The Era of the Dynamite Girl

Apr. 18, 2013 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1910s, anarchists, Bill Haywood, Chicago, Gabriella Antolini, Industrial Workers of the World, IWW, labor, World War I 3 Comments

The years after the end of WWI were turbulent ones in the United States. A slump came with peace, as wartime demand for American agricultural and industrial output weakened, diminishing American opportunities. The Russian Revolution of 1917, and the radical political ferment that contributed to it, had a profound effect on political activism in the States, as workers and intellectuals explored whether communist or socialist doctrines could be used to revolutionize a capitalist system that was generating unacceptably high levels of inequality and suffering. The anarchist sentiment that had triggered the outbreak of WWI had never vanished, and it combined with other domestic conditions, including historically high rates of immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, to make the years before 1920 ones of conflict and unease.

The threat of domestic violence, and the fear of such threats, was felt in many parts of the country. These were the years of the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare, as well as a deadly race riot in Chicago and the dubious prosecution and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in New England.

In Chicago, the year 1918 got underway with the arrest of a nineteen-year-old Italian-born radical named Gabriella Antolini, who was found carrying a satchel full of dynamite (36 pounds) along with a loaded pistol through Union Station. The press immediately dubbed her ‘the Dynamite Girl.’ A professed follower of anarchist Luigi Galeani, Antolini served eighteen months in prison. She was a sympathizer of the IWW, the radical labor union headed by Big Bill Haywood and headquartered in the city. That summer, Chicago tried to stay steady amid a series of bombings and attempted bombings, typically connected with labor disputes, and some seemingly involving IWW members, known as Wobblies.

On September 4, 1918, a bomb exploded in the north lobby of Chicago’s Federal Building, killing four people. According to later accounts, a man in a tan raincoat had been seen pacing around the building around 3:00pm with a cigar box with a string dangling from one side of it under his arm. He was seen to drop the cigar box and kick it under a radiator near the Adams Street entrance before hurrying away. According to Sean Deveney, writing on his website The Original Curse, the explosion was so powerful that it ripped open the Federal Building and threw from their seats employees at work inside the neighboring Marquette and Edison Buildings. The buildings’ windows were shattered, shards of glass raining onto the streets. Although many suspected a connection to the recently concluded trial and conviction of some 100 IWW officials, the perpetrator of the crime was never found.

Image: The wreckage of Chicago’s Federal Building, 1918, from this source.

Introducing Continental Chicago

Mar. 15, 2013 By Susan Barsy in To My Readers Tags: blogging, Chicago, Illinois, interests, Midwest, old photographs 2 Comments

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reorganizing the content of OUR POLITY and spinning off the local and regional material into a new place-based website called Continental Chicago.

Continental Chicago will serve in the future as the primary venue for my work on Chicago and the Midwest, and as home for my contemporary photography and occasional travel and nature writings. Visit the website by clicking here.

OUR POLITY will retain its focus on topics of national interest and concern. It will continue to feature writing on the political parties, American history, historical photography, federal governance, culture, and political reform. The slimmed-down version of the website’s archives consists solely of A-list writing on national themes.

If you have any doubt about where to find material that originally appeared on OUR POLITY, please consult the Index Page, which includes every item ever published on the site along with a hyperlink to its current location.

I welcome your feedback on the changes. Thank you for your readership!

Sincerely,
Susan Barsy

Image:
Victory gardener in a Chicago rail yard, April 1943.
From this source.

Big Bill Haywood

Oct. 6, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History, Protest & Tradition Tags: 1910s, 1912 Lawrence Textile Strike, Bill Haywood, Chicago, corporate responsibility, inequality, IWW, old photographs, protest, strikes, unions, work and workers Leave a comment

There’s something raw about the history of the 1910s, a period of depression and unrest, when Americans were engaged in an anxious quest for alternatives. It was a period of activism, when anti-capitalist sentiment and true human suffering allowed organized labor, still in its infancy, to make significant strides. At the center of these trends were redoubtable labor leaders like Big Bill Haywood (right), shown here in 1913 with his fellow activist Adolph Lessig.

William Dudley Haywood (1869-1928) was one tough customer, a sometime socialist who helped found the radical labor organization known as the International Workers of the World (IWW), or ‘Wobblies.’ Founded in 1905, the IWW was radical in seeking to organize workers of all types and nationalities, even unskilled workers, in contrast to the other, more exclusive, ‘trade’ unions of the day.

Haywood was born in Utah and by age 15 was working in western copper mines. By 1900, he had an invalid wife and two children and had gotten involved in the labor movement, skyrocketing to the top of the Western Federation of Miners, a militant union that in 1903 pitted itself against the Colorado mining industry and the state’s government in a bitter strike lasting nearly three years.

Aligned for a time with the fledgling Socialist Party, Haywood ultimately fell out with that group over strategy. By 1910, his chief interest lay in directly mobilizing masses of people in IWW-led strikes and protests, believing this the surest path to structural change.

Haywood was involved, for instance, in the famous 1912 textile strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts, also known as the Bread and Roses strike, whose centennial is now being commemorated. Lawrence’s textile workers included large numbers of women and teens, and many persons of foreign birth. Their protests aroused national sympathy, particularly when children of striking parents were sent to New York City for safekeeping. The strike ended after three months, with workers gaining many concessions to their demands.

Haywood’s star began to set during WWI, when the IWW’s on-going militancy and vision of international solidarity jarred with wartime industrial demands and an accompanying tide of national feeling. In 1917, Haywood and 100 other IWW officials were arrested on charges of wartime sedition, found guilty, and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. Freed on bail while appealing conviction, Haywood fled to the Soviet Union, where he entered on an ignominious final chapter and died of alcoholism and diabetes a decade later.

His ashes are interred partly in a wall of the Kremlin, while others were sent back to Chicago to be buried in Waldheim Cemetery near the remains of the Haymarket martyrs.

Images: (top to bottom) Adolph Lessig and Big Bill Haywood, from this source;
Haywood and followers in Paterson, NJ (1913), from this source;
and a scene from the Lawrence textile strike (1912), from this source.

RELATED ARTICLES:
May Day Meditations, Our Polity.
The Strike That Shook America 100 Years Ago, History.com.

Florence and Margaret Make a Play for Freedom

Aug. 7, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1900s, 1910s, athletes, Chicago, dress, Finley Peter Dunne, Florence Sutton, Margaret Abbott Dunne, Margaret Ives Abbott, old photographs, Olympics, Progressive Era, western culture, women's movement 2 Comments

The athleticism of the women competing in the London Olympics—and their outfits—underscore how dramatically women’s dress and freedom have changed in the century since women like the American tennis great Florence Sutton began trail-blazing.

Sutton’s pioneering sportsmanship—and the achievements of other women in sports like golf and swimming—were striking indications of the liberties that Progressive Era women were intent on claiming. Circa 1900, it was rare for a respectable woman to do anything but walk, ride, or ski, partly because women were expected to be so heavily clad and partly because they were never supposed to go out unaccompanied.

While poking around for more on Florence and early American sportswomen, I made a surprising discovery. The first American woman to win an Olympic gold medal was Chicagoan Margaret Ives Abbott (1878-1955). She won the Olympic competition in women’s golf in Paris in 1900. Two years later, she became the wife of noted Chicago journalist Finley Peter Dunne. Margaret was born in India, where her father had been a merchant, but was raised in Chicago, where her mother (also named Margaret Ives Abbott) wrote for the Trib and had a literary salon.

Apparently the Paris Olympics were run in an off-hand fashion, for during her lifetime Margaret was never fully aware of what she had won. Only after her death did historians realize that her victory in what seemed to be just another golf tournament was actually part of the Olympic competition. And she received a bowl, not a medal.

Image: Florence Sutton circa 1910, courtesy of the Library of Congress, from this source.
For pictures of Margaret Ives Abbott and other female Olympians, click here.

Ferris: His Wonderland

Jul. 28, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 1890s, aerial views, amusements, Chicago, fairs, ferris wheel, Gilded Age, innovation, marvels, old photographs, photographers, photography, steel, World's Columbian Exposition 6 Comments

Around this time of year in 1893, millions of people were flocking to Chicago to see the great world’s fair the city was hosting. Formally known as the World’s Columbian Exposition, the fair belatedly commemorated the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of the New World.

In a bid for national and international celebrity, Chicagoans (whose young city had burned to the ground 22 years earlier) went all out in constructing the fair’s great White City: acres and acres of magnificent pavilions, illuminated at night by millions of dazzling electrical lights, and all organized around a network of waterways.

To make it even more special, the organizing committee hired a young engineer named George Washington Gale Ferris, Jr., to dream up something similar to the amazing tower that George Eiffel had designed for the world’s fair in Paris in 1889. Similar to that tower, but better. Yet at first the organizers of Chicago’s fair were doubtful about the idea that Ferris came up with.

Ferris, 34 years old (and destined to die of typhoid fever just three years later), had already gained an impressive reputation as an engineer and bridge-builder, a reputation that sprang from his understanding of steel. The design that he proposed to the fair’s organizers was for a gargantuan wheel, that, if built, would tower above everything and lift passengers effortlessly, treating them to aerial views from astonishing heights.

Starks W. Lewis, an amateur photographer who managed to get his camera (it would have been pretty bulky) set up on the wheel, captured the wonder of it all. From his vantage, the intricate workmanship of the wheel itself, as well as size and design of the passenger cars, each of which was designed to hold 60 people, is clearly revealed.

Despite organizers’ fears, Ferris’s daring contraption worked perfectly. Rising to a height of 264 feet and measuring 825 feet around, the Wheel weighed more than 2.6 million pounds. It was powered by two 1,000-horsepower steam engines and operated reliably, unimpaired by lightning and gale-force winds. According to Judith Adams-Volpe, writing about Ferris in the American National Biography, the wheel became the Fair’s leading attraction, the first instance of “technology being harnessed purely as a pleasure machine.”

What steel gave society was the capacity to rise above the earth and gain an entirely new perspective on itself. The people who visited the Fair from all over the US could see their world as they had never seen it, from a perspective previously offered only by mountains or the occasional steeple. In the wondrous aerial vision Ferris gave the world came a hint of the built marvels that were still to come.

Images: Photographs of and from the first Ferris Wheel
by Starks W. Lewis, 1893, courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum, from this source.

Lorimer

Jul. 26, 2012 By Susan Barsy in History Tags: 17th amendment, Chicago, corruption, Gilded Age, IL legislature, machine politics, old photographs, political parties, US Senate, William Lorimer 2 Comments

William Lorimer (1861-1934), was a rare bird indeed: a Chicago political boss who was Republican. By the time he paused to have this photograph taken, he’d risen to a seat in US Senate, but under circumstances that steeled reformers’ determination to amend the Constitution, so that nothing of the kind would ever happen again.

Lorimer had the bored, jaded look of a man who’d been around the corner and back again. Known as the “the Blond Boss,” Lorimer, who’d been born in Manchester, England, had risen to wealth from poverty, the son of a Scotch-Presbyterian minister who died early, leaving his family to negotiate the late nineteenth-century Chicago immortalized in works like Sister Carrie. From the age of ten, Lorimer worked various jobs, including in the stockyards; he received negligible education.

In his early 20s, he became a street-car driver, married a woman who was Irish Catholic, and converted to her religion. Known as a clean liver who did not drink, smoke, or attend the theater, he fathered 8 or 9 daughters, many of whom later worked for the city.

Lorimer’s determination to enter politics on the Republican side is said to have dated from 1884, when a Chicago polling place could not provide him with a Republican ballot to cast for James G. Blaine. Lorimer became the political favorite of ethnic voters on the city’s west side, including many Russian Jews, Bohemians, and Irish who had previously voted Democratic. Lorimer was not a reformer; he believed in competition.

He thrived by delivering on promises to supporters and friends, and by wedging himself between the Democrats and the reform wing of his own party. Exploiting these divisions, he managed in 1908 to defeat a rival Republican for the US Senate, at a time when all Senators were chosen by state legislatures. A year later, one Illinois state assemblyman claimed to have been paid $1,000 for his vote. Several others joined him, claiming to have received payments from a jackpot fund set up to influence decisions in the Illinois assembly.

The allegations were investigated over the next several years by state and federal legislative committees, which could not find evidence of Lorimer’s personal wrong-doing. But the winds of change had been blowing strongly, and eventually grew strong enough to blow Lorimer away. Ignoring the detailed conclusions of the committees, the Senate voted to expel Lorimer in 1911. Two years later, the nation ratified the 17th Amendment, which empowered voters to elect US senators directly.

Though Lorimer dropped dead in a Chicago train station decades ago, something of his spirit still haunts Chicago.

Image courtesy of the Library of Congress, from this source.

YOU MAY ENJOY:
“Boss Lorimer and the Illinois Bribery Scandal,” New York Times, 1909.

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