Readers of local history might have trouble finding references to Ku Klux Klan rallies in Grayslake, or a 1924 alcohol raid on East Dundee during Prohibition.
Nor are they likely to read about a violent monthslong labor strike that bitterly divided Carpentersville at the turn of the 20th Century.
Many historical accounts compiled for Chicago’s suburban communities tend to gloss over or ignore controversial or unsavory events. Some authors say the romanticized accounts complicate efforts to paint accurate portraits of what life was like decades or centuries ago in the Chicago metropolitan region.
Working on a comprehensive Chicago reference book to be published next year, researchers said they began by reading suburban history accounts. But they had to turn to newspapers’ archives for information about controversial events that could be critical to understanding patterns of social change, said Larry McClellan, a historian who worked on the book, the 1,300-page Encyclopedia of Chicago, which was researched and compiled by more than 600 writers, scholars, historians, sociologists, journalists and librarians.
“This is a serious problem outside the city, where so much work remains to be done,” said McClellan, who added that even with news accounts, records of many events in suburban history remain sketchy.
In some towns, local historians said, residents didn’t want their community’s controversies documented.
“The problem is, when locals write their own history, without an ongoing historical regional perspective, they don’t know their history,” McClellan said.
“The function of local history is to tell our story, which tends to incorporate a lot of exaggerated firsts, from the first settler to the first church. It’s a celebration of who we are. It points to our strengths and the adversities we’ve overcome.”
But such idyllic accounts can obscure the stories of people affected by events that weren’t recorded, said Peter Alter, a historian with the Chicago Historical Society.
“People whose stories don’t fall within circumscribed history get lost,” Alter said.
Mary West is one. The fourth-generation Elgin resident, whose great-grandfather and grandmother escaped slavery in the South via the Underground Railroad, remembers watching Klansmen march along Elgin’s streets in their robes during the mid-1920s.
“I had a cousin here who was tarred and feathered,” the 80-year-old said.
Racial discrimination
African-Americans were banned from most restaurants and forced to leave Elgin to find work, West said, and “in the restaurants where we were allowed, they would break the drinking glasses after we finished eating.”
West called the spotty accounting of suburban African-American history a tragedy. “The shame of it is that our children don’t recognize or know what happened in our day to make it possible for them to lead such good lives now,” she said.
Racial and ethnic conflict played a key role in shaping the region’s demographics, yet apart from records of restrictive covenants–a provision written into a home deed precluding its sale to a non-white–patterns of institutional racism can be difficult to find, historians said. “The first African-American and the reaction to these pioneers, for example, is not often captured,” Alter said.
Irma DuPree, a lifelong Dundee resident who in 1935 wrote “The Romance of Dundee Township” for the township’s centennial, said foibles fade with time.
“For towns, after all, are like people,” she wrote in the book’s foreword. “The record of any individual life lived richly is one of alternating tragedies and comedies, joys and sorrows, poverties and prosperities–sometimes scandals, sometimes mistakes, sometimes shame. But there is romance, always persisting, and it is the romance which is remembered longest.”
Her account of the Illinois Iron & Bolt Co., the largest industry in Carpentersville at the turn of the century, omits a violent strike that divided residents, said historian E.C. “Mike” Alft, who published histories of Elgin and Hanover Park.
Nor is there mention that during Prohibition, East Dundee was the only town for miles that served alcohol. After a 1924 raid netted 197 pints of whiskey, 18 barrels of beer, 37 gallons of wine and nine gallons of gin, the Prohibition agent in charge referred to East Dundee as “one of the wettest small spots” in the Chicago area, Alft said.
And “Romance” doesn’t mention a 1926 parade in which 1,000 KKK members paraded through the township led by the Dundee town band, he said.
“For a history to accurately represent the past, it should record events that occurred on the twilight side of the mountain, as well as those that took place on the morning side of the hill,” Alft said.
But Mary Lamp, a historian with the Dundee Township historical society, said she didn’t see the relevance of dwelling on unsavory events. “It mattered then. It happened, but so what? Every locale has a darker side.”
Three years ago, a publisher commissioned Waukegan native Diana Dretske to document Lake County’s history. Dretske, a historian and collections coordinator for the Lake County Discovery Museum, said that while she set out to debunk a few myths and portray a more inclusive history, she didn’t set out to document negative episodes.
“Because I was representing the museum, I felt a little pressure on how I represented the history,” Dretske said. “But [the darker side] was not an image I wanted to portray. Some bad things happened, but it wasn’t like the Trail of Tears.”
When the Schaumburg Township District Library Board commissioned Marilyn Lind to write a township history, she went over news clippings, census returns, township records and settlers’ diaries to produce “Genesis of a Township.”
By 1900 the township, whose first settlers were Yankees from the Northeast, billed itself as the only exclusively German town in Illinois. In “Genesis,” Lind wrote: “Schaumburg Township was isolated from the mainstream of American culture by language, religion, education, geography and economics.” She said rampant German nationalism discouraged non-Germans from settling there.
The library board rejected Lind’s account as “much too strident and unsympathetic to the Germans who settled the township,” said Debby Miller, a library trustee and member of the township historical society. Even after softening Lind’s language, Miller remained troubled by a lack of attribution. “Lind did a thorough job, but she brought her own interpretation to events,” she said.
Lind, who has an advanced degree in cultural anthropology, said: “Controversial information that I read and heard was simply edited out. They just wanted to make it sound better and not offend anybody.”
Local histories omit Klan
Charlotte Renehan of the Grayslake Historical Society said that although she had read newspaper accounts of Klan activities in Grayslake and elsewhere in Lake County, she hadn’t seen them mentioned in local historical accounts. She attributed that, in part, to the tendency of locals to view history through rose-colored lenses. “Communities are like families, and good families don’t air their dirty laundry in public.”
Some contributors aired more laundry than others were comfortable with, but editors of the Encyclopedia of Chicago chose to tread lightly when it came to respecting local history as it related to a community’s image, said co-editor James R. Grossman.
“We didn’t want to perpetuate a myth, but it was not our intention to muckrake,” Grossman said. “We didn’t want to deflate any claim that is important to a community’s identity.”
