Calligraphic wonders at the Newberry →

Think calligraphy is simply that swirling script on nice wedding invitations?

Think, again — then check out the Newberry Library’s newest exhibit, “Exploration 2013.”

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A city is more than a massing of citizens, a layout of buildings and streets, or an arrangement of institutions. It is also an infrastructure of ideas, an embodiment of the beliefs, values, and aspirations of the people who created it. In City Water, City Life, historian Carl Smith explores this infrastructure of ideas through an examination of the development of the first successful waterworks systems in Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago between the 1790s and the 1860s.

On Wednesday, May 15, Smith will discuss City Water, City Life at a meet-the-author event.

Pictured: from the Mitchell Dawson papers—an intimate photograph of a water pump on the Dawson family farm. The Newberry owns the correspondence, literary works, research materials, and personal papers of Chicago lawyer, poet and author Mitchell Dawson.

In the 1920s, Chicago emerged as “the literary capital of the United States”— so said H. L. Mencken, cultural arbiter and critic. American literature became a jumble of Chicago mainstays: railroads, skyscrapers, and overflowing stockyards. The writings of renowned authors (Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Willa Cather, and Sherwood Anderson) were born of Midwestern attitudes and upbringings.

This Wednesday, May 8, join two of Chicago’s famed authors, Sara Paretsky and Rick Kogan, for a “Conversation at the Newberry.” They will discuss Chicago’s evolving depiction in literature.

Pictured: images from Chicago … As Seen from the Skies. It’s crowded, Busy Streets … Views of Chicago, Covering Every Subject that Forms a Factor in the Make-Up of that City. Published by S.B. Frank in 1894. 

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Happy International Workers’ Day!

Albert R. Parsons, an Alabama-born newspaperman, was one of four Haymarket martyrs—labor and anarchist leaders, who, as we explained in our earlier post, were unfairly hanged for involvement in the Haymarket Square riot and bombing. Anarchismus, pictured above, is the German translation of Parsons’s memoir and ideological manifesto, Anarchism: Its Philosophy and Scientific Basis, as Defined by Some of Its Apostles. Parsons penned his manifesto while awaiting execution; it’s been said that he scribbled its final lines en route to the gallows. On the bottom right, there is a cheeky illustration of a scaffold, towering above three lines of text: “unter dem zeichen des neuen kreuzzugs,” or “under the sign of the new crusade.” “Crusade” refers to the harsh policing of the radical left.

Parsons’s manuscript would be posthumously published by his wife Lucy, a powerful orator and a leader in her own right. (In the 1920s, the Chicago Police Department would say she was “more dangerous than a thousand rioters”). Only 300 English-language copies were circulated; police actively confiscated the others. This German-language edition managed to escape police attention. It traveled freely—and quickly—among Chicago’s German-speaking population, which had strong ties to the anarchist, socialist, and labor movements.

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benvanloon:

Newberry Library. Designed by Henry Ives Cobb and built in 1887.

Happy May Day!

This bilingual broadside, written by labor activist Adolph Fischer, calls on “workingmen” to attend a rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. In the demonstration’s aftermath, eight anarchists (including Fischer) were unfairly accused of slaying police officers. An openly biased judge would sentence seven of these defendants—now regarded as the Haymarket martyrs—to death. In 1887, four were executed after one committed suicide.

Two years later, the first congress of the Second International, an organization of socialist and labor parties, proposed an annual holiday to commemorate the Chicago protests and consequent executions. The holiday was dubbed International Workers’ Day, or May Day.

In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining defendants, citing trial irregularities. He was concurrently praised and censured for this decision, which cost him a re-election bid. Today, the Newberry’s Bughouse Square Debates, an annual free-speech forum, begin with the presentation of the John Peter Altgeld Freedom of Speech Award, which is given to an individual or group that has staunchly defended civil liberties.

Fischer’s broadside and unwarranted fate are a potent reminder: Chicago occupies a central position in the movement for workers’ fair treatment. Its nineteenth-century denizens marched for and resolutely demanded their rights—and in turn, the rights of the international laborer.

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Happy 176th Birthday, Chicago!

This is a preliminary draft of the Charter of the City of Chicago, produced in 1837 and signed on March 4. It is now found in the Newberry’s Graff Collection.