Protest, dissent have been part of Chicago history since Washington Square Park's heyday
Ever been told to "get off your soapbox?" If so, don’t do it. Build it higher instead.
The soapbox expression is rooted in Chicago, the city where Abraham Lincoln was nominated to run for president, Barack Obama held a 2008 victory celebration and Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee.
The current "Hands Off" movement may be the latest public pushback, but Chicago parks have a storied history of free speech and protest. The most famous incident came during the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention when Grant Park hosted contentious demonstrations against war, racism and the imperial presidency of Richard Nixon. The fierce protests were the voice for resistance, reason and change. Television cameras caught protesters, police reaction and overreaction and eventually the Chicago Seven trial, which included such notables as Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden.
Public libraries, media, schools, and community parks are vital to preserving the power of the people, especially these days when even the Smithsonian is under assault. The 1968 riots were essential, but the first time our public parks made a difference was a century ago at a storied Chicago park that has a longer, equally profound and decidedly charming contribution to free expression and dissent: Washington Square Park.
With the Trump administration openly declaring war on our national parks, museums, libraries, free press, lawyers, Canada and even Chicago, the importance of all our community venues, especially the city’s very first public park, is heightened. Washington Square Park got its start in 1842 when James Fitch, Orasmua Bushnell, and Charles Butler of the American Land Company donated three acres of land at 901 N. Clark St., just a few blocks west of Michigan Avenue. The space soon attracted numerous free thinkers, poets, anarchists and crackpots who tackled labor, women’s rights, Communism, the flat earth and other pressing or fringe topics. It often drew crowds of 2,000 or more, and by the early 1900s it had acquired the unofficial, now politically dubious moniker, Bughouse Square, harkening to its often vocal, quirky patrons who gave speeches, rants, lectures and sermons, often on top of soapboxes.
During these years, Chicago was also teeming with journalists, thinkers and influential authors. In 1900, there were nine general circulation newspapers competing for readers.
The era produced Pulitzer Prize-winners Carl Sandburg and muckraker Upton Sinclair who wrote "The Jungle" after researching the city’s ruthless meatpacking industry; and prolific screenwriter Ben Hecht, who began at the Chicago Daily News and co-wrote "The Front Page," a classic, comical account of the early Chicago criminal courts newsroom that opened in Times Square in 1928.
As Washington Square Park became one of the most celebrated outdoor free speech venues in America, it may have gotten a fortuitous lift from, of all people, baseball icon William Wrigley Jr., who made a fortune selling boxes of soap before his successful foray into chewing gum and baseball. Some of those boxes may have become early podiums for local speechmakers, reinforcing Chicago’s "soapbox" traditions. Literally.
Today Washington Square Park is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The ashes of Chicago’s literary great Studs Terkel are buried there. And up until a few years ago, it was also the site of the Newberry Library's annual Bughouse Square Debates that celebrated the park’s freewheeling legacy.
From book bans, to cancel culture to the arrests of pro-Palestinian activists, the First Amendment is under attack. Even so, free expression, for now, is still hanging by a welcome thread evidenced by the millions of Hands Off protesters. So far, the courts, the press and even the U.S. Senate have held up, albeit sometimes barely. Those who would deny free expression, free enterprise and even a secure ballot box, know little of the groundbreaking cranks, free thinkers and soapbox lecturers who came long before them.
Visitors and naysayers alike would do well to stroll west of the Magnificent Mile to experience the legacy of our real and metaphorical soapboxes in the little park that roared for so long, so peacefully, and in the best traditions of American discourse.
Eldon Ham is a faculty member at IIT/Chicago-Kent College of Law, teaching sports law and justice. He is the author of five books on the role of sports history in America.
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