A City on the Circuit: How the Lecture Circuit Brought the War and Its Leaders to World War II-Era Chicago

In 1941, 75,000 Chicagoans filed into Soldier Field. The crowd gathered on that blustery day not for a concert or a sporting event, but to hear Polish General Władysław Sikorski discuss the ongoing war. Sikorsky wasn’t the only visitor to Chicago on the eve of the United States’ entry into war: statesmen from Czechoslovakia came in droves; Indian anti-colonial nationalists spoke to local antiwar groups. Once the United States joined the war, the floodgates opened: in 1943, China’s Madame Chiang spoke to thousands at the Chicago Stadium; Carlos Romulo of the Philippines lectured at Northwestern University; and former Prince Otto of Austria made the North Shore’s Women’s Club rounds. Chicago, the supposed beating heart of American “isolationism,” welcomed visitors to discuss the world at large.

Chicago’s wartime penchant for hosting foreign emissaries was hardly peculiar. In and around the Second World War, Americans gathered to listen to speakers from abroad. Recent scholarship on WWII U.S. foreign relations has disproved the myth of an “isolated” United States, by showing that Americans were out in the world—as passengers on international Pan-Am flights, as foreign correspondents, and as proponents of “One World.” This paper, however, argues that the United States welcomed the world into its domestic life. To do so, it explores the prominence of foreign emissaries on “lecture circuits” in the United States during World War II, especially in Chicago.

This paper considers how Chicagoans responded to their guests, the role of Chicago’s many diasporic communities in hosting these lecturers, and the marketing of these talks. Finally, it asks why before and during the Second World War, foreign statesmen in want of American support believed it was essential to speak not just to American politicians, but directly to everyday Americans—and when that ceased to be the case.