Sea Control - Sea Control 187 - Why Chicago with Dr. Ted Karamanski and Akshat Patel

Episode Date: July 5, 2020

Links:1.  Mastering the Inland Sea2. Chicago Maritime Museum3. Chicago Maritime Museum Recovery Fund

Hey folks, Jared here. Thanks for joining us again. You may have heard that CIMSEC has a new chapter in Chicago. You may also be wondering why an organization ostensibly devoted to maritime security would put a chapter in the middle of the U.S. Is it because our new chapter president, Akshat Patel, is just an awesome guy? Yes. But it's also because of Chicago's long maritime history, both as a major inland port and the site for a lot of U.S. Navy training.

So today we have Akshat on the podcast, And if you're interested in joining the Chicago chapter, you can contact him, chicagoatsimsec.org. We also have Dr. Ted Karamansky, a local historian, author, and board member at the Chicago Maritime Museum, tell us about Chicago's rich history. We also officially launched our second podcast feed this week, The Bilge Pumps. You can find them on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify, and wherever else you download your podcasts. Since we now have two podcasts, I'm going to go ahead and call it. We are officially the SimSec Podcast Network. And finally, I wanted to discuss Project Trident.

Project Trident is your opportunity to shape the future of maritime security. Our current call for articles is for ocean governance. Submissions are due July 13th, and you can find more information on our website at simsec.org. With that, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today's episode is entitled, Why Chicago? And we're going to be discussing the new SIMSEC chapter in Chicago, Illinois.

It might seem a strange choice to base a chapter of the Center for International Maritime Security in a city in the center of the country, but I promise you there's a lot of maritime history there. Here to help us explain it all is Akshat Patel, the inaugural president of the Chicago chapter, and Dr. Ted Karamansky from the Chicago Maritime Museum. Gentlemen, welcome and thanks for agreeing to come on today. You're welcome. Yeah, thanks for having me, Jared. So I'd like to start by allowing you each to introduce yourselves and giving us a bit

more about your backgrounds. Akshat, do you mind kicking us off? Yeah, sure. So I'm actually originally from Boston. I went to Boston University. I did a Western Pacific deployment aboard the USS Hawaii out of Hawaii. So that was pretty cool. I was on the Hawaii out of Hawaii.

And then I've recently transferred here to Recruit Training Command, which is the Navy's only boot camp. Thanks, Akshat. Ted, would you mind telling us a little bit about your background? I know I introduced you earlier as being from the Chicago Maritime Museum. There's actually quite a bit more there that's pertinent that I think our listeners would find interesting. Well, yeah, I work with the Chicago Maritime Museum, located on the shores of beautiful Bubbly Creek on the Chicago branch of the river. I'm a historian. I teach at Loyola University in Chicago.

I've been there forever, since 1979. I've written 10 books. The most recent one is also about maritime history. It's called Mastering the Inland Seas, Outlight Houses, Navigation Aids, and Harbors Transformed to the Great Lakes and America, which is a mouthful. That's great. It sounds really interesting, and we will be sure to include a link to the book in our show notes. Akshat, I'm going to turn to you for our first question, though, and ask why you decided to start a Chicago chapter of SimSec. Yeah, sure. So there's primarily two reasons why I decided to start one. So the first one is that, as has been alluded to, although Chicago does not have access to the Atlantic or the Pacific, there is still a high concentration of naval activity, specifically United States naval activity centered here. Tens of thousands of newly trained sailors pass through Chicago every year on their way to the American fleet. So there is a high concentration of officers and enlisted personnel here. So I thought it was a good opportunity to engage them in the overall international maritime security dialogue.

The second reason that I thought Chicago would be a really good place to do this is that because it's the hometown of Admiral Rickover. Although Hyman Rickover is not as well known as, say, a Chester Nimitz to the general public, he certainly has godlike status amongst submariners, and rightly so. He's considered the father of the American nuclear navy, and the submarine force owes a lot of its culture to his leadership ethos. So I was glad to be able to dedicate a chapter in his hometown. Excellent. Ted, let's dive deep into Chicago's maritime history here then, which really begins both with the city's founding and the founding of the state of Illinois. What is it about Chicago's geography that makes it a maritime city? Well, you're right about Chicago's roots being tied to its maritime past. And anyone who comes to Chicago, and if you see one of the streets and sanitation trucks, one of the big blue trucks that are making their way through the city, or just look at

the city seal, on that seal is a sailing ship. And they designed that city seal back in the 1830s, at the same time the city was incorporated. And what that reflected was the knowledge of the people who founded Chicago that it was founded only because of its maritime connection. That Fort Dearborn garrison in 1803 that came and put the first federal presence here in the city, they came by ship. What made Chicago a strategic location for one of those early garrisons was the fact that it was where the Great Lakes navigation system met the headwaters of the Mississippi River navigation system. And that relatively short portage between the two made it a strategic location in North America. As the city's status as a trade and industrial hub increased, how did the local infrastructure and landscape change to support that? Well, Chicago is one of those places that you could say geography determined that it would become a location for a great city, that connection between the Great Lakes and Mississippi system.

But topography was a considerable challenge. This is a very low-lying area. It's a formal bed of an earlier version of Lake Michigan. It's basically a wet prairie. When they started building a city here, they ran into all sorts of sanitation problems because you had this wonderful source of fresh water, Lake Michigan, but all of the city's streets drained into the Chicago River, which drained into Lake Michigan and polluted the drinking water. So at a very early date, Chicago was challenged to have to make major topographic modifications, and this resulted in initially the building of the Illinois-Michigan Canal, which helped enhance the waterway connection between the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi system. but then also to use that canal as a way to pump out the pollution from the Chicago River and send it to our fellow Illinoisans downstream.

Now, I grew up about two and a half hours west of the city of Chicago, and one of the cooler engineering feats that I remember reading about as a kid was reversing the flow of the Chicago River. Can you tell us why and how that happened? I imagine the Y had something to do with the pollution that you just alluded to, but the how remains something of a mystery to me. Yeah, it's one of those things that's really not that well understood in that once they built the Illinois-Michigan Canal, completed in 1848, they had the capacity to reverse

the flow of the river. And in the 1860s, they put a series of pumps in Bridgeport, right where the canal began, And they pumped water out of the Chicago River with enough force to temporarily reverse the flow of the river. And so this allowed them to have fairly clean water, not perfect for quite a while. But as the city grew, that small canal was not big enough to go ahead and affect a regular reversal of the river. So, in 1900, they completed what's known as the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal. It's the waterway that exists and is used by barge traffic today. And that was a much larger waterway, and that was the permanent reversal of the Chicago River in 1900. And it's considered by the Society of Civil Engineers as one of the great civil engineering feats in American history. But frankly, it really was not a dazzling technological feat, let's say the Panama Canal or anything like that.

You mentioned the barge traffic. Is Chicago still a site of a lot of waterborne trade? The barge traffic in particular is critical for Chicago. With the Sanitary Canal completed in 1900, and then what they call the Kalesag Waterway, that's a little bit south and west of the city, that connects the Sanitary Canal with the Calumet Harbor, you've got two very important industrial waterways. And both of them lead into what's known as the Illinois Waterway, which during the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt, they spent a lot of money improving. And that then allows for Chicago to have a very important inland waterway connection with the Mississippi River all the way down to New Orleans. So presumably there would have been a shipbuilding industry that grew to support that trade. What did that industry look like and does it still exist? Shipbuilding is much muted today in Chicago's industrial landscape, but it was once very, very important. And a subsidiary of United States Steel Corporation was very important in building ships in South Chicago.

And during the 19th century, one of the most important of the Great Lakes shipbuilders, William Wallace Bates, he had a shipyard in Chicago. And it's Bates who developed the classic Great Lakes clipper schooners that were absolutely central to the Great Lakes economy in the 19th century. Thanks. I want to jump ahead a little bit in the timeline because one of the things that always draws my attention is Chicago, and I'm sure it draws Akshat's as well, is the long association of Chicago with the U.S. Navy. Anybody who knows anything about the Navy knows that Recruit Train Command, also known as Navy Boot Camp, is in Chicago, actually just north of the city. That's where Akshat works. Akshat, do you know how long that base has been there? Yeah, so it was initially completed in 1911. President Taft kind of broke ground on it in 1906. Something I do want to highlight about ROTC is that while most of the other services have multiple boot camps, the Navy currently only has one. So we used to have three. There was one in San Diego, California, and there was another one in Orlando, Florida. But in the 90s, we closed both of those down and we centralized everything at the Recruit Training Command Great Lakes location. And which is why we have the nickname the quarterdeck of the Navy, because almost everyone in the Navy has to go through here before they proceed on to their careers. And as I peruse the Maritime Museum's website, I find that naval training on the Great Lakes actually dates back to 1890.

However, at that point, it was conducted under the auspices of the Illinois Naval Militia. Ted, can you tell us what the Illinois Naval Militia was? Yeah, I mean, the Naval Militia was sort of a latecomer. Obviously, there had been, in the Midwest, and especially here, army militias, you know, going back to the formation of the state. But in the 1890s, following the publication of Alfred Thayer Mahan's Sea Power and History, there was this recognition that if America was going to be a great nation, it needed to have a great navy. And part of that was to build grassroots support for an imposing naval presence on both oceans. And they did not want to neglect the huge base of population that was in the heart of the country. In fact, the United States Navy, I think, has always been very careful to nurture a strong recruiting presence in the non-coastal areas of the country.

Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, and of course here on the Great Lakes. So they started this naval militia as a way to get young people excited about the Navy and to build up a core of semi-experienced sailors in case war came. As late as the late 1880s, the United States got into a bit of trouble with Chile. And when each side was rattling their sabers, it was clear that, well, we really couldn't fight a war against Chile in the Pacific effectively with the way our Navy was. They actually had a few more modern ships than we did. And that began this real build up of the Navy that was particularly strong in the presidency of William McKinley. And then, of course, later Teddy Roosevelt, who was really the person behind the creation of the Great Lakes

Naval Training Center. And it was Roosevelt that made sure that when we won the Spanish-American War, that a number of warships that we captured from the Spanish, he sent them to the Great Lakes. And so Spanish gunboats became the naval militia for Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Thanks. I'd like to jump forward now to World War II, because I think this was the most interesting period for naval training on the Great Lakes. And of course, your opinion may differ. But why is Navy Pier named Navy Pier? Well, there's a number of stories there, but a lot of it revolves on the fact that they had named the football stadium Soldier Field. And so there was a sense that, hey, we've got to balance this thing out. And so what was initially entitled Municipal Pier was named Navy Pier. This also coincided at a time when the Naval Academy had a very strong football team.

And there was a sense also that this kind of highlighted the Navy's presence even more so. But during World War II, Navy Pier lived up to its name because the Navy took it over for training a wide range of functions, but especially aircraft carrier, flight deck crews, and pilots. Were the pilots and crew training on the pier, or was that just a base for them? They would receive some classroom training on the pier. And then, of course, the aircraft carriers were located there. And then they would be deployed there as well. There was also naval officer training at Loyola University's Water Tower campus. And, of course, at Northwestern University, very large naval training. I believe John F. Kennedy was trained there. And George Bush, of course, was chained on the aircraft carriers. Yeah, you've mentioned the aircraft carriers twice now. What can you tell us about USS Wolverine and USS Sable? Well, they were certainly the most unique aircraft carriers in American history. Both of them were paddle wheel steamboats. I mean, even for like excursion boats, paddle wheels was like a really sort of totally outdated technology, except for one thing.

The great thing about paddle wheels was that you could, as like in a rowboat, you could go ahead and put one on forward and one on reverse, and you could pivot this thing on a dime. And so these were large excursion boats that didn't then require tugboats because of their maneuverability. This is in the days before bow thrusters. So that's why they were paddle wheels. They were recruited by the Navy to become aircraft carriers because their trade was solely a tourist trade, which was not going to really be able to thrive during wartime conditions. So Admiral Whitehead, who was a Midwesterner, saw that it would be foolish to try to risk America's small number of aircraft carriers as training vessels on the coast when German U-boats were going ahead and sinking hundreds of vessels a month. So it was seen that the safe waters of Lake Michigan, the only Great Lake which is entirely in United States waters, would be the perfect place to safely build up a core of naval aviators. So aircraft carriers you mentioned are created by taking vessels from the tourism trade, modifying them to serve as aircraft carriers.

Were those modifications done in Chicago? No. I don't recall exactly. I think they might have been done in Toledo, but they came to Chicago fully equipped for their mission. Thanks. And you had mentioned that Lake Michigan is the only one of the Great Lakes that is entirely inside United States territory. Was there some concern that the Canadians would object to us militarizing Lake Ontario or Lake Erie? Well, we have a treaty going back with Great Britain from the wake of the War of 1812, that neither side would put more than one

armed vessel on the Great Lakes. And so, you know, over time, this has been massaged at various times. That wasn't something that was a big concern for both countries, but it was, in fact, the law. You know, it's interesting. You're the second guest that I've had on who brought this treaty, The other being a Royal Navy Falklands War veteran who mentioned that we're not technically supposed to be building warships on the Great Lakes. Just an interesting footnote to me that this treaty has come up multiple times now on the podcast. Yeah, and I wonder to what extent submarines and aircraft carriers were sort of, they could look the other way on those because of the small armaments they actually had. I mean, unlike a regular fleet carrier, the Great Lakes aircraft carriers didn't have to worry about any aircraft guns or anything. And the submarines, of course, just have basically one serviceable cannon.

So I wonder if they kind of looked the other way with those. I'm sorry, were there submarines that were trained on the Great Lakes as well? Oh, yeah. There was a whole fleet of submarines that was built in Manitowoc, Wisconsin, up on the western shore of Lake Michigan. And again, this may be another way that they avoided conflict with the treaty. When those submarines were built, they did all their initial testing in Lake Michigan in the wintertime. They'd surface just coated in ice. But when they were ready to be deployed, they put them on floating dry docks, took them up the Chicago River into the sanitary and ship canal, and then shipped them to saltwater via the Mississippi River. Because the locks that Franklin Roosevelt's administration had built on the Mississippi and on the Illinois River were actually larger than the locks that were available on the St. Lawrence River. outlet for the Great Lakes. So we have aircraft carriers, we have submarines. Is there any other

U.S. Navy training going on on the lake in World War II? So I did not realize the submarine part until I asked the question. And again, I grew up two hours away from the lake. Well, there were certainly a large number of vessels that were built on the lakes, including at Chicago, subchasers and minesweepers in particular. Minesweepers, of course, in those days, you would want a wooden-hulled vessel. And the Great Lakes had a real strong tradition of building wooden vessels. So some of those were built right on the Chicago River at Grebe Shipyards. Crossed us from the old Riverview Amusement Park that many Chicagoans remember. Now, Chicago's two airports also have a naval connection. I don't think we need to go into any significant detail on what Midway Airport

is named for, but O'Hare is named after Navy Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare. Who is he? Yeah, Butch O'Hara was the son of a rather notable, sometimes infamous Chicago businessman who had certain connections to the mafia. But his son was an unadulterated naval hero for intercepting a flight of Japanese bombers heading for his aircraft carrier early in the war, and he shot down. I believe it was five of those, became the Navy's first ace in the Pacific War, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor and Distinguished Flying Cross, but unfortunately later perished in fighting in the Pacific in 1943. Thank you. Is there anything else in the maritime history that you think is worth noting? Well, I think one thing that would be noted is that Chicago was once one of the busiest ports in the world. Today, Chicago is still a port of significance on the Great Lakes, but nothing compared to a Long Beach or to New York Port Authority. But in the 19th century, Chicago had more ships coming and going than New York City and per near any other port in the United States, any of the other naval large ports in the United States combined.

Even as late as 1900, the busiest ports in the world were New York, Hamburg, Liverpool, and Chicago. Chicago's importance as a port city declined when ships got so large that they could no longer really use the Chicago River. And so they built the other harbor down at Lake Calumet in the southern margins of the city. And there it really became focused just on providing for the steel industry. So have the fortunes of the port also fallen with the fortunes of the domestic steel industry? I think that's the way to put it. as the industry has become more consolidated and has suffered international competition. But still, in terms of Great Lakes shipping overall, the maritime connection is absolutely central.

It's only via the maritime route that coal, limestone, and iron ore, the key ingredients for making steel, come together. That's all through the shipping. Thanks. So then my final question for you would be, besides the museum, What would you recommend visiting if you're interested in Chicago's maritime history in present? Well, let me just note that maritime history happened at the museum earlier this week with the tremendous amount of flooding and rain that Chicago was hit with. Bubbly Creek, which is a branch of the Chicago River on which the museum's located, overflowed

its banks and flooded our museum. So we're doing some fundraising now to try to clean up the museum. Hopefully, we'll be set with that when the state allows us to reopen. Until you can come visit the museum, certainly check out its website. But then I think you'd like to be able, as soon as the mayor allows it, take a walk on the Chicago lakefront, particularly where Navy Pier is located, because there you can get a good view of the Chicago Harbor Lighthouse. You can see the Chicago Police Naval Department headquarters, which is the old Coast Guard

station for Chicago. from the 1930s. And you can see the breakwaters that were built over 100 years ago, which still create the outer harbor for the city. So that's a great place to visit. The Grosse Pointe Lighthouse in Evanston is another great place to visit. And then, of course, there is the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Well, unfortunately, that is all the time that we have for today. I'd like to thank my guest akshat patel akshat is the new president of the chicago chapter of simsec akshat where can we find you online you have any projects that you're working on yes i'm currently researching and writing about an article on the parallels between

what's happening in the caribbean sea and what's going on in the south tennessee today if anyone wants to get in touch with me please email me at chicago at simsec.org Sounds interesting. Yeah, and I think I might know a website that would be interested in publishing something like that whenever it is that you wrap it up. Ted, where can we find you online and what are you working on right now? Well, you can check the Chicago Maritime Museum website and then also Loyola University History Department website. I have a personal page there. So I finished this book on Great Lakes navigation and now I'm currently writing a book on the environmental and cultural history of Lake Michigan. Thank you. That sounds interesting.

I look forward to reading it. For our listeners, if you're interested in donating to the Chicago Maritime Museum during its closure and its cleanup, we will have a link for you in the show notes. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next week. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 Bully in the alley, help me, Bully in the alley, put it on the shimbo now.