author of Man and Wife in America, Someday All This Will Be Yours, and The Trouble with Minna, among other books.
Hartog applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Nobody's Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic, and reported the following:
Nobody’s Boy and His Pals: The Story of Jack Robbins and the Boys Brotherhood Republic explores how Jack Robbins, an itinerant radical and tobacco salesman, started an alternative legal institution, Chicago’s Boy’s Brotherhood Republic (the BBR). The Boys’ Brotherhood Republic was a so-called republic run entirely by poor adolescent boys. It flourished in Chicago between 1914 and World War II. The book moves between Jack Robbins’s own life and legacy, which continued on into Cold War America, and the work of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic in “saving” boys from the clutches of reform schools and juvenile courts and the police. Along the way, it uncovers several large themes in modern American history and culture, including themes of historical changes in childhood and adolescence, state power and violence, care, community, race and ethnicity, sexuality, wealth, radical politics, and civil liberties.Learn more about Nobody's Boy and His Pals at the University of Chicago Press website.
Page 99 occurs in the middle of the third chapter, following a chapter that describes the “boy problem” in Progressive Era America. This third chapter details the constitutional structure of the BBR and recounts several episodes in the early days of the BBR, in the period 1914 to 1918. One of those episodes was about how the BBR used the tragic story of young William Ulrey. Page 99 concludes that episode, though the next page includes an image about the story, drawn from the Chicago Tribune.
Here is William Ulrey’s story, slightly condensed:In the summer of 1916, Ulrey, a twelve-year-old boy, still too young to join but on the waiting list to become a citizen of the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic (BBR), was killed on the grounds of the very elite Saddle and Cycle Club, on Lake Michigan. He died of lockjaw or tetanus poisoning, after a gardener, Nicholas Moga, threw pruning shears at him. Ulrey had been trespassing on club property.The episode illustrates central themes in the book: about how the press talked about the boys, and about the lingering political radicalism of their organization. I’m not sure that one can draw conclusions about the book as a whole either from the episode or from page 99, though, since Nobody’s Boy and His Pals tells an unfolding story.
What had happened? At the gardener’s trial, two companions of the boy testified how they had left one beach to go to the pier at the Edgewater Hotel, so that they could dive. They had received permission to cross the Saddle and Cycle Club’s grounds and its fenced-off beach to get there. When they wanted to go home, the waves were too heavy for them to swim around the grounds. They knew they would be arrested if they walked on the road in their swimsuits. So they decided to recross the club’s grounds, near the lake, where they thought they would not bother anyone. When they encountered Moga, the gardener, they asked him for permission. Instead he chased them, and, when it looked like they were getting away, he threw the shears at Ulrey (or Ulrich), wounding him on both sides of his spine.
The BBR turned the story into a critique of clubs like the Saddle and Cycle Club. At a general meeting, the boy citizenry voted first to offer their aid to the state prosecutor. Still, prosecuting Moga was a secondary concern. They planned to gather fifty thousand signatures in a petition to protest the “silk stocking” directors of the club who insisted that their gardener had the right to hurl heavy shears at a little boy because he was a trespasser. One speech at the meeting questioned whether any property was so “sacred” that a boy could be killed for trespassing on it. Another speech, given by Harry Branovitz, by then the BBR mayor, began, “A boy has been murdered because he had the nerve to trespass on grounds which belong to a club for men who probably never did a lick of work.” According to the Chicago Examiner, the BBR had undertaken “a finish fight” for “freedom for boys” and for the “immortal boy’s right of trespass.” This was their “first great fight for boys’ rights.” The BBR emphasized that it wanted to indict the cold-blooded directors who were using their wealth and influence to suppress the story, rather than the laborer, who was doing their bidding. “Please make clear,” said the BBR city clerk, “that it is not our intention to prosecute Moga. It is to protect boys.”
Apparently, Ulrey’s father was angry that the BBR had abandoned the prosecution of Moga. A citizen of the BBR responded in the Day Book: “Would it bring your boy back if this man was sent to prison? Would you derive any benefits if this man was taken away from his family?” Jack Robbins made a statement that continued that theme. The boys of the BBR were “humanitarians,” not “prosecutors.” Thus they were less interested in sending a poor worker to jail. Moga, he thought had merely intended to scare Ulrey, and it seemed to Robbins that he was not getting “a square deal.” Still, “We don’t want it understood . . . that we are conceding the property of the Saddle and Cycle Club where Ulrey was injured as private. The grounds, in our estimation, are public, but Moga was employed there.” Moga, Robbins concluded, had lost his temper because in his ignorance he did not know “the ways of the American boy.”
Soon, the story of Ulrey’s death became a negotiating opportunity to open up the beaches of the city. In December, the citizens of the BBR once again insisted that they were not after Moga. They wanted to ensure “that both sides in the trial get fair treatment.” What they would continue to fight for, however, was “the right to use the property in front of the Saddle and Cycle club.” They believed it was public property, and the club had “no right to hog it and drive boys away.” The BBR hired an attorney. They drafted a petition to various state officials asking them to determine exactly what rights boys had to use the various beaches in the city and whether a private club had the right to put up barbed wire to keep nonmembers out from what was, they insisted, public property. [99 begins here] Relying on an opinion by a member of the Illinois Rivers and Lakes Commission, that the lakeshore in front of the club was public property (“The riparian rights of the property owner along the shore give him simply access to the lake, but no special privileges”), the BBR circulated petitions to be presented to Chicago’s mayor.
At the end of July, the Day Book ran a longer article about the Saddle and Cycle Club’s beach, about its fences and the guards who kept “common bathers” from “profaning” the sands of the club.” Not that the beach was being used. The next beach over was crowded, but the “swells” of the club found lake bathing “too common” for their taste. When the Day Book’s reporter walked by the club after taking a swim in the lake, he saw Colin C. Fyffe drive by in his “costly car.” Fyffe was the “attorney to millionaires and million dollar corporations,” and he was leading the Saddle and Cycle Club’s fight to keep boys out. But he never used the beach, either.
By early August, the BBR’s attorney had met with Chicago’s corporation counsel. According to him, the Saddle and Cycle Club’s assertion of ownership of the beach violated federal law, laws governing navigable waters, the state’s river and lakes law, and the police powers of the city. He didn’t think the club had “a leg to stand on” when it ran a barbed-wire fence into Lake Michigan and claimed that “the boys of the city must not go upon the beach behind that fence.” The attorney thought the “proper beginning” would be for the city to condemn the land along the lakefront to become a park or a public beach. But he also noted: “If the corporation [of Chicago] does not act, the Boys’ Brotherhood Republic will, . . . and it will start condemnation proceedings.” He was preparing a brief that would be used to open up the beaches of Wilmette, further up the North Shore of Lake Michigan.
The Jewish newspaper Sentinel praised the “remarkable methods” of the BBR, an organization founded, as the paper noted, by a “co-religionist, who was formerly an inmate of a reform school,” and “maintained by an unusually aggressive group of young Jews living on the West Side.” Instead of devising “gang methods” with the object of “getting even” violently, as a Gentile juvenile group might have done, the case was being handled as if by “the most capable lawyers.” All should be surprised and pleased at the legal sense and ability of the boys. Whether they succeeded or not, they had triumphed “in revealing to all how law abiding such boys can be.”
On the other hand, as if to prove that they had not become entirely moderate and law-abiding, on the first anniversary of the boy Ulrey’s death, the BBR citizenry marched onto the grounds of the Saddle and Cycle Club as a memorial to his death.[99 ends here] They marched through once and attempted to do so a second time. But the police were called to stop them. The boys prepared to “storm” a fence put up to keep them out. “A juvenile riot impended,” according to the Chicago Tribune. But then, in the nick of time, the president of the Saddle and Cycle Club gave the boys permission to swim on the club’s beach. The threat of violence had worked. And the boys showed their gifts for civil disobedience along with their legal skills.
--Marshal Zeringue
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