Chicago
H I STORY
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 On the cover: Chicago presented itself as gateway to winter fun. This 1927 broadside for the South Shore Line advertised trains that transported enthusiasts to the Indiana Dunes. ICHi-29942
Designer Bill Van Nimwegen
Copyright 2017 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 Jordyn R. Cox
C H I C AG O H I S T O R I C A L S O C I E T Y OFFICERS
David D. Hiller Chair James L. Alexander Chairman Emeritus Walter C. Carlson First Vice Chair Daniel S. Jaffee Second Vice Chair Tobin E. Hopkins Treasurer Falona Joy 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 Tobin E. Hopkins Cheryl L. Hyman Daniel S. Jaffee Gary T. Johnson Falona Joy Ronald G. Kaminski 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 Mark D. Trembacki 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. 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 Dennis H. Holtschneider, C.M. 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.
Chicago
H I STORY THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM
Winter 2017 VOLUME XLI, NUMBER 1
6 24 40 4 60
Contents Composing the Union’s Battle Cries Christian McWhirter
Sing a New Song Robert M. Marovich
Snow Days Rosemary K. Adams
Departments From the Editor Rosemary K. Adams
Making History Timothy J. Gilfoyle
FROM THE EDITORI Rosemary K. Adams
N
ext year finally arrived! Chicago Cubs fans reveled in their team’s success after a long 108-year wait. Here are 108 highlights of how the world has changed:
1. William Howard Taft became the first president to throw a ceremonial first pitch (1910). 2. Maxwell Street Market opened (1912). 3. The RMS Titanic sank on its maiden voyage (1912). 4. Oreo sandwich cookies were introduced (1912). 5. The Qing dynasty ended (1912). 6. New Mexico and Arizona became US states (1912).
18. Weeghman Park was renamed Cubs Park (1920). 19. Women won the right to vote (1920). 20. The Curtiss Candy Company started making Baby Ruth candy bars (1921). 21. The first baseball game was broadcast on radio: Pittsburgh Pirates vs. Philadelphia Phillies (1921). 22. The Chicago Bears played at Cubs Park/Wrigley Field (1921–70). 23. The Ottoman Empire ended (1922).
7. Harriet Monroe launched Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (1912).
24. The William Wrigley Jr. Building was completed (1924).
8. Chicago hosted seven Republican National Conventions (1912, 1916, 1920, 1932, 1944, 1952, and 1960).
25. The Tribune Tower was completed (1925).
9. The Great Migration began (c.1915). 10. The Edgewater Beach Hotel opened (1916). 11. The Chicago Cubs moved from West Side Grounds to Weeghman Park, now known as Wrigley Field (1916). 12. The National Park Service was founded (1916). 13. Navy Pier was constructed (1916). After being used as a shipping terminal, wartime training center, and college campus, it reopened as an entertainment destination in 1995. 14. Denali National Park and Preserve was established (1917). 15. The Austro-Hungarian Empire fell (1918).
26. Aviator Charles Lindbergh began daily mail delivery flights between Chicago and St. Louis (1926). 27. Cubs Park was renamed Wrigley Field (1927). 28. Mount Rushmore National Memorial was constructed (1927–41). 29. Walter Diemer invented bubble gum (1928). 30. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin (1928). 31. The Chicago Board of Trade Building was completed (1930).
38. The Chicago History Museum moved to a new home (1932), expanded it (1971), and renovated it twice (1988 and 2006). 39. Comiskey Park hosted the first Major League All-Star game (1933). 40. Chicago hosted the A Century of Progress International Exposition (1933–34). 41. Pablo Picasso created Guernica (1937). 42. Bill Veeck planted ivy in Wrigley’s outfield and oversaw the construction of the scoreboard and bleachers (1937). 43. Al Pacelli opened Chicago’s first Italian beef joint, Al’s Italian Beef (1938). 44. Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett hit his famous “Homer in the Gloamin’” off of Pittsburgh Pirate pitcher Mace Brown (1938). 45. Author Richard Wright published Native Son, the first major novel about the black experience in America (1939). 46. The first televised Major League Baseball game was broadcasted: Cincinnati Reds vs. the Brooklyn Dodgers (1939).
32. Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto (1930).
47. America entered two world wars (1917 and 1941).
33. Jane Addams won the Nobel Peace Prize (1931).
48. Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Oscar (1940).
34. Thomas Andrew Dorsey invented gospel music (1932).
49. Velcro was invented (1941).
16. John Lloyd Wright invented Lincoln Logs (1918).
35. Amelia Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean (1932).
17. The Volstead Act, enforcing the prohibition of the manufacture, sale, and transport of alcohol, was passed (1919) and repealed (1933).
36. Wrigley Field witnessed Babe Ruth’s famous “called shot” during Game 3 of the World Series between the Cubs and the New York Yankees (1932).
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37. Chicago hosted seven Democratic National Conventions (1932, 1940, 1944, 1952, 1956, 1968, and 1996).
50. University of Chicago scientists, led by Enrico Fermi, achieved the first selfsustaining nuclear chain reaction (1942). 51. Cubs owner Philip K. Wrigley launched the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in an effort to keep baseball alive during World War II (1943).
52. The National Basketball Association was founded (1946).
74. Christiaan Barnard performed the first human heart transplant (1967).
53. Baseball became an integrated sport with Jackie Robinson joining the Brooklyn Dodgers (1947).
76. The John Hancock Center was completed (1969).
95. Marty McFly brought hope to Cubs fans everywhere when he time traveled to 2015 and saw news coverage of Chicago sweeping Miami, 5–0, in a fictional best-of-nine World Series (1989).
54. Chicago and much of Chicagoland got 312 as their area code (1947).
77. Chicago’s Union Stock Yard closed (1971).
96. President George H. W. Bush signed the Americans with Disabilities Act (1990).
55. Garrett’s Popcorn opened (1949).
78. John F. Mitchell and Martin Cooper of Motorola demonstrated the first mobile phone call (1973).
97. Chicagoan Carol Moseley-Braun became the first African American woman elected to the US Senate (1992).
79. The Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, opened (1974).
98. Dolly the sheep was cloned (1997).
56. The Eisenhower Expressway was built (1949–60). 57. Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy (1953). 58. Ernie Banks joined the Cubs, becoming the first African American to play for the club (1953). 59. The first McDonald’s opened in Des Plaines, Illinois (1954). 60. Roger Bannister ran the first subfour-minute mile (1954).
75. Americans landed on the moon (1969).
80. Apple Inc. was founded (1976). 81. The “Cheezborger, Cheezborger” sketch, a tribute to the Billy Goat Tavern, debuted on Saturday Night Live (1978). 82. The US ice hockey team defeated Russia en route to winning Olympic gold (1980).
61. The first Illinois Toll Road opened, running from O’Hare Airport to the Wisconsin border (1958).
83. Elwood Blues falsified his driver’s license renewal, giving his address as 1060 West Addison (Wrigley Field) (1980).
62. Alaska and Hawaii became US states (1959).
84. The Taste of Chicago festival opened in Grant Park (1980).
63. Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun debuted (1959).
85. Jack Brickhouse retired after broadcasting more than five thousand Chicago Cubs and White Sox games (1981).
64. Queen Elizabeth II visited Chicago, the first reigning British monarch to do so (1959).
86. Sandra Day O’Connor became the first female US Supreme Court Justice (1981).
65. D. Searle & Company introduced the birth control pill (1960). 66. The Berlin Wall was built (1961) and demolished (1990–92). 67. Ed Reulbach, the last surviving member of the 1908 Cubs team, passed away (1961). 68. The Dan Ryan Expressway was built (1961–62). 69. Carl Sandburg became the first poet laureate of Illinois (1962). 70. The Lava Lite was invented (1964). 71. The Civil Rights Act was enacted (1964).
99. Millennium Park opened (2004). 100. The Chicago History Museum celebrated its 150th anniversary (2006). 101. Western Union sent its last telegram (2006). 102. Chicago instituted a ban on foie gras (2006) and repealed it (2008). 103. The US saw nineteen presidents pass through the White House, including the first African American president (Barack Obama, 2009–17). 104. Wrigley Field welcomed Lord Stanley during a Crosstown Classic game as part of the Chicago Blackhawks’ victory celebration (2010). 105. Wrigley Field turned 100 (2014). 106. Same-sex marriage was legalized in the US (2015).
87. IBM released the first personal computer (1981).
107. Lennie Merullo, the last surviving member of the 1945 Cubs team, passed away (2015).
88. Chicago saw fifteen mayors pass through office, including the first female mayor (Jane Byrne, 1979–83) and the first African American mayor (Harold Washington, 1983–87).
108. The Chicago Cubs captured the National League pennant for the first time since 1945, and the World Series came to Wrigley (2016).
89. Hermès released the iconic Birkin bag, named after actress and singer Jane Birkin (1984). 90. The Chicago Bears released the Superbowl Shuffle three months prior to their win in Super Bowl XX (1985).
Emily H. Nordstrom, senior editor, and Esther D. Wang, assistant editor, compiled this list.
91. Martin Luther King Jr. Day became a federal holiday (1986). 92. Ferris Bueller spent part of his day off at Wrigley Field (1986).
72. Interracial marriage was legalized (1967).
93. Wrigley hosted its first night game (1988).
73. Marina City, designed by Bertrand Goldberg, opened (1967).
94. The Simpsons first aired on television (1989).
From the Editor | 5
Composing the Union’s Battle Cries By expressing radical sentiments in song, Root & Cady influenced how Americans experienced the Civil War and transformed Chicago’s music publishing industry. C H R I S T I A N M c W H I RT E R
T
he most significant event of the Civil War Sesquicentennial was probably the release of Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. The film depicts President Abraham Lincoln’s efforts to shepherd the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress, thereby ensuring the destruction of slavery. It climaxes with the amendment’s passage, and Spielberg punctuates the moment by having the assembled House representatives burst into song. The song they sing was one of the war’s biggest hits and a product of Chicago—“The Battle Cry of Freedom.”1 It was a good choice. “The Battle Cry of Freedom” was tremendously popular—selling at least 100,000 copies during the Civil War and somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 during the nineteenth century.2 The song’s popularity, however, was not the only thing that made it well-suited to that particular scene. Like many of the North’s wartime anthems, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” was politically progressive. Less directly emancipationist than the Union’s other primary war tune, “John Brown’s Body,” the Chicago song nevertheless subtly encourages listeners to adopt freedom as their main cause. This subtext increasingly became text as the conflict progressed and more Northerners embraced emancipation as a Union war aim.3
In communicating political ideas through a catchy melody, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” perfectly represents the artistic and business philosophy of its publisher, Root & Cady. The firm—barely in its infancy when the war began—produced some of the North’s biggest hits and put Chicago on the musical map. This success transformed Root & Cady into a political force, providing motivating anthems for Republicans and War Democrats and shaping the way Americans viewed the Civil War.4 Although many of Root & Cady’s songs are still part of our national memory, the firm itself is largely forgotten. The success of tunes such as “Just Before the Battle, Mother,” “Kingdom Coming,” “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” and “Marching through Georgia” made Root & Cady a household name in much of the North and even the South. Although not Chicago’s first successful music publisher—that was probably H. M. Higgins—Root & Cady achieved an unprecedented level of fame and placed the growing city alongside New York, Philadelphia, and Boston as one of the nation’s main sources of sheet music.5 This was remarkable given Chicago’s relative youth and probably could not have happened without the eager audience and stirring themes the war itself provided.
George F. Root composed “The Battle Cry of Freedom” in 1862 in response to President Lincoln’s call for 300,000 recruits. He rewrote the lyrics in 1864 to encourage soldiers to persevere in the face of military hardships. Opposite and above: The sheet music cover and close of the chorus of the original song. 6 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Root & Cady | 7
Chauncey M. Cady and E. Towner Root founded the firm in 1858.6 Both were already involved in America’s nascent popular music industry. Cady carried the strongest bona fides, having worked as a music teacher, editor for the New York Musical Review, and an employee at Higgins.7 Root had a stronger business background but also enjoyed notable connections to the music world. As a member of one of New England’s most prominent musical families, he sang and played piano a little himself and understood the period’s leading trends in musical education. Root was also a follower of prominent New England educator Lowell Mason, who supported democratizing music, specifically religious music, by making it affordable and easy to understand.8 In early 1859, Cady and Root set up their store at 95 Clark Street (now part of Daley Plaza), selling instruments and sheet music.9 Soon thereafter, the firm began publishing songs of its own.
By September, Root & Cady was arguably Chicago’s leading seller of musical instruments, but the bulk of its profits came from sheet music publication and sales.10 A budding industry for most of the antebellum period, American sheet music came into its own during the 1850s and became even more profitable during the Civil War. The relative cheapness of parlor pianos and other instruments created a demand for accessible, easy-tolearn tunes that could be played for family and friends. Mason had demonstrated the medium’s economic potential by selling large numbers of affordable hymnbooks, and Stephen Foster’s subsequent phenomenal songwriting success created a new generation of aspiring tunesmiths. Thus, the modern idea of a “hit song” was born. Knowing that a single tune, such as Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” (1848), could generate enough profit to keep an entire operation in good standing, presses began flooding the market with new songs, hoping at least one would catch on. Publishers could produce a piece of sheet music for about fifteen cents and sell it for ten to forty more—requiring little capital to gamble on a stable of potentially successful songwriters.11 In 1864, newspaper reporters speculated that Americans made more use of printed music than anyone else in the world and that every publishing house then in operation had scored at least one major hit.12 Root & Cady was particularly well-situated to succeed in the sheet music market because of Root’s family connections, especially his older brother, George Frederick Root. A close disciple of Mason, George Root was already a rising star in the east and entering into an extremely prolific songwriting period. The first tune Root & Cady published, the now-forgotten “Oh, Are Ye Sleeping, Maggie?” (1859), was Root’s,13 and he remained the firm’s leading songwriter—both in volume and success—for the entirety of its existence. In 1859, Root was primarily engaged in teaching and organizing musical education conferences called normal schools, and these efforts occasionally brought him to Chicago. While here, Root became increasingly involved in his brother’s business, and by the end of 1859, he had secured his own room in the store. As Root & Cady’s success grew, George found himself drawn into its day-to-day operations and finally decided to relocate to Chicago in 1863. As he later recalled, his involvement was initially “as a secondary matter or a recreation,” but soon it was “clear that I was to be absorbed in its whirl as my hard-working brother had been from the beginning.” Quitting his On Christmas Eve 1858, the Chicago Press and Tribune reported: “We notice that Messrs. Root & Cady are rapidly fitting up their beautiful New Music Store . . . which, in some departments, is now open, and sharing the Holiday trade.” Within weeks, advertisements, like this one, appeared in local papers.
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This is one of the few remaining pieces of evidence of Root & Cady’s original location at 95 Clark Street, opposite Courthouse Square. The rapidly growing firm expanded to the second floor of its building in 1861. Map created by E. Whitefield for Rufus Blanchard, 1862
Root & Cady | 9
events on the battlefront, while soldiers wanted tunes that reminded them of home and reinforced their personal and ideological motivations. The managers of Root & Cady understood this and produced songs that specifically targeted the wartime needs of these two groups. For instance, George Root’s “Just Before the Battle, Mother” (1863) reassures Northern women that their sons were virtuous and brave—thinking primarily of their mothers and their duty before charging into battle: Oh, I long to see you, Mother; And the loving ones at home; But, I’ll never leave our banner, Till in honor I can come.15
George Frederick Root as pictured in Biographical Sketches of the Leading Men of Chicago, 1868. Photograph by Wilson & St. Clair
“normals” for the duration of the war, he became part of what a contemporary Chicago historian called “our Trinity of musical fame,” with Cady managing the finances; Towner Root, “the business detail in all the departments” and marketing; and George Root, publications.14 It is telling that George Root chose 1863 to fully commit to Root & Cady. The year marked the first anniversary of his biggest hit, “The Battle Cry of Freedom,” and would later be acknowledged as the midpoint of the Civil War. The war was a monumental event for American songwriting and publishing, and no firm benefitted as much as Root & Cady. It released all of its biggest sellers during the war and all addressed the conflict directly. This connection was no accident but part of a strategy designed to harness the public’s appetite for songs that made sense of the horrible conflict and its causes. Civilians wanted a way to connect with remote
10 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Root’s “Just Before the Battle, Mother” sold for twenty-five cents. A Root & Cady advertisement described it, “Key of B-flat. Tender and beautiful.”
Similarly, Root & Cady’s two biggest hits, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” and “Marching through Georgia” (1865), motivated soldiers and their families by addressing the North’s dual causes of preserving the Union and emancipation. The chorus of “The Battle Cry of Freedom” encourages perseverance while providing a statement of purpose for the North: The Union forever, Hurrah boys, hurrah! Down with the Traitor, Up with the Star; While we rally round the flag, boys, Rally once again, Shouting the battle cry of Freedom.16 In 1864, Root released a second version specifically for soldiers, replacing the original song’s call to arms with a plea to endure in the face of military hardships and reversals.17 The chorus of “Marching through Georgia” adopts the same Union causes but pushes emancipation to the forefront: Hurrah! Hurrah! we bring the jubilee! Hurrah! Hurrah! the flag that makes you free! So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea, While we were marching through Georgia.18 The managers of Root & Cady closely followed the progress of the war and attempted to publish a song each time an event merited musical comment or consumption. In this way, they hoped to tap into the national zeitgeist for maximum resonance and profit. Within days of the fall of Fort Sumter, George Root published “The First Gun is Fired! May God Protect the Right” (1861).19 Afterward, he recalled, “As I have said, when anything happened that could be voiced in a song, or when the heart of the Nation was moved by particular circumstances or conditions caused by the war, I wrote what I thought would then express the emotions of the soldiers or the people.”20 Indeed, Root was one of the most qualified people in the country to do so. His “normals” highlighted catchy, accessible songwriting, so he was already a master at producing likable melodies with lyrical resonance on demand.21 Several of his biggest hits fit this description: “The Battle Cry of Freedom” responded to Abraham Lincoln’s call for three hundred thousand recruits in the summer of 1862, and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp! (The Prisoner’s Hope)” (1863) commented on the declining conditions of Confederate prisoner-of-war camps. Although Root described this as his personal writing method, it is clear that he encouraged his stable of songwriters to follow suit, and it was obviously good business, filling consumer demand and giving Root & Cady a patriotic public profile. Such a strategy (surely with some influence from Towner Root, the firm’s marketing officer) could easily be viewed as cynical, but the interest in the war and Unionism shown by George Root and his songwriters was genuine.
Root’s musical output was unparalleled. He published “The First Gun is Fired!” (above) within days of the fall of Fort Sumter and used the pseudonym “Wurzel” (below) for his more radical sentiments.
Root & Cady | 11
“One day early in the war a quiet and rather solemn-looking young man, poorly clad, was sent up to my room from the store with a song for me to examine. I looked at it and then at him in astonishment,” wrote George Root, describing his introduction to Henry Clay Work (right) and Work’s song “Kingdom Coming” (below).
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Indeed, besides financial success, Root & Cady’s other wartime achievement was expressing fairly radical political sentiments in song. Civil War music, like music in general, often renders radical ideas more palatable by pairing them with appealing melodies, and Root & Cady showed unmatched skill in producing such content in a way that consistently found a broad audience. It is hard to speculate the degree to which the nineteenth-century public recognized Root & Cady’s political sentiments, but they are clear in retrospect. The Cady and Root families hailed from New England and had ties to abolitionism, temperance, school reform, and other Whig/ Republican movements. In September 1862, the names of George Root and Chauncey Cady appeared in a public appeal for a meeting of “Christians of all denominations who believe that the country is now suffering under divine judgments for the sin of oppression” to draft a memorial to Lincoln “urging him to issue a decree of emancipation, as a sign of national repentance as well as military necessity.”22 Root’s musical output was rarely expressly abolitionist, but he occasionally used the pseudonym “G. F. Wurzel,” “root” in German, for more radical sentiments, such as the pro-emancipation, “De day ob Liberty’s comin’” (1862). Nevertheless, George left the most radical political statements to his stable of songwriters, especially his biggest star, Henry Clay Work. Alanson Work had brought his son, Henry, from New England to the Midwest long before the Cadys or Roots arrived. Work was a radical abolitionist and moved to help operate the Underground Railroad in Illinois and Missouri. He was arrested and imprisoned for his activities in 1841 and clearly impressed his fervent beliefs—if not his penchant
for radical action—on his son.23 The younger Work expressed his ideas through music, and the song he used to break into Root & Cady, “Kingdom Coming (The Year of Jubilo)” (1862), is an excellent example of his style— pairing a catchy melody with radical sentiments barely hidden under a comic minstrel apparatus. Minstrelsy, America’s first original style of music, was drawn from stage performances by white people in blackface mimicking the speech patterns and perceived mental inferiority of African Americans. Work appropriated the style and joviality of minstrelsy, especially in his use of “Negro dialect,” but inverted it into a vehicle for promoting black freedom and increased involvement in the war. “Kingdom Coming” describes a group of slaves seizing control of their master’s plantation after he flees the sound of Union gunboats. The heavy use of dialogue and jaunty melody of the chorus suggests a comic scenario, but by celebrating a jubilee, a religious day of deliverance, the lyrics show Work’s abolitionism: De massa run, ha, ha! De darkey stay, ho, ho! It mus’ be now de kingdom coming, An’ de year ob jubilo!24 Root described his reaction to Work’s piece as “astonishment,” adding that it was “full of bright, good sense and comical situations in its ‘darkey’ dialect . . . the melody decidedly good and taking, and the whole exactly suited to the times.” The last point was probably what appealed to him most. When Work showed him the tune, Root hired him on the spot, launching a somewhat contentious but highly profitable and influential partnership.25 One source of tension between the two
Work excelled at pairing radical sentiments with catchy melodies. His lyrics for “Kingdom Coming” describe a master’s flight and his slaves’ move into “de loghouse on de lawn” before closing with the verse above. Root & Cady | 13
A Root & Cady advertisement for “Babylon is Fallen!” mused, “Some signers have told us that they preferred this song to its companion— ‘Kingdom Coming.’ It certainly becomes more and more appropriate as the strongholds of the South fall into our hands, and the soldiers of ‘African descent’ join in the fight.” 14 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
was Work’s relatively slow publishing schedule: Root constantly complained of Work’s lugubrious pace, and in 1864, Work noted that Root had made himself ill from writing too much.26 Although progressive, Work’s wartime tunes proved extremely popular. Some pieces, such as “Song of a Thousand Years” (1863) and “Wake Nicodemus” (1864), simply celebrated emancipation and Union victory, but Work’s two late-war hits demonstrate an increasingly open radicalism.27 In 1863, he published a sequel to “Kingdom Coming” called “Babylon is Fallen!,” written in response to the call for black enlistment. Again, Work used minstrel tropes to depict African Americans resisting slavery, but this second song makes its politics much more explicit. The same slaves that seized the plantation in “Kingdom Coming” return as Union soldiers—occupying the plantation and capturing their former master. The cover, depicting a group of black soldiers aiming rifles at a fleeing Confederate officer, blatantly illustrates the social order’s reversal. Work’s final and most successful war song, “Marching through Georgia,” drops the trappings of minstrelsy and expresses support for emancipation more clearly than in any of his other lyrics. Written in the aftermath of the Savannah Campaign, more commonly known as Sherman’s March to the Sea, the song heralds the Union army as an expressly abolitionist force, carrying “the flag that makes you free” across Georgia. In Work’s eyes, General William T. Sherman was not just waging a campaign against Southern morale by targeting civilian property; rather, he was a second Moses, transforming the landscape into “a thoroughfare for freedom.”28 Work’s ascension to privileged status within Root & Cady coincided with George Root’s move to Chicago in 1863. In April of that year, the firm launched a monthly periodical, Song Messenger of the Northwest, and appointed Work its editor. The publication was primarily designed to sell sheet music and instruments, but Work also received significant leeway to publish articles reflecting the firm’s stance on music, politics, and Chicago. He would step down before even serving a year,
but the tone he established stayed with the Song Messenger throughout the war. An 1865 editorial states the articles were intended to be “instructive, interesting, or amusing,” but while they are generally short and simple, there is clearly a philosophy behind them.29 The first issue tied Root & Cady and its music to the Union cause, crediting the firm’s success to “some mysterious connection with the patriotism which, like an electrical shock, has so often swept across these prairies.”30 Another early article touts music’s potential influence, noting it can “make the patriot more patriotic, the soldier
“Marching through Georgia” is arguably Henry C. Work’s most enduring composition. Below: The song’s lively chorus written in Work’s hand.
Root & Cady | 15
This Root & Cady advertisement appeared on the back of a printing of “Kingdom Coming� in 1863. In it, the managers encourage readers to submit orders by mail and provide assurances that they will cover the cost of postage. 16 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
By 1863, Root & Cady had outgrown their Clark Street location and planned a move to the new Crosby’s Opera House (above). Delays with the building’s construction, however, meant that the company didn’t relocate until just after the war.
more daring, the lover more loving, the voluptuary more voluptuous, the bacchanalian more reckless, and the devotee more devout. It excites good or evil, purity or the reverse.” Were a reader to wonder if this was similar to drunkenness, the author quickly provides a protemperance answer: “The difference between brandy and music was, that one tended to evil, the good being exceptional; and the other, to good, the evil being exceptional.”31 Abolitionism is evident in many of the songs featured, but the periodical promoted the cause elsewhere, such as in the publication announcement for “Song of a Thousand Years” that hoped “the reverberation of the chorus may reach Richmond and Charleston and a faint echo may even cross the Atlantic, and agitate the smoky atmosphere of London and Liverpool.”32 The Song Messenger also took a strong stance against Democrats who opposed the war, which cost Root & Cady some number of subscribers. The first 1864 edition features an article, “Music and Patriotism,” arguing that patrons cancelled “because we have, in our humble way, without hesitation or reserve, sustained the national administration in all the measures it deemed best calculated to cripple and crush the Rebellion.” The editor shrugged this off, noting that Root & Cady could have “gone still farther” by declaring slavery “is doomed to be swept from our fair land, and its handcuffs, gang-chains,
and coffles be laid away with the racks of the Inquisition and the other infernal enginery of the dark ages.” Noting how the firm’s music emboldened Northern patriots and steeled Northern soldiers, he asserted music’s critical role “in all these scenes as in the family circle, the house of God, or the vaults of heaven” and concluded, “the musical people all over the land see and feel this, and unite with us in rising so far above mere party politics, as to exclaim ‘God bless the President, and all who help him in this fearful struggle!’”33 If the Song Messenger’s politics did not bother most of its readers, the same could be said for Root & Cady’s sheet music. Its sales remained high over the course of the war and transformed the firm from one of a small collection of frontier music businesses into a major force in American publishing. An article in the Song Messenger Extra from April 1867 gives the sales numbers for some of the firm’s biggest hits, and they are impressive: “The Battle Cry of Freedom” sold 350,000 copies; “The Vacant Chair,” 150,000; both “Just Before the Battle, Mother” and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” 100,000; and “Kingdom Coming,” 75,000.34 Perhaps more profound is the effect these and other sales had on the firm itself. Having expanded to the second floor of its Clark Street location in the spring of 1861, Root &
Sheet music cover for “Song of a Thousand Years,” one of Work’s expressly abolitionist pieces, published by Root & Cady, 1863 Root & Cady | 17
Cady had outgrown the larger space by 1863 and planned a move to the new Crosby’s Opera House, to be located on Washington Street between State and Dearborn.35 Problems with the building’s construction repeatedly pushed the move back, and Root & Cady did not actually relocate until just after the war; but an examination of the firm’s output easily demonstrates the need for a larger space.36 Root & Cady published more than 250,000 pieces of sheet music in 1863 alone, often running four thousand copies of “Kingdom Coming” and “The Battle Cry of Freedom” in a single week.37 The Song Messenger repeatedly complained of the firm’s inability to fulfill growing orders and lamented its back stock had been cleaned out. Root & Cady addressed this problem in 1864 by buying an additional press, allowing 1,200 imprints every hour—the largest such operation in Chicago.38 But just as the war and the issues and emotions it generated fostered Root & Cady’s tremendous success, its close caused a leveling off, if not a decline. With the war over, the firm’s songwriters retrenched, largely abandoning the politicization that had served them well since 1861. George Root later recalled that after
Lincoln’s assassination the outpouring of “songs stopped as if they had been shot” and even recent songs on war topics, such as his own “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!,” seemed to immediately lose their appeal.39 Before the wartime boost of patriotic music, sentimental ballads had dominated the market, and Root & Cady returned to this genre. Despite the occasional reference to the temperance movement, the Song Messenger also depoliticized and featured longer articles, primarily focused on music news and education. Still, Root & Cady apparently remained financially healthy. The firm avoided a rash of fiscal problems that afflicted Crosby’s Opera House and continued publishing music and the Song Messenger at a steady rate. Indeed, left to its own devices, Root & Cady may well have remained one of America’s leading music publishers into the twentieth century, but as with many promising mid-century Chicago businesses, the Great Fire of 1871 eliminated that potential. The fire came at a particularly bad time for Root & Cady: the firm had just gone on a printing spree—producing enormous stacks of songbooks and sheet music for its profitable fall season. George Root heard of the blaze from a neighbor in
From its inception in 1863, Root & Cady’s monthly periodical, the Song Messenger of the Northwest, reflected the firm’s stance on music, politics, and issues of the day. Following the war, however, the editorial tone shifted to music news and education. Above: The front page of the January 1870 issue. 18 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Above: Engraving depicting the burning of Crosby’s Opera House, Harper’s Weekly, October 28, 1871. Below: George Root’s account of the disaster includes the lyrics, “Flames! flames! terrible flames! How they sweep, how they rush, how they roar. . . . Till falling! crashing! Our glorious city’s no more. We are passing thro’ the fire!”
Groveland Park, an affluent community about four miles south of the Loop, and tried to check on the store: I went, and when we got within a mile of the fire we began to see signs of the great disaster. . . . I was in time to see the costly and elegant opera-house go. I could not get near enough to see the rear building in which was my working-room and library. I wondered if my green box was safe. The young men in the store had laughed among themselves a great deal because I had often said, ‘If there’s a fire, save that green box.’ It was an old paper affair, but it contained my daily work and all my unpublished manuscripts. A few months before, the firm had built a brick vault for its song plates and other valuables. These items survived, as did Root’s green box, carried out by an employee checking on the shop before fleeing the fire. But Root & Cady lost its entire expendable inventory, including the fall stock and the capital that went into Root & Cady | 19
The Chicago History Museum’s collection includes this original copy of “Grandfather’s Clock” written in Henry C. Work’s hand. The song is widely credited as the origin of the term grandfather clock, first used in 1909. 20 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
preparing it. Any chance of returning to business as usual vanished, as Chicago’s insurance companies defaulted in the face of overwhelming claims. To stay afloat, the managers of the newly reorganized Root & Cady sold the firm’s “book catalogue, plates and copyrights to John Church & Co. of Cincinnati and the sheet music plates and copyrights to S. Brainard’s Sons, Cleveland.” In all, this garnered about $130,000, which saved Root & Cady from bankruptcy but sacrificed the firm’s independence and irreparably changed the business.40 The owners eventually broke their partnership. Cady went bankrupt and left Chicago.41 He started his own firm in New York in 1875, where he notably published Work’s most successful postwar hit, “Grandfather’s Clock.” Nevertheless, the business was a nonentity by 1880, due in part to Cady’s age and ill health. He relocated to Atlanta and worked in the music trade there until his death in 1889.42 The Roots split into two companies: Towner opened a music store with some support from Cady and a new partner, William Lewis. George joined with his sons and another brother, William, to form George F. Root & Sons, which partnered with Church in Cincinnati to produce and sell music. Neither firm did especially well, and Church increasingly took financial control of George F. Root & Sons. The Song
Messenger also endured but merged with Church’s Musical Visitor in 1876. Having maintained an aggressive songwriting and management schedule before the fire, George Root made himself only the nominal head of his new company and returned to his first love: teaching. He enjoyed a pleasant late career and retirement, penning his memoirs, published by Church in 1891, and becoming a musical hero to Civil War veterans by his death in 1896.43 Root was not alone in enjoying legendary status among the war generation. Work, too, became a favorite of veterans, and his “Marching through Georgia” was one of their primary reunion anthems—eventually eclipsing “The Battle Cry of Freedom” for which Root seems to have harbored some jealousy.44 That both anthems endured in the decades after the war is impressive enough, but that they, and other Root & Cady pieces, remain standard fixtures in modern depictions of the war is truly remarkable. Root & Cady’s managers and songwriters tapped into the Civil War generation’s consciousness better than any other collective group of music professionals. Indeed, only one Civil War song, “Weeping, Sad and Lonely (When this Cruel War is Over)” sold better in the nineteenth century.45 But, while that song stands as a singular
After the Great Chicago Fire, George Root returned to teaching. He is pictured (fourth from right) in Chicago with a group of delegates of the National Normal Musical Institute, c. 1872. Root & Cady | 21
firm itself does not. It shone brightly but too briefly to become part of the broader history of American popular music. But at least here in Chicago, Root & Cady’s influence on music, the Civil War, and the city it called home should be appreciated and commemorated. Chicago gave much of itself to the Union war effort, and Root & Cady’s songs are one of its most effective and enduring contributions. Christian McWhirter is research historian at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, and editor of the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. He is the author of Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).
Work’s “Marching through Georgia” retained its appeal for decades following the Civil War. H. M. Caldwell published a commemorative copy around 1889 with illustrations by Charles Copeland. In it, this lithograph accompanies the chorus.
achievement by its authors and publisher, Root & Cady is remarkable precisely because its achievements are not singular. The firm continuously produced pieces that resonated with audiences. In so doing, Root & Cady set the bar for what a music publishing house could achieve in a relatively short amount of time and made Chicago a viable market for music production and sales—a status the city has maintained ever since. Yet, although Root & Cady’s songs remain part of our national memory, the
I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum, unless otherwise noted. 6, ICHi-88774 (detail). 7, ICHi-88772. 8, Chicago Press and Tribune, January 15, 1859. 9, ICHi-64073. 10, top: ICHi-14238; middle: ICHi88775; bottom: ICHi-88776 (detail). 11, top: ICHi-88779; bottom: ICHi-88771. 12, inset: ICHi-32468 (detail); ICHi88761. 13, ICHi-88762 (detail). 14, ICHi-88767. 15, middle: ICHi-88764; bottom: ICHi-92701 (detail). 16, ICHi-88763. 17, top: ICHi-64360 (detail); bottom: ICHi-88768. 18, ICHi88760. 19, top: ICHi-63127 (detail); bottom: ICHi-64406. 20, ICHi-32466. 21, ICHi-88759. 22, ICHi-92700. F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | On music and culture during the Civil War, see Steven H. Cornelius, Music of the Civil War Era (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2004) and James A. Davis, Music Along the Rapidan: Civil War Soldiers, Music, and Community during Winter Quarters, Virginia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2014). George Root’s autobiography, The Story of a Musical Life (Cincinnati, OH: John Church Co., 1891; reprint, New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), is available on Google Books. For broader context, see Nicholas E. Tawa, High-Minded and Low-Down: Music in the Lives of Americans, 1800–1861 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000).
ENDNOTES 1 “This is History,” Lincoln, directed by Steven Spielberg (Touchstone Home Entertainment, 2012), Blu-ray. 2 “Western Enterprise—The Music Publishing House of Root & Cady,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 3, no. 5 (August 1865): 67; Lydia Avery Coonley, “George F. Root and His Songs,” New England Magazine 13 (January 1896): 564. 22 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
3 For the popularity of “John Brown’s Body,” see Christian McWhirter, Battle Hymns: The Power and Popularity of Music in the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 41–50. 4 Sources on Root & Cady are surprisingly few given the firm’s prominence, but all scholars of the firm owe a huge debt to Dena J. Epstein for her pioneering research.
In Music Publishing in Chicago Before 1871: The Firm of Root & Cady, 1858–1871, Detroit Studies in Music Bibliography (Detroit: Information Coordinators, 1969) and other places, she provided an invaluable foundation for future work. In addition, her notes on the firm and other subjects are available to researchers at the Newberry Library in Chicago.
5 For more on H. M. Higgins, see Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, especially 8–10. 6 George F. Root, The Story of a Musical Life: An Autobiography (Cincinnati, OH: John Church, 1891), 122. 7 George F. Root to “Friends and Acquaintances,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 1 (April 1863): 15; Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 24–25. 8 For a concise overview of Mason’s contributions and career, see Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 139–55. 9 Chicago Tribune, January 15, 1859, 1:7. 10 Chicago Tribune, September 23, 1859, 3:7.
18 Henry Clay Work, “Marching through Georgia” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1865).
36 “Moving,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 3, no. 3 (June 1865): 40.
19 Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 43.
37 Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 10 (January 1864): 159; “Western Music Publications,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 1 (April 1863): 3.
20 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 132, 136. It is noteworthy that Root uses “or” not “and” between “soldiers or the people,” suggesting that he understood the needs of each audience. 21 Ibid., 132. 22 Chicago Tribune, September 4, 1862, 4:6. 23 Alanson Work’s arrest and imprisonment was a fairly high-profile event among abolitionists and was memorialized in George Thompson’s, Prison Life and Reflections; or, A Narrative of the Arrest, Trial, Conviction, Imprisonment, Treatment, Observations, Reflections, and Deliverance of Work, Burr, and Thompson (Hartford, CT: A. Work, 1857).
11 Crawford, America’s Musical Life, 231–33; Arthur Loesser, Men, Women, and Pianos: A Social History (New York: Dover, 1990), 506.
24 Henry Clay Work, “Kingdom Coming” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1862).
12 M. E. B., “Musical Instruments,” Arthur’s Home Magazine 23 (June 1864): 305; “Our War-Songs,” Musical Review and Musical World 15 (November 19, 1864): 374.
26 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 138; Henry C. Work, “Patience, Coffee, Beefsteak, Music,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 12 (March 1864): 184.
13 Chicago Tribune, September 26, 1859, 1:3, as quoted in Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 36–37; Root, Story of a Musical Life, 226. 14 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 129, 143–45; I. D. Guyer, History of Chicago: Its Commercial and Manufacturing Interest and Industry (Chicago: Church, Goodman & Cushing, 1862), 180; Root & Cady, “The Song Messenger,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 2, no. 1 (April 1864): 9. For further details on Root’s life, see his autobiography, Story of a Musical Life; Lydia Avery Coonley’s 1896 biographical article, “George F. Root and His Songs”; and the more recent short work, P. H. Carder, George F. Root, Civil War Songwriter: A Biography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). 15 George F. Root, “Just Before the Battle, Mother” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1863). 16 George F. Root, “The Battle Cry of Freedom” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1862). 17 George F. Root, “The Battle Cry of Freedom [Battle Song]” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1864).
25 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 137–38.
27 Henry Clay Work, “Song of a Thousand Years” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1863); Henry Clay Work, “Wake Nicodemus” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1864). 28 Henry Clay Work, “Babylon is Fallen!” (Chicago: Root & Cady, 1863); Work, “Marching through Georgia.” 29 “Renewing an Old Understanding,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 3, no. 1 (April 1865): 8. 30 “Introductory,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 1 (April 1863): 8. 31 “John Prosy’s Talks By the Fireside, Number 1,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 3 (June 1863): 33. 32 “Song of a Thousand Years,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 3 (June 1863): 41. 33 “Music and Patriotism,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 1, no. 10 (January 1864): 152. 34 “Salutatory,” Song Messenger of the NorthWest Extra (April 1867): 1.
38 “Steam Presses,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 2, no. 8 (November 1864): 120; “Music Publishing,” Song Messenger of the Northwest 2, no. 9 (December 1864): 143. 39 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 151. 40 Ibid., 152–57. 41 Ibid., 157. 42 Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 29–30. 43 Root, Story of a Musical Life, 157–61. 44 Ibid., 138. The legendary status of both Root and Work is evident in how frequently their songs appear in Grand Army of the Republic (GAR) publications. Both received direct acclaim from veterans later in life: The GAR honored Root with a memorial concert the year before his death, and at a performance in 1883, attendees bestowed Work with enormous applause. Veterans also attended Work’s funeral and laid flowers on his grave. Coonley, “George F. Root and His Songs,” 569; Nicholas Smith, “The Battle Hymns of Nations,” Military Order of the Loyal Legion of the U.S. – Wisconsin Commandery, War Papers (Milwaukee: Burdick & Allen, 1903), 3: 486; Our War Songs, North and South (Cleveland, OH: S. Brainard’s Sons, 1887), 13; Walter L. Powell, “Henry Clay Work: ‘The Silver Horn’ as Civil War Elegy,” in Bugle Resounding: Music and Musicians of the Civil War Era, ed. Bruce C. Kelley and Mark A. Snell (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2004), 123. 45 Precise sales figures for “When this Cruel War is Over” are difficult to determine, but enough sources claim the song sold as many as one million copies before 1900 to justify the number as reliable. “Dixie” is the only other possible contender; although possibly the most popular song of the war, its 1859 publication and various publishers, in both the North and South, make calculating even moderately reliable sales statistics impossible.
35 Epstein, Music Publishing in Chicago, 38; Root, Story of a Musical Life, 141.
Root & Cady | 23
Sing a New Song J. Wesley Jones and his celebrated Metropolitan Community Church Choir captivated audiences with their stirring performances of formal sacred music. R O B E RT M . M A R OV I C H
T
he line of fashionably attired men and women stretched for more than a city block. Chicago police officers positioned wooden stanchions between patrons and swiftly moving boulevard traffic. When the venue opened, the line wove its way gracefully from the sidewalk into the building, splitting into ever smaller segments as people filled seats on the main floor and in the balcony. The room, abuzz with pleasantries and light laughter, hushed when the lights dimmed. The concertgoers anticipated a pleasant Sunday evening musical program. The event they enjoyed was not a musical at Chicago’s Oriental Theater or a performance at the Lyric Opera or Symphony Center. It was a church choir program in Bronzeville, a predominantly African American community on Chicago’s South Side. The site was the Metropolitan Community Church at Forty-First Street and South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Drive). The year was 1931, and the group that commanded such a crowd was the Metropolitan Community Church Choir directed by J. Wesley Jones. Offering a repertory of concert spirituals, art songs, hymns, anthems, oratorios, and other Western European classical music literature, Professor J. Wesley Jones’s Metropolitan “Prize-Winning and Radio Choir” evoked the cosmopolitan and assimilationist aspirations of Chicago’s black middle class during the first half of the twentieth century. Its dignified comportment countered the prevailing image of Chicago as the tawdry “town that Billy Sunday couldn’t shut down.”1 The Metropolitan Choir was one of the first black choirs to be heard over a radio station with a multistate listener base, make a commercial record, perform frequently before racially mixed audiences, appear on television, and win a major music competition involving both black and white choruses. Even without the choir, Jones 24 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
was a towering figure in the city’s classical music community. Through his tenure leading thousand-voice choirs at the Chicagoland Music Festival, he earned the sobriquet of “Mr. Choral Music.”2 But as ubiquitous as Jones was in the city’s artistic community between 1917 and his death in 1961, he is largely forgotten today. Despite a robust history of accomplishment, Chicago’s African American classical musicians and singers have not received the same scholarly attention as the purveyors of blues, jazz, gospel, soul, and other popular music forms. Additionally, the Metropolitan Choir’s almost nonexistent discography was not the stuff of musical immortality; the group released only one commercial record, made in 1925. The main reason, however, may be that the formal sacred music they performed was all but eclipsed by the gospel chorus movement, which exploded on the scene in the early 1930s and remains the predominant worship music of the African American church. Yet if thousands of southern migrants identified with the emotion-laden gospel music that reminded them of home, thousands of the city’s African American middle-class establishment identified with the formal music presented by Jones. Still, new migrants and old settlers alike could agree that the Metropolitan Choir was a symbol of racial pride. Jones was considered a “race man” for demonstrating that African American artists were as capable as any in presenting classical music with dignity, grace, and imagination. John Wesley Jones was born to former slaves on September 8, 1884, in Nashville, Tennessee. Orphaned as an infant, he was raised by Mr. and Mrs. Robert H. Miller, a white family, until the age of six. Jones was thereafter placed in the Tennessee Industrial School for Orphans, where his aptitude for music impressed school superintendent A. J. Rohelia, who paid Jones’s tuition to Nashville’s Walden University from which he graduated with honors.3
J. Wesley Jones rehearses with a six-hundred-voice chorus in preparation for the 1935 Chicagoland Music Festival. Below: Jones (center) with postal foremen William J. O’Leary (left) and Henry A. Woodson (right) at the Hyde Park post office, where he worked to provide a steady income to support his family.
On August 25, 1906, Jones married Georgia Beatrice Stout and the couple soon moved to Chicago. Jones secured voice lessons from Clement A. Hutter of Kimball Hall and studied at Chicago Musical College.4 Also in 1906, Jones began his life’s work directing church choirs—first at Scott’s Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, then at Friendship Baptist Church, and later at Original Providence Baptist Church on the city’s West Side. Jones became known as a go-to for preparing music for major social occasions. Concerned that church music ministry might not be a reliable source of income, Jones sat for the post office employee examination in 1914. Starting as a porter, he rose steadily, becoming a supervisor in 1934, an assistant superintendent in 1948, and eventually superintendent of Chicago’s Hyde Park station, the first African American to serve as a post office branch superintendent.5 Sing a New Song | 25
Jones’s musical fortunes forever changed in late 1920 when the Reverend Dr. William Decatur Cook invited him to oversee the music program for his new church.6 Cook was an influential leader in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) denomination,7 from which he split in opposition to what he considered less than populist practices. On September 28, 1920, Cook and other disaffected members organized the People’s Church and Metropolitan Community Center.8 In keeping with the credo to be “broadly humanitarian, non-sectarian and serving all people,” Cook sought to create a religious institution that gave all members greater involvement in their church. Metropolitan briefly held services at Unity Hall at 3140 South Indiana Avenue, moving to Wendell Phillips High School’s auditorium in October. By 1927, they purchased the First Presbyterian Church’s imposing stone structure on the southwest corner of Forty-First Street and South Parkway and shortened their name to Metropolitan Community Church. In its heyday, “the Met” claimed a membership of eleven thousand and hosted an impressive roster of speakers representing religious, political, and civic life, including W. E. B. Du Bois, A. Philip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.9 Cook knew that the survival of a middle-class church in Bronzeville meant delivering learned oratory and wellheeled music. Members of Chicago’s traditional Protestant churches were largely aspirational and assimilationist, seeking equality and integration with their white brethren. As a result, and while conscious of their music history, many members of the African American middle class, and those aspiring to that status, cultivat26 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
The Metropolitan Community Church briefly held services at Wendell Phillips High School in Bronzeville, pictured here in 1904.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, pictured here in 1905, wrote “Lift Up Your Heads,” a staple of the choir’s repertoire and included on the group’s only record.
ed a taste for Western European classical music. Additionally, African Americans born in Chicago or those who did not have roots in the Great Migration had little connection with the folk religious practices of the South. For others, spirituals were embarrassing reminders of slavery. They preferred Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, and black classical composers such as Samuel ColeridgeTaylor. For Cook, this meant hiring a choir director steeped in the classics, and Jones was ideal. Indeed, he already had a reputation as a citywide champion of classical vocal music. He had conducted the West Side Choral Society, was named conductor of the Progressive Choral Society of Chicago, and was codirector of the music department of Wendell Phillips Evening School.10 His vocal instruction was in such demand that in 1919 he opened a music studio in his home at 219 North Campbell Avenue on the Near West Side to give private lessons.11 Jones was also among the earliest presidents of the National Association of Negro Musicians (NANM), a group organized in Chicago in July 1919 to “promote, preserve, and support all genres of music created or performed by African Americans.” One of Jones’s first tasks as Metropolitan’s music minister was to organize a Sunday evening musical program. Not only would a “musicale” provide entertainment for Christians forsaking South Side clubs and theaters, it would also draw attention to the church. The visibility and larger membership made possible as a result would endow its pastor with greater political power in a community where African American pastors were regarded as civic as well as religious leaders. Jones recruited his Progressive Choral Society friends to comprise the choir for Metropolitan’s first songfest. Held on October 17, 1920, in the two-thousand-seat auditorium of Wendell Phillips High School, the songfest was so well attended that Chicago Defender music columnist Nora Douglas Holt reported “hundreds were turned away.”12 The performance drew accolades from opera singer Anita Patti Brown, NANM founder Maude Roberts George, and political leader Oscar DePriest13 and became an annual activity on the Bronzeville cultural scene, taking place on the fourth Sunday in October.14 Undoubtedly buoyed by plaudits for the initial Metropolitan musicale, Jones finalized preparations for an even wider-reaching recital. Sponsored by the Progressive Choral Society and held at Orchestra Hall on November 26, 1920, The Negro in Music was a revue of some of the finest African American classical singers and musicians. Although the program featured African American performers exclusively, contemporary reports suggest the audience included “musicians of both races.”15 The Defender’s Holt again praised Jones’s choir, commenting that they were “poised and certain in their knowledge; sang as a unit without sacrificing distinct
The Metropolitan Community Center housed the offices of the church until 1927. Below: An advertisement for the choir’s performance at Orchestra Hall in 1920.
voice coloring and held perfect pitch throughout the evening.”16 The gust of Jones’s celebrity was swift and strong. His popularity as a musician and his affable personality resulted in a broad social circle that persuaded the Defender to make him its chief West Side news reporter. In 1921, with the support of Mayor William Thompson, Jones assembled a thousand-voice choir to sing for the city’s Pageant of Progress Exposition.17 The same year, Jones and the Metropolitan Choir introduced what would become an annual event for the church: the presentation of François-Clément Théodore Dubois’s oratorio The Seven Last Words of Christ (Les Sept Paroles du Christ) for the Good Friday service. Jones was assisted at Metropolitan by a team of talented musicians, including accompanist Neota McCurdy Dyett, Sing a New Song | 27
vocalist C. Wilbur Hardison, organist and singer Walter E. Gossette, pianist and organist Miss Lowell V. Derrick, and contralto and assistant director Magnolia Lewis Butts. Of Jones’s early protégés, Butts became the most prominent in national music circles. Born in Tipton, Missouri, between 1896 and 1899, Butts studied music and graduated from the Chriswell Delsartan School of Expression in Kansas City. She moved to Chicago around 1918 and joined the Progressive Choral Club as early as December 1919, becoming its recording secretary.18 The choir’s repertory consisted of well-known choral literature by Western European and African American composers as well as spirituals arranged with Western European harmony and tonality. The chorus sang Bach’s “Sleepers, Wake! A Voice Is Sounding,” Wagner’s “Shout the Glad Tidings,” F. Melius Christiansen’s arrangement “Beautiful Savior,” James Weldon Johnson’s “O Southland!,” a Handel oratorio, and a variety of choral standards popular with both white and black concertgoers.19 The ensemble earned its “prize-winning” moniker on May 18, 1925, when it participated in a major choral competition sponsored by the Chicago Church Federation and held in Orchestra Hall. Of fourteen choirs, only two—Metropolitan and Grace Presbyterian Church—were black. The compulsory song, performed by all competition entrants, was Alberto Randegger’s “Praise the Lord,” a piece the New Music Review called “one of the standard praise-anthems ever since it was published, being bright, showy and of no great difficulty.”20 The second selection was of the choir’s own choosing. Jones directed an arrangement of the spiritual “Poor Mourner’s Got a Home At Last,” which the Chicago Tribune called “one of the most enjoyable pieces” of the evening.21 Metropolitan took second place, after a white choir from First Ebenezer Lutheran, and also sold the most tickets to the performance.22 Likely as a result of its stellar showing at the competition, Paramount Records, known as a pioneer in the recording of African American blues and jazz artists, agreed to record two sides by the group. According to music scholar David N. Lewis, the recording was made at the studio of pioneering music evangelist Homer Rodeheaver at 218 South Wabash Avenue.23 Identified on the label as “Prof. J. Wesley Jones and Community Choristers,” the choir sang Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Lift Up Your Heads,” a staple of their repertory, with much gusto and accompanied by piano. The other side was a traditional rendition of the Lord’s Prayer as Cook recited the Twenty-Third Psalm (“The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want”) in the foreground. With this, Cook became the first black minister in Chicago to make a phonograph record.24 A Paramount advertisement appeared in the June 20, 1925, issue of the Defender celebrating the choir’s recent victory as “a prize winner in a 28 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
national competitive contest in Chicago where white and colored choirs from all over the country participated.”25 Wherever they appeared in Bronzeville, the Metropolitan Choir drew crowds of astonishing size. Starting in October 1927, the group became one of the first African American church choirs to sing over the airwaves. WLS-AM, a conservative commercial radio station out of Chicago, aired their work on the second Friday of each month at 9:00 P.M., heralding the group as “one of the foremost colored choirs in America.”26 The broadcast was alleged to have been “heard by more people than any other choir in the country.”27 If the chorus was a musical manifestation of the northern black community’s ambition to be modern and urban, it also reflected Jones’s imaginative impulse. In 1927, Defender contributor Maude Roberts George called the director “something of a modernist” in her summary of one of his WLS broadcasts: “He presented ‘Sweet Chariot’ first in the old camp meeting style, with a soprano solo and chorus. Then he presented it as a modern anthem, with contrasts of major and minor, with structural balance and tonal interplay.”28 Reviewing a May 1929 WLS program, Chicago Tribune radio columnist Elmer Douglas commented that the Metropolitan Choir “held quite a niche in last evening’s programs of importance” and lauded its “program . . . made up entirely of Negro spirituals of original and modern compositions, and the concert, except for the announcing, had the air of a [Chicago] Auditorium stage performance.”29 That December, the Metropolitan Choir was invited to provide music for a forum at the Apollo Theater where a panel of speakers, including pioneering social worker Jane Addams, pleaded for good will and tolerance among city residents. Their performance moved Chicago Tribune reporter Sidney Sutherland to exclaim: “What lilting, jubilant rhythm they put into their hymns!”30 In addition to the program on WLS, the choir performed over KYW-AM, Chicago’s first radio station, in December 1930, as part of an effort to raise money “to buy milk for needy infants of all races.” KYW officials were so impressed with the choir’s performance that they asked the group to broadcast on the station every Sunday evening.31 The most significant citywide musical opportunity proffered to Jones came in 1930. On August 23, with financial and promotional sponsorship from the Chicago Tribune, Jones directed a thousand-voice choir of African American singers at Soldier Field as part of the first Chicagoland Music Festival. Historian Monica C. Reed called the event “the most popular outdoor concert in early twentieth century Chicago,” noting that its more than 100,000 spectators included “white and black Chicagoans . . . stand[ing] side by side.”32 Under Jones’s baton, the mass choir took to the darkened stage carrying lamps, with the men
dressed in black and the women in white.33 They sang “I Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” led by Magnolia Lewis Butts, and followed with “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”34 Reed noted: “They were, according to many, the highlight of the evening.”35 Jones also directed a mass intercultural choir of more than two thousand performing the “Hallelujah Chorus” from Handel’s Messiah.
Paramount Records, a pioneer in recording African American artists, produced the group’s only record, making Jones and his choir available to a larger audience.
Sing a New Song | 29
For the next thirty years, Jones directed the Chicagoland Mass Choir in performances of such works as “O Southland!” and “Swing Low, Swing Chariot,” a perennial festival favorite. Over the years, as his festival responsibilities grew, Jones was assisted by several choir directors, including Thomas A. Dorsey, the “Father of Gospel Music.” On occasion, Jones even included gospel songs in his own musicals. A March 1933 appearance of Jones and the Metropolitan Choir at Orchestra Hall featured the Treble Clef Glee Club presenting a Dorsey composition, “Singing in My Soul.” Commenting on the Orchestra Hall performance, a Defender reporter noted that the patrons included “not only the elite of our own group but many notables from the Gold Coast,” meaning that affluent white Chicagoans comprised part of the audience.36 Jones’s ability to teach and lead mass choirs was not lost on Dorsey and other gospel music pioneers. He was called upon regularly, particularly during the 1930s, to train the men and women who were part of the nascent movement. In 1933, Dorsey, Theodore R. Frye, and Metropolitan’s Magnolia Lewis Butts organized the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses (NCGCC) in Chicago. The effort was a product of the explosive growth of gospel choirs in Chicago up to that point, and the desire to spread gospel music beyond the city’s borders. It was instrumental in establishing unions of gospel choirs throughout the country. Dorsey, Frye, and Butts asked Jones to address the delegates at the organization’s initial convention, held at Pilgrim Baptist Church in 1933. While complimentary and encouraging of the gospel singers, Jones took the opportunity to “point out to them their defects and give them a remedy for them.”37 Jones returned for the 1935 NCGCC board
The building that housed Pilgrim Baptist Church was originally designed as a synagogue by Adler & Sullivan. Regarded as the home of gospel music, Mahalia Jackson, Aretha Franklin, and the Edwin Hawkins Singers were among those who performed there. 30 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Thomas A. Dorsey was among the founders of the National Convention of Gospel Choirs and Choruses, formed to spread gospel music beyond the city’s borders.
meeting, where he and Maude Roberts George offered delegates tips for vocal improvement. At the 1936 conference in Detroit, Jones’s address moved a Defender reviewer to call his “food for thought” “a masterpiece in itself.”38 Metropolitan served as headquarters for the 1940 gathering, where Jones presented “Church Music and the Act of Worship.” During the talk, he highlighted examples of “the singing of some of the fine things in his church choir repertory.”39
This advertisement announcing auditions for the O, Sing A New Song pageant appeared in the national edition of the Chicago Defender in June 1934. The advisory committee included both men and women, as well as the world’s fair organization president Rufus C. Dawes and Chicago mayor Edward J. Kelly. Sing a New Song | 31
Cover of the souvenir program for O, Sing a New Song, 1934 32 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
In 1933, Jones and the Metropolitan Choir participated in Negro Day at the city’s second world’s fair, A Century of Progress International Exposition. The event, held on August 12, was similar in purpose to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition’s Colored Folks Day40 and most likely a response to complaints of discrimination. Ill-conceived and generally panned by the African American
media, the day was a flop.41 During the second year of the fair, Jones assisted stage composer-performer Noble Sissle in casting five thousand artists for the O, Sing A New Song extravaganza to be held in Soldier Field on August 25. Jones worked alongside an impressive gathering of the era’s top musicians and composers, including W. C. Handy, Will Marion Cook, William Grant Still, Harry T.
Noble Sissle was a highly regarded composer, conductor, and singer best known for writing the music and lyrics for the Broadway musical Shuffle Along (1921) and its hit song “I’m Just Wild About Harry.” Below, a message from Robert S. Abbott, the founder of the Chicago Defender, regarding O, Sing A New Song.
Sing a New Song | 33
Organizers of an early Bud Billiken Parade included (from left) musician and conductor Noble Sissle, Chicago Defender editor and parade cofounder David Kellum, jazz legend Duke Ellington, attorney Nathan McGill, and (second from right) jazz pianist and bandleader Earl Hines.
Burleigh, William H. Dawson, Major N. Clark Smith, James Mundy, and Carrie Booker Persons.42 An estimated sixty thousand watched Jones conduct the Chicago Tribune Festival Chorus in a series of spirituals, including “Steal Away to Jesus.”43 The week prior to the pageant, Jones’s celebrity earned him a spot in an open car, riding alongside Duke Ellington, in the Defender’s annual South Side Bud Billiken Parade.44 Chicago historian Liam Ford considers O, Sing A New Song an opportunity for African Americans to “show to the rest of Chicago and the country that black entertainers were capable of putting on a stupendous, large-scale spectacle.”45 Yet another Jones milestone during the 1930s was his participation in the 1937 National Folk Festival. Founded in 1933 by Sarah Gertrude Knott and first held in St. Louis in 1934, the 1937 National Folk Festival took place in Orchestra Hall from May 22 to 28. While individuals and music ensembles came from across the country at their own expense, it was customary for local groups to be part 34 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
of daily sessions. For this, Knott engaged a number of local African American classical artists, including Jones, who directed at least three performances during the festival— once with his Metropolitan Choir and twice with a mass choir of 750 voices. An extant series of transcription recordings, made by Sidney Robertson Cowell, of the Metropolitan Choir performing a number of spirituals, including “In That Great Gettin’ Up Morning,”—titled “Fare Ye Well” in the May 27 program—demonstrates the group’s mastery of vocal technique better than the muddy 1925 Paramount sides. Although the fidelity is not much better, Cowell’s transcription nevertheless captures the choir singing with gleeful authority, incorporating elements of jubilee and gospel singing, such as call-and-response, thunderous harmony, and crisp articulation of lyrics. On the Metropolitan Choir’s rendition of the spiritual, “Couldn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” an uncredited female lead singer, probably Magnolia Lewis Butts, ornaments her
“call” with blue notes, sustained notes, and vocal scoops in a thunderous volume that recalls the sonority of the field holler. Knott expressed pleasant surprise that “there are several thousand race members in Chicago who sing spirituals and work songs at least as well, and in some cases with an even greater spirit, than do the people of the Southland.”46 She highlighted Butts’s solo “Pickin’ Up the Little Lambs” as “an example of the spirit that is manifest in the true expressions.”47 In the 1940s, Jones served as founder, general chairman, and director of a mass choir of local children for the Defender’s annual Bud Billiken Easter Music Festival, which in 1947 featured Nat King Cole and the King Cole Trio.48 Jones also directed a chorus of male postal workers, a position he held for decades. He provided the musical background for WGN’s March 1946 radio production “The Story of Bronzeville” written by Defender staffer Robert Lucas.49 Meanwhile, the Metropolitan Choir continued to perform for packed houses. Along with the Goodwill Spiritual Choir, directed by Arthur
Logan and based at Chicago’s Monumental Baptist Church, it was a shining example of the Chicago African American community’s contribution to the fine arts. Tragedy struck on January 6, 1943, when Jones’s wife, Georgia, died. He was remarried six years later, on January 29, 1949, to Winnifred Shirley Hunter,50 who almost immediately set about actively promoting her husband’s many musical activities. In 1952, Jones and the Metropolitan Choir again pioneered with their television debut, appearing with conductor George Schick and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (CSO) on a Christmas Eve WGN-TV telecast. Jones conducted the choir and orchestra together on the William Henry Smith arrangement of “I Stood on the Banks of Jordan,” with Mary Crowley as soloist. Jones called conducting the CSO with his choir “the biggest thrill of my forty-seven years as a music conductor.” This chance to perform with the CSO for a television audience was the “first time such an honor [had been] extended to a Chicago choir.”51
The Metropolitan Community Church Choir, under Jones’s direction, appeared as guests on the Chicago Sunday Evening Club, 1948. Sing a New Song | 35
By this time, gospel music had supplanted senior choirs, such as Jones’s, as the signature sound of the African American Protestant church throughout Chicago and, increasingly, the nation. Nevertheless, Jones remained steadfast in presenting formal choral literature with cross-cultural appeal in segregated Chicago. As the years progressed, the Metropolitan Choir was a prominent but fading remnant of the prewar assimilationist sensibility. Gospel music, however, by incorporating distinctly African performance techniques, expressed the sentiment of a new generation of African Americans who had lost hope of assimilation and integration and instead sought self-determination and self-expression. While Jones’s music transcended cultural barriers with its clas36 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
After directing the Metropolitan Community Church Choir for thirty-eight years, Jones resigned in 1958, and the news made the front page of the Chicago Defender.
sical if now anachronistic underpinning, gospel music, with its extroverted singing and instrumental accompaniment, was becoming distinctly and defiantly Afrocentric. Times were changing, but Jones could look back on successes spanning more than forty years and three Metropolitan pastors—Dr. W. D. Cook, Dr. Joseph M. Evans, and Dr. Theodore Richardson. Jones had been featured on television, radio, phonograph records, at the world’s fair, and the National Folk Festival. He had traveled the country directing mass choirs for the National Baptist Convention preconvention musicals and training
gospel choristers. Ultimately, he had broken racial barriers and brought cultures together through music. It seemed the only force powerful enough to block his way was the petty jealousies of church politics. His resignation as director of the Metropolitan Community Church Choir in 1958, after thirty-eight years on the rostrum, made the front page of the Defender. In his resignation letter to Dr. Richardson, dated September 5, Jones cited “unwarranted criticism which had produced impossible working conditions.” It was prompted by a meeting where he was told that his choir was “not doing anything.” “[The comment] was not a good move toward Christian unity and harmony among the singers,” he told the Defender. “For that reason, I know it will be impossible to work with the minister . . . . the senior choir, under God, has made an enviable world-wide record in the music field. This record stands regardless of what is said to try to disregard it.”52 Whether Jones’s comment referred to Dr. Richardson or a member of the music ministry is unknown. Most likely the comment was the final straw of a political conflict brewing behind the scenes. Nevertheless, the choir adjusted to its new director, Eugene Scott, while Jones continued leading the mass choir at the Chicagoland Music Festival and devoting time to researching spirituals. He also formed a choral society with a handful of artists who had sung for him over the years, including baritone Lorenzo Stallings and Federal Glee Club director William E. Myricks. The J. Wesley Jones Choral Group debuted at Canaan Baptist Church at a tribute program to Stallings on Sunday, February 8, 1959. There was mention that the new choir would be “heard over one of the largest broadcasting stations,” but it is unclear whether that opportunity materialized.53 Four months later, the Banks Conservatory in Birmingham, Alabama, presented Jones with an honorary doctor of hymnology. Back home, Metropolitan honored its longtime choir director with a citation during a June 28 musical.54 Jones remained active in local musical activities until his death on February 13, 1961, after a five-week illness. Services were held at Metropolitan. Dr. Richardson provided the eulogy, and prominent religious leaders, including Dr. Preston Bradley of Chicago’s People’s Church, offered remarks. The songs selected for the occasion were most appropriate: “Goin’ Home,” “Steal Away to Jesus,” and “When I Have Sung My Last Song.”55 A week later, baritone Theodore Charles Stone dedicated his annual recital to Jones. He serenaded a packed house at the University of Chicago’s International House auditorium with operatic airs, folk songs, art songs, and spirituals Following a brief illness, Jones passed away at the age of seventy-six. More than 2,500 mourners paid their respects during services at the church where he served for nearly half his life. Sing a New Song | 37
befitting the late director.56 On February 25, the Chicago Temple Choir invited Jones’s widow for its own memorial concert, held at the Chicago Public Library (now Chicago Cultural Center). The choir rendered music from Bach, Mozart, Schubert as well as the spiritual “Deep River.”57 Jones was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago at 123rd Street and South Kedzie Avenue.58 Perhaps the most moving memorial occurred during the Thirty-Second Chicagoland Music Festival. Approximately sixty-five thousand patrons poured into Soldier Field on August 19, 1961, ignoring the threat of rain. After the 125-member Chicago Fire Department band marched across the field, WGN radio announcer Pierre Andre introduced festival organizer Philip Maxwell, who asked that the stadium lights be dimmed in memory of J. Wesley Jones. The crowd hushed as the stadium fell into darkness. Retha Brown, Jones’s assistant for the Chicagoland Music Festival Chorus, directed the 350-voice choir on “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” No version of the festival favorite could have been quite as poignant as when it was sung that summer evening.59
The program for thirty-second annual Chicagoland Music Festival featured a tribute to Dr. J. Wesley Jones.
Robert M. Marovich is a gospel historian, author of A City Called Heaven: Chicago and the Birth of Gospel Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), and editor in chief of the Journal of Gospel Music. I L L U S T R AT I O N S | Illustrations are from the Chicago History Museum unless otherwise noted. 25, top: Chicago Tribune/Getty Images; bottom, Chicago Defender (weekend edition), October 20, 1951. 26, top: ICHi-19126; bottom: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LCUSZ62122324. 27, top: ICHi-168746; bottom: Chicago Defender (big weekend edition), November 13, 1920. 29, Chicago Defender (national edition), June 20, 1925. 30, top: ICHi-39499; bottom left: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS ILL,16CHIG,56—1; bottom right: Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Historic American Buildings Survey, HABS ILL,16-CHIG,56—3. 31, Chicago Defender (national edition), June 23, 1934. 32, ICHi-89150. 33, top: ICHi-89151; bottom: ICHi-89152. 34, ICHi-38800. 35, Bettmann/Getty Images. 36, Chicago Defender (national edition), October 11, 1958. 37, Chicago Defender (daily edition), February 16, 1961. 38, top: ICHi-89149_e1; bottom: ICHi-89148.
Dr. J. Wesley Jones may be a foggy memory of Chicago’s past, but the Reverend Esther Grier of Metropolitan Community Church no doubt echoed the feelings of many African Americans who lived in Chicago in mid-century: “During Professor Jones’ lifetime we enjoyed I think the greatest glory musically that has been enjoyed by any congregation in the city of Chicago.”60 38 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | For a related work on the historical significance of song and how music enabled the civil rights movement, see Robert Darden, Nothing but Love in God's Water: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement, vol. 1 (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
ENDNOTES 1 As sung most famously by Frank Sinatra in Jimmy Van Heusen’s and Sammy Kahn’s “My Kind of Town.” 2 Chicago Defender, February 15, 1961, 10, daily edition. 3 Chicago Defender, February 14, 1961, 1. Unless noted otherwise, Chicago Defender references come from the newspaper’s city edition. 4 Chicago Defender, November 28, 1925, 7, national edition. 5 Chicago Defender, February 14, 1961, 2; February 15, 1961, 10, daily edition. 6 Chicago Defender, February 15, 1961, 10, daily edition. 7 Chicago Defender, July 12, 1930, 1, national edition. 8 Robert Lee Sutherland, “An Analysis of Negro Churches in Chicago” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1930), 69. 9 Chicago Defender, March 25, 1939, 8; “Coalition to Save the ‘Met’ [Metropolitan Community Church] Archives,” Chicago Public Library, accessed August 14, 2015, http://www.chipublib.org/fa-coalition-tosave-the-met-archives/. 10 Chicago Defender, December 27, 1919, 13, big weekend edition. 11 Chicago Defender, December 13, 1919, 16. 12 Chicago Defender, October 23, 1920, 12. 13 Ibid., 9. 14 Chicago Defender, October 29, 1949, 29. Although not yet confirmed by research, a portion of the Progressive Choral Society membership may have stayed on to become the foundation of the Metropolitan Community Church Choir. 15 Chicago Defender, November 27, 1920, 9, big weekend edition. 16 Chicago Defender, December 4, 1920, 8. 17 Chicago Tribune, June 20, 1921, 11. 18 Chicago Defender, December 27, 1919, 13, national edition. Magnolia Lewis Butts joined the Metropolitan Community Church around 1925, and she was likely a member of the senior choir from the 1920 songfest. The combi-
nation of her talent and association with Jones and the Metropolitan Choir earned for her an induction into black Chicago’s classical music cognoscenti. 19 Chicago Defender, November 2, 1935, 5, 7; January 8, 1927, I-8. 20 The New Music Review and Church Music Review 20, no. 229 (December 1920), 37.
33 Ibid. 34 Chicago Defender, August 30, 1930, 1, national edition. 35 Reed, “Music Festivals,” 67. 36 Chicago Defender, March 18, 1933, 15, national edition. 37 Chicago Defender, September 9, 1933, 15.
21 Chicago Tribune, May 19, 1925, 25.
38 Chicago Defender, August 29, 1936, 12.
22 Ibid.; Chicago Defender, May 23, 1925, I-3.
39 Pittsburgh Courier, July 27, 1940, 14.
23 The author in conversation with David N. Lewis at the Association of Recorded Sound Collections Conference, Bloomington, Indiana, May 12, 2016.
40 Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, To Do This, You Must Know How: Music Pedagogy in the Black Gospel Quartet Tradition (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2013), 228.
24 “Prof. J. Wesley Jones and Community Choristers,” Paramount Records 12274, 1925, 78 rpm. Reverend “Black Billy Sunday” also recorded in 1925, but he was not from Chicago. 25 Beneath Paramount’s fabled musky reproduction is a mixed chorus with thunderous enthusiasm and a preponderance of male voices, likely given their relative proximity to the acoustic recording horn. Rather than the blend that Holt credited Jones for evoking, the choir sounds like a combination of disparate voices. The disc does not do the choir justice and, as it is rare today, may not have sold well. Nevertheless, it is the only known commercial example of the choir or of a Bronzeville church-based senior choir prior to the gospel music era. The author has since learned of the existence of a 1932 recording of Professor Jones directing a mass choir singing “O Southland!” at the Chicagoland Music Festival, but has not heard it. This group undoubtedly included members of the Metropolitan Community Church Choir.
41 Liam T. A. Ford, Soldier Field: A Stadium and its City (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 159–60. 42 Chicago Defender, June 9, 1934, 5, national edition. 43 Ford, Soldier Field, 163. 44 Chicago Defender, August 25, 1934, 15, national edition. 45 Ford, Soldier Field, 164. 46 Chicago Defender, May 8, 1937, 16, national edition. 47 Ibid. 48 Chicago Defender, April 12, 1947, 18. 49 Chicago Defender, March 30, 1946, 13. 50 Chicago Defender, January 29, 1949, 1. 51 Chicago Defender, December 13, 1952, 37; January 10, 1953, 6. 52 Chicago Defender, October 4, 1958, 1. 53 Chicago Defender, February 14, 1959, 31.
26 Chicago Tribune, September 18, 1927, G10.
54 Chicago Defender, June 27, 1959, 31.
27 Chicago Defender, February 25, 1928, 11; August 8, 1936, 7.
55 Chicago Tribune, February 16, 1961, C15.
28 Chicago Defender, October 22, 1927, I-4.
56 Chicago Defender, March 4, 1961, 14, national edition.
29 Chicago Tribune, May 12, 1928, 25.
57 Chicago Defender, February 25, 1961, 32.
30 Chicago Tribune, December 28, 1925, 21.
58 Chicago Defender, February 14, 1961, 2, daily edition.
31 Chicago Defender, December 13, 1930, 5, national edition; December 20, 1930, 11. 32 Monica C. Reed, “Music Festivals and the Formation of Chicago Culture,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 103, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 67.
59 Chicago Tribune, August 20, 1961, 1. 60 Michael W. Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues: The Music of Thomas Andrew Dorsey in the Urban Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 109.
Sing a New Song | 39
Despite the occasional hazards of Chicago winters, generations of residents have managed to enjoy the cold weather in various ways. R O S E M A RY K . A DA M S
A
lthough the first written Chicago weather records date to the 1830s, the book Early Chicago notes that on December 4, 1674, when Father Jacques Marquette and company arrived in the area, “severe blizzards force[d] the group to winter in an improvised cabin near the portage.”1 Clearly the city has a long history of snow days. Back in February 2011, a cab driver, whom I’d hailed outside the Museum, asked me if I minded whether he took Clark Street or Lake Shore Drive to get to my home on the North Side. I casually said Clark was fine. We thus avoided one of Chicago’s most notorious winter adventures: getting stranded on the drive during the infamous Groundhog Day Blizzard. A few years later, as I sat shivering in my garage-parked car trying to warm it up during a second day of subzero weather, I asked myself why I still lived in a city that offered such brutal cold. And I was one of the lucky ones. I didn’t have to stand freezing on an L platform waiting for a train or dig out my car on an unplowed side street. Why do we put up with this year after year? 40 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Above: Employees of the Albert Dickinson Store pose in front of a huge pile of snow, 1886. ICHi-36372. Below: Pedestrians negotiate a storm, as a group of men clear the streets, c. 1902. Chicago Daily News, DN-0000275
This colorful broadside for the South Shore Line makes a compelling case for a ski excursion. Created by Walter Graham, 1929. ICHi-27101
The 1903 Hyde Park High School football team stands on a field of melting snow, striking a monsters-of-the-midway pose. Chicago Daily News, SDN-002036
The city endures extreme weather at other times of the year. Spring rain can cause devastating floods. A freakish tsunami-like wave in 1954 killed several fisherman near Montrose Pier; some thirty years later, summer heat and humidity not only made life outdoors miserable but led to more than seven hundred deaths. And yet it’s our winters that have become legendary. Certainly there is civic pride at stake. Anyone who
survives even one icy January gets bragging rights. Baseball fans who sit through a snowstorm on opening day cheering on the Cubs or White Sox display grit only a true Chicagoan can understand. Blizzards even decide elections: Michael Bilandic’s inability to get out the plows helped Jane Byrne win the mayoral primary in 1979. In between these extremes, we Chicagoans mostly withstand and enjoy the winter weather. Some of
us just grin and bear it, while others maintain a romantic attachment to the picturesque winter scenes. The images in this essay, dating from 1886 through 2000, show the city wrapped in winter. Rosemary K. Adams is editor in chief of Chicago History. 1. Ulrich Danckers and Jane Meredith. Early Chicago (River Forest, IL: Early Chicago Incorporated, 2000), 14.
Before automobiles and trucks ruled the streets, animals of various stripes worked the winter months. Above: A horse-drawn plow moves along Michigan Avenue, 1908. Chicago Daily News, DN-0005820 42 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
While horse-drawn sleds were common in early twentieth-century Chicago, dog-sled teams, such as this one pulling a woman and child, were more rare, c. 1904. Chicago Daily News, DN-0000740
A two-horse team pulls a snowplow through Lincoln Park, March 24, 1903. Chicago Daily News, DN-0002173 Snow Days | 43
44 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Snow still covered the ground on March 13, 1915, when a family fed the ducks in Lincoln Park. Chicago Daily News, DN-0064575a
Snow piled along West Madison Street exaggerates the canyonesque look of the Loop in winter, 1918. In this view, taken from North Wells Street, the sign for the popular Vogelsang’s Restaurant is visible on the right. Chicago Daily News, DN-0069555
A week after the snowstorm of January 6, 1918, schoolboys help clear the road at Dearborn and Ontario Streets. Chicago Daily News, DN-0082795
Snow Days | 45
Right: Children cross-country ski at the Norge Ski Club in Cary, Illinois, 1924. Chicago Daily News, SDN-064913. Below: A woman walks down a cleared sidewalk along North Michigan Avenue, 1927. Chicago Daily News, DN-0082795
46 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
A group enjoys a stroll down a snow-covered path in Lincoln Park, 1929. Chicago Daily News, DN-0087233 Snow Days | 47
Ann Odell poses on the Indian Hill Club skating pond, Winnetka, Illinois, c. 1933. Chicago Daily News, DN-0104806
A toboggan slide near Drexel Boulevard provides hours of fun for young Chicagoans. Undated photograph by J. W. Taylor, ICHi-73532 48 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
A fashionable group poses on toboggan sleds at Medinah Country Club, Medinah, Illinois, 1929. Chicago Daily News, DN-0087914 Snow Days | 49
Comiskey Park during a snowstorm, 1935. Chicago Daily News, SDN077179
Red Faber of the Chicago White Sox sits in a snow-covered dugout at Comiskey Park in 1930, perhaps recalling the warm summer days of baseball seasons past. Chicago Daily News, SDN-069665 50 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Nancy Ann Silber and Mary Joan Ryan enjoy a day of sledding, February 1933. Chicago Daily News, DN-0104808
Eleanor Holm Jarrett poses in chic attire on a chilly day in January 1935. Chicago Daily News, SDN-076899
Snow Days | 51
Commuters wait at the 63rd Street motor coach stop, Chicago, November 3, 1951. Photograph by Napoleon Mills, ICHi-59631
52 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
A familiar Chicago winter scene: a man stands in knee-deep snow next to his parked car, 1929. Chicago Daily News, DN-0090258 View of Dorchester Avenue in Hyde Park after a light snowfall, taken from Fifty-Sixth Street looking south, 1948. Photograph by Lil and Al Bloom, ICHi-30894
Snow Days | 53
The Chicago Theatre marquee and lights along State Street cast a soft glow on a cold winter night, c. 1942. Photograph by Americo Grasso, ICHi-59432
54 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
A pedestrian walks along Michigan Avenue. Undated photograph by Stephen Deutch, ICHi-40778
Snow Days | 55
The Michigan Avenue Bridge (rededicated as the DuSable Bridge in 2010) gracefully spans the Chicago River, January 7, 1962. Photograph by Calvin M. Hutchinson, ICHi-69889 A late snowfall blankets Michigan Avenue, March 19, 1962. Photograph by Calvin M. Hutchinson, ICHi-69890
56 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Night view of the John Hancock Center during winter construction, Chicago, c. 1966. Photograph by Hedrich-Blessing, HB-31216-A Snow Days | 57
Abandoned cars and trucks mired in snow on Rosemont Avenue, looking east from California, in the aftermath of the blizzard of January 1967. Photograph by Howard B. Anderson, ICHi-35577 Clearing the sidewalks following the blizzard of 1967 required extra manpower. Chicago Daily News, ICHi-02067
58 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Children dressed for winter outside Crispus Attucks Elementary School. Photograph by Clarence W. Hines, ICHi-39932 Ice skaters circle the rink in front of the Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, January 16, 2000. Photograph by Antoinette Beckman, ICHi-79017
Snow Days | 59
M A K I N G H I S T O RY I
Ordinary People Leading Extraordinary Lives: Making History Interviews with Fritzie Fritzshall and Art Johnston T I M O T H Y J . G I L F OY L E
F
ew migrants to Chicago have overcome as many discriminatory obstacles in their lives as Fritzie Fritzshall and Art Johnston. For more than thirty years, Johnston has made his mark on Chicago’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) communities. 1 His video bar Sidetrack was one of the earliest institutions in Chicago to promote HIV/AIDS awareness and sponsor related health campaigns. Active in the passage of human rights ordinances at the city, county, and state levels, Johnston cofounded the Illinois Federation for Human Rights (now called Equality Illinois). He was among the first to advocate for a LGBTQ community center, and today, the Center on Halsted is the largest such facility in the Midwest.2 Fritzshall of Buffalo Grove, Illinois, is also a longtime community activist. Responding to the proposed neo-Nazi march in Skokie in 1977, Fritzshall, a Holocaust survivor, proved an instrumental figure in the creation of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center and, for many years, served as its president. Through her influential activism with the Illinois Holocaust and Genocide Commission, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and Jewish United Fund/Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago, she continues to promote antidiscriminatory and educational programs to combat genocide.3 Arthur Johnston was born in 1943 to Lloyd Vernon Johnston and Mary Leone Singer Johnston in North Tonawanda, New York.4 The Johnstons were recent migrants to upstate New York, with Lloyd working first in a hoist and chain factory Fritzie Fritzshall (left) received the 2015 Bertha Honoré Palmer Making History Award for Distinction in Civic Leadership. Art Johnston (right) received the 2016 Jane Addams and later as a shipping clerk: “My Making History Award for Distinction in Social Service. parents had moved there from the 60 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
mountains of Pennsylvania, and like many folks who grew up in north central Pennsylvania, there were no jobs. They moved up in the early 1940s for work.” Johnston describes his family as “country folks,” stating, “I was born at home on the kitchen table.”5 At an early age, Johnston recognized that he was gay. Living in a homophobic era, he confesses that “like so many gay kids, I tried to commit suicide a number of times. It was that sense of aloneness, of knowing that there were things about me that were very important that I could not talk to anybody about.” And, despite Johnston’s later interest in organizing and leading Chicago’s Gay Athletic Association, he was not attracted to sports as a teenager. “I hated sports,” he puts it bluntly. “I was not remotely gifted as an athlete. Clearly, my least favorite part of every week were phys ed classes, which were very large with fifty to seventy people.”6 In 1961, Johnston became among the first in his family to attend college.7 “I recall this well,” says Johnston. “It was the third week of May of my senior year of high school. I get called to the guidance office, and they say, ‘You’ve won this scholarship, congratulations, so where do you want to go to school?’ I said, ‘I have no idea.’” On the advice of that high-school guidance counselor, Johnston elected to attend the State University of New York at Albany (now the University at Albany, SUNY) and major in French. Although slow to adjust to college life, Johnston thrived. Before he graduated, he was elected student body president. He was also a member of Kappa Beta, the local fraternity that Harvey Milk had joined while attending SUNY Albany about a decade earlier.8 Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall was born in 1931 and raised in Klyucharki, Czechoslovakia (now Kliucharky in western Ukraine), near the city of Mukacheve.9 Her father, Herman Weiss, was a farmer and a storekeeper who immigrated to the United States in the mid-1930s. “When my dad came to this country, he started to work for Vienna Sausage Company,” she states. “He rented a room, a bedroom actually, and lived in someone else’s apartment.” Weiss intended to save enough to pay the passage for his family. “It was during the Depression years, however, and he made very little money,” Fritzshall explains.10 By the time he could bring his family over, World War II had broken out. Fritzshall’s mother, Sara Davidovich Weiss, fearing attacks on transatlantic shipping, made the fateful decision to remain in Europe.11 Fritzshall has no childhood memories of her father. “I do know that he came here with good intentions of bringing his family to this country,” she recounts. “He did not desert his family, which is important to know. He would send a five-dollar bill in a letter every so often for the family, which was a lot of money in those days. My mother was able to support her family with this.”12
Johnston, pictured c. 1997, never intended to make Chicago his home, but his adopted city has greatly benefited from his work on behalf of the LGBTQ communities.
Fritzshall (left) pictured with her mother, Sara Davidovich Weiss, in Klyucharki, Czechoslovakia, c. 1940 Making History | 61
In 2008, Fritzshall returned to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Above: Fritzshall (third from left) walks toward the entrance with her friend Joy Erlichman Miller and her grandsons, Scott and Andy. Below: The group visits the Birkenau latrine barrack. Photographs by Steve Fritzshall
62 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Fritzshall recalls the fateful day when Jewish families were transformed from neighbors to outcasts in her small town: “We woke up in the morning to go to school,” she recounts. “I and the rest of the Jewish children who came to school that day were not allowed to walk into class. I couldn’t understand what made me different from the night before to the next morning.”13 Then, on a dreary, rainy winter night in 1944, soldiers gave the Weiss family fifteen minutes to pack up their property. 14 They were initially transported to a local ghetto and then packed into cattle cars so tightly that everyone was forced to stand. When the train stopped, they were at Auschwitz.15 Fritzshall survived the concentration camp by luck. By the time the train arrived at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland, many of the people in her boxcar had died, including her grandfather. Fritzshall’s mother, two younger brothers, and other relatives would ultimately perish at the hands of the Nazis. When she departed the train, she remembers a skinny man in a dirty, striped uniform whispering to her in Yiddish: “Tell them you are fifteen years old.” Fritzshall, only thirteen, soon realized that if the Nazis thought she was older, she would be sent to a work detail, not the gas chamber. “He was the first to save my life,” Fritzshall recalls.16 On a death march from Auschwitz several months later, Fritzshall escaped into the forest, where she was liberated by the Russian army in 1945.17 Johnston, upon graduating from SUNY Albany in 1966, embarked on a teaching career. He moved to Virginia after accepting an appointment at Woodberry Forest, a private boarding school where he taught French. “I was the only faculty or staff member from north of the Mason-Dixon Line,” remembers Johnston.18 He also served as soccer coach, a prelude to his later involvement with the National Association of Amateur Gay Athletes and a sharp departure from his own experience with high-school sports.19 “I had the most wonderful experience of meeting coaches who actually cared about their students, unlike every experience I’d had in high school with coaches and PE classes, which were horrible,” recounts Johnston. “I had never met such wonderful human beings as the people at Woodberry Forest. There was nobody there who was just a coach; you were a teacher and a coach. They were wonderful examples.”20 Johnston’s pedagogical enthusiasm spread to other areas. “Eventually they asked me to assist in the theater program by taking over some of the tech work, which I did,” he explains. Then the colleague who chaired the theater program moved and another opportunity appeared: “We had a brand-new theater, and they asked me to take over. So suddenly, I was directing shows, and they were successful.”21 In 1972, Johnston received a sabbatical from Woodberry Forest and was encouraged to study for a master of fine arts degree in directing at
Fritzshall in Chicago, c. 1947
Making History | 63
Northwestern University. “I intended to stay [at Woodberry Forest] my entire life. I loved my work. I loved it, loved it, loved it,” he gushes. And for good reason: “It was challenging, and I was around people who were very dedicated to what they were doing.”22 But in 1973, he met José “Pepe” Peña, who shortly after became his life partner.23 Johnston never went back to Virginia.24 Woodberry Forest’s loss was Chicago’s gain. Johnston soon found a teaching position north of the city at Wheeling High School. “I interviewed for this job and it was to run all of the tech for the theater productions and to teach English.” He discovered that since the theater program was in the English Department, he could not teach French. “I had a minor in English, and I had taught some English,” he remembers, “so they said you’re going to be an English teacher from now on.”25 Fritzshall would also have to adapt to her new home in Chicago. As a homeless refugee without a family, her prospects at the close of World War II were bleak. “But my dad, from his end here in Chicago, started to look for his family. He wrote letters to neighbors that he could remember and to the post office,” she explains. Fritzshall returned to her hometown, but she recalls: “I’m there alone, and I’m not knowing what to do or whom to contact. The neighbors that got [my father’s] letters did not even acknowledge that I was back, let alone hand me a letter. They didn’t want to know that we Jews had come back, and so we were a nonexistent people at that point.”26 One day fortune fell on Fritzshall. “We had this tiny post office, probably the size of a small Starbucks, and the man from the post office came to where I was living at my grandmother’s house and said if I come to the post office tomorrow morning, there was going to be a call from America. I knew who the call from America was going to be.” When Fritzshall arrived at the post office at the expected time, “all our neighbors were there,” she remembers. “They recognized that somebody’s calling from America, even though they didn’t say hello to me. So everybody’s there to listen to the conversation that I was going to have with my dad.”27 But the nosey neighbors were out of luck: Fritzshall spoke to her father in Yiddish. Leaving war-torn Europe in the immediate aftermath of World War II was not easy. “I wouldn’t have been able to leave under communism,” explains Fritzshall. So her uncle made arrangements for Fritzshall, her cousin, and two other women: “He paid for a smuggler, and they smuggled us across the border at night from communism into the Sudetenland.” After briefly living with another uncle in the Sudetenland, Fritzshall made her way to Gothenburg, Sweden, where she stayed for a short time. She then traveled by ship to England and finally the United States. In 1947, Fritzshall was reunited with her father in Chicago.28 Johnston taught at Wheeling High School for several years. On weekends, he and his partner bartended: Johnston at Carol’s Speakeasy at 1355 North 64 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Opened in 1982, Sidetrack is co-owned by Johnston and his spouse, José Peña. Above: The couple with the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales during the bar’s tenth anniversary celebration, June 1992. Below: Sidetrack’s national championship gay softball team, 1984.
Wells Street and Peña at Cheri’s on Surf and Clark Streets and Alfie’s on Rush. Johnston explains that at the time in the LGBTQ community “people who were bartenders were celebrities,” adding that Peña “was one of the best.”29 After several years, they were recruited to form a partnership with Rocco Dinverno to start a bar of their own. On April 22, 1982, the three opened Sidetrack.30 Running a gay bar was risky business in 1982. Because of Mafia shakedowns, routine police harassment, and homophobic assaults, most gay bars had life spans of about two to four years.31 But not Sidetrack. “We were jammed from the moment we opened, and we had astonishing business every night,” recalls Johnston. Sidetrack was the first video bar in Chicago. After visiting Midnight Sun in San Francisco’s Castro District, Johnston and Peña gambled that the concept would work in Chicago.32 They built their own video studio and created their own material. “People had never seen this; they didn’t know what this was,” Johnston emphasizes. “We had a giant screen when nobody else had ever done this. We had almost no sports bars, even those who had put TVs up, nothing like there is today.” A year later, on May 1, 1983, Johnston and Peña became the sole owners.33 In retrospect, Johnston is incredulous about their success: “We knew nothing about business. I was a schoolteacher and notoriously stupid about business.” In short time, Johnston and Peña realized they needed to gain control of Sidetrack’s property. “We knew, just by listening to our friends, that it was always better to own your building, so I began the long process of trying to convince the landlord to sell it to us. And he finally agreed.” Sidetrack started with eight hundred square feet and six employees. Today, it occupies almost fifteen hundred square feet along Halsted Street and employs a staff of sixty-five.34 Sidetrack proved to be the vehicle for Johnston’s transformation into a human rights activist. “In those days, my community had no institution except bars,” he explains. Johnston believes bars played a role in the LGBTQ community analogous to churches in the African American community. “In our gay history, we have not given nearly enough credit to . . . the gay bar people whose names nobody ever kept track of . . . who organized the marches in the ’70s and early ’80s, who did the early work with AIDS.” Today it’s a different story. “You go to a gay pride parade, and you’ll see groups of gay bankers, gay supermarket workers, and gay post people,” Johnston points out. “You’ll see two groups of gay police officers.” In the 1970s and 1980s, it was different political landscape: “In those days we had none of that,” Johnston recounts. “The only place we had were bars.”35 Upon arriving in Chicago in 1947, Fritzshall spoke very little English. “I knew how to say, ‘No, thank you,’ ‘I’m not hungry,’ and ‘I don’t smoke,’” she laughs. She initially lived with her uncle and aunt, Al and Dorothy Weiss, and their three children. “The decision was that I should not live with my dad, whose English was truly bad,” she explains. “I would be better off living with
Johnston photographed in front of Sidetrack during a 2013 boycott to call attention to Russia’s treatment of gays and lesbians.
Johnston (left) with Dr. Ron Sable, political and HIV/AIDS health care activist, 1989. Photograph by Lisa Ebright
Making History | 65
The Gang of Four—Johnston (from left), Rick Garcia, Jon-Henri Damski, and Laurie Dittman—burn the bylaws of the Chicago Town Meeting after the successful passage of Chicago Human Rights Ordinance, December 1988.
my aunt, and being with three children, and learning the language.” The family resided in a cramped, four-room, one-bedroom apartment at 1348½ West Estes Street in East Rogers Park. Fritzshall enrolled at the Dante School, where she remembers being in a class of refugees. “I was from Hungary. There was someone from Greece; there was someone from Italy. We’re from all over the world, and we were all put into this pot.” Outside of class, she helped raise her three small cousins. “Then I went to beauty school—the American Beauty Academy—and earned my beauty license and worked in a beauty salon all my life.”36 In 1949, she married Norman Fritzshall, a former US Marine who was captured at Wake Island and imprisoned by the Japanese while she was in Auschwitz.37 They lived for several years in a Rogers Park apartment at Sheridan Road and Chase Avenue. Eventually, the couple and their son, Steve, settled in Skokie, off Oakton Avenue.38 In short time, Johnston’s Sidetrack became a leading LGBTQ community institution, playing a key role in the passage of Chicago’s nondiscrimination ordinance. In 1986, some LGBTQ community organizers suggested closing the city’s gay bars on the Sunday night before the city council was scheduled to vote on the measure, thereby encouraging attendance at a rally in Daley Plaza. Johnston stood up at the meeting in opposition. “I think you should keep the bars open,” he advocated. “We should rent some buses, let people gather at the bars, pick them up in the buses, and bring them back [afterward].” Furthermore, he added, “the bar owners will contribute, because they’re going to get some customers, and everybody goes to the rally.” Without warning, Johnston was in charge of organizing the event.39 He now admits that at the time he did not know most bar owners along Halsted Street. Johnston cold-called different owners and requested contributions between one hundred and two hundred dollars. To his surprise, every bar contributed. He also decided to rent public buses. The rally proved a major historical event for Chicago’s LGBTQ community, even though the council rejected the ordinance by a vote of 18 to 32.40 “As recently as five years ago,” explains Johnston, “people would come to me and say it was the experience they remembered most of their life as a gay person, because for the first time, they were not in the minority. When we pulled up around Daley Plaza and 66 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Johnston speaks at a community meeting about the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance, 1993.
Johnston and Peña with happy onlookers on Civil Union Day, June 2, 2011. Photograph by Jason Smith
unloaded, it was a moment of magic that I don’t even know how to describe. It was just remarkable.”41 The event inspired activists and organizers to work for the additional eight votes. On December 21, 1988, they succeeded: the city council passed the Chicago Human Rights Ordinance.42 The ordinance was a seminal moment in local LGBTQ history. “Up until they passed this in December 1988, the people doing the work were mostly bartenders,” explains Johnston. “There were no attorneys because you couldn’t be ‘out.’ That changed after 1988. Over the next two or three years, we doubled the size of our activist base, then tripled, then quintupled.” Johnston adds that many were attorneys “trained in writing and thinking and understanding government. We started having all these professionals which we didn’t used to have. That was an astonishing change.”43 The impact went beyond Chicago. Johnston helped cofound the Illinois Federation for Human Rights, later renamed Equality Illinois (EI). As president of the board, he became a driving force. EI was instrumental in the passage of the Cook County Human Rights Ordinance in 1993 and successfully lobbied for the inclusion of sexual orientation in the Illinois Human Rights Act in 2005. By then, EI was considered one of the most influential civil rights organizations in the Midwest.44 Even sponsorships changed. Johnston was among the first to convince suppliers and vendors to sponsor gay and lesbian athletic events, street fairs, community-based HIV/AIDS service providers, and other LGBTQ organizations.45 He and Peña even refused to sell products that did not support their community. When Rolling Rock beer distributors stopped donating funds to LGBTQ causes, for example, Sidetrack stopped serving the brand.46 “In the early years of looking for sponsors, it’d be Stolichnaya, Bacardi, Miller Beer,” remembers Johnston. The passage of the nondiscrimination ordinance convinced banks, law firms, and other businesses to sponsor such events. “It changed everything,” insists Johnston. “Now you look at the list of sponsors of our big events and it’s Coca-Cola and other all-American brands. It’s all changed.”47 By 2007, Sidetrack had raised more than one million dollars in sponsorships for the LGBTQ community.48 Fritzshall probably would have continued to lead the ordinary life of an American postwar family, but for Frank Collin and the National Socialist Party Making History | 67
of America, more commonly known as the American Nazi Party. In 1977, Collin, who was half-Jewish and a child of a Holocaust survivor, petitioned the Village of Skokie to allow his group of neo-Nazis to march in the Chicago suburb. The event attracted international attention, because by the 1970s, Skokie was home to one of the world’s largest populations of Holocaust survivors. In the decades after World War II, the village had been transformed into an American shtetl, full of synagogues, yeshivas, kosher delicatessens, Hebrew schools, and other Jewish institutions. Many were built and run by Holocaust survivors like Fritzshall. Despite the worldwide outrage, Collin and his hate-mongering horde refused to relent, eventually taking the First Amendment case to the US Supreme Court. Although the Court ruled in favor of Collin, he elected to take his protest to Chicago, avoiding a potentially violent confrontation in Skokie.49 But Collin unwittingly unleashed a movement. The Jewish community in Skokie and the greater Chicago region, aghast at the resurrection of swastikas and anti-Semitism in their own backyard, recognized the pervasive public ignorance concerning the Holocaust. Fritzshall and others organized to address the problem. First meeting in the basement of David Figman’s Skokie residence, a group of survivors decided to create a museum and educational campaign dedicated to remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust.50 On June 2, 1985, they opened the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois in a storefront in Skokie.51 “We had a small room in the little museum on Oakton Street, and most of it was posters,” remembers Fritzshall. “We had posters made, and speakers and classes would come in.” At first, she admits, “We would only accommodate maybe thirty or forty students, because we were still new, and most if it was through books.”52 In 1987, they helped build the Holocaust monument in downtown Skokie.53 68 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Demonstrators gather outside the Skokie Village Hall in 1977 in protest of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party’s petition to march in their community. Photograph by David Kantro
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From the museum’s inception, Fritzshall and her compatriots were focused on education: “What do we do? How do we teach? Who can go to the schools? Who can do outreach?” were the questions Fritzshall and others raised. “We asked to speak to the principals of the schools. We asked to go to their meetings once a month . . . and explain what we do,” remembers Fritzshall. “We’re not bringing the horror stories to you, but we would like to present the stories—we would like to teach.”54 Fritzshall and others recognized that they needed to create a curriculum. “In those days, the teachers didn’t know how to handle the subject matter, because it wasn’t talked about,” she explains. “So we were the first that would approach the teachers and the schools. Then we created a class.” They recruited two historians, Dr. Elliot Lefkovitz of Loyola University Chicago and Dr. Leon Stein of Roosevelt University, to develop a series of courses and teacher-training programs. “They became our teachers and created classes of how to teach the teachers about the Holocaust.”55 Their work paid off. In 1990, officials from the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois successfully lobbied the Illinois General Assembly, and the state became the first in the nation to require public schools to incorporate the Holocaust into their curricula.56 In 2005, the organization was again influential in expanding this instruction; the Holocaust and Genocide Education Mandate now requires Illinois schools to teach about all genocides in world history.57 Chicago is frequently described as a city of neighborhoods. By most measures, Chicago’s gay neighborhoods have been transformed in the past two generations. In the 1970s, the North Halsted Street area running from Belmont Avenue to Grace Street was not yet identified as a “gay area.” Gay and lesbian Chicagoans soon began buying their own buildings around Halsted, creating a level of residential and economic stability that was nonexistent near the Hubbard Street “Towertown” district by the Water Tower and in other areas with gay bars.58 The Lakeview neighborhood, colloquially 70 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
The Holocaust monument in Skokie portrays a member of the Jewish underground protecting a Jewish family during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943. The maquette of the monument (pictured here), originally made by sculptor Edward Chesney, was restored by his son, Dean, in 2012.
known as “Boystown,” became the gate of entry for gay migrants after 1970. The opening of the Center on Halsted in 2007 solidified the change.59 Chicago, Johnston proclaims, is now “one of the best cities to be a gay person.” This was evidenced when the Gay Games were staged in Chicago in 2006. Johnston vividly remembers Mayor Richard M. Daley addressing the more than fifty thousand participants and spectators at the opening at Soldier Field: “He said, ‘I want you all to know you are welcome in Chicago.’ People had never heard this before, never heard it from a public official, let alone the mayor of a major city.” Johnston paraphrases Daley, “Please know you are always welcome here. Please come back any time. There’s always a home for you in Chicago.” He recalls, “People in the stands were crying. They’d never heard this.”60 Johnston further adds that Lakeview is “healthier than the gay business districts in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco.” More importantly, the LGBTQ residents are not just an abstraction. “Here, we actually have a community,” insists Johnston. “We take care of each other. We all know each other. We’re small enough that all of the activists in the gay community know each other.” From AIDS activism to the creation of the Center on Halsted, the LGBTQ community has matured into a powerful political and social force in the metropolitan area. “I really believe this is the best place,” summarizes Johnston.61 Others agree. In 2013, OutTraveler.com named Lakeview the best gay neighborhood in the world.62
In July 2006, twelve thousand participants from seventy countries came to Chicago to compete in Gay Games VII. Above: The opening ceremony at Soldier Field. Photograph © John A Faier
The Honorable Dawn Clark Netsch and Mayor Richard M. Daley after presenting Johnston (center) with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the Equality Illinois Gala, February 2011. Making History | 71
On April 19, 2009, the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center opened its new headquarters at 9603 Woods Drive in Skokie.63 Designed by Chicago architect Stanley Tigerman, the sixty-five-thousand-square-foot, $45million structure can accommodate 250,000 visitors annually.64 The building’s main façade is divided into two halves. The black half incorporates the entrance. “They see those dark years” upon entering, explains Fritzshall. But museum officials did not want to close their story with dead bodies. Rather, visitors are directed beyond the concentration camps. “Then they go through the light side of the building, where it gives them courage, and it brings them out with a lighter feeling.” The museum’s design instills a message: “I have overcome. You too can stand up. You too can have this courage, and you too can overcome,” emphasizes Fritzshall. “This is what we try to teach here.”65
72 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
The Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is the “culmination of thirty years of hard work by the local Holocaust survivor community.” Photograph by David Seide
The new museum’s focus remains education. Fritzshall says, “This is also a teaching building and a teaching museum. It is the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center.”66 The museum has sponsored exhibitions or programs on genocide events in Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia, the Balkans, the Soviet Union, and most recently Darfur. “We need to care for our neighbors,” states Fritzshall. “Someone took a chance and risked their lives and because of that I survived.”67 Fritzshall gives remarks at the Illinois Holocaust Museum’s annual Humanitarian Awards Dinner. Hosted each spring, the event honors pillars of the community, Holocaust survivors, and the museum’s achievements. Photograph by Ron Gould Studios
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For Fritzshall, the Holocaust Museum & Education Center demonstrates the value and importance of history, of how bright the future can be if people work at it and listen to the past. “What we’re trying to do is bring across a message of what can happen,” said Fritzshall. “So this doesn’t happen to your children, your grandchildren. It’s not just a museum, it’s a teaching institution.” It’s not without some irony that she says, “We really need to thank the Nazis who were going to march on Skokie [in 1977]. Because of the march, we now have created this wonderful institution.”68 Fritzshall and Johnston have devoted decades to fighting discrimination and educating the Chicago public. Johnston points out that most LGBTQ people long viewed themselves “as strangers in a strange land. We really didn’t view ourselves as Chicago citizens. We were all passing through from somewhere else.” Only with the election of Harold Washington as mayor and a growing sense of awareness did “our community wake up and realize that we weren’t secondclass citizens.”69 Fritzshall often recalls the starving, skinny man who told her to lie about her age when she departed the train at Auschwitz. “I made a promise that if I survived, I would tell the world what happened.”70 And she did. Timothy J. Gilfoyle is professor of history at Loyola University Chicago and current president of the Urban History Association. I L LU S T R AT I O N S | 60, left: courtesy of Fritzie Fritzshall; right: Chicago History Museum. 61, top: courtesy of Art Johnston; bottom: courtesy of Fritzie Fritzshall. 62–63, courtesy of Fritzie Fritzshall. 64–67, courtesy of Art Johnston. 68–69, Skokie Heritage Museum, collection number 1989.015.001. 70, courtesy of Dean Chesney. 71, top: used with the permission of the photographer, John A Faier; bottom: courtesy of Art Johnston. 72–73, courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center. 74, Chicago History Museum. F O R F U RT H E R R E A D I N G | The most authoritative books on the history of Chicago’s LGBTQ community are Tracy Baim, ed., Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community (Chicago: Surrey Books, 2008); Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016). In conjunction with the Out in Chicago exhibition, the Museum published a collection of scholarly essays: Jill Austin and Jennifer Brier, eds., Out in Chicago: LGBT History at the Crossroads (Chicago: Chicago History Museum, 2011). Valuable information on Art Johnston can be found at Tracy Baim, “Art Johnston,” Chicago Gay History video interview, 60 min., June 7, 2007. A useful introduction to the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center is Leon Stein, Voices: Memories of Chicago Area Holocaust Survivors: A Study Guide (Northbrook, IL: Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois, 1984). See also Linda G. Kuzmack, “Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum videocassette, 60 min., June 74 | Chicago History | Winter 2017
Above: John Rowe presents Fritzshall with her Making History Award, June 3, 2015. Below: Laura Ricketts presents Johnston with his Making History Award, June 8, 2016. Photographs by Dan Rest
27, 1990. Helpful articles on the museum and Fritzie Fritzshall include Howard Reich, “Reawakening the Ghosts of Skokie,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 2013; Bernard Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor shares her story during Holocaust observance,” State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL), April 16, 2010; and Deborah Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber’: Auschwitz survivor heads exhibit that highlights holocaust horrors,” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), October 31, 2010.
ENDNOTES 1 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame, 1998, accessed March 5, 2016, http://www.glhalloffame.org/index.pl?todo=view_item&ite m=112. 2 Johnston, Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. On the Center on Halsted, see Timothy Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout: Chicago and the Rise of Gay Politics (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), location 4523 in Kindle e-book. 3 “Fritzie Fritzshall,” Zoominfo, last updated
July 2, 2016, https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Harvey_Milk. 9 Linda G. Kuzmack, “Oral history interview with Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” United States Holocaust Memorial Museum videocassette, 60 min., June 27, 1990, accessed April 7, 2015, (hereafter Kuzmack, “Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” Holocaust Encyclopedia). 10 Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, April 30, 2015, deposited in the collection of the Chicago History Museum (hereafter Fritzshall, interview).
http://www.zoominfo.com/p/Fritzie-
11 Kuzmack, “Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” Holocaust Encyclopedia.
Fritzshall/1080966344; Bernard
12 Fritzshall, interview.
March 16, 2015, accessed April 4, 2015,
Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor shares her story during Holocaust observance,”
13 Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor.”
State Journal-Register (Springfield, IL),
Chicago History Museum (hereafter
14 Deborah Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber’: Auschwitz survivor heads exhibit that highlights holocaust horrors,” Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), October 31, 2010, accessed April 1, 2015, http://www.dailyherald.com/article/20101031/news/711019883/.
Johnston, interview).
15 Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor.”
April 16, 2010, accessed April 2, 2015, http://www.sj-r.com/article/20100416/ News/304169884. 4 Arthur Johnston, oral history interview by Timothy J. Gilfoyle, May 4, 2016, deposited in the collection of the
5 Johnston, interview. 6 Johnston, interview. 7 Tracy Baim, “Art Johnston,” Chicago Gay History video interview, 60 min., June 7, 2007, accessed March 14, 2016, http://www.chicagogayhistory.com/video _bio.html?id=769. 8 Johnston, interview. Harvey Milk later moved to San Francisco and became the first openly gay person elected to public office in California. For more on Milk, see “Harvey Milk,” Wikipedia, last modified June 26, 2016, accessed
16 Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor”; Kuzmack, “Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” Holocaust Encyclopedia. 17 Kuzmack, “Fritzie Weiss Fritzshall,” Holocaust Encyclopedia; Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber.’” 18 Johnston, interview. 19 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. 20 Johnston, interview. 21 Ibid.
Making History | 75
22 Ibid. 23 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. 24 Baim, “Art Johnston,” Chicago Gay History.
42 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame; Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, location 3691–3715. The city council amended the ordinance in 2002 to guarantee the protection of transgender people.
25 Johnston, interview.
43 Johnston, interview.
26 Fritzshall, interview.
44 Baim, Out and Proud in Chicago, location
27 Ibid. 28 Ibid.
5031; Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, location 4555; “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.
29 Johnston, interview. On Carol’s Speakeasy, see Sukie de la Croix, “Gay History: Chicago Whispers—Memories of Gay Bars’ Openings,” Windy City Times, May 14, 2003, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/ARTICLE.php?AID=2523.
45 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay
30 Johnston, interview; Ross Forman, “Sidetrack and Hunters: 25 Years of Beer and Cheer,” Windy City Times, July 11, 2007, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/ gay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=15 484.
49 Howard Reich, “Reawakening the Ghosts
31 Forman, “Sidetrack and Hunters.” 32 Tracy Baim, ed., Out and Proud in Chicago: An Overview of the City’s Gay Community (Chicago: Surrey Books, 2008), location 5046 in Kindle e-book. On Midnight Sun, see “Midnight Sun,” SF Gay History, undated, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.sfgayhistory.com/ ?page_id=324. 33 Johnston, interview. 34 Johnston, interview; Forman, “Sidetrack and Hunters.” 35 Johnston, interview. 36 Fritzshall, interview. 37 Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber.’” 38 Fritzshall, interview. 39 Johnston, interview. 40 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. 41 Johnston, interview.
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and Lesbian Hall of Fame. 46 Forman, “Sidetrack and Hunters.” 47 Johnston, interview. 48 Forman, “Sidetrack and Hunters.”
of Skokie,” Chicago Tribune, January 16, 2013, accessed July 2, 2016. The case National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie (1977), also known as Smith v. Collin and sometimes referred to as the Skokie Affair, is available at https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/ us/432/43/case.html. 50 Fritzshall, interview. 51 “Holocaust Museum Opens in Skokie,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1985, accessed July 4, 2016, http://archives.chicagotribune.com/1985/06/03/page/20/article/h olocaust-museum-opens-in-skokie/. 52 Fritzshall, interview. 53 Reich, “Reawakening the Ghosts of Skokie.” 54 Fritzshall, interview. 55 Ibid. 56 Reich, “Reawakening the Ghosts of Skokie.” 57 “History,” Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, accessed July 4, 2016, www.ilholocaustmuseum.org/ pages/about/history/. 58 On the history of LGBTQ communities in Towertown, Rush Street, Bronzeville, and other Chicago neighborhoods, see
Chad Heap, Slumming: Sexual and Racial Encounters in American Nightlife, 1885–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57–70, 83–89, 166–82, 238–74; Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout. 59 “Arthur L. Johnston,” Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame. 60 Johnston, interview. Daley’s speech can be found in “Remarks from Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Gay Games VII Opening Ceremony, July 15, 2006, Soldier Field,” Windy City Times, August 16, 2006, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.windycitymediagroup.com/g ay/lesbian/news/ARTICLE.php?AID=12 374. 61 Johnston, interview. For a more critical assessment of the history of Boystown, see Stewart-Winter, Queer Clout, location 4301–4475. 62 See OutTraveler.com, “OutTraveler Award Winner: Incomparable Gay Neighborhood,” January 1, 2014, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.outtraveler.com/out-traveler-awards2013/2014/1/01/out-traveler-award-winner-incomparable-gay-neighborhood; Channel 5 NBC Chicago, “Boystown Named World’s Best Gay Neighborhood,” January 3, 2014, accessed July 3, 2016, http://www.nbcchicago.com/entertainment/thescene/chicago-boystown-outtraveler238463471.html. 63 Reich, “Reawakening the Ghosts of Skokie.” 64 Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber.’” 65 Fritzshall, interview. 66 Ibid. 67 Donovan, “‘We knew one line was going to the gas chamber.’” 68 Ibid. 69 Johnston, interview. 70 Schoenburg, “Auschwitz survivor.”