Whole Zone Media.
Hello, and welcome to Cool People did cool stuff. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy.
That was a really good deep breath. I just have to compliment you.
He's great. I've been working on my deep breaths.
God.
I wonder if it makes people think I'm not doing drugs. I'm not even saying that, like it's not a wink and a whatever. I think people know that I'm too boring to do drugs. I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, whose last name is totally kind of related to the fact that I don't do drugs. But my guest for this podcast is Chelsea Weber Smith. How are you?
I'm doing great and I'm I'm really happy to learn the second half of this story.
Yeah, because well okay, wait, First, Sophie is a producer, Hi Sophie, and Ian is our audio engineer, Hi Ian, Hi Ian. I am on women did their theme music. And this is part two of a two parter. If this is the first time you're listening to this podcast, then I guess that's news to you. But everyone else knows that this podcast is usually two partters on Mondays and Wednesdays, since today is Wednesday. Whenever you're listening is honorarily Wednesday. If you ever, like man, I wish it
was just the middle of a week. You just put on an episode of cool People with cool stuff, and it's either Monday or Wednesday. Everyone's two favorite days historically. What was I talking about. I'm off script. I'm lost in the wilderness.
So we're going to do what you were going to read the script of your podcast.
Oh, that's right, because I'm a podcaster. So this is part two. We are talking about the Deal Pickle Club, and what we talked about last time was some of the people who started it, including a man who could fuck, and also Hobohemia and why Margaret doesn't like that name, even though I'm sure the people who were involved in it thought it was the cleverest thing in the world. But overall they're pretty cool. So we'll let that one slide. Okay,
the Dill Pickle Club. As always, when a group of people try to do a thing, and they do a thing together, history tries really hard to only remember one guy.
Oh that's so true.
Yeah, yeah, I feel like half of my research is being like whenever, like and this was run by this guy, and you're like Okay, who else did it? Yeah, they actually appears.
Yeah, no kidding.
A whole crew of people founded the Dill Pickle Club, and they were all wobbles. Jack Jones and Jim Larkin are the two that historians can verify directly with a long list of potential co founders. Besides, some of them were poets and playwrights, most were soapboxers from bug House Square, our favorite Irish goth labor organizer, Mother Jones, is often listed as a co founder or like people who are talking. When Picklers talk about the founders, they often mentioned Mother Jones.
There's actually no evidence for this, sadly.
Was it like an inspo, like she was like an honorary founder because of what she'd already done. Yeah.
Probably people were just like, oh, she's so cool, she's like the founder, you know, I mean I would that founder. Yeah, this podcast was actually founded by not the magazine Mother Jones, but the the goth Irish socialist who I actually disagree with on a bunch of minor bullshit from one hundred years ago. That she was part of it, I'm not so. Actually she listened to her opinion and not mine, uh for everyone?
Yeah, exactly in the town square.
Yeah, we would have been debating in Buckhouse Square. I'll tell you what, No, I would have just left with my tail between my legs. I mean, like your mother. Jones had good feet. Yeah, yeah, Jack Jones. He is often seen as the kingpin of the whole thing. And he performed three tasks, well four. One of them is that he was the owner on paper and I think by the end he was often the guy right. But he was the master of ceremonies. He was the sign painter and like the set painter for a lot of
the plays. And he was the janitor. And you know what, if you're gonna be in charge of a place, be the fucking janitor too.
Yeah.
And he grew up Jack Jones grew up. It was a good name. I gotta admit, hats off to this American name. Yeah, he grew up poor as fuck. Like most Wobbley's. He worked as a union miner. He was a lifelong teetotaler for the classic reason of ain't no way I'm going to turn out like my dad, which I think that Ben Rightman could have learned from that lesson. But you know whatever. But he had another hobby. He had a lot of hobbies. He was like a hobby guy.
One of his hobbies was dynamite. Not like, wow, it was great. I'm not using slang here, it was it was the combination of nitro glistening saw the that he was really excited about.
The red stick with the fuse.
Yeah. I don't know exactly why he did ten years in prison for arson, but I do know that at least later he would get arrested for trying to dynamite some of his bosses. So I suspect the arson charges were not wildly dissimilar.
He's dynamite, that's right.
And so he's a union guy, likes not drinking, and he likes using direct action to solve problems. When his union joined the Wobblies. When the Wobblies were formed, he was in. He was like fuck yeah. Although later he followed some like twists and turns through various splits in the movement that I don't really care to recount, because
what he's famous for is ignoring. He's not really famous at all, But what he's known for is that he ignored all those splits and brought everyone together at his club regardless of like what flavor of leftist or whatever you are. Respect Yeah. He was also famous for his ruined left hand, and rumors abounded. The main two contenders was that it was damaged while he was breaking into safes with nitroglycerin, or that he had been making bombs
with the IWW's underground Sabotage Division. The historian I read was like, and these were probably not true, because after all, he was poor, and what kind of safe cracker ends up poor? And I'm like most of most of them.
That's like a very big jump in the logic there are.
Yeah, and the IWW absolutely had an underground sabotage division. He got arrested for that shit sometimes so and he also did nothing to discourage the rumors. He I think it's because he did those things or power to him. He was a sober bookworm who is outgoing but always kept kept a part of himself reserved. He was a dreamer and a schemer. He was the kind of person
who's always trying out some new invention or idea. Right Like, he's like the classic I swear I'm gonna build a car from scratch and drive it off from the sunset. Guy got it that classic trope that totally.
Exists, and I didn't just make up I know what you mean?
Yeah, yeah, no, totally like and this led him down some dark paths. Unfortunately, he and his second wife built a boat in the backyard and they took it out for their honeymoon and it was wrecked by a storm and he nearly drowned and his wife did drown.
Wow.
Had a hard fucking life. Yeah, he spent a long time in prison. He was broke as shit. His first wife was far more famous than him, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, far more famous than very specific circles. She was a communist and one of the founders of the American Civil Liberties Union. But by the time she did, like anything that she's famous for, she had already left him for being boring, and before he started the Dill Pickle Club, She's like, man, you're kind of boring, And I'm like,
what kind of life do you lead where this man? Yeah, but he like at one point they'd been married for a while and they were like going around doing labor organizing, and he's like, why don't you like move in with me and we could like have a life, And she's like, Nah, it doesn't sound good. So she leaves him.
Hey whatever, just sounds like a mismatch of needs.
Yeah, exactly. Neither of them bury each other. Bad blood. Okay. So that's one of the founders. The other guy, Jim Larkin, and he's the guy who named the club. He was going for something that screamed working class and he was a leftist of a completely different origin. He was an Irish Republican, like one of the people who helped Ireland not be part of England anymore. He was an irishman born dirt poor in England who organized doc workers there.
And there's a connection I got really excited about when I realized all history is a web. He's a syndicalist, you know, a way of organizing people, organizing dock workers, Irish dockworkers in the nineteen hundreds, and this led to the solidarity between Irish and Jewish communities that smashed the ever loving shit out of British fascism in the nineteen thirties, which you can hear about under episodes of the Battle of Cable Street.
Cool.
Yeah, thanks Jim Larkin. Yeah, he went from England to Ireland and traveled around a bunch of Ireland and he formed syndicalist unions among dockworkers. There he formed the Irish Labor Party alongside future friend of the Pod James Connolly, who's one of the main Irish Republican theorists that sparked the Irish independence movement, and he was executed for his role in the nineteen sixteen Easter Rising, which I is like close to Roman Empire for me, Like I mean,
actually Roman Empire is like nothing. I never think about the fucking Roman Empire, besides the fact that they couldn't get near Ireland because it was too scary. Jim Larkin our guy, not the not James Connelly. He also for the Irish Citizen Army. Well actually he was him and Connolly, but whatever, Conny's not the part of the story. Jim Larkin formed the Irish Citizen's Army, a labor militia that
joined the Easter Rising. They fought for the principle that quote the ownership of Ireland moral and material is vested of right in the people of Ireland and to quote sink all difference of birth, property and creed under the common name of the Irish people. Then East Rising hasn't happened yet. His friend and a co organizer hasn't died yet.
In nineteen fourteen, there's like this big labor thing that I'm not going to get into in Ireland and it doesn't go great, and like he just burned the fuck out, and he's like, I'm get out of here. I'm gonna go to America for a while. And people are like, you're ditching us, and he's like, whatever, I'm burned out.
I'm going. Yeah. Probably why he survived, unfortunately, And so he goes to America nineteen fourteen and he travels around and he's speaking to syndicalis and to Irish Americans about how World War One is bad and the Irish shouldn't fight and die for the fucking British, but instead they should fight the British directly or to quote him directly because it rules, and he had away with words. Quote what has Britain ever done for our people? Whatever we
got from her, we rested with struggle and sacrifice. No, men and women of the Irish race, we shall not fight for England. We shall fight for the destruction of the British Empire and the construction of an Irish republic. We shall not fight for the preservation of the enemy, which has laid waste, with death and desolation the fields and hills of Ireland for seven hundred years. We shall fight to free Ireland from the grasp of the vile carcass called England.
Hell yeah, yeah, that's poetry, maybe, I know.
Okay, here's what I actually think about. Once a week. I think about the fact that Ireland was colonized for more than seven hundred years before it won its freedom and started the decolonization process. And as an American, and I was told that it's too late for decolonization here right. I was told that it's been five hundred years, get over it. The Irish didn't get the fuck over it, and like they still haven't totally won, but like decolonization
is still a possibility and is not over. I think about that once a week.
At least, I'm going to think about that once a week.
And then I got like lost how to talk, think about how to say it, you know, because I'm like, ah, what is it? Anyway? But he had trouble making friends in the US. Jim Larkin. He shows up in the US and he's like, yeah, I'm gonna talk to the Irish Americans and the Irish Americans are like, we're with you on hate in the British, but you're a fucking commy, you know, yeah, you're a socialist. We're kind of shitty
and right wing here. And then he'd go talk to the socialists and they'd be like, wait, you're Catholic and he's like, yeah, what, why is that a problem? So he had a hard time in the US. Yeah, even though he was more of a traditional state communist than an anarchist. He got arrested for criminal anarchy in nineteen
nineteen during the first Red Scare. He defended himself in court there's your Bingo Square listener, and in court he was like, look, I believe in Bolshevism, Catholicism, syndicalism, in Irish nationalism. What's so hard about that? Why is this wrong? He was convicted. He was sent to sing Sing prison in New York, where the strange anarchist superstar Charlie Chaplin visited him, like the most famous man in the world at that point. Probably he was deported in nineteen twenty three.
He goes back to Ireland and he winds up with a mixed legacy in Irish politics. He starts by working closely with the USSR, and then he realizes what most people eventually realize, which is that Stalin is a fuck who didn't let anyone think for himself, and his like Catholic syndicalism does not play with Bolshevism in the end, and does not play with Stalinism in the end, and the Catholic Church weren't really fond of his communism. He is a man between worlds.
Yeah, that's hard, I know.
But he lived good, long life, doing amazing things. He died a working class death. He was overseen some repairs on a building when he fell through the floor at seventy three years old. Oh and like died from his injuries like a little bit later. And he had a big Catholic funeral, And there's a statue of him in Dublin and has one of his sickest quotes, the greats appear great because we are on our knees, let us rise.
That is good.
Yeah. Has a wow fucking poet, Yeah yeah. And some of that might come from the fact that he was basically bullied into writing poetry at the Dope Pickle Club.
Oh, nothing like getting bullied into writing poems that's a beautiful thing.
Everyone who is there was like suddenly kind of forced to be a poet. You know.
Wow, I will tell you I did go to grad school for poetry.
Wow.
I'm also here to your poetry, your poetry, train opera guy too many here?
Yeah, elly, yeah, I wrote more poetry back when I wrote trains.
Hey. Yeah, yeah, they go hand in hand. Yeah, you're just living life, man, you're in the moment. I know.
What I wish I had done is listen to my father's advice, which was, right, write a journal, because I was like, how could I I'm never gonna forget this. This is the most amazing thing. Like how I'm never gonna remember half that shit. I don't remember a third of that shit I have.
I think I have some journal I have journals. I was a journaler, but it wasn't like here was what I did today. So it's just like scraps of like crazy shit whatever. I'm thinking, Well, I'm just doing yeah, just the most dangerous behavior.
Yeah, I know, that's that's what I have. But my father's a big advocate of like literally or like today I did the following three things.
Now, I do wish I would have done that, Yeah, I really do.
Yeah. Anyway, he is famous, and none of his fame is for running a social club in Chicago. I did not mention find any mention of the Dull Pickle Club and anything else I read about him except I've never read a full biography of him or something though, just articles and stuff, except for the book about the Dull Pickle Club, where it talks about his involvement a lot, because he's one of the founders and he's one of the first people there before he's deported for criminal anarchy.
And I think it matters because people tend to see cultural and political stuffs like two distinct spheres. But the people who are like doing it, don't you know. Yeah, you can be a poet and a revolutionist. You could be an actor and a revolutionist. You can have a cool hipster club where you talk about need ideas and still try to overthrow capitalism and direct in material ways and along the way people revolutionize culture. People who actually
just set out to revolutionized culture rarely do. So it comes it comes from great passion. People see these like art and cultural movements and just imitate the aesthetics without seeing underneath, and you wind up with like a pale imitation. I would argue that jazz mattered because it came from black struggle, and so people pick up on the like aesthetic of it and run with it, but they don't have that heart, and it's hollow, you know, it's.
Like slumming and yeah, the jazz clubs kind of yeah, you know, which was so popular, which also but then that was also so important because without the sort of racial mixing that occurred through those relationships, it's just, yeah, history is complicated, and I do think that's like the most important thing to get across. Every moment is as complicated as the one ran.
No totally, and I think that it's like so it becomes less about being like cultures must stay distinct and more like what is the heart of this thing? You know? And like how can people who yeah, no, I know and.
Yeah, like how do you hold up the heart of the thing while still contributing your own? Yeah, it's it's big. These are big quess These are like the questions artists have been asking time immemorial.
It's true. Yeah, And they could have asked them at the Dope Pickle Club and then people would have heckled them. Those are the two known founders. There's there were more and just knowing sure. But there's one figure who is prominent through its entire heyday, the guy we talked about earlier, the fuck boy hobo doctor Ben Ightman. He wasn't there at the start, but he's around soon enough. By nineteen seventeen, he's around on the scene and he is working his
pr magic on the place. He's talking to journalists, he's getting people there, and he's turning it into a thing. He turns it from a like from a place where some wobblies argue about politics to like this like cultural hub that changes Chicago's understanding of the world. This includes bringing out highbrow folks to mingle, but he actually worked really hard to make sure he stayed working class. And he like it was a place for the low life. You know, you could come slum, but it wasn't going
to be yours, you know, which makes sense. He's the hobo doctor. He knows how to run in the upper class, but he is like, yeah, not an upper classman. The homeless, the unemployed, drifters, and therefore a lot of disabled folks were a huge part of the clientele. To quote historian Franklin Rosemont, who wrote the book on the Dope Pickle Club.
It was Reitman, more than anyone else, who perfected the definitive and wonderful, wonderfully improbable dill pickle mix that brought together wobblies and opera stars, poets and scientists, professors and prostitutes, hoboes and psychoanalysts, con men and crack pots. And as for when they started it, no one actually knows when they started it. But you know what, also, well, actually a capitalism started with the enclosure of the commons in England. I would feel I was going to do an ad
transition about no one knows when ads started. I bet there's I bet you, I bet there's old handbills from the Roman Empire, oh yeah, with ads on them. But I wouldn't know because I've never seen the TV show Room, Sophie, were their ads in rom Sophie said, yes, I.
Don't think about the Roman Empire.
Sorry, no, I'm talking about the TV show. I definitely don't think about the TV show. Yeah, I've never seen it. Well, but you know what I am gonna see or listen to or buy whatever comes after the end of the sentence and we're back.
Thanks.
I enjoy the scene now where I can push this.
Really beautiful transition, natural as anything.
So the most likely start date is nineteen fourteen, but some people say it is nineteen fifteen, nineteen sixteen, whatever, blah blah blah. It's the kind of thing that looking back doesn't really matter. I'm sure it matters, but doesn't matter to me. It probably started in late autumn, which lines up with when Jim Larkin came from Ireland. And it probably started as a way for soapboxers to get to be able to keep doing their thing during the winter. Right.
It's hard a soapbox in a Chicago Winner, which you'll change in probably about another ten years or so, when Winner is a vague memory. So that's we have that to look forward to. It probably started the Dill Pickle Club, probably started way too seriously. It was like a labor forum in a tea room called the Copper Kettle and the Dill Pickle, which is too long, if anyone's listening,
that's too long. It was only open on weekends to start, and then in nineteen seventeen the landlord raised the rent and then it moved to its real home eighteen Tucker Alley. At this point it stopped being a clubhouse only for Wobbles and their friends and started to become a bonafide social club and cultural cornerstone. It was in a barn in the alley, which is a thing that does not make sense in my modern conception of how cities work, but it was. It was a barn in an alley.
Over the years, they bought a bunch of other barns and like hauled them over and like constantly rearranged the whole place by sticking all the things together in different ways whenever they like got bored, I guess, and it it seems like it would be a hole in the wall, right of everything that we're going to be describing as place in a barn in an alley. The main lecture hall held seven hundred people.
Wow, yeah, oh okay.
I suspect that it was not like a lot of like fire code enforcement no in nineteen seventeen.
Sitting on a lot of hay bales just waiting to erect in play.
Yeah, this could have gone real different this story. The entrance to the alley had a green light. I believe it is green like a Pickle. I think that's the idea. And then the building itself had two notable signs on the outside on its orange door lit by another green light, which sounds garish as fuck. And I think that this sign is literally like just giant letters carved into the entire door, but I'm not sure. There's no photos of this, and there's like some illustrations that I've seen. It says
step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside. Well yeah, and then once you were in the entryway, the next sign said, elevate your mind to a lower level of thinking.
Great.
Yeah, I love that.
It's great chaos energy, Yeah.
Yeah, totally. The single most characteristic thing about the Dill Pickle Club was the diversity of its clientele. Those who started it and ran it. We're working class leftist revolutionaries of a mix of different ideological positions. The people who showed up were all sorts, and ideas of all sorts were allowed. Atheists debated, breakaway Catholics debated, the spiritualists, Buddhists
and hindu spoke regularly. It was queer friendly and multi racial, when both of those things were far from the norm in the US. This is decades before wase you pointed out you know more actually about this period than I do. But I'm saying this is decades before there's a recognizable LGBT rights movement in the US. Definitely, Yeah, And it
comes just after the peak of white labor. The white labor movements like racism problem, which I want to say like peaked in like probably the eighteen nineties nineteen oughts. IWW had a lot of success by being like you fucking bullshit racists. Look, we're organizing all the different like people of color, and like, you know, we actually rule anyway. For a long time, it was the only integrated club
on the North Side of Chicago. They had talks by black presenters with names like Jazz, the Hope of the Nation, and Moorish Contributions to present civilization. Folks from all over the world came to present about their experiences and lives. If you're an immigrant from anywhere in the world, you'd come and talk about like here's where it's like where I'm from. You know. Birth control was discussed openly, despite people going to jail for talking about it at the time. Right.
Magnus Hirschfeld, probably the single most influential figure in LGBT history. Honestly, I haven't come up with a competing person who had more of an impact. He's a guy who ran the gender clinic in pre Nazi Germany. He came and he spoke there in nineteen thirty one and it was the largest crowd the club have ever gathered in its history.
Wow.
The Catholic anarchist Dorothy Day, who later founded the Catholic Worker Movement, was a regular there, and I think an organizer. And this is before she like I'm like, I don't know as much about her yet as I want to, but like it was before she like got really Catholic and she was just like a hard drinking journalist. People talked about political issues, religious issues, cultural issues, art, everything. There were lectures on every conceivable topic from Cesarean sections
to physics. Probably the first discussions of surrealism and Chicago were held there. Like the guy who maybe found the North Pole, there is this big dumb fight. This actually seems like the kind of thing that you heard this Like there's like two different guys who were like I found the North Pole. No, I found the North Pole.
I have not heard about those.
Like the guy who claims that he did it first, who probably didn't. He came and gave a talk about finding the North Pole and shit, you know.
Again, chaos energy. Yeah, it all in there, see what happens.
Yeah, The New York Tribune was like trying to talk shit, so they referred to its client until they said it quote equally attended by North Shore Society leaders, pickpockets, morons, soapbox theists, University of Chicago professors, and derelicts of all kinds.
They just made it sound cool.
I know. Yeah, Jack Jones, the janitor said, quote more famous people in all lines of creative work have passed through the Dill Pickle than through any fifty universities in the world. But they also like, you couldn't no matter how like famous and what respected you are, like, you are like the same as everyone else, and you're gonna get Apparently the Heckler's like waited until you were done and then heckled you.
Well that's nice. I know.
There was a Dill Pickle gallery of art on the walls because apparently you could pay your debt to the house of the painting.
Wow. Yeah, I love this play. I know.
It was ostensibly a tea house and you could get cheap sandwiches and all kinds of non alcoholic drinks there. I've read different accounts of whether or not the mob muscled in in the twenties and started to serve alcohol. I know that they tried. I currently leaned towards they didn't succeed, But I'll talk about that more later as we talk about the end of it. But no one was coming there for the food or the drinks. People came to feel like they were part of something and
to discuss the issues of the day. Like imagine if Twitter was like a good.
Place, you know, yeah, imagine that.
Not even in the like like this is better than pre elon Twitter.
You know, yeah, right, better than threads. Yeah yeah, sorry, Zuck, yeah.
Yeah, just please fight it out and both both die. Uh legally. Some of the okay, some of the debates that they had were like formal debates, like that whole fucking thing that I don't understand because I wasn't on
my high school debate team. But one of the things that they would do is they have these formal debates where like the Hoboes and Wobblies, which is like school university debate teams on a regular basis, debate teams started showing up just to watch it happen and take notes from the rail riding union organizers about how to fucking debate.
Wow, it's probably because they actually had passion and yeah, you know, weren't just reading from some boring ass dissertation. Totally, that's how you got to do it. You got to hide the medicine, that's what we say. You got to be exciting, you gotta be fun. That gets dangerous too. Yeah, charisma, No, it's true, and like yeah, no, And I feel like they avoided a lot of the like Star Warship thing by having like a ton of.
Characters. You know, you'd go there and it wouldn't be just to see Ben Rightman speak or Jack Jones or Lucy Parsons or any of these people everyone, and you could go be a character, you know, you could like build an identity and build a like culture. And I don't know.
You know what. It kind of makes me think of as like it's some kind of like political vaudeville. It's like yeah, I don't know, yeah, which is also huge at this time. Totally, it makes sense that there were like some cultural exchange, like in terms of structure happening there.
Yeah, no, totally. Yeah, and also and we talk about the medicine that has to go down. It was a free speech and debate and exchange of ideas for him, right, but it was tinged with humor and everything was like kind of stand up comedy ish on some level. There's one category of people who you actually could go there if you want it and be like, I'm going to go advocate for law and order or fascism or like like anything. Like at one point someone was like, I
guess you could go there and argue for misogyny. Everyone would just tear you apart, you know overall, And I wish I knew more about how they made this happen. It was a free speech zone, like a literal actual one, where the people who didn't want to use it were the authoritarians, fascists, stalinists, cops and organized criminals largely stayed clear.
Wow, okay, okay.
And like I don't know, I I like want to know how they threaded that needle, you know, yeah, yeah, because now you have like the people who are like debate me are like bad people.
Yeah, you know, yeah I do.
Yeah, I wonder if it's because like, if your debate cannot be televised, you know, there's no way for you to like gather a complacent, distant audience. Like everyone is there feeling the energy of people being like you're a ideas suck, you know.
Yeah.
Yeah, they did way more than debates and whatever. They every Saturday night were dances and the orchestra was whatever musicians were in the house that night.
Oh I love it. Yeah, what a place.
People came as we cant to talk about this before, but it's in my script, so I'm going forward with it. People also came to be around the sort of characters of a sort we don't have as much today. On some episode or another we talked about Emperor Norton and the San Francisco characters. Have you heard of Emperor Norton?
I haven't.
Oh. He was this guy who like may or may not have been homeless, who declared himself the Emperor of the United States and Mexico and like wrote pardons and laws and shit, and was like actually this like anti racist crusader and organizer. But he was just this guy in nineteenth century San Francisco.
It's a character.
Yeah, Chicago had its own characters, right, some of the founders of the place were some of these characters. A ton of the people who were the characters didn't make their way into their history books. And so there's all these like the Surfesser who didn't actually seem interesting enough to really include in my script much, Martha Biegler and Elizabeth Davis, who I don't know anything about. You know, we'd be like, holy shit, we're going in Martha. Martha
Biegler's there, you know. And and it was a place where a neurodivergence was celebrated as a strength by having this sort of like character based thing because it wasn't let's go make fun of these people, you know, mm hmm. A ton of the Chicago poets started hanging out there as teenagers while they were still in high school. A ton of high school students went there because it wasn't a bar and the food was cheap.
So there you go.
It's the place to be. It's like the mall, I know, right, if the mall was like the crazy awesome place like yeah, like yeah, like imagine just like dropping off your kid being like have fun at the Big the Big Pickle. It's the dual pickle, Mom, Yeah, and leave the carriage or whatever. Yeah, okay, yeah, well you're not too anarchists for me to give you enough money for one of those sandwiches, are you no?
Mom?
They sometimes put on three plays a week at this place. Sunday night was like play night, but sometimes up to three night plays a week. For a while, they were the most active small theater in the city. I think small theater is like a specific designation of a type of theater. But I I think it's the equivalent of off Broadway but for other cities or in the nineteen twenties or something, I don't know, it had its own troop.
They put on all the big name plays, but they also put on plays from local play rights and and then music nights. They ranged from hobo songs to operate a jazz to Eastern European folk music. And it's heyday was like nineteen seventeen to like the mid to late nineteen twenties. Jack Jones the ringleader and janitor. He got arrested more and more in connection to running the place, and the cops fucking hated this place. And as for how it fell apart, I guess it. Well, it depends
on who you ask. For example, if you were to ask Sophie, Sophie would say now is the time to do ads, and then it doesn't actually even tie into what I was saying, is just an awkward ad transition, which is what you come here for. Why why won't you just leave me in peace? Why must I always
do these ad transitions? Even if you subscribe to cooler zone media, then you get the best of both worlds, because I still have to performatively describe the anti capitalist struggle with running a platform that has ads, But then you don't have to listen to the ads. It really is just the best thing you can I good, here's the ads, and we're back. So by the late nineteen twenties,
there's like a bunch of copycats. And it's funny because like if you read some of the people talking about like all these fucking poser clubs, like blah blah blah, and then other people were like, like Ben rightman is like it's great other people are doing it now. Isn't that the point? You know? Because he's just like, yeah, actually earnestly excited about it. But then he actually lists which of the copycats are, like good and which ones of our like total poser clubs that.
Suck you know, nothing changes, I know.
I know. And some of them are like more specialized ares, ones that are actually speak easies, you know, and all these different things. But yeah, it's model expanded across Chicago, and once it was no longer the only game in town, like, the culture started to change and some of the characters went not were the people who would kind of go
and spin off their own clubs, you know. Most of the others failed faster because a lot of them lacked that heart that we're talking about where they actually come
from something. You know, because if someone random centrist or right wing persons like, oh, I'm going to start my new free speech for him, and you're like, oh, it's gonna it can go terribly Yeah, you know, because it goes to this theory that I have that I haven't seen proven wrong yet, which is that new aesthetics are new aesthetic ideas are pushed by radicals and freethinkers, and
then people copy the aesthetics, not the heart. I kind of already mentioned this, but I just think about this like this is another thing I think about it, probably not once a week. This is a like intensely for a week once a year. Is this type of thought where like you pick a culture or a genre of like fiction or music or living, and you can find the like radical roots of it, and then and then you see just the aesthetic is what is then packaged and sold to people. You know.
Yeah, I think drag is a really good example of that too, because we just did a drag queen series and starting around this time, Harlem Renaissance drag queens, you know, co opted by hipsters, White hipsters suddenly slowly take over the drag scene. You know. It's kind of a typical, typical cycle that you're talking about.
Yeah, Yeah, And it's like if you just see the like, yeah, if you just see the aesthetic trappings, then you copy that, because that's the easiest thing to figure out to copy, you know, yeah, as compared to like copying the like way of thinking for yourself and like applying it to your problems, which if you come from a different background, will give you a different aesthetic result. But that's good. We can create a beautiful, chaotic, lovely mess of culture that I want to live in.
Yeah, And it's like you want to have those things passed down even if they're in copy form, which is like unfortunate. But what's the alternative I guess is like we adopt aesthetics and hopefully adopting those aesthetics leads us back to their roots versus fighting against the aesthetic. Yeah, it's complicated, No, that that makes sense.
I mean like yeah, look at punk, Like punk is like a yeah, like I think two of the most obvious, Like like anyone who doesn't know that punk and hip hop both come from like real radical shit, like just like really missed the memo because like it's like pretty they're pretty forward about that, you know.
Yeah, it's like a suburban kid's like, whoa, that's a cool anarchist patch. What's that? Yeah, I don't know. It's like okay, do that with your time? Good? Yeah?
No, absolutely, you know you're right and that like sometimes you can encapsulate the message into the aesthetics and like lead people back to it, that's yeah.
And sometimes it destroys the whole things, yeah, you know, different than different different strokes.
I guess whenever people are like I know the answer to I have the solutions to things, and I'm like, you clearly don't, because we haven't gotten out of this mess yet, you know, like.
Yeah, I'm not hanging out with you totally.
But yeah, So the Dill Pickle Club by the mid to late nineteen twenties, it's struggling and it is no longer the like main happening place. And I suspect it was never incredibly good at making money. I mean they had they had the people showing up so clearly, you know, and they did a and he had a lot of support. But Jack Jones, he has nothing if not a schemer
and an optimist. He's the kind of guy who builds a boat in his backyard while running a club that he started after he blew off his messed up his hand with nitroglycerin, you know. Yeah, And so he kept like publishing papers that were like it's bigger and better than ever, We're gonna have these like bold, new amazing things, and it it just wasn't true anymore. And then like the way he decided he was going to save the place. This is the most this guy energy thing he's going
to do his entire life. He tries to market a self walking Dill pickle duck toy.
Oh that's that's great. I feel like this was the era of like novelty like toys and pranks and stuff. I just got a bunk about novelty toys that that's uh, I bet that's what's happening here.
It's like the whoope cushion era.
Yeah, exactly like the Chattering Teeth. Yeah, those types of just stupid bullshit that we love so much.
Yeah. So he creates the do Dill Duck, which the like rumor among picklers. I I'm not gonna give this one too much credence that it was the inspiration for Donald Duck. I mean, stranger things have happened, and Disney was clearly all about robbing the public domain and then putting it into the copyright. Yeah, but the do Dill Duck didn't go anywhere despite being self walking. And let me tell you, if your cafe is struggling, probably inventing
a duck isn't the way out of it. No, I could have had a walking pickle.
What did it look like? Do we have like pictures of this?
There's like some sketches. It's like kind of boxy.
It's what's it call again?
Do du dash d I l duck?
Uh? Just see this sketch. Oh okay, so it's got a like a little bit of that duck or the little bird that dips its head into water vibe. That's what it looks like to me. Yeah, you know what I'm talking about.
That, Yeah, the drinking duck that I think of from.
The drinks bird.
Yeah all right yeah. Although, actually, now that I've looked this up, it claims that it was invented and copyrighted nineteen twenty two by Jack Jones, The Picture of a Duck, and it says, I walk with a shimmy and wiggle my bill. I wobble my head to give young folks a thrill. I'm just made of wood, but I'm sure to bring luck to those who possess this ungainly old duck.
Nothing more thrilling than that duck.
I take back everything I said about being good to force people to write poetry. No, it's a joke. I think it's a great poem.
Was good.
Yeah, and okay. I've read a bunch of different versions of how the Dill Pickle Club met its end, and a lot of them are like, oh, you know, cycles of hipsters and blah blah blah. I find one the most convincing, and so that's the one I'm going to use.
And it is what Ben Rightman said happened. And basically it's like, all right, Jack Jones, he hates alcohol, and he's like real committed to his ethics, right, you don't become a I mean, you don't live this guy's life if you're not like willing to take some risks to
live by your ethics. You know. Yeah, And the mobsters in the next neighborhood over are getting more and more powerful as prohibition goes on, and they keep trying to muscle in on the place, and they want their guys as waiters so they can do bootlegging and take a cut of the action. And the only like argument is whether or not they succeeded ever or not. You know.
But Jack Jones won't. He won't go for it. Either it happens and he keeps fighting back or it doesn't happen at all, And my money is didn't happen at all. And he goes to the politicians he's like, you got to protect me from the mafia, and they're like, we're not going to fucking help you unless you bribe us. It probably didn't.
Phrase you because the mafia will, you know, mafia takeover, We'll make money yeaheah.
Yeah exactly. So he writes a five hundred dollars check to a politician, but then his conscience wins out and he stops payment on the check before it's cashed. So the politicians who are probably in bed with the mafia. Chicago is fucking notorious for this. They dredge up an old law that a dance hall can't be within one hundred feet of a church, and in nineteen thirty three they shut it down.
Mm hmm. That sounds totally plausible.
Yeah yeah, and like like literally the only because everything else that I've read is like kind of vague, being like, oh just kind of fell off the map, and you know, the neighborhood is gentrified and or like, I don't know, I find this the most convincing argument. Yeah, but it left a hell of a legacy. It was the working class under belly of what gets called the Chicago Renaissance, which tends to focus instead on the like upper middle
class and such like that elements of it. And it was just, you know, just huge cultural touchstone that started with some working class revolutionaries from the mining camps and from Ireland, atheistsyntheists, socialists and anarchists, poets and actors. And I will say, so I close this out, there's one place in my life that I've been to that feels the closest to the dill pickle, and I just want to shout them out. There's a worker cooperative bookstore and cafe in Baltimore called Red Emma's.
I've been there. Yeah, sorry, I just randomly have been there. No one time I went to Baltimore.
I was so cool there, absolutely, And what's cool is the lineage is actually clear here. It is named after Emma Goldman, who taught Ben Rightman everything he knew. Red Emmas is a majority POC like POC owned radical space where ideas all across the left are discs where people go to just be. And it really kind of does
that magical stuff that cities do best. I say, this is someone who doesn't live in a city anymore, but there's like something specific about this, like way of creating culture and like having characters and like bringing people together that cities really do amazingly, and I think Red Emmas does an amazing job of it. And I will say also they sell books online, So if you want a good place to get your books, you should go to Redemas dot org and they have like an amazing selection.
And there's also like kind of another direct lineage in that the Chicago surrealists Franklin Rosemont, who wrote the book about the Dill Pickle Club, was actually a fairly I actually checked with one of my friends who wrote red Emma's right before I recorded this episode, and she was like, yeah, no, the Dill Pickle Club is absolutely a like conscious thing that we were thinking about when we started this place and about twenty years ago now, so they have actually
outlasted the original built Dill Pickle Club by a couple of years.
Wow, that's so cool.
Yeah, and they're on there like fourth building because they keep getting like, you know, it's hard to be a worker Cooperati bookstore, you know. Yeah, but now they own their building. It's been put into a land trust, so they're fucking You should go check out red Emmas if you're only wearing Baltimore, or you should buy their books. That's the dope Pickle Club. I never thought i'd be doing an episode though, Like, let me tell you about a nightclub.
God, yeah, this was so fun. Yeah, I'm just left with the deep sadness that I could never go there. I know, at least we could go to Red Emmas. There's lots of places like it. But it does sound like the energy of that time, Like we said, like the vaudeville character driven energy is so what I want in my life, and I just wish I could have been there. Yeah, and yeah, it sounds like it was a mix of so many different important parts of like the nineteen teens going into the twenties. It's like just
really big changes happening there. Yeah, and about to hit on, like a total changes in American culture that would like you know, talking about pr talking about capitalism and all those things. I feel like, you know, the twenties are coming and it's going to change everything positively negatively. But the roots seem to be you know, in these radical movements.
Yeah that yep.
Yeah, I love that.
It's this behind the scenes thing like this, Like you know, it's all these people who are like or all these movements that are much known, much better known for their other work, you know, and then being like, but there's actually these like nexuses that bring all these people together and like so Jack Jones didn't, you know, overthrow English rule of Ireland the way that Jim Larkin did or something right, but like he cleaned up after a place
where everyone came together. And maybe Jim Larkin, who has that fucking amazing way of putting things, maybe he developed that doll pickle club, or maybe he walked in as a ringer and he was like, whatever, I got this shit, you know, whatever, I don't care.
Yeah, And maybe there's a lesson in terms of how to make politics fun.
Yeah.
Right. It doesn't have to be a boring conversation. It doesn't even have to be a battle on Twitter. It can be you know, sharing space with people and having conversations that are fun and watching shows and reading each other's znes and you know, it's a there's a lot of joy in political movements, and I think that gets lost in kind of the grimness of it all totally.
And I also think that there's something about the fact that they like they listen to each other, Like even when they like would heckle each other, be like, no, you're fucking wrong, you piece of shit, but they they'd be like you piece of shit, but you're like, my piece of shit, you know, like like it was like haha, and that's something that I feel like we've really lost
and we need to bring back. And I think it partly it's because it happens in person, you know, where like, yes, the kinds of things that people say to us online are not the kinds of things that people I mean sometimes people are like driving past me and moving cars will ye all the kinds of things that people say to me on Twitter, you know, but like, but.
That's because they're not looking in your eyes. Yeah, they're not looking in your face totally. Yeah, yep.
And like we actually need to learn to respect diverse opinions and like even when we're like, no, your opinion is fucking wrong, but it's like I hate your opinion that I hate you unless you're like, you know, trying to murder everyone or whatever, right, But like instead of being like I don't know whatever, I clearly like, no.
It's true. It's like always been kind of the saddest part of leftism is just the the continued in fighting
that keeps derailing things. And you know, I mean this, the Bill Pickle Club makes me think of the Rainbow Coalition for at Hampton's Rainbow Coalition for the Black Panthers was just like, let's bring together, you know, all types of people, let's bring together, like these Hillbillies as that you know, they were called the time, and they're going to be flying their Confederate flags and like we're gonna have the Black Panthers yell at you about why that's
fucked up. And then they're like, you know what, We're not bringing the Confederate flag.
Did that happen? We talked about them on the show. I didn't know that they ever put down the Confederate flag. That's amazing.
Did they did? Yeah? I mean again, history is hard, but according to my research and what I found out, they did end up retiring the flag and standing together. Yeah, you know, breakfast for kids revolutionary.
Yeah. Well, also if people want to learn about stuff, I know my ability to do smooth transitions was destroyed somewhere earlier today. Do you have anything you want to plug here at the end of the show.
I mean, I'll just my podcast, American Hysteria. If you like this show, I really think you'll like our show. We cover moral panics, urban legends, conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and crazes all through kind of a sociological lens and how they affected culture and culture affected them, And I do think there's a lot in common. It's very research based, so if you're an obsessive researcher, I think you'll like it too.
Hell yeah, what do I have to plug? I'm doing a bunch of what club? Oh yeah, I started a book club. It's funny to say it like it was in the past when it's actually in the future. For me, Cools own book club every Sunday on both this feed and it could happen here. Feed is fiction, story culture, the kind of stuff that also matters, you know, and
it is hosted by me, and I read stories. And the first month of it is going to be one of my novella's called The Lamble Slaughter of the Lion, which is the first book in the Danielle Kines series, and it is about a squatted town that is ruled over by a three antler deer that the anarchists summoned to try and keep the town safe. And it is good. You might like it. And I read it to Robert Evans, and then after that I'm going to read other stories, most of them won't be by me. They could even
be by you. But I don't know how to tell you to submit, ye, because we haven't figured that stuff out yet. Just make it really good and have it come on my radar naturally. That's the way to submit. Get good at writing fiction. Get good, yeah, be as good at words as Jim Larkin and better than me, Sophie. What you got to plug that? That's what I have
to plug? You did it? Hell? Yeah? All right, We'll see you all either Sunday or Monday or Wednesday, or whatever day of the week you listen to another episode of Cool People Did Cool Stuff.
Hey Bye bye.
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