FROM the 1910s through the Depression 30s, when Chicago was the undisputed hobo capital of the United States, a small north side neighborhood known as Towertown was the vital center of an extraordinary cultural/political ferment. It was home to Bughouse Square (the nation's most renowned outdoor free-speech center), Ben Reitman's Hobo College, and the fabulous Dil Pickle Club, a highly unorthodox institution of higher learning that doubled as the craziest nightclub in the world.
In such places, and in scores of other nearby open forums, tea-rooms, little theaters, bookshops, art galleries, taverns, and cafes, Wobblies, anarchists, and other agitators mingled and debated with a wide range of jazz-age artists, writers, musicians, and eccentrics. It was something like New York's Greenwich Village, but-thanks to the prominence of the Chicago-based IWW-much more workingclass, and more openly revolutionary.
Frank O. Beck's Hobohemia contains a long-time Towertowner's vivid reminiscences of this colorful, dynamic, creative and radical community that flourished for a generation despite constant onslaughts from the Red Squad, the Vice Squad, bourgeois journalists, funda-mentalists and other bigots.
Some of the characters he writes about are well known-Emma Goldman, Lucy Parsons, Ben Reitman, Jane Addams-but Beck's personal recollections of them will be new to most readers. Even more exciting are his memories of such less-well-known personalities as "Red" Martha Biegler, widely regarded as the greatest woman orator at the Square; softspoken labor organizer Anna Martindale; Nina van Zandt Spies, widow of Haymarket martyr August Spies; and irascible Jack Jones, the former Wobbly who from 1916 till his death in 1940 served as the Dil Pickle's ringleader and referee.
Originally published in 1956, Hobohemia has long been out of print and hard to find. This new edition is long overdue, for the book is still one of the best first-hand accounts of a unique place and time.
Franklin Rosemont's introduction provides a historical overview of Chicago's workingclass counter-culture and a biographical sketch of Beck. It also relates the book to earlier and later literature on the subject and fills in some gaps in the narrative. Helpful notes in the text correct a few errors.
Also new in this edition are the illustrations, and a useful index.
Chicago was once richly ornamented with numerous open forums, crowned always by Bughouse Square (Washington Square Park, at Clark and Walton, across the street from The Newberry Library. Until radio and television intruded, the free forums entertained the populace and provided training grounds for labor organizers, political orators, and religious eccentrics. There were women_s forums, African-American forums, anarchist forums, and even a plain, large, successful forum in the South Side's Washington Park just called the Bug Club. In cold winter weeks. the forums often found security indoors in the Dil Pickle Club, the College of Complexes, and elsewhere. -from Hobohemia
These choice books from the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company bring many of Chicago's erstwhile public forums back to vivid life. -Leon M. Depres
