Tom Kacich: Who votes down a playground tax? Champaign did 100 years ago

May 26—In the spring of 1924, everyone seemed to agree: Champaign needed more parks and playgrounds. The growing city, whose population nearly doubled between 1900 and 1920 (and would more than double by 1930 to 20,000-plus), had virtually the same number of public parks it had had at the turn of the century and apparently very few playground facilities for its children.

As a start, the Chamber of Commerce, Kiwanis and Rotary clubs, labor unions, parent-teacher associations and university groups endorsed a property-tax increase to provide playground equipment at five existing parks. George Huff, the respected director of athletics at the University of Illinois who was just completing a monumental effort to finish Memorial Stadium, headed a committee to pass the playground tax. H.H. Shuler of the American Playgrounds and Recreation Association helped organize local support for the effort.

A tax of one mill on each dollar of assessed valuation (or $1 for each $1,000 of assessed valuation) would pay for the playgrounds. By one estimate, the tax increase would amount to about 37 cents per person per year.

The News-Gazette ran a series of editorials endorsing the need for more parkland and creation of a county forest preserve system. None of the editorials overtly supported the playground tax, but with headlines like, "You Need More Playgrounds," the difference was slight.

"Give us more parks — national, state and local — and get them before the land hogs and corporate exploiters finish the grubbing and defacing of nature that already have progressed dangerously far," said one editorial. "The country is building up fast. If we don't strike out our public playgrounds fast, and fight doggedly against invasion by private profit, we'll waken to find the jail-like system of the city in effect in the country, with admission charged to see the sights."

Less than a week before the special playground-tax election, which was inconveniently held on Monday, June 2, with voting from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. — whom do you think they were trying to exclude? — a former head of the department of landscape gardening at the UI spoke of the need for more and larger parks.

"Champaign has no parks," said Ralph Rodney Root, who had since become the head of a Chicago landscape firm, "just a few scattered, undeveloped pieces of property that are even too small to serve the playground needs of the community."

There was at the time Beardsley, Clark, Scott, West Side, West End and Washington parks, plus an old, unused baseball field known as League Park at Church and Russell streets (near where Huber's is now).

Champaign had never spent a penny on the acquisition of parkland, noted UI Professor J.M. White. All the parkland had been donated by people interested in developing the land around the parks.

"Champaign so far has lacked the foresightedness that Urbana showed several years ago when she voted the mill tax and built the beautiful Crystal Lake Park under the supervision of Professor J.C. Blair," Root said.

The playground tax was a shoo-in, right? Who votes down playgrounds for children? Champaign did. The playground tax lost 507-476. Organizers blamed a lack of enthusiasm.

"Labor precincts generally polled a big majority in favor of the plan, though many of the voters did not go to the polls in these precincts," The News-Gazette reported.

"The results of the election defeating the playgrounds idea does not express the general opinion in regard to supervised play for children," said Charles Stahl, secretary of the Chamber of Commerce. "I honestly believe that the people of Champaign want their children to have the playgrounds. It was lethargy that killed it.

"Playgrounds in Champaign will come eventually. The issue is not dead, nor will it be thrown in the discard."

Those playgrounds did come, eventually, but it took the Great Depression to bring them.

A decade later, there were more playgrounds, playground equipment and playground supervisors in Champaign and Urbana, mostly paid for by the federal Works Progress Administration as part of the effort to find jobs for those unemployed during the Depression.

Playground equipment was purchased and recreation workers were hired to supervise children at a number of local parks: Tremont, Beardsley, West End, Hessel and East Side parks in Champaign, and Griggs, Johnson and sanitary district parks in Urbana. The district supervisor of the WPA in East Central Illinois was George Huff Jr., son of the man who headed the committee that tried to pass Champaign's playground tax in 1924.