History on Display: Capturing A German Submarine at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry
U-505 Conning Tower @ The Museum of Science and Industry
It is a truth universally acknowledged that if a major attraction is within a five-minute drive* of your home, you will seldom if ever visit it.
It is not true that I have never visited Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, which is one of the major landmarks in my neighborhood.** My first two summers as a very poor graduate student, I would visit the museum regularly because it was air-conditioned, free, and a nice change from the university library.
But until last night, I had never visited one of the museum’s major exhibits, the U-505 submarine.*** If you want the short version: wow!
The exhibit has two major components. A significant portion of the exhibit demonstrates how a submarine works. This stuff is clear and often fun: think an interactive periscope-navigation section. But the biggest part of the exhibit—and the part I was there to see—was the story of how a U.S. Navy Task Group captured the U-505 off the coast of West Africa, and why it was important. The MSI approached that story in several different ways: a film clip that included the respective commanders of the submarine and the American task force talking about the capture from their own perspectives, panels and timelines that traced the voyages of the U-505and the American ships, artifacts from the submarine (including what I assume was a replica of the Enigma machine from the submarine ), and a tour of the captured submarine itself. ****
Here are the big things I came away with:
- Life on a submarine was miserable and dangerous.
- The Navy captured the U-505 on June 4, 1944—two days before D-Day. The German submarine not only carried an Enigma machine and related code books, but lots of other critical information.
- Because of the proximity to D-Day and the value of the captured information, the United States decided not to inform Germany that we had captured the submarine, leaving the families of the 59 sailors aboard believing that their sons/husbands/fathers/brothers had died at sea. I understand the thought process, but this was a definite breach of the Geneva Convention.
- The task force towed the submarine through open seas to the nearest safe harbor, which was Bermuda, 2500 miles away. (I still can’t get my head around the idea that there wasn’t someplace closer.)
If you’re coming to Chicago, or if, like me you live in Chicago but haven’t gotten yourself to the exhibit, I urge you to put this exhibit on your schedule. If Chicago isn’t in the cards, check out the on-line information from the museum HERE.
*Ten minutes, tops.
**Along with the University of Chicago, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House and, more recently, President Obama’s house—depending on the interests of the person asking.
***I still haven’t visited the coal mine exhibit. Which may also be spectacular.
****Book a time slot for the tour ahead. For obvious reasons, each time slot can only accommodate a small number of people. And while I watched a glamorous young woman navigate the submarine with total ease in four-inch sparkling heels, I would recommend flat, non-slippery shoes.
Eugene V. Debs: Socialist for President, Over and Over Again
Labor organizer Eugene V. Debs was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1855. He left home when he was fourteen to work for the railroad—not unusual for the time. In 1875, he helped organize a local lodge of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Fireman, a fraternal benefit society which gradually took on the role of a trade union. He rose rapidly in the organization, becoming its national secretary and treasurer in 1880.
In 1893, Debs took labor organization one step further, when he successfully united railway workers from different crafts into the first industrial union in the United States, the American Railway Union. As the union’s first president, he successfully led its members in a strike for higher wages from the Great Northern Railway in April 1894. The national press gave him the nickname “King” Debs.
In June, “King” Debs and the union were in the news again in the great Pullman Strike. As a result of financial reverses in the panic of 1893, the Pullman Palace Car Company cut its wages by 25 percent, but did not cut rents for company-owned workers’ housing in Pullman, Illinois, the company town near (now in) Chicago. Many workers and their families faced starvation. Local members of the union sent a delegation to Pullman’s president, George M. Pullman, to present their grievances about low wages, poor working conditions and sixteen-hour work days. Pullman refused to meet with them.
The Pullman workers voted to strike and walked off the job on May 11, 1894. At its June meeting, the American Railway Union’s national council called for a nationwide boycott of trains carrying Pullman cars until the company submitted the dispute to arbitration by June 26. The company was unwilling to play.
Within four days, union locals in twenty-seven states went out on sympathy strikes, affecting twenty-nine railroads. Illinois governor John P. Altgeld sympathized with the strikers and initially refused call out the militia, so the railroads’ management called on the deferral government for help. On July 2, U.S. Attorney General Richard Olney got an injunction against the strike from local judges on the grounds that the union was impeding mail service and interstate commerce. (1) Union leaders ignored the injunction. On July 4, President Grover Cleveland ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago. The strike ended within a week and troops were recalled on July 20.(2)
The Pullman Strike was a critical event in American labor history. It was also a turning point for Debs. He was arrested at the height of the violence and ultimately sentenced to six months in jail for contempt of court and conspiring to interfere with the U.S. mail. During his prison terms at Woodstock, Illinois, Debs read broadly. Introduced for the first time to the works of Karl Marx,(4) he came to see the labor movement as a struggle between classes.
After announcing his conversion to socialism in 1897, Debs helped found the Social Democratic party, which was renamed the Socialist Party in 1901. Debs ran as the Socialist Party candidate for President five times between 1900 and 1920.His highest populist vote came in 1920, when he received about 915,000 popular votes. (But no votes in the electoral college.) (5) He was in prison at the time, serving a sentence for criticizing the federal government’s use of the 1917 Sabotage and Espionage Act against labor activists.
He was released from prison in 1921 by presidential order. His citizenship, which he lost in 1918 when he was convicted of sedition (for labor activism) , was posthumously restored in 1976.
(1) Unfortunately for the strikers, they derailed a locomotive attached to a U.S. mail train. And as you know, neither snow, nor sleet nor striking railway workers can stop the U.S. Postal service from its appointed rounds.
(2) A lot happened in between the arrival of the troops and the end of the strike. Altgeld and Cleveland sent piss-y telegrams back and forth. Strikers rioted and destroyed lots of property. More federal troops arrived. State militia arrived. National guardsmen fired into the crowd, killing several strikers.(3) It was a busy week.
(3)When will people learn that is a bad idea? It never turns out well.
(4) Obviously a well-stocked prison library.
(5) Just to put this in context: the winner, Warren G. Harding, received 16,513,200 popular votes.
A Picture is Worth A Thousand Words: World War II in Infographics
I have said it here before, and I will doubtless say it again: I hoard collect reference books. There is something about the words “atlas,” “dictionary,” or “encyclopedia” in a title that causes me to stop and take a second look at a remainder table, second hand bookstore or library sale.* I own dictionaries for languages I don’t know, historical atlases for many times and places, an encyclopedia of gods from different cultures, a dictionary of twentieth century culture that I’ve never opened, a book on the principles of statistics that has come in handy more than once, and an odd little volume by Barbara Ann Kipfer titled The Order of Things: How Everything in the World is Organized into Hierarchies, Structures and Pecking Orders that I have turned to more often than I would have thought possible. If pushed to explain, I’ll claim that they are part of my working library. Sometimes it’s even true .
All of which is a long way of saying I was thrilled when a review copy of World War II Infographics landed on my desk several months ago.
Created by a team of historians and data designers, led by Jean Lopez, the managing editor of Guerres & Histoire (War & History) magazine, World War II Infographics tells the history of that war entirely through well-designed graphics.
World War II Infographics is visually stunning, but this is not a picture book. Its 357 maps and infographs provide a data-rich examination of 53 topics, beginning with the fall of democracies across Europe in the period between the two world wars and ending with unrest and independence in Europe’s colonial empires after the war.
Whether considering aircraft production statistics, Soviet military losses, or desert campaigns in the Sahara, World War II Infographics uses geopolitical, economic, demographic and military data, organizing each topic in ways that ask new questions about familiar information and often provide new answers to familiar questions.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I want to see what I can learn about the RAF bombing of Berlin in 194o. After all, World War II Infographics is part of my working library.
*I have a special fondness for the weird and quirky reference books that don’t survive on standard bookstore shelves
Part of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.