On the miserable, drizzly morning of May 1, 1865, 50,000 somber and mostly silent people greeted a train that stopped at 12th Street and Michigan Avenue.
Eight crisply uniformed, well-rehearsed Union army sergeants drew a coffin from the dark, bunting-draped train and placed it in a horse-drawn hearse.
Following a carefully scripted protocol, 36 high school girls in snow-white gowns set off with black sashes and gloves strew petals and garlands of red and white roses on the coffin.
Those same girls, “some with sunny ringlets dropping to their shoulders, others with neat braids down the back,” then headed a remarkable procession. The girls, the hearse, orderly ranks of Army generals and public officials stepped slowly through the mud-slicked cobblestone streets of the city’s business district on the way to the Cook County Courthouse.
They were accompanied by a military band that played a march written specially to honor the man in the coffin, “The Lincoln Requiem.” They also were accompanied by 50,000 regular citizens who fell in behind and were watched by 150,000 more who looked on from wooden sidewalks, some of which splintered and collapsed under the weight.
Death seems to demand pageantry. Even the most humble among us usually receives some sort of ritualized send-off. When the deceased is a powerful person who has earned the respect and admiration of the populace, the pageantry can verge on public spectacle.
Chicago will experience this Wednesday with the funeral and entombment of Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, archbishop of the city’s Roman Catholic archdiocese. The funerals of the four cardinals who presided over the archdiocese before him were elaborate, well-attended affairs, even though not all of those cardinals were universally liked or personally respected.
Bernardin’s rare transcendence of his religion to appeal to a much wider population promises to make his farewell especially heartfelt by millions. Such a massive public outpouring of grief and affection for a public figure has several precedents in the city’s history.
The first might well have been the city’s 24-hour vigil for President Abraham Lincoln on his long trip from Washington, D.C., to his entombment in Springfield after his assassination.
Lincoln’s funeral had taken place nearly two weeks earlier in Washington. His coffin was put aboard a funeral train that took a slow, circuitous 1,700-mile route to enable as many people as possible to view the coffin.
In Chicago, he lay in state in the courthouse as 125,000 mourners filed past to pay respects to the man whose strength and leadership enabled the nation to survive the Civil War.
Carl Sandburg, in his epic Lincoln biography, described the collective humanity in the Chicago procession: “Yankees, Mayflower descendants, Sons and Daughters of the Revolution, Jews, Negroes, Catholics, Germans, Irishmen, Dutchmen, Swedes, Norwegians, Danes–the so-called `big bugs’ and the so-called `ragtag and bobtail’ for once in a common front.”
The city wouldn’t see anything approaching such a spectacle again until another assassination. In October 1893, a deranged office seeker shot Mayor Carter Harrison I at Harrison’s home.
A genuinely admired public official, Harrison’s death was an occasion that brought great throngs into the city’s streets. Eighty thousand people trooped past his coffin as he lay in state at City Hall.
Huge crowds jammed around the Church of the Epiphany at Adams Street and Ashland Avenue for the funeral. Afterward, 600 carriages and 20,000 people on foot fell in behind the cortege as it wound its way past hundreds of thousands of onlookers along the route to Graceland Cemetery on the North Side.
“It was not a holiday crowd,” a Tribune reporter wrote. “There was little noise, and that died away as the riderless saddle-horse of the late mayor came into sight led behind the catafalque.”
In 1933, Chicago Mayor Anton J. Cermak was killed by an assassin in Miami. The gunman had intended to hit President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Cermak died a dramatic death over a period of weeks in a Florida hospital. When his body was returned to Chicago, he arrived with martyr-like status.
More than 80,000 visited his coffin as he lay in state at City Hall. Hundreds of thousands watched the procession that took him to the funeral, held in front of 23,000 at the Chicago Stadium.
The Tribune account called the Cermak rites “the most spectacular funeral demonstration ever seen in Chicago.”
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The deaths of more recent mayors, Richard J. Daley and Harold Washington, also traumatized the city. But they died in the era of television, Daley in 1976 and Washington in 1987. The grieving for those two was no less deep than for their predecessors, but people no longer had to travel to the funeral procession to observe the ritual.
Daley wanted his final rites to be held in his beloved Bridgeport neighborhood, and 25,000 managed to view him during a 19-hour wake at a funeral home. Several thousand also crowded into his neighborhood church and followed the procession to his burial at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Worth.
Far more people were able to mourn Washington, the city’s first black mayor, as he lay in state at City Hall. Tens of thousands more stood along the funeral route when he was taken from Christ Universal Temple, 11901 S. Ashland Ave., to his burial place at Oak Woods Cemetery, 1035 E. 67th Pl.
Usually, it is elected leaders who elicit widespread grief because they–symbolically, at least–represent people of all ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds.
By virtue of the Roman Catholic Church’s size and breadth of membership, its leaders are among the few who have claimed similar allegiance.
Two previous prelates were especially widely mourned.
Cardinal George Mundelein, the first Chicago archbishop to become a cardinal, built more than 600 churches, schools, convents, rectories and hospitals during his tenure at the archdiocese from Feb. 9, 1916, until his death Oct. 2, 1939.
He became internationally known for his outspokenness against fascism after he rebuked Adolf Hitler in 1937 as “an Austrian paperhanger, and a poor one at that.”
When Mundelein died, so many people filed past his bier at Holy Name Cathedral that they wore out the blue carpet in the nave.
An estimated 1 million people turned out to view the cortege that carried his body from the church to the burial vault. He had asked to be laid to rest at the seminary he founded, St. Mary of the Lake, in the town named after him.
Cardinal Samuel Stritch died in May 27, 1958, in Rome after a prolonged illness. During his illness, Vatican doctors tried to save his life by amputating his right arm.
His struggle, not unlike Bernardin’s battle with cancer, evoked widespread sympathy in Chicago. After he died, Stritch’s funeral was even bigger than Mundelein’s.
Andy Frain, founder of the firm that once specialized in crowd control at public events, said at least 1.5 million people filed past Stritch’s bier at Holy Name in the days before his funeral June 3, 1958.
Cardinal John Cody, Bernardin’s immediate predecessor, was buried on a chilly day at the end of April in 1982. The mass for Cody was open only to those with a ticket, just like Bernardin’s will be.
Hundreds who couldn’t get in gathered outside Holy Name Cathedral to listen to the ritual on loudspeakers hung from trees and light poles. At Mt. Carmel Cemetery in Hillside, dozens of Catholic schoolchildren joined the 500 mourners for the final committal service.
More than 60 North American prelates were on hand. Among them: then-Archbishop Joseph Bernardin of Cincinnati.