Examples of Dissent in American History: Bohemian Culture: The Dill Pickle Club

Digital Collections for the Classroom

Dissent and Democracy in Modern American History

Introduction

What is dissent? What role has dissent played in the development of American democracy? The Oxford English Dictionary helps us begin to answer the first question. The OED defines dissent as “difference of opinion or sentiment; disagreement” and the “opposite of consent.” This document collection encourages teachers and students to elaborate that definition and to develop answers to the second question by examining four case studies in dissent from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These case studies represent four very different forms of dissent: the mass demonstrations and violence of Haymarket, the parades and petitions of the women’s suffrage and anti-suffrage movements, the pamphlets and clinics of Margaret Sanger’s birth control crusade, and the free-speech forums and masquerade balls of the Dill Pickle Club. These case studies, in their variety, allow us to consider the different forms that dissent might take, and the different paths that these movements could follow within national history.

Please consider the following questions as you review the posts in this blog site:

• Develop a definition of dissent based on your reading of these documents. What do the documents have in common? How does the concept of dissent allow us to bring together documents that are, in many ways, quite different?
• What forms has dissent taken in U.S. history? What are the objectives of the writers and organizations represented in these documents? In what ways do they dissent from the political and social conditions of their times? What are their methods for advocating change? What are their relationships to mainstream American politics and culture?
• What is the role of dissent in a representative democracy such as the United States? Why have groups of Americans chosen to go outside of official channels (e.g., elections) in order to try to reform government and society? How have traditions of dissent changed the ways that Americans practice democracy?
• In what ways does the pursuit of individual liberty conflict with the quest for social equality and justice? In what ways are these goals compatible?  
• Your dissent exercise examples/suggestions are welcome on my facebook page

Bohemian Culture: The Dill Pickle Club

Photo showing the entrance to the Dill Pickle Club, a Chicago social club popular among artists, intellectuals, and nonconformists of all classes from the 1910s to the 1930s.

The Dill Pickle Club was established by the labor activist Jack Jones around 1914 on Chicago’s Near North Side. It was a social club in the broadest sense of the term, by turns coffeehouse, nightclub, lecture hall, art gallery, and performance space. The club hosted lectures and debates (some serious, some not), concerts and plays, dances and parties. It attracted free-thinking, nonconformist artists and intellectuals known as Bohemians. (The term Bohemian comes from the association of “gypsies,” or Romani people, with an anti-establishment, vagabond life and with the Eastern European region of Bohemia, now part of the Czech Republic.) The Dill Pickle Club was not an elite or exclusive environment, but instead offered patrons the thrill of meeting people from different economic, educational, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Socialites could mingle with factory workers, professors with activists, writers with prostitutes. The Dill Pickle was not alone in promoting nonconformist thought and expression; rather, it was one of about 200 free-speech forums that flourished in Chicago during the first half of the twentieth century. A random selection of lecture titles from the 1910s and ‘20s gives a sense of the club’s wide-ranging topics: “Is Jazz Better than Opera?” “Is Monogamy a Failure?” “Nuts I Have Known,” “Evolution and Revolution,” “Who’s Responsible for the Depression,” “Why Bolshevism Succeeded in Russia.” Some of these lectures were given by local professors and doctors, others by popular nonacademic speakers, such as attorney Clarence Darrow and anarchist Emma Goldman. The club was popular with celebrated writers such as Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, and Ben Hecht. However, the Dill Pickle struggled to survive the Great Depression and closed in the mid-1930s under pressure from tax auditors and moralists.

Questions to Consider

1. The Dill Pickle Club changed sites a few times, but settled in this basement on Tooker Place, off Dearborn, not far from the Newberry Library. What does this photograph of the entrance tell you about the club? What does the door’s famous inscription, “STEP HIGH STOOP LOW LEAVE YOUR DIGNITY OUTSIDE,” suggest about the atmosphere that Jack Jones wanted to create?
2. Examine the flyer for the Dill Pickle’s Masked Ball. Masquerades were among the clubs most frequent and most popular events. What will be the ball’s special features? What do you think the promise of “A Night in Bohemia” might have meant to people who went to the dance? Why do you think costume balls were so popular among Dill Pickle patrons?
3. Examine the flyers for the anti-war dance and the free love debate. What do these flyers suggest about bohemian culture, or the culture of dissent, in Chicago during these decades?
4. What are some of the relationships and differences between political and cultural forms of dissent, as suggested by these documents?

This poster advertises a masked ball at the Dill Pickle Club, also featuring dance performances, poetry readings, musical acts, and sketch comedy.

A hand-drawn poster advertising an anti-war dance at the Dill Pickle Club. Dated 1929 or 1935.