Illinois History Minutes

It’s August 26. And comedian John Mulaney was born in Chicago on this day in 1982. 

It’s August 25th, marking the birth in 1885 of actor and comedian Charles “Chic” Sale, who grew up in Champaign-Urbana. In his day, Sale was famous for a vaudeville routine, about a man who builds outhouses, which were still common in rural areas.

It’s August 24th, and one of the fourteen individual treaties that make up the Treaty of St. Louis was signed on this day in 1816. With this particular treaty, the Chippewa, Ottawa and Potawatomie tribes sold off a strip of land that would later be used for canals linking Chicago with the Illinois River.

It’s August 23rd, and writer Edgar Lee Masters was born on this day in 1868. Masters grew up in central Illinois, inspired his best-known book.

It’s August 22nd, and on this day in 1858, people in Ottawa Illinois were still talking about the first of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, held the day before.  An estimated 12-thousand people turned out to hear U-S Senate candidates Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate the future of slavery in the new western territories. Douglas said voters of each territory should decide whether to permit slavery. Lincoln said slavery was a “monstrous injustice” that should not be expanded. But he stopped short of demanding its complete elimination.

It’s August 19th. And on this day in 1975, President Gerald Ford visited Pekin for the dedication of a new congressional research center named for his old colleague, the late Everett Dirksen. Dirksen, a Pekin native and fellow Republican, had been the Senate minority leader, while Ford held the same post in the House. Their joint news conferences to promote the GOP’s views were nicknamed the Ev and Jerry Show.

It’s August 18th. And on this day in 1971, President Richard Nixon signed a bill that transferred ownership of Abraham Lincoln’s Springfield home from the state of Illinois to the National Park Service as a National Historic site. Lincoln and his family lived in the twelve-room house from 1844 until the start of his presidency in 1861. Lincoln’s eldest son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had wanted the home preserved and kept open for the public.  The Lincoln home underwent a major restoration in the 1980s.

It’s August 17th, and author Jesse Lynch Williams was born on this day in 1871 in Sterling Illinois. Williams wrote the first play to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, a 1917 satire about marriage entitled “Why Marry?”. Five years later, he wrote a play about divorce entitled “Why Not?”.

It’s August 16th, the day in 1908 that the Illinois National Guard came to Springfield to stop a multiday massacre by about 5-thousand white residents.

It’s August 15th, the day that conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly was born Phyllis Stewart in 1924. The St. Louis native moved across the river to Alton Illinois when she married attorney Fred Schafly. As a leader in the Republican Party’s conservative wing, Phyllis Schlafly campaigned against feminism, gay rights and abortion. She helped to block ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, which she argued would take away women’s rights, not expand them.