Allison Hantschel

Chicago's Historic Irish Pubs

From dancing at Hanley's House of Happiness to raising pints at Kelly's Pub on St. Patrick's Day, the history of the Irish community in Chicago is told through stories of its gathering places. Families are drawn to the pub after Sunday church, in the midst of sporting events, following funerals, and during weddings. In good times and bad, the pub has been a source of comfort, instruction, and joy--a constant in a changing world. Based on interviews with tavern owners, musicians, bartenders, and scholars, Chicago's Historic Irish Pubs explores the way the Irish pub defines its block, its neighborhood, and its city.

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Press: 

Chicago Sun-Times: 

Danahey’s original plan was to scour the Chicago Irish bar scene, score a few free drinks, hear boozy barroom lore and write.

“The idea was to go into bars and say, “Tell me a story and we’d take the best stories,” Danahey says. “Stories and beer. That’s pretty good, I thought.”

Instead, the project turned into a charming picture book that feels like you’re thumbing through an old family album — more than 120 photos — accompany an oral history of the Irish Pub culture’s place in Chicago history.

“It’s very visual storytelling. So it was tell us a story and drag down your grandma’s photo album and your grandfather’s dusty box of war memorabilia,” Hantschel said.

Chicago Tribune's Rick Kogan: 

"When we first started talking to the people who ran the pubs, there was some concern expressed that this was just going to be a book of drinking stories," says Hantschel. "But that was never our intention. This was always a book about families' stories. The pub was the place you went after the wedding, the funeral. These were the places you gathered for the important events in your life."

They take readers back to the long-vanished places from the earliest days of Chicago to places that will be packed tight on Thursday. There are dozens of great photos, some quite old, such as an 1895 shot of a charming-looking Wentworth Avenue tavern, and some of more recent vintage, like a 1980s photo of local merchant Maureen O'Looney flanked by Jane Byrne and Ted Kennedy at the Irish Village.

WGN News: 

 

It Doesn't End With Us: The Story of the Daily Cardinal

 It Doesn’t End with Us is the history of the Daily Cardinal, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s 115-year-old student newspaper. It is the story of deadlines and datelines, dating and mating, rock and roll, indie films, and protest politics. It’s the story of two World Wars and two worker strikes, a shutdown, a bombing, and a centennial birthday. It’s the story of long nights and longer days in a windowless basement, of journalism on the edge, and of college kids discovering their dreams.

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Reviews/Press Coverage:

David Miller, The Isthmus, 3/14/08

With many interviews and much archival material, this history of the paper's 115 years reads not as a plodding chronology but more like a roller coaster, with each decade featuring its own fight for the paper's existence.

Doug Moe, The Capital Times, 1/16/09

What no one has ever accused The Daily Cardinal of is a lack of passion. Allison Hantschel's book, brimming with tales of all those young, aggressive, talented, self-righteous, wrongheaded, tireless and hopeful journalists, is itself a passionate work, and rightly so.

Tom Sumner, Publisher's Round-Up, 2/18/08

In the end, It Doesn't End with Us is a sweeping story of what it has meant to be a college student in America for all these years, and a reminder that surviving those years means not taking the system for granted, going it alone, keeping the bigger picture in mind, and confronting impulses of the body and impulses of the intellect, if never quite resolving any of this. And did I mention that Allison's writing style is a real kick in the pants? It is.

Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith and the Faulty Intelligence That Led to War

 

Here’s a story of espionage, think tanks, power brokers, a crazy drunk named Curveball, and Douglas Feith—the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy whose Office of Special Plans oversaw the enormous manipulations and failures of intelligence that led to the U.S. war and occupation in Iraq.

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Press Coverage:

The Progressive magazine: Interview, 2/6/06

My guest is Allison Hantschel, author of "Special Plans: The Blogs on Douglas Feith & the Faulty Intelligence that Led to War." We discuss the rise and fall of this neocon, as well as the role of blogs in the media field.

A Critical Ear: Interview 4/17/07 

Yesterday’s show included discussion of Carter’s visit to Palestine as well as an interview with Allison Hantschel about Douglas Feith (the focus of her book, Special Plans).

Op-Ed News, Karen Kwiatkowski, 3/4/07

“The blogosphere is that rough, raw and personal reporting, complete with elements of gossip and imagination. Mainstream media is establishment media, the kings' notices to the serfs. I think Allison's investigation into how well or how poorly the truth was reported in the run-up to Iraq, within the blogosphere and by the mainstream media, is not only important, but points us into a new place that may in fact lead us to fewer wars rather than more wars.”

Charlottesville Right Now: Interview 2/25/07

Allison Hantschel is a blogger and author who posts to the site First Draft. She has a new book called Special Plans: The Blogs & the Faulty Intelligence That Led To War. The book traces the story of Douglas Feith, a key figure in President Bush’s Defense Department in the run-up to the Iraq War. He ran the Office of Special Plans, which was created to collect intelligence on the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.”What Douglas Feith was doing was taking reports from Iraqi defectors who were questionable,” she says. “For example, we were fed a bunch of lines about mobile biological weapons laboratories that were terribly dangerous and could strike us from anywhere. And the main source for that allegation turned out to be an alcoholic cousin to an aid to Ahmed Chalabi.” She adds that Chalabi later turned out to be also shown as less than reliable.

 

Media & Political Commentary

From New Orleans: Our Lady of the Driveway, First Draft, 3/31/07

She was standing at the entrance of somebody's driveway, as we drove past looking for the spot where the levees broke and the water came rushing past. Scout would know the precise name of it, the name of the street: we drove around today for two hours looking at places she'd been and I'd never imagined. Mary, full of grace, with her head cracked off and put back on, and all the broken places showing.

What you don't want, what you aggressively don't want, when you're going through something, is some comfortably situated loudmouth telling you they know exactly what you're going through. Misery hates company. Misery hates shallowness more. Misery hates, above all, being lectured at. We came to put our hands to use places where they could be used. I came, having been here as a child only once and only briefly (there was a doll shop, and a doll with a purple hat with ostrich feathers, and the raised graves concerned me, is all I remember). The light is different and the streets are narrow and everything smells sweet, like something baking, and this is what we saw, around the city, today.

Saturday Gutting

Inside the house it was dusty and dark; our goggles fogged up and we were drenched in seconds, but it was satisfying, in a situation in which you feel there's so little you can do, to slam a crowbar into some drywall. And that's for the convention center, and that's for fucking Geraldo having smarts our government didn't have and that's for every right-wing nutball who said people should just pull themselves up by their bootstraps and that's for everybody who ever told me America was a Christian nation. That's for Gentilly and that's for St. Bernard and that's for New Orleans and that's for my country, you fucking fucks, as Ashley would say.

We were joined on our gutting trip by 15 students from Elon University, who were from a policy class and were in town interviewing people. They'd come up the Gulf Coast and were in Mississippi the previous day, and were heading home on Sunday. So it was us, the First Draft Krewe, and a bunch of college kids playing football with the water bottles when they weren't working harder than six people each.

And we were joined by an incredible gentleman named Victor Vavasseur, who had lived next door and moved back two weeks before, into a FEMA trailer and part of his house, and told us the people that had lived in our home were all dead, except one daughter in a mental hospital and another now living in Houston. Mr. Vavasseur was 76 years old, he said, and had a Scottish Terrier named Whoopi Goldberg, and when he saw us all on his lawn he came out and told us how he and his wife Germaine evacuated intending to come back in a week, and were gone two years.

FEMA had told him his home was worth $50,000, and offered him that for the $290,000 he needs in repairs. Houses in his neighborhood, he said, were going for more than $100,000 before the storm. He knew the people next door, whose house we were working on, and told us their story. Then he ran his hose out into the front yard so we could wash up, bought us all chicken wings (like a protein rush to the cortex after all the work we'd been doing) and brought his wife and dog out to meet us. He had pictures of snow, he said, from when he was living in Chicago after the evacuation.

Begging to Be Wed: Sirens Magazine 9/21/06

Gay union opponents can grandstand all they want about the “defense of the family.” That doesn’t change the fact that these loving couples fighting desperately for this right are actually reminding us, at a time when some heteros slip easily in and out of marriage and divorce at will, how precious this institution actually is. They’re making it damn near impossible for even cynical sworn bachelors and bachelorettes to deny how desirable a state betrothal can be.

Democrats Need to Step Up in the Fight Against Illegal Wiretapping: Daily Southtown 2/6/08

Neither of the present Democratic candidates has been especially proactive on the issue of civil liberties, to great disappointment from the very Democratic base they are trying to convince to nominate them for president. Supposedly liberal Democrats like Sen. Jay Rockefeller, of Rhode Island, were behind the bill that gives the president exactly what he wants: impunity to spy on Americans, with no chance of consequences from inconvenient things like laws.

From the 2008 Democratic National Convention: First Draft 8/24/08

 We need to walk around an amazing city, in the shadow of mountains blue and blush in the morning light, and see nothing as far as we can see but people with Obama buttons, Hillary signs, Biden stickers, donkeys on doors and windows and light poles, nothing but people who believe, in some fashion, in large part, what we believe.

And we need to say it out loud, say it as big as we possibly can with whatever voice we have, who we are and what we want, not just so that others hear us, but so that we hear ourselves.

So that we hear Diane Watson, who joined the Army in 1977, when women were even less welcome than they are now. Watson, who turned 50 on Wednesday, worked as a supply technician for twelve years in Korea and Japan before coming home and finding a job in a bank.

She rode the bus downtown Wednesday, an Obama fan to the core and a proud Democrat.

"We need to treat our troops better," she said, when asked why she is supporting Obama. "We need to bring them home and then we need to take care of them, because the people in charge right now are not doing right by them. It's time to stop this war. They shouldn't be fighting someone else's war, and that's what this has turned into."

From Grant Park on Election Night 2008: First Draft 11/3/08

When the polls closed in California, people counted the seconds down, and when the CNN "Breaking News" chyron came up, the yell that came from that crowd was like nothing I've ever heard, ever, ever. And I've been in some hockey stadiums. It was a yell that came from people's guts, that came from every advancement denied, every hope dashed, every moment stolen, every bit of joy they'd ever lost in the past eight years and for longer than that, longer. It was a yell that came from someplace deep and hungry, now satisfied.

The Cuban-American woman next to me held my hand tight, and said, "This is for '68. It took 40 years, but we got here." And we danced to the music. The three boys behind me said, "Dude, did we actually just win this thing?" We high-fived. Mr. A put his arms around me and sang in my ear. I'm getting over a cold, my feet hurt, my back hurt, I wanted a drink, I wanted to lie down, it was gonna be a monumental inconvenience getting out of there and on the train and walking home. Screw it, though. That roar went up, and there was nowhere else on earth you could have persuaded me, in that moment, to have been.

Or, as my friend J. texted me a second later, "I THINK BARACK OBAMA JUST GOT ME PREGNANT LOL."

It's been a long eight years, and George W. Bush has been a miserable, divisive, small, nasty president. John McCain, gracious concession notwithstanding, ran a miserable, divisive, small, nasty campaign. As President-Elect Obama (how crazy is that to say OMG that's crazy) reminded us his own self, we have some shit to take care of in the coming months and years. But for the first time in a long time, we all held on to each other, and when the moment came, we raised our voices together, in a loud and joyful noise. For the future. For tomorrow, only hours away.

Drinking the Sand: First Draft 8/20/2006

Once you've jumped on a bandwagon, you can't just get off. You've publicly declared that this is now a new day, that we are a new country, that you are a New Man Made Of Moonbeams or something, and you've dedicated yourself to a president you thought was providing leadership. Leadership of the sort you've craved since you were a kid hearing your parents' stories about FDR and Kennedy. Leadership of the sort you got into media and politics to provide, and now look at you, falling for the first snake oil salesman who comes along promising national greatness in an amber apothecary vial.

It takes a big bag of stones to climb out of the pool after you've gotten yourself into that deep end. And if our politicians and the leadership of our press had those stones they'd have recognized Bush's insincerity the moment he started to talk about Iraq. They'd never have bought destroying a country to make it free, they'd never have listened to talk about weapons of mass destruction, they'd have laughed Condi Rice off the set of Tweety's show. But this wasn't about the facts anymore.

This was about the story they were telling themselves in their heads. And it couldn't end with an apology.

On Newspapers

Rationing Your Give-A-Shit

I say over all the time that too much energy is expended rooting out political slants in news coverage and not enough energy is expended rooting out laziness and stupidity. Add to those the allergy to excitement, the confusion of passion with bias, and the beaten-down attitude you get after being mindfucked daily by one corporate asshole after the next and what you end up with is this: A COLUMNIST FOR A MAJOR AMERICAN NEWSPAPER explaining to you why he just can't be bothered to get excited about a news story because hey, the jury might come back not guilty, and then he'd look futile and small. It's hard for me to put into words how crazy that is, especially when it's said with such blithe certainty, in such a reasonable tone, by such a sensible guy.  

 

I had this fight with an editor, once. He asked me if I thought a certain public figure, exposed as an amoral, lying monster in stories I'd written, should be called upon in our editorials to resign. YES, I said. We should advocate for his resignation, we should advocate for application of all legal remedies to lock this bastard up, and we should do so repeatedly and loudly until time ground us into dust. The editor looked confused and troubled. "What if he doesn't resign?" If he doesn't resign? Then he'll still be a son of a bitch who is going to hell, and you'll still be right Jesus God. Isn't that enough? It wasn't. It was more important that we look as though we had influence, and if we'd called on him to resign, and he didn't, well, then we'd look dumb, wouldn't we?

 

This is a fundamental misunderstanding that infects every level of every medium in which we transmit information to one another. Your responsibility is not to WIN, and still less to look like you're winning. It's to speak with whatever voice you possess about the things that matter to you. Listening is somebody else's job and they'll do it or they won't but you can't make your whole life about the presumed actions of others, it's a quick route to the madhouse. This is a thing writing teaches you, especially, that you send your stories out into the world and sometimes they matter, sometimes they change things, sometimes they inspire and uplift and make somebody a different person, alight with courage and glory. Sometimes they just lay there like a dead fish and nobody does anything and nothing changes and you feel like an asshole.

 

And the point is, you can never tell which it's going to be. Should you play the odds, rationing your ink and your "emotions," figuring out how much to give a shit based on if there might be a big enough parade as a result? Plenty of people do. How many times a day in our lives do we hear this? How many times do we say it to ourselves and others? Don't get involved, you won't change anything. Don't get het up, you won't change anything. Don't worry, don't work, don't lose sleep, don't open your wallet, don't open your heart, don't open your mind, don't laugh, don't cry, for God's sake whatever you do don't raise your voice. Don't say fuck. Don't care. As if you have a certain amount of give-a-shit in you, and you have to portion it out like it's a bowl of sugar. As if there should ever be an end to your passionate interest in and advocacy for the betterment of the environment in which you live.

May Conrad Black and David Radler Rot in Hell

Let's have a "Chicago Journalism Town Hall" panel to talk about how Google is stealing from us! Fuck iPhones! You suck, college kids! Nobody wants to pay for quality journalism anymore! I don't see any bloggers at the local zoning board meetings!  The Internet is a cesspool of opinion and false information! I hate pixels! *fap fap fap* Craig Newmark ruined our lives!

It is unconscionable to have the discussion we are having when what is happening is happening. It is irresponsible. It is MAD. It is a failure of leadership on every level from people who claim they love newspapers but don't know a damn thing about them, and they can yell all they want about the changes in the market. Increasingly and to my immense satisfaction people are no longer buying their bullshit. The evidence of criminal neglect and dereliction of even a semblance of duty is finally stinking up the doorstep of society enough that ordinary people can't ignore the smell.

Present consumers with this rotting corpse and say it's our fault it's dead. Please. You killed it, assholes, and you did it over and over, for years. You did it on purpose and you did it despite advice from everyone you knew, and you did it with a smug smile on your rich face, and you ruined the lives of people who got up every day and went to work in spite of your idiocy because they cared about the world around them and wanted to make it better. You did it. So don't come to us now and try to pretend we didn't want to save it. Every time we revived it you were right there with the axe.

No One Knows What To Do

We all just got here. In the lifetime of a new medium we are freaking larval. For people who've been in newspapers for decades to come up and puff out their chests and be all, "Oh yeah, what kind of money do you make, punk?!" is a bit premature. Not to mention which, on balance, the answer is as likely to be "as much as you do, and how are the layoffs treating you?" as it is, "not much, sir, I'm very sorry for existing." If we all had a foolproof way of magically growing money and cotton candy and ponies in our back yards, wouldn't it be kind of creepy? I'm not trying to pass off confusion as some kind of authenticity, I'm saying, give us a minute to collect our belongings.

Dan Sinker of Columbia College made my freaking day by talking a lot about how local papers in Chicago gave up on local news in large parts of the city years ago and that local coverage in the Trib and Sun-Times peaked in 1994, according to this Community Media Workshop study about which I'll probably have a separate post later. And, really. You can claim to be the guardians of our democracy but the argument only works if you actually, you know, do it. Otherwise you're just stroking yourself and while I'm sure it feels nice I'm not particularly interested in listening. I could have stood up and kissed Sinker, too, when he said that any time a new tool is introduced, going all the way back to the radio, people have always panicked about the implications, so everybody calm down.

As the panelists talked about innovation, about making your own site what you want local news to be, someone behind me kept shouting out, "Who pays you while you do it? Who pays the rent?" and it's not that some of the blithe "You just have to work for the love of the story and wait tables if you have to in the meantime until somebody hires you" didn't come off as romanticizing the poverty-stricken artist's life as one somehow more noble than any other. But what I think the panelists were trying to say was something we say around here all the time: If you want things to stop sucking you have to go make them not suck. You can't wait until somebody just hands you a giant platter of not-suck and tells you it's all yours.

You can't just sit back and complain, as we knock on the conservative punditry for doing all the time, that the world doesn't offer you the choices that allow you to be who you want to be. I'm not advocating poverty for anyone. I'm not arguing it's great that for some reason people aren't flinging money at those I know to be talented writers and good solid reporters. What I am saying is that eventually, when you continue to ask that something happen and it doesn't, you either change your strategy or you shut the hell up. Who pays the rent while you figure your shit out? I don't know. And nobody should be asking anyone else to answer that question for them.

 

Other Writing/Commentary

The Last Safe Place on Earth, Common Ties, 1/30/07:

Two recliners in the living room and after dinner, he dried the dishes she washed, they sat in those recliners and you sat beside hers on the carpet which was brown-red and then gray, pretending to do your homework but really watching as he answered every question on Wheel of Fortune right but scoffed when you told him he should be on the game show, he’d make a million dollars.

There was a butter dish in the kitchen cupboard full of quarters and she told you to take some and run over to the dime store, buy some bubble gum and a glitter pen, it’s just a quarter, it doesn’t matter. Every Wednesday night you slammed open and shut the gate and walked up the back, flung your backpack down on the lawn, joined her on the patio swing and chattered, for a solid hour, about your day.

He loved her so desperately, terribly, you could see it in their wedding photo, his wide, gap-toothed grin, wearing her like an Olympic medal, his rumpled too-big suit beside her perfect satin dress. You had the same one made for your own wedding, admiring her straight back, her determined eyes. He dated two of her sisters but settled on the older one, who’d studied nursing by herself in Chicago, who left home at 19 and came back having stepped over drunks in the gutter and treated children burned in fires. He settled on the one with the eyes that saw to the end of her life and though she was four years older he married her, and told you once, on their anniversary, “Only one man had a better wife than me: Saint Joseph.”

And she was happy to see you, no matter what you did wrong that day, what you’d failed at, she was happy. All you had to do was walk in the door and you’d be the best person she could think of. She loved you like that. He said your name, drew it out so that its three syllables lasted a full minute, and because he said so little, that said everything.

Citations & Quotations

The New York Times Opinionator Blog, 2/19/09

First Draft: Athenae writes: “All day I’ve been reading stories and tweets about Iran cracking down on text messaging, cell phone videos, but the pictures are getting out anyway.” People who deplore “citizen journalism” and talk about how awful it is that anyone with a cell phone camera can be a journalist should be paying attention right now, because at its most basic, this is what journalism is: getting the signal out, any way you have to, any way you can.

Disconnected, American Journalism Review, August/September 2008:

In waxing poetic about small-town America and its salt-of-the-earth values, do we forget that communities can also harbor darker instincts – small-mindedness or even racism and other prejudices? One who voiced that concern is Allison Hantschel, formerly of the Chicago Sun-Times, now a popular blogger (as "Athenae" at First Draft), author and weekly columnist for Chicago's SouthtownStar. She told me: "I had one editor who was a local at my old paper who didn't think it was relevant that the cops in a neighborhood we covered sat on the corners of the borders of the hood and made a habit of pulling over any black person who drove past the imaginary dividing line because 'it's always been that way.'"

The National Journal's Blogometer, 2/27/06

Athenae at First Draft finds the "our people" line especially chilling: "In another fifty years, we'll ask ... why do they hate us? Perhaps this is the answer, as well as the impetus for the question. They're not our people. They hate us and so we hate them and on and on, forever and ever. For Thine is the kingdom."

Day One for Democrats, Las Vegas Sun 8/24/08

Bloggers Jeff Spoeri, far right, and Allison Hantschel,  second from right, talk inside "The Big Tent" workspace for new media, on the first day of the Democratic National Convention.

Bankruptcy — Now Starring the Sun-Times, Chicago Reader News Bites, 3/31/09

Here, from blogger Allison Hantschel, is a peroration against Conrad Black and David Radler, the former owners who left the company in this sorry state, that expresses how a lot of present and former STMG employees surely feel.

Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting Blog, 4/27/2009

Athenae reminds Cohen that the "fact of the matter is, not everybody lost their damn minds, and it is a profound dishonor to those who held to their convictions in the face of overwhelming public pressure to go all kill-crazy that we lump them in with the nutballs painting their chests red, white and blue."