When Corporate PR Meets Social History

File this under “while you were on summer vacation.”  The Newberry Library released a fascinating photo collection under the deceptively plain title “Daily Life Along the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.” It is a selection of some 3,000 black and white photographs taken by Russell Lee and Esther Bubley in 1948. Both Lee and Bubley are more well known for their role in the New Deal Farm Security Administration photo collections, much of which is available online.  In this case they were promoting a folksy identity for fairly large corporation with deep roots in the Midwest, rather than reform of the American political economy.

A handful of these pictures were published in the volume Granger Country, written and compiled by then Newberry Library president Stanley Pargelis and Chicago newspaperman Lloyd Lewis.  The rest languished in the stacks of the Newberry until a few years ago when Newberry archivist Martha Briggs, librarian Hjordis Halvorson, and others secured funding to scan a selection.

The CB&Q collections makes for an interesting companion to the much larger Charles Cushman collection at Indian University (14,000 color slides by an amateur photographer). It is much more focused, as you would expect from two professional photographers who were escorted around the railway system by Pargelis and CB&Q PR employees.  There are series of “daily life” shots that focus on particular towns, workshops, and farms.  One series documents life on a family farm in north central Illinois, including a trip to Chicago by the farm wife (on the CB&Q, of course) to shop at Marshall Field’s.

A good number of the shots have a formulaic feel of corporate publicity, but there are some real gems, too.

I’m struck by the image above, of two women rail shop workers in Havelock, Nebraska.  What a story these two must have.  Their body language suggests the bonds of women working in an intensely male environment–likely as not the only women on the shop floor.  Were these two “Rosie the Riveters” who held on to their wartime jobs?  The woman who looks into the camera is wearing a wedding ring.  Is her husband working there too?  Unemployed?  Gone?

The collection is also rich in describing the work processes of a large railroad at a moment when rail travel was still quite common.  There are quite a few shots documenting work in roundhouses, loading and unloading freight and passengers, and cleaning passenger trains.  There are also a few shots of the pre-computer information technologies used by railways to set freight rates (agent with rate books and a phone), and keep track of individual train cars across their sprawling continental networks.

Like the Cushman collection, the CB&Q collection documents a peculiar moment in U.S. history.   Historian Eric Sandweiss writes that Cushman’s images captured a landscape and built environment frozen in time by the Great Depression.  Among other things, the Depression ground to a halt the massive construction boom of the 1920s.  True, the New Deal would sponsor a wide array of public works including housing and roads.  But compared to the phenomenal growth of the post-World War II period, the 1930s saw relatively little in the way of urban transformation, and much of the building during the war was temporary housing.  So the immediate postwar years are interesting in that they retained much of the feeling of scarcity held over from depression and war.  The take-off was still just over the horizon.

Unfortunately, the collection is housed within CONTENTdm in such a way that makes it impossible to easily integrate into blog posts.  No doubt this is to protect the Library’s intellectual property.  But if any of my old colleagues at the Newberry are reading, you can see that it’s easy enough to grab a low-res image from the site.  So why not facilitate blog integration?  Put the images up on Flickr?  Similarly, to save image links in Delicious or Zotero, you have to go and grab a separate “reference link” by clicking on a nearly-hidden link at the bottom left of the images catalog page.  On the plus side, CONTENTdm provides a way to save your “favorites.”  But for me, I’m more interested in saving my favorites centrally, along with my other citations.

Despite these gripes, I’m thrilled that this collection is out, and I salute the Newberry librarians and archivists who worked hard to preserve it, catalog it, and made it accessible.

History in the Mix

We’ve all been watching and reading the denunciations, from the right and the left, of Wall Street and Obama’s alleged complicity in enriching the rich.  History has become something of a motif in these “debates.”  For instance, conservatives claim that the New Deal had no impact, or made the Depression worse.  (Don’t let facts get in your way, folks.)  And more recently, we have a series of allegedly grassroots anti-tax “Tea Parties” that aim to harken back to the American Revolution.  (Contrary to MSM belief, evidence points to these “tea parties” being a premeditated astro turf project).

On the left there is the implication that Obama is failing to take the kind of bold actions that FDR took in the 1930s.  Here it’s worth recalling that many of Roosevelt’s early actions were largely symbolic, or repackaged extensions of Hoover policies.  The boldest moves toward regulation, especially the National Recovery Act had complex impacts, often empowering employers more than workers.  Many left wingers considered Roosevelt a tool of big business, or worse, an American fascist.  It was the “Second New Deal,” beginning in 1935, that brought us an effective labor law, and the famous public works of the WPA. (And it was the war that ended the Depression).

For your enjoyment, I offer this little ditty from the July 1933 issue of the New Pioneer, the Communist Party’s youth magazine.

The Spirit of ‘33

We celebrate July the Fouth
With patriotic glory–
But have we got enough to eat?
Oh, that’s another story!

Yankee Doodle, fight to win
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until a workers’ land we’re in
Yankee Doodle dandy

Our President, old Franklin D.
So busy with his new deal,
Forgetting the forgotten man,
Is helping bankers to steal.

Yankee Doodle, march right on,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Until the long hard fight is won,
Yankee Doodle dandy

Morgan won’t pay income tax,
He hasn’t any money–
Will they put him into jail?
Come on, don’t be funny!

Yankee Doodle, shout on high,
Yankee Doodle dandy
We’re in this fight until we die
Yankee Doodle dandy

The bosses are in quite a mess,
They can’t find a solution–
Workers know the answer, though–
The answer’s Revolution!

Yankee Doodle, let ‘er go,
Yankee Doodle dandy
Here’s your friend and there’s your foe
Yankee Doodle dandy

by Sim Slim.

Here’s hoping Rush Limbaugh will pick this one up!  You can see an image of the page on my Flickr photostream.

An awakening as sudden as it was violent

From James Maurer, It Can Be Done (New York:  The Rand School, 1938).

Learning to Read

Working beside me in the machine shop was a journeyman named Thomas King.  I learned later that he was one of the original organizers of the Knights of Labor.  He talked to me about justice and labor’s rights, of the need for workers to organize, of their solidarity at the ballot box, and other ideas new to me.  They were subjects that I knew nothing about and cared less; he might as well have talked about trigonometry or the nebular hypothesis for all the impression he made on me at first.  However, I pretended to be interested so as not to hurt his feelings, for outside what I thought were his foolish notions, he was a good fellow always ready to help me in my work.

One day he asked me if I would care to hear him make a speech.  I really wasn’t interested in a speech by him or anybody else, but I agreed to go in order not to offend him.  The meeting was held in the Junction House Park and several hundred attended.  The next morning King asked me what I thought of his speech.  Ashamed to admit that I hadn’t understood it I cheerfully lied, “Great!”  He then gave me a small pamphlet with the remark, “Read that and tell me what you think of it.”

It was the first time anyone had asked me for an opinion on something in print, and that night after supper I tackled the pamphlet, but try as I might I found the job too much for me.  I could spell out the words but could pronounce only a few;  and some were so big I suspected they belonged to another language.  For over an hour I wrestled with the little pamphlet, determined to find out what it had to say, but finally had to acknowledge defeat.  Mother’s prayer book lay on the table;  I hurriedly opened it and tried to read it, but could not.

I was nearly sixteen, yet had no idea why anyone should learn to read.  My vocabulary consisted of a few hundred simple words, fully half of which I pronounced wrong or with a Pennsylvania Dutch accent.  That evening I had an awakening as sudden as it was violent.  For the first time in my life it dawned on me why children were sent to school;  schools weren’t penal institutions after all.  I rushed to the front room to Mother, fairly screaming;  “Why can’t I read!”

“Why, Jimmie!” she exclaimed.  “What are you talking about?”  I explained myself.  “Well,” said Mother, “it’s like this, Jimmie.  We always were poor and instead of going to school you had to go to work.  And, besides, you never seemed to get anything out of school when you did go.”

Up to then no one had taken the trouble to explain the purpose of learning the alphabet or the multiplication table.  I could recite the multiplication table by heart, but I hadn’t the slightest idea what use I was to make of it;  it sounded like a poem without any sense.  And I couldn’t understand why I should learn to spell “apple” or “horse” or “cat,” when I could say the words so much more quickly.  That is the way I had reasoned out the scheme of education, and not even the educators had thought of setting me on the right track.  It was a little labor pamphlet that switched me off the narrow path of illiteracy to the broad highway of knowledge and light.

The next morning when King asked me what I thought of the pamphlet I frankly admitted that I couldn’t read it.  He looked at me in amazement.  “Sixteen and you can’t read!” he exclaimed.  “Boy, what have you been doing with yourself all these years?”  I made no effort to excuse myself.  Instead, I said: “I’d give a thousand dollars, if I had them, to be able to read.”  For a quarter of an hour or so neither of us spoke another word.  King was evidently doing some serious thinking.  Finally he came over to my machine and laying a hand on my shoulder, said;  “Jimmie, I’ll give you your chance and it won’t cost you a cent.”

And with that Tom King, the labor leader, opened a school with me as his only pupil.  Our schoolroom during the day was the machine shop, with our machines for desks.  Two or three nights a week he labored with me at home, and thus he started me on a journey I should have begun ten years before.  For over a year King worked with me;  I read everything I could lay my hands on, and I developed my knowledge of mathematics by measuring everything in and around the machine shop and figuring out the square and cube of each.

###

Reviving and Gentrifying Bughouse

Tomorrow is the annual Bughouse Square Debates.  And so I end my series of historical documents with a few snippets from early efforts to revive the square’s free speech tradition.

The Soapboxes of Yesteryear, June 27, 1971, Chicago Tribune, p. A4.

Jimmy Sheridan, a veteran orator of Bughouse Square [alias Washington Square Park, on the Near North Side], stopped addressing his audience of two long enough the other day to talk to one of our Metro reporters, Carolyn Toll, about the decline of his profession.

For years, as he recalled, just about every tree in the square sheltered an orator on a soapbox, each with his own attentive, if not always respectful, audience.  And it wasn’t just Chicago.  London had its Hyde Park Corner, and San Francisco its Union Square.  Anybody who had a few minutes to kill, or wanted mental stimulation, could wander by and listen to “Jesus screamers,” atheists, Socialists, or even peanut vendors.

But today the outdoor forums are almost deserted.  The soapbox are gone.  Some say that World War II brought the change.  Some say television.  Some blame the fear of crime.  But Mr. Sheridan put his finger on another possible reason when Miss Toll asked if he missed the old days.

“Don’t need to,” he said.  “The whole world has become Bughouse Square.”  Sometimes we think he may be right.

###

Pat Colander, Fun to Do:  Step on the soap box, May 2, 1975, Chicago Tribune, p. B1.

Friday night, Bughouse Square–bounded by Dearborn, Clark, Delaware, and Walton Streets and officially known as Washington Square Park–will rise and ring with oratory again.  The Committee to Re-Open Bughouse Square is sponsoring a free speech celebration from about 5:30 to 9:30 p.m.  In addition to newcomers to the public forum, some veteran speechmakers will be on hand.

###

Pat Colander, Fun to Do: A hard times picnic, August 29, 1975, Chicago Tribune, p. B2.

A “Hard Times Picnic and Forum” will be held from 2 p.m. ’til nightfall Monday in Washington Square Park.  The park, familiarly called “Bughouse Square,” is bounded by Clark, Dearborn, Delaware, and Walton Streets.  Besides the speakers and debaters for which Bughouse Square is famous, there will be music, theatrical performances, food, clowns, and games.  Those who can afford it are asked to bring pot-luck.  Folk singers scheduled include Jo Mapes, Art Theime, and Nick Scott.

###

Jean Latz Griffin, Bughouse Square clean-up driving out “undesirables,” July 8, 1982, Chicago Tribune, p. N1. [excerpted by TH]

A bush planted by Mayor Jane Byrne in Washington Park, formerly known as Bughouse Square, will be a symbol of the area’s “reflowering,” according to the mayor.

In the 1960s and ’70s the area around the square fell on hard times.  Prostitutes roamed the park, pornographic movie houses and adult book stores moved close by and people were afraid to walk the streets or use the park any longer.

Within the last five years neighborhood civic groups, nonprofit agencies and the police have worked together to turn the climate around.

When she put in the bush, the mayor was also celebrating the groundbreaking of a 30-story, 280-unit apartment building at 100 W. Chestnut St., a block southwest of the the square.

Lawrence Dillehay represents the Salvation Army in the Washington Square consortium.  Dillehay was asked how the Salvation Army can help “down-and-outers” on the one hand and try to push them out of the neighborhood on the other.

“There are still some down-and-outers in the area, and we’re not trying to run them out,” he answered.  “Just because somebody doesn’t have on a coat and tie, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t belong in Washington Park.

“It’s the male and female hookers we want to get rid of.  It was so bad that a man couldn’t walk home from work at night without being propositioned.  That’s better now, but we’re still working on it.”

###

Events: Walking Tour of Washington Park, October 28, 1984, Chicago Tribune, p. M24.

Chicago’s oldest park, Washington Square, is the focal point of a Chicago Architecture Foundation walking tour from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. today.

The tour begins at the Newberry Library, 60 W. Walton St., and includes interiors of the library and the George Dunlap mansion.  CAF guides will explore the literary, labor and Bohemian movements that earned Washington Park its nickname “Bughouse Square.”

Cost for the tour is $3; CAF members free.

###

Soapboxing on Madison Street, July 1922

Nels Anderson, DOCUMENT 60:  Notes on an Afternoon’s Series of Talks on the Soap Box on Madison Street

During a Sunday in July, 1922, no less than twenty men spoke on the box at the corner of Jefferson and Madison streets; and as many topics were treated.  In the afternoon the following speakers shared the time.

1.  The meeting was opened by a man who borrowed a box from a nearby fruit stand.  He tried to get another man to speak first, so that he would not have to hurt his voice gathering the crowd, but no one cared to start.   He talked for twenty minutes about graft in the patent medicine trade.  He had a very catchy speech, well tempered with humor, and he gathered a big crowd.  Evidently he had made a study of the patent medicine business, and his speech was an “exposure” of the game.  He finished by selling some pamphlets dealing with the subject.

2.  The second speaker was an I.W.W. who talked for fifteen minutes on education.  He was a good talker, and held the crowd.  He would up by selling some I.W.W. literature and periodicals, in which the thoughts of economists had been reduced from the difficult academic language to the understanding of the man on the street.  He also passed out some old literature, i.e., old issues of Solidarity, an I.W.W. paper.

3.  Another I.W.W. talked twenty minutes on organization.  He argued that the rich man organizes and for that reason is successful.  He does not want the poor men at the bottom to organize, because he fears that he will not be able to keep them at the bottom.  He did not blame the rich man for organizing; he blamed the poor man for not organizing.  He gave some literature away and sold some.

4.  A speech on superstition followed.  It lasted twenty minutes, and was aimed at a mission group that was holding a meeting across the street.  The argument was that the Bible and the Church were the most powerful instruments in the hands of rich men for keeping the poor man down.  No collection was taken.

5.  A twenty-minute speech on the economic organization of industry was given by a man who took great pains to remind the crowd that he had spent seven years to learn all about it.  He made a plea for the co-operation of labor to combat the organization of capital.  No collection was taken.

6.  The next man argued that the unemployment problem was caused by two things–the overcrowding of population, and the concentration of wealth into the hands of a few; 85% of the people had but 15% of the wealth and 15% of the people had 85% of the wealth, or more than they could possible consume.  This man usually takes up a collection, on the grounds that he is physically handicapped, but on this occasion he did not.  He spoke for twenty minutes.

7.  No more speakers wanted the box, so a drunk got on the stand and asked for the attention of the crowd.  He furnished amusement for fifteen minutes.  He was witty, but was easily led from subject to subject.

No speaker talked long enough to bore the crowd.  Each speaker, when he had finished, yielded the box to his successor.  The crowd was a characteristic hobohemian gathering, willing to stand as long as they could be interested by some talk that touched their interests.  Like most such gatherings, it kept diminishing and increasing in size.  Some would stand in front and listen for an hour, while others would stop for only a few minutes on the outer edge of the gathering.  The reaction to the speakers was for the most part sympathetic.  Occassionally, a man on the sidelines would be seen to frown disapproval, but the custom is for those who are not interested to worm their way out of the group and go their way.

Soap Box Ethics and Tactics

While the sixth speaker of the above list was talking, the crowd was attracted to the side by a discussion between one of the previous speakers and another man.  The argument attracted so many listeners that the speaker became irritated; he called to one of the men engaged in the discussion–”Say, B–, do you think that’s a square deal?”  Sorry, C–, I didn’t know that we were disturbing you.”  The crowd on the side dispersed and gathered around the speaker on the box.

Just as there are certain unwritten laws that are found in the [hobo] jungle camps, so there are unwritten laws that the soap-boxer observes.  Regardless of how much they differ in their schemes of reforming the world, they are seldom personal in their opposition to each other.  Soap-boxers behave toward each other when not on the box, much as lawyers do when they are out of the courtroom, and even while on the box they consider each others’ interests.  The six speakers who took part in the above program were far from being of one mind, but they co-operated admirably in holding the crowd for each other and in dividing up the time.  Any one of them could have talked longer, but each one closed with some such statement as this:  “I’d like to talk longer on this subject, but there are other speakers here, and they have something to say that you might like to hear.”

###

Nels Anderson, “Document 60: Notes on an Afternoon’s Series of Talks,” Ernest W. Burgess Papers–Other’s Work, Individual Students and Collaborators, Nels Anderson, Box 127, Folder 1.  Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago, Library.

What the Hobo Reads, c. 1922

Daniel Horsley, “What the Hobo Reads”

When I write of the “hobo” I wish to define what I mean by the term.  I don’t consider a man a hobo who is down in the rut because of his own licentiousness, but rather the man who has been thrown on the mercies of society by the introduction of machine power that has made him a wanderer against his better wishes.

The hobo’s desire to read is varied in the main.  There is a tendency to seek a more educational class of literature dealing with the nature of things.  In fiction they read most of the type created by Jack London and other writers who have written their psychology with the reality of the life of the adventurer and student embodied in them.  That this kind of fiction satisfies their minds, may be due to the life they live.  I am rather inclined to think that it is because of their desire to understand life better, that they seek these books.

When they enter the store it is not uncommon to see these men looking for scientific works.  Many of them read Nick Carter and other stories, but if you discuss with them a few of the main topics of hobo life you will find that they have not absorbed the spirit of the progressive, and they read these, as they say, to kill time.  In periodicals it is a matter of guessing.  Some periodicals are written from a literary standpoint and appeal mostly to the men who by the process of life have been slung, as it were, from their aesthetic standing, and they long to satisfy those tastes cultivated by their early training.

Many people assume that all hobos are of the type whose condition is due to their slothfulness and ignorance, but I believe that if they would converse with many of these men they would find that there are many exceptions.  They would hear them discussing Wagner as a musical revolutionists, Bernard Shaw as a satirist, Frank Harris and Mencken, and many others.  They buy the books, and because of their uncertain livelihood, in replenishing their treasury, devour them with keen interest.  Hunger seems to quicken the senses, and that may account for their perception in discussing things.

Proprietor of the hobo bookstore

Nels Anderson, DOCUMENT 22:  Marxian Socialist, Soap-boxer, Dogmatic and Undiplomatic, Would Educate “Slaves”

Daniel Horsley is a book seller. His establishment, located at 1237 West Madison street, is the hobo book store, if there is one in the city.  Everything the average hobo reads may be found here.  The place is known as the “Proletariat” to the men on the “stem.”  Here many men who have no other addresses receive their mail. Says one man, “Where is _____ lately, Dan?”  “I don’t know, but I suppose he is on his way to Chicago.  I have had some mail from him for tow weeks.”  The men meet their friends at the “Proletariat,” or they leave things there for safekeeping.  They all know Mr. Horsley, and he has the good will of all the ‘bos.

Horsley has been somewhat of a hobo himself, as the following excerpt will show:

My occupation during the past fourteen years has carried me through many grades of labor.  First, the coal mining industry for many years my sole occupation.  The miner, having more dangers to confront than most workers, does not last long.  The industry claimed two of my brothers.  After having received a dose of black damps (foul air) my health was not of the best, so I decided the open air would be the more beneficial.

I started with a picture machine to earn my living as I recuperated.  I traveled through Nebraska, Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, and Alberta, Canada.  In every small town we would generally come across some of the boys (hobos).  Returning from the Northwest, I came back East without the machine.  I stayed a while in Iowa, and then went back to the West.  Previous to and during the war I was in the shipbuilding industry.  Leaving there, I worked for a short while in the woods, but decided to come East again.  Visiting the eastern seaboard, I saw great industries closing down, so I finally landed in Chicago.

Dan’s work is selling books and periodicals, but he gets his recreation by climbing on the soap-box occasionally.  He is a devout student of Marxian economics, and likes nothing better than to talk economics to an audience of workers.  At the Hobo College he is known as “Professor,” and he gives lectures there now and then, on economics or his other favorite topic, current history.  He is a close student of events, and these talks are instructive.

Horsley still operates the Proletariat.  He is rather friendly to me, but feels that I am wasting my time by not adhearing to Karl Marx.  He condemns outright all university men.  Enter his place at any hour of the day, and there will be a crowd discussing the “economic question,” Marxian style.  He has no room in his thinking, for any contribution of any other man.   Indeed, he does not think that anyone has made any contribution since Marx.  One of his stock phrases is “Now get this into your heads.  I am making it simple so that you can understand it.”

###

Field notes by Nels Andeson.  Ernest W. Burgess Papers–Other’s Work, Individual Students and Collaborators, Nels Anderson, Box 126, Folder 11.  Department of Special Collections, University of Chicago, Library.

Bug Club vs. University of Chicago, 1921

Chicago, July 7.

To the Editor of the Tribune:

In direct contrast to the wonderful University of Chicago on the Midway with its wonderful buildings of stone exists the Bug club of Chicago, situated in Washington park, without any stone walls or medievel towers but the blue sky above.

Here men of learning and unlearned self-styled atheists, infidels, theologians, historians, Socialists, rationalists, conservatives, astronomers, mythologists and just plain Americanists gather.

They all sit in a circle as the Rev. Theologian Bishop Burke opened the meeting with a prayer.

Quietly starts the evening meeting with the chairman announcing, choose your own subject, but once a speaker expresses his views three out of every two (in other words, some want to talk twice) are on their feet for a chance to enlighten the rest with his theories, and the evening progresses.  I generally leave about 11 and they are still going strong.

Sunday afternoon is the big day and the world and its troubles certainly get ironed out then.

It’s a glorious institution and the man with a craving for knowledge who works all day and cannot afford a university education, if he but listens with an open mind, knowing what to discard as bull (for naturally some of it is) and knowing what to digest, will certainly assimilate a wealth of knowledge in a short summer term.

Oh, the Bug club, long may it rave.

Dick Arman

###

Chicago Daily Tribune, July 9, 1921, p. 6

Touring “really ’slummy’ places” with the ladies from Gary

Like other urban spectacles, the places and personalities associated with Bohemia were popular tourist destinations.  In this series of letters, a group of women from Gary, Indiana, arrange with Ben Reitman for a “sociological tour” of Chicago’s underworld.  By 1940, Reitman had been giving similar tours for at least 5 years. –TH

March 11, 1940

Dr. Ben L. Reitman
32 N. State Street
Chicago, Illinois

Dear Sir,

A group of Gary women want to make a tour of the slum district of Chicago.  We would like to visit some of the Bohemian places and also some of the really “slummy” places.  I wrote you some time ago but received no reply.

Please answer as soon as you receive this, so we can arrange for some one else if yo are not interested.  If you are, please give us suggestions as to where we may go have dinner etc. and the estimated cost of the tour.  I have attended some of your tours and found them quite instructive and entertaining.  I might suggest Won Kow’s for dinner.

I would like to have this information by Wednesday.

Signed,
Verain L.A. Dilley
Mrs. Harry Dilley

***
Reitman’s reply (carbon copy)

March 12, 1940

Mrs. Harry Dilley
125 East Sixth Street
Gary, Indiana

My dear Mrs. Dilley:

I will be very happy to take a group of Gary women on a sociological tour through Hoboland, Povertyville and Crooktown.  And also visit some of the studios in the Bohemian and Hobohemian district.  Won Kow’s is a very interesting place to dine.  Many of our sociological tour groups dine at the Hull House and some on West Madison street in the heart of Hoboland.  There are all kinds of places to eat–if you prefer Chinese, Won Kow’s is the place.  There are a lot of little West Side restaurants and several good Italian eating places.

Usually at the eating place I invite a few underworld characters–prostitutes, gangsters and beggars–to dine with us.  That all depends upon what you want.

As to my fee:  that depends largely upon the number of the group.  I usually get $25 and pay my speakers and the incidental expenses of the tour.  You can get a good meal for anywhere between 50 cents and a dollar.  We will expect that you will pay for the meals of the speakers that I bring.

I had no previous letter from you.  I can go any night except this Thursday night, when I hope to hear Eleanor Roosevelt.  You can call me up any time during the day at Dearborn 3837.

I have two hobo tours in the last weeks with University of Chicago students.  Today I speak at the Hyde Park YMCA to a Lions Club group.

Yours sincerely
[Ben Reitman]

*****

March 23, 1940

Dr. Ben F. Reitman
32 North State Street
Chicago, Illinois

My Dear Dr. Reitman,

Our group would like to make their tour on Friday, April 12th, if that date is all right for you.  We would like dinner at Won Kow’s around six thirty P.M. then a visit to Bug House Square, Raoul Josset’s Studio, a flop house, a black and tan, and any of the many places you may have in mind, that will give to us examples of the underworld.  This group of women is interested in social welfare work and are quite active.  They are interested in seeing the worst in order that they may work harder for the best.

Kindly let me hear from you by return mail.  By the way some of these women have gone on your tours and they expect great results.

Yours sincerely,
Verain L.A. Dilley
Mrs. Harry Dilley

*****
March 25, 1940

Mrs Harry Dilley
125 East Sixth Ave
Gary, Indiana

My dear Mrs. Dilley:

I was very glad to have your letter, and Friday April 12th, will be satisfactory. We will have a great tour, and visit the flop houses and the dives, the police stations and the homes of the “men that God forgot.”

We’ll have a great time and I’m sure the ladies of your group will have their fill with many a thrill. I’m not too sure that we can go to the artists studio that you suggest–Jossuet moved from his lovely big studio and I don’t know whether his new studio will be large enough for a crowd. But rest assured that we will visit an interesting studio. And if your crowd like it we will go to a studio party, and see some of the artists and the intellectuals, thespians and Lesbians and androgynes.

Tell me, will you make reservations at Won Kow, or shall I do it? Also about how many ladies will be in your group. What will be your means of transportation–are you coming in by bus, the train or auto.

Anticipating a happy, instructive evening and with best wishes, I am,

Yours sincerely,
Ben L. Reitman

*****

March 28, 1940

Dr. Ben L. Reitman
32 North State Street
Chicago, Illinois

Dear Sir,

We shall come by bus, arriving at Won Kow’s Restaurant as nearly at six thirty P. M as we can, and we prefer that you make arrangements for the Chinese dinner that costs around $0.85 the same as we got before, which consisted of a full dinner with dessert, for around that amount. I cannot give you the exact number but there will be approximately twenty-five or thirty.

We are interested in seeing only the slummiest slums and the nicest Bohemian places, dives, police court etc. We have made a thorough study of Gary conditions and we are coming to Chicago to learn more about conditions in the underworld.

We are not interested in visiting the piers or buildings or things of that sort because most of these women are very familiar with the city and want to visit the places they are unable to see without a guide.

The date is April 12, 1940. Your fee I believe is $25.00.

Will you please let me know the cost of the dinner, so I can make out the cost of tickets accordingly.

Yours sincerely,
Verain L. A. Dilley
Mrs. Harry Dilley

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From the Ben L. Reitman Papers, Supplement II, Folder 93, University of Illinois at Chicago Special Collections. Thanks to Chad Heap for alerting me to this set of correspondence.  You might like to read his book Slumming:  Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885-1940 (University of Chicago Press, 2007).

College of Complexes, 1951

Tower Ticker, by Savage

THE COLLEGE OF COMPLEXES, “Where the literati linger and the cognoscenti congregate,” held a memorial service the other night marking the 18th anniversary of the passing of the old Dil Pickle (Jack Jones, the founder, always spelled Dil with one “l”) club.  From its nonivied facade at 1651 N. Wells st., “the college” looks like any run-of-the-gin-mill neighborhood tavern, but within those walls there is culture, camaraderie, conversation, and beer–the like of which hasn’t been known in Chicago since the shuttering of that bulwark of Bohemia in Tooker alley in 1933.

DEAN, head bartender, instigator, and conciliator of debate and owner of the lyceum is Slim Brundage, President emeritus of Hobo college, author of three unpublished books and a poet of parts, Slim is also a house painter by trade, a craft to which he intends returning “unless more cognoscenti congregate and the nut on the joint is reached.”  This piece is frankly designed for nut gathering.

A man may speak his mind in The College of Complexes, and if he wishes he may write it for posterity for the walls are all blackboards and chalk is distributed as freely as at Bensingers.  Slim himself holds forth under blackboard and backbar mirror signs such as: “It’s agin the law to sell liquor to drunks, spendthrifts, minors and lunatics.  Let’s see you prove you ain’t.”  There is also a sign, “Let there be no moaning at the bar.”  Tennyson’s name used to follow the quotation but so many of the noncognoscenti took to calling Slim “Mr. Tennyson,” that he modestly erased the poetical credit.

IN ONE CORNER of the taproom is “The Pub Crawlers’ Itinerary,” recommending sympathetic spas within “the college” circle.  Money won’t get a place on the list but it is chalked up if “it has something.”  Topping the itinerary are:  The Kustahl (where the old cows dance), at 1625 Burling st.;  Bell Pine inn (where the barbershop quartets lather);  The Barn Dance (American folk dancing), 2650 Lincoln Av.  Close by is the “Want-Ad Corner,” where habitues may chalk their needs, and to give pause to passing physicists, scrawled equations and mathematical formulas share a panel with odes composed on the spot.  There are books to read, chess to play, and a battered piano on a rostrum to have at you when a “professor” is available.

ON WEEK-ENDS the College of Complexes is all of that.  Author Sam Moss (“Thy Men Shall Fall”) may debate with Author Dorothy Sparks (“Nothing as Before”), and the audience may take them both apart.  Dr. E. I. Scheiman may orate on “Why Marriages Fail,” and the audience may produce several horrible examples.  The Rev. William T. Baird (“The most militant pacifist you ever saw”) may goad an unwary opponent into debating, “Can man stop killing man before we’re all dead?”  Anybody can get in it.  Bertie Weber, Joseph (The Yellow Kid) Weil, The Terrible Sheridan Twins, Jack and Jim, and Margaret Casey may reminisce on the past of the Pickle.  Then the tears flow like wine, into the beer.

MISSING from the group which burns a candle for their return are such Dil Picklers as Carl (Big Swede) Sandburg, Ma Colahan, Ben Hecht, Slim Minot, Max Bodenheim, Ralph Chaplin, Maurice Beam, and Edgar Miller.  No return is expected in this life from Ben Reitman, Hank Heil, Jack Jones, and Sherwood Anderson.  These last named gents would not have approved the sonnet contest of last week which was won by Fanny Nolton, a 69 year old, former “Follies” girl.  Fannie’s sonnet wasn’t even in 14 line, iambic form, but the audience gave her first prize which was $50 in cash.  Slim suggested, rather wistfully, that she leave some of it at the bar, but Fannie said heck, no, and hied for the Kustahl, maybe.

WE started to say they hold a memorial service the other night for the Dil Pickle club.  More rightfully we should have said they hold a memorial service for the Dil Pickle club EVERY night at the College of Complexes.  Come on over and bring yours.

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Chicago Daily Tribune, March 20, 1951, p. A7.  Image from the Outspoken: Chicago’s Free Speech Tradition.  See also the Slim Brundage Papers at the Newberry Library.