The year is 1917, or maybe it is 1922. You are a reporter, or perhaps a high school student. Maybe you are a hobo and are, for all intents and purposes, unemployed. Regardless, there is a place on the near north side where you can share a bench and enjoy a good heckle.

Between State and Dearborn, just north of Chicago Avenue, you take the narrow passageway in Tooker Alley to an orange door with a green light. You are at the Dil Pickle (yes, Dil is spelled with only one “l”). At the door, you are told to “Step high, stoop low, and leave your dignity outside.” And in you go, to a packed room with low ceilings, famous for its open forums, lively debate, and diverse speakers and clientele. Jack Jones, the club’s principal founder (and janitor) informs you that you are at “the world’s greatest university, where all isms, theories, fantasies and other stuff can have their hearing.” And they did, from 1914 until the late 1920s. An audience diverse in race, class, and political opinion settled in nightly for a bill that might have include anything (e.g. poetry, politics, theater, or a good round of debate).

Franklin Rosemont’s lovingly-edited The Rise and Fall of the Dil Pickle: Jazz-Age Chicago’s Wildest and Most Outrageously Creative Hobohemian Nightspot chronicles the history of the Dil Pickle, part of a vibrant Chicago subculture that is often neglected in mainstream accounts of the city’s history. Beginning with outdoor lectures and public meetings organized by anarchists, socialists, and labor leaders in the early part of the century, Chicago was a major hub of a growing popular education movement. This movement encouraged discourse and debate through oration on the platform of a soapbox. From the 1910s until the early 1960s, Washington Square Park, across from the Newberry Library (a.k.a Bughouse Square) was the city’s most active soapboxing site.

The Dil Pickle was opened by Bughouse soapboxers and frequenters, and offered a similar flavor and philosophy to Bughouse Square. The Dil Pickle was often called the “ Indoor Bughouse Square”, and many of the same people frequented both places. One of the most unusual and exceptional aspects of the Dil Pickle was the diversity of its audience. While the core founders were generally of working-class backgrounds, North Shore society leaders and professors also visited frequently. Among some of the famous regular visitors were poets Carl Sandburg and William Carlos Williams, labor leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and Dr. Ben Reitman, an early champion of birth control for the poor.

Rosemont’s book is the most comprehensive portrait of the Dil that has yet been written. Through an impressive thirty-four page introduction, Rosemont introduces the reader to the ideological influences on the Dil Pickle, brief biographies of the founding members, a tentative chronology of its history, and a detailed account of its last years.

The rest of the book is a collection of accounts of the Dil Pickle by those who experienced it firsthand: poets, artists, journalists, hobos, anarchists, and other radicals and eccentrics. These diverse accounts are divided into sections based on the experience of each writer. There are reminiscences by mainstays, regulars, critics, and visitors. Several of these recollections are reprinted in this book for the first time since their original publication.

As Rosemont notes in his introduction, many of these eyewitness accounts contradict each other on details. It is, perhaps, these very contradictions that allow the reader to get a sense of all of the perspectives that created the Dil Pickle’s culture. While the casual reader may not find it necessary to read every account, they represent an impressive effort of scholarship, and are important as a sum of raw materials. Rosemont writes hopefully that these recollections should help prepare the way for more detailed studies.

This is an important book of Chicago history, and it reads as surprisingly current. While there is a glaring paucity of public discussion in mainstream society, it is important to note that Chicago has its own distinctive tradition of popular debate of the status quo. As Rosemont writes in his introduction: “ Indeed, any group that emphasizes poetry, humor and creative spontaneity and refuses, on principle, to recognize any contradiction between making the revolution and having a good time… belongs to the Dil Pickle anti-tradition” Academics and experts are not the only ones capable of answers. By creating accessible alternatives, ordinary people with vision have always lived their own answers.