Nunes: Illinois plays significant role in nation’s history

Throughout its existence, Illinois has played a significant role in our nation’s past. Cahokia and Kaskaskia were the nation’s oldest settlements west of the Appalachians. George Rogers Clark’s Revolutionary War victories in Illinois doubled the size of America. The murders of Elijah Lovejoy (freedom of press) and Joseph Smith (freedom of religion) were landmark tragedies. In the 1830s, Abe Lincoln participated in the Black Hawk War in the northern tier of the state. The Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 are the most significant and famous in all of the nation’s history. In the Civil War era, the Prairie State provided the most leadership with the likes of Stephen Douglas, Abe Lincoln, U.S. Grant, John Logan and Ben Grierson. The Civil War prison for Confederate soldiers at Alton was the most infamous Union POW site of the entire war.

From about 1890-1922, Eugene Debs was the leading socialist in America. He was born in Indiana but most of his union organizing activities took place in Illinois. He led the famous Pullman Strike in Chicago which was quashed by federal troops in 1893, Debs was often defended by Clarence Darrow of Chicago, America’s most famous lawyer of the era. Darrow and W. J. Bryan butted heads in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in the 1920s. The defendant, John Scopes, grew up in Salem and Danville, Illinois.

How about our famous labor leaders such as Mother Jones and John L. Lewis? Or infamous labor violence such as the Haymarket Riot in Chicago and the Herrin Massacre. Illinois provided the nation with two of its greatest heroes in World War II. And both attended the Western Military Academy in Alton. Chicago’s Butch O’Hare was our nation’s first air ace of the war; Paul Tibbets of Quincy, the pilot of the Enola Gay, helped to save an estimated million lives by dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and ending World War II.

Illinois is noted for its political leaders such as William Jennings Bryan, Charles Dawes, Adlai Stevenson, Senator Paul Simon, Dick Durbin, Hillary Clinton, Donald Rumsfeld, Jesse Jackson, Mel Price, Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, Jean Kirkpatrick, and Harry Blackmun. During the late 1950s and ‘60s, Illinois had the two top-rated senators out of 100 — Paul Douglas and Everett Dirksen. Don’t forget social reformers like Jane Addams, Frances Willard, and Betty Friedan.

It would be hard living without Illinois inventions such as barbed wire, the Pullman car, the zipper, the steel plow, the pinball machine, the cell phone, modern dentistry, the grain reaper, the grain silo, and the dishwashing machine.

Another significant event that took place in Illinois was the world’s first controlled, self-sustaining, nuclear chain reaction at the University of Chicago. The work was carried out under the direction of physicist Enrico Fermi. Illinois introduced the world to the Atomic Age on Dec. 2, 1942 — quietly, in secrecy, on a squash court under the west stands of old Alonzo Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. Fearful that Germany might be the first to develop an atomic weapon, Albert Einstein wrote a letter to President F. Roosevelt, which resulted in the authorization of the secret Manhattan Project.

The atomic pile was created by surrounding bits and pieces of uranium oxide and uranium metal with graphite blocks shaped into a beehive-like structure. History was made that day at 3:25 p.m., with the splitting of a single uranium nucleus into a sustained chain reaction.

Mallinckrodt Chemical Co., on the St. Louis riverfront near the McKinley Bridge, was an important contributor to the project. Mallinckrodt took uranium ore and processed it into usable uranium oxide that was needed for the project.

Bill Nunes, of Glen Carbon, has written dozens of books including “The Buster Wortman Story” and “History of the St. Louis Cardinals,” both in color, to Jan’s Hallmark Shop locations. Nunes taught history for 30 years at Collinsville and Edwardsville high schools.