Rebel yell

For the past 21 years, the Bughouse Square Debates have brought ranters, shouters, monologuists and other rebels to the square by the Newberry Library to fight the power. But the free-speech celebration—which has its annual verbal brouhaha Saturday at noon—actually dates back to the 1880s. Back then, the area was a popular spot for German anarchists to converge on the cow pasture–turned–park for some alfresco agitation.

Then Chicago became the country’s hobo capital, and those romantic transients also found their way to the park. Along the way someone dubbed the spot Bughouse Square, and it’s been the official unofficial name ever since.

In Chicago’s Left Bank, published in 1953, Alson J. Smith wrote about the area as having “a purer bohemia than Greenwich Village…Bug-House Square across from the Newberry Library still has a full quota of radical orators, homos, and floozies in open-toed sandals.”

BULLHORN OF PLENTY Studs Terkel sticks it to the man at the 1989 Bughouse Debates.

Photo: Courtesy of Newberry Library

Many radical icons came here to speak their minds—orators included anarchist Emma Goldman, poet Carl Sandburg, author Sherwood Anderson, labor organizer Big Bill Haywood and the Industrial Workers of the World’s Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.

“It went on every night, and the buses used to come by and listen to what they thought were kooks, and people would talk about whatever they wanted to harangue about, and the audience cheered them and heckled them,” says Lila Weinberg, who was instrumental in establishing the current Bughouse Square Debates. Some preachers from the nearby Moody Bible Institute even ventured onto the occasional soapbox, she notes.

This mode thrived for the next few decades before slowing down to a dull roar in the early 1960s. Alas, the square slowly lost its funky edge and became part of the Gold Coast, and the park fell into disuse.

“The other day I tried sitting on the grass…but the stench drove me out,” Slim Brundage wrote in an undated manifesto titled “Let’s Save Bug-House Square” (probably written in the early 1960s). Brundage was a hobo and founder (or “Janitor,” as he liked to call himself) of the College of Complexes—a tavern with a lecture series. “I’ve enjoyed sitting in that Square for over thirty years…. How many generations of squirrels I’ve fed there I can’t count. But I guess I’m an effete—I just can’t stand the smell of stale urine.”

But true Chicagoans remembered the square and its place in the city’s past.Weinberg says she conceived the idea for the current debates in the 1980s, and she and her late husband, Arthur, approached the director of the Newberry Library about supporting an event. “We suggested that it would be fun and historical to have it once a year,” Weinberg says.

In the 1920s, Arthur hung out in the square and spoke out with the rest of the Bughouse bunch. He also served as the “mayor of Bughouse Square” until he died in 1986, and Studs Terkel took over the gig. (To understand how important Bughouse Square is to Terkel, you only need to know that it is the place he has chosen to have his ashes scattered.)

 Nowadays, the event is a competition between speakers, and part of the contest is not only to see if an orator can hold his own while being heckled, but if he inspires heckling at all. The grand prize is a giant plastic pickle, a nod to the Dil Pickle Club (officially with one  l) which was a boho hangout in an alley near the square.

Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth, who grew up in Chicago in the 1920s, wrote in his memoir about the club (closed in 1932): “Around the corner was Bughouse Square, where every variety of radical sect, lunatic religion, and crackpot health panacea was preached from a row of soapboxes every night in the week when it wasn’t storming. The soapboxers, or at least the political radicals among them, hung out in the Dill Pickle.”

BULLHORN OF PLENTY Studs Terkel sticks it to the man at the 1989 Bughouse Debates.

Photo: Courtesy of Newberry Library

Bughouse Square ain’t what it used to be; in lieu of constant, impromptu public speech, only this annual, formalized event remains . But some things don’t change: Someone from the Moody Bible Institute still weighs in annually. Last year, a few anarchists spoke truth to power, along with eventual winner Michael Tsonton, the chef at Copperblue, who railed in favor of foie gras. For about seven years, writer Warren Leming has portrayed various characters: Last year it was Clarence Darrow, and other times he’s done Albert Parsons, Thomas Paine and Upton Sinclair. Leming speaks in part to keep the memory of the park’s radical past alive: “Public space in America, where it hasn’t been eliminated, has been, let’s call it neutered,” he says.

This year, soapboxers will include Erwin Lutzer of Moody Church on “Jesus in the Spin Zone: Why the Early Church Got It Right,” Keith Bolin of the American Corn Growers Association on “Green Fuels/Family Farms” and KittenINFINITE on “Legalize Prostitution.”

The Newberry’s neighborhood has gentrified, and the park is pretty spiffy these days. But it’s comforting that, at least for one day a year, the soapboxers have their say.

The Bughouse Square Debates are Saturday 28 from noon to 4pm. Admission is free; hecklers are welcome. Call 312-255-3700 or visit bloghousesquare.blogspot.com.