, the pictures blended into a three-dimensional image. By the end of the nineteenth century, many middle-and upper-class people owned these devices. They were praised for their accurate depictions of the world, bringing to the average person sights often unobtainable without a good deal of expense and travel.12 Stereopticon photographs of the Chicago Stockyards and Packingtown covered just about every phase of the process, and they provide a fascinating historical record of methods and conditions in the Chicago packinghouses. At times, the stereopticon cards contained a written explanation of the scene depicted on the back. Others simply left the explanation to the photograph. In either case, images of the pens, chutes, and packing plants found a ready audience in the stereopticon trade. These images were not only sold in the United States; Europeans and others could view the sights of Chicago’s meat industry no matter how far they lived from South Halsted Street.13

Postcards too brought the scenes of the Chicago Stockyards to individuals around the world. Their images, like the stereopticons, depicted not only the market, but also the packinghouses. Views of cattle in the pens seemed to be among the most popular, but others showed the Transit House hotel, the horse market, and the various draft horse teams owned by the packers and the USY&T Company, as well as the Exchange Building and the various packinghouse general offices. Still others featured the packing process, including the Hurford Wheel, the sheep kill, the cattle knocking pens, coolers, beef dressing and cutting departments, and aerial views of the packinghouses.14 Jules Huret explained that the packers realized the value of publicity and never failed to take advantage of it. The stereopticons and color postcards allowed them to amaze a large public with the size and complexity of the industry, and to convince the skeptical potential customer of the cleanliness of their methods.15 Some packers even produced the meat industry equivalent of baseball cards. Libby, McNeil and Libby issued colorful trading cards depicting the images of literary characters such as Shakespeare’s Falstaff enjoying canned Libby, McNeil and Libby meat. Others extolled their cooked corned beef as valuable for explorers and travelers by portraying a frontiersman walking into the wilderness with his gun, his dog, and a huge can of corned beef under his arm. The back of the card contained statements

Many packers produced trading cards—the equivalent of baseball cards—such as this Swift & Co. trade card from c.1893. Industrial Spectacle | 13

Swift and Libby were not the only firms to dabble in the art of advertisement. Armour and Company put out calendars often depicting beautiful young women. These calendars carried the Armour name, and the company also distributed trading cards with these images each embossed with the packer’s name. Armour even issued vanity boxes or women’s compacts with the Luxor soap name on them and marked Armour & Company on the bottom. The company issued advertising ink blotters with Armour’s Magnolia Oleomargarine depicted on the card. In addition, the company published recipe books in order to promote Armour products. Not to be outdone, the Union Stock Yard and Transit Company produced its own memorabilia. Images of the Union Stock Yard decorated teacups, glass paperweights, letter openers, and other advertising materials. Coin savings banks made in the form of hogs or the Livestock National Bank appeared throughout the stockyard’s history. Comical postcards depicting visitors

Libby, McNeil & Libby often referenced Shakespeare in their advertisements, poetically suggesting that a cooked corned beef was an appropriate gift for lovers.

by various chemists as to the quality, smell, and taste of the canned meat. Yet another card had two children playing with an empty corned beef can using it as a toy boat with the caption “Even the children make a toy of an empty can.” During the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, Swift and Company greeted thousands of tourists to their plants and distributed colorful cards depicting their exhibit at the world’s fair. These included an elegant depiction of an exhibit of a Swift Refrigerator Line Express railcar made out of glass so that the product lines could be easily observed. Other Swift products surrounded the picture of the faux railcar exhibit. On the interior of the two-fold card was a list of all of Swift’s exhibits at the Columbian Exposition and an aerial view of the Swift plant with all the major buildings marked including viaducts for moving livestock from the pens. The back of the folded card pictured an elegantly dressed young woman sitting on a fence trying to shoo hogs, sheep, and cattle away with her parasol. The cards could easily be used to decorate the visitor’s wall back home and to remind them of the “excellence” of Swift products. 14 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Swift & Co. published this more prosaic and straightforward ad for its ham and bacon.

Nelson Morris and Company encouraged visitors to the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Columbian Exposition to view its display at the fair.

to the yards looking hungrily at livestock were distributed to remind visitors, and their friends back home, of the importance and purpose of the Worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Greatest Livestock Market. The various commission firms also used such promotional methods to entice producers to ship livestock under their care to the stockyard. Commission men distributed

bullet pencils, notebooks, and printed materials imprinted with their company names. The Wood Brothers commission firm circulated an illustrated biennial report of the statistics important to shippers to the Union Stock Yard. These also featured portraits of employees of the firm and photographs of the Union Stock Yard, as well as the other stockyards in which the firm traded.16 Industrial Spectacle | 15

Burnham and Root designed the terra-cotta arch of the National Live Stock Bankâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s main entrance (left), and the Northwestern Terra Cotta Company created it in 1888. The arch is now on display at the Chicago History Museum (above).

The Drovers Journal, published within the gates of the Union Stock Yard, not only disseminated news of the market and the livestock world, but also put out other publications for producers, commission men, and packers alike. The newspaper supplied a vital means of communication and advertisement for the Union Stock Yard and the meatpackers under various titles from 1873 until the closing of the stockyard in 1971. In turn, the National Provisioner, a trade journal of the meatpacking industry, also supplied news of the Union Stock Yard and the packers around the nation. Beyond newspapers and trade journals, other publications promoted the Union Stock Yard and Packingtown. In 1896, W. Joseph Grand published his Illustrated History of the Union Stock Yard. Grand explained that his book included sketches of familiar faces and sights as well as humorous stories, facts, and figures. O. Benson Jr. provided extensive photographs for the heavily illustrated book 16 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

that told the story of Jack-Knife Ben, Willie the Telegraph Messenger, and other colorful stockyard characters. Grand began a tradition of tall tales of the stockyards, which embedded the myths of the Union Stock Yard in Chicago’s history, and the history of the rural hinterland beyond. Memoirs and “histories,” often self-published, appeared, and even as late as 2011 a former member of the management of the Union Stock Yard self-published yet another memoir.17 The Union Stock Yard and Packingtown produced images and texts for public consumption alongside food, leather, lard, and the other by-products of the industry. These celebrated the spectacle by portraying both the human and familiar side of the industry along with a demonstration of the industrial process. And to think it all began in a swamp.

Dominic A. Pacyga is professor of history in the Department of Humanities, History, and Social Sciences at Columbia College Chicago. His recent books include Chicago: A Biography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

ENDNOTES 1 Robert Williams, ed., The Chicago Diaries of John M. Wing, 1865–1866 (Carbondale and Edwardsville, IL, 2002), xxiv–xxvii, 34–70; Chicago Times, September 18, 1865. 2 Jack Wing, The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago: Their Railroad Connections, Bank, and Exchange, The Hough House, Water Supply and General Features also, A Sketch of the Live Stock Trade and the Old Yards (Chicago, 1865), 4–5, 24. 3 Chicago Tribune, December 5, 1867. 4 Chicago Tribune, July 18, 1869. 5 Chicago Tribune, December 30, 1871, January 3, 1872. 6 Chicago Tribune, October 24, 1894. 7 Chicago Tribune, February 24, 1889, August 18, 1889, October 22, 1889; Daily Sun, December 30, 1891. 8 Daily Sun, May 28, 1892; Swift and Company advertisement in The National Provisioner, January 5, 1907, 18. 9 George Wm. Lambert, A Trip Through the Union Stock Yards and Slaughter Houses, Chicago, U.S.A. (Chicago, n.d., c. 1890s); John O’Brien, Through the Chicago Stock Yards: A Handy Guide to the Packing Industry (Chicago and New York, 1907); Swift and Company, Swift & Company

I L LU S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 4–5, ICHi-40085; 5 top, map by Chicago CartoGraphics; 6, DN-0058058; 7, DN-0075800; 8, top: ICHi-40626; middle: ICHi-68255; bottom: author’s collection; 9, ICHi-85823; 10, ICHi-22679; 11, top: ICHi-85824; middle: ICHi85825; bottom: ICHi-85826; 12, ICHi-03287; 13, ICHi-38149; 14, left: ICHi-85828; right: ICHi-38150_b; 15, ICHi-38143_b; 16, top: ICHi-40951; bottom: ICHi-40088. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the history of the meat industry in Chicago, see Louise Carroll Wade, Chicago’s Pride: The Stockyards, Packingtown, and Environs in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987). To learn more about the family, politics, and work life of the Back of the Yards community, see Thomas J. Jablonsky, Pride in the Jungle: Community and Everyday Life in Back of the Yards Chicago (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Reprinted with permission from Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made by Dominic A. Pacyga published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2015 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.

Visitors Reference Book, Swift and Company, A Visit to Swift & Company, Union Stock Yards, Chicago (Chicago, n.d.). The copy of A Visit to Swift & Company, Union Stock Yards, Chicago is postmarked February 15, 1917. 10 Chicago Tribune, July 29, 1910, August 19, 1902. 11 Sarah Bernhardt, My Double Life: Memoirs of Sarah Bernhardt (London, 1907), 400–401. Quoted in Lawrence A. Scaff, Max Weber in America (Princeton and Oxford, 2011), 45; Rudyard Kipling, “How I Struck Chicago, and How Chicago Struck Me,” in Bessie Louise Pierce, ed., How Others See Chicago: Impressions of Visitors, 1673–1933 (Chicago, 1933, 2004), 259; Chicago Tribune, August 11, 1910, November 16, 1910, June 6, 1905, September 25, 1909, April 10, 1908, October 1, 1908, March 22, 1908, July 22, 1906, August 15, 1909. Lisa Krissoff Boehm, Popular Culture and the Enduring Myth of Chicago, 1871–1968 (New York and London, 2004), 81–82. 12 For an exhaustive discussion of the development of the stereopticon, see Laura Burd Schiavo, “From Phantom Image to Perfect Vision: Physiological Optics, Commercial Photography, and the Popularization of the Stereoscope,” in

Lisa Gitelman and Geoffret B. Pingree, eds., New Media, 1740–1915 (Cambridge, 2003), 113–38. 13 There are various websites dedicated to the story of the stereopticon. I have an extensive collection of the cards, and many of these were used to illustrate the original publication. 14 For the importance of postcards and Chicago’s place in their history, see John A. Jakle and Keith A. Sculle, Picturing Illinois: Twentieth-Century Postcard Art from Chicago to Cairo (Urbana, Chicago, and Springfield, 2012). The authors deal with the stockyards on pages 63–65. 15 Chicago Tribune, June 23, 1905. 16 Stockyard memorabilia often appear for sale on the Internet, especially on eBay. Wood Brothers, Ninth Biennial Edition of Facts and Figures of Chicago Live Stock Trade for Twenty-Four Years with Other Valuable Information (Chicago, 1904). 17 W. Joseph Grand, Illustrated History of the Union Stockyards: Sketch-book of Familiar Faces and Places at The Yards (Chicago, 1896); Theodore Alexander Herr, Seventy Years in the Chicago Stockyards (New York, 1968); Larry Caine, My City: The Great Chicago Stockyards, The International Amphitheater, The International Livestock Show, etc . . . etc . . . etc: An Autobiography (2011).

Industrial Spectacle | 17

Consumer City From 1890 to 1930, outdoor advertisers transformed the cityscape and developed a surprisingly nuanced vision of Chicagoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential. DA N I E L J . S T O RY

n the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a question loomed large over Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s cities: amidst rapid growth, what would they become? Would the diversity of people, buildings, and teetering infrastructure push cities to their breaking point, or could some sense of order be found that might secure a more humane and prosperous future? Given its exceptional pace of expansion, Chicago faced these challenges to a more acute degree than perhaps any other American city at the time. And as diverse as the challenges it faced, so too were the voices who lobbied for reform: architects and urban planners, religious leaders, utopian visionaries, literary writers, even academics. Adding to this diverse group, another surprisingly visionary force emerged in turn-of-the-century Chicago: outdoor advertisers. Although critics often accused billboards of adding to urban disorder, advertisers were in fact in the process of a transformation. As their industry grew ever larger and more rationalized, their work transformed the landscape of countless cities across the nation. Along the way, they interacted with a variety of supporters and detractors and, in the process, developed a surprisingly nuanced vision of what cities could become in the light of a new consumer age. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, Chicago became the national center of the rapidly growing outdoor advertising industry. In the 1870s, the R. J. Gunning and Thomas Cusack Companies were founded in the city and soon became key national leaders in their field. By the 1890s, Gunning, Cusack, and the American Posting Service, headed by R. C. Campbell, were the cityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s three leading outdoor advertising businesses along with approximately fifty other smaller firms.1 Trade associations were also headquartered in Chicago, the most important of which was the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, which remains the primary 18 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Park Row, now 11th Street, east of Michigan Avenue, Chicago, 1910. Photograph by Charles R. Clark

Consumer City | 19

national trade organization.2 Additionally, after 1910, several promotional booklets and trade magazines were published here, most notably The Poster (renamed Advertising Outdoors in 1930), the industry’s leading news and promotional journal. Not surprisingly, such industry concentration had significant effects on Chicago’s cityscape: “It is doubtful whether any of the metropolitan cities can outrival Chicago as a vantage ground for the billboard advertiser,” claimed an 1896 article in Billboard Advertising.3 It was not so much the number of signs that set the city apart, the author stated, but their placement in prominent and strategic locations. Billboards were positioned liberally along all major transportation routes, on street railways, on major thoroughfares, and throughout the busy downtown business district. “Along State and Clark,” noted another article, “the railroad tracks . . . are fenced in along the streets. On Wabash Ave there is unimproved property, to say nothing of houses, completely fenced in and plastered with boards.”4 With Chicago so covered,

As a young man, Robert J. Gunning (above, c. 1893) “chose his own occupation, apprenticing himself to the sign painting business.” Using his experience and natural business acumen, Gunning went on to establish one of the nation’s most profitable outdoor advertising companies. Photograph by John Joseph Flinn

Chicago was a hub for all aspects of the burgeoning advertising industry. Above: The cover of the Arbitrator, an early trade magazine “devoted to the interests of western advertisers.” 20 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

one contributor concluded, “There is no escaping the sign board.”5 According to another enthusiastic estimation, “It is calculated that there is enough paper posted in Chicago annually to encircle the globe.”6 Not only numerous, billboard displays were increasingly large. Many locations received not one but multiple boards, frequently linked together in unbroken lines and stacked two and three high. An 1899 Chicago Tribune article cited multistoried billboards at Forty-Third Street and Indiana Avenue as well as a number around Lincoln Park as examples of signs throughout the city that threatened to cut off the views of streets and parks.7 Wall paintings could at times be significantly larger than the growing collage of billboards. One notable painting by the Thomas Cusack Company covered close to ten stories of the side of a building on the corner of Madison and Wabash; the advertising copy claimed the wall to be the “largest picture in the world” and displayed the height dimensions of various aspects of the design. In the same moment of this tremendous increase, many of Chicago’s elite were attempting to establish the city as a center of art.8 Following the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, these sentiments rapidly evolved

Upon completion in 1888, William Le Baron Jenneyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Manhattan Building dominated South Dearborn Street. The R. J. Gunning advertisement on the building next door (c. 1895) was clearly visible to all who came to marvel at the sixteen-story skyscraper. Photograph by J. W. Taylor Consumer City | 21

Thomas Cusack (above, c. 1899) built “one of the largest sign and advertising enterprises in the country.” He was also active in politics, serving on the Chicago Board of Education and in the US House of Representatives. Photograph by Lloyd Shaw

into a national reform movement that adopted the “City Beautiful” as its mantra.9 Inspired by the neoclassical style of architect Daniel Burnham and the landscape architecture of Frederick Law Olmsted, the local Chicago Beautiful movement collided squarely with the city’s expanding outdoor advertising industry and its billboards, which were considered a particularly egregious affront to reformers’ artistic vision of Chicago’s potential. Founded in 1899, the Municipal Art League of Chicago became the leading voice of this crusade. According to minutes from an April 29, 1902, meeting, the group agreed to target two primary issues that it felt were hindering the city’s progress: smoke and billboards. “The former,” it was said, “has been mitigated to a considerable extent. . . . The invasion of the latter has increased notwithstanding restrictive legislation.”10 Reformers’ objections were manifold. The sheer size of many signs, including one downtown said to be nearly four stories in height, was faulted not only as a visual obstruction but also as “a danger to pedestrians,” particularly in high winds.11 Indeed, on more than one occasion, newspapers reported the downing of billboards during storms, in one case fatally striking a passing pedestrian.12 Furthermore, police and residents alike testified that billboards concealed various forms of criminal

Billboard opponents were affronted by the ever-increasing size and prominence of outdoor advertisements, such as this double row of signs along South Cottage Grove Avenue, February 7, 1908. Photograph by the Chicago Daily News, Inc. 22 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

The Cusack Company outdid itself with this multistory advertisement for the Wilson Distilling Company, Madison Street and Wabash Avenue, 1895. Photograph by Charles R. Clark Consumer City | 23

Some of reformersâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; strongest objections concerned advertisements placed in residential and recreational areas. Above: An undated advertisement for Maurice L. Rothschild, a prominent menswear store on State Street (1906â&#x20AC;&#x201C;61). Below: Billboards line the lakefront at the Wilson Avenue Bathing Beach, 1919. Photograph by the Chicago Daily News, Inc.

24 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Added to all of this, reformers viewed the ads themselves as inartistic and distasteful. During a 1915 Building Committee hearing, for example, one man complained of a billboard he was forced to pass each day as he walked to Lake Shore Drive that in large letters displayed the word “constipation.” In the same meeting, a still more heated controversy arose over sexually suggestive images: “Isn’t it a fact,” interposed Ald. H. E. Miller, a member of the committee, “that the teachers take the children to the Art institute [sic] and show them nude figures?” “That is true,” was the response. “But the nude is pure: we want it taught to our children. It is the arms and legs with suggestions of nudity that we oppose.”16

Miss Helen Peterson walks past an advertisement for oven baked beans, possibly expressing her distain for the debris collecting beneath it. Photograph by the Chicago Daily News, Inc.

activity, serving as a diversion for individuals running from the police and offering hiding places from which thieves could surprise passersby.13 Still greater emphasis was given to the allegedly unsanitary conditions created by the presence of billboards. In a March 1914 superior court hearing, proponents of billboard regulation testified that the space behind more than half of the signs they investigated held “all kinds of rubbish and refuse, from which offensive and unwholesome odors arise.”14 No criticism was as strongly pursued, however, as the placement of billboards in numerous objectionable locations. While a limited number of signs in Chicago’s downtown business district might be tolerated, their presence along the city’s boulevards, near its many public parks, and in predominantly residential streets was viewed as a nuisance of the worst kind. Union Park, Washington Square, and Lincoln Park, among others, were cited as locations sullied by large signs. One article stated, “St. Gaudens’ [sic] statue of Lincoln has a western setting of a billboard a block long . . . at the gate of [Lincoln] park, [it is] the first thing to greet the people.”15

With these arguments in hand, along with the backing of prominent Chicagoans, including Louis Sullivan, Bertha Palmer, Daniel Burnham, and Marshall Field, the Municipal Art League conducted a decades-long legal and public relations campaign aimed at driving back outdoor advertising in the city. Their effectiveness, however, was limited. The resulting legislation introduced relatively mild safety and permit requirements along with specific restrictions on residential advertising. The latter point was subject to numerous and often successful appeals by advertisers who insisted that private property rights allowed them to construct signs on any location they could legally secure, residential or otherwise. The right of a city to regulate residential advertising was not upheld until a 1917 decision by the United States Supreme Court in the case Thomas Cusack Company v. the City of Chicago. Such legal success was certainly important for reformers, but ultimately, it was not enough to stem the tide of outdoor advertisers whose industry grew at its most rapid rate to date during this very period.17 Advertisers’ success, at least in part, lay in their abilities to adapt and respond to challengers’ objections. Even as they doggedly appealed legal action, in most public debate they sought common ground with reformers by emphasizing the artistic merits of their advertisements. Sometimes this took the form of very practical gestures, such as in 1906 when R. J. Gunning announced a plan to make his own contribution to Chicago Beautiful aspirations: These signs are now going to be “boulevard” as rapidly as we can accomplish the job. Where they are in unsightly vacant lots, the greater part of which, of course, they hide, we shall fill in the ground in front of them, sod most of it, and plant the rest in flowers, with a shrub or two at the ends to give it a finish. We shall start this, naturally, near the boulevards, where Consumer City | 25

police protection may be had for these flower beds. Then gradually, as the community grows accustomed to them, we shall spread them through the Ghetto and wherever our signs go.18 Such improvement of city properties was a common argument used in defense of billboards. In 1914, G. B. Read of the Cusack Company testified that their signs had improved an area along Sheridan Road near Grace Street on the city’s North Side. Before their arrival, its vacant lots had been “unsightly and covered with rubbish, broken boats, and dilapidated huts” and, furthermore, had frequently attracted some of the city’s homeless. According to Read, the company had “cleared the lot and improved things in every way.”19 Most importantly, outdoor advertisers saw no contradiction between consumer messaging and artistic value. On the contrary, displays of consumer art served both to educate the public on the newest products and services while at the same time aesthetically educating the many

Chicagoans who might never visit the Art Institute. One of the more bold examples of such an argument came in a 1912 presentation to the Chicago City Club by US Lithograph Company manager Albert de Montluzin: “We have had posters go up on the billboards in eight colors and gold,” he boasted. “Talk about beautifying your city – why, gentlemen, by putting billboards in front of the vacant lots . . . we can make them beautiful by a wealth of colors.” Even many artists, he argued, were attracted to the medium of the billboard as “the one place to let out their art because of the size permitted.” In fact, de Montluzin predicted the day when “the billboards are going to be your public galleries, out in the open, instead of the restricted galleries that your high artists want to have inside of stone walls.”20 According to Chicago’s outdoor advertisers, city residents did not have to choose between art and commerce when billboards offered them both.21 As significant as these conflicts were, advertisers’ abilities to withstand legal challenges rested ultimately in the

Outdoor advertisers boldly promoted their services, often emphasizing the size and constant presence of their products. Here, the Cusack Company asserted, “Nothing is more graceful than magnitude.” 26 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Published in a promotional brochure for the General Outdoor Advertising Company, this map depicts billboard coverage in the Chicago area, c. 1930. The â&#x20AC;&#x153;24-sheetâ&#x20AC;? poster, measuring approximately twenty-one feet wide by nine feet high, was the standard size of billboards at the time. Consumer City | 27

still greater support they enjoyed from their many commercial clients. And here—in the many ways they promoted their services—their claims could be even more bold. Not surprisingly, advertisers often emphasized the size of their billboards, such as a Cusack promotional that read, “Big?—I’ll say so! Why, it’s as big as a house.”22 A similar ad featured a large billboard that covered almost the entirety of the city in its background.23 It was not merely the size of ads, however, that recommended them but their constant presence. Unlike newspaper or magazine advertisements, billboards remained in place for days, weeks, even months. According to George Hawkins in his promotional booklet Poster Advertising, “You simply cannot get away from it, and, consciously or otherwise, it burns its way into your mind through an ever alert vision.”24 Furthermore, billboards could place such messages in distant locations, giving clients a presence in the neighborhoods of faraway customers. As another Cusack ad read, “Why don’t you localize, or rather neighborize your business?”25 Moreover, outdoor advertisers argued that their ads would transform the dull gray of the industrial city into a landscape of vibrant color, a point made abundantly clear in numerous promotional drawings by the Cusack Company. At times, advertisers underscored the positive impact of their ads by calling attention to what the city might be like without them. In an article in The Poster, contributor Barker Madison described a nightmarish dream in which the city had been stripped of all of the color of its outdoor advertising: Only bare walls and the eye-sockets of holes-in-theground. . . . Batteries of brick and cement, and stone and gaunt steel, led into the distance. We could have screamed, from the very monotony of them. There was a glut of architecture, maudlin back-drop of smoke and masonry. And the world seemed made up of a million windows.

study of Chicago’s major thoroughfares and neighborhoods. It also, however, led advertisers to identify the moving masses not primarily as workers or producers but as consumers. More important still, advertisers believed that this consumer identity was heightened when residents were out of their homes and traveling through the city. In other words, the power of outdoor advertising was in its ability to reach consumers at “the most important time of all—the purchasing time.”27 Such notions quickly developed into what was essentially a consumer psychology of urban movement, as illustrated in one Cusack advertisement which read: “Your message is delivered while the reader is outdoors and most susceptible to impression. This is the psychological moment to present your product.”28 In fact, advertisers maintained that this mental susceptibility rendered irrelevant the admission that most city residents did not actively focus on advertising signs. As a 1920 article titled “The Man in the Street” suggests, “They are not thinking about the posters, but the posters’ various messages have taken hold of their thoughts.”29 Or in the words of another promoter, the advertising sign “asks not even fifteen minutes of any man’s time but anomalously [sic] requires it all.”30 Finally, advertisers promoted their services as a uniquely modern intervention in the life of the city. While in the past, cities were considered modern for the goods they produced, advertisers were sure that cities of the future would be measured by the goods they offered for consumers to enjoy. Outdoor advertisers believed they were in the unique position of inscribing this message on the city landscape itself. What is more, some held the billboard itself to be a distinctly modern medium. Herbert Duce, in a 1912 publication of the Chicagobased Poster Advertising Association, proclaimed:

It was the poster we were missing! That was it. That was the friend that had gone, the missing color, the vanished rainbow, the comradeship of the inanimate made living, through the powerful aid of the pictorial.26

The poster . . . springs from our age, as the Pantheon sprang from that of Greece, and as the cathedrals sprang from the Middle Ages. This coloring, thrown upon fine paper, sums up as completely, as mysteriously, the modern world as the decorations of old doorways solidly fixed in stone, sum up older ages . . . the poster is indeed the art, and almost the only art of this age of fever, of laughter, of struggle, of ruin, of electricity and of oblivion.31

As Madison dramatically implies, outdoor advertisers felt their signs could transform the very fabric of the city itself. Without them, the city would not only suffer commercially, it would be drained of vibrancy at a deeper level. While advertisers showed understandable concern for city spaces and locations, they were equally interested in analyzing how residents moved through such locales on a daily basis. On the one hand, this meant a meticulous

While few outdoor advertisers adopted such dramatic tones, it is clear that promoters of the industry saw themselves among the vanguard of modernity, lifting the urban environment along with its residents into a bright new world. Although advertisers’ most often interacted with reformers and commercial clients, their relationships in the city did not stop there. These firms collaborated with

At first mystified, the dreamer suddenly identifies the problem:

28 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

a number of other and sometimes unexpected partners. In 1896, city billboards were employed liberally in support of Flag Day: “When the sun sets this evening miles upon miles of bill boards from one end of Cook County to the other will be covered with the Red, White and Blue.”32 Likewise, in an 1897 judicial campaign, the nonpartisan Judicial Committee decided that Chicagoans had grown weary of speeches. Instead, reported a Tribune article, “it is proposed to have billboards of the city plastered with great colored posters so that he who runs, or rides by on the street cars, the suburban and elevated trains, may read.”33 More consequentially, advertisers took part in numerous World War I campaigns, featuring such initiatives as Liberty Loan bonds, the Red Cross, and War Savings.

Advertisers supported numerous World War I campaigns. Top: Esther Richman poses in front of a series of war posters, c. 1918. Photograph by the Chicago Daily News, Inc. Above: The Division of Advertising of the Committee on Public Information published this report of their work during the war. Note Thomas Cusack’s position of prominence among the directors. Consumer City | 29

Reverend D. L. Moody was an early, enthusiastic adopter of outdoor advertising. Above: Banners on the Pennsylvania Freight Depot promote Dr. Moody’s forthcoming speaking engagement in Philadelphia, 1875.

Indeed, such wartime needs sometimes opened up locations that were otherwise considered out-of-bounds, such as when the Cusack Company secured space for a government billboard in Grant Park, much to the dismay of some Chicagoans.34 More broadly, government investment in outdoor advertising played a significant role in propelling the industry to new financial heights: national figures showed industry expenditures to be $5 million in 1913, but by 1917, the figure was $15 million and in 1920, more than $30 million. In 1923, industry researcher Wilmot Lippincott summarized the effects of World War I advertising: The use of outdoor advertising for selling Liberty Bonds and War-Saving Stamps, for recruiting, and for other war activities, popularized outdoor advertising as no other influence could have done. Posters appeared everywhere—on public buildings, on private property, in the windows of homes. Space was donated for painted and electrical display. Many famous artists came into the field. Unprecedented sums of money were raised by this means, and much else accomplished which helped in winning the war.35 30 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Perhaps more surprising still were those who adopted outdoor advertising for religious purposes, none of whom was as enthusiastic as evangelist Dwight L. Moody, noted by the Chicago Daily Tribune as early as 1876 for his extensive use of advertising: Brother Moody has been one of the best advertised men in the world. No circus or show of any kind was ever better or more thoroughly sustained than him upon this score . . . there is not a bill-board or show-card in city or country which does not either herald his coming or announce his presence.36 Likewise, historian James Gilbert confirms Moody’s liberal use of handbills, religious tracts, and even horsedrawn wagons in his extensive gospel campaign during the 1893 world’s fair.37 Broader religious employment of such methods was decidedly more mixed, but it is clear that it was more than just Moody who warmed to the idea of outdoor ads. An 1895 Chicago Daily Tribune article recorded the response of several city ministers to a colleague’s “theatrical method of advertising church matters.”38 In the words of Reverend W. B. Riley of Calvary Baptist

Church, “Billboard advertising will attract the eyes quicker than any other method and so why should not the church use them.”39 Finally, and not to be overlooked, were the many working-class Chicagoans who were connected in some way to outdoor advertisers. At the broadest level, advertisers sought to appeal to all socioeconomic classes and placed billboards in a variety of neighborhoods throughout the city. More direct, however, were the large number of laborers employed by outdoor advertisers as billposters, painters, electricians, and craftsmen. According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, as of 1900 the number was roughly six hundred. By 1914, it had risen to more than 1,300.40 In addition to their daily work, these employees were often directly engaged in the saga of the city’s billboard Dwight Lyman Moody (right, c. 1877) arrived in Chicago in 1856. He established a successful shoe store and taught Sunday school classes at the YMCA. With encouragement from his associates, Moody opened the Illinois Street Church (now the Moody Church) in 1864.

After Reverend Moody’s death in 1899, his evangelistic ministry continued to flourish. The rapidly growing congregation moved to 1635 North LaSalle Street in 1915. The Moody Church’s permanent home, dedicated in 1925, replaced this temporary structure. Photograph by the Chicago Daily News, Inc., April 1, 1916 Consumer City | 31

conflicts, and at times, large groups of workers along with labor union representatives attended public hearings, calling attention to the conspicuous economic divide between billboard supporters and detractors. Emotions ran high in one such meeting in 1915, where John Fitzpatrick, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, suggested that a proposed ban on residential billboards would severely affect the incomes of “electricians, carpenters, sheet metal workers, teamsters, printers, and the like.” Such capitulation to the “idiosyncrasies of the Municipal Art league” hardly seemed justified, he argued, in the face of already high levels of working-class poverty.41 And in response to the often-repeated accusation that billboards concealed criminal activity, billposter D. F. Murphy questioned why “nothing was said about the crimes behind the closed doors of the mansions on the boulevard.”42 More positively, one West Side resident, a renter of billboard space to the Cusack Company,

defended the presence of outdoor advertising: “They closed down the disreputable poolrooms in our neighborhood and put up billboards. . . . We can’t get to the lake front; Cusack’s billboard is the only color we see.” While direct economic interest may have loomed largest for some, other workingclass Chicagoans felt that outdoor advertising provided visual uplift to otherwise gray neighborhoods. As the 1920s approached, Chicago’s outdoor advertisers were on an upward trajectory. Industry growth continued unabated into the new decade.43 The Outdoor Advertising Association of America remained headquartered in the city, and national trade publications flowed from local presses. Furthermore, advertising operations had grown significantly more sophisticated, as illustrated in more stylized display structures, sleeker ad design, and more complex analyses of urban geography and movement. Perhaps most notable, however, was the place of prominence taken by

The outdoor advertising industry employed a significant number of workers, both in Chicago and across the nation. Top: The symbol of the Illinois Bill Posters and Distributors Association boldly proclaims, “We enlighten the world.” Above: Sign painters refresh a billboard owned by the Cusack Company, 1918. 32 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Advertisements for Coca-Cola and Pall Mall cigarettes dominate North Michigan Avenue, June 19, 1959. Photograph by J. Sherwin Murphy

Billboards line an unidentified Chicago street, April 26, 1945. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing for Raymond Loewy Associates

the Thomas Cusack Company. At a 1922 national conference of outdoor advertisers, the company was recognized as the undisputed industry leader, having conducted “considerably more than half of the total volume of outdoor advertising in the United States” the previous year. Operating in hundreds of cities and employing more than seven thousand workers, it was touted as the only outdoor advertising firm to offer truly national campaigns.44 The Cusack Company and its competitors, both large and small, had gradually but forcefully emerged as significant players in the shaping of Chicago’s built environment while at the same time developing a deeper vision of what the city could be under the guiding hand of a rapidly emerging mass consumer culture. Given the visual landscape of present-day cities, it is not difficult to see that the vision of these advertisers has had tremendous staying power. Daniel J. Story, PhD candidate in the Department of History at Indiana University, is completing a dissertation on the advertising industry in the United States from the Civil War to the early twentieth century. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 18–19, ICHi-71854; 20, left: ICHi-88555, right: ICHi-88581; 21, ICHi-20719; 22, 34 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

top: ICHi-88582, bottom: DN-0005679; 23, ICHi-37563; 24, top: ICHi-88552, bottom: DN-0071106; 25, DN-0085090; 26, Billboard Sketch, Outdoor Advertising Association of America Archives, John W. Harman Center for Sales Advertising and Marketing History, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University; 27, ICHi-74092; 29, top: DN-0070197, bottom: ICHi-88556 (left) and ICHi-88557; 30, i88554 (detail); 31, top: ICHi-19690, bottom: DN-0065406; 32, top: ICHi-88561, bottom: R. C. Maxwell Co. Digital Collection, image XXG0302, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University; 33, ICHi-37564; 34, HB-08481-A. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on the history of outdoor advertising and its opponents, see Catherine Gudis, Buyways: Billboards, Automobiles, and the American Landscape (New York: Routledge, 2004), William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), and William Henry Wilson, The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989). For related works more specifically about Chicago, see James Burkhart Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991) and Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

ENDNOTES 1 “Chicago,” Billboard Advertising, July 1899, 2. 2 “History of OOH,” Outdoor Advertising Association of America, accessed December 2, 2012, http://www.oaaa.org/about/historyofoutd oor.aspx. 3 “A Billboard Center,” Billboard Advertising, December 1896, 20. 4 Ibid. 5 “Gunning’s Bulletins,” Billboard Advertising, April 1896, 6–7. 6 “Chicago Bill Posting,” Billboard Advertising, June 1896, 4. 7 “Movement to Regulate Billboards Threatens Livelihood of Art Students Who Paint Signs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 7, 1899. 8 Stefan Germer, “Pictures at an Exhibition,” Chicago History 16, no. 1 (Spring 1987): 4–21. 9 The definitive treatment of the movement is William H. Wilson’s The City Beautiful Movement (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1989). 10 Ibid. 11 “Movement to Regulate,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 7, 1899. 12 “Check on Billboards,” Chicago Record Herald, July 2, 1906; “Chicago is Swept by a Fatal Wind,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 4, 1906. 13 For example, see “Movement to Regulate,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 7, 1899; “Thief Uses Bill Boards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 25, 1900; and “Call Billboards Aids to Crime,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 19, 1913. 14 “Women Object to Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 27, 1914. Also see “Ball Testifies Billboards Are Dangerous To Health,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 10, 1914. 15 “Art Versus Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 22, 1900. 16 “Labor Joins with Cusack to Block Billboard Foes,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1915. 17 Lucius H. Cannon, Billboards and

Aesthetic Legislation: New Applications of the Police Power (St. Louis, MO: St. Louis Public Library, 1931), 212; “Files Ruling on Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 4, 1901; “Knocks Out Billboard Law,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 10, 1904; The Chicago Municipal Code, ed. Samuel A. Ettelson (Chicago: T. H. Flood & Co., 1905), 209–12; Chicago Municipal Code, 1911, 240–45; “Await Billboard Case Ruling,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 23, 1909; “Says Billboard Helps Beautify,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 26, 1914; “Women Object to Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 27, 1914; “Thomas Cusack Co. v. City of Chicago - 242 U.S. 526 (1917),” Justia: US Supreme Court Center, http://supreme.justia.com/cases/ federal/us/242/526/case.html. 18 “‘Uplift’ for Big Signs,” Chicago Daily Tribune, July 1, 1906. 19 “Says Billboard Helps Beautify,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 26, 1914. 20 “Billboard and Other Forms of Outdoor Advertising,” The City Club Bulletin, 1912. 21 Carl Smith has ably pointed out that many writers at work in Chicago during this period likewise struggled to come to terms with the future of art in a city so dominated by commerce (Carl S. Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880–1920 [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984]). The outdoor advertiser is an interesting juxtaposition of these contrasts as a category of businessman whose trade not only allowed but required the incorporation of visual media. 22 Cusack, “Big?” Duke University. 23 Cusack, “Put it over Strong!” Duke University. 24 George Henry Edward Hawkins, Poster Advertising: Being a Talk on the Subject of Posting As an Advertising Medium, with Helpful Hints and Sensible Suggestions to Poster Advertisers, and with Thirty-Two Pages of Full Color Reproductions of Posters Used by National Advertisers (Chicago, 1910), 7. 25 Cusack, “Localize!” Duke University.

27 Cusack, “Color,” Duke University. 28 Cusack, “A Selling Force,” Duke University. 29 “The Man in the Street,” The Poster, November 1917, 29. 30 “The Surest Form of Advertising,” The Poster, April 1920, 36–37. 31 Herbert Cecil Duce, Poster Advertising (Chicago: Blakely Print Co., 1912), 94–99. 32 “Take Every Billboard,” Chicago Daily Tribune, October 30, 1896. 33 “Billboard and Button Campaign,” Chicago Daily Tribune, May 18, 1897. 34 “Grant Park Bows to War Need with Food Saving Sign,” Chicago Daily Tribune, March 4, 1918; “Outdoor Advertising Men to Give More War Aid to the Government,” Chicago Daily Tribune, September 11, 1918. 35 Wilmot Lippincott, Outdoor Advertising (New York: McGraw Hill, 1923), 26–27. 36 R. Atkins, “Moody’s Success,” Chicago Daily Tribune, December 17, 1876. 37 James Burkhart Gilbert, Perfect Cities: Chicago’s Utopias of 1893 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). 38 The colleague was Reverend Johnston Myers of Immanuel Baptist Church. 39 “Like the Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 17, 1895. 40 “Art Versus Billboards,” Chicago Daily Tribune, April 22, 1900; United States Bureau of the Census, Census of Manufactures, 1914, 358. 41 “Labor Joins with Cusack to Block Billboard Foes,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1915; “Hear Billboard Arguments,” Chicago Daily News, June 19, 1915. 42 “Labor Joins with Cusack,” Chicago Daily Tribune, June 19, 1915. 43 Lippincott, Outdoor Advertising, 26. 44 Conference proceedings quoted in Thorstein Veblen, Absentee Ownership: Business Enterprise in Recent Times: The Case of America (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1997), 316–17.

26 Barker Madison, “Should Man Return to the Garden of Eden?” The Poster, August 1920, 17–18, 45.

Consumer City | 35

Hope and Healing on the Battlefield During the nation’s bloodiest conflict, the Daughters of Charity fulfilled their mission to seek and serve those most in need. SISTER BETTY ANN MCNEIL, D.C.

n 1861, at the request of Bishop James Duggan, Sisters Ann Regina Jordan, 41, Catherine Carroll, 24, and Beata McFaul, 23, members of a Catholic community of women, the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul (popularly called the Sisters of Charity in the nineteenth century), arrived in Chicago to open a school in Holy Name Parish. Although they quickly discovered that “there was no house ready” for them, parishioners extended warm hospitality to the sisters until they could occupy their new facility at 295–297 Huron Street.1 The sisters opened their hearts and the doors of the School of the Holy Name to Chicagoans in September 1861. This first stay in Chicago, however, proved short-lived. Soon after opening the school, their superiors summoned the sisters to return east to help care for the wounded soldiers of opposing armies during the Civil War. The warring capitals, Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia, were hubs for hospitals and accessible by train, land, and waterways. The sisters in Chicago and Illinois who answered this call were in good company. More than three hundred Daughters of Charity served as military nurses in fifteen states and the District of Columbia. Lucius E. Chittenden, register of the US Treasury during the Lincoln administration, commended the work of Catholic sister-nurses: “Of all the forms of charity and benevolence seen in the crowded wards of the hospitals, those of the Catholic sisters were the most efficient. . . . More lovely than anything I had ever seen in art, so long devoted to illustrations of love, mercy and charity, are the pictures that remain of these modest sisters going on their errands of mercy among the suffering and the dying.”2 Physicians and citizens alike recognized the sisters for their nursing expertise and compassionate care. They had directed nursing services and cared for patients from diverse backgrounds since 1823 when they began serv36 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

On this prayer card with St. Vincent de Paul and St. Louise de Marillac, two nuns of the Daughters of Charity are visible on the right with their distinctive cornettes.

ing at the Baltimore Infirmary in Maryland. Their roots, however, reached even further back. Saints Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac cofounded the Daughters of Charity in Paris in 1633. The sisters’ “chief concern, after the love of God” was and remains to fulfill their mission “to serve the sick poor with great gentleness and cordiality.”3 The Daughters of Charity developed in North America from the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s, which Saint

Louise de Marillac was married to Antoine Le Gras and was styled Mademoiselle Le Gras after his passing. She then met Vincent de Paul and together they cofounded the Daughters of Charity. Hope and Healing | 37

Above: The Daughters of Charity working at the motherhouse in Paris at 140 rue du Bac. Below: A postcard depicting the legacy of Mother Elizabeth Ann Setonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s work, who established the first North American post in Maryland in 1809.

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Mother Seton was the first American to be canonized. The buildings in Emmitsburg, Maryland, are now part of the National Shrine of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.

Elizabeth Ann Seton established near Emmitsburg, Maryland, in 1809.4 By 1840, the American sisters established or managed the nation’s first free Catholic school for girls (1810, Emmitsburg), the first Catholic orphanage (1814, Philadelphia), the first Catholic hospital (1828, St. Louis), and the first Catholic psychiatric hospital (1840, Baltimore). The sisters’ ministries proliferated. They served in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Alabama, Delaware, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, Wisconsin, Virginia, California, and the District of Columbia. Before the Civil War erupted, the Daughters of Charity staffed three public and twelve Catholic hospitals throughout the United States. In 1861, Chicago became the third mission of the Daughters of Charity in Illinois. The first, St. Vincent’s Asylum and School, opened in LaSalle, Illinois, in 1855, while the School of the Immaculate Conception in Alton began the following February.

Flexibility and mobility have always characterized the sisters’ mission-driven spirit amidst demanding and changing realities, just as the French Daughters of Charity had done when called to nurse on the battlefields of Europe beginning in the mid-seventeenth century.5 Saint Vincent motivated those early sister-nurses to see God in whomever they were serving. “Men go to war to kill . . . and you, you go to repair the damage they do . . . you go to restore life, or at least to help to preserve it in those who survive by the care you take of them.”6 In addition, the charity of Christ impelled the sister-nurses to provide ailing and maimed war victims with quality nursing care in the wake of military engagements. These important aspects of the order’s work became apparent during its first year in Chicago, when Emmitsburg superiors issued an urgent call for sisternurses to alleviate the wholesale human misery in the eastern war zone. The sisters at Holy Name responded. They reported to the Union Military Hospital (US Military Hospital no. 1) in Frederick, Maryland. They cared for patients, along with eight other sister-nurses, in the Hessian Barracks, which originally housed captured German soldiers during the American Revolution. After the Battle of Antietam, which devastated Sharpsburg, the Daughters nursed at the US Military Hospital no. 5, also in Frederick.7 Mother Ann Simeon Norris and Reverend Francis Burlando were at the helm of the Daughters of Charity at St. Joseph’s Central House, Emmitsburg, Maryland, which could be considered a mission control center for the sisterhood.8 They sent bands of sister-nurses to relieve the growing misery throughout the South.9 In November 1861, Mother Ann Simeon sent Sister Euphemia Blenkinsop, 45, to be the authorized representative of the community on missions in the Confederacy. Sisters native to Southern states, particularly Louisiana and Virginia, were few. Sisters from the Northern states went wherever the need was greatest, regardless of their personal roots; formed by the teachings of Saint Vincent de Paul, the sisters understood that “a true Daughter of Charity is ready to go anywhere.”10 Illinois natives Sister Vincent Foster of Alton and Sister Genevieve Ewers of St. Claire were among the heroic sister-nurses to tend to the wounded and dying after the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. Both had prior experience in military nursing: Sister Vincent at Portsmouth, Virginia, and Sister Genevieve at the Lincoln Hospital, Washington, DC. Patients and physicians esteemed Sister Matilda Coskery, a skilled nurse, nursing educator, and hospital manager. She compiled the holograph, Advices Concerning the Sick, and instructed young sisters in the principles of nursing, both medical and psychiatric. Her practical knowledge of patient care—remedies, procedures, and Hope and Healing | 39

The Daughters of Charity established St. Joseph's Academy, the first free Catholic school for girls, in Emmitsburg, Maryland. Painting by L. Enke. Lithograph by A. Hoen & Co., Baltimore.

infection controlâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;prepared a generation of Daughters of Charity for wartime nursing.11 At the age of sixty-two, Sister Matilda, went to Harpers Ferry on the first of numerous missions. At Antietam and Gettysburg, she comforted victims left on the battlefield amidst their lost comrades. Sister-nurses worked tirelessly in ever-shifting fields of labor caused by military engagements, battles, and campaigns, primarily in the Eastern and TransMississippi Theaters. The Daughters treated and consoled soldiers in many venues: with the ambulance corps; in improvised, temporary, general, and marine hospitals; floating hospitals; isolation camps; prisons and prisoner-of-war camps; and in the ongoing care of veterans. Strategically located cities became natural hubs for deployment, particularly St. Louis, New Orleans, Washington, DC, Richmond, and St. Josephâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Central House in Emmitsburg. From whence draw sufficient charity and spirit of sacrifice necessary to save from death these thou40 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

sands of victims? By their tears,â&#x20AC;&#x201D;with words which penetrate hearts and enlighten spirits, our Sisters knew from the first how to inspire patience infusing the balm of hope in wounded souls. Men whom the horrors of war has as it were brutified [sic] felt themselves moved at the sight of a Sister of Charity in the performance of her duty.12 Daily life for the sisters involved vigilant observance of security measures. The sister-nurses carried out their charitable services in the wake of spies posing as Daughters of Charity and fraudulent nuns.13 The sisters crossed enemy lines at great personal danger. Sometimes access control required passports, passwords, and countersigns. When traveling at the request of the Confederates to Harpers Ferry to nurse at the Military Hospital on Bolivar Heights, for example, the sisters crossed the Potomac River on a bridge laden with kegs of dynamite prepared for the anticipated arrival of Union forces.14

Mother Ann Simeon Norris served as visitatrix of the US Province during the Civil War. Hope and Healing | 41

Sisters from Mobile and New Orleans went to the hospital at Camp Warrington, Florida, near Fort McRae. Situated on a hill adjacent to thick woods, the camp’s location permitted surveillance across the Gulf of Mexico to the Pensacola area and Union-occupied Fort Pickens on the Isle of Santa Rosa. When the sisters were distributing the evening meal to patients, officials feared bombardment by Union troops. The Confederate general ordered the sisters to relocate the most acutely ill patients into the woods. Three nurses immediately moved their patients into wagons and pushed them two miles into the woods, where they endured almost continual rain. Three other sisters remained at the hospital. During the day, they periodically passed in front of the building within view of their opponents, presenting a business-as-usual approach to camouflage the hospital’s evacuation. Thirty Daughters of Charity nursed soldiers of both armies with the ambulances in and around the Confederate capital. The Daughters established St. Francis de Sales Infirmary for civilians on the outskirts

of Richmond in June 1860. The infirmary, located on Brook Road, was variously called Catholic Charitable Hospital and Brook Hospital. Confederate medical authorities requested that the Daughters of Charity admit their sick and wounded soldiers in May 1861. Among the infirmary’s patients were a female soldier and female prisoners, including accused spy Mary Caroline Allan of Cincinnati.15 The Louisiana General Hospital for sick and wounded Confederate soldiers was a joint operation of the Confederate government and the Louisiana Hospital Committee beginning in June 1862. Within three months, government officials received a report praising hospitals managed by the Daughters of Charity and citing their lower mortality rate: “The report presents many valuable and interesting statistical facts, showing the superiority of female nurses as compared with males. . . . In the St. Francis de Sales, conducted by the Sisters of Charity [sic], with nine hundred patients, three per cent. – At the Louisiana Hospital, conducted by the Sisters, six per cent.”16

Company B of the 9th Mississippi eats a meal at Warrington Navy Yard in Pensacola, Florida. The Confederate camp had a clear view across the Gulf of Mexico to the Union-held Fort Pickens. Photograph by Jay Dearborn Edwards, 1861 42 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

When faced with the bloodiest conflict in US history, the sisters tirelessly consoled victims, cared for patients, and managed the ongoing care of veterans. Top: View of deceased Union Army soldiers on the battlefield at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 1, 1863. Photograph by Timothy H. O'Sullivan. Bottom: A large number of Confederate dead after the Battle of Antietam. Photograph by Alexander Gardner, 1862

Hope and Healing | 43

44 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Reverend Louis-Hippolyte Gache, chaplain of the Tenth Louisiana, suffered a prolonged spell of illness at Richmond. Gache wrote a friend about the solicitude of the Daughters: “I couldn’t even begin to tell you how indebted I am to these saintly Daughters of Charity, nor could I begin to enumerate all that they have done for me since my arrival in Richmond.”17 After the Seven Days Battle, fighting that spanned from June 25 to July 1, 1862, wounded soldiers revealed that “they had received orders from their Generals, to capture Sisters of Charity [sic] if they could, as the Hospitals were in such great need of them.”18 One of the nurses assigned to Richmond, Sister Juliana Chatard, described some of the sacrifices of hospital life: “Our hospitals were often also extremely scarce of the necessities of life. . . . For our own table, rough corn bread and strong fat bacon were luxuries. . . . As for beverage, we could not always tell what they gave us for coffee or tea; for, at one time it would be sage, or some other herb, roots, beans, etc., etc.”19 Other sisters also commented on the conditions under which they lived as they worked. The sisters referred to General Hospital no. 1 in Richmond, as St. Ann’s Military Hospital; they had commenced nursing there on the feast of St. Ann, July 26, 1861.20 Sister Rose Noyland, 27, recalled the stench that permeated their sleeping quarters and their shocking discovery: “Weary as the Sisters were, they could not sleep, when indeed they were able to leave the dying men, for the heavy smell of death that seemed to fill their lodgings. They at last looked for the cause of this horrid stench, and found in an adjoining room, amputated limbs of a week standing, falling, even into corruption.”21 In contrast, Sister Angela Heath, 31, remembered this hospital as “a commodious and well ventilated building.”22 A visiting Protestant minister asked a sister if she ever felt tired. She responded to him honestly saying that fatigue plagued her often. The minister commented, “You must get a large salary for what you do?” and the sister simply stated that her remuneration was “no less than the Kingdom of Heaven.”23 In her memoir, Sister Juliana Chatard wrote: “All kinds of misery lay-outstretched before us.”24 The nine sisters initially took turns for night duty, but shortly they received fifty wounded soldiers and prisoners from the First Battle of Bull Run (Manassas). Sister Rose Noyland recalled that the sisters soon

The sister-nurses served in both Union and Confederate territory, sometimes while under enemy fire. Pictured here is the Union’s Fort Pickens in Pensacola Harbor, Florida. Print by Currier & Ives

found three hundred sick and wounded Confederate and Federal soldiers. Many of those poor soldiers lay on the battlefield several days under sun and rain.25 Their wounds were filled with maggots and gangrene. We spent days scraping maggots and cutting away rotten flesh. In a few days we got good food and clothing for them. Sunday night, Hope and Healing | 45

eleven prisoners were brought to the Hospital. . . . They didn’t know where they were being taken to, but when they saw the [sisters’] cornettes, prisoners as they were, they gave three cheers for the Sisters of Charity at twelve o’clock at night!26 Author Mary Chestnut wrote of General Hospital no. 1, “Dr. Gibson in charge . . . The Sisters of Charity are his nurses. That makes all the difference in the world. The sisters!”27 Varina Howell Davis, wife of President Jefferson Davis, visited hospitalized Union soldiers in General Hospital no. 1 and supplied them anything they requested, including tobacco, cigars, soap, and razors. Mrs. Davis asked the sisters not to disclose her identity, because “The Confederates would want [for] nothing.”28 She knew Confederate soldiers would have plenty of visitors, but the Union patients would not enjoy such support. She was sensitive to them and the needs of sick and injured soldiers from both armies.

Varina Howell Davis, first lady of the Confederacy, visited and comforted Union soldiers who were hospitalized in Richmond. Photograph by E. & H. T. Anthony 46 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

As Union forces advanced on Richmond, patients, reflecting on their time at the hospital, recalled two long days of being surrounded by the sounds of war and lamented for the sisters, who, despite the noise, did not interrupt their duties. Convalescing soldiers asked one another: “How is it that the sisters do not tremble? As for us, we are used to the noises of cannon and shells, but they are very different, and yet they go about as if nothing were the matter.” When asked what they would do if the enemy arrived victorious, the sisters replied, “We’ll remain at our post!”29 In doing so, they became eyewitnesses to history.30 At J. E. B. Stuart Hospital, Sister Juliana Chatard and others saw authorities and residents fleeing Richmond at the imminent demise of the Confederacy: Medical stores, commissary departments, and houses of merchandise were thrown open. Liquors flowed down the streets. . . . Stores became public property. Our poor City was trembling from the blowing up of the Gun-boats in the [James] River . . . The noise of the breaking of windows in our hospital and neighboring dwellings added greatly to the alarm, . . . the Confederates had blown up their own supplies of powder, which were very near us. These followed the explosion of all the Government buildings. . . After the surrender, a Federal officer rode up to the door, told us we were perfectly safe, that property should be respected. He would send a guard to protect the house.31 Local physicians petitioned the Daughters of Charity Council to establish a hospital for civilians in the District of Columbia, but after the first battle of Bull Run, they began admitting wounded and sick soldiers. The council commissioned Sister Mary Carroll, 25, previously a nurse in Baltimore and Philadelphia, to open Providence Hospital, On June 4, 1861, the Washington National Intelligencer reported, “two hundred Daughters of Charity are ready . . . to take charge of hospitals, ambulances for conveying the sick or wounded.”32 The hospital opened on Capitol Hill six days later. Sister-nurses also served at the Washington Infirmary and Cliffburn, Eckington, Stanton, and Lincoln Military Hospitals. The Daughters of Charity had nursed at the Washington Infirmary at the request of the staff of the Columbian College (now George Washington University) from 1846 to 1848. They returned in 1861, but moved to other sites after a fire destroyed the facility that November. Two weeks after Providence Hospital opened, hundreds of casualties from the First Battle of Bull Run arrived. Sister Mary Carroll, administrator, arranged the assembly of military tents on the hospital’s property to serve as improvised wards. Union General Daniel E. Sickles highly regarded both Sister Mary Carroll’s nurs-

ing skills and her compassion, remembering that not only did she care for soldiers and sailors, and prisoners of war, in several of the hospitals in Washington but also

Sickles also shared his personal experience of Sister Mary’s compassionate care after a cannonball mutilated his leg resulting in an emergency amputation at Gettysburg:

was a woman of remarkable aptitude for her vocation. She was gifted with a rare union of executive force and feminine gentleness; she knew how to gain the help of the authorities and of citizens in providing means for her work; whilst her skill and tact as a nurse were gratefully acknowledged by the sick and wounded in her charge, and by the surgeons associated with her at the hospitals.33

In 1863—July and August—while suffering from a serious wound received at Gettysburg, I was visited daily as a nurse by Sister Mary Carroll, under the advice of Dr. Sim, my attending surgeon. This service was rendered in addition to her arduous duties as chief of Providence Hospital; and I am persuaded that I am equally indebted to my surgeon, Dr. Thomas Sim, and to my nurse, Sister Mary Carroll, for my recovery.35

According to Sickles, Sister Mary Carroll’s service and abilities also impressed Dr. Thomas Sim, medical director of the Third Army Corps, and she enjoyed “the confidence of President Lincoln and of Secretary Stanton.” Additionally, “Sister Mary seemed to apply herself with peculiar tenderness to the care of wounded and sick prisoners of war.”34

In appreciation for such care, some patients tried to give gifts to their sister-nurses. One evening, for example, a downcast and fatigued soldier returned to Eckington Hospital. He explained to a sister: “I got my pass early today and have walked thro’ every street in Washington to buy one of your White Bonnets for you, and did not find one single one for sale.”36 At Cliffburne Hospital, located on the former site of barracks for the Fifth US Cavalry, Sister Stanislaus Roche, 31, a native of Tyneclash, County Wicklow, Ireland, was responsible for five tents, each with eighteen patients. Upon the sisters’ arrival on June 4, 1862, they decried their patients’ lack of sheets or pillows for their beds—many exhausted soldiers rested their weary heads on hard knapsacks. Sister Stanislaus used sarcasm to highlight conditions in the sisters’ quarters: “[our] beds were in keeping with the surroundings, the rats were numerous and by way of welcome, sported with our shoes which they dragged here and there . . . The rain poured in through apertures in the roof.”37 In late December 1862, Cliffburne merged with Lincoln General Hospital. Sister Helen Ryan, 29, a native of Glenmore, County Kilkenny, Ireland, directed nursing and supervised the transfer of patients.38 Her colleague, Sister Loretto O’Reilly, 29, a native of Kanturk, County Cork, Ireland, earned the moniker, “guardian angel of the ambulances,” for her ministry to the wounded.39 These sisters were likely acquainted with Mary Todd Lincoln when she visited Lincoln General, sometimes accompanied by the president. The first lady was reportedly always very solicitous and generous to the patients. The Daughters of Charity also traveled with medical transports navigating the Chesapeake Bay along the coasts of Virginia and Maryland. On one trip, Sister Consolata Conlan, 19, a bright young woman originally from East Boston, Massachusetts, caught typhoid fever from an infected soldier, although her symptoms did not appear immediately. After arriving in Point Lookout, Maryland, where the large Hammond Hospital would be constructed, the fever attacked Sister Consolata. She was the only fatality the Daughters of Charity had because of wartime nursing. Her death deeply disturbed the local

Union General Daniel E. Sickles witnessed and experienced the excellent care and compassion of the Daughters of Charity. Photograph by Mathew B. Brady

Hope and Healing | 47

Above: A bird’s-eye view of Lincoln US General Hospital, Washington, DC. Lithograph by G. Sanders & Co. Below: First Lady Mary Lincoln likely encountered some of the sister-nurses on her visits to military hospitals. Portrait by Mathew B. Brady, 1862

soldiers, prisoners, and officers. During her funeral service, “the Authorities walked in procession, the soldiers playing a dead march. There on the bank of the Potomac, rested the worn-out Sister of Charity. . . . A Martyr of Charity had become the base of that new mission.”40 In St. Louis, the House of Refuge General Military Hospital, staffed by the Daughters, earned a reputation of excellence.As wounded soldiers returned to their regiments, they “would say to their sick companions: ‘If you go to St. Louis, try to get to the House of Refuge Hospital. The Sisters are there, they will make you well soon.’”41 Union Major General John C. Frémont, commander of the Department of the West, had asked the Daughters of Charity to staff the hospital in August 1861. Within days, twelve sisters were tending the eight wards of the hospital. One of the nurses, Sister Mary Florence O’Hara, 45, described the practical way she remedied an amputee’s suffering: I was accustomed to visit every evening a tent, that was a few yards distance from the Hospital, where 48 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

Above: Point Lookout, Maryland, showing Hammond General Hospital and US General Depot. Below: Stipple engraving portrait of John C. Frémont, who asked the Daughters to staff the House of Refuge hospital in St. Louis.

the gangrene and worst wounded cases were put. One evening I found a poor man (whose hand from the wrist had been amputated) suffering very much, the arm being somewhat inflamed. He complained to me that the Doctor had that morning ordered a hop poultice, and that he did not get it. I called the nurse and wound dresser, to inquire why the Doctor’s orders had not been attended to. They told me that there were none in the Hospital. The steward had gone to town that morning before they knew it, and that there was no other opportunity of sending to town that day. I immediately sent across the yard to the Bakery and got some hops and had the poultice put on. The poor man was surprised. ‘The Sisters,’ he said, ‘found ways and means of relieving every one; and those who made profession of the business, did not even know where to look for them.’42 The Daughters also served at Satterlee Hospital in West Philadelphia, the largest military hospital in the Union. Hope and Healing | 49

Above: The large staff at Satterlee Military Hospital was ably managed by Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace (below).

During the summer of 1862, Sister Martha Moran, 22, and Sister Pacifica Ulrich, 19, left LaSalle, Illinois, for Satterlee. The hospital’s size and high patient census motivated Sister Mary Gonzaga Grace, 50, administrator, to exclaim, “What a field of labor both for soul and body.”43 Approximately ninety sisters nursed at Satterlee during the three years the Daughters managed the immense military hospital, including treatment of many injured at the Battle of Gettysburg. Dr. Isaac I. Hayes, the surgeon in charge, delighted to recount that there had never been a rupture in the good relationship between the sisters and the officials. He boasted that everyone remained on the same good terms from the first to the last day: “Some of the City Hospital doctors said they did not believe that forty women could live together without disputing, much less be among such a number of men.”44 Closer to home, some sisters tended to a large Union army encampment on their own property near Emmitsburg in June 1863. Many years later, Sister Mary Jane Stokes reminisced about the arrival of the Union soldiers. Sister Mary Jane, then 29, and Sister Camilla O’Keefe, 48, were walking from St. Joseph’s Central House toward the barn, when looking back, they saw “a whole pack of them at the house behind us. The poor fellows looked half-starved, lank as herrings, and barefoot. . . . Well, the Sisters were cutting bread, and giving them to eat as fast as they came for it, all the evening.”45 Colonel Thomas Egan commanded the Mozart Regiment, 50 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

some hostile or fearful. Gradually, many of the soldiers warmed and their hearts changed—some even trusted their ward sister with money for safekeeping. Soon the patients saw that the sisters were genuine in word and deed, developing complete confidence in their nursing care but not always with their physicians. Many soldiers preferred that the sisters provide remedies. Sisters sometimes “had to encourage [their patients] to have confidence in the Doctors.”47 The universal charity the sisters afforded everyone did much to erode religious bigotry, particularly toward Roman Catholics. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel S. Troy, Sixtieth Alabama Regiment, an Episcopalian and son of a Mason, met the Daughters at Lincoln Hospital in Washington, DC. Troy and his family converted to Catholicism after the war and became benefactors of the local parish in Montgomery.48 After hearing of the carnage at Gettysburg, friends and family members swarmed there to learn news about their loved ones. Many feared the worst but some relatives were more fortunate and received directions to a hospital ward where survivors received medical care.

Dr. Isaac Hayes, who served at Satterlee, praised the sisters for maintaining excellent relationships with officials and among themselves. Photograph by Mathew B. Brady

Fortieth. New York Volunteer Infantry, part of General Philippe Régis de Trobriand’s Brigade, which encamped on the sisters’ fragrant fields on their way to Gettysburg. The clover ready for harvest instead quelled the hunger of Union horses. Shortly after the regiment’s departure, Confederate forces arrived and imposed martial law, demanding care and supplies from the Daughters. Some sister-nurses assigned to Alton, Illinois, staffed the Federal Military Prison. In 1864, Sister Othelia Marshall, 45, and Sister Ignatia Casey, 29, found conditions terrible at the former Illinois State Penitentiary. Eager to care for the inmates, the sisters worked diligently amidst intolerable conditions to reduce the high mortality rate: The place was too small for the number of inmates, who were all more or less afflicted with disease, some were wounded, others a prey to despondency, typhoid fever, diarrhea and the small pox; consequently, the atmosphere of the prison was filled with the most noisome exhalations, fortunately the small pox cases were removed to an Island on the Mississippi as soon as discovered.46 Most soldiers were unfamiliar with Catholic sisters before arriving at the hospitals. Many were suspicious;

. . . an elderly gentleman came into Gettysburg immediately after the battle to look for his son who was in the army and might be found either killed or living. The old gentleman, with others were seated on a bench outside of the [McClellan] Hotel, upon seeing some of the Sisters stepping out with bundles of clothing, taking to the wounded to some of the Hospitals, the old man exclaimed, “What, good God! Can those Sisters be the persons whose religion we always run down!!” “Yes,” replied Mr. McClellan, the Hotel Proprietor, “They are the very persons that we often run down by those who know nothing of their charity.” Mr. McClellan told us this and that the old gentleman was quite taken back and could hardly believe what he had seen with his own eyes. Mr. McClellan said that he had heard similar remarks from parties seeing the Sisters going around nursing and caring [for] the wounded and that they would almost swear that they would never again believe anything wrong of persons doing what those Sisters have been doing around the battle grounds of Gettysburg.49 The sisters respected the soldiers’ denominational beliefs and religious desires. They did not proselytize but responded to them pastorally, honoring requests for a Protestant minister as for a Catholic priest. When questions about Catholic beliefs arose, the sisters responded. When requested, they offered reading material, arranged baptism, or sent for a clergyman. A convalescent recounted his experience with gratitude: “it was a Sister who came to me when I was unable to help myself in an Hope and Healing | 51

Above: Cardinal William O'Connell spoke at the dedication ceremony for the Nuns of the Battlefield monument in 1924. Below: The Daughters of Charity is one of many orders honored for service during the Civil War. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith

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old barn near Gettysburg . . . and she dressed my wounds, gave me a drink, and took good care of me until I came” to the hospital.50 Fifty years later, Charles T. Barnes, a Union army veteran of the Musician Corps, recalled, “On July 1, 1863, [my regiment] was invited to parade thru your convent yard for the patriotic edification of the Sisters who were at the windows waving handkerchiefs and flags.… I, myself, was a drummer boy in the Regiment.”51 After the war, Barnes studied dentistry at Northwestern University.52 By 1913, he had a dental office at 140 North State Street. He was very active with the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) until his death in 1928. His remains rest at Gettysburg, as he wished. Ordinarily when a Daughter of Charity dies, the community inters her remains in the city where she served at the time of death. Seven Civil War sister-nurses died in Chicago between 1867 and 1920; their graves are in Calvary Cemetery, Evanston, Illinois. Four died at St. Joseph Hospital, and one each at St. Vincent Infant Asylum, St. Vincent’s House of Providence, and the School of the Holy Name. At the time of their deaths, they ranged from age thirty-seven to eighty-one. Five were immigrants; two were born in the United States but none in Illinois. After the war, Chicago again benefited from the Daughters of Charity’s work. Sisters returned in 1867 to teach in various schools, including Holy Name School, St. Patrick’s School, and St. Columba’s school, as well as to serve in hospitals such as Providence and St. Joseph’s. After the Civil War the Daughters of Charity would also open St. Vincent Infant Asylum, Marillac Social Center, and DePaul Day Nursery and Settlement.53 The Daughters of Charity showed universal respect and concern for persons in need. Their mission impelled them to seek out and serve the least fortunate. Such is enlightened charity. The hearts of the sister-nurses burned with charity afire to relieve sick, wounded, and dying soldiers. The Nuns of the Battlefield monument in Washington, DC, honors twelve communities of religious women, including the competent, compassionate, and valiant women of the Daughters of Charity, who were witnesses to frightful fratricide.54 They comforted the dying, nursed the wounded, carried hope to The imprisoned, gave in his name a drink of water to the thirsty.55

Sister Betty Ann McNeil, a member of the Daughters of Charity Province of Saint Louise (St. Louis, Missouri), is a Vincentian Scholar-in-Residence, DePaul University. She most recently published Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity to Civil War Nursing; A Compendium (Chicago: DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute, 2015). I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 36, Vincentian Studies Collection, VHC-20110217-003. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library, Chicago, IL; 37, Vincentian Studies Collection, VHC-20110912-013; Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library, Chicago, IL. 38, top: Vincentiana Collection—Postcards, ARCHIVESCM1-1687, Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library, Chicago, IL, bottom: Vincentiana Collection—Postcards, ARCHIVES-CM1-1408. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library, Chicago, IL. 39, Vincentiana Collection—Postcards, ARCHIVES-CM11441. Special Collections and Archives, DePaul University Library, Chicago, IL. 40, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-07095. 41, Courtesy, Daughters of Charity Province of St. Louise, St. Louis, MO; 42, Library of Congress, Civil War Collection, LC-DIG-ppmsca35444; 43, top: ICHi-22078, bottom: ICHi-22074; 44, Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, LC-DIG-ds00360; 46, ICHi-79991; 47, Library of Congress, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, LC-DIG-stereo-1s04482; 48, top: Library of Congress, Civil War Collection, LC-DIG-pga-08191, bottom: ICHi-22199; 49, top: Library of Congress, Popular Graphic Arts Collection, LC-DIG-pga-02593, bottom: Library of Congress, Drawings (Documentary) Collection, LC-DIGppmsca-23075; 50, top and bottom: Courtesy, Daughters of Charity Province of St. Louise, St. Louis, MO.; 51, Library of Congress, Brady-Handy Photograph Collection, LC-DIGcwpbh-00491; 52, top: Library of Congress, National Photo Company Collection, LC-DIG-npcc-26205, bottom: The George F. Landegger Collection of District of Columbia Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. LC-DIG-highsm-09888 F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For more on Louise de Marillac, see Kathryn B. LaFleur, Louise de Marillac: A Light in the Darkness; A Woman of Yesteryear, a Saint and Model of Today (Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996). Specifically on hospital work during the Civil War, see Louisa May Alcott, Civil War Hospital Sketches (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2006) and Jane E. Schultz, Women at the Front: Hospital Workers in Civil War America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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ENDNOTES 1 “Remarks on the Life of Sister Ann Regina Jordan,” Lives of Deceased Sisters, vol. 1864–1868 (Emmitsburg, MD: privately printed, 1868), 1867: 38. 2 Lucius E. Chittenden, Recollections of President Lincoln and His Administration (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1891), pp. 258–60. This passage is often but mistakenly appropriated to President Lincoln. 3 Conference 85, “Service of the Sick and Care of One’s Health,” November 11, 1657, Marie Poole, D.C., trans., ed., Saint Vincent de Paul Correspondence, Conferences, Documents, 14 vols. (New York: New City Press, 1983–2008), 10:267 (hereafter cited as CCD). 4 The Emmitsburg-based community of the Sisters of Charity of St. Joseph’s joined the Paris-based Company of the Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul, March 25, 1850. Priests of the Society of Saint-Sulpice of Baltimore negotiated the union. 5 Conference 75. “To Two Sisters Being Sent To La Fère,” July 29, 1656, CCD 10:160–66. The Daughters of Charity nursed war victims in France at Châlons (1653), Sedan (1654), La Fère (1656), Stenay (1657), Calais (1658), SainteMenehould (1659); in Poland at Cracow (1655); in Crimea (1854), in the United States (1861-65); in the SpanishAmerican War; at Vicenza, Italy, during World War I, and elsewhere worldwide. 6 Conference 97, “Trust in Divine Providence,” June 9, 1658, CCD 10:407 7 See “Academy of the Holy Name,” Alfred T. Andreas, History of Chicago: From 1857 until the Fire of 1871 (Chicago: Higginson Book company, 1885), 404. 8 Mother Ann Simeon Norris, her Council, and Reverend Francis Burlando formed the leadership team for the Daughters of Charity province of the United States. Mother Ann Simeon was the provincial superior and Father Burlando, C.M., a priest of the Congregation of the

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Mission, served as spiritual director and advisor for the province. 9 See George Barton, Angels of the Battlefield (Philadelphia: The Catholic Art Publishing Company, 1897); Ellen Ryan Jolly, Nuns of the Battlefield (Providence, RI: Providence Visitor Press, 1917); Mary Denis Maher, C.S.A., To Bind Up the Wounds: Catholic Sister Nurses in the U.S. Civil War (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1999). See also Betty Ann McNeil, “Memoirs of the Daughters of Charity as Civil War Nurses—Maryland, 1862,” in Mid-Maryland History: Conflict, Growth and Change, Barbara M. Powell, ed. (Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2008),61–69; ____, “The Daughters of Charity as Civil War Nurses—Caring without Boundaries,” Vincentian Heritage 26–27, issue 1, article 7 (2007) at http://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol27/is s1/7. 10 Conference 52. “On the Spirit of the Company,” February 24, 1653, CCD 9:474. 11 See Enlightened Charity: The Holistic Nursing Care, Education, and ‘Advices Concerning the Sick’ of Sister Matilda Coskery (1799–1870), Martha M. Libster and Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., (Golden Apple Publications, 2009), 172–281. 12 Rev. Francis Burlando, C.M., to Rev. Jean-Baptiste Etienne, C.M., superior general, Emmitsburg, April 10, 1868. Cover letter sent with the packet of Notes of the Sisters who served sick and wounded soldiers as nurses during the Civil War. Notes—Military Hospitals, 2–3. See Annales CM, v. 33 (1869–1869), 499–504. See also Betty Ann McNeil, D.C., ed., Balm of Hope: Charity Afire Impels Daughters of Charity Civil War Nurses. A Compendium of United States Civil War Records Daughters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul Province of the United States of America (Chicago: DePaul University Vincentian Studies Institute, 2015). (Hereafter cited as Balm of Hope).

13 Francis P. Kenrick, archbishop of Baltimore, wrote Father Burlando December 17, 1861, stating that sisters traveling from St. Joseph’s had caused alarm. Major General of Volunteers John A. Dix had charged “that ladies dressed in the costume of the Sisters of Charity furnished by the convent in Emmitsburg, have passed the lines into Virginia, for the purpose of keeping up communication with the Confederate States.” The Daughters of Charity Council refuted the charges, stating that the sisters serve the “poor and suffering of every nation, independent of creed or politics.” Mother Euphemia Blenkinsop, 1816–1887, (Emmitsburg, MD: published privately, 1969), 36–39. See also Balm of Hope, 260–62. 14 Balm of Hope, 37. 15 See ____,“Arrested as a Spy,” Richmond Sentinel, July 20, 1863, 2; ____, “Mrs. Allan,” ibid., July 27, 1863, Civil War Richmond (2008), accessed 10/21/2014 12:45:36 PM. See also Balm of Hope, 145. 16 “The Hospital Bill,” Richmond Inquirer, September 26, 1862, 1. Civil War Richmond (2008), http://www.mdgorman .com/Written_Accounts/Enquirer/1862/r ichmond_enquirer,_9_26_18621.htm 17 Cornelius M. Buckley, S.J., trans., ed., Frenchman, chaplain, Rebel. The Civil War Letters of Pere Louis-Hippolyte Gache, S.J., 10th Louisiana Infantry, Rev. LouisHippolyte Gache, S.J., to Rev. Fr. De Carrière, S.J., June 11, 1862, (Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 1981), 110. Ibid., 6, n. 129. 18 Ibid., 142. 19 Ibid., 145. 20 It was also called the Alms House Hospital because it was located in a former almshouse. Balm of Hope, 61, n. 129. 21 Balm of Hope, 138. 22 Ibid., 137. 23 Ibid., 63.

24 Ibid., 138.

40 Balm of Hope, 88.

25 The soldiers were injured in engage-

41 Ibid., 31.

ments near Richmond at Phillippi, Big Bethel, Romney, Rich Mountain, Carrick’s Ford, and the first battle of Manassas (Bull Run), Virginia. See Barton, Angels of the Battlefield, 31. 26 Balm of Hope, 62. The distinctive headdress (cornette) worn by the sisters was a large white bonnet made of folded, starched linen. The sides resembled large wings. 27 C. Vann Woodward, Ed., Mary Chestnut’s Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 158.

42 Ibid. 30. See Libster and McNeil, Enlightened Charity, 218–19. 43 Balm of Hope, 338. 44 Ibid., 233. Dr. Isaac I. Hayes had previously been the surgeon on the historic Arctic exploratory expedition of 1853–55. 45 Ibid., 364. 46 Ibid., 102. 47 Ibid., 30.

3, 1865; General Lee surrendered April

48 “How I Became a Catholic,” Troy and his wife converted to Roman Catholicism, April 20, 1868, at St. Peter’s Church, Montgomery, Alabama, Archives Daughters of Charity Province of Saint Louise, Emmitsburg, MD.

9, 1865.

49 Balm of Hope, 363–64.

28 Balm of Hope, 63. 29 Ibid., 426. 30 Federal forces captured Richmond April

31 Balm of Hope, 146. Troopers from the 5th Massachusetts Cavalry were among

50 Ibid., 232.

the first Union forces to arrive in

51 Ibid., 494.

Richmond. President Abraham Lincoln

52 See Dr. Charles T. Barnes, “Old Times in Chicago,” Northwestern Dental Journal 10, no. 1 (June 1912), 6, and “A Unique Surgical Case,” ibid., 11 no. 10 (May 1916), 3.

visited the next day. 32 Sister Daniel Hannefin, D.C., Daughters of the Church. A Popular History of the Daughters of Charity in the United States 1809–1987 (Brooklyn, NY: New City Press, 1989), 109. 33 Balm of Hope, 387. See ibid., 383–91. Sarah Mary Carroll applied to the United States Government for an Invalid Pension. The official report supporting her petition is dated May 7, 1886. 34 Ibid., 387. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 268. 37 Ibid., 255. 38 Catherine C. Ryan, (formerly Sister Helen), applied for an Invalid Pension which Congress approved in 1893.

53 Services continue through Marillac St. Vincent Family Services to strengthen, empower, and give voice to those in need through education and comprehensive programs to build vibrant communities in Chicago. The vision is to end the cycle of poverty. Visit http:// marillacstvincent.org 54 The Nuns of the Battlefield monument is located across from St. Matthew’s Cathedral, at M Street and Rhode Island Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC. Sculptor: Jerome Connor. 55 Inscription on the granite above the basrelief that depicts twelve sister-nurses in traditional attire.

39 “Remarks on Sister Loretto O’Reilly,” Lives of Deceased Sisters (1869–1875), 2.

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

Chicago’s Public Servants: Making History Interviews with William M. Daley and Jesse White Jr. T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E

ill Daley and Jesse White have devoted their lives to public service. Daley grew up in Chicago’s best-known political family, but while his father and brother were fixtures in local and state politics, he has maintained a national profile, serving in the Jimmy Carter administration, on Bill Clinton’s cabinet, as national chair of Al Gore’s presidential campaign in 2000, and as White House chief of staff for Barack Obama.1 White, a standout athlete and inductee into the Halls of Fame for the Southwestern Athletic Conference, Alabama State University, and the Chicago Public League Basketball Coaches Association, was the first African American elected secretary of state in Illinois. Previously a state representative and Cook County recorder of deeds, White is now the longest serving secretary of state in Illinois history. He may be best known, however, as the founder and director of the Jesse White Tumblers.2 William “Bill” Michael Daley was born on August 9, 1948, in Chicago, the seventh and youngest child of Richard J. and Eleanor “Sis” (Guilfoyle) Daley.3 Daley’s childhood home at 3536 South Lowe Avenue was a modest bungalow built in 1939 after the birth of his two older sisters. Nearby was Nativity of Our Lord Catholic Church and School. “We went to school a block and a half away from where we lived,” remembers Daley. “At lunchtime, we came home, which I think is a rarity today. You literally ran home, had a peanut butter and jelly or a bologna sandwich, and ran back.”4 Jesse White Jr. was part of the Great Migration of African Americans to Chicago.5 Born on June 23, 1934, in Alton, Illinois, just across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, White was only seven years old when his family Bill Daley (left) received the 2010 Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership. Jesse White (right) received the 2015 Jane Addams Making moved to Chicago. He was the midHistory Award for Distinction in Social Service. Photographs by Dan Rest dle of seven children raised by Jesse 56 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

At the twenty-first annual Making History Awards ceremony, the Jesse White Tumblers arrived for a surprise performance to the delight of those in attendance. Coach White (far left) spotted the athletes during their routine. Photograph by Dan Rest

White Sr. and Julia May White. The family settled on the Near North Side, first at 536 and then 466 West Division Street, 6 an area then derogatively called “Little Hell” because of the high rates of poverty and crime.7 White remembers the neighborhood was populated by a “large array of people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, primarily Italians.”8 After World War II, urban renewal turned most of the neighborhood into the Cabrini-Green Homes. Jesse White Sr. worked in the American aircraft industry before taking a job with Chicago Pottery. After several years of making sinks, bowls, and toilets, “he decided that he was going to open his own company, a janitorial company,” recounts White. “He was highly successful with it.”9 At the same time, the younger White attended Friedrich von Schiller Elementary School and then Robert A. Waller High School (now Lincoln Park High School). White remembers Waller as “the most cosmopolitan high school in the city of Chicago at the time.”10 In 1955, Richard J. Daley, then clerk of Cook County, ran for mayor. His campaign materials emphasized his role as a husband and father. His youngest son, Bill, is pictured in the lower left. Promotional postcard created by Harry Johnson Making History | 57

One of Daley’s earliest memories is a political event. “My father was elected mayor in 1955, and I was seven. I remember election night. John and I, who were the youngest, were not allowed to go downtown,” he recalls. But Daley’s supporters followed him home. “That was about the last time a big crowd with the press came into the house. John and I were asleep. My dad woke us, picked us up, and a great celebration going on.”11 Despite growing up in the mayor’s home, Daley believes he experienced an ordinary childhood. The day after his father’s election, for example, “we had to go to school,” Daley recalls. “My mom was pretty tough on that. We didn’t get passes on school very often, and we pretty much lived a fairly normal life.”12 He describes a backyard spacious enough to play baseball. “My dad would come home and play catch with all of us,” relates Daley. “Generally, he ate dinner at home every night or most every night, and in the summer or the spring, we’d go in the backyard and play catch for a couple minutes at least.”13 The Daley homestead was legendary to Chicagoans because of its modest size, especially for a family of ten. “My grandfather lived with us until he passed away in 1959.” Daley and his brothers slept in the attic, his grandfather in “a real small bedroom” beside the kitchen, his sisters in the middle

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Daley grew up in a modest home (above, 1967) in the city’s workingclass Irish neighborhood of Bridgeport. Photograph by John Tweedle for the Chicago Daily News. Below: President John F. Kennedy (third from left) welcomes the Daley family into the Oval Office, January 21, 1961. Bill Daley stands at the far left, next to his father.

Daley, like his brother John, chose to break with family tradition and attend St. Ignatius College Prep, pictured here in 1962. Photograph by Glenn E. Dahlby

room, and his parents in the front bedroom. “Mike and Rich were in one part of the attic, and John and I were in the back. The staircase was in the middle.” Daley chuckles, “Thank God we were all small because you couldn’t stand up, except in the very center of the attic.”14 Daley’s childhood home was also in close proximity to the famed Union Stock Yard. “The smell of the stockyards was unbelievable,” recounts Daley. Once, his older sister Mary brought some friends home from college. “They got out of the car and immediately said, ‘Whoa, what is that?’” Accustomed to the smell, Daley responded, “I don’t know. What are you talking about?”15 Daley attended Saint Ignatius College Prep for high school. His brother John had broken from the family tradition of attending De La Salle Institute. “I remember the president of De La Salle called up my mom. He wanted to come over and was outraged that John wasn’t going there.” According to Daley, his mother’s attitude was, “He’ll decide where he wants to go himself. I’m not telling him where to go. And it doesn’t bother me.” She prevailed, “so then I followed John to Ignatius,” recounts Daley.16 Daley admits that Chicago neighborhoods have changed. Growing up in the city, he recognizes how local religious institutions shaped his community. “I think the ability to walk to school gave a cohesiveness. When I grew up, there was St. George’s for the Lithuanians, St. David’s which was Italian, and the Croatians were at St. Jerome’s. And they all had schools. It was just a different time. We miss that.”17 White’s upbringing was also rooted in Chicago’s neighborhoods. While growing up on the Near North Side, he excelled in sports at Waller High School. He once scored sixty-eight points in a basketball game,18 and by his senior year, he was named to Chicago’s all-city teams in basketball and baseball.19 After graduating in 1952,20 White enrolled in Alabama State, a historically black college in Montgomery. “I was offered a scholarship to Beloit [College] and to Ripon [College] and to Northwestern [University]. But I was turned down because I didn’t have a sequence in math,” remembers White. “Tennessee State also said we’d like to have you, but then they called me back and said you’re only five [feet] eight and a half [inches]. You’re too short.”21 Making History | 59

White had the last laugh. In Alabama State’s third game in 1952, he scored twenty-nine points against Tennessee State. “Coach [John] McClendon walked over to me and said, ‘We’d like to have you at our institution. Will you consider transferring from Alabama State to Tennessee State?’ I said, ‘No, I’m happy with the institution that I’m a part of right now.’”22 White went on to become an all-conference athlete in both basketball and baseball before graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1957.23 By then, his 1,620 points on the basketball court were a school record.24 White’s athletic career did not end at Alabama State. “After I graduated from college, I came back to Chicago, went out to Wrigley Field, and tried out with the Chicago Cubs,” remembers White. “There were about five hundred people trying out at the time, and they only took five, and I was one of the five.” Four days before going to spring training, however, White was drafted into the army. “Instead of going to spring training, I ended up going to basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri.”25

While in the army, White trained as a paratrooper and was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division. The division’s eagle is visible on his shoulder patch (above, c. 1958). Upon leaving the service, he signed on to play for affiliates of the Cubs, including the Salt Lake Bees (left, c. 1963).

60 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

White made the best out of his circumstances. “I decided I wanted to learn how to jump out of airplanes,” he remembers matter-of-factly.”26 For the next two years, White served in the 101st Airborne Division of the United States Army.27 “I did my thirty-five jumps, came back to Chicago, put my uniform in a closet. Got my ball, bat, and glove, and flew off to Mesa, Arizona, to play baseball in the Cubs organization.”28 For college, Daley attended Providence College in Rhode Island and Loyola University Chicago. “I went to Providence for a year, but never really got into it,” he admits. “I missed being back in the action. My dad was going to run for reelection in the spring of ’67. So I came back for almost a month with spring break and stayed around.” The experience convinced him to transfer: “I finished up at Loyola while I lived at home and commuted.”29 Daley’s Catholic upbringing and education shaped his political philosophy and world view. At Loyola, “The Jesuits were always very engaging on the issues of social justice,” he recalls. “When you go all the way back to grammar school with nuns and priests so much of the Gospel message every Sunday is about justice, fairness, and Jesus’s life, whether it was the money changers in the temple or treating prostitutes in a way that was kind, just, and fair.” He emphasizes how these messages profoundly affected him. “I’ve always thought that, that was a strength of the Gospel and the Church, not a negative, angry message that you get sometimes around abortion and other issues today.” But Daley is quick to say, “My parents added to it. It was a product of their religious upbringing, and they went through Catholic education themselves.”30 After graduating from John Marshall Law School in 1975,31 Daley went into business. “I started with my brother John and we got our insurance licenses,” he explains. The brothers then opened Daley and Daley, an insurance brokerage business, at Thirty-Fifth and Halsted Streets, walking distance from their childhood home. “I then stopped the insurance stuff in the late seventies and joined my brother Michael’s law firm downtown. I began to do work with him, picking up some law business in the neighborhood.”32 White’s first job was playing center field, shortstop, and third base in the minor leagues, an adventure that enabled him to see the country. His travels took him from Pennsylvania to the West Coast, even Honolulu on one occasion. In some places, he confronted racial segregation. “When we’d go to Texas, the black ballplayers had to

During the 1955 mayoral campaign, the candidates’ families received media attention, perhaps more than usual because the outgoing mayor was a bachelor. Center: Mrs. Daley and her family at mealtime; Bill is seated in the foreground on the left. Below: The Daley children escort their parents to vote on Election Day, April 5, 1955. Bill, third from right, holds his father’s hand. Photograph by Bill Quinn for the Chicago Sun-Times

Making History | 61

Richard J. Daley won re-election in 1959, 1963, 1967, 1971, and 1975. Here, the mayorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s wife, Eleanor, and their children lend a hand during a campaign rally and meet-and-greet event in the 1960s. Photographs by Mart Studio, Inc.

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live with black families,” remembers White. “We could not live in a hotel, and we could not eat in a hotel.”33 The worst racial incident White ever experienced, however, occurred in St. Cloud, Minnesota. He was wearing a brand-new suit and departing from a restaurant after eating dinner with his teammates. “This fellow came up to me and hit me on the shoulder. I said, ‘I beg your pardon, sir,’” remembers White. “He didn’t say anything. He just kept looking at me with fire in his eyes.” White tried to reason with the stranger, encouraging him to go back inside the restaurant and finish his meal. “The next thing I knew he threw me down on the pavement, knocked the knees out of my three-hundred-dollar suit, and my knees were bleeding. Then he got on top of me and started choking me.” White defended himself. The next thing he knew, he was on top of his foe, who finally relented. The police arrived, and White was in the middle of explaining what happened when suddenly his attacker apologized. “He said I want to shake your hand.”34 White looked at him incredulously. The assailant explained, “I saw you sitting in the restaurant with this nice suit and tie on. I became envious. I became jealous. That’s the way I’m supposed to look, and I just couldn’t envision a black man looking the way I should look. That’s why I reacted the way that I did. I’m really sorry about it, and I know I’m wrong. I just want you to accept my apology.” White shook his hand. In retrospect, he smiles, “I was a little upset about the fact that I lost the suit.”35 White carried this incident with him the rest of his life. “That’s why I teach my young people that they cannot dislike anyone because of race, creed, or color,” he emphasizes. “That is the ugliest card in the deck. You cannot play that way. I made it part of my program. There’s this big, wide, wonderful world out there. We have to figure out a way to love our fellow man and woman.”36 Daley’s family pedigree and education encouraged him to enter politics. “I’d always go with my dad to all of that sort of stuff,” Daley recounts. In 1976, Daley worked on Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign. Paul Sullivan ran Illinois for Carter in the general election, remembers Daley, “and I was the point person for my dad to the Carter campaign.” The experience proved invaluable since, in Daley’s words, “I got to know the Carter people and a lot of fundraising people.”37 After the election, Carter appointed Daley to the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity, a position he held from 1977 to 1980.38 This served as a springboard for his work on Walter Mondale’s presidential campaign of 1984.39 Daley briefly considered running for Congress in the 1970s. Surprisingly, his father discouraged him. “I toyed with the idea in 1976 and talked to my dad,” he admits. “But he was not excited about it. He didn’t want to see me go to Washington.” The mayor offered good reasons. “I was married at the time with two little kids, a third one on the way,” remembers Daley. “Dad’s attitude was that it’s not a good life, going back and forth and commuting.”40 During the 1980s, Daley continued working at Daley and George, his brother’s law firm.41 Then, in 1989, he became first vice chairman of Amalgamated Bank of Chicago, and a year later, he ascended to the position of president and chief operating officer.42 Three years later, he was named a partner at the law firm of Mayer, Brown & Platt.43 Daley remained active in Democratic Party politics throughout this period, working on his brother Richard’s 1983 and 1989 mayoral campaigns, chairing Bill Clinton’s campaign in Illinois in 1992, and cochairing of the host committee of the 1996 Democratic National Convention, which was held in Chicago.44 Like Daley, White was also engaged in public or volunteer work while working full-time. Back in Chicago during the off-season, White taught at Making History | 63

Edward Jenner and Schiller Elementary Schools during the day and worked for the Chicago Park District in the evenings.45 For a time, he lived in the Marshall Field Garden Apartments in Old Town along with his almost-teammates Ernie Banks and Gene Baker. They were the only African Americans residing in the complex.46 By the 1970s, White had assumed many roles in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood: scout leader, crime fighter, social worker, baseball coach, and food distributor. His selfless activism earned him the sobriquet “the Hoodlum Priest.”47 On one occasion, White was asked to organize a gymnasium show at the Rockwell Garden Housing Project in 1959. That “was the beginning of the Jesse White Tumbling Team,” he points out. Although his talents were in baseball and basketball, creating a tumbling team was not surprising. “I was a gymnast as a kid,” White explains. “I had taught gymnastics in college, for the [Chicago] Board of Education, the park district, and the YMCA.”48 White envisioned his tumblers as a vehicle to address poverty and crime in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood. Then and now, he insists that participants be more than just talented athletes but also good students and selfless human beings: “They have to be leafless, smokeless, and pipeless,” he summarizes. “The only time they can practice pharmacy is after they’ve earned the white coat—that means no drugs.” White emphasizes formal education, insisting that no tumbler be “a part of SWU, Sidewalk University, where you drop out of school and hang around the corners getting in trouble with the law.”49 While White was turning his tumblers into an internationally recognized phenomenon, Daley was at the center of two national controversies. The first concerned the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). In 1993, when Daley was named special counsel to President Clinton to promote passage of the controversial legislation, he confronted 64 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

In 1971, White (left) received a standing ovation upon being presented with the Good Scout award from the Boy Scouts of America. White was then scoutmaster of Troop 4151, which served 376 youth in Cabrini-Green, according to an article in Jet magazine. Comedian-actor Bob Hope (center) was also honored during the ceremony.

considerable skepticism from fellow Democrats. Dan Rostenkowski, a Chicago congressman and chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, was blunt: “What the hell are you taking this thing for?” Daley responded that Clinton genuinely believed it was necessary, adding that the president already had twenty-nine Democrats on his side. Rostenkowski burst into laughter. “You don’t have twenty-nine Democrats,” he retorted. “You got about two Democrats. This is a dog. They didn’t do you any favors.”50 Absent any favors, Daley went door to door on Capitol Hill, convincing Democrats and Republicans alike about the benefits of the agreement. Clinton came to refer to NAFTA as “the Lazarus Project,” because he thought Daley “raised it from the dead.”51 In the end, Daley helped convince 102 Democrats in the House of Representatives to support the legislation. The agreement passed the US Senate, 61–38,52 and the House, 234–200.53 One reporter even dubbed Daley “the quarterback of political persuasion.”54 Daley’s success and acumen convinced Clinton to name him to his cabinet, where he served as US secretary of commerce from 1997 to 2000.55 Ironically, Daley had less contact with the president as a cabinet member. With any president, according to Daley, “if a cabinet member doesn’t give him a problem, then that’s good. It’s the problems that come to the president. So if you’re not being brought to the president with some problem, generally things are working pretty well. And I always had a great relationship with Clinton.”56

The Jesse White Tumblers have grown into an international phenomenon. Today, the team’s seven units present more than 1,500 performances per year. Above: White, back left, with a group of tumblers in 1986. Making History | 65

Secretary White (left) presents a certificate of accomplishment to United States Senator Barack Obama, c. 2006. 66 | Chicago History | Spring 2016

The second controversy was Bush v. Gore and the disputed presidential election of 2000. Daley served as the national chairman of Al Gore’s presidential campaign. When the final count of votes in Florida came under intense scrutiny, the entire election became a legal matter to be ultimately settled by the US Supreme Court. Daley was realistic from the start. “Lots of elections are screwed up,” he explains. “Generally, if it isn’t changed in the first twenty-four hours, literally by finding ballots or finding that somebody wrote 681 instead of 186, so they entered a number wrong, the first [candidate] who is ahead or perceived ahead will win the recount.” Simply put, “it’s very tough to win a recount.”57 Daley presented Gore with that harsh reality: “This guy’s brother [Jeb Bush] is the governor. Every judge is appointed. You can’t get a promotion of a judge down there without the governor basically signing off on it. So the odds of winning this thing are very slim in every count. I know we got to do it, but we got to be realistic about this thing.” Daley remembers it as one of “the most intense, difficult experiences” of his life.58 On December 12, 2000, the US Supreme Court reversed the Florida Supreme Court request for a selective manual recount of the state’s presidential election ballots, effectively awarding the White House to George W. Bush. By 2000, White was also a highly visible figure in Chicago politics. He was first elected to the Illinois House of Representatives in 1974, 59 representing a North Side district that was more than 80 percent white.60 He liked to say that he represented “the Gold Coast to the Soul Coast.”61 White entered Chicago politics at the behest of George Dunne, the Cook County Democratic Party chairman and Forty-Second Ward committeeman. “George Dunne was probably the finest human being I’ve ever met,” White states without reservation. Dunne took an interest in White when he was young, providing him with a

Bill Daley (right) consults with President Barack Obama in the Oval Office. Daley served as White House chief of staff in 2011 and 2012.

Making History | 67

summer job during college and recommending him for a position in the Chicago Park District after. White fondly remembers, “Every Monday night for about thirty years I would eat dinner with him.”62 White did not abandon his social activism upon election. He continued teaching at Schiller and remained an iconic role model to the youth in Cabrini-Green, as the tumblers became ever more prominent.63 In 1992, White was elected Cook County recorder of deeds.64 Six years later, he became the first African American secretary of state in Illinois history, receiving 55 percent of the vote.65 White was reelected four more times with more than 60 percent of the vote in each contest.66 Less well-known is that White’s introduction to civic life came in Montgomery, Alabama, when he was a student at Alabama State. A young minister by the name of Martin Luther King Jr. organized a bus boycott while White was an undergraduate. “Dr. King used to come to all of the basketball games, so he knew me well,” explains White. White remembers attending church and hearing King announce “that Rosa Parks had been arrested and that the city fathers had asked him to lead the effort to desegregate the Montgomery Transit System.”67 Dr. King joins George Dunne as White’s most influential mentors. They were “two of the finest individuals I’ve ever had a chance to meet,” he is quick to state.68 White remembers King as “a mild-mannered individual, as honest as the day is long, as genuine a person as you ever want to meet. He was everything that you would want in a leader. He’s everything that you’d want in a father.”69 While White was proving to be a transformational secretary of state, Daley returned to the world of finance. In 2001, he was briefly at Evercore Capital Partners70 before being named president of SBC Communications.71 For the next three years, Daley worked in Texas before returning to Chicago as the Above: White excelled as a student-athlete at Alabama State. As an undergraduate, he witnessed the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the seminal Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and 1956. Left: Secretary White (left) presents a commemorative license plate to “Mr. Cub” Ernie Banks.

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Midwest chairman of the newly merged JPMorgan Chase and Bank One.72 In 2007, JPMorgan Chase named Daley head of its newly created office of corporate social responsibility, in which he coordinated the bank’s global strategy as it affected public policy, charitable giving, environmental issues, and community affairs. Over the course of four years, Daley reorganized corporate philanthropic functions into one department and developed a unified charitable giving strategy with nonprofit organizations.73 But public service called again. In January 2011, President Barack Obama named Daley as White House chief of staff. Daley had been a prominent supporter of Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign and briefly served on the advisory board of the Obama–Biden Transition Project. He succeeded Rahm Emanuel, who had resigned in order to replace Daley’s retiring brother Richard as mayor of Chicago.74 Daley served for a year in the White House and in 2014 joined Argentière Capital as a managing partner.75 The Illinois secretary of state is among the most powerful secretaries of state in the nation. In addition keeping official records and laws (as in most states), the officeholder issues licenses to motor vehicles and their drivers (Illinois does not have a department of motor vehicles) and serves as the state librarian, state archivist, custodian of the state capitol, and registrar of corporations, lobbyists, and notaries.76 White has been a tireless advocate for traffic and automobile safety. In 2007, he introduced one of the nation’s leading driver licensing programs, requiring teenagers and other new drivers to have fifty supervised hours behind the wheel before receiving a license. Illinois also restricts newly licensed drivers, allowing them to transport only one unrelated passenger at a time. Additionally, White addressed the growing problem of driving under the influence by introducing the BAIID (Breath Alcohol Ignition Interlock Device) and policy of requiring some stopped drivers to blow into a tube that detects the presence of alcohol. Since the adoption of the program, alcohol-related traffic deaths in Illinois have dropped by 44 percent.77

Secretary White (pictured at center) is a tireless supporter for the Illinois organ and tissue donor registry, which reached five million participants in 2012. The “Life Goes On” campaign aims to raise awareness of and support for the registry.

Making History | 69

White, as secretary of state, is also responsible for more than five thousand libraries in Illinois, distributing $77 million in support grants and $50 million in construction grants.78 In 2007, he received the Robert R. McClarren Legislative Development Award from the Illinois Library Association, in part for creatively redirecting federal funds throughout the state.79 Another of White’s major accomplishments is the growth of the state’s organ donor program. In this case, his motivation was personal. “My sister became ill and was in dire need of a kidney,” he explains. “There was not a match within the family, so she put her name on the organ and tissue donor list.” That saved her life, according to White. “Someone showed her the love that she richly needed and gave her a second chance at life.” The experience inspired White to considerably expand the program when he became secretary of state.80 By 2012, Illinois was fourth in the nation for organ donor registrants.81 Both White and Daley consider their public service to be their most significant accomplishments. For Daley, his service as secretary of commerce “was a great honor that I think was the highlight in my life professionally.” In particular, “representing the United States of America and what it symbolized to much of the world was most exciting.”82 For White, the more than fifty years he has devoted to the Jesse White Tumblers embodies his commitment to and importance of volunteerism. “This world would be a better place for all of us if we could find more people who would say, ‘I want to make this world a better place in which to live,’” he believes. “I’m not looking for anything for myself. I just want to give back. I got mine. I want you to get yours.”83 Timothy J. Gilfoyle is a professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and current president of the Urban History Association, which will hold its biennial conference in Chicago in October 2016. Daley received the Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership on May 13, 2010. He is pictured here with the late Maggie Daley, his sister-in-law, who presented the award. Photograph by Dan Rest

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I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 56–57 top, Chicago History Museum; 57, bottom: ICHi69963; 58, top: ICHi-76627, bottom: courtesy of Bill Daley; 59, ICHi-88551; 60, courtesy of Jesse White; 61, center: i88548, bottom: ICHi-24433; 62, top: ICHi-88547, bottom: i88550; 64–66, courtesy of Jesse White; 67, courtesy of Bill Daley; 68–69, courtesy of Jesse White; 70–71, Chicago History Museum. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | Bill Daley and Jesse White await their biographers. Insightful profiles of William Daley appear in Don Terry, “The Patient Nominee: William Michael Daley,” New York Times, December 14, 1996; Joseph Kahn, “Public Lives: Another Call for the Quarterback of Political Persuasion,” New York Times, March 27, 2000; and James Dao, “The 2000 Campaign: Man in the News; A Son of Chicago—William Michael Daley,” New York Times, June 16, 2000. The most accessible sources of information on Jesse White are the websites of the Illinois secretary of state and the Jesse White Tumblers: cyberdriveillinois.com/about_us/biography.html and jessewhitetumblingteam.com/about/. Clifford Terry’s profile “Jesse White’s Cabrini Green,” Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1981, is a revealing account of White’s early career.

ENDNOTES

On June 3, 2015, Jerry Reinsdorf (left) presented Secretary White with the Jane Addams Making History Award for Distinction in Social Service. Photograph by Dan Rest

3 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia.

5 On the African American migration to Chicago in the twentieth century, see James R. Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed America (New York: Knopf, 1991); Jacqueline Jones, The Dispossessed: America’s Underclasses from the Civil War to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 205–65; Joe William Trotter Jr., ed., The Great Migration in Historical Perspective: New Dimensions of Race, Class, and Gender (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).

4 William M. Daley, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, June 30, 2010, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.

6 Jesse White, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 18, 2015, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum.

1 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia, last modified January 8, 2016, accessed January 18, 2016, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/William_M._Daley. 2 “Jesse White (politician),” Wikipedia, last modified January 15, 2016, accessed January 19, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Whit e_(politician); “Jesse Clark White,” Alabama State University, undated, accessed January 19, 2016, http://www.alasu.edu/alumni/notablealumni/jesse-clark-white/index.aspx.

7 Dominic A. Pacyga and Ellen Skerrett, Chicago, City of Neighborhoods: Histories and Tours (Chicago: Loyola University Press, 1986), 46–53. 8 White, interview. 9 White, interview. 10 White, interview. 11 Daley, interview. 12 Daley, interview. 13 Daley, interview. 14 Daley, interview. 15 Daley, interview. On the Chicago stockyards, see Dominic A. Pacyga, Slaughterhouse: Chicago’s Union Stock Yard and the World It Made (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

Making History | 71

16 Daley, interview.

wp-srv/politics/govt/admin/daley.htm.

17 Daley, interview.

45 White, interview.

18 White, interview.

46 White, interview. White lived at 1359 North Hudson Avenue.

19 “Jesse White (politician),” Wikipedia. 20 “Noteworthy Alumni of Waller/Lincoln Park High School,” Lincoln Park High School, undated, accessed January 21, 2016, http://lincolnparkhs.org/ourpages /alumni/alumni_you_should_know.jsp. 21 White, interview. 22 White, interview. 23 “Jesse White (politician),” Wikipedia. 24 Clifford Terry, “Jesse White’s Cabrini Green,” Chicago Tribune, July 19, 1981. 25 White, interview. 26 White, interview. 27 White served from 1957 to 1959. See “Jesse White (politician),” Wikipedia; “Jesse Clark White,” Alabama State University. 28 White, interview. 29 Daley, interview. 30 Daley, interview. 31 Caitlin Huey-Burns, “10 Things You Didn’t Know about William Daley,” U.S. News & World Report, January 10, 2011. 32 Daley, interview. 33 White, interview. 34 White, interview. 35 White, interview. 36 White, interview. 37 Daley, interview. 38 Don Terry, “The Patient Nominee: William Michael Daley,” New York Times, December 14, 1996. 39 Daley, interview. 40 Daley, interview. 41 Terry, “The Patient Nominee; “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia. 42 James Dao, “The 2000 Campaign: Man in the News; A Son of Chicago— William Michael Daley,” New York Times, June 16, 2000. 43 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia. 44 “William M. Daley, Commerce Secretary,” Washington Post online archive, 1998, accessed January 19, 2016, http://www.washingtonpost.com/

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47 Terry, “Jesse White’s Cabrini Green.” 48 White, interview. 49 White, interview. 50 Daley, interview. 51 Joseph Kahn, “Public Lives: Another Call for the Quarterback of Political Persuasion,” New York Times, March 27, 2000. 52 US Senate, “H.R. 3450 (103rd): North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act,” November 20, 1993, accessed January 18, 2016, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/s395.

67 White, interview. On Martin Luther King Jr.’s later civil rights campaign in Chicago, see James R. Ralph, Northern Protest: Martin Luther King, Jr., Chicago and the Civil Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993). 68 White, interview. 69 White, interview. 70 William M. Daley,” Forbes profile, June 2010, accessed June 15, 2010, http:// people.forbes.com/profile/william-mdaley/485. 71 Michael D. Shear and Jackie Calmes, “Daley Named Next White House Chief of Staff,” New York Times, January 6, 2011. 72 “Daley’s Brother Named to Bank Post,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 2004; “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia.

53 US House of Representatives, “H.R. 3450 (103rd): North American Free Trade Agreement Implementation Act,” November 20, 1993, accessed January 18, 2016, https://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/103-1993/h575.

73 Lorene Yue, “Bill Daley promoted to Chase’s elite leadership circle,” Crain’s Chicago Business, June 28, 2007.

54 Kahn, “Public Lives.”

76 “Illinois Secretary of State,” Wikipedia, last modified January 27, 2015, accessed January 21, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois_ Secretary_of_State.

55 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia. 56 Daley, interview. 57 Daley, interview. 58 Daley, interview. 59 Illinois General Assembly Legislative Research Unit, “African American Legislators in Illinois, 1876–2005,” LRU First Reading, 19:3 (February 2006), 9, accessed January 19, 2016, http:// ilga.gov/commission/lru/Feb2006FirstRdg. pdf; “Jesse White (Illinois),” BallotPedia: The Encyclopedia of American Politics, undated, accessed January 19, 2016, https://ballotpedia.org/ Jesse_White_(Illinois). 60 White, interview. 61 “Noteworthy Alumni of Waller/Lincoln Park High School,” Lincoln Park High School, undated, accessed January 21, 2016, http://lincolnparkhs.org/ourpages/alumni/alumni_you_should_ know.jsp. 62 White, interview. 63 Terry, “Jesse White’s Cabrini Green.” 64 “Jesse White (Illinois),” BallotPedia. 65 “Jesse White (Illinois),” BallotPedia. 66 White was reelected in 2002, 2006, 2010, and 2014. See “Jesse White (Illinois),” BallotPedia.

74 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia. 75 “William M. Daley,” Wikipedia.

77 White, interview; “Jesse White (politician),” Wikipedia. 78 White, interview. 79 Illinois Library Association, “Robert R. McClarren Legislative Development Award,” 2016, accessed January 21, 2016, https://www.ila.org/about/awards/robert-rmcclarren-legislative-developme; “Secretary White receives prestigious ILA award,” Insight, November–December 2007, accessed April 17, 2016, https:// www.cyberdriveillinois.com/publications/p df_publications/insight_111207.pdf. 80 White, interview. 81 Donate Life America, National Donor Designation Report Card, 2013, p. 6–7, accessed January 21, 2016, http://donatelife.net/wp-content/ uploads/2014/04/DLA-Report-Card39146-FINAL-2013.pdf. 82 Daley, interview. 83 White, interview.