Abstract
Increasing school attendance and shifting tax burdens in Chicago spawned a fiscal crisis that grew throughout the late nineteenth century and culminated in the collapse of public schools during the “payless paydays” of the 1930s. The actors pitted against each other in the struggle over tax policy were newly unionized teachers, who flaunted their affiliation with labor and the working class, and a loose coalition of attorneys representing railroad, utility, bank, and real estate interests. The stalemate created on the floor of the Illinois General Assembly and in the courts of law eventually triggered, during the Depression of the 1930s, the mechanism for the collapse of urban public finance.
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Notes
Minutes of the Chicago Teachers’ Federation, 1897, Chicago Teachers’ Federation Collection. Chicago Historical Society. For the history of the CTF and the Chicago school system, see Marjorie Murphy, “From Artisan to Semi-Professional: White Collar Unionism among Chicago Public School Teachers, 1870–1930,” Diss. University of California—Davis 1981;
Cherry Wedgwood Collins, “Schoolmen, Schoolma’ams and School Boards: The Struggle for Power in Urban School Systems in the Progressive Era,” Diss. Harvard University 1976;
Robert L. Reid, “The Professionalization of Public School Teachers: The Chicago Experience, 1895–1920,” Diss. Northwestern University 1968;
David Hogan, “Capitalism and Schooling: A History of the Political Economy of Education in Chicago, 1880–1930,” Diss. University of Illinois—Urbana 1978.
Forty-fourth Annual Report of the Board of Education … 1898 ( Chicago: John F. Higgins, 1898), pp. 11–12; Mary J. Herrick, The Chicago Schools: A Social and Political History (Beverly Hills, Calif: Sage Pub., 1971), pp. 96–100.
George S. Counts, School and Society in Chicago (New York: Harcourt, 1928) pp. 36–40.
For the Civic Federation and other urban reform groups, see James E. Herget, “Democracy Revisited: The Law and School Districts in Illinois.” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 72 (1979), 136–38;
Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency, Chicago School Finances, 1915–1925 (Chicago: Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency, 1927);
Michael Patrick McCarthy, “Businessmen and Professionals in Municipal Reform: The Chicago Experience, 1887–1920,” Diss. Northwestern University 1970, pp. 58–59;
Donald David Marks, “Polishing the Gem of the Prairie: The Evolution of Civic Reform Consciousness in Chicago, 1874–1900,” Diss. University of Wisconsin, 1974, pp. 89–201;
Stephen D. London, “Business and the Chicago Public School System, 1890–1966,” Diss. University of Chicago 1968.
See also Homer Hoyt, One Hundred Years of Land Values in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1933), pp. 207–08, 351–53.
A similar bill, also sponsored by Juul, had earlier passed the Senate but failed in the House: Senate Journal, 41 G.A. (1899), pp. 122, 254; House Journal, 41 G.A. (1899), pp. 317, 907–08; Laws of Illinois, 42 G.A. (1901), pp. 272–74; Laws of Illinois, 40 GA., Spec. Sess. (1897–1898), pp. 34–54 (Sec. 49 was the provision later declared unconstitutional); John Murray Haig, A History of the General Property Tax in Illinois, University of Illinois Studies in the Social Sciences, Vol. 3 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1914), p. 190; Knopf v. The People, 185 Illinois 20 (1900).
J. A. Fairlie, A Report on the Taxation and Revenue System of Illinois, Prepared for the Special Tax Commission (Danville: Illinois Printing Co., 1910), p. 16.
Forty-sixth Annual Report of the Board of Education … 1900 (Chicago: Hack & Anderson, 1901), pp. 143–46; Counts, pp. 90–92. Later tax reformers characterized the CTF approach to tax reform as “narrow” because of the union’s search for revenues. See Herbert D. Simpson, Tax Racket and Tax Reform in Chicago (Chicago: Institute for Economic Research, Northwestern University, 1930), pp. 112–24. For more on the tax system in Illinois, see the following reports of the Educational Finance Inquiry Commission, all published by Macmillan in 1924: Nelson B. Henry, A Study of Public School Costs in Illinois Cities; Floyd W. Reeves, The Political Unit of Public School Finance in Illinois; and Henry C. Morrison, The Financing of Public Schools in the State of Illinois
Ray Ginger, Altgeld’s America: The Lincoln Ideal Versus Changing Realities (Chicago: Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1958), pp. 169–83; Stormy Years: The Autobiography of Carter H. Harrison, Five Times Mayor of Chicago (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1935), pp. 110–208.
Dominic Candeloro, “The Chicago School Board Crisis of 1907,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 68 (1975), 397–401; Laws of Illinois, 46 G.A. (1909), pp. 323–25.
Laws of Illinois, 48 G.A. (1913), pp. 517–19, 519–20; Haley, “Stenographic Report of an Address to the Public Ownership League, Chicago,” Aug. 28, 1915, Chicago Teachers’ Federation Papers; Albert Nelson Marquis, ed., The Book of Chicagoans: A Biographical Dictionary (Chicago: A. N. Marquis & Co., 1917), pp. 587, 718.
L. F. Merrill, “A Report Concerning the Plans of 596 Children on Leaving Eighth Grade,” Chicago Schools Journal, 5 (1922–1923), 156.
David Hogan, “The Making of the Working Class in Chicago,” History of Education Quarterly, 18 (1978), 227–70;
Michael Katz, “Who Went to School?” ibid., 12 (1972), 432–53. The rise in home ownership is evident in the Chicago census reports from 1900 to 1930.
Robert A. Nottenberg, “The Relationship of Organized Labor to Public School Legislation in Illinois, 1880–1948,” Diss. University of Chicago 1952, pp. 51–60.
See, for example, Joan K. Smith, “Progressive School Administration: Ella Flagg Young and the Chicago Schools, 1905–1915,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 73 (1980), 27–44.
John A. Vieg, The Government of Education in Metropolitan Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1939); Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency, Chicago School Finances, 1915–1925.
David Tyack. The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 182–83.
Herrick, pp. 188–243; George D. Strayer, comp., Report of the Survey of the Schools of Chicago, Illinois, 5 vols. (New York: Bureau of Publications, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1932). For the teachers’ view of junior high schools from 1919 to 1925, see Margaret A. Haley’s Bulletin, and The New Majority.
Lyman B. Burbank, “Chicago Public Schools and the Depression Years of 1928–1937,” Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, 64 (1971), 365–81; Herrick, pp. 177–257; and the testimony of teachers in Hearings Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Manufacturers, United States Senate, 72nd Congress, 1st Session, May 9, 1932 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1932), pp. 48–51.
Studs Terkel, Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression (New York: Random House, 1970), pp. 388–89.
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© 2005 John L. Rury
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Murphy, M. (2005). Taxation and Social Conflict: Teacher Unionism and Public School Finance in Chicago, 1898–1934. In: Rury, J.L. (eds) Urban Education in the United States. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403981875_8
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