The Corn Latitudes

A lengthy exploration of a topic that is more interesting that I was able to make it when writing a guide to curious newcomers to Illinois’s great metropolis. Chicago, like all places, made history, then as it matured proceeded to un-make it, re-make it, re-imagine it as times changed. Not only history’s events are contingent; so is our collective recording and understand of it them.

 

This essay, I see on reading it again after several years, is itself very much of its historical moment. Written for my never-published guide to Illinois history and culture.

 

Since the 1970s or so, Chicago, the town of the future that had no use for a past, finds that its past is the most interesting thing about it. An essential part of Chicago’s culture is its history—not just the events of its past, but its own sense of itself as a place derived from what it knows, and understands, about those events. The search for a meaningful past is especially difficult for a city that for so long regarded the past not as something to be learned from but merely to be overcome. Historian Donald Miller, in a 2003 interview praised the city’s “ability to reinvent itself. Its toughness. Its unconquerable optimism. And, its sense of experimentation, i.e., its refusal to be bound by old traditions.”

 

This aptitude for reinvention was not only a civic trait, but a personal one. Chicago has always been a place where people come to master new lives, a new language, often a new trade, and it was the future that mattered in that process, not the past. A city of immigrants from virtually every nation is inescapably a city without a shared memory. There are Chicagoans who can recite, from memory, the names of the kings of Lithuania or the genealogy of Polish princes, but who cannot tell the name of one mayor not named Daley or Washington. The four bright red stars that decorate the official city flag represent Fort Dearborn, the Great Fire of 1871, and the two world’s fairs held in Chicago; a typical Chicagoan is less likely to know that, or of the events they represent, than to know Michael Jordan’s shoe size.

 

Every growing city, like every growing company or institution or person, is concerned with creating a  future for itself. It has yet no past to recall, but lives in a succession of presents. Cities get careless with their pasts that way, and Chicago, a new city ins every respect, was more careless than many. Consider the World’s Columbian Exposition, which is, along with the Great Fire and the gangster era, how the world came to hear of Chicago. Most artifacts of the fair were treated with scandalous disregard for the future. Scant thought was given to the possibility that this temporary exhibit would engender permanent interest. Consider the out-sized murals that decorated the Women's Pavilion, including ''Modern Woman'' painted by soon-to-be famous Impressionist Mary Cassatt. The work was panned; placed into storage after the fair, it has never been seen again.

 

Only a mishmash of exposition-related objects can be found here and there in Chicagoland. One is The Republic, a 1/3-scale replica cast in 1918 from the model that Daniel Chester French made for the massive statue that greeted visitors to the Court of Honor. The “Golden Lady” has stood since then at the eastern end of the Midway Plaisance on the University of Chicago campus; it was restored in 1992 by the Chicago Park District.

 

Germania, a statue representing Germany that stood at one of the entrances to the German section of the fair, had been built to advertise the virtues of Portland cement. Cruelly discarded after the fair and used as fill in the construction of the nearby lakefront, the work rose from the dead in 2002 when its broken remnants were found during construction work—the only surviving statue of the army of statues carved for the fair. In early 2003, the Chicago Park District mounted the Germania remains in a park shelter at 56th Street and South Shore Drive

 

Among the curiosities sent to dazzle fairgoers was a working replica of a Viking ship, a replica of the Gokstad, built around 890 AD. Its Norse builders intended to prove that their countrymen had indeed been able to traverse oceans in such crafts, and more specifically that it had been they, rather than Columbus, who discovered America. The Viking ship sailed from Bergen to Chicago via the Great Lakes, where it attracted happy crowds.

 

The vessel is by some reckoning the largest surviving artifact of the World’s Columbian Exposition. After the fair, the ship was put in the care of the Norwegian Women’s Club and later of the Chicago Park District via a trusteeship. The ship was for a time housed in the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago, then restored in 1919 and placed in Lincoln Park under a fenced-in, wooden shelter. Scandinavians in those days were still a large and self-conscious part of the city, and for years they helped pay to jeep up the boat. Attempts in the 1970s to find a proper permanent site for display failed. The hull was moved to Good Templar Park in Geneva; in 1993 the CPD gave it back to a different Scandinavian group, which disbanded, and the CPD got it back in 2000. The dragon head and tail of the ship are in storage at the Museum of Science and Industry; a few of the shields are housed in a museum in Norway, Illinois.

 

A ticket booth from the fair ended up in the yard of the Wright-designed DeCaro House in Oak Park, where it served variously as a garden toolshed, a rabbit hut, and now a garden folly.

 

At the American Indian exhibit on the Midway, a native bur oak was incorporated into a site containing a replica of Sitting Bull's cabin. The tree, improbably, remains on the spot more than a century later, standing in solitary splendor smack in the middle of the Midway opposite the original University of Chicago hospitals.

 

A mounted Sioux chief as rendered by sculptor Cyrus Edwin Dallin has stood since 1894 at the mouth of Diversey Harbor. Titled “A Signal of Peace,” it was first exhibited at the fair; local art lover Lambert Tree bought it and donated it for display in Lincoln Park as a monument to a disappearing way of life. 

 

As these examples make plain, the survivors of the fair make up a collection almost as odd as the one of which they once were only a tiny part. One of those wonders was the “Porcelain Porch,” fully about 25 feet high and 30 feet wide. Technically accomplished and aesthetically ludicrous, it was fashioned entirely of china, thanks to the skill of the Royal Porcelain Factory of Berlin. Observers at the time praised it as “the most astonishing performance in the history and achievements of pottery,” which is not the same as calling it beautiful. Scenes of German landscape and legend, portraits of national heroes with statues of angels, cherubs, eagles, and pots of flowers. It is framed by four twisting pillars modeled after those inside St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. The fact that it was shipped to Chicago without breaking a near miracle, and no one expected to survive a return trip, so the German government gave it to a grateful Germania Club, of Chicago after the fair, which installed it in its second-floor ballroom near Lincoln Park.

 

Even the Chicago Historical Society, a seemingly natural repository for Fair memorabilia, has remarkably few artifacts. Most of these are souvenir gimcracks; seeing a meat tenderizer with depictions of Columbus's American landing and the Agriculture Building on the handle is probably not worth a trip to the North Side, even if people did once think owning one was worth a trip to the South Side.

 

The Uses of History

 

Each era—indeed, each historian—contrives a Chicago history that satisfies the needs of the time. It contrives story that allow it to answer its most pressing questions, celebrates own heroes, hisses its own villains. “Chicago history has served many masters,” wrote Perry Duis in 1991.

 

It has functioned as a rallying point for early settlers, as a way to assure old-timers that they would not be forgotten, as a source of security in the ‘burnt city’ of 1871, and as a bulwark of identity in a multi-ethnic and multi-racial metropolis. It made money for the authors of ‘mugbooks.’ It provided background for academic sociologists and pleasureful popular reading for the multitudes. And, more recently, it has become the focus of scholars, who have examined and interpreted it in small segments. By the late nineteenth century, history began to play a role in the efforts to create a sense of celebration and civic unity amidst economic discord and labor violence.”

 

History’s role in creating a sense of celebration and civic unity was never more vividly, or more obviously true than the staging of World’s Columbian Exposition. History was what the fair was all about—the attempt of a city that had very little history to get some, and the attempt by its designers to direct it. That a fair stuck in the past was offered as a glimpse of the future suggested how ambivalent Chicago was about the forces that industrialism had unleashed.

 

History has also been appropriated from time to time to other civic purposes. Take for example Chicago’s famous cholera epidemic of 1885, which broke out after a massive rainstorm flushed polluted water out of the Chicago River into the lake, contaminating drinking and leading to the deaths of one in eight Chicagoans. It was that awful event that spurred construction of the Ship and Sanitary Canal that well and truly reversed the flow of the Chicago River.

 

Alas, the catastrophic epidemic never happened. There was a massive rainstorm, but a combination of factors prevented any contamination of the drinking water supply, there was no cholera, and even and the death rate from typhoid, another water-borne disease, was actually lower than usual in the weeks following the rain. The story was made up, apparently by staff of the forerunner of today’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District, to excite public support for a massive (and massively expensive) new stormwater diversion project. The fable was exposed decisively in Libby Hill’s excellent 2000 book, The Chicago River: A Natural and Unnatural History.

 

Duis notes in his introduction to Gem of the Prairie that accounts of Chicago’s past were still largely dominated by booster history as late as 1940. The deeds of its merchants and industrialists—Chicago’s kings and knights—its stockyards, even the Great Fire were offered as evidence of or opportunities for Progress.

 

Booster history had little room for the story of such social developments as the growth of eth­nic neighborhoods, the struggle for food and shelter, the trans­formation of work, and, especially, the growth of crime. By 1940 Bessie Louise Pierce’s pioneering academic history of the city had just begun to appear, and even her work was predominantly eco­nomic and devoted only a few pages to crime. In 1929, Chicago: A History of Its Reputation, by local newsmen Lloyd Lewis and Henry Justin Smith, had taken the first tentative steps toward providing Chicago with a glimpse of the people and events that the booster histories ignored.

 

Boosterism survives in popular accounts, although academics pursuing the fuller record about political corruption, racial and ethnic antagonism, and economic decline have been like termites burrowing away at the foundations of the city’s good opinion of itself.

 

It is only recently that history has become respectable enough to bore people. For most of the city’s early history—indeed until well into the 20th century—Chicago history and hucksterism were seen everywhere together. In an exhibit about one of the former’s most prized relics, the cloak worn by Mary Todd Lincoln on the night of her husband’s assassination, the then-Chicago Historical Society and Northwestern University tell the story of the man who brought it to Chicago who was in many ways Chicago’s P. T. Barnum.

 

Charles Gunther was a Chicago candy maker with a taste for historical curiosities and self-promotion, who came up with a way to indulge both. With backers he planned a Civil War museum to be housed in Libby Prison, a notorious Confederate prisoner-of-war camp. The fact that Libby stood in Richmond, Virginia, was only an inconvenience; Gunther had the stone building dismantled and shipped it to Chicago where it was reassembled on Wabash Avenue in 1889. (“They could dine at the Libby Prison Restaurant, on the same cobblestones where thousands of Union soldiers had starved to death only thirty years before,” reports Andrew Ferguson in his book, Land of Lincoln. “And you thought Baby Boomers invented irony.”) He later tried import the house in which Jesse James was shot from Missouri, a no doubt genuine "Uncle Tom's cabin" from Louisiana, Independence Hall from Philadelphia, even an Egyptian pyramid.

 

The object of such places was to astound rather than to educate. Gunther’s taste was an indiscriminate as his curiosity. If he lacked an object to wow the yokels, he simply forged it, such as "Skin of the Serpent That Tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden."

 

The aging candy magnate offered to give his collection to the City of Chicago if a fire-proof building was built to house it; that never happened, and Gunther’s heirs eventually ended up selling it to the Chicago Historical Society following his death in 1920. The acquisition had the same effect on that institution that the gift of Bertha Palmer’s Impressionist paintings had on the Art Institute—it put it on the map. Among 50,000 historical manuscripts were documents of Washington, Shakespeare, and Napoleon and—more crucial to the CHS mandate—Abraham Lincoln.

 

The Gunther documents merely continued a tradition of Lincolniana initiated by Lincoln himself; Lincoln donated the original draft of his Emancipation Proclamation to Chicago's 1864 Northwestern Sanitary Fair to raise money for troops with the understanding that it would eventually be given to the Chicago Historical Society, an act that established the Society’s bona fides as a Lincoln repository. So honored were the society’s directors that in 1868 they built a magnificent, state-of-the-art repository for it on the city’s north side, advertised as invulnerable to any disaster from the hand of man or God, “the perfect fireproof structure.” It burned to a cinder three years later, and the handwritten proclamation went up with it.

 

Who Owns the Past?

 

Just as vexing as the uses to which history is put is the dispute about who history belongs to. This has been a continuing controversy in museum practice, indeed the practice of history itself in recent decades. Every ethnic, racial, or religious group wants to own its own history and a house in which to keep it and have the freedom to remodel it occasionally to suit their own needs.

 

No recent controversy illustrates that process better than the rise from obscurity of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, the Haitian trader who was the first known permanent settler of what became the city of Chicago. Donald Miller: “Had he not been black, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable would not have been an embarrassment to old settlers; indeed, one historian speculates that his father was a descendant of a famous French family. That is pure conjecture, but the fact remains that ‘the First Chicagoan’ was a proud and prosperous black man who lived at the head of the river for almost twenty years in a house that his white-skinned pretender was too impoverished in his old age to hold on to.”

 

Long ignored by history because of his race, du Sable is today celebrated because of his race. Du Sable has become a totem, a hero, a symbol in a campaign by local African Americans and others establish a significant role for blacks in the city’s history. His rehabilitation is part an attempt not only to set history straight, but to make amends for an perceived injustice.

 

History seldom provides the simple truths that myth-making needs. That charge that du Sable was deliberately overlooked by white historians because of his race may be true without being the whole truth. Other factors explain why du Sable lingered in the shadows of history for so long. History always is biased in favor of  the sources available, and du Sable left little in the way of written record, while Kinzie had an able and energetic chronicler who recounted his exploits, and did so in English. Also, the Great Fire in 1871 destroyed the local archives in which facts pertaining to du Sable’s residence resided; historians had to ferret information scattered in dozens of out-of-town collections and the reminiscences of the pioneers themselves. It was not until the 20th century that Milton Quaife—not a du Sable advocate, but an “objective” historian of the now-old-fashioned type—piled up the facts (in his 1913 Chicago and the Old Northwest) on which du Sable’s new standing rests.

 

Du Sable’s many African American partisans feel aggrieved at the long denial of what they feel to be their hero’s place in the history of old Chicago. Nor are African Americans the only modern clan eager to claim du Sable as one of their own. Du Sable also was substantially involved in local Indian life, and not only as a businessman, even if Mrs. Kinzie’s suggestion that he sought election as a chief of the local Pottawat­omi is dubious. Roman Catholics are eager to claim Chicago’s first citizen too, whatever his color; the Reverend Thomas Meehan, in a widely quoted article in the 1963 Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, praised not his business acumen or his good taste but his piety. 

 

Du Sable partisans are not alone in shaping history to fit their needs. Baby boomers idealize a society they perceive as one in which color did not matter, and commerce has not yet exerted a stranglehold on culture. Historians, those famous party-poopers, urge against such too-simple notions. “The multiracial settlement of the early l800s at Chicago was no utopian paradise,” wrote Jacqueline Peterson. While the village enjoyed an “easy, enveloping spirit,” racial harmony was only tenuous. What looks to us like a precocious multiculturalism in which whites lived in harmony with Indians is more likely a canny response to the same commercial imperatives that drove Chicago in later days; protecting the trade in fur required that the Indian ways of life be preserved. A Potawatomi Indian woman named Catherine, or Kittihawa, reputedly the daughter of a chief, to whom du Sable was married during his Chicago years. As Donald Miller noted about Hubbard’s mate, she was part of a female kinship networks that connected her husband to fur settlements throughout the Great Lakes and Mississippi River valley.

 

This kind of distortion of the character of old Chicago began with the residents of old Chicago. As early as the 1830s, the Indian past was being romanticized as Indian peoples were themselves being marginalized by the now-dominant Brits and Americans, Peterson notes, “When town dances were formalized in the 1830s and became invitation-only affairs, the locals called them wabartos or Grand Wa-ba-nos, after an Indian medicine society noted for its all-night revelries. “The name retained the native flavor” of old Chicago, wrote Peterson. “But something had changed: the Potawatomi and most of the mixed-bloods were noticeably absent from the guest lists.”

 

Donald Miller, in what is for the moment the best popular history of Chicago through its adolescence, takes up the theme as it was lived by one of his heroes. The protean Gurdon Hubbard—trader, capitalist, booster—won encomia from the early historians of the city. But, complains Miller,

 

there was more to Hubbard’s life than his eulogizers were given to mention. No one spoke of his Indian wife, Watseka, niece of Chief Tamin of the Kankakees, of his brotherly ties to the Potawatomi chiefs whose lands Hubbard’s fellow Yankees stole to establish legal claim to Chicago, or of his friendship with flinty, hard-drinking French Cana­dians and mixed-bloods who were the real first Chicagoans—not the Protestant old crowd who packed the pews on the day of his funeral. This was a part of Hubbard’s life, and of the life of their city, that his old friends either romanticized or ignored entirely.

 

If an injustice has been remedied by elevation of du Sable to the top of the list of Chicago’s People Who Used to Be Important, another may still need fixing. Women remain as invisible as black people used to be in accounts of Chicago’s past. That women played a part in Chicagoland’s history goes without saying. The dispute over the years has been whether that role was significant enough to merit attention by historians. For decades it was not. Denied a say in public matters by not having the vote, held legally inferior in all questions save those of child rearing, women made lives for themselves in the interstices . . . often creating new institutions and new professions in the process.

 

The result is that women, while always present, are a shadowy presence in the histories of early Chicagoland, with a few exceptions. Among the heroes of the Fort Dearborn massacre were women such as Rebekah, wife of Captain Nathan Heald, and Mrs. Margaret Helm. It is Mrs. Helm whom sculptor Carl Rohl-Smith in 1893 portrayed fighting off a tomahawk-wielding brave in “Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument” or “The Potawatomi Rescue.” Generally, those that emerged from the murk of the past were daughters or wives of conspicuous men to whose success they often made contributions only lately recognized.

 

Few statues, alas, stand to the uncounted women who were dark-skinned or whose names ended in vowels who also fought for their survival against different kinds of foes. A good example are the Native American women who wed French Canadian metis, providing the men with access to trade networks by virtue of their kinship with wives’ clans, among other services.

 

One of these long-invisible women was Archange Ouilmette, the Potowatomi wife of trader Antoine Ouilmette, was granted nearly two square miles of land on the north Lake Michigan shore now occupied by Wilmette and Evanston as a reward for her aid to whites during the Fort Dearborn Massacre. The crowds that took part in the “strikes” in the 1870s—a sporadic series of inchoate worker uprisings—not only included but in some cases were led by women, who impressed more than one visitor with their ferocity and the strength they showed in fending off cops. Etcetera.

 

As life in Chicago took on less vivid tones, middle- and even working-class women withdrew into the anonymity of the home. The exceptions were the wives and daughters of the local elites, especially its business elites (of which there was scarcely any other kind in Chicago decades). These women of privilege were not only visible, their visibility was the point of their existence as debutantes, hostesses, and patrons. (Some part of these glittering careers is owed to the mostly German and Irish women who washed and cleaned and cooked for the city’s middle and upper classes. Without them these women would not have had the time to devote to “improving” the city’s social and cultural life.)

 

The 1960s was an era in which victims of injustice were eagerly sought out, both to right old wrongs and to provide young historians the raw material for a career. Working class women in particular came to be portrayed by historians as victims, or as heroines of hearth and home, usually through some form of cooperative effort that shamed the selfish, grasping ways of the menfolk. Such invaluable works as Women Building Chicago were meant not only to restore women to the city’s history, but to restore Women to History.

 

History as Entertainment

 

Showing visitors what a great town Chicago used to be has become an especially bustling version of what some have dismissed as the “yesteryear industry.” Consider its two biggest tourist draws: architecture and the blues. People used to come to Chicago and marvel at the buildings of a kind that no one else was building; today they marvel at the buildings of the kind that that no one else builds anymore. The successful blues clubs in today’s Chicago are far from the South Side neighborhoods where the style blues arose. Instead they are on the North Side or, lately, downtown, where they entertain tourists drawn by the city’s busy beating of the drums as the “home of the blues.”

 

Such venues can be understood as pop culture museums. The bands’ endless replaying of blues standards is reminiscent of the Chicago Symphony’s beating Brahms to death in subscription concerts, or the Lyric Opera’s reliance on the warhorses of that repertory. Just as those classical works recall an age long dead, so the blues evoke for nostalgists and tourists a Chicago that is no more.

 

Tour guides specializing in the scenes of famous crimes do good business, in spite of the fact that virtually none of the landmarks of the great gangster era—the hangouts, the nightclubs, the bordellos—remain standing. One firm offers tours led by guides wearing gangster attire and “talking the lingo” who escort visitors around town in an imitation “gangster car.”

 

Close enough for tourism. As noted, 1995’s City of the Century by Donald Miller is the best of the general histories of Chicago aimed at the literate public, even if his account stopped in 1893. It sold respectably for a regional history and was the basis for an equally well-regarded PBS documentary about the city. But the book that got people talking came out several years later—Eric Larson’s The Devil in the White City (2003), which could have been subtitled, Jack the Ripper Goes to the Fair. For this novel in historical disguise, tut-tutted the Encyclopedia of Chicago History, the author “arranges facts, suppositions, and invented scenes to meet the expectations of historical fiction.” He also thus put it on the national best-seller lists.

 

The Relevance Industry: The New Chicago History Museum

 

How to package history so it appeals to a public whose taste in narrative runs toward the soap opera, the beach novel, and the recovery saga? It is a problem that confounds museum administrators confronted with declining audience numbers. Museum exhibits of the traditional kind must be studied, not merely looked at, the visitor is—usually—not allowed to touch the artifacts, and decorum is expected, if too often not required. None of these things recommend such places to the general public.

 

Changing the ways history gets displayed has it its own interesting history. The traditional history museum has been reinvented several times since the turn of the 20th century alone. The messages didn’t change much, but the telling did, as museums sought to entice the visitor and speak to her in her own language. From objects entombed in glass cases, exhibits progressed (or at least changed) to video loops and interactive displays that owe more to television than the lecture hall.

 

Dismaying, then, that innovations in telling about the past coincided with a steady drop in public interest in the tale, as indicated by steadily falling attendance over the decades. The answer has been either to make history more “relevant” to the museum-goer, to make it more dramatic, to make it more “fun,” or all three. The Disneyfied Abraham Lincoln Presidential Museum in Springfield opted for the dramatic and the fun, with mixed results. The Chicago-area’s principal repository of history opted for relevance.

 

Chicago’s oldest cultural institution, the Chicago Historical Society was founded by the city’s elites in 1856. As described above, the CHS became a serious museum—meaning a museum with a permanent collection—in the 1920s, with the acquisition of the collection of Charles Gunther. It became a serious intellectual place in the 1940s, an up-to-date exhibit space in the 1970s, and a determinedly multi-cultural place in the 1990s. Along the way what had originally been a museum of U.S. history in Chicago—in which the city was significant because it embodied the story of America—turned itself into a museum of Chicago.

 

At its founding, its mission was to foster an appreciation for local and national history. Perry Duis has explained what this meant. An “appreciation for local history” meant preserving the story of the contributions made by the founding members’ to the city’s developments. An “appreciation for national history” meant instruction for its immigrant citizens in Americanism, of which the lives of the elites were assumed to be models.

 

In the 1960s, the CHS became alert to new issues. The museum was changing, owing to the deaths of the wealthy patrons, or rather to the death of patronage on which it had always depended. Its new reliance on foundation grants and ticket sales for revenue meant it had to attend to new constituencies with new ideas about what history museum ought to be, indeed about what history was.

 

And the world around the museum was changing. History had come to be seen as the means by which the powerful had kept their hold on peoples of color and on the lower economic classes, by the telling of stories that justified that social order. Activists of a dozen stripes sought to liberate themselves and their peoples not only in the present but from the past.

 

In 1973, a group of Native American activists protested the racist stereotyping of the Fort Dearborn Massacre statue and demanded a role in deciding how museums interpret individual and community experiences. The statue in dispute was the above-mentioned “Fort Dearborn Massacre Monument” by Carl Rohl-Smith. This controversial and much-traveled work originally stood at 18th and Calumet, close to where the attack occurred. Suffering there from exposure, it was moved indoors in 1931, to the lobby of the CHS building at Clark at North. The powerful work made a grim but not wholly inappropriate prelude to Chicago history for visitors, but as the years went by it became politically charged. It depicted an act of mercy by a Native American, but what stuck in the mind of most visitors was the horror of the attack that they were thus reminded of. Thus it was that offended American Indians gathered at the Society in the 1970s to protest their people’s depiction as “war-like savages.”

 

In narrow terms it was a feeble objection. Of the two Indian figures in the work, one is staying the hand of war, and if the other warrior is indeed depicted acting as a war-like savage, it was because war-like savagery is what happened that day. The argument of course was not that this statue lied, but that it was this particular event that was chosen to be depicted and displayed in the temple of Chicago history. No statue anywhere in Chicago, for example, depicts the acts of war-like savagery directed by whites against Indians, to say nothing of the persistent disregard of their own treaty obligations. The winners, it might be said, carve the statues.

 

Whatever the historical merits of the protestors’ case, they had public sympathy on their side. By then, more and more whites had come to see the massacre as a warranted if futile retribution by Indian peoples against a hostile occupying force. The protestors demanded removal of the sculpture; what they got was a new subtitle, The Potawatomi Rescue, that aimed to make clear the fact that not all Indians on that day, at least, acted like savages. But by any title, the work was a complication if not an embarrassment, and in 1991 the sculpture was returned to near its original site, in a park south of Glessner House Museum at 1800 S. Prairie Avenue. (Alas, Chicago’s weather is no kinder to bronze today than it was a century ago, and the statue was taken off the streets again, this time to be put into storage by the city.)

 

The protesters were not representative of the museum-going public, and it is not clear whether they even were representative of the larger Native American community. The complaints rattled the CHS nonetheless, as it was by then desparate to cultivate new markets which consisted largely of precisely those peoples whose stories, like those of the Indians, had been slighted or distorted by the museum in the past.

 

The key to unlock the enthusiasm of publics long shut out of museums, both in front and behind the exhibit walls, was to invite them in. This would be done by transforming museums like the CHS from temple to forums, as one critic put it. The “Great Man”—long assumed to be the principal agent of History—was replaced with the People. A new generation of historian had concocted a new history for the U.S. and its second city. The history that mattered was the history that the rich had never allowed to be told, including the true story of the rich and their depredations. And who better to tell it that the academic historians, who brought an inclusive, democratic, anti-establishment, anti-sexist, and anti-racist agenda to the business of interpreting the past?

 

Beginning in the 1970s and continuing through the 1990s, the CHS under several directors, underwent a series of reorganizations and re-staffings. The intent was to make the CHS’s collection and exhibitions policies more collaborative and inclusive, the institution itself more corporate in organization and more commercial in approach. Librari­ans and gentlemen scholars were replaced by academic historians. As for the telling, the singular was replaced by the everyday, human stories with social processes, all on the assumption that what people want most to learn about is not the Past but themselves.

 

None of which seemed to matter much to the public. By 2005 the Chicago Historical Society Museum had to lay off staff in the face of deficits caused largely by falling attendance, even though the number of tourists visiting Chicago had never been higher.

 

The museum leadership reasoned that the public was not bored by the new history, but that the history the CHS had offered so far was not new enough. The museum closed for a year while it undertook a wholesale reinvention. It would offer new kinds of exhibits, organized in new ways, devoted to new topics. Touted as a reinvention, it was merely a further refinement of a process that by then had been underway for a generation. Exhibits would be more thematic and more inclusive. They would rely on media rather than static displays. They would explore such the global connections of the city economy, recall how the city responded to moments of crisis, from the Great Fire to the 1919 race riots and the political riots of 1968. The history of the common people would be offered in a gallery devoted to the city's neighborhoods that will touch on the roles played by race, religion, and politics. And the CHS—which has mounted virtual exhibits for years on the Web—offers visitors another form of virtual history—a replica of a 1930s blues club in which visitors may sit at cabaret tables to see and hear the city's rich history in the development of jazz.

 

“Inclusiveness” at the new CHM is not limited to ethnic groups and social classes of the sort that were too long ignored by traditional historical accounts. The programs and exhibits also are more geographically inclusive. In 2007, the museum offered its first-ever exhibit on a Chicago suburb, “Schaumburg: From Farmfield to Woodfield,” which marked the first time that “Chicago” as universally used was acknowledged to include its hinterland.

 

The Chicago museum gave History back to the People, in other words, but the People didn’t seem very interested. The turnstile count at the CHS steadied for the first year of the new CHS, boosted no doubt by curiosity-seekers and by vigorous promotions associated with the re-opening. In 2007, it posted attendance of 201,952. That was its highest since 257,713 toured it in 2000, but it was still fewer people than attended any of the city’s two major art musums, its aquarium, and its museums of anthrology and science.

 

Journalist Andrew Ferguson had happily toured the CHS’s old Lincoln dioramas as a boy. He was less enamored of the new approach in which visitors were assumed to be interested only in their history of their own. Lincoln as now presented was an extraordinary dead white, midwestern, heterosexual, male,  but he was still a white, midwestern, heterosexual male.

 

What if a woman who’s white and lesbian and northeastern and alive comes to the museum? Or a live black rich guy from the Southwest, or a breathing Hispanic homosexual from Alaska? By the curatorial logic of new history, such people should have no interest in Lincoln, not sharing with him the proper income level, melanin count, genital pro­file, sexual proclivity, or ontological status.

 

Critics of the conventional museumology have deduced from falling attendance that Americans new and old are not indifferent to history, only indifferent to other people’s history. It may be that in making history politically and intellectually correct, museum administrators risk losing its audience. Few people want to be instructed by the past. Rather they want to be thrilled by it, awed by it, amused by it, justified by it. This offends many academics, but with school kids it goes down a treat.