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| January 2010 |
| Billie Silvey |
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| largest crowds of any evangelist before electronic sound systems were invented. His preaching played a significant role in the adoption of Prohibition. Sunday grew up in an orphanage and played for teams in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, where he was known for fast running and thrilling catches in the days before outfielders wore gloves. His personality made him popular with fans as well as teammates. Manager Cap Anson made him the team’s business manager, including handling ticket receipts and travel expenses. On a Sunday afternoon in Chicago, he was attracted by the sound of hymns he’d heard his mother sing and stopped to listen to a gospel preaching team from Pacific Garden Mission. Attending services at the mission, he was converted by a former society matron who worked there and began attending services at the Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church, which was handy to the ball park and his rented room. Upon his conversion, he denounced drinking, swearing and gambling and began speaking in churches and YMCAs. It was at the Jefferson Park church that he met and married Helen Amelia “Nell” Thompson, daughter of the owner of one of Chicago’s largest dairy products businesses. In the spring of 1891, he turned down a $3,000 a year baseball contract to accept a position with the Chicago YMCA at $83 a month. For three years, he visited the sick, prayed with the troubled, counseled the suicidal and invited people in saloons to evangelistic meetings. In 1893, he became full-time assistant to evangelist J. Wilbur Chapman, working as an advance man to organize prayer meetings and choirs and take care of other details. Listening to Chapman preach and receiving instruction on putting a sermon together formed his formal training. When Chapman returned to local church work, Sunday began holding meetings in communities in Iowa and Illinois that he called the “Kerosene Circuit” because they didn’t have electricity. In 1908, the Sundays hired a nanny to care for their four children and set out together with Billy preaching and Nell handling the administrative details. Nell transformed her husband’s organization into a “nationally renowned phenomenon.” New staff included a song leader and women’s ministry director. Between 1915 and 1917, Sunday conducted meetings in Philadelphia, Kansas City, Boston and New York. He was front page news in cities where he held campaigns, with his campaigns often surpassing coverage of World War I. Over the course of his career, he probably preached to more than one hundred million people face-to-face. Some 1,250,000 people responded, and their cards were returned to the church or deonomination of their choice. Sunday had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and was well read on the religious and social issues of the day. He denounced child labor and supported urban reform and women’s suffrage. He never lost sympathy for the poor and tried to bridge the gulf between the races during the Jim Crow era. Competition from radio and movies caused the crowds to wane after the war. In early 1935, he suffered a mild heart attack and was warned to stop preaching. He died November 6, a week after preaching his last sermon on the text, “What must I do to be saved?” |
| Saints and Sinners |
| Chicago is a city of contrasts—a world-class city built on an agricultural economy of livestock and grain, a quintessentially American city built from a hodgepodge of races, nationalities and languages, a down-to-earth, gritty city that has thrown some of the most fanciful glittering parties for the world. It is also known for the contrast between its saints—famous religious leaders, social reformers, and law enforcers—and notorious sinners—the first and arguably most brutal serial killer and the most violent massacre perpetrated by organized crime. |
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| Billy Sunday
The aptly-named Billy Sunday was a popular National League outfielder in the 1880s. He converted to evangelical Christianity and became the most celebrated and influential American evangelist during the first two decades of the 20th century. Known for his colloquial sermons and frenetic delivery, he held campaigns in America’s largest cities, attracting the |
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| Jane Addams
Jane Addams was the founder of the U.S. Settlement House movement and the second woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Born in 1860, her mother died when she was two years old. Her father, bank president, Illinois State Senator and grain mill owner, remarried when she was eight. A founding member of the Republican Party, he supported Abraham Lincoln. New Yorker cartoonist Charles Addams was a cousin. Educated in the U.S. and Europe, Jane graduated from the Rockford Female Seminary, now Rockford College. Upon her father’s death, she inherited $50,000. In 1885, she left for a two-year tour of Europe with her stepmother. During a second tour, in 1887, she visited London’s Toynbee Hall, a settlement house for boys and her main inspiration for Hull House. |
| Raised as a Quaker, she became a member of a Presbyterian church in Chicago.
In 1889, Jane and a college friend, Ellen Gates Starr, co-founded Hull House in Chicago, the first settlement house in the U.S. Residence for some 25 women, it was visited each week by about 2,000 people. Facilities included a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, coffeehouse, gymnasium, girls club, bathhouse, book bindery, music school, drama group, library and labor-related divisions, serving a neighborhood of Germans, Jews, Greeks, Irish, French-Canadians and Italians. The adult night school was a forerunner of continuing education classes at universities today. In addition to offering services and cultural opportunities for the largely immigrant population, Hull House trained young social workers from across the country, including my husband Frank's grandmother, Irene Mattox Young. Hull House eventually became a 13-building settlement, including a playground and summer camp. Addams was attacked for pacifism during World War I and defending immigrant rights during a period of fear of anarchism and socialism. She spoke and campaigned extensively for Theodore Roosevelt’s 1912 Presidential campaign. Elected president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, she was condemned as unpatriotic by the New York Times. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931, the first U.S. woman to win the prize. Addams’ idea that physical and social landscapes can influence subcultures continues to influence social, political and economic reform in the U.S. and abroad. Her work was disseminated through the writings of Jared Diamond, E. O. Wilson and Willard Motley. Through her own Hull House Maps and Papers in 1893, she defined the interests and methodologies of her colleagues at the Chicago School of Sociology. She also worked with George H. Mead on women’s rights, ending child labor and mediating the 1910 Garment Workers’ strike. With other reform groups, she worked on the first juvenile-court system, tenement-house regulation, an eight-hour working day for women, factory inspection and workers’ compensation. She advocated for research into the causes of poverty and crime, supported women’s suffrage, and advocated for justice for immigrants and African Americans as a charter member of the NAACP. She influenced the shape of the United Nations. “What after all has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind if not faith in new possibilities and the courage to advocate them,” she said. Jane Addams Middle School in Lawndale, where our children attended, was one of numerous institutions named in her honor. |
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| Eliot Ness
Born April 19, 1903 in Chicago, Eliot Ness attended the University of Chicago at the age of 18, majoring in commerce, law and political science. He graduated in the top of his class in 1925 and became an investigator for the Retail Credit Company. In 1927, he became an agent with the Chicago branch of the U.S. Treasury Department. Italian mobster Alphonse Capone wielded tremendous power in the city of Chicago. President Herbert Hoover was infuriated over reports of the rich gangster who flouted the law by |
| evading taxes and bootlegging. At this point, Capone's enterprises brought in an approximate annual salary of $75,000,000. His money allowed him to buy protection from politicians, Chicago policemen and even government agents, making it difficult to determine just who was on the take. U. S. Attorney George Emmerson Q. Johnson was in charge of finding honest men to bring Capone down. Impressed by Ness’s outspokenness, Johnson assigned him to lead the operation. He had to choose no more than 12 men to form his special unit. By October, 1929, he had selected nine agents who began locating and shutting down breweries in the Chicago area. Through surveillance, tips and wire-tapping, they discovered many of the businesses Capone was involved in. Within nine months, they had seized 19 distilleries and six major breweries, reducing Capone’s income by some $1,000,000. One of Capone’s men offered Ness $2,000 to stop ruining business, promising an additional $2,000 a week if he continued to cooperate. Ness was outraged, ordering the man out of his office and calling the press in. He announced that neither he nor his men could be bought, and the next day a Chicago Tribune reporter referred to the squad an “The Untouchables.” Ness planned to attack the mobster’s source of income by destroying his breweries and gathering evidence that he had broken federal laws. Ness and his men forced Capone to buy alcohol outside Chicago and smuggle it in, which was more expensive and time-consuming. Capone beefed up security around his businesses and assigned men to follow the squad members. Ness even caught sight of one of Capone’s men watching his parents’ home. Capone caused a friend of Ness’s to be brutally murdered. In response, Ness called Capone and told him to look out his window at eleven o’clock. Then he paraded all of Capone’s vehicles seized from raids on their way to be auctioned off. Three attempts were made to murder Ness, but he didn’t give up. Eventually Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison for tax evasion. Ness died in 1957, and two years later, The Untouchables became a TV series starring Robert Stack. It continued through 118 episodes, ending in 1963. I found the series fascinating, mostly because my mother wouldn’t let me watch it. She said it was too violent. It was followed by the 1987 by the movie starring Kevin Costner and Sean Connery, with Robert DeNiro as Al Capone. I saw it with Robert, who was too young at the time to get in by himself. |
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| Dr. H. H. Holmes
Dr. H. H. Holmes was America’s first serial killer. Born in Gilmantown, New Hampshire, in 1860, Herman Webster Mudget found surgery fascinating. He graduated from high school at 16, and two years later married Clara Loveringat. While enrolled at the University of Michigan Medical School, he stole corpses from the school laboratory, disfigured them and collected insurance money from policies he took out on them. In 1886, he visited E. S. Holton’s drugstore in Englewood, just south of Chicago. Holton was dying of cancer. Mudgett introduced himself to his |
| worried wife as Dr. Henry Howeard Holmes and asked if she needed an assistant. She hired him on the spot.
By the end of the summer, Holton was dead, and the grieving widow left Holmes with more and more responsibility. When he offered to buy the drugstore, she accepted, on condition that she continue to live upstairs. Holmes agreed. When he failed to pay her, Mrs. Holton sought legal advice. When she disappeared, Holmes explained that living above the store so depressed her that she moved to California. He moved in. On a trip to Minneapolis, Holmes met and married Myrta Z. Belknap, bringing her back to Englewood to work in the store. Eventually, she left him and moved back to her parents’. Holmes purchased a lot across the street from the drugstore, where he built a three-story castle of his own design. He carefully supervised the construction, marking sure no workman stayed on the job for more than a week. While the first floor housed exclusive shops, the second and third floors were a maze of secret hallways and closets connecting 71 bedrooms. These “guest quarters” were soundproof, with doors that could only be locked from the outside and gas pipes connected to a control panel in Holmes’ bedroom. Large greased chutes led to the basement, with its acid tank, dissecting table and crematorium. When the building was completed, Holmes hired Ned Conner to manage the jewelry store on the first floor. Conner’s unusually tall wife Julia and their three-year-old daughter Pearl accompanied him. Eventually, the Conners divorced, and Ned moved away. Julia and her daughter disappeared, and Holmes sold a skeleton to a medical college. It was of a woman almost six feet tall. Not long after, he took up with Emmaline Cigrand. A few weeks later, he sold a female skeleton to another medical school. In 1893, the Chicago World Fair opened just a few blocks from the palace where Holmes had 71 rooms for rent. No one knows exactly how many fairgoers, but some estimate that as many as 50 tourists never returned home from the Chicago World’s Fair. Holmes was arrested, tried and hanged in 1895, thanks largely to the efforts of Detective Frank Geyer of the Philadelphia Police Department. The story became the subject of Erik Larson’s 2003 book, Devil in the White City. |
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| Al Capone
Compared with the diabolical Holmes, Alphonse Gabriel “Al” Capone was simply an American gangster who led a crime syndicate dedicated to smuggling, bootlegging and other illegal activities during the Prohibition Era of the 1920s and 30s. Born in Brooklyn in 1899, Capone moved to Chicago, where he became the boss of the criminal organization known as the Chicago Outfit, which specialized in gambling, |
| prostitution, and liquor sales. After bribing the Mayor of Chicago, William “Big Bill” Hale Thompson, Capone operated largely free of legal restraint. Known for his custom suits, cigars, gourmet food and drink, jewelry and female companionship, he became a celebrity. “I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want,” he said. Capone was under frequent attack from rivals, including North Side gangsters Hymie Weiss and Bugs Moran. In September 1926, the North Side gang in a motorcade of 10 vehicles using Thompson submachine guns and shotguns riddled the Hawthorne Hotel where Capone was eating lunch. His bodyguard threw him to the ground and lay on top of him. As a result, Capone fitted his Cadillac with bullet-proof glass, run-flat tires and a police siren. Seized by the Treasury Department in 1932, the car was later used as President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s limousine. Capone arranged the most notorious gangland killing of the century, the 1929 Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre in a garage in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago’s North Side. The massacre was in retaliation for the hijacking of the Outfit’s booze trucks and the assassination of organization leaders. To monitor their opponents’ movements, Capone’s men rented an apartment across from the trucking warehouse than served as a Moran headquarters. On the morning of Thursday, Feb. 14, Capone’s lookouts signaled gunmen disguised as police to start a fake raid. Lining up seven gangsters along a wall, Capone’s men signaled for accomplices with machine guns who struck each with from 15 to 20 bullets. Photos of the massacre shocked the public, damaging Capone’s reputation. In 1929, Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness began a successful investigation of Capone’s business, shutting down breweries and speakeasies. In 1931, Capone was indicted for income tax evasion and violations of the Volstead Act. Capone attempted to bribe and intimidate potential jurors, but his plan was discovered by Ness’s men. The jury pool was switched with that for another case, and Capone was found guilty and sentenced to eleven years, together with heavy fines and liens against his properties. In 1932, he was sent to Atlanta U. S. Penitentiary, where he was given special privileges. Transferred to Alcatraz, he was denied contact with the outside world until his release in November of 1939. He died in 1947. |