The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting by Pocket Guide to Hell (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting by Pocket Guide to Hell Scott Magelssen The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting. By Pocket Guide to Hell. Benton House, Chicago. 25 April 2015. By the sixth match the game had degenerated into chaos. The referees had joined in the scrum, taking the side of the sweating, mustached aggressors. Stray balls knocked spectators’ drinks from their hands. The players slid and stumbled on the beer-slicked floor as balls careened off their bodies in loud smacks. Perhaps the “epic dodgeball battle” achieved what Rebecca Schneider evocatively terms the “touch across time” in reperforming the public demonstration that had taken place 160 years ago near this same spot, when police clashed with Chicago’s Irish and German immigrants—even as the missiles exchanged this night deliberately mismatched the original volley of bullets across the Chicago River. Pocket Guide to Hell’s 1855 Lager Beer Riot “audience interactive” reenactment commemorated the first act of public civil disturbance in Chicago. The April 21st riot (named for the beer popular among German immigrant workers) was motivated by the actions of the American Party (the “Know Nothings,” colloquially) that, although not popular among Chicago’s majority with their ultra-conservative, anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant platforms, had taken control of the mayor’s office and common council with low voter turnout the previous month. Within weeks the Know Nothings banned non-US-born citizens from city employment, closed saloons and beer gardens on Sundays, required liquor licenses to be renewed every three months, and raised the renewal fee from fifty dollars to an impossible $300. The legislation targeted Chicago’s Irish- and German-immigrant saloonkeepers and the six-day-a-week working-class citizens who patronized the saloons for community on their day off. When saloon and beer garden owners’ refusal to close shop on Sundays resulted in several arrests the Irish and Germans took to the streets. The demonstrations climaxed in a confrontation between North Side German immigrants and a posse of Chicago police and volunteer militia over the Chicago River at the Clark Street Bridge. The standoff erupted in a clash of gunfire, with many wounded and one dead, before the police and militia rounded up the protesters. This night’s reenactment took place in the gymnasium of Benton House, a former settlement house and now a Bridgeport neighborhood social-service agency and community center. Pocket Guide to Hell, a “series of interactive and participatory talks, walks, and reenactments dealing with Chicago’s past,” put on the event in coordination with Marz Community Brewing Company and the 2015 Version Arts Festival. The conceit of the reenactment was to pit “10 Chicago Brewers as the Forces of Law and Order” against “10 Bridgeport Citizens as the Irish and German Saloonkeepers,” while everyone in attendance, performers and spectators alike, quaffed any and all of the fifteen kinds of beer supplied by local brewers. Thirty dollars bought admission to the reenactment; fifty dollars bought the chance to play in one of the ten matches. Proceeds for the event benefited the youth and senior programs at Benton House. Click for larger view View full resolution Participants in The 1855 Lager Beer Riot Dodgeball Reenactment and Beer Tasting. (Photo: Roslyn Cohen.) This was not so much fidelity as a camp winking to the past that has come to define Pocket Guide to Hell’s signature form of reenactments. In 2011, for example, Pocket Guide organized a spectacular 125th-anniversary commemoration of the “1886 Haymarket Affair” in which a participants played speakers, anarchists, and police at the site where the law’s attempts to break up a labor rally ended in a violent explosion, allegedly of a bomb hurled into the crowd by the anarchists (a cartoonlike confetti bomb stood in for the real one in the reenactment, although in a more sober turn toward the end, Paul Durica read aloud the names of the victims on all sides). To be sure, contemporary ideals like pro-labor political involvement and the vigilance of Occupy [End Page 716] are the morals here. On this night Edward Marszewski of Marz Brewing, in a wine-colored waistcoat...