This Saturday, July 31, the Newberry Library will be holding their annual FREE Bughouse Square Debates. The weekend’s affairs will include numerous soap box speakers defending their beliefs. The Newberry’s enormous book fair will liven the action during the day. This year’s main debate focuses on the current topic of Gun Laws in the City.
Otis McDonald, plaintiff in the recent U.S. Supreme Court case McDonald v. Chicago, will speak out against Chicago gun laws at the Main Debate of the 25th annual Bughouse Square Debates, sponsored in part by the McCormick Foundation and emceed by author and Chicago Tribune writer Rick Kogan. Mr. McDonald will debate Garrett Evans, a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre. The Main Debate is at 1:30 pm in Washington Square Park, immediately following the presentation of the John Peter Altgeld Freedom of Speech Award.
The Bughouse Square Committee is also pleased to announce this year’s program of Soap Boxers. Soapbox speeches begin at 2:30 pm in Washington Square Park; three soapboxes run simultaneously throughout the afternoon. The Soapbox Champion is announced at 4 pm. This year’s speakers and their topics include:
- Erwin Lutzer, “Logical Reasons Why Jesus Is the Only Way to God”
- Nona Willis Aronowitz, “Can Sarah Palin be a Feminist? (Is There Such a Thing as a Conservative Feminist?)”
- Herbert Caplan, “Standing Up to City Hall”
- Steve Stevlic, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death Panels”
- Jim Grossman, “The Past is Never Dead”
- Rachel Goodstein, “Twenty is Plenty: Reasons to Dethrone the Daley Dynasty”
- Pam Selman and Evan Ribot, “Students are Americans, Too!”
- Edwin C. Yohnka, “Who Will Guard the Guardians? Stop Prosecution of Citizens Who Videotape Police Officers at Work”
- Tania Unzueta, “Undocumented Immigrant Youth at the Forefront of Our Own Movement”
- Paul Durica, as historical soapbox speaker Dr. Ben Reitman, “The Art of Soapbox Oration, with an Historical Survey of the Most Distinguished Chicago Boxers”
- Jeff Bilotich, “Unless You Repent”
- Edward Crouse, “The Patient Neglect and Bankruptcy Act: The Health Care that Obama and Company Actually Delivered”
- Rob Sherman, “Why Illinois Should Cancel Millions of Dollars in State Grants to Religious Organizations”
- Leah Fried, “How Organized Workers Can Change the World and Win Justice”
Saturday, July 31, 2010
1:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Washington Square Park (across from the Newberry Library)
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ABOUT THE BUGHOUSE SQUARE DEBATES
Bughouse Square (from “bughouse,” slang for mental health facility), the popular name for Washington Square Park, was the city’s boisterous and radical free-speech space from the 1910s through the 1930s. Orators mounted soapboxes and spoke to responsive, vocal crowds, and bohemians, poets, atheists, and religionists of all persuasions entertained bystanders. The square’s core contributors, however, came from the ranks of the Wobblies, men and women of the Industrial Workers of the World whose radical views, wit, and humor made them champion soap boxers and perennial crowd favorites. World War II and a post-war crackdown against socialists and communists, however, led to Bughouse Square’s decline and, by the mid 1960s, it ceased to exist. The Newberry Library revived the Bughouse Square Debates in 1986.
