Editor's Note

Abstract

TOUCHING THE GREAT LAKES and plunging into the South, the State of Illinois offers tremendous diversity. What it lacks in geographical variation is more than compensated through a rich blend of people, places, customs, and of course, a past that reveals the conflicts, clashes, and compromises marking our life as a nation. As Americans of the early twenty-first century redefine themselves in a changing world, Illinois's shared past opens insights.This combined Summer/Fall issue of the Journal illustrates a state's history from the battles between local breweries in Rock Island to Black workers’ response to bitter discrimination, exclusion, and violence to the competing visions of Czech Americans and Czech nationalists at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. These pages reveal the struggles of a headstrong, courageous to the point of foolhardiness veteran of the Philippines war and the improbable rise of an unassuming immigrant to leadership in the Capone mob and its successors.Michael W. Dean explains the hopes of both Czech Americans and Czech nationalists at home in the old Austro-Hungarian Empire as they focused on Bohemian Day at Chicago's 1893 exhibition. Chicago, he notes, had the largest population of Czech immigrants in the United States. Here we find the roots of future political involvement by Bohemians producing leaders and, eventually, a governor. Native Illinoisan and US Army officer F. S. Wild, was, as J. T. Murphy demonstrates, a complicated individual—resenting perceived slights, taking great personal risks in combat, and unable to successfully adapt to peacetime conditions after his service in the Philippines. We find a man most at home in combat and frustrated when not under fire.The complicated, sometimes violent, history of race relations in Illinois, particularly in the workplace and on picket lines emerges in Alonzo Ward's “‘A Revolution in Labor’: African Americans and Hybrid Labor Activism in Illinois during the Early Jim Crow Era.” Contrary to the once-prevalent portrayal of Black workers acting as scabs during mining and other labor disputes, Ward offers a complicated picture, including Black unionism and hopes—unrealized until later—of successful biracial labor organizing. Braden Neihart, in his work on Rock Island's “beer wars” between 1896 and 1907, unveils an often overlooked area of study—the brewing and marketing of beer. It is, he writes, an “important avenue to explore American history and the negotiations disparate groups undertook to navigate power relations.” Contests such as the ones he examines in Rock Island demonstrate the “messiness” of monopolies and capitalism.Finally, James S. Pula explores the unlikely rise of a man who bragged that he never carried a gun to a leadership position in the Al Capone gangster enterprise. Jacob “Greasy Thumb” Guzik not only outlasted his benefactor but played a key role in expanding Mob enterprises after the end of Prohibition. This issue's Special Projects contribution comes from Timothy Dean Draper, who interviews Jon Lauck, a leader in the revival of midwestern studies.These pages provide evidence of Illinois's diverse, complex story—stories requiring multiple perspectives. We hope you will find such multivariegated slices of history interesting. As always, let us know what you think.