Pete Lit

Lost bridge

Check out this fantastic 1898 birdseye map of Chicago's Loop. One particular curiosity can be seen at the bottom center of the closeup above, which shows an extra bridge (for the Metroplitan West Side Elevated line) between Jackson and Van Buren. The bridge no longer exists. From the larger image, at the left you can also see the original course of the river, before it was later straightened to be more north-south.

(Via James Iska.)

"...believed that his remorse would prove lasting..."

Sad anecdote from Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House:

I recall a similar case of a woman who had supported her three children for five years, during which time her dissolute husband constantly demanded money for drink and kept her perpetually worried and intimidated. One Saturday, before the "blessed Easter," he came back from a long debauch, ragged and filthy, but in a state of lachrymose repentance. The poor wife received him as a returned prodigal, believed that his remorse would prove lasting, and felt sure that if she and the children went to church with him on Easter Sunday and he could be induced to take the pledge before the priest, all their troubles would be ended. After hours of vigorous effort and the expenditure of all her savings, he finally sat on the front doorstep the morning of Easter Sunday, bathed, shaved and arrayed in a fine new suit of clothes. She left him sitting there in the reluctant spring sunshine while she finished washing and dressing the children. When she finally opened the front door with the three shining children that they might all set forth together, the returned prodigal had disappeared, and was not seen again until midnight, when he came back in a glorious state of intoxication from the proceeds of his pawned clothes and clad once more in the dingiest attire. She took him in without comment, only to begin again the wretched cycle.

Other than a difference of fifty-something years and another continent, this could have come straight from Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

Jane Addams, American Opium-Eater

Surprising anecdote here from Jane Addams from her time at Rockford College during the 1870s:

At one time five of us tried to understand De Quincey's marvelous "Dreams" more sympathetically, by drugging ourselves with opium. We solemnly consumed small white powders at intervals during an entire long holiday, but no mental reorientation took place, and the suspense and excitement did not even permit us to grow sleepy. About four o'clock on the weird afternoon, the young teacher whom we had been obliged to take into our confidence, grew alarmed over the whole performance, took away our De Quincey and all the remaining powders, administrated an emetic to each of the five aspirants for sympathetic understanding of all human experience, and sent us to our separate rooms with a stern command to appear at family worship after supper "whether we were able to or not."

"Weird afternoon", indeed. Hard to believe that the aspiring missionary women at Rockford would have easy access to such a libertine work of literature. Addams is coming across as being much less stodgy than I had expected.

Honor Bright

Demolition of an old building in Highland Park, Michigan, has revealed two beautiful faded ads. How poignant to realize that the ads first appeared during a time of great prosperity, then were covered up and only revealed again after decades of decline.

When the ads for Honor Bright and Black Beauty first appeared, between 1915 and 1925, Highland Park was in glorious ascent. The Ford assembly lines were humming, and the city had become a desirable community whose population had grown tenfold, to 45,000, in a decade...When the ads reappeared, it was to an entirely different city, one of abandonment, decline and the hope for a return to days when children carried schoolbooks and rode bicycles, carefree and smiling.

And it's always nice to see a quote from my friend Frank Jump, who has really become the go-to guy on faded ads.

"It’s a reminder of our own timeline and how quickly things become obsolete," said Frank Jump, a photographer and the author of Fading Ads of New York City, (The History Press, 2011). "One minute people had thriving businesses building buggies, and the next minute Henry Ford is pushing out automobiles on an assembly line and nobody wants horse and buggies anymore."

Frank's book is next on my buy list.

(Photo credit: Nicole Bengiveno, The New York Times)

"...bearing my responsibility as best I could..."

Curious anecdote of Jane Addams from her early childhood, as recounted in her memoir Twenty Years at Hull-House:

That curious sense of responsibility for carrying on the world's affairs which little children often exhibit because "the old man clogs our earliest years," I remember in myself in a very absurd manifestation. I dreamed night after night that every one in the world was dead excepting myself, and that upon me rested the responsibility of making a wagon wheel. The village street remained as usual, the village blacksmith shop was "all there," even a glowing fire upon the forge and the anvil in its customary place near the door, but no human being was within sight. They had all gone around the edge of the hill to the village cemetery, and I alone remained alive in the deserted world. I always stood in the same spot in the blacksmith shop, darkly pondering as to how to begin, and never once did I know how, although I fully realized that the affairs of the world could not be resumed until at least one wheel should be made and something started. Every victim of nightmare is, I imagine, overwhelmed by an excessive sense of responsibility and the consciousness of a fearful handicap in the effort to perform what is required; but perhaps never were the odds more heavily against "a warder of the world" than in these reiterated dreams of mine, doubtless compounded in equal parts of a childish version of Robinson Crusoe and of the end-of-the-world predictions of the Second Adventists, a few of whom were found in the village. The next morning would often find me, a delicate little girl of six, with the further disability of a curved spine, standing in the doorway of the village blacksmith shop, anxiously watching the burly, red-shirted figure at work. I would store my mind with such details of the process of making wheels as I could observe, and sometimes I plucked up courage to ask for more. "Do you always have to sizzle the iron in water?" I would ask, thinking how horrid it would be to do. "Sure!" the good-natured blacksmith would reply, "that makes the iron hard." I would sigh heavily and walk away, bearing my responsibility as best I could, and this of course I confided to no one, for there is something too mysterious in the burden of "the winds that come from the fields of sleep" to be communicated, although it is at the same time too heavy a burden to be borne alone.

It's interesting that she saw nightmares as involving recognition of one's duty and a crippling inability to perform that duty. It's also fascinating that a mere six-year-old could have been so troubled by her presumed duty that she would try to learn how to make wagon wheels herself, in order to meet the responsibility she envisioned in her dreams. This innate sense of responsibility must surely have compelled her toward the great work she achieved as an adult.

A brewery reborn

This is fantastic: Baltimore's American Brewery, which has been vacant since 1973 and decrepit as recently as 2005, has now been totally restored and renovated into the home of Humanim, a non-profit social service agency. The architect even went to great lengths to repurpose the existing brewery infrastructure into new uses - that second photo above is an old wort tank, now a unique workspace. This is exactly the sort of bold, forward thinking needed for Chicago's Michael Brand Brewery, which now faces demolition. I do realize, however, that any renovation of the Brand complex would inevitably be much less spectacular than American Brewery, as the Brand structure is much more utilitarian in design. Still, saving Brand is something that needs to be done, and I hope someone at least takes the Baltimore example as inspiration in what Brand could become.

Hull House to close

I had been wondering what book I should read next, and now I know: Jane Addams' Twenty Years at Hull-House.

Hull House to close
By Kate Thayer, Chicago Tribune, January 21, 2012

The need for its services is as strong as ever, but after years of rising costs and dwindling income from fundraising the Jane Addams Hull House Association will close and file for bankruptcy, the agency said Thursday.

"For the last several years the agency has had trouble in the fundraising side of things," said Stephen Saunders, chair of the association's board of trustees. "After many years of struggling, we have to close our doors. It was a very difficult decision."

The 123-year-old agency, headquartered at 1030 W. Van Buren St., provides foster care, domestic violence counseling and prevention services, child development programs, and job training to about 60,000 children, families and community groups each year.

Sad, but times change, and we have to change with them.

"Everything 'anti' was Communist."

"If you were against starving, you were a Communist. If you were against unemployment, you were a Communist. If you were against what the government was doing in terms of making the rich richer, you were a Communist...Everything 'anti' was Communist. So you end up being against the government, because the government is against you."
- Leo Seltzer, on the Hoover Administration's repressive response to dissent during the early 1930s (quoted in Soul of a People: The WPA Writers' Project Uncovers Depression America, by David A. Taylor)

Chicago billboards, 1901

Check out these billboards on South Michigan Avenue in Chicago from 1901, taken from this panoramic view at Shorpy. Cigars, champagne, oatmeal, kidney water and some sort of haircare product, along with the soon-to-be-missed Kodak cameras. The panoramic looks north from 12th Street (now Roosevelt Road), with Michigan Avenue on the left, Grant Park in the center and the Illinois Central railyard (plus a bit of the lake) on the right.

Edwin Porter Brewery

Here's an interesting historical piece in the Joliet Herald-News about the old Porter Brewery, including a column by the late John Whiteside on the Feds' attempted crackdown during Prohibition. Edwin Porter's son Harry built our house, in 1927, but passed away before it was completed - his wife re-married shortly afterward and lived in the house for a while. When we first looked at the house I was pleasantly surprised to see that the knocker on the front door is engraved with the name "Porter." I wonder what Mrs. Porter's second husband thought about having that around as a constant reminder of whom came first.

Breaching the levee, then and now

Given the big international news events of the past week (Osama bin Laden, the royal wedding), the story of the demolition of a Mississippi River levee in Missouri to ease severe flooding has gotten remarkably high exposure. At the University of Illinois Press blog, historian Jarod Roll (Spirit of Rebellion: Labor and Religion in the New Cotton South) writes an excellent piece on the last time that the Bird's Point-New Madrid Spillway was intentionally breached, in 1937. Back then, the action spurred not only the creation of federal public housing for the displaced, but also government-provided health care.

Although impossible to predict, the effects of the 2011 flood will probably not be as dramatic as those that followed the inundation of 1937. It would be difficult to imagine renewed protests for federal housing projects, especially in a section of Missouri that once routinely voted Democratic, but is now a Republican stronghold. It is perhaps even more difficult to imagine protestors using the flood to not only call for but actually receive a government health service.

Times have definitely changed, and not necessarily for the better.

More on the Raber House

Lynn Becker has a fine post on the Raber House (pictured above, in 1870) and a history of the surrounding Englewood neighborhood. Sounds like Lavicka is asking for more than the original Tribune article disclosed, but it would still be a very worthy undertaking.

"I probably like the buildings more than wisdom would allow, or should allow."

This is fantastic. I see this mansion whenever I take the Rock Island line to work, and despite the article's claim it's not that hard to imagine something beautiful returning there. I've seen 19th Century etchings of the house, and it was quite lovely in its day. Best of luck to Mr. Lavicka.

Bill Lavicka's renovations have always been unusual. The veteran rehabber and owner of Historic Boulevard Services has trucked four buildings intact from one site to another, converted small churches into homes, remade entire Near West Side blocks and showcased his quirky aesthetic by topping spires and balusters with bowling balls.

But the next remodel he has his heart set on raises the bar on unusual. Lavicka wants to turn a boarded-up Washington Park mansion, one of the city's last surviving examples of a multiacre country estate, into a winery.

And he doesn't want to import the grapes.

He wants to plant about 5,000 vines in the yard — what's now three or so bombed-out-looking blocks along the Dan Ryan Expressway just south of Garfield Boulevard.

The airport? It's that-a-way!

Gapers Block just linked to a database of Chicago aerial photos from 1938-41. The images aren't indexed (yet?) so I randomly clicked a link that brought up this photo, which includes the unmistakable outline of Goose Island (near the upper left - the diagonal that bisects it is the since-removed Ogden Avenue viaduct). Interesting enough in itself, but zoom in closer and you can see this, just to the west of the island:



The lettering is fuzzy, but reads "Chicago Municipal Airport 10 Miles" with a big arrow pointing to the southwest (the airport is now known as Midway). Wow. Fortunately, airplane navigation is much more technologically advanced than it used to be. All other things being equal, I'll gladly take the chance that a modern-day air traffic controller might be asleep on the job, rather than being back in the forties and having a pilot who has to read directional signs from the cockpit.

The good kind of propaganda

Gerald Spencer Pryse, “Belgium Refugees in England” (1915)


Olaf Gulbransoon, "Poster of the Ludendorff Fund for the Disabled" (1918)


Kürthy, "Hungarian War Loan poster" (1917)

The bold title of this book at Project Gutenberg - War Posters Issued by Belligerent and Neutral Nations 1914-1919, edited by Martin Hardie and Arthur K. Sabin - is what first grabbed my attention, drawing me to the very arresting images within. I think I even have a crush on the Belgian woman.

Orwell comes alive

When I first subscribed to the RSS feed of The Orwell Prize (the daily posting of George Orwell's diary entries) I was very disappointed by the dry, pedestrian accounts of the weather and chicken-egg production output that I read there. Especially since it was compelling entries like this one that I had been eagerly anticipating instead.

Yesterday when having my hair cut in the City, asked the barber if he carried on during raids. He said he did. And even if he was shaving someone? I said. Oh, yes, he carried on just the same. And one day a bomb will drop near enough to make him jump, and he will slice half somebody’s face off.

~

Everyone I have talked to agrees that the empty furnished houses in the West End should be used for the homeless; but I suppose the rich swine still have enough pull to prevent this from happening...When you see how the wealthy are still behaving, in what is manifestly developing into a revolutionary war, you think of St. Petersburg in 1916.

And his dog, it turns out, was named Marx. Perfect.

How Samuel Pepys spent my birthday, in 1667

(Okay, so I guess "my birthday" should actually read "the date of my future birth." Whatever.)

Up, and at the office all the morning till almost noon, and then I rode from the office (which I have not done five times I think since I come thither) and to the Exchequer for some tallies for Tangier; and that being done, to the Dog taverne, and there I spent half a piece upon the clerks, and so away, and I to Mrs. Martin’s, but she not at home, but staid and drunk with her sister and landlady, and by that time it was time to go to a play, which I did at the Duke’s house, where “Tu Quoque” was the first time acted, with some alterations of Sir W. Davenant’s; but the play is a very silly play, methinks; for I, and others that sat by me, Mr. Povy and Mr. Progers, were weary of it; but it will please the citizens. My wife also was there, I having sent for her to meet me there, and W. Hewer. After the play we home, and there I to the office and despatched my business, and then home, and mightily pleased with my wife’s playing on the flageolet, she taking out any tune almost at first sight, and keeping time to it, which pleases me mightily. So to supper and to bed.

Nice day - he had drinks at two different locations, watched a play, and listened to his wife play the flageolet ("a woodwind musical instrument and a member of the fipple flute family"). But I'll still take my day over his.

Poe in New York

Just saw this come up on Project Gutenberg: Literary New York: Its Landmarks and Associations, by Charles Hemstreet (1903). Though I may or may not browse through the rest eventually, I was immediately drawn to the chapter "Those Who Gathered About Poe" which charmingly describes the various literary associates and residences of Poe's New York years. Here the author describes the vicinity of Poe's last New York home, in the village of Fordham (now the Bronx):

After passing through these rooms and with the memory of Poe strong upon you, walk away along the street remembering that in Poe's time it was a delightful country road. Stroll towards the Harlem River as he wandered many a moonlight night, his brain busy with the deep problems of The Universe. After a time you will pass on to the High Bridge, that carried the pipes of the Croton Aqueduct over the river,—this at least unchanged since his day. Walk over the path there, high above the water, and visit the lonely spot where the suggestion came to Poe for that requiem of despair, the mystic Ulalume.

The house still stands.

Not only are my parents awesome...

...but now they've also been immortalized for their roles in what was purportedly the first panty raid in history, at Augustana College in 1949. Just good clean fun, though the starched college elders and many students' parents were scandalized by the event.

Happy Birthday, Chicago!

A very happy 173rd to Chicago, which was incorporated as a city on this day in 1837. Chicago History Journal has some interesting insights on the city's earliest days, including this surprising response to its request for its very first loan:

State Bank Of Illinois, Springfield, May 31, 1837. Peter Bolles, Esq.,

Dear Sir: Your letter of the 18th, addressed to the president of this bank and proposing on behalf of the city of Chicago a loan from this bank of the sum of $25,000, has been laid before the directors of the bank, and, I regret to have to state, declined. I am very respectfully, your ob't serv't,

A. H. Ridgely, Cashier.

Re-JEC-ted! Fortunately, or unfortunately, the city has had absolutely no problem going into debt ever since.

(Image: Saloon Building at Clark and Lake Streets, which housed the first City Hall.)

Wabash Avenue, 1900

I love almost all of the old photos at Shorpy, but what I love most of all are the full-sized original versions of each displayed photo. Case in point: this 1900 image of the west side of Wabash Avenue in Chicago, looking north from Adams Street (presumably from the Adams El station). The main image is interesting enough, but if you click on "View full size" you'll see an immensely larger version, in which fine details can be easily discerned. That image I've posted above is cropped from just a fraction of the larger photo, from which you can clearly see the faces of pedestrians and read shop signs. The literatus in me couldn't help being drawn to the "Pilgrim Press Booksellers" and "Summer Reading", though the former was presumably a purveyor of inspirational works which would probably not have been of much interest to me. If you look several floors up on the facade of this building, the name "Potter Palmer" can be seen, which leads me to believe that this is actually the backside of the Palmer House hotel which would have fronted onto State Street, just one block to the west.

The Flatiron, Under Construction

Though I've seen images of the iconic Flatiron Building countless times (including a framed poster of Edward Steichen's famous photograph, which once adorned my college dorm-room wall - yes, I've always been a geek), this is the first I've ever seen of the building under construction. Two oddities catch my eye - one, the unfinished fifth and sixth floors, as if the builders just skipped over those floors and vowed to get back to them eventually; and two, the scaffolds on the top floors being supported from within the building itself instead of from the ground.

Bury My Heart... turns 40

One of the finest books I have ever read (and an early impetus towards my finally challenging conventional wisdom and recognizing the plight of the powerless), Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, celebrated its fortieth anniversary this year. At The Huffington Post, Tim Giago writes a nice appreciation on the book, including this vivid and moving quote:

Perhaps prematurely, Black Elk said, "I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream...the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer and the sacred tree is dead."

(Via MobyLives.)

William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940

William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932-1940 is a very fine and highly informative overview of the New Deal - the domestic economic and social programs developed by Roosevelt and his army of reformers in response to the crisis of the Great Depression. Refreshingly, the author resists considerable temptation in not making this a mere hagiography of FDR, but discusses both his successes and his failures, both his personal strengths and shortcomings. The author acknowledges that, for all of its success, the New Deal never solved the problem of widespread unemployment, which was only quelled with the rapid military armament in support of the war in Europe. Still, the New Deal did stabilize our country and bring it back from the bring of collapse, while also establishing much of the social safety net (Social Security, insured bank deposits, unemployment insurance) that we often take for granted today, as well as regulatory bodies like the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board which have been critical in curbing the worst abuses of big business.

My one qualm is that, despite the title, this is not exclusively a study of the New Deal, but more of an overview of FDR's first two terms. Leuchtenburg narrates at length about the rise of fascism in the mid 1930s and the start of World War II at the end of the decade, which of course are essential to any discussion of FDR's presidency (especially since the author details FDR's response to each, most notably charting Roosevelt's evolution from isolationist to internationalist) but don't specifically pertain to the New Deal. The book could well have stayed to its New Deal theme, not by ignoring fascism and WWII, but by explaning how each impacted New Deal policies and programs. Still, that qualm is a minor one, and Leuchtenburg's book is a thorough and well-written study of a fascinating era and one of our greatest political leaders, which I highly recommend.

Quotes

Three more great quotes from Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940 by William Leuchtenburg, which I finished reading yesterday. First, Justice Louis Brandeis, on Scandinavia's "middle way" (emulated by the New Deal) which accomodated both public and private institutions, and also a backhanded refutation of Communism:

"Why should anyone want to go to Russia when one can go to Denmark?"

Next, Harry Hopkins (FDR's WPA director and later Commerce Secretary) on the New Deal's spirit of innovation and non-ideological pragmatism:

"I am for experimenting...in various parts of the country, trying out schemes which are supported by reasonable people and see if they work. If they do not work, the world will not come to an end."

Lastly, Republican Senator Jim Watson of Indiana, expressing, to Wendell Willkie (the GOP presidential nominee) at the 1940 nominating convention, the conservatives' concern over the political ideology of Willkie, who had only recently left the Democratic Party:

"I don't mind the church converting a whore, but I don't want her to lead the choir the first night!"

"In Flanders Fields"

Despite being a pacifist, I still find myself moved by this verse...

In Flanders Fields
by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD, Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Today is Veterans Day, so please give some remembrance to all of the soldiers who have fought for our country. But also recall that this day was originally called Armistice Day ("a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace"), which marked the peaceful end of World War I, and remember that striving for peace means more soldiers come home safely or never go to war in the first place.

Quote

"Why shouldn't the American people take half my money from me? I took it all from them."
- Edward Filene, as quoted in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, by William Leuchtenberg

I didn't know anything about Filene (other than his department store chain) before reading this quote, but he seems to have been an interesting individual. He was a highly successful merchant, of course, but also was instrumental in the creation of both credit unions and workers compensation insurance.

Great Depression reading

My literary tour of the Great Depression continues. Over the weekend (thanks in part to Internet-connection problems that kept me off my laptop, blissfully as I now realize) I finished Edmund Wilson's The American Jitters: A Year of the Slump, a collection of magazine essays from 1930-31, when the "Great Depression" moniker hadn't been coined yet and the turnaround engineered by FDR (who took office in 1933) was still a few years off. Wilson surveys the national landscape, with particularly memorable pieces on labor strife in the West Virginia coal mines and the construction site of the Hoover Dam, making no effort to hide his Communist sympathies (which were admittedly more socially acceptable in those capitalist-backlash days) and his loyalties to the common laborer. As the book concludes, I was struck by how convinced the otherwise astute Wilson was then that the Communist revolution in America was imminent. Which makes me wonder why, despite conditions being so ripe, that revolution never happened - was it the success of FDR's New Deal? the preoccupation with the rise of Hitler and immersion in WWII? the emerging horrors of the totalitarian Soviet state that revealed that maybe Communism wasn't paradise after all? Interesting question, I think.

Next up is William Leuchtenburg's Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal: 1932-1940, which I'm seventy pages in to. Fresh from his resounding 1932 defeat of Hoover (electoral college margin: 472-59!) FDR has just completed his whirlwind first 100 days in office, during which time he managed to enact a truly mind-boggling mass of legislation designed to stauch the Depression bleeding and prod the country toward recovery. Good reading so far, though a bit heavy on detail.

L’Anse aux Meadows

As an American of Scandinavian descent, I've long been fascinated by L’Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in North America, on the far northern tip of Newfoundland. Atlas Obscura has a nice summary on the site here (including the video clip above, only about the first third of which is of L’Anse aux Meadows). I hadn't realized until now that the actual site was intentionally buried in sand and sod for protection, with a replica built on top of it. It's truly a testament to both the hardiness of the Vikings and the discomforts of months at sea aboard ship for a site this desolate to have been considered a desirable settlement location. This is one of those places that I'd absolutely love to visit, but likely won't due to its extreme remoteness.

Joe Hill

Time to honor a great American (or great American immigrant), the organized labor hero Joe Hill, who was born 130 years ago today. Or more accurately, as Mobylives points out, Joel Emmanuel Hägglund, Hill's given name. I had no idea he was Swedish. And check out the Wikipedia section on the remarkable fate of his remains - Billy Bragg, you're a braver man than I.

The not-so-ancient lost city of Goverthing

Fascinating, bizarre, baffling: the archaeological excavation of a small town on Governors Island, New York, which disappeared...in 1954.

"Chicago, the Beautiful"

Here's a relic - a 1948 MGM travelogue on our fair city. Plenty of physical superlatives abound, such as "tallest" (Stevens Hotel) and "largest" (Merchandise Mart). I hope the Chamber of Commerce bankrolled this entire project, because they certainly got their civic-booster money's worth.

(Via Lake Claremont Press.)

Cahokia

Timothy R. Pauketa's book, Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi, sounds utterly fascinating.

In retrospect, Pauketat sees an even more important conclusion emerging from Mound 72 and other Cahokia excavations: evidence of a metropolitan Native American society "characterized by inequality, power struggles and social complexity." These people were neither half-feral savages nor eco-Edenic villagers; they had lived and died in a violent and sophisticated society with its own well-defined view of the universe.

Though I'm a native and lifelong resident of Illinois, I've spent almost no time in the southern part of the state. But the Cahokia Mounds site is definitely one place I'd love to visit.

The Newgrange Tomb

This is quite amazing. The Newgrange Tomb (which I first heard about last night on NPR) is an ancient Celtic burial mound in the north of Ireland which was ingeniously built with a long passageway that is illuminated along its entire length by sunlight only at the Winter Solstice. Bear in mind that this technological feat was accomplished 500 years before the Egyptian pyramids and 1,000 years before Stonehenge. Awesome, particularly coming from supposedly "primitive" tribes.

Tourist demand to visit the tomb on the Solstice so far outstrips capacity (according to the story on NPR, 28,000 people applied this year for only 50 available slots) that this year a live webcast will be available from inside the tomb so that everyone can experience it online. The webcast starts today at 8:30 A.M. GMT.

Oops. Now that I've done the time zone conversion from GMT, it looks like the live webcast is over already. But it looks like the webcast is archived here, which I can't view at the office but am very much looking forward to viewing later at home.

Joliet History - Dairy Queen

The world's very first Dairy Queen opened in my adopted hometown of Joliet, Illinois, on June 22, 1940. The newspaper ad above appeared in the Joliet Herald-News two weeks after the store first opened. The building at 501 N. Chicago St. still stands, though the DQ has long since departed from downtown.

Mmmmm...large cuplet...

"The Rule Of His Will"

In 1866, in the Supreme Court case Ex Parte Milligan, Attorney General James Speed argued--in trying to justify President Lincoln's imprisonment of hundreds of dissenting citizens--that during wartime, the President should rightfully become "The supreme legislator, supreme judge, and supreme executive."

The Court wisely disagreed with this affront to civil liberties. Chief Justice David Davis wrote:

"The proposition is this: that in a time of war the commander of an armed force...has the power...to suspend all civil rights and their remedies, and subject citizens...to the rule of his will...If true, [our] republican government is a failure, and there is an end of liberty regulated by law."

Some things never change. John Ashcroft certainly agrees with James Speed. Hopefully the Supreme Court will agree with Chief Justice Davis and end the administration's ongoing assault on the Constitution.

(Via Nat Henthoff's fine article in the Village Voice.)

I Don't Care If I Ever Get Back

In belated honor of Opening Day, here's an old view of the West Side Grounds, the Cubs' home prior to Wrigley Field. (Courtesy of ePodunk.com.) The West Side Grounds (at Polk and Wolcott, where the hospital campus now stands) was the site of the Cubs' last World Series championship. Now, that's old.

Legend has it that the phrase "out in left field" originated here, as there was a mental hospital just beyond the left field wall. (Insert punchline about Cub fan loyalty here.)

Jefferson's Substance Over Style

The presidential election of 1796 between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson was closely enough contested to come down to a handful of electoral votes. There was a problem with the votes from the Vermont delegation, which might have been considered technically invalid, although the intent of the delegation--in favor of Adams--was apparently quite clear. Rather than dispute the results on purely technical grounds, Jefferson conceded the election. In a letter to James Madison, Jefferson made this remarkable statement:

I observe doubts are still expressed as to the validity of the Vermont election. Surely in so great a case, substance and not form should prevail...I pray you to declare it on every occasion foreseen or not foreseen by me, in favor of the choice of the people substantially expressed, and to prevent the phaenomenon of a Pseudo-president at so early a day.

Jefferson's taking of the moral high ground, even though it cost him the election, is truly admirable. While he might very well have cooked the 1800 electoral ballot count in his favor, thus bolstering his election to the Presidency (but not stealing it outright), at least he was consistent in applying the same logic he used in stepping aside in 1796.

I can't help but wonder if George Bush, if faced with a similar substance-versus-style dilemma, would act as honorably.

Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I don't wonder. He wouldn't, period.