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| Arrest Notifications, various selections |
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| drawing, untitled |
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| Membership list, Dill Pickle Club |
The Newberry Library's manuscript collection hosts a wide variety of materials from the Dill Pickle Club. Included in this post are a few of those images. The collection includes around 30 different arrest notifications, the kind of slips that would have been handed by the arresting officer to the person being arrested. All of the notifications are pertaining to arrests of two different men: Daniel Finucane and John A. Jones. The charges are for 4 or 5 different crimes, indicated by their code in the index of Illinois laws. John A. Jones could either be the formal name or a relative of the manager of the club during the 20s and 30s, referred to in other documents as Jack Jones. Once I can find the necessary resources required to decipher what exactly those charges are for, I believe these arrest notifications will be greatly significant in my project at large. There were only 4 different arresting officers, and the arrests often happened on several consecutive days. Without any other context, it would appear that the members of the Dill Pickle Club were being genuinely harassed by the Chicago Police Department. I also plan on pursuing the membership list, shown to the right, as a means of tracking down other information about those involved in events at the Dill Pickle Club. Because so much was happening there, in terms of gay activism, leftist activism, communist activities, intellectual discussions, and a myriad of other events that would all be discussed in the adjacent Washington Square Park (then referred to as Bughouse Square), there is a plethora of stories hiding behind those names. I think this will really help paint an accurate picture of what the major point of gay population was like in the early 20th century. As an additional bonus, I threw in a doodle that I found that was labeled as "untitled drawing" with an unknown author. The paper appeared to have been folded several times and was well-worn. It is part of a large number of drawings, sketches, and political cartoons done by members of the Dill Pickle Club that show the culture and atmosphere among its members.
All images are credited to the Newberry Library's Special Collections.
I love this post! Especially the drawing. Whoever did it has some artistic talent, for sure. Hundu gods? What? What happens if you put the doodle into the context of the arrest records?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think it’s hard to identify actual harassment based on a few arrest records. What exactly leads you from the arrest stuff to that conclusion?