Der Geist issue 4 is now available! That creates a total of 724 pages of egoism from 1845 to 1945, with “lost” works reprinted, new translations every issue, rare photos and images, and new research and writing.

Available from: Underworld Amusements | Amazon.com | Amazon.UK | Barnes & Noble | Bookshop.org

In this issue, a previously undiscovered speech by Ragnar Redbeard; original translations of Max Stirner and Malfew Seklew; rare reproductions from Dora Marsden and Friedrich Nietzsche; individualists and eccentrics versus the KKK; and more.

DER GEIST, The Journal of Egoism from 1845 – 1945
ISSUE 4
Spring 2021
Paperback, 172 pages, fifteen dollars
ISBN 978-1944651-21-3
ISSN 2639-5339

Just north of Towertown, on the outskirts of the elegant Gold Coast, was the famous Dill Pickle Club, establish to provide a theater in which poets could recite their verses. [Founder Jack] Jones often found it necessary, however, to tailor the presentation for the audience that was present, and typical nightclub entertainment was not uncommon. “I give the audience the high-brow stuff until the crowd begins to grow thin,” he explained, “and then I turn on the sex faucet.” […] Several attempts were made during the 1920’s to commercialize the Towertown bohemia. One such enterprise was a seventy-five-cent “Seeing Bohemia” tour, during which patrons were conducted through tearooms and studios decorated for the occasion in a bizarre fashion. The Dill Pickle Club reportedly staged raids, at least a few times, and later increased its admissions charge as a come-on to those who expected to see legally forbidden activities. [With] the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt of the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity… The gangsters did not appall the writers and journalists the way they did most men; they knew them personally; Chicago was a a jungle anyway, and Prohibition was decidedly unpopular.

The Search for “Chicago’s Great Soul”

When Chicago was the intellectual and literary heart of America — and incredibly it once was — its nerve center was a rambling old barn in back of 876 1/2 North Dearborn Parkway, or, more specifically, at 18 Tooker Place. You walked down an alley and found, between two piles of ash cans, a short narrow door bearing the sign, “Step high, bend low and leave your dignity behind,” and you had arrived at the Dill Pickle Club.

It lasted from 1917 to 1932, a span of years which marks almost exactly the rise, decline, and fall of any authentic cultural vigor the city ever saw, reflecting too the glare of the wild and uproarious twenties with sound effects by tommy gun.

The Dill Pickle Club started as a high-souled movement of revolution, and the early group included Jack Jones, one of the I.W.W. founders; poet Carl Sandburg; Jim Larkin and Jack Carney, two Irish revolutionaries; William Z. Foster and Jack Johnston, two American Communists; writers Ben Hecht and Alfred Kreymborg; and Stanley Sokolsky, the sculptor.

Initially, it was the idea of Larkin, a former commander in chief of the Irish Republican Army and one of the warriors in the Irish revolution of 1916 headed by Padraic Pearce; he started it in memory of a Dublin club as a sort of rallying point of young revolutionaries.

But its Moses and leading light from beginning to end was “Dynamiter Jack” Jones, a Canadian-born, sharp-featured, bushy-haired union organizer, a house painter by trade and creative painter by hobby. First married to Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, still a well-known Communist, Jones authored a book called Techup, which became the model plan for the C. I. O. ‘s industrial unionization. His life was studded with tragedy; shortly after the advent of the Dill Pickle Club, Jones married a beautiful young socialite artist. Sailing north on Lake Michigan for a honeymoon trip, their craft was overturned in a sudden storm. Jones clung to his bride and the capsized boat for a herculean eighteen hours, but she was drowned and he near death when aid finally reached them.

The Dill Pickle Club quickly became a hangout for literary and artistic rebels, and the Hobo College crowd moved over from the West Side. It was a hodgepodge, sometimes wild-eyed collection of little theater folk, flappers, society leaders, anarchists, hoboes, and writers, but the most alive and stimulating group ever assembled beneath a Chicago roof. It was, in short, a synthesis, a comradely coming together of the most imaginative and daring souls from every walk of life: the minister met the prostitute, the labor leader knew the editor, the politician met his constituents, the college student found the philosopher, the sociologist studied the criminal, the criminal discovered the beauty of art and perhaps a lawyer, and the writers found treasure beyond belief. The writers included Hecht, shaping his Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, Sandburg playing his banjo, Charles MacArthur, Manuel Komroff, Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Ring Lardner, Maxwell Bodenheim, Edgar Lee Masters, Vachel Lindsay, Henry Justin Smith, Austin O’Malley, John Drury, and many others; and they were joined by attorney Clarence Darrow, artist Edgar Miller, and actor Richard Bennett, father of Joan and Constance.

The declared intention of the Dill Pickle Club was to “find Chicago’s great soul.” Another purpose, said Dr. Ben Reitman, long its lecture chairman, was “to elevate the minds of the people to a lower level.” He added:

“We of the Dill Pickle Club believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men, and thinkers. Some of us practice free love and free love and some medicine. Many of us have gone through religion and tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.”

As many as seven hundred people often crowded into the Sunday night lecture meetings, and no topic was barred. Here poets read their own verses; artists talked Dadaism, futuristic abstracts, and Picasso; and experts discussed Vorticism, Freud, psychoanalysis, free love, and companionate marriage. You could get any ideas off your chest, whether you were a paroled convict, a concert musician, an unwed mother, a psychiatrist, a reformed vegetarian, or a three- headed guinea pig. You could advocate murder and arson. In a period when women were revolting against a prudery that was almost obscene in its inversion of truth and lascivious whispering silences, the “inside stuff on sex” was a big draw; the largest crowd that ever attended a lecture came to hear Magnus Hershfield when he discussed sexual abnormalities. It was the heyday of gabby greatness, and a Dill Pickle audience might hear General Coxy (of Coxy’s Army), Tom Mooney’s brother John, Frederick Cook, the uncrowned discoverer of the North Pole, Chicago Mayor “Big Bill” Thompson, con man “Yellow Kid” Weil, “Big Bill” Heywood, evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Eugene Debs, and Emma Goldman.

The heckling was devastating. If the visitor didn’t leave his dignity intact outside, as the motto warned, it was battered beyond recognition inside. The detractors used powerful eloquence, vulgar sarcasm, biting wit, and Marxist logic. Lucy Page Gaston, who came to lecture against cigarettes, said later it was “the most awful adventure of my life.” When she was through, Statistical Slim unstuck himself from his chair, opined nastily about reformers in general, then announced:

“I never smoked a cigarette in my life. Always been a snuff user. But after hearin’ this woman and lookin’ into her face, I’m gonna start smokin’. Has anybody got a cigarette?” Then Chairman Reitman ordered two collections taken up, one for the Anti-Cigarette League and the other to buy cigarettes for pacifists then serving jail sentences. Lucy was “infinitely disgusted.”

The collections couldn’t have amounted to much. The Dill Picklers, gathered about the old pot-bellied stove in their old barn, were a proud proletariat, hugging their poverty. Once, some bandits wandered in and relieved the whole assembly of a total $1.02 except for one embarrassed gentleman who parted with $875. The Picklers explained hastily he wasn’t a regular.

Lizzie Davis, then queen of the hoboes, once introduced a speaker as “the famous New York gangster who ran Al Capone out of Brooklyn.” Even the Dill Picklers were skeptical until they heard later that “Wild Bill” Lovett had been killed in New York. He was wanted for fourteen murders. Lizzie, who wanted to be a writer, knew innumerable gangsters, thieves, prostitutes, con men, and hop-heads. She often sat all night talking with them. Sometimes she didn’t talk; she just stayed all night.

In addition to the serious intellectuals, the club attracted a fantastic assortment of guests; it was the rendezvous of high low-brows and low high-brows, long-haired boys and short-haired girls. There was Lena, a little old lady with a poke bonnet and a half-dozen underskirts, widow of the hanged August Spies; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Van Cina, the Dutch artist vittles and vice and piccolo player; Paddy Caroll from Hell’s Half Acre; a Spanish spiritualist who shaved off her hair and dyed her head green; and Reitman, in a frock coat, his red shirt showing beneath a Windsor tie, demanding silence while his wife read her poem, “I Am a Woman, Wee,” about standing in the light and looking toward the sun and cosmic love.

Reitman, a physician, an ex-anarchist press agent for Emma Goldman and once a foe of matrimony, also presided over a forum when six young women, “authorities on the subject,” discussed the faults and errors of the matrimonially-inclined male.

“Long practice has shown these ladies just where the man falls down when wooing women,” explained Reitman.

Once an unmarried pregnant girl was presented for the audience to decide her fate, suicide or abortion, but there are no records of the verdict.

At one time an unnamed patron was going to donate $250,000 for a club building; the first floor was to be used for a forum, a little theater, and a dance hall; the second and third floors would contain rent-free quarters for struggling young artists. The quarter of a mil- lion in cash never materialized, but miraculously, the group managed to follow that general plan of action in its ramshackle old carriage house. The Dill Picklers presented plays salvaged from the purgatory shelf which couldn’t appear in legitimate theaters: Dreiser’s labor drama, The Girl in the Coffin, Pendleton King’s Cocaine, Padraic Pearce’s The Singer, and a Russian refugee performed Salome and the Dance of the Seven Veils.

Death by violence was no stranger among the Dill Pickle members. In a period of revolt, it occurs among rebels whether there is physical revolution or not. Life and ideas run at a furious pace, and sometimes the pace is too great. One poet got a cop’s bullet in the neck while trying to break into a store one night to get paper to write his poems. Another arranged for a drinking wake and then put a bullet in his head. Harry Batter had left an estate of four hundred dollars with instructions to spend fifty dollars to bury him and drink up the balance. It was the most popular wake Chicago ever had.

A minister, Dr. Thornton A. Mills, once pastor of the New England Congregational church at Delaware and Dearborn, in the same block as the Dill Pickle club, constantly defended Jones, and it cost him his parish. To the distaste and alarm of his fashionable flock, he believed that the membership of his wealthy church needed augmenting, and he saw a field of service among the Dill Picklers; he felt they could be brought into his fold and re-educated. His first wife divorced him, and his third suicide try was successful.

Of course the Dill Pickle Club spawned its branch temples. Eddie Clasby opened the Seven Arts Club (among the arts were Vice, Vulgarity, Sacrilege, and Midnight Slumming), Berty Weber’s House of Blazes was the most disreputable branch. Big John’s Coal Scuttle, Dick Vail’s Blue Fish, Berger’s House of Correction, and Monty Randall’s Montparnasse were all poor imitators. Even today, on North Clark Street, there is a latter-day remnant of the Dill Pickle called the College of Complexes.

The Dill Pickle itself began coming apart at the seams about 1931. The Chicago press had constantly derided them, but conceded at the end that, of the 57 varieties, the Dill Pickle Club was most entertaining. The newspapers accused them of plotting “the over-throw of New York’s Greenwich Village and the Latin Quarter in Paris… with pink-shaded lamps, black cats, incense and Turkish cigarettes.” Actually, they could afford no fancier trappings than ten-cent egg sandwiches. It was strictly “Art for Art’s sake. We’re going to make Chicago the center of intellectual expression, the Mecca of the free-minded,” they insisted to the last.

The hecklers were supplanted by people who hurled rotten vegetables at the speakers; one night, Dr. Reitman was kidnapped, robbed, and beaten. At the end, members were hounded by cops (Jones had 150 arrest slips the last winter), landlords, gangsters, Prohibition agents, and finally the Internal Revenue department. Through the years, Dill Picklers had constant run-ins with Volstead officials, though there was never any bootlegging; indeed, it was unnecessary, as the visitors brought their own flasks, and Jones sold ginger ale. Then the government revenue men decided, after fifteen years, the club was not “educational” but for profit, though Jack Jones was still yelling his heart out when the final decision came in. But the denouement was a typical Chicago climax: hoodlums tried to horn in and seize control of the club. It started when five gangsters tried to collect a “Capone defense fund”; they wanted to install their mobsters to act as short-change waiters, serve bootleg liquor, and see that the proper crooks got their proper cut. Jones refused to pay vittles and vice off. Suddenly a swarm of city inspectors descended on him and decided he’d been breaking the law for years. Jones finally closed the club himself rather than turn it over to underworld operation.

“Dynamiter Jack” then got a job in a WPA printing project and used to hang around Bughouse Square in the evening, in the shadow of the raucous old glory that was the Dill Pickle Club. He died, broken and unknown, in 1940, followed by Reitman in 1943. The next year there was one last election for the presidency of the non- existent Dill Pickle Club, and one-armed Cholly Wendorf, who is still the Dean of Bughouse Square, won out over Jeff Davis, king of the Hoboes of America, Inc., Jimmy Sheridan of the Sheridan brothers, and Herbert Shaw, the Cosmic Kid.

The moral of this story may be: Chicago has a lot of everything else, but it never had a soul.

Jack Jones was the proprietor of the Dill Pickle Club and the Dill Pickle Press (publisher of Might is Right).

Andrea Hofer Proudfoot (1866 – 1949) founded the League of International Amity in 1913, the Poetry Lovers of America in 1922, and after World War One the American Committee For Vienna Relief. She was the author of several books, including Trolly Lines (Chicago: R.F. Seymour circa 1919).

Elizabeth Fuller Goodspeed (1893 – 1979) was called “Bobsy” throughout her life. She was the President of the Arts Club of Chicago, a friend of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, and was a Chicago socialite.

Sidney H. Minchin (1893 – 1951) immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1900. Among other Chicago landmarks, he designed the Storkline Furniture Corporation Factory of Chicago, a building listed in the National Register of Historic Places Program.

– Trevor Blake is the author of Confessions of a Failed Egoist
(Baltimore: Underworld Amusements 2014).

Mystery Angel Plots $250,000 Dill Pickle Club (March 7 1920)

A mysterious woman, scion of “one of Chicago’s oldest and richest families,” is at the bottom of an arch plot to overthrow Greenwich Village and the Latin quarter of Paris as capital of the bohemian world, and make Chicago the ultimate goal of short haired women and men that barbers know not. With a few years she plans to set up the Dill Pickle Club, that highbrow organization at 18 Tooker place, as the style center of the globe for aesthetic ideas and untrammeled thoughts. There the newer poetry will be born and the higher art will receive its swaddling clothes.

Jack Jones, chief dill among the intellectual pickles, admitted the plot yesterday. He said a woman interested in the club promised to advance $250,000 for the erection of a building containing a “telescopic” theater, a ballroom, and studios where the inspired may be instructed for a nominal sum. The structure will contain four stories and look externally as plain and dilapidated as the most rabid bohemian could desire. The inside, however, is to be a beauty and a joy – all pink shaded lamps and black casts and incense and Turkish cigarets.

‘Angels’ of New Dill Pickle Club Abandon Clouds (March 19 1920)

The mystery of the feminine “angel” who was to erect a $250,000 building for the dill pickles and give Chicago the world’s greatest “Latin quarter” has been solved. [Yesterday] it was discovered there are at least a score of well-to-do folk who will finance the build-structure for the muses to muse in. Among these “angels” are Mrs. Andrea Hofer Proudfoot, author of “Trolly Lines” and president of the Poetry Lovers of America, Mrs. Elizabeth Fuller, wife of a mine developer in the Porcupine gold fields of Ontario, and Sidney H. Minchin.

The latter has already drawn preliminary sketches of the new building, which he describes as a style suitable for the housing of Dill Pickles. In this structure is to be a ball room, a telescopic theater which will fold up so that even the smallest audience may fill it, cosy eating places, and a number of studios where instructions will be given to the talented. […] The success of the building venture will depend, it is claimed, upon a ball to be held tomorrow night at the North Side Turner hall. It is to be an “affinity costume” affair, with the dancers masquerading as milk and cream, squirrel and nut, Antony and Cleopatra, and other great inseparables. There will also be vaudeville and boxing. One thousand dollars must be realized from the ball to obtain an option on the new building site. Then the “angels” will do the rest.

Blaze Damages Printing Plant of Dill Pickles (October 12 1929)

The printing plant of the Dill Pickle club, rendezvous of a so-called Bohemian set at 10 Tooker place, was wrecked yesterday by a fire which for a time threatened to destroy the entire club quarters. Sam Hall, 1216 North Dearborn street, a printer, discovered the blaze and turned in an alarm. Jack Jones, owner of the premises, and manager of the club, estimated the loss at $500.

The Optimist’s Ego

I do not feel me travelling these rails,
Elbowing the herd;
For have I not been chosen to be I?

Some great wise power pruned so well
Through the bloom of teeming life
That I am pleased with this I that I am.
It picked me a keen gray firey glance
To look out from the lifted mind
It clothed my Self with,
To glimpse all these vistas
That open before me as I ride.

Looking down into the cross-paths
I find the source of this Me that is I
(Which I adore);
I see the vistas of the mother-worlds
Bringing forth I’s and I’s
To finally fashion just this one
That fits my last and crown so perfectly.

As I press forward into the expanses
Down each passing avenue I look and see
The radiating rows of golden paths
Called for want of better names:
Poetry, Art, Music—
Dawning into the sun-stream
Which happened to be just I;
Dressing the lambent fibers
Which threaded down the pattern into Me.
How perfectly they’ve come together;
What a choice revelry of dance
They carry on in Me. (Where are we passing?)
So that waking they crowd my longings,
And sleeping they people a world
That I may roam in glory-gleaming ways.
Often I meet John there
And match colors with him,
To prove that the heavenly streets he painted
Were but the poor thoroughfares of his day,
Compared with the endless crosslines
And the intricate composite alleys
That transport us into the glow world Of the expanded I
Of my day

A Century of Progress by John Drury (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers Inc 1933)

“TOWER TOWN,” over the river on the near north side. Chicago’s largest and most flourishing bohemian quarter, bounded roughly on the south by Grand Avenue, on the east by Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive, on the north by Division Street and on the west by Clark Street. District centers about the historic old Chicago Avenue Water Tower, Chicago and Michigan Avenues. Studios, art galleries, tea rooms, bookshops, alley forums and Italian restaurants are on every hand. The famous Dill Pickle Club, conducted by Jack Jones, is “Tower Town’s” main rendezvous. On Wednesday, Saturday and Sunday evenings lectures, debates and dances are held here. The Dill Pickle occupies a chapter in Albert Parry’s “Garrets and Pretenders: A History of Bohemianism in America.” It is located at 18 Tooker Place. Nearby is “Bughouse Square” (Washington Square, North Dearborn Street and Walton Place), haunt of soap-box orators.

Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1953)

In Towertown, one-eyed Jack Jones had started the Dill Pickle Club, and here, every Saturday night, a Chicago one act play, written by some unknown Chicago playwright, presented by unknown Chicago actors, took the boards. […] With the coming of Prohibition, Towertown became something of a haunt for the underworld, too. The Dill Pickle became a scarcely-disguised speakeasy, and even had itself raided a few times just for the publicity.

Hobohemia by Frank O. Beck (Rindge: Richard R. Smith Publisher Inc. 1956)

One evening in 1919 no less a luminary than Sherwood Anderson published in The Chicago Daily News the statement, “Jack Jones and the Dill Pickle Club are the bright spots in the rather somber aspects of our town.”

Jack was a man of stature and a visit to the Club was for many years a must in the itinerary of all pilgrims making a round of the night clubs of the Windy City. It was a focal point of the nightlife of Towertown, a region of the near north side where, when the shades of night arrived, foregathered the Bohemian, the artist, the near-artist and the strange conglomeration of city dwellers who follow in their train.

The Dill Pickle Club is surely an appropriate name for an eating spot. What epicure but does not relish the dill, the humble anise of the Scriptures? When the eating club was opened on Locust Street and patronized mainly by disputatious labor leaders, it had over its door the sign, “The Copper Kettle and the Dill Pickle. ” A few years later, Bohemia-in-Chicago was stirred by food poisoning caused (supposedly) by the use of the copper kettle and the Club dropped “The Copper Kettle” end of the name and the Dill Pickle went it alone. While the Irish were pleased, the Germans were not.

The same Jack Jones, who in 1917 opened the Dill Pickle Club, now incorporated the club, copyrighted the name and moved it to Tooker Alley, where he continued to serve “coffee and a few light foods that are tolerable” as John Drury writes in his Dining in Chicago. On Wednesdays, his mild-mannered sister prepared a goodly assortment of sandwiches for the literary group who took over that evening. It was on one of these special evenings that I, in search of a copywriter, bought “coffee and — ” for a young writer, Carl Sandburg. He ate it in a dimly lighted recess in the wall, as I tried to persuade him to come with me to do some special writing, as I was then making the Chicago Area Survey of the Inter-Church World Movement.

But for John Archibald (Jack) Jones, the Dill Pickle Club was to serve purposes other than gastronomy. This king of the Picklers came to Chicago about the year 1907 and, as a labor leader, he wished his Club to serve his ends, by enlisting the intelligentsia.

Where he came from and who he was was definitely secondary to the fact that he was a most intelligent and militant labor agitator, one of the founders of the Industrial Workers of the World. His Club was to be a public forum for the discussion of what, to Jones, was the most vital subject in our national life, the rights of manual laborers.

Of an earlier interesting place, a nursery rhyme said, “The way into my parlor is up a winding stair.” The way into the Dill Pickle Club was even more complicated. Off North State Street to the left you wedged yourself, if you were thin enough, through a hole in the wall, a narrow slit between the four-story buildings. Then, with ashcans and garbage cans making it wise to watch your step, you went over the cobblestones and bricks of Tooker Alley to No. 18, where you faced a bright green light over an orange door with three small stained glass apertures. Here you were admonished, if you aspired to enter, to “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.” Crawling was really the best means of locomotion from there on in.

Blazed across the vestibule was the enigmatical line “This club is established to elevate the minds of people to a lower level.” There were several ways in which the Club made no more sense than that.

However, the founder, Jack Jones, an American pioneer in the field of labor education, was a powerful magnet and drew unusual personalities within his orbit. It was probably in the cards from the beginning that Jack, years later, should die alone in a third-class men’s lodging house, and his wasted and besotted body, not yet sixty-four years old, be buried in a casket, the gift of a thousand derelict men on the stem on West Madison Street.

What mattered was what Jack Jones, a flaming missionary of industrial justice, did with his opportunity in the Dill Pickle Club. At once it became the rendezvous of leading labor organizers and leaders, of radical artists too often coarse and ribald, of modern poets often equally unrefined and gross, of rising literary personages and revolutionists. It became more than a serious labor forum, it became an institution for all the arts. It opened its doors wide to everybody who had a message, a grievance, a hope, or a criticism, constructive or destructive; who wished to raise his voice against oppression, prejudice and injustice in all their multiforms. To every guest, at some time during his sojourn at the Club, Jack Jones, the ingenious, put the question, “Are you a nut about anything?”

One night in an unrestrained moment the group of the evening accepted the following credo: “We of the Dill Pickle believe in everything. We are radicals, pickpockets, second-story men and thinkers. Some of us practice free love, and some, medicine. Most of us have gone through religion and have tired of it. Some of us have tired of our wives.” This was the Dill Pickle Club in its most indulgent and unrestrained mood.

This creed did not express the main objectives of the Club. It was definitely not a place where men grow broad bellied and narrow minded, despite the fact that there were hedonists there and those allergic to purity. Through the years they did much creative work. Here experts taught dancing and other arts. Poets read their own verses. Artists, wood carvers, ornamental iron designers, sculptors and painters created and displayed their handicraft, always to an interested public. From the haymow on the second floor — the city used transportation that fed on hay — came the mingled odors of charcoal, turpentine, fixatives. Often a party of visitors stood by, waiting to be shocked at the nude subject.

In the birth and early development of the little theatre the Club must be given prominent mention. This, one of the earliest of the little theatres, presented some of the finest amateur talent. Jack, a man of varied talent, built with his own hands a splendid stage, invented and installed an unusual lighting system, wrote, directed and acted in the plays.

The open forum of the Club was stimulated by the idea that truth wholly controlled may become dangerous. Yet no matter how important the question brought before the Dill forum or how illustrious the speaker, he was thrown to the lions, as he expected to be. His message — important, crack-brained, serious or humorous — the omnipresent heckler treated the same as the last and the next. And what consummate hecklers were there! There was big John Laughman, whose biting Irish witticism, often almost sadistical, literally cowed the speaker and thrilled the audience; little Birdie Weber, hook-nosed and bespectacled, vulgar always and thunderous in his approach, confused and trapped the orator. The heckling was usually brilliant and constituted not an inconsiderable part of the entertainment.

The Dill Pickle Club drew to its platform a surprising “Who’s Who” of speakers. In my diary are listed speakers heard there, and many of them were monthly guests. There was Maxwell Bodenheim, author of Ninth Avenue; Carl Sandburg, the poet; Ben Reitman, King of the Hoboes; Ben Hecht, author of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, editor of the Chicago Literary Times and a promising poet; Countess Luddie, who wore sandals and bobbed her hair; Paddy Carrol from Hell’s Half Acre; Aimee Semple McPherson, and a Spanish spiritualist who shaved her head and dyed it green; Morris Levine, blind, gray-haired orator; Van Cima, Dutch artist and piccolo player; Emma Goldman, the Anarchist, and Rube Menken, Russian art critic; Eugene Debs and William D. Haywood, tycoons of the labor movement; Sherwood Anderson, the playwright, and Jim Larkin, the famous Irish rebel; Harry Batters, selling socialism to the Democrats and democracy to the Socialists; Yellow Kid Weil, of high-finance fame; Clarence Darrow and scores of the more brilliant members of the faculties of Northwestern and Chicago universities. Sooner or later everybody had a chance to ex- press himself and the Club’s Sunday night doings often made Monday morning news.

One night one of the university speakers remarked seriously, “More famous people have passed through this Club than through any fifty universities in the world.” The statement was, to say the least, extravagant. It was statements like this that convinced me that I was using rather well the time I gave to them. Early in the Club’s history, Jack Jones invited me to join his staff and called me “Chaplain.” I have met few groups with such enormous responsiveness and so much in need of education of the spirit. I tried to understand when they needed praise and when they needed prayer. They always needed a friend. Jack Jones climaxed his study of labor’s problems by writing a treatise, “The Tech-Up,” a pronouncement on technocracy.

Harper Leech, co-originator of the War Insurance plan, wrote of Jack’s “The Tech-Up”: “A masterpiece of explanation of the industrial form of unionism.” It brought Jack a trip to Washington, D. C., during World War I at Uncle Sam’s expense, for conference with the Department of Labor. Labor sympathizers of the Dill Pickle type later followed the worker’s movement through syndicalism and the Worker’s Party into the Communist Party.

When the crest of bootlegging came, the Club’s cultural flame flickered low. The lawless horned in on the management of the Club and chiseling gangsters followed. Man shall not live by free love, companionate marriage, unrestrained Bohemianism, rackets, “red” Russia, alone — vital subjects though they were to the adherents of the Club. However, sincere voices raised against suppression, prejudice and injustice bring their own reward. Dill Pickle’s popular forum, little theatre, art school, social center, all often on the five-yard line in their way and day, served the cause of adult education and democracy.

And possibly society has a greater ability to reform itself than many of us thought that day.

The man identified here as Doc Rawleigh of the Toltec tribe may be Redwood Bailey, Cherokee. Bailey wrote about the Sirfessor in The Day Book for February 5 1916, and the Sirfessor replied in the same periodical five days later. W. Kibbler comments on the both two days after that, and all of these letters are collected in The Gospel of Malfew Seklew.

Franklin Rosemont lists Bertram Lester Weber as an active and early member of the Dil Pickle Club in The Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle Club. The Pickle was the publisher of the Sirfessor’s work as well as the 1927 edition of Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard. Weber wrote plays performed at the Pickle, plays lost to time. “No speaker could withstand […] the biting wit of Bertie Weber” said Ben Reitman. Edna Dexter described Weber as “clever and humorous. He would go about Bughouse Park and the Pickle and peddle [his poems] for ten cents a piece.” Rosemont’s recommended book reprints a two-page poem by Weber. The Big Red Songbook by Utah Phillips writes Weber was born in Chicago in 1885 and died in Wisconsin in June 1962. – Trevor Blake

Unhatched Egos Bathe Their Souls in Super Sunlight

Mildewed Minded Mortals List to Sirfessor Superman Rage

HE GETS AWAY WITH IT

Whatever gentle, lamb-like traits a Superman may display when among his fellows, he certainly gets real rough when talking to mere mortals who, unlike him, have failed to ascend to the Summit of Ego.

At least that was the conclusion to be drawn from attendance at a meeting held in a hall at 20 West Randolph street last night where “Sirfessor” F. M. Wilkesbarre, who modestly admits he is the only Superman running at large in the United States at the present time, engaged in a debate on “Is Exploitation the First Law of Nature?” with Lester Weber, who describes himself as “a rationalist lecturer.”

Call ‘Em Supernames.
In taking the affirmative side and trying to convince his audience of 300 persons that his Superintelligence was the greatest thing ever brought to Chicago, the “sirfessor” – a term to be carefully set apart from that of common, ordinary “professor” – shook his Superlocks as he Superraged majestically about the platform and called his hearers the following Supernames:

Spineless grovelers.
Sniveling humbugs.
Pestiferous pifflers.
Mildew-minded mortals.
Unhatched egos.
Beatific believers.
Benighted and bedamned bipeds.
Beatitude mongers.
Sentimental sobbists.
Humid humilitarians.
Creeping cemeteries.

Gets Away with It.
And not only that, but the “sirfessor” got away with it without having a single chair bounced off his Supercranium. As for “Rationalist” Weber, he didn’t stand a chance and was glad to quit the argument in half the time allotted to him.

With his tawny bangs drooping artistically over one eye so that he could look at the audience only with the other optic, Weber opened the debate.

“You have gathered here tonight to witness a battle royal between two of the greatest intellects the world ever saw,” he began in the voice of a well drilled chorus man. “You may bathe your souls in the sunlight of our brilliant personalities.”

“Haw!” Laughs Doc Rawleigh.
“Haw!” laughed a long-haired individual who claims to be “Dr. Raleigh, medicine man of the Toltec tribe.”

For a time it looked like a riot, but Weber managed to hold the platform for a few moments, asserting that exploitation couldn’t be the first law of nature because nature didn’t have any first law, and that the “sirfessor” was real mean in making him debate on such a subject when what he really wanted to argue about was, “Resolved, That the Self-COnscious Ego is a Cheap Organism.”

Then Arose the “Sirfessor”
Then he sat down and the “sirfessor” arose.

“You angry and antagonistic atoms!” he thundered at his hearers. “You cheap organisms and banal babblers – all that you know is how to get and beget. Poor, miserable devils of workers, you have no conception of the Supreme Ego. I stand before you, superior to any human being I’ve ever met, ready to push Infinity in the face and tell it to get out of my way, while you – you miserable misfits – sit there ready to kiss the hand that crushes you and kick the hand that benefits you… ”

You Gotta Hand It to Him.
Even the long haired medicine man was willing to admit that the “sirfessor” took the cake after the debate was closed.

The “sirfessor,” who is president of “the Society of Superites of England,” is in America to organize “the Society of Social Aristocrats,” to be composed of supermen and superladies. He says he can turn any “mental aristocrat” into a superbeing in four lessons.

When not engaged in this he sells super cigarette holders and superite netcktie grippers.

Over at 213 West Oak street last night gathered a clan under a new banner. It was the housewarming of “The Superite Coffee Tavern,” where, according to its founder, Sirfessor F.M. Wilkesbarre, the nimble witted can walk the intellectual slack wire, indulge in tea and talk, cake and conversation, and other forms of mental acrobatics.
” It is my hope that this place may become the hub of intellectual hubbub.” the Sirfessor announced. “It is to be a thought foundry when we can good naturedly destroy each other’s illusions and learn to speak a new language. Some day you who laugh at me will laugh with me, when you learn what its all about. I personally have added forty words to the English language and can use 2,000 others that are not comprehensible to the average intellect. I think a lot of myself. I am the most interesting man I ever met.”
Dr. Ben Reitman contributed an encomium in behalf of the members of the Dill Pickle club. There was a sprinkling of Socialists. anarchists, and nihilists. All, including a grandmother who smokes cigarets, admitted they are super men and women.

From “The Phoenix Nest,” a column by William Rose Benet appearing in the April 26 1947 edition of The Saturday Review (page 36)…

Mark Twain relates in one of his stories, the furore up in Heaven when an obscure tailor, Billings by name, from somewhere in Tennessee, arrives in the Celestial realm. Shakespeare is proud to sit at his feet while at the banquet in his honor; it is Homer who stands behind his chair and waits upon him. Yet this was an unknown poet although recognized by his peers as the greatest of them all. No mortal had ever read his verses. They had never even been published. In fact, during his lifetime he had been merely the butt of his contemporaries.

There were many such back in the twenties. For every Eugene O’Neil, Floyd Dell, Ben Hecht, or Maxwell Bodenheim, there were a dozen other real personalities in Greenwich Village and Union Square whose names have rarely reached the public except in column-long eulogies at their passing.

Looking back at those days a score or more years ago, one is struck by the renaissance of thinking which followed the First World War. There was a complete examination and overhauling of ideas which is sadly lacking today. It was a time of great optimism, for everyone felt that if the problems of the world had not as yet all been solved, at least their solution was attainable if not already in sight.

Thoughts were precious then and intellectual integrity the highest goal. There was no compromise with the popular taste in these philosophers, writers, and artists whose books were never printed and pictures never bought. Yet they were men and women of character. In an earlier age they might have been looked on as saints. They were in this world but not of this world. Their wants were few, a cold water flat on the East Side, where they could paint or write or dream, a meagre meal every once in a while was all they required. Yet this was often beyond their reach.

As chairman of the old Dill Pickle Club on 14th Street where they were wont to congregate, the writer knew them well and mourns their passing. There are but few of them left. Ike Shepps still holds forth at Columbus Circle with his satirical tirades against the futile money-grubbing pursuits of humanity. Jo Silverman, who studied medicine in England and then never practised [sic] it because he felt that too little was known about the art, today in his eighty-third year still pursues his studies of Spinoza and the humanities in his hovel on East 3rd Street. Dan O’Brien, King of the Hoboes, no longer delights his listeners with his wit and rich Irish brogue. He merely awaits his end in one of the city’s charitable institutes. Joe Gould still works on his “History” of our times. But where are the Wilkesbarrs, Pollocks, Marchands, Jack Joneses, and Lizzy Davises all gone like the snows of yesteryear?

The “Sirfessor,” as Wilkesbarr was called, rated a column-and-a-half obituary in The New York Times. Is there today in existence a single copy of his “Gospel According to Malfew Seklew,” to which he devoted his entire life? His was the doctrine of enlightened selfishness. He sought the rise of a race of “Supcrcrats,” an aristocracy of brains and skill that would rescue the world from its rising slough of mediocrity. His was a voice “crying in the wilderness.” A Cockney by birth, he had sung with the D’Oyly Carte Company. He had known Shaw and Wells and the Webbs intimately, yet never was his work known by more than a few dozens of his friends.

Abe Pollock was a collar salesman until in middle life, like Gauguin, he began to paint. His work was praised by some critics, scoffed at by others but it never sold. Perhaps Michelangelo passes him the finger bowls in Heaven.

Dr. Marchand had been a professor at Columbia University. During the anti-German outbreak of World War I, he was fired from his job. He never recovered from the blow. He spent his life on the personal project of coordinating all human knowledge. His manuscripts? Who knows where they are today!

There was Helen Langdon, who knew more about Oriental art than some curators of museums. She died in a garret (it was whispered of starvation), yet she could never bring herself to part with her precious Cinnabar vases and Japanese sword-guards.

Those were the days when ideas were all important, when Pollock and Vincent Beltrone holding opposite views on the subject of art — almost but not quite coming to blows about their theories — could argue far into the night before a group of enthralled listeners.

When Leon Samson first read his manuscript on the “New Humanism,” the entire intellectual body of the town was split into “pro” and “anti” factions.

Yes, ideas were important then and poetry was important. John Cabbage with his “Sea Chanteys,” Jack Sellers, Anton Romatka, Lew Ney each had his defenders and detractors, but they were sincere and judged them by their poetry and not as today by their political orientation.

It is amusing to note how many of the former dwellers within their “ivory towers” today have hung “to let” signs upon them and have rushed into the arms of the “proletariat.” For them perhaps, thinking is no longer necessary. Still the prospect of a world without the Sirfessor and his kind is anything but pleasant.

Where are the youngsters who are to take their places? Who will dare to question the dogmatism of the right or the left? Who will examine every self-ordained savior and demagogue and puncture stuffed shirts with an ever-ready arsenal of barbed wit?

Will they perhaps be found among the student bodies of our universities or will their war training and their exposure to college curricula squeeze out the last drops of individualism that they may have retained? What can we expect of a generation reared on comic strips and movies? Perhaps a revulsion, perhaps a re-awakening of a burning love for Democracy which is the only cradle for Nature’s masterpiece — the individual Ego.

The Union of Egoists is in hot pursuit of details regarding Sirfessor Wilkebarre’s time in the D’oyly theater company. Working for D’oyly would explain why the one and only Malfew Seklew repeatedly cites Gilbert and Sullivan in Gospel According to Malfew Seklew.

Some words are used in speech before they get written down, and early on in being written down they are spelled in many ways before they settle on a single spellings. The music we call jazz was also spelled jaz, jas, and jass early on.

The Dil Pickle Club of Chicago (where Sirfessor Malfew Seklew often lectured), home of Dil Pickle Press (publisher of the 1927 edition of Might is Right by Ragnar Redbeard), advertised their lectures and publications with posters printed by linocut blocks. They also printed linocut blocks with more cryptic messages on them, such as “GLANDS – ‘NUFF SAID!” and “DU-DIL-DUK BRINGS GOOD LUCK.” Seen above are block prints by Trevor Blake reproducing an original Dil Pickle Club design.  Jack Jones, owner of the Dil Pickle Club / Press, manufactured wooden toy Du-Dil-Duks.

The word for idle sketching, the word for drawing without much thought, that word appears in printed English in the 1930s,  just as the avant culture of the Dil Pickle Club was at its height.  Before the 1930s the word was probably in use but not written down yet.

du-dil-duk… doodle duck…