“SCRIMMAGE WITH SELF-IMAGE”

By Seymour S. Raven

Behavioral scientists of the playing fields, such as Vince Lombardi and Yogi Berra, have made certain imperishable statements. The late Mr. Lombardi was quoted as having said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Mr. Berra has turned up in the professional literature with “The game isn’t over until it’s over,” or more recently, “It is déjà vu all over again.”

Déjà vu. That’s it. It is the trigger mechanism which takes me back a half century to a historic situation now imbedded in Chicago’s civic psyche, usually sounding muted by the passing of time, but occasionally erupting with the force of seeming newness.

When it does so, it reasserts a collective guilt we tend to accept, without much question, as detrimental to our self-image. Because of this, I am proposing this bit of behavior analysis, wishing only that I had the phrasemaking skill of Mr. Berra:

If you get into too much scrimmage with your self-image, you may end up flat on the ground with nobody on top of you.

Now let us see what that purports to mean.

When I was a boy, there were some local celebrities with names like Jim Colosimo, Dion O’Banion, Hymie Weiss, and Johnny Torrio. Some did not live to enjoy the fullest measure of their fame. The most famous of them was a man named Al Capone. Because of an injury, incurred perhaps in jousting, he became known also as “Scarface.” He had many admirers among relatives, entrepreneurs, and politicians and he achieved great power for awhile. He also had rivals, even enemies, one of them known as “Bugs” Moran. The friends of one delivered heartfelt greetings to several associates of the other on a St. Valentine’s Day, and fatalities resulted. To this day, we occasionally forget anniversaries of the Eastland Disaster and the Iriquois Theater Fire, but we never forget the folkloristic significance of Valentine’s Day in Chicago.

Eventually, as “Scarface” and “Bugs” and Valentine’s Day began taking on venerability in the pages of our city’s history, the West Coast was producing young luminaries named “Bugsy” Siegel and Mickey Cohen. The East Coast entered contention with such personages as “Lucky” Luciano and “Lepke” Buchhalter.

The concept was institutionalized in New York with an outfit called “Murder Incorporated.”

We come closer to the present time, as we read out of town newspapers and nationally circulated magazines, to say nothing of books. Perhaps you saw recently in the New York Times an article with headline across the width of a page on January 4, 1987, proclaiming, “Capone’s Chicago Stirs Again for ‘The Untouchables’.” Reference there is to a new motion picture.

Fair is fair, especially where artistic and literary fairdom is concerned. If there is to be a new film which takes off from an early televisions series about Al Capone and the federals; if the movie is being scripted by Chicagoan David Mamet; if the Times’ advance piece is written by Chicagoan Eugene Kennedy, how much closer to authenticity can we get even if it hurts a little in Chicago?

The pain must be borne without flinching. I wince, however at the headline – not Chicago’s Capone, you understand, but “Capone’s Chicago.” That, I submit, is a bit unfair, as though he begat us, not we him. But unfair or not, it is what First Amendment lawyers will point out is “protected.”

Well, if it is protected in New York, it is protected in Chicago. Otherwise the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Illinois would have thought twice before dropping several hundred copies of their publication, “Prime Times of Illinois” in our apartment lobby. A recent 16-page issue deals variously with health insurance, medication, aging, tax reform and even general articles outside of the insurance company’s usual business and professional spheres of interest.

So it went with the greatly famous in the period, illuminating or illuminated by our national pastime, where other dignitaries in front row box seats have thrown out the first ball – Presidents and mayors – while thousands cheered.

It is necessary to point out now that this essay is not intended to deny historic truth. There was indeed an Al Capone who lived in Chicago. Around that time, there were also Carl Sandburg and Frank Lloyd Wright for awhile; and Louis Sullivan a little earlier and Theodore Thomas. They were famous in Chicago and around the country and across the sea.

But somehow, the so-called gangster image took hold of us in such a way – and here I come to the point – that we imposed on ourselves an obligation to erase that image by asserting and occasionally insisting on our cultural image.

To be sure, there might have been another obligation – to erase the gangster image by eliminating or markedly reducing crime. We have made this resolve periodically, usually every four years before elections, city by city and the nation as a whole.

But whipping crime is not as soul-satisfying, it seems, as self-flagellation in the name of our cultural reputation. Not in Chicago, as I noted much of the time.

So some of us, after getting up off the ground from our scrimmages, took vows in private and public ways that we would enhance Capital-C-Culture in Chicago so as to rid ourselves of that terrible gangster image.

Sometime after Capone went to the penitentiary for federal tax evasion, we went into determined scrimmage with our self-image. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, for example, should play a European tour, for two reasons. First, it had never done so and second because the Europeans think of us as a gangster-ridden city.

Tell a European that you are from Chicago and he grins, extends his forefinger while clenching the remainder, and says, “Bang Bang!”

It was as though we were to greet a dancer from Spain and chuckle, “Inquisition.” Or to confront an Italian guest conductor at the Orchestra and grin and say, “Mussolini – castor oil!”

I am not saying that we may not ever think these things or to speak of them in appropriate situations at appropriate times. Of course we should, for we must not deny the lessons of history, especially when some of the most advanced cultures, with capital C or K, had perfected some of man’s grimmest inhumanities to man.

What I am saying is that Virtuosi di Roma did not come to make music in Chicago so we could forget how we welcomed Mussolini’s foremost military aviator here and named a street for him just off Michigan Avenue. It did not occur to Sir Thomas Beecham, that wonderful musician and grand individual, that he was conducting music in this very building so that we might forget Jack the Ripper or some workings of the old British empire on its colonies.

Truth to tell, there has been in more recent years some relaxation of our guilt about our gangster image and a lessening of suspicion that the rest of the world does not show sufficient respect for our culture. The Picasso statue, though an importation, has helped, as have Calder and Miro sculpture, domestic and foreign. And of course the Louis Sullivan architecture, at least that which escaped the wrecker’s ball. Chicago Symphony tours abroad have helped. Our universities are magnets for foreign students and scholars.

But there is gnawing fear of a relapse, our cyclical paranoia, not only with regard to “bang-bang” and the gangster image, but the more recent “Beirut by the Lake” witticism which sought to assert our claim to a piece of late-twentieth century wreckage and disorder around the world.

What I fear is that our metropolitan tensions will be made to seem worse than street and subway crime elsewhere and that political and corporate crime were invented in Chicago, to the detriment of its artistic life. Is it necessary to point out that taste could be come mediocritized, that certain cultural forms could take on the resemblance to a “vast wasteland,” as Newton Minow once said with regard to television, without a shot being fired or a pedestrian mugged?

Perhaps then it is important to remember Theodore Thomas, who in 1891, founded, and became the first conductor of, the Chicago Symphony and was founder, indeed, of America’s symphonic life. As you leave the building where we meet this evening, or when next you enter it, look up at the façade and see what is inscribed there in stone – not “Orchestra Hall” but “Theodore Thomas Orchestra Hall.”

About a year ago there was an article about American symphony orchestras in the San Francisco Chronicle. It contained passages from several interviews, one of which mentioned that Chicago’s was one of the world’s great orchestras under Fritz Reiner but was recognized as such only by “a few record collectors.”

I do not know how few is few. I do know that I the last five years of Reiner’s regime in the early 1960s the conductor and the Orchestral Association shared recording royalties well up in six figures. It goes without saying that the dollar volume of sales was several times greater, leaving a little something of the take to the recording company after the royalties commitments and musicians’ payroll had been met.

It may not be worth anyone’s time to figure the exact number of albums sold. We may safely assume that it was more than a handful.

Certainly the Philadelphia and Boston orchestras sold more recordings than Chicago from the 1930 to ‘60s. Philadelphia, under Leopold Stokowski and Eugene Ormandy, were prodigious record producers during an unbroken run of decades in which one virtuosic conductor stepped in right after the other. Stokowski had set things in motion on the turntables because he was a phenomenal experimenter with acoustics and recordable repertory, because also – and remember this – Philadelphia was close by Camden, New Jersey, where recording studios of the Victor company were located. The head start gained by the Philadelphians before recording technology was to acquire great mobility, gave Stokowski an advantage he was well able to exploit.

The Boston Symphony, for its part, not only was off and running in the recording sweepstakes because of Serge Koussevitzky’s brilliant leadership, but kept going round and round the spindle on the commercial momentum of it lively offspring, the Boston Pops Orchestra. The Pops conductor, Arthur Fiedler, was a talented and facile musician who became known to some as the world’s richest conductor. I never counted his money, so I don’t know, but I did pay him some fees, so I have an idea.

I know, also, that he could be, among other things, a good sport. One time, when I was still writing about music for the Chicago Tribune, I reviewed a summer concert at Ravinia in which Fiedler, as guest conductor, programmed a trick piece full of those “singing commercial” tunes from radio advertising. In my review I stated in no uncertain terms what I thought about that kind of thing.

Yet when I took over the orchestra management and Fiedler came to conduct later on, he did not show the slightest resentment of what I had written. One might say he could afford to be indifferent to a roasting; his fame and fortune were secure.

But it was better than that. I am pleased to say, in respect to his memory, that he was not indifferent. Witness his programming this time around: Beethoven’s Eighth Symphony. I like to think that he was paying his respects to music in Chicago and was not going to seem indifferent to it.

Again, now, as to that handful of record collectors. It happens, also, that in the Reiner years the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was performing a notable series of television concerts entitled “Great Music from Chicago.” The series, produced by WGN-TV, was sent out on syndication to a good number of countries on several continents.

The roster, in addition to Reiner, held many of the renowned guest conductors and soloists who had been appearing on the subscription concert series. To name just a few, there were Hindemith, Stokowski and Szell, Rosbaud and Cluytens, Serkin and Milstein, Casadesus and Stern.

Appearances with the Chicago Symphony on television, before nationwide and international audiences, must have been attractive to such artists and their agents. So it would appear that a few more – or do we say another few? – listeners were gained in the process.

My intention at this point is not to belabor one ill-informed remark as quoted in a west coast newspaper. Rather I should like to point out that long before there was any possible assistance from radio, recordings or television, Chicago’s reputation in music was certifiably first class, on an international scale. The picture of the little dog, trademarked as it cocked its ear at the Victrola horn, had not yet made its debut.

Exhibit A in this regard was the remarkable career of the aforementioned Theodore Thomas at the turn of the century. He had been a violinist in his native Germany. Only after he settled in America did he become a conductor.

In an essay I wrote some years ago in the Chicago Sun Times, I mentioned that Thomas was the first conductor invited to take the Chicago Symphony Orchestra to Europe. He was the first to be honored by a President of the United States, William Howard Taft, not at a White House musicale, but in a concert hall where the Chief Executive marched up onto the stage. Thomas’ orchestra manager was a woman, who took that job almost a century before Chicago had its first female mayor. Thomas gave the first symphonic performance of music by a black composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, in 1903.

I continue by quoting my newspaper article:

“Long before commercial aviation, Thomas and the Chicagoans rode the rails a hundred or a thousand miles in any direction to perform. Just one example: In March, 1896, they played 10 concerts in New York and Brooklyn and one in Philadelphia. Gifts of silver were showered upon Thomas: a gleaming laurel wreath, a centerpiece with an inscription from Ignace Paderewski. After a few days of rest back in Chicago, there were concerts in Ann Arbor, Columbus, Akron, Cleveland and Toledo. There were tours to Southern states, Western states, Northern states.”

“In 1899, Thomas and our orchestra were invited to the 1900 Paris Exposition as one of the ‘great artistic societies, French or foreign,’ of the age. But that was shortly after the terrible injustice of the second Dreyfus trial, which found Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish officer in the French army, guilty of espionage after a closed hearing that barred testimony favorable to him.”

Rose Fay Thomas, the conductor’s widow, explained Thomas’ response to the invitation. Writing in her memoirs, she stated that Thomas found the trial to be a “piece of monumental injustice…and was so indignant about it that he was unwilling to accept an invitation, even indirectly, from a governmental institution.”

After Thomas’ death, at one of the events of the Cincinnati music festival he had founded, a bronze statue of the conductor was dedicated in the lobby of the concert hall. During a break I the dedicatory concert there erupted a fanfare of trumpets and the portly mustachioed William Howard Taft came to the stage to memorialize “this great man.”

When Thomas died in 1905, international tributes to the man became in their own right historic statements. The Boston Transcript wrote: “Nowadays it is merely a matter of setting aside a million or so and issuing the fiat, and an orchestra exists. In Thomas’ day, the taste and desire for good music had to be built up in the first place… It was Theodore Thomas’ destined life work to create the broader popular base for musical culture, on which alone it can have any vital relation to or influence on the national character and refinement…”

The New York Times editorialized, “It is hard to estimate the debt that this country owes to Theodore Thomas. It is the debt of a pupil to the teacher, or it is the debt of a people led out of a wilderness to the prophet who has shown them a sight of the promised land…”

From the artists of Europe (remember, no radio, recordings or TV) came such statements as this from Richard Strauss: “What Thomas signified for musical development in America is universally known. What we Germans owe him shall be held in everlasting remembrance.”

This from Paderewski: “The purity of his character, firmness of his principles, nobility of his ideals, together wit the magnitude of his achievements, will assure him everlasting glory in the history of artistic culture.”

From Felix Weingartner, composter-conductor who had been among other things Mahler’s successor at the Vienna State Opera: “We younger composers must always be especially grateful to him because he often brought out our works in the United States before they were presented here.”

John A. McDermott, one of our leading citizens, has suggested lately that while we take pride in our heroes and superachievers, we also are rather fond of our gangsters and rogues. “We like our Al Capones and Sam Insulls to be the baddest of the bad. If outsiders and visitors are shocked, well, that’s their problem,” comments McDermott.

My concern is that our rogues are gaining on our heroes. I have just gone into scrimmage with another view of Chicago’s image, which appeared less than a month ago in the Skyline, which identifies itself as “A Pulitzer-Lerner Community Newspaper.” The paper, which devotes a lot of space to pictures of well dressed people at parties and other festivities, included a photograph of two attractive ladies in the February 19 issue, one of them holding a familiar-looking object in her two hands.

The photo caption was as follows: “Faye Schwimmer and Joan DeWitt (right) don’t usually attend parties with a tommy gun, but they did at Al Capone’s birthday bash at Schulien’s Restaurant and Saloon.”

Suitable comment does not come easily. Women, lately having become more liberated, are entitled to a social and historic perspective through which they may wish happy birthday unselfconsciously to such a symbol of machine-gun machismo as their hero of recent occasion.

We must remember that male historians, journalists and their likes are not infrequently conjuring up a noted female figure out of Chicago’s violent past.

I refer to that stupid if well-meaning female, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, who touched off you-know-what by kicking up her heels at the lamp of learning and culture.

But here again – for the last time in this essay, I promise you – I must recall Theodore Thomas if I am to rekindle the memorial flame for Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

As a fateful day was developing in 1871, Thomas and his orchestra were arriving in Chicago by rail to start a series of 10 concerts in the Crosby Opera House. Emphasis here is on his orchestra, literally. This was long before the establishment of the Chicago Symphony. Thomas and his musicians had been playing in city after city, in the spirit of a musical Johnny Appleseed, you might say.

Charles Edward Russell told it best in his 1927 book, “The American Orchestra and Theodore Thomas.” Philo Adams Otis, a pioneer patron of Chicago music (eventually a trustee and historian of the Chicago Symphony) was, as Russell described it, walking out of his house on Michigan Avenue and Twelfth Street on the morning of October 9, 1871, observing the course of the fire that had broken out the night before.

At State Street Otis came upon a line of men walking cityward and carrying musical instruments. Music being the business of his soul, he spoke to them. It appeared, Russell continues, that they were members of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra, just arrived.

On arrival at the 22^nd Street Station of the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern Railroad, they had learned that the train could not proceed, so they continued on foot toward the morning rehearsal at the concert hall. “They did not walk far,” says Russell. “Mrs. O’Leary’s cow had done her justly celebrated work the night before and at the hour of rehearsal there was no Opera House and not much of a Chicago.”

From that point on, Thomas could have taken advantage, says the historian, of “that elastic intervention known legally as ‘the act of God’” in the contract. He could have withheld the players’ salaries and that would have been that.

But not Theodore Thomas. He reassembled his men, got them on a train to Joliet, and acted altogether like the “real man that he so carefully hid behind his mask of austerity.”

Thomas, who already was financially in trouble, kept the players for two weeks in Joliet until they could proceed to their St. Louis engagement on October 23, and paid their salaries for the whole time of enforced idleness.

“Though one of those uneasy souls to whom debt is a mad pursuing demon with horns and hooves,” Thomas kept up the struggle in New York, Boston, Cincinnati and Chicago, and the rest is American cultural history.

Could a Valentine’s day greeting from Chicago be delivered to him in heaven, we might say to him:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue,

When we point those guns,

We don’t mean you.

With love and kisses, and a fanfare in brass.