The Rise & Fall of the Dil Pickle

Book excerpt: What do Lucy Parsons, Clarence Darrow, Carl Sandburg, Mary MacLane, Lawrence Lipton, Elizabeth Davis (Queen of the Hoboes), Jun Fujita, Sherwood Anderson, Ralph Chaplin, Katherine Dunham, Djuna Barnes, Kenneth Rexroth, Sam Dolgoff, and Slim Brundage have in common? They were all Dil Picklers! Founded in 1914 by former Wobbly Jack Jones, Irish revolutionist Jim Larkin, and a group of fantastic IWW-oriented Bughouse Square hobos and soapboxers, the Dil Pickle in just a few years was widely recognized as the wildest, most playful, most creative, and most radical nightspot in the known universe - especially after Dr. Ben Reitman joined the club in 1917. In this book, Rosemont has collected forty-one reminiscences of the Dil Pickle by poets, artists, journalists, novelists, hobos, scholars, anarchist, wobblies, and other assorted radicals and oddballs. Among them are accounts by the club's founders, habitues, visitors, and critics. Rosemont's introduction provides the fullest account so far of the Dil Pickle's chaotic history, and goes on to explore the role of the Picklers in the arts and the 'Chicago Renaissance', along with its meaning(s) for our own troubled times.