What would you grab in a fire?

    The California wildfires causing such devastation have drawn attention, concern and sympathy across the country—well, except for Donald Trump, who saw them as a chance to lash out at the state for ... well, forest conservation, insanely enough. It was almost funny to see him suddenly start heaping praise on first responders, trying to cover for his initial mean-spirited slam.
     Our Fearful Leader notwithstanding, it's impossible to avoid being caught up in the drama of the raging fires in the Golden State, the courageous efforts to battle the blazes, and the sight of ordinary people forced to flee their homes, sometimes at a moment's notice.
     Which raises the question, if only in the back of the mind: what would you take? Confronted with the same situation—the fire approaching, you have to run for your life, what would you grab going out the door?
     Having pets, that's easy. I would grab the dog, try to corral the cats, get them in the van and get out. Nothing else in the house is worth the time it would take to pick up.
     That's something of a fudge, I suppose. Given a couple minutes, I could come up with something. An armful of old journals—they're irreplaceable, and useful in reconstructing the past, which I sometimes do. I might grab our wedding album. But really, with Facebook, so many photographs are safe online (not to mention about 40,000 I have tucked safely in iCloud) that fire doesn't pose the threat to memory it once did.
     At least I assume they're safe. It's always remotely possible some computer worm or sun storm could wipe out the Internet. But I doubt it....
     That said, I didn't want to take chances. I do have 10 years worth of jottings on the boys, when they were small, that I did worry might go up in smoke if the house burned down. I didn't see the need to worry, in this day and age, so spent the hour it took to photograph each page, then transfer the pictures onto a thumb drive and toss it in the bank vault (this was before the iCloud). It seemed prudent.
     Part of me worries this is a sign of shrugging age. Isn't anything precious? But to be honest, I believe it reflects proper values and priorities. Once you've cleaned out the home of a departed relative, as I have, the grip of things loosens. It's just stuff.  Like money, it's just not that important.
     The realization is something of a comfort really. Dozens of people have died in the California fire, a few no doubt because they were lingering to load up their cars with crap. Maybe the fires just moved so fast, maybe they didn't realize it, and I don't want to criticize the dead. But I like to think that before the fires were 10 miles away I would be camping out at a Motel 6 somewhere if I humanly could. That might not be possible for everybody. But if it is, that seems the path of prudence. You can always buy new stuff. You've got the one life, and it's foolish to risk the latter for the former. Grab the wife, grab the pets and get out. That sounds like a plan.
   

In November, the leaves fall and the president violates cherished traditions

     The trees are bare. Dry leaves blow around the yards, the gutters. Leaves of all sorts. Maple leaves. Oak leaves. Big catalpa leaves and tiny linden leaves. Yellow ginkgo leaves. Serrated elm leaves. Oval ash leaves. Buckeye and hickory and persimmon. Beech and redbud and poplar. Many, many leaves.
     Of course there are, you might be grumbling. It’s November. Get to the point.
     The point being that belaboring what everyone already knows gets dull. Which is why I haven’t been commenting on Donald Trump lately. Once we’ve established — and boy have we ever — that the man is a liar, bully and fraud busily trampling cherished American institutions, each new instance of deceit, intimidation, chicanery and blasphemy, well, at this point it’s just another leaf in a huuuuge pile.
     Over the weekend, however, Trump violated a norm so long established that, speaking personally, I felt a kind of awe. It was impressive. While the world leaders went to the American cemetery in France to mark the centennial since the end of World War I and honor Americans killed, Trump stayed in his room. The White House explained that it was raining: “logistical difficulties caused by the weather.”
     The Internet erupted with photographs of Barack Obama in a downpour, drenched to the skin, doing what leaders do. No need to stop there. Begin at the beginning: George Washington, riding to his inauguration in … c’mon, anybody? … New York City. In Philadelphia it began to rain, and his entourage urged him to get into a carriage. The Father of Our Country waved that off. He would remain on horseback, like his escort.

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A whole new meaning to "Watch on the Rhine"

Cody McCullough

     All things considered, the Internet is the best way to publish the written word. You have all the space you need. The work goes everywhere instantly. You can fix mistakes immediately. 
     There are of course drawbacks. Speed can be the enemy of accuracy. And all that room is an invitation to verbosity. Space is unlimited, but attention spans are not. Being forced to keep it short by the limits of physical space is a blessing. At least for now. I am always cutting my column to make it fit, and that is typically an improvement.
    Although you do lose things. I had to cut back on Sister Zanin's personal history in my column on Mother Cabrini yesterday, for instance, losing the four languages she speaks, the hostility she had to overcome in this country and the scars it left.
    Or in my column on the 100th anniversary of the Armistice (which ran on Saturday so I could get an extra 300 words) I limited my remarks about the war's effect on fashion to what I thought was most surprising: the trench coat, named for the trenches that officers wearing such coats spent time in.
    I considered mentioning wristwatches as well. But no space. Which is the glory of this blog: there is always another day.
    So let's have at it. 
   Prior to World War I, men generally carried pocket watches, strapless timepieces attached to a chain, typically tucked into their vest pockets.
     Precise timing became of crucial military importance in World War I: the assault had to begin at a certain moment, over a front miles long. But it is difficult to fumble around in your vest pocket while holding a rifle. Or while sprawled on the ground. Increasingly soldiers took to wearing their watches on their wrists. 
     Not that wristwatches began with World War I; it was a practice noted during the Second Boer War, 1899 to 1901. Wristwatches had a distinct military flair—a 1902 Omega ad called them "an indispensable item of military equipment.” This became widespread during the First World War, particularly as soldiers began taking their fashion cues from flying aces. Pilots could not carry pocket watches, their vests were buried under thick leather and lambskin jackets. Though the most famed watch of World War I owed its inspiration to a different new development in military technology—the famed Cartier "Tank" watch, created in 1917 and based on the overhead view of a Renault tank.
    Having written none of this, I stopped by American Legion Post 791 in Northbrook Sunday afternoon, to view their display of WWI memorabilia. There I ran into Cody McCullough, a World War One re-enactor from Manteno.  We got to talking, and I mentioned the wristwatch/World War I connection, which prompted a legionnaire overhearing our conversation to scoop a small, dried-out leather item from a table top and bring it over for our inspection. 
     Of course. A watch was expensive, and infantry soldiers could not be expected to equip themselves with the latest fashion just because they went to war. Thus this band designed to hold your pocket watch.  Such "wristlets" had been worn by British soldiers for 40 years. The sort of transitional stopgap than any student of shifting technology has to savor, like those little wheeled stands that people used to tuck under galvanized metal garbage cans before they realized they could construct them with attached wheels.
     Pocket watches linger on as affectations and items of nostalgia. The U.S. Army did not stop including a watch pocket in its uniform trousers until 1961, a fact that I should not know off the top of my head. But I do.

'If we turn away from our brothers and sisters, we turn away from God'

     The contrast would look trite in fiction.
     Facing Lincoln Park, the luxurious Lincoln Park 2520, where condo prices soar toward $6 million a unit. The building, opened in 2012, has two pools, a movie theater and a private garden. Designed by Chicago architect Lucien LaGrange, the center 39-story tower is flanked by a pair of 21-story wings, given a distinct Parisian air with its metal mansard roof.
     Nestled behind — the building actually wraps around it — and sharing the same address is the National Shrine of Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini. It’s the former chapel of Columbus Hospital, shuttered in 2001; when the 3-acre hospital site was sold to developers, the stipulation was the shrine would be preserved.
     And it is, having re-opened in 2012. No pool, but the first American saint’s upper right arm bone displayed at the altar in a glass and bronze reliquary. The bedroom where she died in 1917. Her bed, where prayers for the sick are sometimes tucked under the pillow, and it is not

Sister Bridget Zanin

unknown for a sick child to be laid upon the mattress in hope of a cure.
      Born in Italy, Cabrini dreamt of working in China, but was sent to the United States instead, arriving in 1889. The contempt held for Italian-American immigrants at that time can hardly be overstated. They were seen as not white, lower than even the hated Irish, sometimes lynched — the largest mass lynching in the United States was of 11 Italian-Americans in New Orleans in 1891.
     Cabrini, undeterred by all this, traveled the country, starting convents, schools, orphanages and hospitals. She was made a saint in 1946 — 100,000 people attended the celebratory mass at Soldier Field....

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Armistice Day, 2018

 

     The small town where I grew up had a triangle downtown instead of a square, and at its center was a statue honoring those who served in the Civil War, the typical Union Army soldier standing at attention upon a plinth, holding his rifle. When World War I came around, many memorials echoed that alert soldier, with doughboys at attention, ready for action, eternally.
     George Julian Zolnay took a different approach when commissioned by the Kiwanis to commemorate the fallen of Davidson County, Tennessee. His statue features a corpse, a dead doughboy, covered protectively by his mother.  It's located in Nashville's Centennial Park, not far from their very odd scale beige concrete reproduction of the Parthenon in Athens, complete with 42-foot statue of Pallas Athena—Zolnay sculpted some 500 feet worth of frieze figures on that displaced pagan temple. 
    Born in Hungary in 1863, he came to the United States to participate in the 1893 Columbian Fair, fell in love with this country, and stayed, becoming a favorite sculptor of the Southland—he sculpted the statue of Jefferson Davis that adorned his grave. Zolnay also returned to Chicago, becoming director of the Chicago School of Fine Arts there. 
     The Armistice—the end of hostilities after the first World War—took place at 11 a.m., Nov. 11, 1918 (the famous "11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month.") But Armistice Day wasn't established until a year later, President Wilson's declaration echoing the indifference to lost life that allowed the war to drag on in the first place. There's nothing in it about horror or futility, rather smug self-congratulation at the "splendid forgetfulness of mere personal concerns" with which our country threw away its young men and capital. The tens of thousand dead and maimed is a source of "solemn pride."
     Armistice Day was expanded to honor World War II veterans after 1945, and in 1954 Congress, seeing that the wars would just keep rolling on, changed it to "Veterans Day" to save themselves the trouble of legislating each new crop of war-weary survivors. It is technically different than Memorial Day, as that holiday is designed to honor those who died, while Veterans Day honored those who served, though those two purposes get muddled. Most soldiers never see combat, fortunately, yet their very real contribution to our nations are not exactly highlighted today. There are no statues to stateside quartermasters, though I imagine a lot of grateful troops on the front lines wish there were.
     And to give the final dusting of dreary practicality to what started out as a spiritual event, observance of the holiday was kicked to Friday, if Nov. 11 fell on a Saturday, or to Monday, if it fell on a Sunday like today, with the Uniform Monday Holiday Act in 1971. In other words, no mail tomorrow, not that anybody cares about the mail much anymore.
     So not great art by any stretch of the imagination. What redeems the statue, for me, is the look of stunned grief on the woman's face, a kind of hollow-eyed yet fierce grief. It is true that no war monument matched the true nature of its subject until Maya Lin's radical black granite gash of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington D.C. But lesser artists groped toward it. I wouldn't group this statue among fine statuary, even judging by the lowered bar of public monuments. But glorify war it does not.


   

The Saturday Snapshot #14

     I could have written about the centennial of Armistice Day without actually visiting the Elks Memorial at Diversey and Lakeview. But I knew it was a singular space, rococo, enormous and empty, from when we lived three blocks away at Pine Grove and Oakdale. I wanted to make sure it was still open, and still as unpopulated as I remember.
    Yup. I showed up an hour before they closed, and the log said I was the second visitor. The docent told me they get 500 visitors a year. An Elks official later changed that to 500 a month, either way, that still constitutes a very few people for a dome almost as large as the Jefferson Memorial. I'd bet not 1 out of 100 Chicagoans knows it's there, and not one in a thousand has gone.
    I took photos for my column on the effects of the war on Chicago, but also couldn't help but snap this little tableau, set up in a side chamber that featured cases of military memorabilia from America's 20th century wars. The memorial was completed in 1926, and dedicated to the 70,000 Elks who served in World War I and the thousand who died in the war. It was subsequently re-dedicated to include veterans from World War II, in 1946, and later to vets from our more recent wars.
    To be honest, the general emptiness, while no doubt a source of unease for the Elks, is fitting. The essential truth of those who die in war is they are gone and don't come back, and what better way than an ornate hall empty of people. Perhaps that is what inspired someone to set up this ill-advised tableau of mannequins, which only made things worse.
     We give a lot of chin music to the sacrifice of our soldiers and sailors, air force and marines. But that supposed respect doesn't extend to, oh, visiting a gorgeous shrine set up in their memory. Of course a 100 years is a long time. Their parents, their brothers and sisters, their wives, are gone. The only people who could mourn now—really, the ones most affected, whose loss is greatest—are the children never born to the soldiers who never come back. With the right eyes, they crowd the empty hall of the Elks Memorial, sealed off from the living world they never were permitted to enjoy.
     

100 years since the end of World War I, a bloodbath that shaped Chicago

"The Armistice: The Field of Battle, Europe, November 11, 1918” by Eugene Francis Savage (detail)
in the Elks Memorial in Lincoln Park. 

     World War I glows in American memory. Handsome doughboys in leggings and wide-brimmed hats. Dashing air aces like Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker in white silk scarves, piloting those wonderful wood-and-wire biplanes with their evocative names: Sopwith Camel, Curtiss Jenny.

The Elks Memorial is only a little shorter than the Jefferson Memorial

     Yes, terrifying tanks and machine guns and barbed wire. But those songs! We can still hum the songs. “Over there, over there, send the word, send the word, over there.” We’re wearing some of the fashions a century latter, even if we don’t know it. Where do you think the “trench” in “trench coat” comes from?
     War nostalgia is a particularly perverse form of human folly, and must be resisted. Savoring the pomp and drama that is certainly there, while glossing over the incomprehensible human cost, the death and suffering and loss, is a grotesque insult. It’s like envying someone whose spouse has died because of all the goodies at the funeral.
     Thus with the centennial of the end of World War I this Sunday, the famed “11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month,” we are obligated to remember the war fully, not just its joyful conclusion. The full scope and horror, and deep significance that echoes today.
     World War I was a bloodbath of incomprehensible proportions: 37 million casualties. Almost 9 million killed. Two million French soldiers died; 460,000 at one battle, the Somme. The French Army lost 27,000 men — half the number of Americans killed during the entire Vietnam War — on the first day of the Battle of Frontiers, Aug. 22, 1914. Another 2 million Germans.
     The United States—which entered the war only in April 1917, and took nearly a year to get significant numbers of troops overseas—suffered far less: 112,000 dead, half of those from disease, particularly a flu epidemic that fall.
     No wonder we're so fond of World War I.
     This doesn't even bring up the issue of World War II, which historians agree was a mere continuation of World War I, begun 21 years later, a pause to let a generation grow up to replenish the ranks of cannon fodder.
     And for what? I'd defy most Chicagoans to explain why World War I was fought. The most historically-savvy might offer up Archduke Ferdinand being assassinated in Sarajevo, causing various alliances to creak into motion and soon everybody was fighting. But what issues were behind that? Old grudges, old territorial spats.
     Chicagoans can be proud that our city resisted the war. Our mayor, Big Bill Thompson, might have become rightly known an avatar of corruption during the Roaring '20s, but he joined a widespread scorn for the war. Part was pure ward and ethnic politics.
     "Chicago is the sixth-largest city in the world," he said when President Woodrow Wilson— whose re-election slogan in 1916 had been "He kept us out of war"—declared war anyway the next year. "The second-largest Bohemian, the second-largest Norwegian and the second-largest Polish."
     Pacifists who'd been hounded from other cities found refuge in Chicago. Thompson invited one group to meet in Chicago, but Gov. Frank Lowden sent the National Guard up from Springfield by train to try to stop them.
     Freelancers abounded. The American Protective League indexed 18,000 registered German aliens and began performing "character checks" for the federal government. The teaching of German was dropped from public schools. Bismarck School became Funston School, and the City Council dutifully scrubbed away German street names.
     World War I influences life today in ways we might not think about. Wilson instituted a federal income tax to pay for it.
     The Great Migration began in 1916, as Southern blacks were drawn by jobs vacated by men enlisting or being drafted. Chicago's black population nearly doubled in two years, from 58,000 to 109,000.
     The war jump-started Prohibition, both because it got people used to government rationing comestibles, and because big Midwestern brewers—Schlitz, Pabst, Blatz, Anheuser, and Busch—were German and easy to demonize. The war also energized women who, fresh from the factories and war volunteer work, pushed all the harder for the right to vote, granted in 1920. By war's end, they had stepped from the parlors forever. "In saloons women drank openly with men" the Tribune noted in a story on the Nov. 11, 1918 celebration. Headline: "Loop goes wild."
     Chicago has a number of monuments to the war. The "Victory Monument" at 35th and King honors the Eighth Regiment of the Illinois National Guard, an all-black unit that fought in France. There will be a variety of events at churches and VFW halls. At Cantigny, in Wheaton, visitors are invited to bring their own bells to ring at 11 a.m,. then join in a "Victory Tea."
     The Elks National Memorial in Lincoln Park is probably the most significant tribute to World War I in Chicago and, ironically, is closed Sunday, though open from 12 to 4 p.m. until Nov. 15.
     The enormous dome, nearly as tall as the Jefferson Memorial, is tucked at the corner of Diversey and Lakeview. Dedicated in 1926 to the 70,000 Elks who served, later re-dedicated to embrace veterans from other wars, most of the art is the high-minded 19th century tributes to "Charity" and "Brotherhood." But if you visit—and you should, admission is free— go into the back, into the Grand Reception Hall, one of the most ornate rooms in Chicago, and look at the mural to the right of the door. This is "The Armistice: The Field of Battle, Europe, November 11, 1918" by Eugene Francis Savage, and it skirts the loftiness of the rest of the artwork. Hope is chained to a gun carriage, lofted by soldiers who look half joyful, half crazed. By a dead horse, the corpses of their colleague stare blindly or reach their imploring hands to heaven. The clock on a shattered church is stopped at 11—the celebrated hour of the Armistice. Above it the Madonna, clad in blood red, holds out her hands, bent at the wrists, a gesture of "Stop!" Her plea of course went unheeded.
     The Elks say that the shrine is visited by almost 10 people a day when it's open, April 15 through November 15. Wednesday, when I visited, there had been two.

The clock at the bottom, stopped at 11, marks the end of the war.