One of the wealthiest towns in Illinois, Winnetka, is shaped by three Christians who sympathized with socialism, including one who defended an anarchist act of terrorism.
Woodsy Winnetka—the name meant “beautiful place” to Potawatomi Indians—belies its tranquil setting and was incorporated in 1869 with a ban on alcohol and an ecological law not to do “injury” to trees.
Within its first 30 years, besides those strict controls, Winnetka’s philosophy congealed around one driving ideal: collectivism. Winnetka’s Community House was erected to promote “Christian citizenship”. Its crowning achievement—New Trier High School at 385 Winnetka Avenue—is named for Trier, Germany, the town where the region’s immigrants came from and birthplace of Communism’s philosopher-father, Karl Marx. Winnetka’s most radical resident, Henry Demarest Lloyd, who conceived the Winnetka Town Meeting, asserted that every Winnetkan has a “duty to the village”, according to Michael H. Ebner, author of Creating Chicago’s North Shore, A Suburban History (University of Chicago Press, 1988).
Lloyd, who came to Winnetka from Massachusetts when he was 29, is what might be called one of Winnetka’s three godfathers.
“The most commonly associated name with Winnetka is Charles Peck,” Ebner explained in an interview. “He wanted Winnetka to have a public school.”
Ebner said Peck bought Winnetka’s land with railroad businessman and one-time Chicago Mayor Walter Gurnee. Nature preservationist Peck later deeded the Village Green to the public—on the condition that nothing would be built there—and gave Winnetka nature-based street names, such as Cherry, Elm and Oak. Peck had come to the North Shore from Vermont with his wife, Sarah. They had two daughters and sought to create a school-centered community.
Eventually, Winnetka approved a bond issue by referendum to construct a township high school. Upon passing the township referendum on the third try—there was resistance—New Trier Township founded a board of education.
The result, New Trier Township High School, opened in 1901 with what Ebner called a sumptuous campus for its time which included an indoor swimming pool because swimming and proper hygiene were thought by the board to be part of a proper education. In alignment with Peck’s views on nature, Winnetka built its schools with an exterior door for every classroom so that the teacher could take students into nature.
The heir to Peck’s legacy of nature worship and centralized public works for the “common good” is Henry Demarest Lloyd (1847-1903), whom Ebner credits with establishing Winnetka’s public library and its raucous, socially democratic government.
“Lloyd was a foe of monopoly who wrote Wealth Against Commonwealth and he took off after the fact that Winnetka bought its water from a private company,” Ebner said.
Lloyd was not such an opponent of monopoly, however, that he did not seek to give Winnetka its own government-run monopoly—a municipally-controlled water utility—and he was extremely active in politics, running and losing for a seat in Congress (twice), traveling to New Zealand (twice) and to Europe (six times). Lloyd pleaded for clemency to the Illinois governor in defense of anarchists arrested in Chicago’s Haymarket riots, in which someone threw a bomb during the labor riot, murdering seven policemen and four civilians. Lloyd’s biographer called him an ‘intellectual activist”.
Ebner writes in his North Shore history book that Lloyd had married the daughter of Chicago Tribune publisher William Bross, an abolitionist and founder of the Republican Party and, later, lieutenant governor of Illinois. Their relationship, Ebner said, was contentious at times.
Lloyd brought other intellectuals to Winnetka, hosting social activist Jane Addams, five-time Socialist candidate for president Eugene V. Debs and Booker T. Washington. Having introduced the town’s first Independence Day celebration on the Village Green in 1887 and the first Winnetka Town Meeting in 1890, Ebner writes that Winnetka’s meetings included readings on socialism and a lecture by Clarence Darrow.
After Lloyd died, Winnetka’s consensus-style government was embroiled in a raging controversy over whether to contract for gas to individual homes or simply create another government monopoly to operate the gas utility. After Kenilworth and Glencoe chose contractors for at-home gas, Winnetka finally gained gas in 1908 after a group of women—claiming the burden of domestic inconvenience—insisted on a resolution. Winnetka, too, contracted for its gas.
Peck had initiated community nature worship. Lloyd had introduced collective government. But a man named J.W.F. Davies from South Dakota, who arrived in May 1909 as an associate pastor of the Winnetka Congregational Church, infused Winnetka with Judeo-Christian collectivism.
Davies, who inexplicably acquired the term ‘chief’ during his time in Winnetka, befriended a group of loitering boys who he said told him that the town was dull. Davies, whom Ebner said lived in Winnetka until 1931, claimed that this was the impetus for creating the Winnetka Community House with church donations.
Originally projected to cost $10,000, the structure eventually cost $49,500 and upset Winnetka’s fundamentalists by showing movies on Sundays. But the town’s Puritanical types prevailed as the meeting hall, inspired by Davies’ church, excluded for-profit individuals from using the house. Winnetka Community House, ostensibly open to all, opened on November 17, 1911 with one rule: no one seeking to make money was permitted to use it to achieve that end.
Ebner described Winnetka’s top figures as Unitarians and freethinkers and he attributes credit to Davies and Lloyd for a visit from Martin Luther King, Jr. in the summer of 1965.
“On July 25, Dr. King was invited to Winnetka to speak on the Village Green,” Ebner recalled. “The New York Times estimated that between 8,000 and 10,000 people attended with more than 100 reporters, so this was very much in the tradition of Winnetka’s civic activism.”
The event was part of King’s Operation Freedom Movement in Chicago—a campaign for government-subsidized housing—and Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had publicly challenged Dr. King to go into the suburbs.
King did. He visited Naperville, Evanston, Highland Park and Winnetka. Ebner said that by the mid-1960s Winnetkans had become concerned that their children were living in a cloistered environment.
“Upper middle class Winnetka moms were involved in something called the North Shore Summer Project, which was inspired by clergy, and they took the spontaneous initiative to invite King, who had received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964—the youngest person ever to have that bestowed upon him—to come to Winnetka,” he said.
For all efforts and edicts proclaiming Winnetka’s egalitarianism by town intellectuals, Ebner said that Winnetka’s population remains predominantly wealthy and white. “Winnetka is a homogeneous community,” he said. “It’s 97 percent white, near the very top of the socioeconomic scale among the 262 communities in metropolitan Chicago and it’s very buttoned down.”
Among Winnetka’s wealthy residents throughout the years are Rock Hudson, Ann-Margret, Charlton Heston, Phil Donahue and Harold Ickes, FDR’s secretary of the Interior for 13 years, whose favoritism gave Winnetka special interest from the Roosevelt administration. Ebner said that Ickes had the government subsidize an operation to depress Winnetka’s railroad tracks to run at grade level, which improved safety. It’s why Winnetka has no grade level crossings.
Other renowned residents include A.C. Nielsen Co. founder Arthur C. Nielsen, Jr., whom Ebner said endowed a recreation center along Hubbard Road for tennis and skating as an alternative to country clubs. Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner, a businessman like many other residents, also lives in Winnetka.
Ebner cites the May 20, 1988 assault by New Trier graduate and former Northwestern student Laurie Dann as Winnetka’s darkest day—she poisoned, fire-bombed, tried to incinerate and fired upon her victims, one of whom died, before shooting herself—though the double murder by New Trier honors student David Biro, 17, of Richard and his pregnant wife Nancy Langert two years later was also a heinous Winnetka crime.
“Winnetka’s people take immense pride in Winnetka,” Ebner said. “Winnetkans take their history and the caucus system with the utmost seriousness. They are passionate about it.”
“They study thorny questions and particular conclusions and they have a high level of civic investment,” he explained. “Winnetka is at times contentious and I know that people are earnest and passionate about what they believe is good and bad about Winnetka.” Ebner added: “On any given public issue, no stone is left unturned and I think that does go back to Winnetka’s founding. That is the legacy of Peck, Lloyd and Davies.”