Showing posts with label History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label History. Show all posts

Sunday, October 23, 2011

Our Erasable Chicago History - Remember Mopetown?

Mopetown Archer west of Ashland today.

I remember Mopetown, it was a tiny neighborhood squeezed between Bridgeport and McKinley Park along Archer Ave. between Ashland and Hoyne and 31st and 33rd Streets.

The huge and largely accurate Encyclopedia of Chicago has no entry for Mopetown. If you Google search Mopetown, Chicago you have the devil's own time finding anything and you get coaxed into surrendering for MOBTOWN.

Mopetown was there. There was a saloon called McGloin's at Archer and Ashland that was home to Mopetown neighbors. I would take the Archer bus from Loyola's Lewis Towers Campus and or my various jobs in the Loop and transfer at Ashland for the bus south to 75th Street. I'd duck into McGloin's when the weather was really bad. It was there that I'd first learned of Mopetown - where diversity first manifested itself. Every ethnic and racial face and religious creed lived in Mopetown.



The name, I was told came from a German family name that Irish, Bohemian, Lithuanian, Mexican, and Polish folks somehow translated to Mope. Nothing to do with the character of Mope - one prone to moping, or acting the mope. Mopes weren't dragged up in Mopetown. They worked at the Yards, Stock & Lumber, or the barrel works, or Darling Rendering at 35th & Ashland, or Wrigley's Gum at the same location.

The smell of offal, mint, and spearmint mingled in Mopetown.

History is what happened, what was, and what we allow ourselves to remember.

The late Anne Keegan was a Tribune columnist who was the goods, as the old timers would say.

She saved history and Mopetown in 1987, when she wrote about the last families still living in the shadows of the Stevenson Expressway.


The Gerrings, the Atkinses, the Starrs and the Polyaks lived there.

The Camps, the Higginses, the Kuberas and the Van Tillbergs lived there too, just north of Archer Avenue, near the railroad tracks. It was a secluded neighborhood of Chicago that outsiders couldn`t find or didn`t dare go into unless they knew somebody. The Scolios, the Forrers, the Walshes, the Verdons and their slew of kids all were once part of that tiny section of town where families were big, cottages were small, times were tough, men hard-working, women long-suffering and every third or fourth house was a ``blind pig.``

The Stevenson Expressway stands where these families once lived--their cottages gone, their trees cut down, their yards cemented over, their inhabitants moved away, their neighborhood erased forever from the map.

It is one of the Chicago neighborhoods that, over the last three decades, has disappeared as quietly as Brigadoon faded into the evening mist.

Only Russell Wilkens and his wife, Mary, remain. Living in a house along the eastbound Ashland Avenue exit where trucks rumble and cars speed by, they are the last family in Mopetown.

Mopetown. Find an old-timer and he`ll tell you.

Mopetown--when the houses were still standing and the families were living there, with all the kids racing around and everybody`s dogs sleeping on the unpaved streets--was tucked between the Bridgeport and McKinley Park neighborhoods, from Ashland to Hoyne Avenues, from 31st Place to 33d Street.

``Mopetown. No one ever really knew how it got to be called Mopetown,``
Click my post title for Anne Keegan's full history lesson.

History today is more about forgetting in order to advance an agenda.

People forget that racism did not exist at the turn of century. Negroes coming to Chicago for a better life were called Strikebreakers. Jane Addams got to Mike Donnelly of Amalgamated Meatcutters Union and the 1904 Stockyard Strike was called off, after a unanimous vote was taken to continue the strike. The union was broken and more poor blacks were shipped to Chicago to compete for jobs with the Canaryville Potato Eaters, the Bridgeport Loogans, Polacks, Bohunks, Kikes, Dagoes and Krauts.

Racism is a neologism coined in 1907, four (4) years after the Chicago Stockyard Strike and did not come into common usage until the 1930's a decade and change after the Chicago Race Riots of 1919.

The Oxford English Dictionary defined racialism as "belief in the superiority of a particular race" and gives a 1907 quote as the first recorded use. The shortened term racism did not appear in the English language until the 1930s. It was first defined by the OED as "[t]he theory that distinctive human characteristics and abilities are determined by race", which gives 1936 as the first recorded use. Additionally, the OED records racism as a synonym of racialism: "belief in the superiority of a particular race". By the end of World War II, racism had acquired the same supremacist connotations former associated with racialism: racism now implied racial discrimination, racial supremacism and a harmful intent. (The term "race hatred" had also been used by sociologist Frederick Hertz in the late 1920s.)


While racism did not exist when Mopetown was born and lived most of its life, there sure were brawls between whites and blacks in Chicago. Read Black and White Workers in Chicago's Packinghouses, 1904-54 by Rick Halpern or re-read Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.

We can lay racism over anything we wish and reduce history to an agenda. That is not the best thing to do, in my opinion. Nothing is easy. History ain't nothing.

Mopetown was there.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

History? Just a Bunch of Stuff That Already Happened - American Education Fails Fabulously!


Of all the studies by which men acquire citizenship of the intellectual commonwealth, no single one is so indispensable as the study of the past. Of History -Lord Bertrand Russell

Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself.
John Dewey

Life without even a basic understanding of the past has been accomplished by John Dewey the Progressive Hegelian Father of American Public Education. Sadly, even some Catholic schools and far too many universities ape Public Education and have cashed in classical learning for Dewey's shell game.

Here are the results of Mr. Tests & Measurements' handiwork:

The overall lackluster performance is certain to revive the debate about whether history and other subjects, such as science and art, are being pushed out of the curriculum because of the focus on math and reading demanded under the No Child Left Behind federal education law. The federal law mandates that students be tested in math and reading.

Sue Blanchette, president-elect of the National Council for Social Studies, a national association of K-12 and college social-studies teachers, called the results disheartening and said history education has been marginalized in the last decade.

"Everyone is going to participate in civic life by paying taxes, protesting against paying taxes, voting, and we must teach our children how to think critically about these issues," she said. "Clearly, we are not doing that."
Click my post title for the Wall Street Journal's report on the American social studies shame.

Sue Blanchette is 'disheartened' that is Progressive speak for "more tax dollars."

Here is a critical thought, Sue, how about teaching civics and history. Here is another gem from Johnny Dewey - "Education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living." John Dewey and Jane Addams and Mary McDowell and other turn of the 20th Century Hegelian's bullied educational methods into place that eroded public education and murdered America's sense of History.

The History Channel is a monument to John Dewey. History is series of Nostradamus, Ice Road Truckers, Pawn Stars, Swamp People, American Pickers ( "Fabulous Bric-a Brac!") Larry the Cable Guy and UFO's. Reality TV as History.

The American public school classroom is no different. A coach (of whatever sport is necessary) pops in a disc of Glory and accepts a paper posing the question of why they didn't use flame-throwers or call in airstrikes. No teacher would consider recording the Sunday Morning lectures from the Pritzker Military Library on every Sunday on cable, because the lectures might be too boring.

Dewey demanded that education be play! He built the Laboratory School at the University of Chicago upon that very dictum.

Education is preparation and our students are unprepared.

Teaching should be harder than learning and learning is everything that it is cracked up to be.

History was written by 'Dead White Men' we are told by Educators. White Guys like Berossus of Babylonia which is now called Iraq, St. Augustine the Bishop of Hippo, a suburb of Carthage which is in North Africa; Ban Zhao of the Han Dynasty - not the Swedish Zhaos mind you. There were a few skirts too, like Mary Bonaventure Browne, Poor Clare 16th Century Irish historian.

How many Chicagoans could tell you why Comiskey Park was built on Shields Ave*.? That is a leading question. All good teaching is leading. Education comes from a Dead Language - educere - to lead away from . . .that would be from ignorance. John Dewey encourage education to be contrarian -that is Progressive: No exceptionalism!

Here, in essence, is American Eduction ala John Dewey:


I'm not kidding.

Ignorance is temporary but stupid is forever. It seems Education in America is Dewey forever. We can do and have done much better, but that would require a sense of history and John Dewey helped kill that with a great deal of help.

* James Shields Elementary School in Chicago's Brighton Park neighborhood is named for Senator/General james J. Shields the only American to be elected a United States Senator from three states ( Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri), who nearly fought a dual with Abraham Lincoln, was a hero of the Mexican American War and the only Union General to defeat Confederate General Thomas Stonewall Jackson in the field at 1st Battle of Kernstown in 1862. Likewise Shields Ave. is named for the same man. Charles Comiskey's father served in the Union Army and prior to that was a member of the Shields Guards Militia which partly formed the 23rd Illinois Irish Brigade. History is a big deal made of very small things.

Update from Mr. Dan Kelley, historian/journalist/attorney


Honest John Comiskey was also a Chicago alderman. His son was tipped to the fact that street car lines were going to be routed towards the area where the ballpark was eventually erected (on the site of a former dump) and this was a valuable consideration for the site of the Baseball Palace of the World.

Oddly enough, the same architect worked on both Comiskey Park and Weegham Park (later remodeled and renamed Wrigley Field), but Charles Comiskey scaled back on Zachary Taylor Davis' plans and cut expenditures whereas the Northside Park was built on a more liberal basis.

Thursday, January 03, 2008

Harry Paget Flashman and George Macdonald Fraser - R.I.P.




Te Deum! Non Nobis Sed Te Deum!

Well, that was what the old Anglo/Catholic rituals and send-offs should ring from England's fields and forests. But - I prefer this quote from Flashy from Flashman's Lady:


"I'm not proud of what happened in the next moment. Of course, I was very young and thoughtless, and my great days of instant flight and evasion were still ahead of me, but even so, with ... my native cowardice to boot, my reaction was inexcusable ... in my youthful folly and ignorance, I absolutely stood there gaping ..." at a lusty busted Temptress!

In my Freshman year at Loyola University (1970) I was introduced to the world of history by Father Charles Ronan, S. J. and to the one created by George MacDonald Fraser, a Scottish novelist with a jeweler's eye for history, and his creation - Harry Paget Flashman. Fraser took a 19th Century villain of Tom Brown's School Day and developed the greatest scoundrel, lecher, coward, hypocrite, swindler, pimp, cheat, drunkard, and lay-about into the most affecting and charming rouge in literature.

History often presents us with idealized heroes who often can not withstand the careful eye of truth and our delusions and illusions cast us into funks of depression and incivility. Not so our villains. George MacDonald Fraser once said that he always rooted for the 'bad guys' in adventure stories and movies- Basil Rathbone over Errol Flynn; Aaron Burr over Thomas Jefferson; Mike Tyson over Anyone.

George Mac Donald Fraser died but his character Flashman - Flashy lives on Fraser's novels - Read them. You may learn some history and you will laugh yourself to good health.

Damme, More Claret! Now for some bodice ripping! Here's a Wikpedia Plot Summary from the first Novel in the series - Flashman

Flashman's expulsion from Rugby for drunkenness leads him to join the Army for what he hopes will be a sinecure. He joins the 11th Regiment of Light Dragoons commanded by Lord Cardigan whom he toadies in his best style. After an affair with a fellow officer's lover, he is forced to fight a duel but wins after promising a large sum of money to the pistol loader to give his opponent blanks in his gun. He does not kill his opponent but instead delopes and accidentally shoots the top off a bottle thirty yards away, an action that gives him instant fame and the respect of Duke of Wellington. However, once it was found out what they were fighting over, Flashman is stationed in Scotland. He is quartered with the Morrison family, and soon enough he takes advantage of one of the daughters, Elspeth. After a forced marriage, Flashman is forced to resign the Hussars due to marrying below his station. He is given another option, to make his reputation in India.

By showing off his language and riding skills in India, Flashman is assigned to the worst frontier of the British Empire at that time, Afghanistan. His adventures include the retreat from Kabul, Last Stand at Gandamak and the Siege of Jalalabad, in the First Anglo-Afghan War. Despite being captured, tortured, and escaping death numerous times, and hiding and shirking his duty as much as possible, he comes through it all alive and with a hero's reputation.


Here are Gorrge Mac Donald Fraser's Flashman novels: ( again from Wikpedia - Thank God for that handy tool)

Flashman • Royal Flash • Flash for Freedom! • Flashman at the Charge • Flashman in the Great Game • Flashman's Lady • Flashman and the Redskins • Flashman and the Dragon • Flashman and the Mountain of Light • Flashman and the Angel of the Lord • Flashman and the Tiger • Flashman on the March


Click on my Post Title for the Death Notice of George MacDonald Fraser - Good on You George!
Get To Reading!