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ONE
Heavenston
It is of a quiet city that still prefers to call itself a village; kissed on one cheek by Michigan’s waves, fanned from behind by prairie breezes, jeweled with happy homesteads set in waving green, and wreathed about with prairie wild flowers, a town as comely as a bride, even to strangers’ eyes.
FRANCES WILLARD1
The official story of Evanston begins when its “uninhabited” natural beauty is contrasted to Chicago’s decay. A group of moral and religious men “discover” Evanston and build Northwestern, a world-class university. Notable entrepreneurs (railroad barons and meatpackers) and political leaders (associates of Abe Lincoln) add to the new community’s spirit and greatness. University buildings, public schools, and streets carry their names and cement their accomplishments into the town’s landscape. Nicknames like Heavenston illustrate the city’s character. Urban legends celebrate local patriotism. Over time, collective representations create a governing identity (abolitionist, temperance worker, Democrat) thought to embody a broader social character (moral, progressive, racially integrated). These stories are told and retold by city boosters who promote an unequivocally positive image and the local media that always find the past in the present.2 The causal importance of these visible and tangible cultural manifestations “lies less in their capacity to express mass sentiments than in their ability to elicit them.”3 Over long periods of time they become fixed to the point where it’s hard to believe that things could have happened differently. This chapter reinterprets Evanston’s political, economic, and cultural history.
Evanston was a destination for white elites who worked in Chicago but sought refuge from the manufacturing hub for peace on the northern shoreline and for black migrants who were mostly confiined to low-paying jobs in personal service and outdoor labor. Servants living in close proximity were a convenience that whites enjoyed, so they encouraged black settlement on the west side, away from the lakefront. Vibrant and self-contained, Evanston’s black community grew. Black institutions provided educational, health, and recreational services. A substantial black presence contributed to a prevailing discourse of racial and economic diversity and persuaded my own parents to raise their children in Evanston during the 1960s. For white graduates of colleges and professional schools in the North and blacks leaving the South to start new lives in the “Promised Land,” moving to Evanston was the first in a series of events that would lead to the formation of our friendship group.
Fleeing the City
Economic greed was an early driver of the formation of the Chicago area. European fur traders were drawn to the region because its proximity to the Mississippi River and Great Lakes watershed facilitated the exchange of goods. The location was ideal for shipping and receiving goods, and for trading with Indians until President Andrew Jackson’s Removal Program became law and the land’s original inhabitants were effectively relocated west.4 Native Americans signed away their last claims to the area as early as 1833.5 Less than two decades later, railroads were carrying freight into and out of Chicago, and trade had moved well beyond fur to include grain, lumber, and cattle. As a gateway between eastern cities and western frontiers, the city was becoming a focal point for commerce.
According to the fable of its beginnings, Evanston was nothing but swamps in 1840. If one overlooks the Potawatomi Indians who traveled on the long trail from Milwaukee to Chicago, the area was largely uninhabited. In what was then known as Ridgeville, Major Edward Mulford built the first log cabin in 1840. Hoping to establish a place for “sanctified” learning and living, a group of Methodists headed by John Evans founded Northwestern University in 1851.6 They purchased several hundred acres north of Chicago along Lake Michigan to establish the campus. Several years later, in 1854, the university business manager drew up the original street plans for the town that Northwestern would adjoin. The university and its property were declared “forever free from taxation for any and all purposes.”7 This arrangement structured white advantage in the economy from the beginning, creating a dual labor market where elites filled positions in the top tiers of the university and members of the working class serviced their needs, taking care of grounds and campus buildings. Without tax revenue from the city’s largest institution, its ability to subsidize low wages through social services would be limited.
Exact figures are not available, but it is estimated that in 1854 Ridgeville’s population was between five and six hundred. Early settlers applied to the Illinois State Legislature, and three years later, on February 15, 1857, the village was officially recognized and its name changed from Ridgeville to Evanston. Through the gradual stages of its growth, Evanston became coterminous with the township (the smallest subdivision of government at the time) of the same name. The 1860 census records two black residents, women who worked as domestics, out of a total of 831. Among Evanston’s early black settlers were at least three former slaves, Nathan Branch, James Lindsay, and Richard Day. The demise of slavery also meant the end of the fugitive slave law. By 1870 Evanston’s black population reached 43 out of 3,062. Ten years later it had increased to 125. The 1880 census lists five Canadian-born blacks and two northern-born blacks, all of whom had parents born in the South. The ages of these seven residents suggest that they may have been the children of slaves who fled the South via the Underground Railroad.8 When the Civil War ended, blacks left Canada no longer fearing capture or reenslavement, and emancipated southerners moved north.
Autonomy from Chicago depended on pure water and grew out of annexation of the separate villages of North Evanston in 1873 and South Evanston in 1892. In 1896 the newly structured town absorbed a small black community reaching to its western side—the population’s early growth established patterns promoting the eventual formation of a substantial black neighborhood. The process continued into the 1930s, when the last fragments of unincorporated township land were annexed and physically the city of Evanston was complete.
By the middle of the nineteenth century Chicago’s elevators, lumberyards, and stockyards were the most basic symbols of the city’s wealth and power.9 Schooners carried timber from Michigan and Wisconsin to the world’s largest lumber market. Environmental destruction was not far behind. Western landscapes quickly gave way to farms growing popular crops such as corn and wheat. Settling the western prairies meant cutting the northern forests; “without [this timber], houses, barns, and corncribs–not to mention churches and schools—were almost impossible to construct.”10 Moreover, “it heated homes, cooked meals, and supplied the energy that ran steam engines. No raft, boat, or railroad could be built without it.”11 Forests were quickly exhausted. By virtue of its central location and outstanding transportation system, Chicago was also a meatpacking powerhouse. The Civil War cut Texas ranchers off from their ordinary markets in the Caribbean and slave states. By 1867 hundreds of thousands of animals were making the journey north to graze before being sold as beef and pork in the bustling metropolis. As the economy grew, increasing numbers of working-class peoples (mostly foreign-born immigrants and blacks) were needed to sustain it.
Until the nineteenth century, work and residence had naturally combined, and the best location for transacting business had determined the location of one’s home. Neighborhoods functioned as integrated worlds of work and family life containing a multiplicity of classes.12 As the nation’s economic and political system took shape, however, wealthy white men secured their privilege. The separation of business districts and residential areas was inevitable as the country moved from an agrarian to an industrial economy. By the mid-nineteenth century, cities were divided into distinct districts of work and home, “matched by the growing segregation of residence communities by class, ethnicity, and race.”13 Trade unions and political parties emerged as separate institutions. At work, employees were class conscious, but with a difference, for the “awareness narrowed down to labor concerns and to unions that established few ties to political parties”; away from work, “ethnic and territorial identifications became dominant.” 14 Challenges to the larger social order were suppressed as the politics of class was restricted to the workplace, where workers opposed their bosses, not the capitalist system. Tension between the owners of capital and their employees drove wealthy city dwellers to Chicago’s North Shore as early as 1870. Located on the periphery of major cities, suburbs were the most radical rethinking of the relation between work, power, and residence.15
Chicago’s North Shore had been a popular spot for wealthy families to build second residences. After Chicago’s Great Fire, these homes became primary as well as permanent.16 On the night of October 8, 1871, nearly 100,000 city residents lost their homes to the burning inferno.17 In the aftermath, while the underclass fell prey to “cheap housing that was poorly built and very dense,” the wealthy, assisted by their servants, relocated north to escape apocalyptic ruin and crime.18 A construction boom and a move away from the city’s center followed. “The higher the downtown became, the greater the horizontal spread of the residential neighborhoods that housed its daytime inhabitants: skyscraper and suburb created each other.”19 Evanston’s population increased precipitously.
Elites associated the hustle and bustle of city life with the “dregs of humanity.” Centrally located business districts were becoming too expensive for residential use, forcing workers into flimsy cottages located in the industrial and warehouse districts where they labored. Those who owned the factories also moved from the city centers where they conducted business. Additionally they sought to separate themselves from the working classes. An immigrant tide purportedly lacking values drove their exodus from the city to less crowded and more appealing areas in order to escape the “hordes of rats [that] lived under the wooden sidewalks of the sprawling frontier town filled with rootless, rough, careless men and women who drifted through life.”20 The rich set their sights on communities lining the Lake Michigan shore north of Chicago, “all far upwind from factory smokestacks.”21
Mable Tresesder’s travel diary gives a glimpse of what life in Evanston was like in 1893. Tresesder describes Chicago as ridden with want, misery, and crime, including gambling and prostitution. By contrast, she was thoroughly impressed by the suburbs, which struck her as an “ideal combination of city and country.”22 The landscapes were pastoral, yet the comforts brought by technological progress were present: “paved streets, gaslights, water mains, sewage lines, and eventually electricity.”23 During an excursion to Evanston she noted: “We saw the most beautiful stretch of country which was as fresh and green as sun and rain could make it. Farms were ideal with everything present necessary to make them so, the houses being complete with all conveniences and barns and sheds well built and painted.”24 Evanston had “clean air, quiet domestic seclusion, and little chance that rich and poor would rub up against each other in a threatening way.”25
The suburban ideal was based on exclusion. White elites with the resources to reorder the material world to their needs created a strict segregation of class and function. They established their home life in bedroom communities, commuting to Chicago for work. Middle-class women were especially affected by the new dichotomy of work and family life. Suburbia exalted their role in the family as wives and mothers, but it also segregated them from the world of power and productivity. To function, these newly formed towns required a workforce to live and work nearby. Black southerners eagerly filled these positions, but their labor was virtually invisible to commuters who did not work where they lived, and did not view those who shuttled back and forth between segregated residential neighborhoods as contributors or political actors. The exclusion of labor and industry from the social milieu revealed a deeply buried fear that translated into a hatred of others.
Technological innovations in transportation accelerated population growth. But the relatively high cost of train travel insulated bourgeois peripheries like Evanston from lower-class invasion.26 The first charter for a railroad through Evanston was in 1851. To this point trains had been used to move goods in and out of the city; now they helped middle- and upper-class Chicagoans remove their residences from the “crowds, noise and pollution of the downtown and factory areas. The result was Chicago’s extraordinary suburban growth in the decades following the fire.”27 By 1883, improved rail service provided convenient transportation. By 1891, the Chicago and Northwestern Railway ran thirty-five passenger trains daily between Evanston and Chicago. By the end of the century, Evanston’s population had grown to 19,259. It was transformed from a college town of 4,200 in 1880 to a busy commuter suburb of 25,000 by 1910.28 The university set the dominant tone. Residents were attracted by its influence.
A Classic Town
In her memoir A Classic Town: The Story of Evanston by “an Old Timer” Frances Willard praises the city’s natural beauty and advanced technology, including a “system of supplying an abundance of pure water.”29 The accolades of this early booster emphasize religious and moral values inextricably tied to Northwestern University. Founding fathers infused the growing town with many of the qualities that it is still known for today. Religion shaped politics, forming the issues and the rhetoric. Education was at the core. Religious fervor and intellectual discourse attracted wealthy white families, who affectionately called Evanston “the Athens of the Northwest.”30 The dreams of early settlers were transparent in their reference to the ancient Greek city. Garrett Bible Institute and the Woman’s College put Northwestern at the forefront of an emerging modern higher education.
The university encouraged an abstract pursuit of knowledge, offering courses such as art and philosophy. The curriculum also reflected a moral code of righteous living, which in turn shaped the social and political life of the town. A school of oratory where preachers and ministers were trained to spread the gospel opened in 1878. The first of its kind, the department was financed with money donated by meatpacker Gustav Swift, whose wealth came at the expense of limbless workers. Recruited from St. James Episcopal Church in Chicago, Peter Christian Lutkin developed the nation’s first music school and was named dean in 1892. Lutkin believed that students needed to be educated in a “proper” atmosphere: “In large cities there is, unhappily, a tinge of the moral laxity prevalent in European capitals among professional men. . . . The wholesome surroundings of Evanston offer a marked contrast. Its churches and Christian associations, its freedom from saloons and questionable resorts, together with its educational facilities and attractive location, make it an ideal home for the pursuit of a musical education.”31
The Woman’s College had special significance during a time when men dominated...
