Building Blocks
I’ve lived in Chicago since the fall of 1980, but I never noticed that the street side of the Tribune Tower is embedded with stones from famous buildings around the world until recently. The trigger for me was correspondence from Sigrid Schultz detailing her successes and failures in acquiring, authenticating, and shipping stones to the Tribune’s Chicago office from a variety of locations, including Wartburg Castle, where Luther lived in hiding for a time.
The project was a brainstorm of the paper’s owner, Colonel Robert McCormick—one of many that he would inflict on his foreign correspondents over the years.
Among other things, McCormick was a history bugg* and collector of historical memorabilia on a grand scale. He acquired what would be the first pieces of the Tribune Tower collection on a brief stint as a war correspondent in 1914. While touring the trenches in France, he pocketed stones from the medieval cathedral of Ypres, which had been damaged by German shelling, and a historic building in Arras.
When McCormick began constructing his Tower in 1923, he decided to expand his collection of historical rocks and incorporate them into the structure of the building. He sent a memo to his foreign correspondents instructing them to acquire “stones about six inches square from such buildings as the Law Courts of Dublin, the Parthenon at Athens, St. Sophia Cathedral, or any other famous cathedral or palace or ruin—perhaps a piece of one of the pyramids” and send them to Chicago.
Not surprisingly, local authorities were not always happy to supply the Colonel with a piece of their historical landmarks. Nonetheless, Tribuners successfully collected 136 stones from sites near and far. After the Colonel’s death in 1955, his successors decided to continue the tradition, adding a moon rock in 1971 and a piece of the Berlin wall in 1990.
*A typo that I accept whenever I commit it. I honestly think it makes as much sense as history buff. If the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, the use of buff to describe a fan of any sort is an extension of a person who was fascinated by fires and firemen. They were called “buffs” in the early twentieth century because of the buff-colored uniforms then worn by volunteer firemen in New York. Who knew?
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For those of you who might be interested, I will be talking about Sigrid Schultz on the History Happy Hour podcast on Sunday, August 18 at 3pm central time. You can watch it in real time here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1514126705853093 or here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ1eErYSE6E. It will also be available for streaming later.
Reporting from Weimar Berlin: More Than Just the Nazis
Last Saturday, I spoke about The Dragon From Chicago to an enthusiastic audience at History Camp 2024 in Boston.* At the end, a member of the audience stopped me and asked if Sigrid Schultz reported on anything besides politics.
The short answer is yes, indeed she did. In fact, at one point, Joseph Pierson, then managing editor of the Chicago Tribune, felt the need to remind Sigrid that "Public interest in stories involving scientific progress and adventure is much more constant and reliable than its interest in the long-winded maneuvers of international politics."
Foreign bureaus didn't just cover the "big news" Sigrid was expected to report on American visitors in Berlin, especially visitors from Chicago, on advances in science and technology, human interest stories, the escapades of Europe royalty, and the arts. Aviation-related stories were particularly popular, because Americans (including the Tribune's owner Colonel McCormick) were aviation mad, even before Lindburgh's flight across the Atlantic took over front pages everywhere in May 1927. Sigrid reported many, many aviation stories. In fact, she almost managed to be a passenger on the first Zeppelin passenger flight from Germany to the United States. She was thrilled with the idea, but ultimately the Tribune decided the story didn't justify the cost of the ticket. Schultz was not pleased. Especially when Lady Hay Drummond-Hay had the distinction of being the only woman on the flight.
At various times Sigrid reported on the opening of direct telephone service from Berlin to Chicago,** royal marriages and misalliances, and the hunt for and status of America's most notorious World War I draft dodger, Grover Cleveland Bergdoll, whose appearances and disappearances were a regular feature of Sigrid's "mail stories" in the 1920s and 1930s. ***
In short, Nazis were the big story of her career, but they weren't the only story.
*For those of you who don't know, History Camp is a day-long extravaganza for history nerds of all kinds. 50 speakers. 350 attendees. Lots of programs. Many badges simply listed their wearers as history enthusiasts. Rumor has it that they will post videos of the sessions on the website down the road. In the meantime, if you're interested, here's the link to my podcast episode on History Camp Author Discussion: https://historycamp.org/pamela-d-toler-the-dragon-from-chicago-the-untold-story-of-an-american-reporter-in-nazi-germany/
**It was a big deal and the story made the front page. Previously calls had to connect through Paris. Sigrid called in the story on February 10, 1928, as the dateline proudly noted, by trans-Atlantic telephone from the Berlin office of the Tribune. She pointed out to her readers that in Berlin night was falling and the street lamps were lit, though she knew it was midday in Chicago: "Science at last enables my voice to conquer time and space."
***America's fascination with celebrities, the wealthy, and especially wealthy celebrities, behaving badly is nothing new. Grover Cleveland Bergdoll--wealthy playboy, early aviator, race car driver, and draft dodger--checked all the boxes.
More Stories of Women Journalists
I've heard from a number of you that you enjoyed the stories of women foreign correspondents that I posted over the last two months. Some of you shared your own experiences as journalists in the 1970s and 1980s--remarkably similar to those of women reporters in the 1930s and 1940s, alas. More than one of you suggested that any one of the women whose stories I shared would be worth a book in her own right.*. Since so many of you were interested, I think it is time to share a book that I think many of you will enjoy.
Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism by Brooke Kroeger is not an encyclopedic listing of women journalists over the last 180 years.** Instead, it is, using her own word, a representative account of women who held meaningful positions in American newsrooms, beginning with Margaret Fuller in the 1840s and ending with the reporters who launched the #MeToo movement with their investigative reporting in the early 2020s. The book is full of intriguing accomplished women, many of whom are largely forgotten. More importantly, it traces what Kroeger describes as a recurring theme that continues into the modern day of "progress followed by setback."
The book is fascinating, occasionally infuriating (because of the subject, not because of Kroeger's writing), and overall a delight to read. If you're interested in women's history, journalism or, obviously, women journalists, this one's for you.
*That might be true, but I won't be the one writing those books. Even if the sources exist, which may not be the case, I'm ready to move on from journalists to something else. I don't know what, but I most likely will be writing about a tough broad whom we need to know more about.
**And a good thing, too. Such books, whether they look at women journalists or women warriors, are useful, but not much fun to read.