History Book
On the occasion of its 125th Anniversary, the Union League Club in cooperation with Northwestern University Press, published Glory, Darkness, Light: A History of the Union League Club of Chicago.
Stories about a secret army that may have led to the downfall of gangster Al Capone, aggressive advocacy for the elimination of patronage and waste in the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Chicago, and the expulsion of a United States senator that paved the way for reform of U.S. election rules are among many colorful anecdotes told in the book, written by historian James D. Nowlan.
Drawing on interviews, oral histories and the Club’s archives, Nowlan delivers a colorful history of Chicago and a revealing look at what went on behind the scenes at one of the city’s most prestigious clubs over the past 12 decades.
In Glory, Darkness, Light, Nowlan chronicles the Club’s
long history as a catalyst for civic and cultural enrichment in Chicago.
For more than a century, the Club has been a site where leaders have
gathered to lay the groundwork for important civic projects, and to organize
social and philanthropic events. Along the way, the Club declared its
purpose to be “commitment to community and country.”
A Cultural Booster
Since its founding in 1879, members of the Club have been credited with playing a role in establishing many of the city’s major cultural organizations, including: The Art Institute of Chicago, Orchestra Hall, the Auditorium Theater and the Field Museum. The Club also was instrumental in having Chicago named the site of the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. More recently, Club leadership spearheaded the siting and opening of the Harold Washington Library Center in downtown Chicago.
Nowlan traces the Club’s origins to 1862 – 17 years before its official founding – to Pekin, Illinois, where the Union League of America was established to support the failing northern cause.
Club Born in Tumultuous Times
“In 1862, Union success was anything but guaranteed. Anxiety ran high among fervent Republican war supporters such as firebrand editors Joseph Medill at the Chicago Tribune and William Penn Nixon at the Chicago InterOcean,” Nowlan reports. “Radical southern sympathizers in the north plotted violent insurrection in Lincoln’s home state.” The Knights of the Golden Circle and other offshoot pro slavery secret societies were sworn to aid and protect deserters, disseminate antiwar literature and aid Confederates in destroying government property, he states.
To counter this movement, a group of 11 men gathered on June 25, 1862, in Pekin, the seat of Tazewell County, along the Illinois River near Peoria, to establish the first council of the Union League of America. Individual clubs had already formed in Tennessee, Maryland and other border states. Soon, the Union League movement was focusing on providing medical supplies, training nurses, and advocating equality for slaves. By the end of the War Between the States, the Union League of America movement grew to two million members, Nowlan reports.
As the War gradually turned in favor of the North, the Union Leagues
shifted to political endorsements, favoring radical Republicans who advocated
full equality and voting rights for African Americans. The Union League
played a prominent role in Lincoln’s closely contested re-election
in 1864.
Nowlan characterizes post-Civil War Chicago in the 1870s as “ tempestuous times.” Chicago, he said, had become the “ fastest-growing city in the world. Fire and anarchy blazed.”
Following the Chicago Fire of 1871, a six-year national depression ignited discontent among workers sparking the labor riots of 1877 and a major railroad strike. Though manufacturers responded and wages were restored by 1879, according to Nowlan, Chicago had “ become the most important site for socialist activity in the nation.” The riots, he said, “scared Chicago manufacturers and businessmen to their souls. Socialism or capitalism—that was the issue.”
Government corruption was rampant. A new city charter provided opportunities for vote fraud.
Club Sows Seeds of Reform and Commitment to Community
So, Nowlan explains, the 1870s were ripe for the establishment of the Union League Club and of other civic and social clubs for “ upright, law-abiding businessmen.”
Long John Wentworth, the colorful former newspaper editor, police commissioner, two-time mayor, and congressman, saw an opportunity to form a “marching club,” a group of partisans who worked and paraded for their favorite candidates. The Republican National Convention of 1880 was in Chicago and Wentworth formed the Union League Club to support Ulysses S. Grant, who sought a third-term nomination for president. Though the Convention denied Grant the nomination and selected James A. Garfield of Ohio, the Union League of Chicago was established. The Club’s first president was James Bradwell.
A native of England, Bradwell worked his way through Knox College, was admitted to the bar and elected to the Illinois state legislature where he advocated women’s suffrage. His wife, Myra Colby, founded the Chicago Legal News and after numerous defeats became the first woman in the United States admitted to the bar. She represented Mary Todd Lincoln at her insanity hearings and secured her release from an asylum in Batavia, Illinois.
Other early members included architect William LeBaron Jenny, who served as a major with General W. T. Sherman at Vicksburg. Another was George Cole, a Chicago stationer who, as a teen drummer boy, provided the cadence for Sherman’s “ March to the Sea,” Nowlan reports. The early Union League Club attracted veterans, business leaders and Union loyalists and patriots.
Early Club Roster—A Who’s Who of Early Chicago
According to Nowlan, among the Club’s prominent early members were the Who’s Who of Chicago—names like Armour, Field, Ogden, Glessner, Pullman, Ryerson, Swift, Shedd, Buckingham, Harris, Smyth, Wrigley, McCormick, Mayer, Deere and Palmer.
Early active Club members also included Frank O. Lowden, who nearly became president of the United States in 1920, and Charles Gates Dawes, who was a U.S. Vice President and later a Nobel Peace Prize winner. William Rainey Harper, head of the new University of Chicago, and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, who created what today is the Museum of Science and Industry, both served three-year terms on the Club’s political action committee. Many early Club members were attorneys or traders. Architects who left their mark on the city who were members include: Daniel Burnham, Louis Sullivan, Dankmar Adler, William Holabird and John Wellborn Root.
Among the publishers of the city’s six competitive daily newspapers were Medill and Nixon of the Tribune and Inter-Ocean as well as Victor Lawson of the Chicago Daily News, Herman Kohlsaat of the Chicago Times-Herald and Melville Stone, credited with building the Associated Press.
The Club Takes Stand on Important Issues of the Day
Throughout its history, the Club stimulated nonpartisan initiatives, such as election reform; the formation of the Chicago Crime Commission; the adoption of a new state constitution; the establishment of the Armed Forces Council of Chicago; and protection of the City of Chicago’s municipal personnel code.
Nowlan reports that the “local elections of 1883 were a travesty of democracy.” A team of Club members who volunteered to take a census, found that although 1,183 votes were cast in the second precinct of the Ninth ward, there were only 351 persons living in the precinct, including “voters” who signed themselves as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson. Five election officials were indicted as a result of the Club’s actions, but a judge dismissed the case. This defeat gave rise to a vigorous political action effort in later years.
The Union League Club has addressed a wide number of issues—endorsing the sale of bonds to build new county facilities to care for the poor and consumptive; bond issues for more parks, police, libraries and public baths. The Club even supported preservation of the Appalachian Mountains and New Hampshire’s White Mountain timber reserves. For several years in the 1890s, the Union League hosted a dinner for 20-30 reform organizations together with Illinois state legislators to discuss the merits of reform bills.
Club Action Sparks Constitutional Amendment—Popular Election of U.S. Senators
Nowlan retells the story of how in 1912, the Club played a key role in the reform of federal election law by prompting the expulsion of U.S. Senator William E. Lorimer after it was revealed that his election to Congress was the result of bribery. The action led to the adoption a year later of the 17th Amendment to the United States Constitution – a move that changed election rules for U.S. senators from election by a state’s legislators to today’s popular vote.
Later, in 1919, former Club president Edgard A. Bancroft led a commission following infamous race riots that year in which 38 people died. The commission criticized the police, prosecutors and the courts for discriminatory handling of cases related to the riots involving African Americans.
The Club's first full-time professional director of public affairs, Edward Martin, held a doctorate in government from the University of Chicago. During his lengthy tenure (1924-1959), he stimulated Club members to call for the adoption of voting machines, judiciary reform, and advocate for city-manager government and fair property taxation.
A Landmark Contribution—a Death Penalty Moratorium
In the 1990s, William J. Nissen, a partner at Sidley, Austin, Brown and Wood, was the court-appointed lawyer for serial killer John Wayne Gacy. In the process, Nissen became concerned, Nowlan writes, about imposition of the death penalty when 13 men on death row in the decade were found to have been not guilty.
Nissen led the Club’s adoption of a moratorium on the death penalty to allow further analysis and proposals for reform to be considered. Former Governor George Ryan, himself a Club member, and who once favored the death penalty as a candidate in 1998, called for the moratorium and created a blue-ribbon panel to evaluate the Illinois death penalty statute and process. In January, 2003, just days before leaving office, Governor Ryan commuted the death sentences of more than 100 inmates on death row in Illinois.
Commitment to Country
According to Nowlan, the Club has a long tradition of supporting the military. Following World War I, the Club played an important role in reviving the Illinois National Guard, which had experienced a decline in its ranks. Illinois Governor Frank Lowden named 13 members of the Club to a commission to reorganize and rehabilitate the Guard. Club members solicited banks and businesses to recruit men to the Guard. In 1920, as a demonstration of its own interest, the Union League Company was sworn in as Company E of the First Infantry Regiment of the Illinois National Guard.
In the 1980s, the Club established the “721 Club” to support the sailors and families of the “USS Chicago 721,” a nuclear submarine stationed at Pearl Harbor. This group provides holiday gifts for the crew and families. They also travel to Hawaii annually to visit with and entertain the crew and their family members, and they host members of the crew on visits to Chicago. Today, “Chicago 502,” a group of civilians, consisting largely of Union League Club members, honors and supports the soldiers of the U.S. Army’s 502nd Infantry Regiment and their families.
During the 20th century, the Club also launched three independent philanthropic
organizations – the Union League Boys and Girls Clubs that provides academic, athletic and artistic training to nearly 7,000 young people in four inner-city clubhouses and a residential summer camp in southern Wisconsin; the Civic and Arts Foundation that provides scholarships and grants in art, music, writing, performance, civic and academics for hundreds of young people; and the Chicago Engineers’Foundation,
that grants college scholarships to engineering students.
Among the Club’s many famous visitors highlighted in Nowlan’s book are Winston Churchill, Amelia Earhart, Charles Lindbergh, U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and numerous former U.S. Presidents, including George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Several other former U.S. presidents, Supreme Court Justices, military heroes and legislators have been named honorary members. The first honorary membership was bestowed in 1880 upon former U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. Fourteen other presidents hold the same status on the Club’s rolls.
|
James D. Nowlan is a senior fellow with the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs. Professor, politician, newspaper publisher and senior aide to four Illinois governors, Nowlan is the author of novels and scholarly works, including The Itinerant: A Heartland Story and, with Samuel K. Gove, Illinois Politics and Government: The Expanding Metropolitan Frontier.
