Be Our Guests! 1%ers March Through Back of the Yards, Canaryville and Bridgeport

 Occupy anti-NATO Commandos in Bridgeport - skin that never met a day's work, God Bless Them.

A band of several dozen protesters marched up Halsted Street this evening from the South Side through Bridgeport, where some engaged in a shouting match with residents.
The marchers, some of whom covered their faces with hoods or bandanas(sic), began their protest at about 51st Street and Halsted, chanting obscenities about police and police brutality.

A few dozen well-heeled, college educated, really sincere and snappily dressed masque-ers sporting button-festooned North Face head wear, American Eagle T-shirts and bandannas marched with a police escort up through the 11th Ward.  From Back of the Yards ( 51st Street) through Canaryville (47th-39th Streets) and Bridgeport up Halsted and past Jackie Schaller's landmark Chicago dining venue Schaller's Pump, America's young  spark-plugs of change paraded their V masks, Ninja costumes, and Indie fashion apparel along with the naughty words of the truly edgy. Like Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey in 1904, the Occupy Commandos were protected and served by the Chicago Police Department.

Halsted Street became the  Occupy/Dissident/Anarchist/ Hipster Runway.  We were given a preview of the accessory conscious young, armed with Dad-funded Visa Debit cards and Rage Against the Machine.

I'd bet a shiny new Sacagawea gold dollar that not one of these later-day Mother . . .Joneses could identify the significance of these neighborhoods in the real struggle of working people*. Below are the residents of Canaryville and Bridgeport who fought the real fight on Halsted Street the site of  yesterday's Che fashion stroll

The Residents of Canaryville circa 1904- meat cutters in Armour's & Swift's Packinghouses - one their great grandchildren attends Leo High School - a young man from St. Gabriel's parish in Canaryville.

This is where American Labor, real Labor and not the phony Reds of SEIU, won its spurs by being betrayed by Progressives and buried by Progressive History.  This is where the Jungle happened Cupcakes.  Bridgeport was the home of the real Lithuanian workmen portrayed by Upton Sinclair, another armchair recvolutionary opportunist, as protagonist Jurgis Rudkus and his co-workers. Upton watched the 1904 Amalgamated Meatcutters Strike that shut down the American Meat Packing Industry from July to September in 1904 from the front porch of a previously Packingtown blacklisted Knight of Labor John Joyce and scribbled notes.
Jane Addams, like most Progressives is affluent, imperious and a very well protected species

Dr. Cornelia  De Bey and Jane Addams and her partner at the time Mary Rozet Smith were members of the Chicago Public School Board. Doc Cornelia had another partner.

The March of the Real Workers began at the Meatcutters Hall at 47th & Ashland. Michael Donnelly the President of the Amalgamated Meatcutters held out against the Strikebreakers, Meat Packers and the phony   Out And Proud Progressives Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey**.  Read the Chicago Tribune account of the end of the 1904 Strike - you will be required to purchase the articles in true Medill fashion; however the NYT covered the strike very well and praised the work of Father Maurice Dorney of St. Gabriel Parish in Canaryville, giving short shrift to the short-haired women and long-haired Progressives. The New York Times accounts are free.  Ask me nicely, and I might link my privately owned collection of contemporary accounts.

Father Maurice Dorney was a figure of National renown ( NYT reported on his Spanish American War Service and his heroic fight for workers in three national strikes) -try and find any mention of Father Dorney in the much ballyhooed Chicago Encyclopedia.

Too many Americans subsist on a diet of redacted historical bullshit.  Progressive revisionists have erased all traces of genuine social justice fighters.like Father Dorney, John Joyce, the Knights of Labor and actual strikers and given praise and homage to the likes of Jane Addams who sold out the strikers.

Hull House and other Settlement Houses in Hyde Park flourished immediately after the strike was broken.  Michael Donnelly, who called and led the strike, disappeared from Chicago and from history.  Upton Sinclair wrote a swell book.  Teddy Roosevelt got Progressive street cred.  The Strikers got bupkis.

*Packinghouse workers, experiencing horrible working conditions and insufficient wages, sought to secure union recognition as the Amalgamated Meat Cutters. Two long and bloody strikes (1904 and 1921) were defeated by the companies. During both strikes, many African-American workers were temporarily employed to break the strikes. Since Black workers suffered from economic circumstances as desperate as those faced by the striking White workers, and since they were excluded generally from unions and consequently the benefits they would gain from unionization, these so-called "scab" workers felt no loyalty to the strikers or the union. In the aftermath of the two defeats, hostility towards Black workers rose, and Black resentment of Whites increased as well. For years, remembrances of racism and scabbing impaired any effort to create a common front against the packers. 

**When Jane Addams's travels took her away from her close companion Mary Rozet Smith, she sometimes took along a painting of Smith, even though the portrait was a rather bulky piece of luggage. Addams, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning social activist who founded Chicago's Hull-House in 1889, clearly felt a strong emotional attachment to the aristocratic, gracious woman in that picture, which now hangs at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum—with a question mark for a caption.
For the past year, the museum has been seeking suggestions on how to label the portrait, which Addams commissioned from Alice Kellogg Tyler. Should the caption suggest Addams and Smith were companions? Lesbian lovers? Or simply focus on Smith's role as one of Hull-House's most generous financial supporters? This summer, as the museum gets ready to decide, a new WTTW documentary is stepping into the fray and staking out the position that Addams and Smith were lesbians. The producers of Out & Proud in Chicago, Alexandra Silets and Dan Andries, say their film on the history of gays and lesbians in the city wouldn't be complete without Addams. "In not revealing this part of Jane Addams's life, you're denying the rest of us a role model," says Silets, a lesbian.

 http://www.politicalaffairs.net/class-and-race-in-the-us-labor-movement-the-case-of-the-packinghouse-workers/

http://books.google.com/books?id=DW4TAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA425&lpg=PA425&dq=Jane+Addams+and+Cornelia+De+Bey&source=bl&ots=dQjc7A18Xg&sig=89nzLwjY4pN7hC4BQE098u4Aws0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hpuzT5bbOabS2QWO6cnpCA&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Jane%20Addams%20and%20Cornelia%20De%20Bey&f=false
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/June-2008/Friends-With-Benefits/

http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/tc/xtf/servlet/org.cdlib.xtf.crossQuery.CrossQuery?text=dorney&text-join=or

Catholic Was as Catholic Remains - Michael Smith and Jaimie O'Reilly's Songs of Catholic Childhood

Yesterday, I went to Chief O'Neill's restaurant and Pub up north on Elston.  Chief O'Neill is buried at Mount Olivet Cemetery in my neighborhood.  O'Neill was the Superintendent of Chicago Police during the 1904 Stockyard Strikes and somehow managed to keep the violence between strikers, also buried very close to the Chief, and trainloads of strikebreakers brought in to Chicago  by Swifts and Armours to destroy the Amalgamated Meat-Cutters Union (AMC),  The Packers succeeded with the help of  social justice icons Jane Addams and Dr. Cornelia De Bey. Race relations in Chicago begin and end with the Stockyards Strike. Chief O'Neill kept the killing to a minimum.

As my legion of reader will note, I have been concentrating on issues Catholic . . .noooo, honor bright? on the square, really; this prosing only in reaction to the popular trend to treat Catholics in America, like Coptics in Alexandria.

The Sunday afternoon at Chief O'Neill's was a real pallate cleanser.
Chief O'Neill could not be bribed, unlike the iconic reformers who were patronized by the robber-barons for their help in destroying the AMC. Chief O'Neill was content to do his job and when time allowed to play, preserve and protect Irish Music.

The fine restaurant and pub named in his honor was wonderful venue for celebrated songwriter, singer, guitarist and unapologetic Catholic Michael Smith and songstress Ms. Jaimie O'Reilly to Launch their upcoming CD -Songs of Catholic Childhood. The songs and tone itself was a celebration of Catholic experience, especially those of us who remeber pre-Vatican II.  May Crownings, Christmas memories and sweet classroom moments were celbarted in songs adapted or written by O'Reilly and Smith.

Michael Smith's brilliant song The Dutchman has been recorded by singers such as the late Steve Goodman, Jerry Jeff Walker and Liam Clancy. Ms. O'Reilly has been cited by Rick Kogan as One of Chicago's Notable Persons, an accomplished performer and teacher of voice for De Paul University.

Together Smith and O'Reilly have created a two-hour song tribute to the American Catholic Experience.  This is not a nun-bashing, priest eviscerating abattoir, but banquet of sacred and touching memory of Catholic Childhood.

I hope that venues like Beverly Arts Center, Irish Cultural Center, Balzekus Lithuanian Museum, the Italian American Sports Hall of Fame, and the Polish National Museum avail their facilities to these great artists.

I know that Mike Nix could pack the Beverly Arts Center with this show.  My neighborhood is Catholic Ground Zero - even the Unitarians have an Irish Castle.

Dennis Byrne Nails 501(c) Hypocrites - Hull House Settlement for Cronies?

Remember when real estate agent and hausfrau Patty Blagojevich was named to the board of directors for a local charity? Thought so. Let me refresh you, dear reader.

CHICAGO — The wife of impeached Illinois Gov
Rod Blagojevich was fired from her $100,000-a-year job as a Chicago homeless agency's chief fundraiser.

The Chicago Christian Industrial League's board exercised a termination clause of Patti Blagojevich's contract on Tuesday, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times reported on their Web sites Wednesday.

Interim Executive Director Mary Shaver told the papers she could not discuss personnel issues. She did not return telephone messages from The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The poor girl went from bagging 100K to eating worms in Costa Rica - life's viscissitudes.

Mrs. Blagojevich was fired almost immediately after her husband was cuffed by the Feds; however, the same folks hired her for some reason at a husky salary, I might add. That is Charity these days.

I have been working in and around charity since 1991. Mostly, I work with private family foundations with, in charitable circles, modest piles of loot. They are not the Ford, Hearst, Joyce, MacArthur, Polk Brothers, or God forbid, the Woods Fund. There's charity . . . and then there's Charity.

I also have a great deal of luck taping local companies for support - Wells Fargo, The John Buck Company, McDonalds & etc. Law Firms with Leo Alumni are very generous, as well.

CHARITIES - Wood Fund, Joyce and MacArthur play big league politics. Those charities pay hugely and grant magnificently to connected and sanctioned entities.

It seems to me that since the early 1990's more of the Big Charities play politics rather than philanthropy. In fact, some family members of the MacArthur Foundation beefed to the press in the mid-1990s about the radicalization of their family fortunes by hand-picked boards of directors. I recall the Chicago Tribune running a series of such articles back then, but no such inquiry seems to arouse the tepid souls of editorial boards these days. The Annenburg Foundation, once a rock-ribbed conservative entity was handed over to the likes of Bill Ayers and folded into the Woods Fund Web. No story there.

Recently Hull House caved in under the burden of . . . well, someone is asking. Dennis Byrne, an old timey news guy, takes hard look at why that well-larded CHARITY went alewive.

Take Chicago's historic Hull House, the "crown jewel of settlement houses," which went belly up. A tragedy, indeed. The conventional, and correct, wisdom is that it became too dependent on government largesse. Yet, it's too easy to blame someone else, namely the stingy government.

The signs were there. The Better Business Bureau, in its last review of Hull House, found that it failed to meet some standards for charity accountability. It cited insufficient board oversight, lack of transparency in certain financial matters and inadequate reporting of its activities.

In 2009, the federal Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp.announced its takeover of Hull House's pension plan, whose liabilities for employees and retirees amounted to $11.1 million. Hull House Executive Director Clarence Wood at the time called the group's financial position solid, saying, "We are not about to close our doors."

And why would he want to? According to the last public disclosure I could find (2008), he was paid $283,000. As much as that might surprise many people laboring in the vineyards of public service for much more modest sums, it's not that unusual for nonprofit bosses. Scanning public records, I discovered top salaries and benefits in many Chicago-area nonprofits were in the reasonable, if not humble range. Then there were those that zoomed into the stratosphere, from $300,000 annually to a good deal more than $1 million. You can, and should, check out your favorite charity by examining its Internal Revenue Service Form 990 (Return of Organization Exempt From Income Tax), available on the Economic Research Institute and other Internet sites.

Those high salaries rile Rick Roberts, who received from President George H.W. Busha Point of Light award for his work in the 1990s as CEO of the former Chicago Christian Industrial League, a social service agency serving the homeless.

"The CEO of any tax exempt charity must be held to a higher standard," he said. "With limited private dollars available and massive public budget deficits, why should any organization receive preferential tax treatment, let alone expect tax deductible private donations when the key people in that organization are enriching themselves, even if it's legal?

Roberts wanted to make clear that he wasn't indicting all nonprofits, naming Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army as examples of organizations serving the needy without enriching their employees or CEOs. Others may pay high salaries but do an especially good job, such as the Greater Chicago Food Depository. It's "doing not only a remarkable service but doing so to save money for hundreds of other nonprofits," he said.

Roberts sees too many nonprofits gaming the system, such as Illinois hospital executives plunging into debt to fund exorbitant expansions, and not incidentally to justify their plush salaries. He also warns about the increasing trend of nonprofits turning their operations over to for-profits so they can avoid the IRS' Form 990 disclosure requirements.

"If your goal in life is to help the poor rebuild their lives and heal their minds or bodies by working in a charitable endeavor, then accept the fact that you're not in the private sector where capitalist standards of compensation are an appropriate goal," he said. "It doesn't mean paying pauper wages. Just reasonable ones."

Today the belly-up museum and charity boasts the fine contributions to urban living by the Conservative Vice Lords. Charities -the bigger ones, always managed to attract program directors who spent far too much time with the Testors Glue tubes in youth. Thus, one can also understand its failure to attract any public willing to toss away a ten-spot, or more to honor gang-bangers, or other miscreants and perverts in a celebration of diversity.

Dennis Byrne, a Chicago writer, blogs in The Barbershop at ChicagoNow. dennis@dennisbyrne.net

Patty Blagojevich, briefly, received a pretty handsome pay package for her experience as a fund-raiser, but the board of CCIL took a real hard look at that salary once her hubby did the perp-walk.

Hull House was founded by Jane Addams and her special friend Ellen Gates Starr in 1889 with a donation of the mansion by the Hull Family and help from her Alderman Johnny Powers. Jane Addmas, as phony and homely an old broad as ever wore a page-boy, really saw her settlement house 'take off' after the 1904 Stockyard Strike. Jane and her short-haired activist intimates sold out the strikers - it's in the Chicago Tribune by the way.

Charity is good business. Dennis Byrne is doing a great job in calling public attention to the disconnect - philathropy and business . . .monkey business.


http://www.uic.edu/jaddams/hull/

Jody Weiss - Learn from CPD Chief Francis O'Neill ( 1848-1936)

Click my post title for the MSNBC Bonfire of the Vanities celebration of Phil Rogers over his slanted report on The Judge Gettleman/G. Flint Taylor Law School Smack-down of Police Superintendent Jody Weiss.

Jody Weiss made a tepid attempt to 'do the right thing' for Police Officers but backed down.

There is a wonderful new book Chief O'Neill's Sketchy Recollections of an Eventful Life in Chicago, Edited by Ellen Skerrett and Mary Lesch. Chief O'Neill saved lives in the Iroquois Theatre Fire, Protected strikers in the Railway Strike, The 1904 Stockyard Strike, the great municipal and Teamster Strikes of 1905. fought with Progressive phonies and loudmouths like Emma Goldman, who was involved in the assassination of McKinley, and Dr. Cornelia DeBey 'a Mannish woman who was most aggressive,' Vice Lords Hinkey Dink Kenna, and Corporate monsters like Meat Packing Companies, and the thousands of vicious criminals. Chief O'Neill even had a cockroach lawyer like G. Flint Taylor - One Brode Bradford Davis, who tried to make some dough off of the police.

Chief O'Neill warned all persons who decide to be Chicago's Top-Cop.

Every head of the police in a large city, whether know as general superintendent, chief, or commissioner, is certain to encounter difficulties. The general public wants the law enforced. The leaders of the powers that be expect concessions and special favors. Between the two influences he is liable to get forced out before the term of his office expires.

On difficulties not already mentioned, I had more than my share, all of them based on the desire of certain elements to force my resignation. As soon as Mayor Harrison had left the city on his midsummer vacation in 1901, investigators were set to work to dig up something to my discredit in past years. It was surmised that in the mayor's absence discipline would be relaxed and that I might incautiously become involved in questionable associations. As nothing came of this move, a scheme was evolved to indict me on the charge of attempting to violate the civil service law; in back of this scheme was the political leader most interested in my disgrace. It was rehearsed for one week in the home of a police lieutenant, When the time was ripe, the witness was seized on a [subpoena] duces tecum and hurried to the office of the state's attorney, where he lost his nerve, forgot his lines and blurted out the truth. Notwithstanding this, he was taken before a grand jury, where he denied knowing anything to my detriment. It appears that the lieutenant had been promised a captaincy in any police district of his selection if he succeeded in smirching me. Instead, he lost his job and his pension.

The publisher of an evening paper, now dead, had been subsidized to harass me daily, but it did not work, the final effort was to "frame" me. It was very alluring bait indeed if I would only bite, but as I could not be induced to visit 'the spot.' I escaped all conspiracies unscathed and continued as head of the Chicago Police Department until it suited me to retire from service.

Chief O'Neill knew the Progressive phonies, the corrupt politicians, the dangerous anarchists, the vicious strike breakers, the callous capitalists, and sneaks in his ranks. Most importantly O'Neill knew the respect he had earned as a 'flat-foot' who took a burglars bullet, who backed his men when a radical tossed a bomb that killed eleven at Hay Market Square, who treated strikers as dignified working men, and never trusted the Press.