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From the desk of Robert Loerzel
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THE COOLEST SPOT IN CHICAGO
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Chicago’s 1918 War Against Fun
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I called my latest chapter “Chicago’s 1918 War Against Fun,” because this was the year when the debate over morals reached a fever pitch in the city.
It was the climax of years and years of political fights about things like whether saloons should be open on Sundays. The United States was on the verge of approving the prohibition. At the same time, World War II was increasing the pressure on Chicago city officials to stop allowing soldiers and sailors to get drunk—or to have sex with the women they met in the city’s saloons and cabarets.
In a move that seems astonishing and remarkable in hindsight, Chicago’s aldermen voted to outlaw most live music and dancing in drinking establishments. The vote was nearly unanimous, but two aldermen voted no. Predictably, those two were Chicago’s most famously corrupt aldermen, who presided over the vice district south of the Loop: Bathhouse John Coughlin and “Hinky Dink” Kenna.
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It seems clear that the rising popularity of jazz music was one of the factors pushing officials to take action. The new law allowed Chicago drinking establishments to get a special permit for performances of instrumental music. The city’s lawyers sounded disappointed that they couldn’t figure out a way of writing this law to prevent “noisy rag-time, the jangle of the jazz band and the tom tom with which is associated the sinuous oriental dance.”
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Not surprisingly, the law against live music and dancing inside drinking establishments wasn’t very effective. Saloons and clubs came up with some creative solutions for getting around the law.
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This chapter also includes some other stories from 1918:
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— The local waiters’ union was accused of attacking Green Mill Gardens with a stench bomb, as well as drugging restaurant and hotel patrons by slipping “Mickey Finn” powders into their drinks.
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— The Dolly Sisters, identical twins from Hungary were stars of stage and screen, performed at a Green Mill Garden benefit for the Chicago Daily News Tobacco Fund, which sending cigarettes to American troops in Europe. During the show, men paid money to dance with their own wives, prompting the Daily News headline: “Dance With Wife, $10.”
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That made me wonder if this event might have inspired the lyrics Fred Fisher wrote four years later for his song, “Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town)”:
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“They have the time, the time of their life / I saw a man, he danced with his wife / In Chicago, Chicago, my hometown.”
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— The estranged wife of former congressman Frank Buchanan confessed that she was responsible for a woman’s “wild screams of anguish and fear” near Green Mill Gardens. She told the Tribune that she’d attacked her husband and his secretary, who was rumored to be his mistress. “Yes, I made ’er scream, with my little fist I made her scream,” she said.
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The Race to Reverse the River
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“The Race to Reverse the River” can now be watched online or via streaming devices such as the PBS Passport. I co-wrote this hourlong documentary with producer Eddie Griffin. It premiered September 29 on WTTW, Channel 11 in Chicago. It’s one of eight episodes in the new season of Chicago Stories.
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Working on this documentary gave me a chance to include a fun fact that I delved into several years ago: The baseball team we know today as the Chicago Cubs was called the Chicago Microbes for a short time—as an unofficial insult, that is. If you’d like to find out more about that, here’s a story I posted on Medium in 2016: “When the Cubs were the Microbes.”
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From the desk of Robert Loerzel
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