They knew how to party in 1912
By NEIL STEINBERG nsteinberg@suntimes.com December 29, 2011 5:10PM
Updated: January 31, 2012 8:21AM
New Year’s Eve is a strange holiday.
It isn’t religious, like Christmas or Passover, nor patriotic, like the Fourth of July or Veterans Day, nor for the family, like Mother’s Day or Thanksgiving.
It’s part mortality festival, like Halloween, but for adults, part romantic holiday, like Valentine’s Day. Another year gone, honey, so let’s go out and party.
It’s a public holiday, or was, in cities where big crowds gathered — a tradition that ebbed with television, but is still found in places like New York’s Times Square.
At New Year’s, we look back, but typically only at the year past — short-sighted, in my view. I didn’t want to know about Kim Kardashian’s wedding the first time, never mind have it reprised four months later.
Better to remember the distant past. New Year’s Eve 1912 in Chicago was complicated because it fell on a Sunday. Mayor Carter Harrison II relaxed the Sunday liquor laws, to the joy of downtown hotels and the displeasure of ministers such as the Rev. Charles Bayard Mitchell, pastor of St. James Methodist Church at 46th and Ellis, a reminder that Cardinal George did not invent the idea of clergy sparring with politicians.
“In giving immunity to those who break the Sunday closing law tonight, Mayor Harrison arrays himself with lawbreakers,” Rev. Mitchell scolded. “He himself breaks for the law of God and the laws of the land.”
Beside it being Sunday, the weather helped tamp down 1912 festivities. Temperatures dropped 37 degrees in 12 hours, to 9 degrees. “Sane New Year’s,” the Tribune headlined on its front page. “Chill Winds Drive Gay Crowds Within.”
In a sentence that should serve as a tribute to the school of vague journalism, the Trib reported, “Jests were augmented then by mirthful frolics which in some cases led to mischievous bursts of hilarity.”
Police chief John McWeeny — imagine what the rank and file would do with that moniker today — had vowed to resign if he couldn’t “keep a lid on” revelry. He assigned 300 extra policemen to special duty and they busily confiscated the horns that vendors sold to merrymakers, along with cowbells and fake mustaches, the noisemakers used not just at midnight, but for hours up to it. New Year’s Eve 1912 was deemed “tame compared to 1905” when downtown had been “in an uproar” with “a deluge of libations, revolvers were fired without restraint” and “every known device for producing discord being employed by men and women.”
Things were wilder in Chicago’s red light district, “the Levee,” where, promptly at midnight 1912, the various establishments killed the lights for five minutes of celebration in the dark. Women grabbed the waiters for hugs, and a number climbed atop tables and danced “the Grizzly Bear.”
For some it was too much.
“Many of the large American cities appear to be growing tired of the reproach that has come upon New Year’s Eve through the revelry and rough-housing to which it has been given over for years,” Jacob Riis wrote later that year, noting that many cities, including Chicago, were “endeavoring to provide public festivities of a different type.”
For instance, the lights were off in the Levee, but they were on at the Art Institute — if you think boozeless First Nights are a recent development — which stayed open as “an experiment.” By midnight 1912, 2,500 of “Chicago’s believers in a ‘sane’ New Year’s Eve” had passed through the museum free of charge, its best day that year.
For your “the more things change” file, the mayor, asked for his New Year’s resolution, replied “to keep my temper” and promised “increased efficiency in every direction, with the highest measure of economy.”
As far as how things have changed, the Daily News edition for Monday, Jan. 1, 1912 holds the biggest surprise: There wasn’t one.
“Following its custom of giving as many as possible of its employees and carriers a holiday on New Year’s Day,” the paper explained in a notice on the front page Saturday, Dec. 30th — the 10th edition printed that day — “The Daily News will not issue its regular editions on Monday next.”
A policeman, surveying the subdued scene welcoming 1912 in downtown Chicago, told a reporter, “It ain’t like it used to be.”
It never is. Have a Happy New Year.
