Chicago History | Winter 1975–1976

Chicago History

WINTER 1975-1976

View of Columbus Park on Chicago 's West Side, designed by Jens Jensen.

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

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Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society WINTER 1975-1976 Volume IV, Number 4

Cover: You are right if you guessed that the lithograph reproduced on our cover is not a local scene. But it is in the Bicentennial mood , and very much in the spirit of Perry Duis ' article , so we found it irresistible.

Chicago Historical Society

CONTENTS

HARRIET MONROE AND POETRY MAGAZINE/204

by Ellen Willia.ms

THE SALOON IN A CHANGING CHICAGO/214

by Perry Duis

JENS JENSEN AND COLUMBUS PARK/225

by Aialcolm Collier

Isabel Grossner, Editor Frederick J. Nachman, Assistant Editor

CHICAGO'S CIVILIZED WORLD OF WILD ANIMALS/235

by Al Griffin

GOLFING IN AND AROUND CHICAGO/244

by H erbert Warren Wind

Mary Dawson , Editoria l Assistant FIFTY YEARS AGO/252

Editorial Advisory Committee Emmett Dedmon James R . Getz Oliver Jensen Robert W. Johannsen Herman Kogan Will Leonard Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Robert M . Sutton

Copyright, 1975 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and Am erica: History and Life

BOOK REVIEWS : YESTERDAY'S COMMUNES/257

by Pau l Elmen

CRIME IN CHICAGO/260

by Isabel S. Grossner

BRIEF REPORTS/261 LETTERS/263

Harriet Monroe and "Poetry" Magazine

BY ELLEN WILLIAMS

Art critic) writer) poet) world traveler) and mountain climber- but best known as an editorChicago)s Harriet Monroe was quite a gal.

AMONG THE LITTLE MAGAZINES-magazines usually of small size and always of limited circulation-Chicago's Poetry has been preeminent.

Each little magazine has had an almost individual purpose, but Harriet Monroe's special hopes for Poetry are of special interest to us because they stemmed from her experiences in Chicago during the boom times which followed the Great Fire of 1871 and the panic of 1873-a burgeoning development of the city and its sense of itself which culminated in the Columbian Exposition of 1893. The White City of the World's Fair seemed an instant imperial capital blooming against a Lake Michigan which receded indefinitely, like a future laid open for ever newer manifestations of the awakened Midwest.

Poetry followed the Columbian Exposition by almost twenty years, yet their association is not arbitrary. Monroe, born in Chicago in 1860 of New England stock, was an old native by local standards. The rushing boom of the 1880s and the Gilded Age of Chicago gave her a double sense of American possibility. Like many Americans and many writers of the time, she admired the "tycoon"-the industrial emperor who had begun in a farmyard or a tool shedas an emblem of individual accomplishment.

She also hoped that American materialism had the seeds of something finer in it. As an aspiring poet, first published in 1888, she suffered more than most from the crass aspects of American life for, in the tradition of Emerson and 'Whitman, she hoped that American democracy,

Ellen Williams has taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Nebraska. Her book Harriet Monroe and the Poetry Renaissance is due in 1976 from the University of Illinois Press.

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untrammeled by outdated traditions, might develop a freer, better integrated, spiritually uninhibited human type.

Harriet Monroe's friendship with John Wellborn Root, the young architect who married her sister Dora in the early 1880s, gave her an unusual insight into the relations of the world of business and the world of art. Root, Daniel Burnham's partner, had conducted his own education as an architect in the wild building boom which followed the Great Fire, relatively unhampered by the styles and strictures of the Parisian Ecole des Beaux Arts, the academy which dominated not only Europe, but also America's East Coast. In Chicago, the architect could build with rare freedom from cliches and imitative forms.

Harriet Monroe's John Wellborn Root makes it clear that she understood the drama behind the development of the skyscraper in Chicago in the 1880s. The successful buildings were the ones which responded to functional and commercial necessities. Root's Monadnock Building was an early embodiment of the service to function which is the familiar slogan of later architecture. The tradition , carried on by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright, had worldwide influence.

Her understanding of Root and his art must have fostered modernist sympathies in Harriet Monroe, yet her own poetry does not seem advanced today. Her blank verse play Valeria, published in 1892, won praise from important contemporaries, but it is no more than a skillful imitation of the Shakespearean mode. And her "Columbian Ocie," written for the opening program of the Columbian Exposition in the same year, seems overburdened with abstractions-a far cry from the modern work she lat-

THE

COLVMBIAN ODE

By HAltRIET MONI\QE

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.MDOXX0/1 Chicago Historical Societ y

Title page of Monroe 's "Columbian Ode," designed

by Will H. Bradley for the World's Columbian Exposition.

Harriet Monroe in 1906.

er published. Harriet Ionroe, however, had won someLhing of a baule for poetry in getting it on the program.

American poetry was at a low ebb in the 1 Sgos, and "Chicago poets" were figures of fun; Eugene Field, now remembered almost solely for hi own poetry, liked to deride Chicago's poet in his newspaper column. But Harriet Ionroe believed that poetry was the crowning human achievement, the source of value for its civilization, and she became dismayed as planning for the Columbian Exposition progressed.

John Root and Daniel Burnham were superintending a specLacle in which Lhe arts were given an unusually prominent place. The World's Fair was to be a showplace for the besL of American architecture and sculpture: gardens, buildings, perspectives, fountains, statues, and murals proliferated in the plans, and a series of concerts was scheduled for the Chicago Orchestra.

There was no thought whatsoever for the art of the word. Harriet Monroe protested to the committee and suggested that they commission her to write poem. She had experience at formal celebratory poetry, having written the cantata

a

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Harriet Monroe

sung at the dedication of Sullivan's Auditorium Theater three years before. Her "Columbian Ode," written less for personal glory than for the honor of her art, fit harmoniously with the other ornaments of the Exposition, as the opening lines make clear: Columbia! on thy brow are dewy flowers Plucked from the wide prairies and from mighty hiils.

Lo! toward this day have led the steadfast hours.

Now to thy hope the world its beaker fills.

The most lyric sections of the ode were set to music and sung at the Exposition "by a chorus of five thousand voices, to the accompan iment of a great orchestra and military bands," according to the beautiful printed souvenir edition designed by Will Bradley.

With the "Ode," Harriet Ionroe struck a double blow for the status of poetry in the U nitecl States. ot only was it widely praised by critics, it was also paid the clubiou compliment of being pirated by the New York TVorld, which reprinted it from an unauthorized advance copy. At that time, newspapers routinely reprinted verse without payment or acknowledgement, expecting writers to be grateful for the notice, but Harriet Monroe felt otherwise.

In an u¡nhearcl-of move, she sued the TT' orld for infringement of copyright and won a l:,5,000 judgment.

In the years after the Fair, her own art turned more toward some poetic equivalent of Root's work. She wanted to find in modern lives and in modern speech subjects and rhythms worthy of verse; she abandoned the Shakespearean, heroic mode in which her first play was written and devotee! herself to a series of short verse plays based on contemporary life. She was not isolated in this work; association with fellow writers and artists in the group which called itself "The Little Room" stimulated her. The Little R oom was largely social; it developed from the pleasant habit of gathering for tea and chat in Lorado Taft's studio after the Friday matinees of the 206

Chicago History

Chicago Historical Society

Ali ce Corbin Henderson, Poetry's associate editor.

Chicago Orchestra, then in its first prominence under the directorship of Theodore Thomas. l\Iost Chicagoans with artistic aspirations met there, and Harriet i\Ionroe could count on seeing such friends as the novelists Hamlin Garland and Henry Blake Fuller. Fuller, especially, encouraged her modernism; he felt that her memoir of Root, published in 1896, was a powerful piece of social realism, in the mode then sponsored by McClure's Magazine, one which influenced his own books profoundly. And he encouraged and praised her work in verse drama. Garland was also a prominent realist, a worker in local color-another variation of the ideal of art grounded in immediate experience.

Chicago's entrenched literary critics disliked Fuller's and Garland's fidelity to fact and the social criticism in their writings. Francis Fisher Browne, editor of The Dial, the Chicago weekly which upheld high academic standards, attacked Garland in particular, arguing that art must be informed and judged by the great traditions of the past.

In these same years, Harriet Monroe became active in journalism, writing art criticism for the Chicago Tribune and feawres for a number of newspapers and periodicals. Her newspaper propaganda for an art which expressed the val-

ues of ¡ American democracy against imported tradition earned Louis Sullivan's gratitude at a time when his career was declining. The young Frank Lloyd Wright, however, was at first put off by what he called House B eautiful English.

He conceded, after an exchange of letters with Harriet Monroe, that he was misled by superficial impressions and gallantly asked to call her his Harriet-a tribute which the eminently proper Monroe declined. Her articles on the Grand Canyon and on the ceremonial dances of the Hopi Indians, published in Atlantic Mont!tly, show a deepening sense of America and of the relation of art to the life of a community. She had made several European sojourns, she knew London and Florence, but she found everything European too finished, too completed. She loved the sense of future possibilities which the West gave her.

In 1910, when she was fifty years old, Harriet Monroe took a long holiday from her city and her journalism, traveling around the world to Peking to visit her sister Lucy, wife of William J. Calhoun, the American minister to China.

In London, she heard about a young American who had made an impression with his first two books of verse. She carried Ezra Pound's Personae and Exultations with her as she crossed Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railway, reading and re-reading the poetry as the train crawled across Asia.

Perhaps she also spent some time thinking over her life. She had earned some status as an American poet. Besides Valeria and John Wellborn Root, she had published a volume of verse plays, Th e Passing Show, in 1902. She had placed her quota of verses in magazines: in 1908, Atlantic Monthly had published an ambitious poem on a modern subject, "The Hotel," which had been widely reprinted and praised, and in 1910 it was publishing her poem "The Turbine." One of her verse plays had been produced in Chicago, and several prose plays had come close to Broadway production: Ethel Barrymore had wanted The Happy Isles as a vehicle. Har-

Chicago H islori ca l Society

Ezra Pound, Poetry's London correspondent, who introduced writers such as Joyce, Yeats , and Frost to the magazine.

riet l\Ionroe had not begun with any marked advantages of wealth or education. She had made a career for herself and supported herself in a world that gave few openings to women; she had become something of a spokesman for cultural betterment and for progressive art. She might with justice have rested upon past accomplishment as she entered deep middle age.

But Harriet Monroe was not built that way.

She had a nagging sense of unfulfiIIed possibilities, and she returned to Chicago from Peking with a new scheme in her mind. She wanted to make room in American life for the poet. Her long experience with publishers, the debacles of friends who were aspiring poets, the careers of poets like Eugene Field, who became celebrities only by spending their best energy on ephemeral newspaper writing, the spectacle of Ezra Pound, an exciting new American writer who had chosen, like Henry James, to make his mark in London-many things convinced her that America lacked significant poets because it throttled them. She decided to begin a magazine which would be devoted exclusively to the publication of poetry and which would welcome poems of length arid seriousness. Few existing magazines published poetry as anything but a trivial inChicago History

207

terlude, a column filler between stretches of prose, and some of them declared that under no circumstances, ever, would they publish a long poem. Poetry: A Magazin e of Verse, as she entitled her venture, was to give the poet his own place and to defend his interests, as endowed orchestras and art museums fostered the other arts.

Harriet Monroe had no capital of her own and needed about five thousand dollars a year to finance a modest magazine. Here the memory of what Chicago had done in the "\,Vorld's Fair inspired her. The merchants and industrialists who had opened their fair to the nation's architects and sculptors might respond to a similar appeal on behalf of the poets. For a year she canvassed the Loop and won support from Ryerson Steel, McCormick Harvester, Sears Roebuck, Swift Meatpacking, from the Potter Palmers and Samuel Insull, from manufacturers of electric supplies, paints, and coffee roasters.

She also appealed successfully to architects, among them Daniel Burnham, to brokers and 208

Chicago History

bankers, and to lawyers, including Clarence Darrow. Much of her support came from predictable quarters, the people behind the town's existing cultural institutions-Charles L. Hutchinson of the Art Institute; Kate Buckingham; Arthur and Owen Aldis of the real-estate firm which had promoted Burnham and Root's buildings; F. vV. Gunsaulus, president of the Armour Institute of Technology; a brace of professors at the University of Chicago; Anna Morgan, whose Drama School had been a progressive influence in the 1890s; and two newspaper editors, H. H. Kohlsaat of the R ecord-Herald and Victor Lawson of the Daily N ews. The first of all her guarantors was H. C. Chatfield-Taylor, active in Chicago's cultural affairs for years, a wealthy old friend who suggested the appeal for sustaining contributions. Most guarantors of Poetry magazine pledged fifty dollars a year for five years, and $250 was a substantial sum in those days.

The idea and the financial backing for Poetry thus came out of Harriet Monroe's Chicago

past-her years of struggle to make and sustain a career in poetry, and the friends and associations she had formed. There is little evidence that she was responding to any specific signs of poetic renewal in the town in 1911. The Chicago writer closest to Poetry at the beginning was novelist Henry Blake Fuller, who served as a member of the Advisory Board, devoted himself to proofs, and seldom offered his valuable advice on editorial selection. The poets who are remembered as Chicago writers all turned up after the magazine was launched. Indeed, the magazine seemed so rooted in the 1 Sgos that some of the new writers fought shy of it. Edgar Lee Masters felt, at first, that the magazine was an "efflorescence" of The Little Room , which seemed to him a detestably snobbish establishment. Harriet l\fonroe knew Floyd Dell, a young Kansas socialist who had made his mark as editor of the Chicago Evening Post's Friday Literary Review and had become something of a leader of the town's young artistic bohemians. She appealed to him for advice and contributions, offered to

throw the magazine open to him; if he felt it needed livening, he was free to ginger up its tone. But Dell waved her aside and shortly thereafter removed himself to New York.

Harriet Monroe was remarkably open in managing the magazine. Modernist sympathies meant in editorial practice a responsiveness to any writer who seemed to have life in him. Also, she had suffered a great deal from small-time editors and was therefore determined that Poetry should not become a smug institution which served the egos of its managers. She and Alice Corbin Henderson, her associate editor, worked in a small office at 543 Cass Street (now Wabash Avenue) which breathed welcome and informality. Poets formed the habit of dropp ing in to debate the latest developments of the "new movement," to read over debatable manuscripts, and to offer evaluations. Discussions would continue over lunch at a small Italian restaurant around the corner or at the studio which Mrs. Henderson 's painter husband, William Penhallow Henderson, maintained nearby. Soon VaChicago Histo ry

209

Harriet Monroe

chel Lindsay, then Carl Sandburg, then Edgar Lee Masters, became intimates of the magazine, and the Chicago School of Poetry arose.

Her first major support, however, came from Ezra Pound in London. As she had from the first invitee! comment, contributions, and criti cism from Floyd Dell in Chicago, she also welcomed them from Ezra Pound. Unlike Dell, Pound responded enthusiastically to the invitation she extended to him in August 1912. The youthful Ezra Pound could dramatize an ideal of the pure art of poetry as no critic before or since.

Pound communicated absolute dedication to writing-to words chosen in the light of a literary conscience fired equally by the great texts of the past and by the inescapable realities of the present. His concept of Image-that mysterious jewel which was a poem-was shorthand for his poetic ideal. In Poetry in 1913, he described it as "an intellectual and emotional complex caught up in an instant of time." Pound's Imagism cut across the division between tradition and modernity which ruled most of Chicago's free-verse controversy. He was himself not much interested in the free-verse crusade, once the poet's freedom to set his own form was acknowledged. Nevertheless, he was the first of the freeversifiers to be published in Chicago: Dawn enters with little feet like a gilded Pavlova, And I am near my desire.

Nor has life in it aught better Than this hour of clear coolness, the hour of waking together.

To the traditionalistic Dial, this was heresy, yet The Dial did not want to notice Poetry's existence. The older magazine solved the problem by fostering an attack in its correspondence columns on this and other Pound "indecencies," shameful in matter and manner, in 1913.

Pound combined a flair for the dramatic critical dictum with an uncanny insight into the work of new writers. He recognized T. S. Eliot's value instantly when he read the much210

Chicago History

rejected manuscript of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," and he promoted James Joyce out of obscurity. Eliot, Joyce, Yea ts, the Imagists H. D. and Ri chard Alclington, Ford Madox Ford, D. H . Lawrence, William Carlos Williams, Rabindranath Tagore, even Robert Frost, were introduced to Poetry by Pound.

But Pound was never an easy man to work with. The fierce light of his imagination could distort as well as illuminate, and he was incapable of acknowledging Harriet Monroe's point of view. If she agreed with his judgment of a poem and printed it, Pound felt that he had bullied her into it; he insisted that he had to "hammer" her to get Robert Frost published. She was disappointed by "Prufrock," which Pound aclvertisecl in advance as the greatest poem he had found by a contemporary American. Perhaps expecting a vivid picture of American life, she found Eliot's "Pru[rock" precious and introspective: Would it have been worth while, After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets, After the novels, after the teacups, after the sk irts that tra il along the floorAnd this, and so much more?lt is impossible to say just what I mea n!

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen: \Vould it have been worth while If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl, And turning toward the window, should say: "That is not it at all, That is not what I meant at all."

Although Harriet Monroe gave Eliot his first publication by printing "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" in June 1915, commentators inspired by Pound have overlooked that fact to quibble because she die! not rush the poem into print the moment she received it. Since Pound had no hold over her, no voice in the magazine except what she gave him , it is hard to see what leverage he had for bullying her. But to some, Harriet Monroe's own choices get washed out in the glaring legend of Ezra Pound the great

THE DIAL

II !6rmf•fl\ontbll! Journal of 1..ftmltJ! l!ttitfci1m, l!lflCIIHion, anll lnfonnatfm.

°"

TITH DIA 1, (/•u•dtd I• 1880) I, P"bll,A,d IA, 1'1 tnt<I 161A of each monJA. o, Suacurnow, 12. a ,ea,. in adr"Jttt, po.,lnfld µrtpaltl ,,. th~ Utallt!tl 8llllt1 a1td Mt-.rlco ,• F°"lp mad Cnnadla11 Ji(}l/nge tiO rt:nl, pu 11ear er.Ira. BurrrJ. • ou ,Ao1dd be by clt«k, or

Taa••

l>V urpf.14 or JHHtal order, poyablfJ to THE DIAL CON PANY. U,,./tu oth,ru,iae or,lrred, ,ub.tc-rlplf0111 u,i/l begin 10Uh tM CffrTe'JII uumbt>r. When 110 direct rey"t•t lo cll.,-qnlinufJ «J upfrall<m of .n,b,.

1cri11tlo11 t, rtceirtd, ii t, auumffl that ti co,alinuance o/ /ht .ublcrlpti<m i, (le,ired . Al>TUTl.111'0 RJ.TU /uMal,htd Oh appllcaJi07', Pub/1,htd by T/11:i DIAL l'OMP,J.NJ',J,'ln•Arl, &.Udlng,CMcugo.

Enten,d u Seoond-Clau Matter Octobo.:S:-Ul9'2, at tho Poot 011100 at Chicago, llllnola, und.-r Act of :March 3, 1870.

No. 666.

MARCH 16, 1914.

Vol. LVI.

CONTEN'.1'8.

PA.OB

NEW LAMPS FOR OLD . • . . . . . . . . . 231 CASUAL COMMENT . . . . • . . . . . . . 233 A great cartoonist of the Victorian age. - The writ• ings of the new Johna Hopkins Pre•ident. -The revival of a Tanishinr a.rt. -An author'• helpmate.

-The compnrative delights of literature and farm• ing. -The true cauoe of l)ickena'• death. - Public appreciation of publio librariee. - Governmental unfairne8" to publi•hera. - A atrange taote in paeu• donyma. -A noticeable fact about juvenile fiction.

COMMUNICATIONS . . . . . . . . . . . • 236 Theodore Low 0., Vinne. George French.

Anti-Babel. Edgar Ma11h•w Bacon.

A Ca"" of Wrongly•A•oribed Authonhip. William B. Cairn,.

Precurl!On of the Present-Day Heroine, FI011d Adams Nobl•.

"G. B. Lancaater." William Nd,on.

THE CRUISE OF A PIONEER YACHTSMAN. Percy F. Bicknell . . • . . • • . • . . • 239

INVESTIGATION::; OF THE MEXICAN WAR. Frederic Austin Ogg • • . . . • . . 240 THE LORE OF PRECIOUS STONES. Marlha Hale NJo:W

Shacliford .

. . . . . . • . , . • . .

• 2-12

LABOUCHERE OF "TRUTH." Laurene• M. Lar1on 244 THE LIFE AND ART OF THE MIDDLE AGES. Sidney Fi,k• Kimball . . . • . . . . . • 246 William Morton Pa11nt . . • 247 De Morgan'• When Ghoet Meetll Gho.t. -Cannan'• Old Mole.-Phillpotta'a The Joy of Youtb.-Naaon'• The Witue88 for the Defence,- Hioheno'• The Way of Ambition. -Mn,, Humphry Ward'• The Coryoton Family. - Mn. Wharton'• The Cuotom of the Country.-Mn. Watfa'• Van Clen.-Weblter'• The Butterfly. - Home.

BRIEFS ON NEW BOOKS . • • • • . • . . . 262 A new eatimate of Luther and the Reformation. An approach to Aristotle for oollere otudento. Christina of Denmark, -Studie• of aix European dramatists. - Conaenatin -.iewa of popular rovern• ment,-Intereating bywayoof media,val life.-A popular p....acher'a mi-llany.-Rural Eng-land 1111 seen from a motor-car. -Ramb18'1 in well-trodden literary patha.-The poetry and charm of oommon thinp.

DrUEFER MENTION • . • . . • . .

• 2M

RECENT FICTION.

NOTES . . • • . . • • . . . . • . . • • . 2M ANNOUNCEMENTS OF SPRING BOOKl:l • • • • 2/l7 A cJa.ified liat of boub to be iaoaed by Amerioaa publiaben duriDC the Spring and &mmer of 1914.

NEW LAMPS FOB OLD.

" Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge ; it is the impaB11ioned expreuion which is in the oountenance of all Scienoe."

The quotation is ao hackneyed that we are almost ashamed to recall it t.o the attention of our readers, who must have known it by heart all their lives, but there are times when the impulse t.o go back t.o first principles becomes an mperative mandate. "A frequent recurrence to the principlesofcivil government is absolutely necessary to preserve the ble88ings of liberty."

These noble words of the Illinois Constitution remind us of a similar urgency of obligation in other spheres of thought than the political, and wherever the fundamentals are flouted or ignored, it behooves those who stand for sanity and the acceptance of the ripe fruits of the world's experience to rally around the old standards. The parlo118 times in which we live afford occaaions innumerable for thus calling out the old guard, for it baa become the fashion with young people to reject everything that has been tested in the alembic of reflection, and to offer us in its stead all manner of raw and fantastic imaginings. Whatever is old must perforce be outworn; whatever is new muat be deserving of serious consideration just because of its novelty, and the more freakish the form of expression, the more a.eaured the triumph.

What we are about to say is concerned mainly with the art of poetry, which account& for the W ordsworthian text, and also for the following collocation of words descriptive of Chicago: "Hog Butcher for tbe World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation•• Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders."

Here a word of explanation is needed. The typographical arrangement of this jargon creates a 8118picion that it is intended to be taken 1U1 some form of poetry, and the suspicion is oonfi.rmed by the fact that it stands in the forefront of the latest issue of a futile little periodical deecribed aa "a magazine of vene."

This, then, _is what the coterie :responsible for Chicago Historical Society

Part of The Dial's scathing attack on Sandburg's " Chicago Poems" shortly after their publication in Poetry.

The editorial does not deign to mention the author's name, the title of his work , or the "futile little periodical" which published it.

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Harriet Monroe

discoverer-"The Divine Ezra," as William Carlos v\Tilliams callee\ him. She had the wit to see that Pound deserved the widest la litucle; tha l the contribution he made lo the healthy development of poetry more than oULweighed the irritations he occasioned. She was the first in a long line of Pound enthusiasts who were able lo overlook his distortions for the sake of the fire in him. It seems regrettable that the latest heirs of this enthusiasm, the scholars who supervise Pound criticism, fall so easily into a snide opinion of Harriet l\Ionroe; she was their model and their precursor.

And even the most brilliant discoverer can have blind spots. Pound, through all the time he acted as Monroe's London correspondent, ignored the poems of Wallace Stevens which Poetry printed. Harriet Monroe picked "Phases," Stevens' little war poems, out of the incoming mail when he was still unknown to her and, in order to print them in the War Number of November 1914-which was already in proof-cut out an Amy Lowell poem. For a number of years, Harriet Monroe was Stevens' principal promoter. In 1915 she published "Sunday Morning," the great poem of his early period; in 1916, she voted a prize to his verse play Three Travelers TVatch a Sunrise; and she awarded Stevens Poetry's prize for the most distinguished publication of 1919. As critical bickering intensified, it was Harriet Monroe who could be found wondering why the Amy Lowell school or the Ezra Pound school never had a word to say about Stevens.

Harriet Monroe praised both Pound and Stevens for "strange and beautiful rhythms"; perhaps her power as an editor was an ear for the unique vibration, the special personal cadence, of an original poet. Her record indicates that she had a sense for the poem which went much deeper than attachment to any particular school and was not related to any particular poetic dogma.

It was in an almost parallel development, therefore, that Harriet Monroe was able to 212

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foster the Chicago School of Poetry. Vachel Lindsay sent in his new work very early in the magazine's history, and the booming chant of "General William Booth Enters Into Heaven" created something of a sensation when it was published in 1913. This seemed modernism with a vengeance-street revivalism taken from the raw center of the city and developed in lo a fantasy whose images and values belonged lo the Salvation Army, no't to Homer or Longin us: And when Booth halted by the curb for prayer He saw his ]\faster thro' the flag-filled air.

Christ came gently with a robe and crown For Booth the soldier, while the throng knelt down.

He saw King Jesus. They were face to face, And he knelt a-weeping in that holy place.

Are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?

As Lindsay developed to write more fantasias-"The Congo," "The Santa Fe Trail," "The Chinese Nightingale"-Harriet Monroe came to hope that he would go further than anyone else in getting the American world into poetry, in an idiom which did not falsify it. She said of Vachel Lindsay that he wrote in "our own jargon, our own gesture."

Sandburg came next, sending a group of "Chicago Poems" in 1914 which created an even greater uproar because his work was not so singable or so involved in fantasy. And readers had to take its pictures of the city and its strongly colloquial speech without the embellishment of rhyme or obvious rhythm. This early work of Sandburg's enraged literary traditionalists, and T!te Dial brought its attack into the open, falling on "Chicago" in fury. In a leading editorial in the issue for March 16, 19q, it displayed a snatch of verse that has since become familiar: Hog Butd1er for the World, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler; Stormy, husky, brawling, City of the Big Shoulders:

~.,oetr AJntlJla~ine ofVerse VOLUME IX October-March, 1916-7

Edited by Harriet Monroe

543 CASS STREET CHICAGO

Chicago Historical Soi::iety

Title page from a bound volume of Poetry magazine.

This, The Dial proclaimed, was worse than doggerel. It was sheer, insolent anarchy, and the magazine which sponsored it was a "futile little periodical."

Harriet Monroe, far from frightened by The Dial, felt that its overt attack testified to the power of her magazine, and she proceeded to make an editorial reply full of the joy of battle.

This free verse quarrel was, after all, only another episode in the old war over Garland's realism or over innovations in architecture, and she was delighted to expose the underlying issue.

Poetry, she wrote, had experimented, had taken chances, had tried to express the life of its vast, chaotically rich region, while The Dial had trundled along for thirty years repeating the cliches of the London critics. She wondered if its editor was competent to define the word "futile." And she awarded Poetry's prize for the most distinguished publication of 1914 to Sandburg's "Chicago Poems."

After Sandburg, the. poetic revolution flourished. Edgar Lee Masters, perhaps the most important figure in the Chicago Renaissance,

emerged before 1914 was over. He had been practicing law in Chicago for twenty years as Clarence Darrow's partner and had published several volumes of uninteresting verse under a pseudonym. In the frigid poetic climate of the 1890s, he had feared that a reputation as a verse writer would destroy his law practice. Now, reading in Poetry the verse of Pound and the Imagists, watching the development of a crusade for freedom in poetry, and especially influenced

by Sandburg, he felt a new power stirring in him. In the spring of 1914, he began to write the Spoon River Anthology, publishing it serially in William Marion Reedy's St. Louis paper, the Mirror. A collection of meditations from the grave in which the citizens of a small prairie town speak out the deepest secrets of their past lives, the whole long poem has much of the impact of a novel. The book, published in 1915, became a best seller; Masters was hailed in London and translated into foreign languages before the world at large knew much about the rest of the Chicago Renaissance. Spoon River read like free verse at its boldest and realism at its most pitiless; commentators freely compared Masters to Dostoevski. Even The Dial found great power in it, despite its "deliberate unloveliness." Masters' success meant full victory for social realism and freedom of form in poetry.

The Chicago School of Poetry was the fulfillment of Harriet Monroe's crusade against dogmatic tradition and stifling formalism in poetry, but, as we have seen, it is not for this accomplishment alone that we shall be forever in her debt.

She edited Poetry until 1936, when she died in Peru on the heights of the Andes. The thin air of her beloved mountains was too much for her seventy-five year old heart. Her magazine survived her, is still published in Chicago-its rival, The Dial, went East long ago-and it pays her an unusual tribute every month on its title page, wh_ich reads: Poetry Founded in 1912 by Harriet Monroe Chicago History

213

The Saloon in a Changing Chicago

BY PERRY DUIS

For some) the old-time saloon was a gathering place) a home away from home) or a place to bring the family)¡ for others) just a place to stop for a quick bracer)¡ for still others) a den of vice.

It was all these things) and a free lunch to boot. had witnessed strange activities in downtown Chicago. People scurried about carrying small boxes from store basements and back rooms. Limousines backed up to the Fidelity Safety Vault Company on Randolph Street, where uniformed chauffeurs carried out carefully wrapped bottles, and less well-heeled citizens toted bags or carts and even pressed baby carriages into service. It was January 16, 1920.

Prohibition would begin at 12:01 A.M., but whatever alcohol Chicagoans could gather inside their homes would be a legal possession.

As evening settled upon the city, things were unusually quiet. The Celtic Bar in the Sherman House was dark, as was Righeimer's luxuri ous place. Moran's, a downtown landmark since 1883, and Stillson's bar had already been transformed into coffee shops. Hick's Cafe had in its window a small coffin banked with flowers; in it was a bottle of whiskey. One of the few farewell parties for Demon Rum took place at the Stevens Restaurant, but those celebrants were teetotalers, the same that tomorrow would travel from one former saloon to another drinking victorious toasts of grape juice. The very term "saloon" is still illegal in Chicago. ,vhat disappeared that evening was more than a retail business. It was also a unique social THE AFTERNOON

Perry Duis is currently teaching at Roosevelt University and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle, and delivering a series of lectures on "The People of Chicago" at the Chicago Historical Society. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Chicago was titled, "The Saloon and the City: 1880-1920."

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institution , as much a part of Chicago's history as the , vater Tower or Hull-House. For more than a century, the corner saloon and its proprietor had been the center of a bitter debate.

Temperance folk viewed the saloonkeeper as a plague, a thief who took work ingmen's wages and left their families to starve. His substantial girth and diamond stickpin symbolized a prosperity based on Satan's Commerce. Everything that proper citizens viewed as evil in urban society-crime, civil unrest, and corruptioncould ultimately be blamed on the "liquor trust."

To the saloonkeeper's friends, on the other hand, a bar was a retreat from the hectic world, a place of relaxation where clocks and traffic jams did not exist, and the barkeep was a professor of common sense and an expert on everything from the rules of card games to city politics to international finance. When Finley Peter Dunne began his newspaper column of biting social commentary in 1893, he chose a mythical saloonkeeper, Martin J. Dooley, as his philosopher.

Whatever one's own view, the saloon and its proprietor demonstrated an important principle in the history of urban social institutions: that the ability to adapt to massive and rapid changes was necessary to survival in nineteenthcentury America. Especially in Chicago, that principle was obvious. Few cities in the world grew as rapidly. Few welcomed as many different ethnic groups; in few, did the local economy grow and diversify as rapidly; and few witnessed such a swift transformation of outlying rural villages into residential, then commercial and,

,

finally, industrial neighborhoods. The changes came with lightning speed, and only the ability of the saloonkeeper to adjust to his environment and tailor his service to new customers insured his survival. His adaptability also made the liquor business a durable foe, one which temperance interests were able to conquer only through a constitutional amendment.

The friendly bar on a Chicago corner was the product of years of adaptive evolution, its roots deep in three liquor-selling businesses of the nineteenth century. One was the familiar inn or tavern. The first, the Miller House, opened in 1827, but Samuel Miller and Archibald Clybourne had a competitor only two years later, when James Kinzie and Archibald Caldwell opened the Wolf Tavern . Thus began the liquor dealer's greatest problem: attracting customers away from his rivals. Still these were almost primitive hostelries. As one old timer, Charles Cleaver, remembered years later: The outer door opens into a large room used as a sitting-room for the men folks, and also as a barroom, for in one corner, generally in the angle, you will see a cupboard with two or three shelves .... From this room you would enter the family sitting-room, also used as a dining-room for travelers .... The upper story, although sometimes divided into two rooms, was often left in one, with beds arranged along the sides. Once in a while you might find a curtain drawn

Chic ago H is toric al Society

Whiskey Row on So. Ashland Ave . near the stockyards, about 1905. Note the Sample Room at left.

across the further encl of the room, affording a little privacy to the female portion of the occupants, but often not even that, the beds being occupied promiscuously, on the first-tome-first-served principle.

Although more sophisticated hotels appeared in later decades, and they continued to operate barrooms, the hotels had begun to encounter new types of competitors by the 185os-the grocers and the wholesale liquor dealers. Both concentrated on bulk sales-barrels and jugsand their involvement in the retail trade came about almost by accident. Wise customers demanded a sample of the spirits or wine they were about to purchase, so dealers set up small "sample rooms" for tasting. Before long, such facilities began attracting people who were more interested in drinking than in making a purchase to carry home. A number of retailonly places called themselves "sample rooms" and, by the end of the 1850s, that term had become merely another name for a saloon.

Indeed, by the 1850s, retail liquor sales had become a specialized business, and by the end of the Civil War, most barrooms had no connection :Vith groceries, hotels, or wholesale dealerships. Lacking these sidelines, saloonkeepers also began to adapt their businesses to parChicago History

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To each his own in this unidentified saloon in the late 1800s.

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ticular areas of the city or to particular groups of customers. The North Division of the city had several beer gardens to cater to the German immigrants who brought their families along, while Irish neighborhoods had dimly lit standup bars that sold mostly whiskey and which no "decent" woman would enter. A few downtown places were attractively furnished, and drinks there cost more than in the unadorned neighborhood bars. Between 1860 and 1880, the saloon trade prospered and seemed destined for further prosperity along the same lines.

But a change was in the making. Although the German immigrants, with their taste for lager beer, established only a few breweries in the city before the Civil War, lager became Chicago's most popular drink after 1870. It was light and effervescent, it could quench a parched throat faster than the heavier ale and porter, and its manufacture was simple and inexpensive. Moreover, everything needed to make Chicago a major brewing center was handy. Talented immigrant brewmasters arrived by the dozen. The limestone ridges in some parts of the area made excellent coldstorage cellars, and Lake Michigan's abundant ice made it easy to construct substitutes. Finally, Chicago lay in the center of a major grain and hops market, making those raw materials both plentiful and inexpensive.

The result was a prolific expansion of the lager beer industry after 1870. By the turn of the century, there were over fifty Chicago brewers competing for customers and contending with products shipped in from other cities. Milwaukee brewers had first established major Chicago markets during the disruption caused by the Great Fire of 187 1. The widespread adoption of pasteurization, which made it possible to ship chilled beer hundreds of miles without spoilage, allowed Anheuser-Busch of St. Louis to move its brew into Chicago in rubber-lined refrigerator cars. As the wholesale price of beer began to fall, the competition became chaotic.

Saloonkeepers in New York or Boston in 1880

paid $15 for a fifty-five gallon barrel of mediumgrade beer but, in Chicago, because of the competition between city and outside brewers, saloonkeepers paid only $3.50 and got back a rebate of 50¢. Such low beer prices could not help but change Chicago's retail liquor busines .

Low wholesale costs meant inflated retail profits, which allowed many marginally profitable barrooms to remain open. As a result, Chicago became notorious for the number of its saloons.

In the 1870s, the desperate brewers began to employ many gimmicks to win the loyalty of saloonkeepers and thus assure themselves of retail outlets for their beer. They gave away large murals, many of them the infamous saloon nudes, as well as brightly decorated mirrors, steins, and trays, and a few of the larger brewers furnished large glass signs to hang over the front door. Their salesmen promised loans for remodeling and time payments for beer purchases. But it seemed like a losing battle: no deal, however good, legally bound a saloonkeeper to one brewery or prevented him from accepting gifts and buying beer from others. It was Illinois' temperance reformers who unwittingly delivered the individual proprietors into the hands of the brewers.

During the 1880s, the so-called "high license" idea swept the nation. Not a new idea-it had been tried in 1855-the plan was a simple panacea for the evils of the proliferating saloon. And saloons had indeed proliferated, primarily in Chicago. In 1882, for example, there were 3,759 of them to slake the thirst of 560,693 residentsone pair of swinging doors for every 149 men, women, and children. In some areas, like the old 16th and 17th wards at the lower end of Milwaukee Avenue, there was a liquor license for every dozen drinkers.

A tenfold increase in the license fee, the reformers believed, would close down the worst of the "low dives," slum groggeries that propped up their ailing beer and liquor business with gambling and prostitution. The additional municipal revenue that was generated would fiChicago History

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GRAND OPENING_

tic

'!!llil (1.!Âźeda;,) ~,c,u;y, $vcmrt1 ICJlh, tmtfr!-3//IZCd 1utll ,yim, hM ,, @'a:t>lm~/, JiP

'JP a?lnet i;/ SiÂźt}f,man

a.,/~,, :!f&ttm Shied,.

J21fl ht,1,/4m14 ate a?tafa~ ,;,v,k/ta attm/

,,,,/j,altal, i;/ a FB~Ji; r.UN!Cflt,

Chicago Historical Society

Invitation to the Grand Opening of Tommy's Exchange, probably in 1868. Many businesses were called "exchanges" during this period.

nance a larger police department, pay for new streets, and underwrite other city services. After prolonged debate, the Illinois General Assembly passed the Harper High License Act of 1883.

Within a year, it was clear that the new law was having an unforeseen effect. Saloonkeepers who were unable to pay $500 for a license turned to the brewers who, in turn, began purchasing the permits and furnishing them to the retailers.

In return, the beermaker demanded that the saloonkeeper sell only one brand of beer and that he purchase it at an inflated figure. Most proprietors had little choice.

The new arrangement permanently altered the retail liquor business in a number of other ways. It initiated an extensive brewery investment in saloons. The larger companies established real-estate offices and began renting prime locations and subletting to licensees. They conducted surveys of traffic patterns in order to locate their saloons on the most profitable sites.

They bought buildings when they could, and later even began to construct their own saloon buildings. The handsome structures that remain today on the South Side at 94th Street and Ewing Avenue and Front Avenue between 113th and 115 th streets and, on the orth Side, at Belmont and Southport avenues are visible reminders of the involvement that the Schlitz Brewing Company once had in the retail business.

Financial control of the saloons by the brewers also transformed the saloonkeeper from an 218

Chicago History

entrepreneur to an employee. By the turn of the century, nearly three-quarters of all Chicago barrooms were dominated by the brewers. A prospective proprietor would invest only $50 or $75 . In return he received a storefront, fixtures, a supply of whiskey and beer, and glasses.

The fixtures, which were turned out in brewery woodshops, were standardized, much as they are in chain groceries. Most important, the decision as to whether the saloonkeeper had failed or succeeded was no longer his. The failure to have enough nickels at the day's end might mean instant foreclosure. He might find himself locked out in the morning. Moreover, his failure often worked to the advantage of the brewer, who could retain only the most talented barkeeps and keep enough licenses and fixtures available to serve the needs of new ethnic groups as they entered the'c:i ty.

A third of the hopefuls failed each year, and those who survived did so only by attracting new customers, encouraging loyal ones to drink more, or by adding sidelines. The sidelines included a variety of crimes, almost all of which were unofficially supported by the community.

Almost everyone ignored the midnight closing law, for example: when reformers tried to have it enforced, the City Council moved the time back to 1 A.M. Few obeyed that law, either.

Public opinion also went counter- to the Sabbath law. Mayor Levi Boone, who had advocated Sunday closings along with the high license fee in the mid-185os, had thereby helped to precipitate the Lager Beer Riot of 1855. Joseph Medill had ordered a crackdown during his post-fire administration. So in 1874, the City Council simply passed a new law requiring that the front door be locked and the shades drawn, leaving the rear and side doors open to the thirsty. Not only did this nullify the idea of Sunday closing, but it also placed a premium on corner locations, After that, no mayor until "Big Bill" Thompson in 1915 dared to demand a quiet Sabbath.

Some saloonkeepers-perhaps 5 percent-be-

Saloon and billiard hall at 489 (now 1138) So. Canal St., about 1880.

came entangled in more serious offenses. The public, however, had its own definition of crime.

Prior to the 1890s, gambling and prostitution were widely thought to be incorrigible masculine weaknesses. Most brothels were accordingly confined to the three vice districts where the north, south, and west streetcar lines entered the Loop, and there was an open gambling district on Clark Street, just north of Madison Street. It was not until 1894 that the Citizens' Association, a group of reformer-businessmen, drove the gambling saloons into secrecy, and the red-light districts did not suffer the same fate until two decades later.

Although Chicago's vice resorts and their unsavory owners attracted most of the attention, most male and a few dozen female proprietors survived legitimately by trying to anticipate the needs of their customers and by ad justing to

Chicago Historical Society

changes in the neighborhood. Competition caused them to provide more than liquor, and their saloons became important social institutions. The free lunch was an important service: the better the lunch and the more services offered to the patrons, the more nickels in the cash regi-ster. And that meant survival.

The variety of saloons seemed endless. Some catered to transients in the city's three skid-row districts. Bars along ¡w est Madison Street and on Clark Street at the north and south ends of the Loop doubled as flophouses and cheap dives.

Day-labor agencies were located either inside the saloons or near-by, and many of the quarters that the tramps earned passed over the bar.

Many of these places for transients were impersonal, quic_kly ushering into the street those who had run out of money. The free lunch was coarse and unattractive, usually made up of Chicago History

21 9

Saloons

crackers, cheese, and the cheaper cuts of pork and beef.

The saloonkeeper in Chicago's tenement district served a very different constituency and performed other services. His free lunch often fed whole families; unemployed patrons brought along their wives and children. Other neighborhood tragedies called for someone to pass the hat or organize some other form of informal charity. In happy times, the barroom served as a pleasant annex to everyone's crowded tenements. The back room could be reserved for special occasions, and many blushing brides emerged from receptions held there. On quieter evenings, card games and serious discussions of politics were held in many of Chicago's neighborhood saloons.

The neighborhood saloon also served as a kind of communications center. It was stocked with newspapers for those who could read but not afford to buy them. For illiterates who had to depend on verbal information, the saloon, like the grocery store, the clothesline, and the front stoop, was an important meeting place.

The barroom was also a portal to the outside world. The man at the bar could tell you how to get downtown or where to find a job. Many of h is neighbors moved frequently and used his place as a permanent mailing address, making it an informal post office. And when relati~es arrived from the old country, the address that they nervously clutched belonged to a pair of swinging doors. The man behind the bar would lead them to their families.

Th is knowledge of the neighborhood and the trust of his customers made the saloonkeeper a natural politician. Many voters assumed that a man who could arbitrate disputed card games could make laws; similarly, if they could trust him to keep their valuables in his safe, they could give him control of the city treasury. And it was obviously in the saloonkeeper's own best interest to become involved in politics. Seven ou t of thirty-six aldermen in 1886 were saloonkeepers; they could fend off new laws that would 220

Ch icago History

damage the business, and their connections were useful in controlling the police and manipulating the judicial system when necessary.

Barkeeps were among the city's most colorful politicians. On Sou th Clark Street stood the famous \ Vorkingmen's Exchange, presided over by "Hinky Dink" Kenna, whose free lunch could compete with the heartiest restaurant fare. Years later, one of his former customers could still remember the meal: a pair of large pork chops, a heap of fried potatoes, and four slices of toast. From 1891 until 1913, John J. Brennan wielded his "inrrooance" as alderman of the 18th Ward on the West Side. His barroom was adjacent to a police precinct station, and his secondary job as a bail bondsman earned many votes from those he saved from a night in jail.

Brennan also provided food and lodging in exchange for votes at each year's elections, prompting Raymond Robins, the director of the Municipal Lodging House to comment that: 1

John Brennan comes nearer to living up to the teachings o( the scripture than a great many who make greater pretentions to morality. He controls the people o( his ward, not because he is base and corrupt, but because he is simple and democratic.

He has saved more people from eviction, given more food to hungry men and sent more people to hospitals and kept them there than perhaps any other man in Chicago.

Most of the saloonkeeper-aldermen thrived on chicanery. Nonresident "repeaters" were transported from precinct to precinct on election day, bribed by a free drink. But men like Edward F. Cullerton and John Powers were also able to survive because they could adapt to the ethnic transitions in their own neighborhoods. Both had started out in politics when their constituents were primarily Irish, but when Powers retired his ward was heavily Italian, and Cullerton's Lower West Side neighborhood was predominantly Czech and Polish.

Both had to bring the new nationalities into their organizations and adjust to new languages

Chicago H istorical Soci ety

"Rushing the Growler," one of the many masterpieces in Sigmund Krausz's Street Types of Chicago, published in 1891.

and new customs. Like the barrooms they ran, they had to reflect the characteristics of their surroundings.

Thousands of Chicago liquor dealers faced that same problem. Neighborhoods changed quickly, and each nationality had its own variety o( saloon. We have already mentioned the different drinking habits of the Germans and the Irish. Later groups also had their preferences. Poles enjoyed whiskey, but they proudly bought beer made by their countrymen's White Eagle Brewery; Italians drank wine and played cards; Bohemians held weekend dances in rented halls. Other ethnic groups, notably the Greeks and Jews, preferred coffeehouses and other community meeting places and did not generally frequent saloons.

Ethnic changes meant that a saloonkeeper had to decide whether to stay where he was or try to follow his customers. If his trade was large enough, he might try to hire an additional bartender from the incoming nationality, someone who could converse with the newcomers and prepare their favorite delicacies ÂŁor the sideboard. Or the owner might try to survive the change on his own, counting on the trade of former residents who occasionally returned to the old neighborhood. If he moved out, his replacement would start out with high hopes and financial backing from a brewery.

Many departing saloonkeepers moved into factory districts. There were major clusters of bars near such neighborhoods as Roseland and in Kensington, adjacent to George Pullman's saloonless town; along Ashland Avenue's "Whiskey Row" near the stockyards; and at the gates to the South Chicago steel mills. Such trade also had special requirements. The workingmen demanded a hearty lunch, and the noon-hour traffic was especially brisk. Neighborhood boys toted in dozens of growlershomely tin pails-for workers who stayed outside. These saloons also cashed the men's paychecks, a service that required the handling of large amounts of cash and increased the risk of holdups. Many places furnished halls for union meetings. There was never any rental charge-provided, of course, the men patronized the bar.

Some proprietors moved onto busy thoroughfares, where service tended to be less personal, and the reputation of the owner was secondary to the location. Spots near park entrances were desirable, although the trade was seasonal and varied with the days of the week. Streetcar transfer corners were the best: riders caught in winter snow or summer heat were easily lured through near-by swinging doors. Many people also came in to use the washrooms, although etiquette required the user to return the favor by patronizing the bar-a practice which convinced temperance leaders that thousands of Chicago History

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Saloons

unwary men had been led to ruin because of simple biological need. Women's clubs demanded that the city erect drinking fountains and washrooms in parks, elevated stations, and other public places. In 1911, the City Council finally gave in, and the publicity that greeted the new City Hall focused as much on the toilet facilities as on any other aspect of the new building. But despite the fanfare surrounding its new rivals, the saloon restroom continued to serve the commuting public.

Saloonkeepers at the edge of town also dealt with strangers. Places which clustered near the entrances of cemeteries served mourners on their way back to town. On the far Southwest Side, the community now known as Mount Greenwood began as a row of bars on 111 th Street, opposite the cemetery of the same name.

Other roadhouses catered to the weekend carriage trade. During the 1880s, when social groups planned "tally-ho" outings in old twenty-passenger coaches, the ultimate destination was often an old country inn that had become a suburban saloon. " ' hen the bicycle fad hit Chicago during the next decade, members of exclusive cycling clubs toured the countryside in caravans and stopped to hold parties in the same bucolic barrooms. During the week, many of these places also hosted farmers on their way to and from the city markets.

In the outlying areas, one could also find liquor in commercialized amusement areas; most of these had begun as beer gardens that added bands and games to attract crowds. During the 1880s, Grenier's Garden, at Madison and Throop streets, held six-clay bicycle races on its grounds; and Rudolph Voss's place, on the Southeast Side, had a model coal mine and a village blacksmith shop in full operation . The Relic House, which opened near Lincoln Park soon after the Great Fire, housed hundreds of melted mementos. Finally, after the turn of the century, amusement parks like Sans Souci, White City, and Riverview continued the tradition. Although mechanized rides had replaced 222

Chicago History

Chicago Historical Society

The opulent Hannah & Hogg bar-complete with polished spitoons-in the Fisher Building , about 1890.

the German bands and the patrons arrived on the "El," even these large places could trace their ancestry back to the enterprising saloonkeepers of earlier generations.

From the 1880s on, when the first attractive saloons opened downtown, the great ambition of many barkeeps was to open such a place. A dmvntown operation, however, required not only money, but also an ability to adjust to a different cl ientele and to great variations in the hours of peak patronage. Bars near the train stations served "bracers" to commuters hurrying to work; the same people stopped by on their way home in the evening. Noontime brought the heaviest trade. The fancier places, fitted like private clubs, had private dining rooms, billiard parlors and barrooms fitted with onyx wainscotting, matched veneers, and uniformed bartenders. There were also bars like Jim McGary's, which catered to politicians, and ex-Alderman Billy Mangler's place which, during one period, served as a hideaway for newspaper reporters. It was in Mangler's back room that George Ade, Finley Peter Dunne,

John T. McCutcheon, and other members of the famous Whitechapel Club gathered to drink, sing, and trade stories.

Many of the downtown saloons had reputations that extended far beyond Chicago's borders. Henrici's and the Berghoff were considered fine restaurants. Both Chapin & Gore and Hannah & Hogg were distilling and bottling companies that operated chains of saloons. Each richly furnished outlet owned by Chapin & Gore had large caricatures of famous Chicagoans on its walls, and Hannah & Hogg set large stone statues of people and animals on the sidewalk in front of its branches. But none could compare with the attractions o( Heinegabubeler's, on State Street, where "Mutographoscopes"-a kind of Kinetoscope-showed such treats as Night at Vassar and Mid night in Paris in "natural motion." Heinegabubeler's had a gymnasium and reading rooms, but it was most famous for making "greenhorns" the butt of pranks.

Holes in their mugs leaked beer on their shirts.

The vending machines dispensed rubber gum, and the washroom bowl collapsed. Customers who complained were ushered to the sidewalk, but those who could laugh at their own plight

were treated to free food and drink while they watched the misadventures of the next victim.

Despite the standardizing inOuences of brewery ownership, there were, as we have seen, almost as many types of saloons as neighborhoods in Chicago. Each proprietor could still shape his business to his clientele-if he did not, his competitors would soon put him out of business.

Such adaptability and aggressiveness enabled the liquor business to survive decades of criticism. Still, by the turn of the century, trouble, as well as beer, was brewing.

All of the individual dealers depended on cheap wholesale beer prices but, as the 1900s began, grain shortages nearly tri pied the cost of making beer. The salonkeeper, trapped in the tradition of "nickel beer," had to absorb the increase. In 1906, the brewers quietly joined with temperance forces to raise the annual license to $1,000 and freeze the number of permits issued.

The beermakers were anxious to squeeze out the

The last of the saloonkeeper-aldermen: Paddy Sauler (center) and Charlie Weber (right) celebrating Bauler's 66th birthday at Weber's hall (2924 No . Southport Ave.) in 1956. Paddy's son Harry is at the left.

Saloons

remammg independent saloonkeepers, and many of the smaller places did indeed close up, but the major effect of the new laws was to increase the operating expenses of the average proprietor. He now had to pay back twice as much to the brewer.

Then, in 1907, the General Assembly enacted a local option law, enabling individual precincts and wards to enact their own prohibition laws.

Within two years, two-thirds of the city had outlawed the saloon. Brewers moved their licensees to the "wet" central wards, but there were too many dealers competing for too little trade. The rate of bankruptcy increased so rapidly that the municipal judicial system had to establish a special "license court" to arbitrate disputes between evicted saloonkeepers and the brewing companies, and the trade journals began publishing lists of closings so that whiskey salesmen and food purveyors could keep track.

Even the politics of the situation were changing. Membership of the Liquor Dealers' Protective Association dwindled to a fraction of its size in the 1890s. Shortly after, Anton Cermak's United Societies for Local Self Government emerged as the leading defender of the immigrant's "personal liberty" to drink. The United Societies, a union of athletic clubs and singing societies, displaced the saloonkeepers themselves as the most prominent spokesmen for the liquor trade, undoubtedly with the industry's aid and assistance, and only a few barkeeps remained in the City Council. The anti-vice crusades wh ich ultimately closed the red-light Levee district in 1912 had given all saloonkeepers a bad name. "Respectable" people did not want to be seen drinking in public. Public health officials claimed that the liquor served in saloons was adulterated with artificial coloring and even fuse! oil. The health department attacked the traditional flyspecks on the free lunch, demanded that the food be covered, warned against the common serving forks, and outlawed the unwashed mustache towel.

Ultimately, the saloonkeepers also began to 224

Ch icago History

encounter changes in Chicago's social life to which they could not adapt. One was the rise of the automobile. During its first years, this invention was considered a toy, a recreation for the wealthy, but by 1910 increasing numbers of the middle class had come to regard it as an ideal means of daily transportation. Faster and more comfortable than a streetcar, it also removed saloon customers from the street corner and made it more convenient for them to drink at home. Delivery services bought bottled goods directly to their homes. Hip flasks came into vogue. Meanwhile, the nickelodeons-another form of the Kinetoscope-invaded the workingclass neighborhoods. There were 606 of them in 1913, and many men found that they could entertain the whole family for less than the cost of an evening's drinks in a saloon.

The last few years of legal liquor proved even more agonizing for the survivors. AntiGerman sentiment during World War I made beer drinking appear to be unpatriotic, and wartime measures to conserve grain limited and then ended the production of alcoholic beverages. By 1915, the saloonkeepers' political influence had evaporated, and Mayor Big Bill Thompson felt he could safely defy Cermak's United Societies. He announced that he would enforce the ancient Illinois Sunday closing law.

Big Bill accomplished the feat- not without protest, to be sure, but without a riot.

Still, the honorable profession of saloonkeeping survived. There were fewer and fewer saloons in Chicago as the years wore on, but the survivors demonstrated an important characteristic of social institutions: they adapted to economic, social, and physical changes. The one or two saloons that remained open in a neighborhood where there had been twenty became that much more important to the neighborhood.

The result was a business that mirrored its environment and that was almost impossible to eradicate.

Until the cold night of January 16, 1920, when even the survivors perished.

Jens Jensen and Columbus Park

BY MALCOLM COLLI ER

The rise from street sweeper to superintendent of the West Parks was anything but smooth for this genius of a park designer because) although he fell in love with the prairie) he wouldn)t go along with graft.

1886, Jens Jensen, a young immigrant from Denmark, went to work for the West Chicago Parks as a day laborer. Thirty years later, he transformed 150 acres of land on Chicago's western boundary into Columbus Park, re-creating the Midwest landscape as he had experienced it in those thirty years.

Jensen never wrote an autobiography, but he often said that "there was a great story in those decades" of his life. It is the story of his personal experience with the Midwest and of his professional development within a group-other landscape architects, architects, writers, and otherswho found something unique here and who generated a movement for its recognition. Jensen expressed his own recognition by creating beautiful landscapes in which he used native plants to re-create local forms and spaces. Those thirty years also tell the story of the development of Chicago's great urban parks, of which his own Columbus Park may have been the last. The two stories intertwine.

Jensen was born in Slesvig in 1860, into a prosperous Danish farm family. He attended agricultural school and served in the German army during a period of German domination of Slesvig. When he was twenty-four he sailed for America because he wanted neither to become a farmer nor a German subject. Anna, his Danish fiancee, also came. They married and began the immigrants' search for a place to setIN

Malcolm Collier is an anthropologist who has worked in editing and curriculum development. Her present absorbing interest is the life and times of Jens Jensen.

tie. Their first attempts-a job on a Florida celery farm and on a farm in Iowa-failed.

They moved on to the big city, to Chicago, where Jensen worked in a soap factory and then as a street sweeper in the West Chicago parks.

At least he was out of doors again, and the companionship of the Scandinavian community near Chicago's West Side parks must have helped. The Jensens, as it turned out, remained in Chicago for fifty years, until Mrs. Jensen's death in 1935. And during those fifty years, Jensen became an internationally noted conservationist and landscaper. He worked all over the Midwest, designing city parks, private estates, playgrounds, state park systems, and forest preserves. But landscape design is an almost anonymous art, and Jensen's name is now largely forgotten.

The story of Jensen's early personal and professional development, however, still exists in the memories of his friends and family and in scraps of information in park district documents. The larger story, the planning of spacious urban parks in which Jensen was to play so important a part, is part of the history of nineteenth-century America.

The first urban "country park" in the New World, planned by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, was New York's Central Park, and the prodigious task of transforming those city acres was begun in 1858. Earlier, in 1841, Andrew Jackson Downing had published A Treatise on the Theory and Practise of Landscape Gardening Adapted to North Americaa formidable title which went to six editions.

Downing urged the development of public parks in America, for a curious reason-since Chicago History

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Chicago Historical Society

Pergola in the Humboldt Park rose garden.

Americans made great recreational use of the rural cemeteries on the outskirts of their cities, he reckoned that they would welcome public parks created for their leisure. He also found in the design of those cemeteries an emphasis on the "spirit or essence" of nature which seemed to him very much in the tradition of the eighteenth-century English landscape gardens.

Many nineteenth-century landscape architects shared his interest in the natural and informal. They also had social-welfare goals, seeing their work as barriers against rigid commercial developers who treated the land and the houses on it only as commodities. Olmsted expressed these goals in his writings; later, Jensen also wrote about his strong conviction that man's survival depended on his understanding that the soil is the source of all life.

It was in this spirit of naturalism and of social benefit that the first land cape architects had worked in Chicago. Olmsted and Vaux applied their social and environmental planning to the residential community of Riverside in 1868 and to Chicago's newly established South Park lands beginning in 1869. H. W. S. Cleveland moved from Massachusetts to Chicago, where his pamphlet Public Grounds of Chicago: How to Give Them Character and Expression. was published in 1869. He believed that parks had "sanitary and moral purposes" and he advocated that their form be "simple and graceful."

For Ossian C. Simonds, who lived in Chicago from 1878 until his death in 1931, the "guiding spirit was that respect for the quieter beauties of native vegetation." Graceland Cemetery, Lincoln Park, The Morton Arboretum, the University of Chicago Quadrangles, and other sites in the Midwest attest to Simonds' preoccupation 226

Chicago History

with the visual and the horticultural aspects of his profession. His special gift was to emphasize native plants and "spatial design in harmony with the Middle Western landscape."

By the time Jens Jensen went to work as a day laborer in 1886, these talented and dedicated people had been working in Chicago for some years. Their architectural contemporaries were the vanguard of the movement which became the Chicago School. They were concerned with expressing the unique character of the Midwest, rather than with drawing on Eastern or European precedents. Of these architects, Dwight Perkins shared most completely the moral and social concerns which motivated the landscape architects.

Jensen's introduction to the special qualities of the Midwest began shortly after the family settled on Chicago's West Side. On family picnics, the Jensens explored the neighboring country and acquired a knowledge of the native plants. These trips into the countryside were made by wagon or streetcar, and the conductor was often reluctant to let the family board the car for the return trip, loaded as they were with baskets of flowers and plants. Within two years, Jensen had made use of these native plants in a new landscape in a corner of Union Park. He called it an "American Garden," perhap to symbolize his new-found citizenship.

The early family excursions must have imprinted on Jensen's mind the form and composition of Illinois countryside-the prairie, the streams, the rocky ledges and many-storied woods, the rolling meadows, and the distant horizon-as well as the associations among the plants. Later they became the elements of his great designs, his incredibly beautiful parks.

Jensen's particular skill in drawing on these elements in the execution of landscape designs developed over the years, but his industry and ability must have impressed his employers very early because they made him superintendent of Union Park in 1890, just four years after he started work as a sweeper. Union was a small

0

park, b ul iL was reasonably prominent in the 1890s because of its locaLion in a somewhat fashionable neighborhood ancl because Lhe West Chicago Parks Headquaners was localed Lhere.

In 1894, he was promoted again- Lo Lhe superintendency of HumboldL Park, two hundred acres of land on the \Vest Side, only half landscaped. It must have eemed Lo Lhe Jensens that Lhey had found their place and Lheir work.

Chicago had Lhree thousand acres of park Janel in 1890, and a population of only a million and a half. This enviable proportion was due to Lhe foresight of civic leaders who, as early as the 1850s, had envisioned a crescent of parks curving from Lake 1\Iichigan north o[ the city (at Lincoln Park), then west, south, and east again to the lake on the soulh (al Calumet).

They viewed parks as importanl culLUral facilities and as aesthetic improvemenls. Active recreation was far from Lheir minds. In fact, an 1851 ciLyordinancestaLed Lhat" o per on shall play at ball, cricket, or al any other game or play whatsoever in any of Lhe enclo eel public parks or grounds in this city."

From the beginning, the development of park was supporLed by men with quite different i11Lerests and purposes: real-estate peculators, doctors, civil engineers, politicians, and railway entrepreneurs. John S. WrighL, called "The Prophet" of Chicago' parks, was the first of many real-estate speculators to promole the idea of acquiring land for future parks. The good business judgmenl of these men was confirmed in 1868 by reports wh ich showed a very great increase in the value of land around ew York's new parks. Early upport for the parks movement came also from men who were building railroads and hoped to have added attractions along their rights of way. Each of Chicago's three divisions had its local promoters; they all hoped to improve the city and not co lose out in Lhe process. More disin Lerested was a doctor, G. H. R auch, secretary of the Illinois State Board of Health.

At a time when the bills creating the parks

¡were pending and Laxpayers needed to be reas urccl of the merit of such invesunent, Dr. Rauch addressed the Chicago Academy of Sciences on "Public Parks: Their Effect upon the l'vforal, Physical and SaniLary ConcliLions o( the TnhabiLanLs of Large CiLies, wiLh pecial reference to Lhe CiLy o( Chicago." Like many of his conLemporarie, Dr. Rauch was well informed about parks and urban arrangemenls in oLher ciLies, and he atlribuLecl much of Lhe astonishing progress in land cape development in the preceding twenty-five years to Downing and the "impress of his genius visible everywhere."

Rauch spoke of trees as protecting man's health by consuming carbon dioxide and by preventing the spread of cholera and malaria. Parks, he reasoned, al o provided an opportunity to escape from everyday pressures, to relax, and to be protected from Lhe corruption of the city.

His was a nineteenth-century view.

"More parks" was also an early plea of Chicago's politicians. Mayor .James Curtiss preceded even Prophet Wright by proclaiming, in 1847, that each division of the city should have at least one "public ground" of from ten to twenty acres. The bills Lhat establ ished the city's parks in 1869 reflected and enlarged upon his views. Three boards, independent of the city and independent of each other, were created.

Later, when the city tried to regain co11Lrol of the park administrations, which were obviously going to handle a great deal of money, the separate park districts were already en trenched.

The West Chicago Park Commissioners, appointed in April 1869, undertook the creation of three parks, connected by boulevard between about Ful1erton Avenue on the north and 19th Street on the south-generally along the line of Western Avenue. The land was sandy desert and marshy prairie land, conditions which made it particularly appropriate that William LeBaron .Jenney, engineer as well as architect, was appointed to work on these large tracts-called, ultimately, Humboldt, Garfield, and Douglas parks.

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Jens Jensen

The task was enormous. Huge quantities of earth were moved, lakes were created, buildings constructed, woodlands planted, flower beds established, boulevards laid out. Work proceeded so well that in 1893 Andreas Simon wrote, in his Chicago: The Garden City, that "Nature had been tamed and her ruggedness and her softness woven into a garment for the earth."

Jenney was the first of many notable architects to work in Chicago's West Parks. The first greenhouse in Humboldt Park, built in 1886, was planned by Emil Frommann and Ernst Jebsen, who in 1896 designed the Receptory Building at the park's south end. The first refectory, completed in 1893, was the work of Jenney and William B. Mundie. The year Jensen created his American Garden in Union Park, 1888, Jenney and \V. A. Otis designed the West Chicago Parks Headquarters building in the same park. Jensen worked with these men and knew their colleagues, several of whom later became his own colleagues. One of Jensen's qualities, observed by a later friend, was his ability to attract interesting and inspiring people. No doubt he did so as a young man.

During the 1890s, Jensen's circle of acquaintances widened to include other groups then active in Chicago. One of these was the group which gathered at Hull-House around Jane Addams. Jacob Riis spoke there in 1898 on the playground movement, inspiring a committee of Hull-House members to petition Mayor Carter H. Harrison II for playgrounds. And playgrounds became the next development, one in which Jensen was very active. Hull-House, like other settlement houses, was a crossroads where social workers, writers, architects, civicminded citizens, and scientists met to share their interests. A number of these people, including Jensen, also gathered at Dwight Perkins' house for informal Sunday suppers.

They shared a vision of civic responsibility and of the application of their talents to urban problems. Perkins called them The Committee on the Universe.

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In 1892, the arrival of a large number of outstanding professionals who were helping William Rainey Harper build the University of Chicago added new academic and cultural emphasis to the life of the city. One of these, the botanist Henry C. Cowles, became Jensen's friend. Together, they explored the countryside around Chicago, studying the plants and the plant communities, a focus which Cowles described as "the science of plant housekeeping or, as some would say, plant sociology." Cowles and Jensen were really teaching themselves ecology, approaching it from their respective interestsCowles' scientific analysis and Jensen's direct interest in form and life complementing each other.

Gradually, Jensen came to move among other groups-writers, financers, and industrialists who also shared in the life o[ a very rich period in the city's history. The young immigrant emerged into a professional as the city emerged into an urban, industrialized center.

During those same years, of course, the West Chicago Park Commissioners were themselves an important in0uence on Jensen. Through the maze of official reports, auditors' figures, engineers' descriptions, legislation, and recorded rhetoric, Jensen's personal contacts may be traced. Two commissioners in particular may have been significant in Jensen's development: Edward G. Uihlein and C. C. Kohlsaat. Uihlein, a prominent businessman who served from 1894 through 1896, owned a greenhouse a11d a collection of tropical palms and orchids. About 1901, Jensen landscaped Uihlein's property on Wisconsin's Lake Geneva. Judge Kohlsaat, who served from 1884 to 1890, submitted a plan for a "nalUral park" north of Lake Street in Garfield Park. The idea was adjudged inappropriate for the 29-acre site available, but its submission indicates the growing interest in the new idea.

Joseph W. Suddard, who became president of the West Park Board in 1897, was also interested in the "natural park." He advocated ere-

The lily ponds and sandstone bridge, which framed the Receptory in Humboldt Park during Jensen 's superintendency of the park.

The mature landscaping , which became known as Lover's Lane, virtually obscures the building .

Chicago Historical Society

.

The perennial or "natural" garden in Humboldt Park.

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historica l Society

a ting small parks and a chain of outlying parks.

In 1899, Suddard reported on "the sentiment that has been created during the last two years in favor of small parks in our populous districts and of an enlarged park system to provide for the future needs of our growing city." In 1900, he urged that the "newly created commission on small parks and playgrounds be given power to act." Suddard considered the valley of the Des Plaines especially suitable and urged action while the land was still available. "If acquired," he wrote, "but little expense would be necessary, as the lands should be preserved to retain as nearly as possible all their primitive beauty."

At that time, the park board and the city's most interested citizens seem to have been in accord. In view of Jensen's subsequent involvement with small parks and of his 1919 plan for "A Greater West Parks System," with a series of outlying parks in the same Des Plaines valley, the interaction among these men seems clear.

But before any extension of the West Side parks at all came about, Jensen was out of a job.

As superintendent of Humboldt Park, he refused to accept short measure in the delivery of coal for the park buildings. His employers, accustomed to graft and patronage but not to moral challenges, simply fired him. Years later, one of Jensen's daughters told Leonard Eaton, Jensen's biographer, that the dismissal was the best thing that could have happened to her father. Probably she was right. It is hard to conceive of the West Parks as Jensen later rede230

Chicago History

Recreation in the garden of Small Park No. 2 (now Stanford Park) at 14th and Jefferson sis., shortly after it opened in 1909. Small Park No. 2 was one of a series constructed on the West Side after Jensen became superintendent of the West Parks.

signed them, or of Columbus Park, as coming directly out of his first Humboldt Park period.

Jensen returned to the West Chicago Parks in 1905 as landscape architect and general superintendent of all the West Parks with complete authority and with superb support. In 1900, however, he was forty years old, had a family to support-and no job.

The years from 1900 to 1905 were as crucial for Jensen's professional development as they were for his family's finances, but information about these years is scarce. The landscaping job for Mr. Uihlein in 1901 was not extensive. In 1902, architect Jebsen designed a house for lumberman Herman Paepcke, and Jensen landscaped his twenty acres of Glencoe, Illinois, lakefront. The architect and landscaper had become acquainted, no doubt, because of Jebsen's buildings in Humboldt Park. Jensen landscaped two G. W. Maher houses in 1902 and 1903-a house built for E. J. Mosser, an attorney living in Edgewater, and Harry Rubens' extensive estate in Glencoe.

Jensen's natural setting for the August Magnus house, designed by Robert Spencer in 1905, included native hawthorn, which Spencer also used as a design element in the windows. With

Jens Jensen

this, Jen~en seems literally to have been incorporated into the Chicago School of Architecture. In 1908, he landscaped Frank Lloyd Wright's house for the Coonley family and, in 1909, Louis Sullivan's famous Babson House in Riverside.

During the early 1900s, Jensen steadily moved into a wider sphere of action and relationships, including membership in civic and intellectual clubs and an appointment to the recently created Special Parks Commission, of which Dwight Perkins was also a member. In 1903, Perkins was authorized to make an extensive survey for a metropolitan park plan-one of the goals towards which Perkins, Jensen, and their allies had been moving. The two men worked on the survey for a year, but without pay.

We also know some few but interesting smaller details about those five years. Between 1902 and 1903, Jensen started signing his plans "Jens," his Danish name, instead of "James," perhaps seeking a more special identity. He also began to dress more dramatically, wearing a neck scarf instead of a tie and a special cap which, he told Paepcke, "added to his character." His individuality became more pronounced, as did his emphasis on the Midwest landscape as his source of design. An assistant later said of him, "He knew he had to be different, found this notion [and] it turned out well."

Meanwhile, the West Parks were suffering financially and physically under the management of the self-serving politicians who had fired Jensen. Even the robust annual reports of over eighty pages shrank to twenty-seven. In 1904, however, when Charles S. Deneen was elected governor, he appointed Bernard A. Eckhart as president of Lhe West Parks Board.

Eckhart, a successful businessman known as a "student of subjects related to public welfare," was already familiar with park problems, having worked on the law for refunding the West Parks Board bonds from 1889 to 1891 as well as on some laws relating to drainage and water

supply. He easily identified Jens Jensen as the man to restore the West Parks.

Jensen's appointment was enthusiastically reported in an August issue of the Chicago R ecord-Herald: SPRINGTIME IN THE WEST SIDE PARKS

The announcement is made that Jens Jensen, formerly landscape gardener of the W est Side parks, has been offered and will accept the superintendency of the entire West Park system.

This brings all three of the large park systems of the city under expert administration. The South parks have long enjoyed that advantage. It was a great day for Lincoln Park when political administration ended and expert administration began. The West Side parks will henceforth receive similar benefits.

It is, of course, true that even the most capable professional park superintendent cannot get good results if he is subject to undue in terference or if he is hampered by inefficient or loafing employees. No difficulties of this kind are to be expected on the ,vest Side, as the new board of commissioners has made its policy known in emphatic manner. Mr. Jensen will have free scope for his skill, and he will have no workmen under him whom he does not desire to employ on the basis of their merits alone.

Though the dog days are approaching, it is springtime for the West Side parks.

Jensen held the position of superintendent and landscape architect from 1905 until 1909, at which time he became consulting architect in order to escape the burden of park administration and concentrate on private practice. But he continued to insist that park employees be trained to earn their pay and, in 1920, Gov. Len Small, who preferred to use park jobs for political patronage, got rid of him by abolishing his position.

The years under Jensen and Eckhart were a very active period in the West Side parks. The work which Jenney and others had accomplished had fallen into disrepair and decay. Fortunately, the new men had more than their dedication to work with-a $3,000,000 budget which enabled Jensen to hire the best talent in Chicago.

He created the Garfield Park Conservatory, the largest in the world. The prairie river winding Chicago History

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through Humboldt Park, the rose garden there, and the very large "natural" garden west of it were a few of his many famous accomplishments. Still, they represented a transitional phase in Jensen's development as a designer.

Prairie rivers appear again in Columbus Park and elsewhere, but the formal rose garden eventually became an embarrassment which Jensen would have preferred to disavow. The "natural" garden was really only informal; it was in his later gardens that he included more and more native plants. Today, that corner of Humboldt Park is a dismal sight: the prairie river is sluggish, the garden is a jungle of growth, and the rose garden is not, as Jensen wished, dug up. It is just neglected.

During that same busy first decade of this century, Jensen was also planning playgrounds and urging the development of complexes of schools, gardens, and playgrounds. He was known in Europe for his conservatory, his playgrounds, and a paving compound he developed for park roads; indeed, his European reputation was as great as Frank Lloyd Wright's. He continued to promote a series of outlying parks and to maintain an active interest in civic and nature-related matters on a national scale.

The story of the land from which, in 1916, Jensen designed Columbus Park is interesting itself. Along Austin Avenue, on the line between Chicago and Oak Park, Andrew J. Warren started farming 180 acres in 1872. His farm was called Warren's \1/oods. In 1890 his widow turned down an offer of $4,500 an acre for 150 acres of the woods from a Mr. Corrigan who wanted to build a racetrack; instead, she sold it to the Archbishopric in 1904 for $1,650 an acre as a site for a seminary. The seminary was never built, and in 1910 a man named W. E. Golden started agitating for the West Park commissioners to buy the land. In 1911 , the General Assembly authorized the purchase for $560,000, over $3,370 an acre. The 150 acres thus became avai lab le to the West Parks.

Anyone who has followed Jensen's career thus

Chicago Historical Society

The palm house in the Garfield Park Conservatory, still the largest municipally owned conservatory in the world.

Chicago History

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Jens Jensen

far could anticipate the results. Columbus has been called "the finest and most complete of his parks." Jensen's statement on the design was published in the West Chicago Park Commissioners Annual Report for 1917. He wrote, in part: The motive that guided the landscape plan for Columbus Park is to be found in the general type of landscape in the immed iate environment of Chicago.

The greater part of the Janel has been left in its natural form. Water, in the way of a symbolized prairie river, has been introduced at the lower level.

At the source of this river, the Janel has been slightly elevated. To the east of the river, an elevation or ridge has been built-this ridge skirts along the southern and western boundary of the Park. Along the river, it forms river bluffs, whid1 are an important part of the landscape composition, and serve as a screen to shut out the city to the east.

The bathing and swimming pools have been picturesquely designed in accordance with the rock ledges of our Illinois rivers, a laughing brook furnishing water for these pools .... To the south of the neighborhood house and near the source of the river, is the players' green, dedicated to the drama and to music out-of-doors. This players' green consists of a slightly elevated spot, separated from the space for the audi-

Playground in Columbus Park, framed by a shelter opening.

ence by a brook .... The American drama is still in i~s mak_ing. Tl~e writer believes that its early express1011 will be _111 _the out-of-doo:s, and he sincerely hopes that thi s simple but poetic place will become an inspiration that will help to create the great American drama .

The center of th e Park consists of a prairie or large meadow, dedicated to golf and playfields. Several groves of trees break its monotony and furnish shade for the players, at the same time forming the oases in the prairie landscape. The major part of the planting 1s found on the Park borders, the river bluffs, and the elevated section south of the community house. It consists of material native to Illinois, with a large assortment of plants that invite the birds . . . . Illinois hawthorns and crab apples are used in great profusion on the woodland border. These more than any other plant of this region express the landscape of northern Illinois, and with their stra tifiecl brandies give a f~eling of breadth and spaciousness, and repeat the horizontal lines of the prairies.

It is extraordinary prose to find in a municipal report.

Even today, despite tragic neglect and deterioration, anyone looking at the basic forms of space and planting in Columbus Park will agree that "The power of Jensen's park is the power of nature." It is certainly the essence of all the qualities which Jensen h ad found significant in the landscape of the Midwest and of all he had taught himself about ecology. And it embodies his principle that landscape design should refer to nature only, not to the culture of the people creating it.

Standing in Columbus Park, one can recapture its creator's vision: Looking west from the river bluffs at sundown across a quiet bit of meadow, one sees the prairie melt away into the stratified clouds above, touched with gold and purple and reflected in the river below. This gives a feeling of breadth and freedom that only a prairie landscape can give to the human soul.

--

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Columbus Park is still a great park, exciting and intriguing enough to launch a career of search and speculation about the man who created it.

r .._.

Chicago's Civilized World of Wild Animals

BY AL GRIFFIN

Do you feel more comfortable around wild animals ifyou are in the cage-or do you prefer to see them there?

Chicagoans have their choice. s are aware of the distinction of their city's zoos. Lincoln Park is the oldest municipal zoo in the country and Brookfield Zoo is the first completely modern-style zoo built in the United States.

Chicago even has a third municipal zooone which most Chicagoans have never even heard o(-Indian Boundary Zoo, at 2555 West Estes Avenue. It is actually a branch of the Lincoln Park Zoo, with a collection of some one hundred animals. The little zoo's small clientele is faith(ul, though; many of the patrons have a habit of visiting it every Sunday. And, like Lincoln Park and Brookfield, it is open all year.

Lincoln Park Zoo was started with the gift of a pair of swans from New York's Central Park back in 1868. In 1870, small barns and paddocks were built for the animal collection and, by 1873, the admittedly casual inventory included two buffalo, three foxes, three wolves, two elks, five deer, a catamount, four eagles, a couple of prairie dogs, eight peacocks, four guinea pigs, and thirteen swans. All were gifts.

Lincoln Park Zoo's growth continued on its casual way for some years. The first lion to take up residence at Lincoln Park, for example, was a guest on loan from a traveling circus in 1874.

That year, the zoo also paid a freight charge of $9.85 for a donated elk. Later in 1874, a full month before the Philadelphia Zoo opened, it paid $10 for a bear cub. The present director, Dr. Lester Fisher, does not publicly contest Philadelphia's advertisement of itself as "America's First Zoo," but contents himself with now FEW CHICAGOA

Al Griffin has recently completed a full-length manuscript on the nation's zoos.

having more than twice as many mammals, seven times as many reptiles and amphibians as Philadelphia, many more birds-and four times as many visitors.

The Philadelphia Zoo, though, had already opened for business when Lincoln Park Zoo bought, from the same circus that had lent it the lion, two more bears, a condor, and a kangaroo. The total price was $275, with a goat thrown in for free.

It was the bears that ultimately forced Lincoln Park Zoo to begin constructing adequate housing for its animals, although the problem was met in stages. The bears were the most popular of the zoo's animals, and their wooden cage was soon considered not secure enough.

The rocky bear pits which were constructed to house them constituted the zoo's first big plant investment: $958.78. The total for all other expenses that year, 1879-including feed, fuel, and the zoo keeper's wages-came to $1,481.98.

The bears loved their new pits. For one thing, the rock-like projections enabled them to get out any time they felt like it; it became their nightly habit to climb out and roam around the park. They annoyed neighbors along Clark Street by rummaging through their garbage cans and sometimes were even found during the winter out on the ice in the lake, headed for the Michigan shore. One of the rascals was once chased up a tree by zoo personnel, who then stationed a park policeman to keep the bear from coming clown until daylight. The cop resigned on the spot, whereupon the bear followed him home on Fullerton Avenue, looking for handouts.

Other q:mstruction followed along shortly.

Although there is no record that the bears committed any damage to persons or property in Chicago History

235

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their excursions, curved iron bars were installed at the top of the dens in 1880. That year and the next, adequate though modest wolf and fox dens, a prairie-dog pit, a raccoon cage, an otter pit, squirrel cages, sparrow cages, and a sea-lion pit were constructed. ,vhen the sea lions were installed in 1880, the superintendent and one of the park commissioners had to visit the Cincinnati Zoo to find out how to care for the animals.

Other public parks in Chicago had become interested in animal collections as far back as 1874, when Lincoln Park donated a pair o( swans and a pair of geese to help the West Chicago Park Commissioners start a zoo in Central (now Garfield) Park. The city also had an animal collection at Union Park, including some wolves and eagles, and oflered to donate some to Lincoln Park but the gift was declined in 1875 because of lack of accommodations. However, by 1885, when the ,vest Park Board abandoned their zoo plans, Lincoln Park Zoo was able to accommodate the entire collection. Lincoln Park was also able to absorb the South Park Commissioners' collection in 1888.

The Bengal tiger that arrived that year was more of a problem. There was no safe place for him in the animal house, so he was wintered in an annex to the greenhouse. A modest brickand-stone animal house, constructed primarily for the tiger in 1889, still serves as winter quarters for some tropical animals. The original animal house, which dated back to 1870, was sold and became the bathing pavilion north of Diversey Parkway.

Lincoln Park had a very good year in 1889.

The royal Bengal tiger was on loan, but the zoo paid $3,000 to the Barnum & Bailey Circus for another pair of tigers, a lion, a pair of leopards, a camel, a llama, a zebra, an ibex, a bear, and an elephant by the name of Duchess.

Duchess was not always as docile as Barnum & Bailey's people had led the zoo keeper to believe.

While being led on a free rein from the animal house to her summer quarters in 1891, she took the keeper's elephant hook away from him and 236

Chicago History

headed west through and over fences, yards, and buildings. She completely carried away a North Park Avenue summer house on her shoulders and ripped the gate off a brewery by its hinges.

She was finally lassoed and tied to a telegraph pole until she calmed clown enough to be led back to the zoo.

Even some of the customarily tractable sea lions acquired a police record. A cargo of eighteen arrived from the Pacific Coast in 1889 before the iron fence around their enclosure was finished, and a number simply walked away. Two waddled into a Clark Street restaurant and scared everybody into climbing onto the table tops. Another headed straight for Lake Michigan and dove in. He was reported as having been spotted as far away as filwaukee, but never returnee\ to Lincoln Park.

Many residents along orth Park Avenue complained that the nineteen sea lions that ended up in the zoo kept them awake at night with their barking and splashing and, in 1890, they even circulated a petition demanding that the animals be removed. Lincoln Park sold some to other zoos, and the rest died off within a year or two.

By the turn of the century, Lincoln Park was a major zoo. On March 31, 1899, the zoo reported it had spent over $45,000 on buildings and enclosures, almost $80,000 in salaries and supplies, and S65,ooo on feed. Purchase of animals had cost $17,000, while the sale of surplus stock brought in $8,500.

After the construction of the Small Animal House in 1882-now the commissary buildingonly two major buildings were constructed before the beginning of World w ¡ar I: the Bird House, with its soaring central aviary, in 1900, and the magnificent Lion House, in 1912. Although Duchess arrived in 1889, the Elephant Barn was not finished until 1915. The first monkeys began arriving in 1896, but did not get their own Monkey House until 1927, four years after the Reptile House-because the public was afraid of the sn;ikes but not of the monkeys.

The improved fencing surrounding the sea- lion pit in Lincoln Park Zoo in 1902 was designed to prevent the sort of escapades which occurred earlier.

Daily News Collection Chicaqo Historical Socii:lY

The animal house in Lincoln Park Zoo , 1907.

Daily News Collection Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historical Society

Approach to the animal cages, Lincoln Park Zoo , about 1890.

Lincoln Park's Bird. House features a soaring central aviary.

Chicago Historical Society Photo by Albert M . Hayash i

Zoos

Then, of course, there was the glass cage bu1lt for Lincoln Park Zoo's greatest celebrity, Bushman. Dead for almost a quarter of a century, he is still one of the most famous zoo animals that ever lived. The gorilla was known by name to millions of visitors to Lincoln Park, and he still awes crowds where the stuffed animal now dominates his "own" hall at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Bushman was the product of publicity.

Weighing over five hundred pounds and measuring over six feet in height, he was neither the heaviest or tallest gorilla in captivity, but he had excellent press agents. From the moment he arrived from Africa in 1931, weighing in at thirty-eight pounds, he captured the public's imagination. And when the adult Bushman pinned that baleful eye on a visitor, even without his roaring rush to the front of his cage, the visitor never forgot it. Nor would Lincoln Park's public relations people ever let anybody forget it, as long as Bushman lived. His successor at Lincoln Park, Sinbad, just doesn't have Bushman's charisma.

On the whole, however, the Lincoln Park Zoo did not fare as well as other zoos during the Depression, when the Works Progress Administration performed so much construction elsewhere. The only two new major buildings were the Buffalo Barn, built in 1936, and the Eagles Cages the following year. Since then, lack of acreage has limited the construction of major buildings. The only exceptions have been the unusually shaped Children's Zoo Building, constructed in 1960, and the Farm-In-The-Zoo, with its Main Barn, built in 1964.

In other ways, however, expansion has been enormous. From that $1,500 spent in 1879, including the salary of the sole zoo keeper, the annual budget of the Lincoln Park Zoo has grown to over a million dollars. It also employs some one hundred people and is the most heavily patronized municipal zoo in the United States, with some four million visitors a year.

Nevertheless, like all other American zoos 238

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Edith Rockefeller McCormick.

built before Brookfield Zoo opened in 1934, Lincoln Park Zoo is still basically an old-fashioned, menagerie-type zoo. Brookfield was the first zoo ever built in the United States with a comprehensive concept of free-view enclosures, where the animals are confined only by moats, in simulated natural habitats. Ever since, zoo architecture has been strongly influenced by what is now known all over the world as "The Brookfield Style."

The story is told that, at the 1974 opening of orth America's newest major zoo, in Toronto, Director Gunter Voss proudly asked a visiting zoologist from England how he liked the new layout. "Lovely, quite lovely," said the visitor. "I always did like the Brookfield style."

Brookfield is governed by the Chicago Zoological Society, operating under the authority of the Forest Preserve District Commission of Cook County. The Society has no connection with the Lincoln Park Zoo. To the contrary, it was founded as an expression of Edith Rockefeller McCormick's dissatisfaction with the Lincoln Park Zoo. She preferred the progressive zoos in Europe, notably the Hagenbeck Zoo in Germany where free-view enclosures were first used extensively. In 1920, she donated a large tract of land in suburban Brookfield to the Cook County Board of Commissioners, who subsequently added more acreage for what has now officially become the Chicago Zoological Park, fourteen miles west of the Loop.

Peter Reinberg, president of the County Board Commissioners, was convinced that the zoo should be built and operated by a private

body. "If the Art Institute can operate on that basis so successfully," he opined, "then so can a zoo. This project must be supervised by a non-political board."

And so it was. The Chicago Zoological Society was organized in 1921 by Charles L. Hutchinson, the first president of the Art Institute, and Chicago Tribune cartoonist John T. McCutcheon became its first president. By a narrow margin, the voters of Cook County approved a tax levy to provide funds for the zoo's construction and maintenance. Construction began in 1926; the acquisition of animals was financed by funds supplied by the Society, by private gifts, and by the start of an elaborate exchange program with other zoos, and the park was officially opened on June 30, 1934.

At the time, Brookfield's barless free-view concept took the American zoo world by storm; today, zoo men privately admit that the natural habitat concept is more beneficial to the patrons than to the animals. A kangaroo couldn't care less if the artificial rocks in his enclosure are accurate reproductions of the real thing in Australia. Zoo-bred animals-that is, most animals in American zoos today-are often nervous and uncomfortable in free-view enclosures if they are accustomed to the security of bars on their cages; those bars protect them from the visitors.

But the average visitor relates to him or herseH when seeing conventionally caged animals and insists that the more open space an animal has, the happier the animal is.

Actually, most wild animals are territorial.

They stay within an area only large enough to provide food, water, shelter, and mating opportunities. If animals in the wild are lucky enough to find all these elements in a single area, they never leave until they are killed by predators.

In a good zoo, where an animal has enough room for exercise and diversion, there is no reason for it to want more space. Animals have even sought out the security of a zoo. Before special barriers were put up at Brookfield's raccoon ex-

hibit, for example, the season invariably finished with a much bigger population than could be accounted for by new births. The wild raccoons which inhabited the wooded countryside west of Chicago were joining the captive raccoons. Finally, the zoo had to take measures to keep out the freeloaders.

The best known of Brookfield's first exhibit buildings was the then-revolutionary Pachyderm House. This 110 by 259 foot building, the largest in the zoo, was entirely covered with rockwork, so that the exterior resembled a natural butte. It was surrounded by barless enclosures within which the different species were separated by a labyrinth of dry moats not visible to the spectator. Animals from Asia had a section separate from the animals of African origin. Each enclosure was big enough to exhibit

German zoo expert Lorenz Hagenbeck (with pointer) discusses his model of Brookfield Zoo in 1923 w;th (left to right) assistant forester Thomas F. Sullivan, Cook County Commissioners Daniel Ryan, Henry A. Zender, Emmett Whealan, and County Board President Anton J. Cermak.

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Aerial view of Brookfield Zoo, 1936.

elephants, hippopotamuses, rhinosceroses, and tapirs in family groups, and to give enough room for running.

The pachyderms had bathing pools inside the building as well as outside. The six elephant stalls each measured thirty by forty feet. The doors were operated by remote controls, so that dangerous animals could be shifted, feel, and watered without peril to their keepers. The interior moats for elephants were ten feet wide, and the ones for the hippos and rhinos, six feet.

The striking architecture of the all-metal building made the most of monolithic walls, ceiling, arches, and floor, without the usual cosmetic details used to conceal the massiveness of the essential structural components. It's still a great building-it /oohs like a building for pachyderms.

The architecture of most of the early Brookfield buildings, however, was in a somewhat pretentious style purported to be "the informal Italian farm style of the 15th century." What this really meant was that the buildings had autumnal roof tiles and that the walls had a soft, "antiquey" texture. The fountains, stone animal figures, and many carved wooden guideposts were made by workers on the Federal Arts 240

Chicago History

Project during the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Fewer than two dozen living trees were removed from building sites when the Brookfield Zoo was under construction. After all, the property is owned by the Forest Preserve. The remaining native trees include numerous oaks, some of them almost two hundred and fifty years old. There's still a good stand of black, red, and white oaks, although burr oaks predominate. Walnut, ash, hackberry, and white and reel elms are plentiful, too. Norway maples were introduced to line the malls in formal patterns, and hundreds of thousands of plants have since been added. The drinking water at Brookfield Zoo, from wells drilled to a depth of 2,269 feet , was some of the purest in Illinois, and still is. The bears even swim in it.

The only bars at the enormous bear exhibit are on the fence, to keep visitors from falling into the moat. This has always been one of Brookfield's major exhibits, exploiting the fact that bears are notorious exhibitionists and probably enjoy the visitors' company and attention more than most captive animals. The popular free-view exhibit, while not as old as the free-view Bear Mountain built at the Denver

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Monkey and goat island , Brookfield Zoo.

The lions' den at Brookfield Zoo.

Chicago Histori ca l Society

Tigers at Brookfield Zoo.

Zoo in 1916, was one of the first in America to provide climbing areas, swimming and bathing pools, and deep, dark retiring dens for the animals.

Many early visitors to Brookfield were scared away by rumors about the Lion House. It was originally built to house all large felines, with a moat between the visitor and the animals twenty feet deep and twenty-five feet wide, surrounded by rockwork a minimum of sixteen feet high.

The lion is one of the laziest zoo animals-particularly the maned male, who customarily sleeps sixteen to eighteen hours a day. The barriers, however, did not provide ample safety from the leopards. These active and athletic cats were getting out at night. They returned at feeding time, to be sure, but the situation made a lot of people nervous. The black leopard is the most ill-tempered and difficult cat to reconcile to confinement; so, when Frank Buck brought back a couple to Brookfield from India, new accommodations for all the leopard-like animals were quickly arranged, and the Lion House was left to the lions.

Brookfield's South American Exhibit was an experiment in getting different kinds of animals to live together harmoniously. Mammals, birds,

Photo by Frank E. Rice

Cour tesy Chicago Zoologica l Society

Su-Lin, one of the two giant pandas who lived at Brookfield Zoo.

Co urt esy Chicago Zoo logica l S oc iety

Ziggy, Brookfield's famous bull elephant, in the enclosure built for him after he was freed from solitary confinement.

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241

Zoos

and reptiles from all over that continent, sometimes numbering as many as fifteen different kinds, were apprehensively "aggregated" in a single exhibit. Remarkably few of them ate each other. John T. McCutcheon attributed their amiability to the good nutrition provided by the zoo as much as to what he considered an extraordinary and unique social instinct of most animals from that continent.

Brookfield also experimented with the idea of exhibiting animals in family groups, rather than showing a single caged animal. In 1937, when a gorilla named Sultan was imported to join a pair of females, Suzette and Miss Congo, Brookfield had the only family group of gorillas in captivity and was the only park exhibiting both sexes.

The original Primate House was built with thirty-two cages for baboons and smaller monkeys around the outer walls of the building, a tropical patio for gibbons, and large enclosures with adjoining outdoor cages. The male baboons, always bad tempered and frequently hysterical, had special quarters to which they could retire if the visitors annoyed them. The inside ventilating equipment changed the air content every seven minutes for these smelly animals.

Brookfield opened with three separate bird houses. The most spectacular was the Aquatic Bird House, whose Flying Cage occupied an entire side of the building. Many of the exotic birds also had outside accommodations for the summer months. The south encl of the building was a large glass enclosure lavishly planted with tropical plants and an irregular-shaped pool for shore and wading birds. The glassed enclosure at the north end of the building represented a rocky shore in Antarctica, which housed the first Emperor Penguins ever exhibited in any zoo in the world.

The Parrot House exhibited some of the gaudiest birds on earth, and certainly the noisiest; unfortunately, the building's acoustical properties were far from ideal. The adjoining 242

Chicago History

Pheasant Runs featured the Impeyan Pheasant, whose brilliant metallic plumage literally glitters in the sunlight. A connecting loggia led to the enormous Perching Birds House, whose central hall was flanked by two skylighted wings.

The middle of the building was a community aviary with naturalistic trees and rockwork, usually dominated by the spasms of demoniacal mirth resounding from the Laughing Jackass bird from Australia. The special Hummingbird Cage was fronted with plate glass and planted with flowering tropical vines, and a spray of mist was turned on daily to substitute for the clew these beautiful little creatures need for preening.

Below the terrace on which the Parrot House and Perching Birds House are built is a formal pool for waterfowl during the summer months.

It was augmented by a nine-acre wildfowl pond back in the woods along Salt Creek, which is the western boundary of the park. Ornithologists have recorded over two hundred species of uninvited birds which have visited the pond.

Brookfield has had its own share of celebrities.

In 1937, it acquired Su-Lin, the first giant panda ever seen in the ,vestern world. He died less than fourteen months later, but not before beguiling millions of visitors with his playful antics. Su-Lin, like Lincoln Park's Bushman, is now stuffed and on exhibit at the Field Museum.

Su-Lin's "cute" appearance did a lot to create the panda's image as a playful, huggable creature. Not so. An adult panda is a dangerous animal. Brookfield's other male panda, MeiLan, who was acquired in 1939, mauled keeper Ralph Small so badly that Small lost a hand.

Mei-Lan set the longevity record for captive pandas, however, and when he died in 1953 he was the last panda in America. Only nine pandas had ever been exhibited in the United States before President Richard Nixon brought back two more from China for the National Zoo in Washington, but Su-Lin was the best known of them all.

Brookfield's greatest celebrity, however, was probably Ziggy, the Asian bull elephant who attracted national attention when the public became aware that he had been chained in solitary confinement for thirty years following a vicious attack on his keeper. Abusive letters poured into the zoo from incensed but misguided animals lovers, while at the same time Ziggy was dubbed "The Killer Elephant" by sensation mongers.

A public fund drive was launched in 1969 to remodel Ziggy's indoor enclosure, construct a remote-control doorway system, and build an outdoor exercise yard. The battle cry of the campaign was "Let Ziggy see the sun in '71." Over fifty thousand dollars was raised privately, including donations from schoolchildren across the country. Ziggy was "sprung" on August 28, 197 1, with full press and television coverage.

Like many show-business celebrities, Ziggy had a clouded past. He even had his name changed for professional reasons, having started life with John Ringling as plain Herman.

Florenz Ziegfeld bought him as a birthday present for his daughter, who gave him his new name, but Ziegfeld became disenchanted when his namesake started to tear clown the greenhouses on his Long Island estate.

Ziggy soon found himself with a circus called Singer's Midgets, where he was taught to play a harmonica, but his heart wasn't in iL. He collapsed a stage in Spain ancl battered his stable apart in Milwaukee. He is reputed to have gone on a rampage through a San Diego circus crowd where he killed a musician by hurling him thirty feet through the air, but old San Diego newspapers indicate that the worst he really did was run away from the circus and then come back the next day when he got hungry. Finally, he was purchased by Brookfield for $800 in 1936.

Ziggy behaved himself until April 26, 1941, when without warning he turned on his keeper, George Lewis, threw him to the ground, and tried to kill him. The head-down charge drove the elephant's tusks deep into the ground, with

"Slim" Lewis pinned between them. The imbedded tusks saved Lewis as the maddened animal tried to crush him. A punch in the eye dazed Ziggy enough to allow Lewis to scramble away. That was when Ziggy was sentenced to solitary confinement. George Lewis was flown in from California for Ziggy's coming-out party in 1971; the keeper and the elephant eyed each other warily, but there was no attempt by either party to shake hands and let bygones be bygones.

Ziggy got a roommate in 1972, a forty-two year old female named Minnie, but she didn't like him. Two years later, he banged against a barrier he didn't like and broke almost three feet off his right tusk. ¡w hen he died last October, in his middle fifties, Ziggy was the largest living land animal in the United States, standing at ten feet, two inches and weighing thirteen thousand pounds.

Brookfield's extensive collection at present includes over eight hundred mammals of some two hundred species, over six hundred specimens of birds of two hundred fifty species, almost three hundred reptiles of over one hundred twenty-five different kinds, and several dozen amphibian and invertebrate animals. A simulated rain forest for tropical animals has push-button thunder and lightning storms, a free-flight exhibit has only psychological barriers to keep the exotic birds within their enclosures, and a "black light" exhibit of nocturnal animals reverses day and night so that the animals-seldom seen in the wild because of their nocturnal habits-are now most active during visiting hours.

Except on Tuesday, when admission is free, it costs $1.50 for an adult to visit Brookfield Zoo, and unescorted children must pay 25¢. The Children's Zoo and the Porpoise Show are extra.

Bargains, all. The Lincoln Park Zoo is still free every clay. Considering the state of professional football in Chicago, it looks like a great idea to get out and see the bears in our great zoos.

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Golfing in and around Chicago

BY HERBERT WARREN WIND

In its early daysy Chicago golf was the story of one man--Charles Blair Macdonald.

But he established the first 78-hole course in the country and won the first U.S. Amateur Championship.

And did you know how the Village of Golfgot its name? when Lou Graham edged out John Mahaffey in their playoff at the Medinah Country Club, in Medinah, Illinois, it marked the first time in twenty-six years that the United States Open Championship had been played in the Chicago area. This was such a long interval that there were only two golfers in this year's field who had competed in the earlier event, the 1949 Open, which was also held on Medinah's No. 3 Course. One was Bill Campbell, the fine amateur from West Virginia, and the other, of course, was that elegant confounder of athletic longevity Sam Snead, now sixty-three, who was joint runnerup to Cary Middlecoff in 1949. (Neither Campbell nor Snead made t!1e thirty-six-hole cut this June.) Since Chicago is one of our most vital golf centers-at present the Chicago District Golf Association is composed of a hundred and forty member clubs, spread throughout Illinois and adjacent parts of Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, and lowa--one wonders why a quarter of a century was allowed to slip by without having the Open there. It is hard to arrive at a clear explanation, because the various organizations involved do not always agree on the basic facts, let alone the shadowy circumstances surrounding them . As nearly as most people in golf have been able to ascertain, however, LAST JUNE,

Mr. Wind's article an article in The Yorker Magazine, American.Golf has 244

is reprinted by permission from New Yorker; Š1975 The New Inc. His revised The Story of just been published by Knopf.

Chicag o Hi story

matlers began to get complicated when the \Vestern Golf Association (WGA) announced that, starting in 1962, it would hold the annual vVestern Open- for many years second only to the U.S. Open in importance among American tournaments-at some course in or around Chicago. The \VGA, founded in 1899, only five years after the United States Golf Association (USGA), has always made its headquarters in the Chicago area and staged the bulk of its tournaments in Illinois and the other North Central states, but it has historically regarded just about the whole length and breadth of the country as its purview, and has put on the \Vestern Open in such scattered oases as Buffalo, Los Angeles, Houston, Pittsburgh, and Phoenix.

After its decision to make Chicago the regular home of the Western Open, the \VGA, according to some sources, let it be known that it believed that Chicago could support only one large tournament a year and that the USGA should be considerate enough to stay out of its territory. For its part, the USGA went on record to the effect that it reserved the right to hold the U.S. Open in or near Chicago if it so wished.

This is where matters rested for a while.

In the winter of 1972, the situation suddenly changed. As a rule, the USGA does not approach a club and ask if it would like to hold a national championship on its course. Rather, it waits to be invited. However, in .January 1972, the USGA's Championship Committee, eager after so long a hiatus to play the Open in Chicago, was considering approaching Medinah. At about that time, Don Stillwaugh, a young archi tect who had recently been elected to the board

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of directors of Medinah, had an eyeopening experience when he was playing in the proamateur tournament that precedes the Dean Martin Tucson Open: he found that most of the pros he met lit up on learning that he was from Medinah and expressed the hope that another U.S. Open would soon be held over the No. 3 Course. At the next meeting of the board of directors, when Stillwaugh proposed that the club approach the USGA about the possibility of putting on the Open, he received a very faint green light. He went ahead nonetheless, phoned the USGA, and learned that it was most enthusiastic about the prospect of taking the championship back to Medinah. He then suggested to the club's board of directors that a referendum on this matter be submitted to the members, and this met with the board's approval. On a raw Saturday morning in midApril-the official opening day of the golf season-several hundred members of Medinah gathered in a large frescoed dining room of the club for breakfast, following which Stillwaugh, equipped with an easel and a series of posters, whipped through an artful presentation of the advantages that would accrue to the club from putting on the Open. The anti-Open faction had not sent a spokesman to the breakfast, and this may explain to some degree why the balloting resulted in a landslide victorv for Stillwaugh's forces and the subsequent tendering of

Charles B. Macdonald matches his play against Laurence Stoddart 's (waiting at left) at St. Andrew's Golf Club in Yonkers, New York, 1894, as portrayed by Currier and Ives.

an invitation to the USGA. As was only fitting, Stillwaugh was later named general chairman of the 1975 U.S. Open.

The return of the Open to Chicago served, among other things, to remind everybody of the considerable influence this city has had on the rise o( American golf-something that had been largely forgotten with the passage of time. In its early days, Chicago golf was the story of one man-Charles Blair Macdonald. A tall, corpulent, mustachioed gentleman of wealth, social position, and not a little arrogance, Macdonald had the fixed idea that he had been divinely selected to direct the growth of the game in this country. Up to a point, one can understand why he felt this way. In 1872, when he was sixteen, his father sent him to St. Andrews, the oldest university in Scotland, to complete his studies.

He had hardly arrived there when his grandfather, who lived in Scotland, took him to the golf shop operated by Old Tom Morris, the great champion, where he had the young man outfitted with some clubs and balls and arranged for him to rent a locker. Macdonald fell in love with golf almost instantly. By the time he left the university, he not only had become a first-rate player but, from the many hours he had Chicago History

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spent listening to Old Tom and the other local heroes, had developed a fervent devotion to the game, which in St. Andrew's amounts almost to a religion. On returning to Chicago in 1875, he found himself sad and bereft. There were no golf courses there-indeed, it wasn't until 1888 that the first permanent golf club in the United States, the St. Andrew's Golf Club in Yonkers, New York, was established-and the only times Macdonald was able to play were on occasional business trips to Britain. He frequently expounded on the beauties and benefits of golf to his friends in the very social Chicago Club, but his words fell on deaf ears until 1892, when several y"oung university men in the English delegation to the upcoming World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago expressed the desire to play some golf, and Macdonald's friend Hobart Chatfield-Taylor asked him to devise a makeshift course on the Lake Forest estate of Chatfield-Taylor's father-in-law, Senator John B. Farwell. The course that Macdonald worked out consisted of seven abbreviated holes-the longest was only two hundred and fifty yardswhich weaved their way among the flower beds and trees of the senator's lawn, but it proved to be just the tonic that the golf-sick young Englishmen needed. It also stirred up some interest in the game among Chicagoans, and Macdonald was now able to persuade a number of members of the Chicago Club to ante up ten dollars 246

Chicago History

Teeing off at the Glen View Golf Club in 1902, the year it hosted the U.S. Am ateur Tournament.

apiece, with which he acquired a tract of land on a stock farm in Belmont, west of the city, and built nine holes over it. The response to the new game was extremely enthusiastic. The following spring, Macdonald added nine more holes, and that July the Chicago Golf Club was officially incorporated-the first American golf club, incidentally, with an eighteen-hole course.

The next year, 1894, the members of the club, eager to build a course that would compare favorably with the best in Britain, put up twentyeight thousand dollars to buy two hundred acres of farmland in Wheaton, twenty-five miles west of Chicago, and there Macdonald fashioned an eighteen-hole course 6,200 yards longroughly the same length that the Old Course at St. Andrew's was in those clays. The only members who had any beefs about the new course were those who chronically hooked their shotsthat is, hit them so that they curved in a rightto-left arc. Macdonald had cagily routed the first seven holes so that they marched in a clockwise progression close along the perimeter of the property. As a result, whenever a player hit a bad hook, the ball bounded off the course and into an adjoining cornfield, from which it often took several strokes to recover. After strenuous

Golf

protests by the hookers that these conditions were unfair, the club adopted an out-of-bounds rule-the first club ever to do so-whereby the goHer who hooked his drive, say, off club property was permitted to play a second shot from the tee. The new rule didn't affect Macdonald.

He was never out-of-bounds. It was his style, as one might have guessed, to fade his shots from left to right. At the Chicago Golf Club, he was unbeatable.

Quite by accident, Macdonald was a major force in the founding of the USGA. There was no question at all in his mind that he was the best golfer not only in Chicago but in the entire country, and when the Newport Golf Club announced a thirty-six-hole stroke-play tournament in the summer of 1894 to determine the national amateur champion, he rode out of the West brimming with confidence. An 89 on the first round gave him a four-stroke lead, but on the second round he topped a fairway shot that ended up at the foot of a stone wall and led to his undoing; he blew to a 100 and finished a stroke behind the winner. He .did not take his defeat gracefully, storming around and insisting that a stone wall was not a legitimate hazard, and also intimating that anybody who knew golf was aware that a national amateur

championship was traditionally decided not at stroke play but at match play-an elimination tournament in which the winner of each match is the man who wins more holes than his opponent. To appease Macdonald, St. Andrew's arranged for such a match-play tournament that October. Macdonald made his way to the final without much trouble, as was expected, but was upset there on the first extra hole by Laurence Stoddart, who had played some golf in England.

On the extra hole, i\Iacdonald hit a wide slice into a plowed field. This time, he blamed his defeat on Stanford White, the architect. White, he said, had kept him up all night partying, and then, at lunch before the final, when Macdonald had complained that he. wasn't feeling well, had foolishly prescribed champagne as a cure. After cooling down, Macdonald asserted that Stoddart really couldn't be regarded as a true national champion, because he had merely won an invitational event at an individual club, and not an official tournament superintended by a governing body composed of all the golf clubs in the country. That December, in order to avoid further acrimony, representatives of five of the leading American clubs-St. Andrew's, Newport, The Country Club (in Brookline, Massachusetts), Shinnecock Hills (on Long

Louis N. James, the U.S. Amateur winner in 1902, and Bob Gardner, the 1909 and 1915 champion.

Daily Ne ws Collection Chicago Historica l Socie ty

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View of the grounds of the Chicago Golf Club , the first eighteen-hole course in the U.S., in 1912.

The course at the posh Onwentsia Country Club in Lake Forest, 1915.

Island), and Chicago-met in ew York and formed the organization that came to be known as the USGA. In October 1895, when the first official U.S. Amateur Championship was played, in Newport, Macdonald won the thirty-six-hole final, 12 and 1 1, from Charles Sands, an able young tennis player who had only recently taken up golf. Then, in a .characteristically egotistical gesture, Macdonald played the rest of the holes back to the clubhouse with Jim Foulis, the professional from the Chicago Golf Club.

In 1900, Macdonald moved to New York, where he remained at the forefront of the game for another forty years, frequently quarrelling with the USGA, which he considered an upstart usurper, and also revealing a remarkable talent for golf architecture in the superb courses he 248

Chicago History

created, such as Yale; Lido, in Lido Beach, Long Island; and, above all, the ational Golf Links, in Southampton, Long Island- the first great American course. Back in Chicago, his old club continued to be the pacemaker in the Midwest, serving as the venue of the U.S. Open in 1897, 1900, and 1911, and of the U.S. Amateur in 1897, 1905, 1909, and 1912 . The last significant competition held at the club was the 1928 ¡walker Cup Match. The course had been lengthened and mildly revamped in 1921 and 1922 by Seth Raynor, an engineer who worked with Macdonald on his projects, but it preserved the fundamental aspect of a classic nineteenthcentury British course-which had been Macdonald's intention. It looks much the same today, except that, because of Dutch elm disease,

Golf

there are¡ fewer elms among the ash trees planted in clusters alongside the bluegrass (airways, the grass-banked bunkers, and the handsomely contoured greens of creeping bent that was sown from seed first ordered by Macdonald from H olland in 1897. Inside the clubhouse, which was rebuilt in 191 3, Macdonald glares clown from several walls, and one senses his personality and his era just about everywherefrom the seven-foot-high white lockers in the men's locker room to the charming, summery Casino, with its old white wicker furniture and lovely flowered slipcovers. Winston Churchill was once entertained in the Casino, and one feels that Macdonald would have found that quite all right.

Once golf got rolling in Chicago, it gathered momentum swiftly. By 1900, the number of golf clubs had risen to twenty-six-among them such familiar names as Onwentsia (established in 1895), Edgewater ( 1896), Exmoor ( 1 896), Evanston (1897), Glen View (1897), Hinsdale (1898), and Midlothian (1898). Onwentsia and Glen View were particularly interesting clubs.

The man behind Onwentsia, which found its perman ent home on a wide stretch of flattish farmland in Lake Forest not far from Lake Michigan, was M acdo nald's old friend Chatfield-Taylor. A very posh preserve, it included among its member the McCo rmicks, the Palmers, and the meat-packing princes-the Armours, the Swifts, and the Cuclahys. After several failures to agree on a name for their club, the group settled on Onwentsia, an Iroquois word that means a meeting place for sporting braves and their squaws. For many years, starting in 1906, the big blowout was the annual Pow vVow, held at harvest time. Aside from the excellent condition of the course (it might be interjected here that in the spring and early summer there are few sections of the country in which the courses can match those in and around Chicago for the quality of their fairways and greens), Onwentsia's eighteen holes have never been anything special, but the club

has always had an impressive enthusiasm for golf. It was the scene o[ the 1899 U.S. Amateur and the 1906 U.S. Open , and it has produced some very proficient players, foremost among them Bob Gardner, the U.S. Amateur Champion in 1909 and 1915. The 1909 Amateur was undoubtedly the high-water mark of Chicago golf, which during the first decade of the century hacl become po sibly the best in the country. Of the eight quarter-finalists in that Amateur, no fewer than seven were Chicagoans: Gardner, Paul Hunter, Mason Phelps, Albert Seckel, Chandler Egan, Ned Sawyer, and Chick Evans. Evans, a former caddie from Edgewater, developed into the best golfer, professional or amateur, in the history of the Chicago area: U.S. Amateur Champion in 1916 and 1920, U. ' . Open Champion in 191(j, and a shotmaker of such astonishing natural ability that there is no knowing how many more national titles he might have collected if only he had been a sounder putter. As for Glen View, it broke into the big time when it became the scene of the 1902 U.S. Amateur, which was won by a Glen View member, Louis N . .James. Two years later, the U.S. Open was played there. From the beginning, Glen View was out to be as Scottish in flavor as Onwentsia was Indian. Its motto was " Laigh ancl Lang" ("Low and Long"); Jock Hutchison , from St. Andrew's, was its professional for thirty-eight years (1915-1953); Harry Lauder once braved a cold November blast to play nine holes there and then composed a club song; and, instead of a Pow Wow, its members hacl (a nd still have) their Twa Days memberguest tournament, a fearsome test of endurance that at one time called for the entrants to play thirty-six holes on both days and enjoy themselves most of the intervening night. The membership of Glen View has always included a large number of railroad men, among them Albert J. Earling, the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul between 1899 and 1917.

It was Earling's habit, whenever he planned an afternoon round, to inform his staff that he was Chicago History

249

Golf

Albert J. Earling, president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad.

The point at which he disembarked from his private railroad car to golf at Glen View later became the village of Golf.

Chicago Historical Society

"going to golf." To get to Glen View, he usually boarded his private railroad car, which would be dropped off onto a siding about a mile and a half from the course. In time, the spot came to be referred to as Golf, and in 1906 the railroad built a station of that name there. A few homes and shops grew up around the station and, at length, in 1928, that area was formally incorporated as the village of Golf. The red brick Georgian building in which GoH's post office and the village offices are situated also houses the headquarters of the Western Golf Association and of the Evans Scholars Foundation, which has been marvellously well administered by the \,VGA and has since 1930 sent more than thirty-eight hundred ex-caddies through college on scholarships. Chick Evans himself, who is now eighty-five, has played his golf in recent years at Glen View.

After the First World v\Tar, most of the pioneer clubs continued to flourish, but golf in "Chicagoland" underwent an alteration with the coming of the super country club, epitomized by Olympia Fields, forty-five minutes south of the Loop on the Illinois Central. Olym250

Chicago History

pia Fields' six hundred and ninety-two forested acres originally contained four eighteen-hole courses designed by ¡w illie Park, Jr., the old British champion; a good-sized Tudor clubhouse with a grill room that seated six hundred and a dining room that could handle another eight hundred ; a hundred cottages that could be bought or rented; and , for good measure, an icemaking plant and a hospital. (The club fell on hard times during the Second \Vorlcl \Var, but it saw itself through by selling off two of its courses to land developers. The lavish clubhouse amenities remain relatively unchanged.) The lVIedinah Country Club, twenty miles west of the city, was equally grandiose. It sprawled over four hundred acres that had been bought in 1921 by a group of Shriners who were affiliated with the Medinah Temple, in downtown Chicago, and who wanted a roomy rural retreat where their families could forget the cares of the day in strenuous physical activity. They built a polo field, riding trails, skeet shoots, a ski jump, toboggan runs, a fifty-three-acre lake (called Kadijah, after Muhammad's first wife) , and three eighteen-hole golf courses. They also decreed, quite literally, a stately pleasure dome.

R. G. Schmiel, the architect who designed the clubhouse, made provision at the main entrance for a rotunda that was covered by a Byzantine dome rising sixty feet above a terrazzo floor. For the most part, the rest of the building carried out this Byzantine theme, but students of architecture like to point out Mediterranean, Oriental, and Louis XIV touches that Schmid threw in, presumably for a change of pace. All this cost a pretty riyal, and subsequently the membership in l\Iedinah was opened first to all Shriners and then to all l\Iasons and finally to everybody. Today, the club has six hundred regular members.

Golf at Meclinah got under way in 1925, when the No . 1 Course was completed. The No. 3 Course was originally intended for women golfers, but well before it was opened, in 1928, its exceptional possibilities were recog-

I

I

___

.----- - - -----

ni,.ed. The club decided to give the women the o. 2 Course instead, and No. 3 became the championship course. No. 3, surprisingly, was designed by Tom Benclelow- surprisingly because Benclclow, who first earned his living as a linotype operator for the New York Herald, was renowned chiefly for his speed and not his a rti stry: he usually staked out his courses in a single clay. ln 19 '.{2, after No. 3 had been extended to 0,800 yards, it was regarded by the cognoscenti as perhaps the rnost diffirnlt exami nation in go lf in the Midwest. The ¡w estern Open wa~ played over it in ' 9'.\!), and ten years later the U.S. Open, which Cai y [ iddlecofI won with a total of 286, two shots over par (7 1), on a course that measured 6,936 yards-a fairly long layout [or those clays. It was also a very tight layout, for most of the holes were bordered on both sides by bulging stands of oak, hi ckory, and maple. For the 1975 Open, Medinah again played to a par of 71, but it measured 7,032 yards . In the interval between the two Opens,

Dnily Ne ws Coll ,.,c ti on Chicaoo H 1stori ca t Society

The Byzantine clubhouse of the Medinah Country Club, one of whose many architectural features is a rotunda covered by a sixty-foot high dome.

the course had been remodelled extensively, first by Jerry Dearie and Jerry Dearie, Jr. , both o[ them former superintendents at Medinah, and then by the C hi cago golf-architect ural firm o[ Killian &: Nugent, which rcclc igned and resurfaced several greens a nd elaborated on the greens icl e bunkering. For the 1975 championsh ip, to be sure, Medinab was treated to the special Open-co urse preparation that the USGA perfected in the nineteen-fifties: the greens were given a snug collar of rough, and the rough was allowed to grow in so that the width of the fairways averaged only about thirty-three yards.

'When I visited Medinah No. 3 ten days before the Open, it was in splendid condition, the fairways well knitted and the rolling greens of C-15 bent grass beautifully fast and smooth.

Chicago History

251

Fifty Years Ago

As recorded by newspapers in the collection of the Chicago Historical Society

1925 Dec. 4. A grand jury investigating 119 bombings of small businesses indicts 44 men for complicity in a campaign of terror against bakers, shoe repairers, milk dealers, and others who refused to join "business associations" which offered them "protection."

Dec. 5. Seven railroads agree to contribute $7,000,000 toward straightening the Chicago River between Polk and 18th sts., ending nine years of negotiations. The city will contribute an additional $1,600,000.

Dec. 6. The Pottsville (Penn.) Miners defeat the Chicago Cardinals, 2 1-7, to capture the National Football League championship before 6,000 fans at Comiskey Park. The Chicago Bears, on an East Coast exhibition tour to showcase Red Grange, defeat the New York Giants, 19-7, at the Polo Grounds before an audience of 65,000, the largest assemblage of football fans in New York City's history.

Dec. 8. Federal Judge James Wilkerson rules that the Chicago Auditorium Association may not tear down the Auditorium Building and construct a $15,000,000 skyscraper. The Association has been paying rent of $30,000 a year to the owners of the land under a ninety-nine year contract.

Dec. 10. Commenting on the increased number of inmates at Bridewell prison since Prohibition, Supt. Richey V. Graham sta tes, "those that we do get are in terrible shape. They're crazed by this moonshine they drink." Although there are three times as many prisoners as in pre-Volstead clays, Graham does not 252

Chicago History

protest a $ 100,000 budget cut, figuring that the money will be recovered by having the additional men work on the prison's stone crushing and brick making projects.

Dec. 14. The state parole board reveals that almost a thousand Cook County convictsamong them murderers, rapists, and child molesters-have been paroled within the last two years. The list is made public following protests over the secret parole of the son of a wealthy Joliet family who had served only three years of his sentence for murder.

Dec. 16. The Illinois Supreme Court upholds lower court decisions ordering Gov. Len Small to repay the state $ 1,000,000 in interest withheld while he was state treasurer in 1917 and 1918. Small has been convicted of channel ing state funds into a fictitious Grant Park Bank and repaying the state only a fraction of the interest earned.

In another decision, the court overturns a lower court ruling allowing women to sit on juries. The judges rule that classifying women as "electors" does not entitle them to jury service and that new legislation is required.

Dec. 18. l\fore details of the $1,000,000 sacramental wine scandal are revealed in new indictments against former prohibition directors Percy Owen and Ralph '"'¡ Stone and seven others. Owen is charged with receiving $60,000, but officials say his total take was $200,000. The indictments also list numerous payoffs for phony inspections and the approval of wine permits for a hundred fake Jewish congregations.

Dec. 20. The Municipal Voters League releases its findings on aldermanic campaign expenditures and warns Chicagoans against possible shakedowns by next year's ca ndidates.

The brochure quotes one unnamed alderman as saying, "It cost me $ 15,000 to be reelected and I have got to get the money back," although the average expenditure of the 84 candidates who answered the League's questionnaire was a modest $2,500.

The West Cell House and Dining Room at Bridewell jail.

Inmates sent there after Dec. 10 could expect to join its work force .

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History

253

50 Years Ago

Dec. 24. A syndicate of wealthy Chicagoans organized by Walter A. Strong, business manager of the Chicago Daily News, purchases the paper from the estate of Victor F. Lawson for between $12,000,000 and $14,000,000. Included in the group are Sewell Avery, Rueben H. Donnelley, John V. Farwell II, Frank 0.

Lowden, and Julius Rosenwald.

1926 Jan. 1. New Year's Eve is wetter than ever but far less rowdy than usual as hotels, restaurants, and nightclubs play host lo thousands of celebrants. Chicago's citizenry seems to have heeded Prohibition Administrator E. C. Yellowley's stern admonitions, and only thirty-five are arrested.

Jan. g. Commenting in Educational Review magazine on the glorification of war in the nation's schools, School Superintendent "\,Villiam McAndrew writes, "to believe that ... past barbaric necessities must be attractively drilled into the minds of school children is not a part of the equipment of the present day schoolmaster." McAndrew proudly notes that the famous painting The Spirit of '76"with the drum and fifes and bloody bandage"-:-hasn't been seen in a Chicago school for over ten years.

Jan. 13. The City Council votes to investigate Chicago's diminishing home-rule powers after the State Department of Purchases and Construction withholds a permit for a new industrial harbor in Lake Calumet. The resolution, submitted by Aid. Jacob Arvey, notes that recent act ions by the legislature have taken away the city's right to regulate its utilities and the Sanitary District's right to sell off its land.

Jan. 14. A modern municipal airport will be constructed on a 247-acre prairie at Cicero Ave. and 63rd St. The city, which has leased the land from the Board of Education for $1,500 a year, will build the hangars, runways, and beacon lights.

254

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Daily News Collection Chicago Historical Society

Supt. of Schools William McAndrew proved he was no ordinary flag-waver on Jan . 9.

Jan. 15. Although the stale legislature voled over a year ago to pay farmers S2,ooo,ooo to destroy their diseased cattle, Gov. Len Small admits that the slate treasury doesn 't have the money. Angry farmers, who last month losl a City Council battle against tuberculin testing of milk cows, are considering court action to free the money.

Jan. 22. Construction of a $100,000 "white way" on Stale St. between Lake and Van Buren sts. will begin immediately, announces John T. Miller, c:ommissioner of gas and electricity.

The new street lamps will make State St. one of the brightest in the world.

Jan. 30. Prohibition agents raid the Pfeifer Products Company on No. Leavitt St. and find beer production going at full blast. The brewery is thought to be owned by Terry Druggan and Frankie Lake, a belief strength-

cned w11en lawyers for the de bonair boo tl egge rs show up to inquire a fter te n a rres ted empl oyees.

J an. 31. Farmers in north wes t Cook Coun ty are ala rmed a t the th eft of 1 2,000 ch ickens in the las t 10 days . A uth ori ties be!ieve th at ultramodern thi eves are usin g sulphur gas to anesthetize the fow l and render them squ awkl ess, and tire tracks show th a t some have been brazen enough to dri ve a tru ck r ight into a farm ya rd .

Feb. 1 . Sports p romote r Padd y H arm on announ ces pl ans for a n .$8,000,000, 39,000-scat indoor arena a l M adi so n a ncl vV ood sts. Th e stadium , large enough fo r foo tball, will also be equipped for ice h ockey.

Feb. 3. Actin g a fter o ne pat ient at th e O ak Fores t Infirm ary a ttempts sui cid e ancl another wounds his wife with revolvers purchased th ro ugh the ma il , Cook County Boa rd P res.

A nton J. Ce rm ak opens an in ves ti ga tion into the ma i I-ord er sa le of gu ns.

Feb. 7. All Loo p traffi c, a tota l of fo rty-nin e intersec ti ons, is now controlled b y automa ti c stop-ancl-go lights. Th e sys tem, th e larges t in the world, is operated by a cont rol board in Ci ty H all.

A crowd at Cl ark and Mad ison sts . adm ires one of the Loop 's newest t raffic li ghts on Feb. 7.

Ch icago Histo rical Society

Bariton e Paul Robeson performed at Orch estra Hall during the week of Feb. 8.

Feb. 8. Movi es around town this week include The Sea B east, with J ohn Barrymore; Th e Eagle, with Rudolph Valentino a nd "\Vilma Banky; Th e Phant om of th e Opera , with Lon Chaney; B ehind the Front , with , ,vall ace Beer y; L ights of Old Broa dw ay, with M arion Davies; Little Ann ie Rooney, with M ary Pi ckfo rd ; and B en-Hu r, with R amon Novarro, Betty Bron son, a nd Fra ncis X. Bushman.

On stage are George Arli ss in Old English, Al J olson in B ig Boy, Holbrook Blinn and Judith Anderson in Th e Dove, and Helen H ayes in Young Blood. Paul Robeson and Lawrence Brown are at Orchestra Hall, Fred Waring's Pennsylvanians are play ing at the Uptown , Bill Robinson dances at the Palace, and soprano Florence Austral sings Wagnerian arias with the Chicago Symphony, conducted by Frederick Stock.

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255

Feb. 10. The Pullman Company agrees to a 10% increase in salary and benefits for its 12,000 porters and maids after meeting with the employees' delegates. The minimum salary is raised from $72.50 to S8 3.50 a month; the maximum, to $104.

Feb. 11. The federal government agrees to help Chicago deport Sicilian gunmen convicted of murder after hundreds of jurors refuse to serve in fear of retaliation. Sec. of Labor James J. Davis, who is investigating a Chicago organization suspected of bribing immigration agents to permit illegal entries, opines

Books Yesterday's Communes of the contemporary scene is the proliferation of communes from coast to coast.

Nobody knows how many there are, but two thousand would be a sober estimate. The new communes have no single character. You run into them on farms and in cities, in the boondocks, and in the mountains. Their principle of organization is a baffiing combination of idealism and hanky-panky, of shrewd social criticism and stardust. All of themand we, as well-can profit from knowledge of some of the communal experiments of America's past.

The utopian experiments of the mid-nineteenth century were almost as various as today's-as Emerson noted, every literate man he met had the plans for a perfect society in his hip pocket. The English Shakers had colonies across the country; the Owenites were in ew Harmony, Indiana; the Fourier phalansteries were dotted across the landscape; there were Swedenborgians in New York; and Brook Farm drew literary attention. The Mormons stirred up deep resentments in their neighbors and were driven from place to place-when they left Nauvoo, Illinois, the Icarians moved in.

Clyde Browning's Amish in Illinois is a good account of the Amish settlement in central Illinois.

Originating in one of the ancient theological quarrels of Europe, the Amish held that the classical religious reformers-Luther and Zwingli-had not gone nearly far enough, and that the True Believer should not drift into church membership simply by being born but should go through an ordeal of confession , forgiveness, and baptism. The True Believers should also be set apart from others by the sharpest of distinctions: they must wear different clothing, have a distinctive life style, and shun the State, especially the most compelling of the State's functions-making war. According to Browning, there were several kinds of Amish. The Hook-and-

A STRIKING FEATURE

that "we never shall be able to put an end to the smuggling of criminals and other undesirable aliens into this country until the registration of aliens is required."

Feb. 12. Federal Judge Evan A. Evans refuses to padlock the Fish Fans' Club even though its manager, steward, and headwaiter have been found guilty of violating the Volstead Act. Judge Evans, absolving the club's outof-town officials, agrees with the defense that "the mice [were] playing while the cats were away."

Feb. 17. Red Grange and his agent, C. C. Pyle, announcing the formation of the American League of Professional Football Clubs, reveal they will own the New York franchise and have already signed an agreement to play in Yankee Stadium. Walter Eckersall of the Chicago Tribune declines their offer to become commissioner of the new ten-team organization.

Feb. 18. The Illinois Supreme Court upholds the South Park Board's $5,000,000 bond issue for the restoration of the Fine Arts Building in Jackson Park, overruling objections that the project exceeds the Board's funding power. Numerous architects, art lovers, and club women rejoice at their success in saving the crumbling edifice, which is to be converted into an auditorium and community center, or perhaps a museum of industry.

Feb. 19. Paul M. Angle, historical investigator for the Lincoln Centennial Association, discovers seven original documents in Lincoln's handwriting in the files of the Logan County Courthouse in Lincoln, Ill. The manuscripts were believed destroyed in an 1857 fire.

Feb. 20. "Black folks all over the world are beginning to recognize their common kinship and common problems," W. E. B. Du Bois tells the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations at the Palmer House. Du Bois believes that blacks will "achieve spiritual unity and world-wide understanding through cooperation with European civilization."

Amish in Illinois, by Clyde Browning, privately published, 1971, $2.50; Nauvoo: the City of Joseph, by David E. and Della S. Miller, Peregrine Smith, 1974, $10; Sex and Marriage in Utopian Communities, by Raymond Lee Muncy, Indiana University, 1973, $10; Bishop Hill Colony: A Religious Communistic Settlement in Henry County, Illinois, by Michael Mikkelsen and Eric Janson and the Bishop Hill Colony, by Sivert Erdahl, Porcupine Press, 1972, S10.50; Bishop Hill, Ill.: A Utopia on the Prairie, by Olov Isaksson and Soren Hallgren, trans.

Albert Read, LT Publishing House, the Museum of National Antiquities, and the Swedish Pioneer Historical Society, 1969, $9.50; Chautauqua; A Center for Education, Religion, and the Arts in America, by Theodore Morrison, University of Chicago, 1974, $10.50; An Icarian Communist in Nauvoo; Commentary by Emile Vallet,

ed. H. Roger Grant, Illinois State Historical Society, I 971 , $2.00, Chicago History

257

Books

Eye Amish saved their special wrath for buttons.

They also would not wear ties or cuffs, the devil's blandishments, nor moustaches, which they identified with the military. 'When Social Security was instituted, they paid their share but accepted none of the benefits, nor would they accept any other kind of welfare or insurance. The Bible was their daily companion, but they held churcl1 services only every other week. The House Amish, for their pare, held services in Pennsylva9ia Dutch and felt at ease only in houses where there were no window shades, rugs, or electricity. Some of the more progressive Amish e\'entually phased out these crotchety prohibitions: the Church Amish drove to services in automobiles, instead of horses and buggies, and the New Order Amish made their peace with electricity, telephones, and radios, but drew the line at tele\'ision. Browning's book helps steer us through these fog-bound waters.

Of special interest to observers of Illinois communality are the J\Iormons, who lived from 1839 to 18,16 at Nauvoo, on the banks of the J\Iississippi.

Nauvoo: the City of Joseph, the i\Iillers' account of these astonishing people, is sympathetic. Joseph Smith , their handsome, charismatic leader had been granted in the 1830s the primary revelation in The Book of l\Iormon , delivered on plates of gold by an angel named Moroni. Later, in Ohio, their scriptures were supplemented by Th e Book of Abraham, Smith's translation of some Egyptian papyrii which had been bought from a traveling sideshow. Joseph Smith had regular conversations with God, during one of which he was told that it was permissible for some of the l\formons, as it had been for the patriarch Abraham, to have several wives. Polygyny began as a secret practice reserved for the Mormon elite, but the practice nevertheless proved disastrous.

The J\Iormon colony at Nauvoo rapidly grew into a thriving town with imposing buildings, including a temple which was the largest building in the \1/est at the time. The colony had two brass bands, vocal groups, theater and lyceum programs, and the Nauvoo Legion, an armed military company, uniformed and with a commission from the State of Illinois to keep the peace around that bend of the river. In the end, his military arm failed to protect Joseph Smith: he had been taken to Carthage to stand trial and a jealous mob attacked the jail in which he was being held. Joseph and his brother Hyrum were murdered . The disconsolate Mormons, at first torn by dissension, eventually packed up their belongings and, under the leadership of Brigham Young, made the trek to the Great Salt Lake.

The book makes fascinating reading and, written from inside the Mormon camp, it has undeniable authority. But a price is paid. \Ve are persuaded that the l\formons were courageous, persevering, respectable citizens, far more sinned against than sinning, but we do not hear some of the more shabby details.

Nothing is said about Joseph Smith's affair with Fannie Alger in 1835, or about his carrying-on with 258

Chicago History

Eliza Snow in Nauvoo. The Millers inform us that Smith concealed his amorous adventures because of the laws against bigamy, but they do not mention his need to keep the secret from his wife, Emma. Still, if the l\lillers are overimpressed with the Mormons' ach ievements and too little distressed by their kinky life style, the book remains a valuable contribution to utopian literature.

Raym o nd Lee ;\Iun cy's Sex and Marriage in Utopian Communities tries to a nswer the intriguing question of whether or not the communal ideal has enough cohesion to supplant the unifying power of the nuclear family. His is a sober sociological inten tion, but there is some good, clean fun along the way, enough so that the book could be bought by barber shops. l\funcy runs through some of the nineteenth -century answers to his question , checking out how much success most of the utopian colonies had in establishing permanent sexual inno\'ations. An astonishing \'ariety of innoYations was attempted, from the complex marriage schemes which .John Humphrey Noyes established at Putney, Oneida, and \Vallingford in which every man was married to every woman, and every woman to every man, to the Shakers' strict separation of the sexes . The lcarians required everyone to be married; the Rappites forbade marriage. Sex was sometimes enshrined as though Freud had written the by-laws and sometimes dreaded as though it was Satan's most dangerous Jure.

Of special interest to our own age, increasingly aware of the role of women, is the attitude of women towards these sexual experiments. The evidence is not conclusive, but a reading of these books leads to the conclusion that women as a whole profited neither by the proliferation nor the repression of sex. Women and children seem on the whole to ha,¡e fared better under the stodgier idea] of monogamy and the nuclear family. What is striking, however, is the emergence of several female communal leaders. Ann Lee, i\fargaret Fuller, and Frances Wright kept a cold maternal eye on the masculine penchant for tumbling in the hay. Like them, l\Iuncy concludes that free Jove offered certain inducements, especially to the males, but that sooner or later the commune returned to more conventional patterns.

Nearest to our readers' home was the Bishop Hill colony, founded in 1846 by Swedish settlers who fled from the restrictions of the Lutheran State Church and repaired to the plains of lllinois, 150 miles clue west of Chicago. The colony, led by a charismatic figure named Eric Jansson, was very successful at first, cultivating vast acres of farmland and building impressi,¡e structures which still lure a stream of tourists to Bishop Hill. But a variety of misfortunes-the murder of Eric Jansson, the cholera epidemic, poor business investments, and dissension-led to the dissolution of the commune. The experiment was over by 1862.

The two books under review are good introductions to the Janssonist adventure. Professor M ikkelsen , a member of the history faculty at Johns Hopkins Un iversity, had the advantage of lengthy interviews with some of the original settlers who

we1e still alive in the 1890s, \\'hen l\likkelscn vis it ed th(;m . /\!though he failed to separate th(; true rem inisces from the la lse, and rern1dcd even those which were s teeped in bile and corrupted by severa l clec.acks of feuding, his book , Erst published in 1892, holds its place as a primary reference. H e understood what many later researchers have forgouen: that Bbhop Hill was primarily a religious colony whose sclllers came to America seeking not wealth , but religious lrccdom . ,\ I ikk elsen's own interests, carefully sc:parated from the sculcrs', were: socioeconomic, and he gives us the Erst c,ohcre11t account of the w lo11y's farming and manufacturing. His mistakes a rc not crucial: there ;ire no mou11Lai11s around Si>derala and J\lfta in Sweden , .J a nsson did not embark at Copenhagen for New York , John R oot (hi s w,sassi11 ) was not the so n of well -to -do Stockholm people, and the peddler he may have murdered wa, not .) (;w ish but Norwegian. The book remains an impo1 ta Ill early c.ontr i bution lO uwpia n lore, now fortu11atcl y reprinted together with a Enc accoum of 1hc colony by Sivert Erdahl.

JJi.1 hojJ Hill , Ill.: A Utopia on the Prairie offers something for everyone : a Swedi,h text by Olm Jsaksso 11 , a uamlation by 1\lb cn Read, and a c.o ll ecti on of photographs by Si>re n Hall gre n. The whole , a good introduction for the beginner, is also not without interest to the spec ia liH. The assemblage of photographs a nd Olof Krans paintings is impress ive, bul one, Ji rik J anson in thf' Boat , is merely a wpy of a familiar nincteenth-c.cnwry engra, in g liy C lare n ce '.'/. Dobell ca lled From Shore to Shore , a copy of which hangs in Carl Sandburg's binhplac.c in Galesburg. No photograph or painting of Eric Jansson is known to exist.

Though the Chautauqua tradit ion in America is nol. str ictly speak ing, utopian , it bears some resemblance in that its gu idin g principle was LO uplift th (; whole co untr y. Founded in 1875 by fundamentalist preacher J o hn H ey l Vincent and wealthy manufacturer Louis Miller, Chautauqua began piously a, a Methodist Su nd ay School assembly. It quickly became more secu lar in its aims, evo lvin g into litcra1 y and sc.iclllifi c lecture circl es- a forerunner o( the Great Books programs. In 1()18, there were three hundred thousand cager Americans enrolled in its co1 11 ,e. grimly determined 1101 on ly to educate thcm,clvc, lrnt abo to bring some refinement to a vulgar land . Chrwla11q11a: A Center for 1-:rl11cation, Religion , and th<' Arts i11 America, Theodore Morrison's book about the program , c.elcbrating its ce 11Lc nnial i11 1971, is ai m ed at the ge n era l reader. Wriucn in simple, clear English a nd supported by interesting photographs-its scholarl y apparatus is co n cealed :n the back- it is an important bit of Americana , prcsc1 ving (or posterity a crea ti ve idea as well as some of the socia l changes during the past century. :--rost of the utopian experime nts, like th e Chautauqua series, began with a religious motive, but there were a lso a gieat many purely secular colonies in the mid-nineteenth ce ntury. l\lany of th ese were the so-ca ll ed Fourier phalansteries, inspired by a worldly Frenchman, Charles Fourier, a nd carried on by his American disciple, Albert Brisba n e. They aimed at the kind of good life advocated by the

F1cnd1 R(;,o!ution: they s:111g hym1Vi about liberty, justice and fiaternity: and moH of them collapsed after a few months. The1 e were four ,uch settlements in Illin ois: the Bureau County l'halan x, thC' Sanga mon Count) Ph alanx, th e Integra l l'h :ilanll. of L:10mi Township, and th(; Canton Ph a lanx.

The Icarian colony, wh ic.h settled in the aban doned horn.cs of Nauvoo in 18.19 , three years after the 1\lormons had b(;gun their nek. was also of French origin. Emile Vallct was a young member of tl1is colony who fonu11atcly kept a diary of his experiences, his daily life and diet, hi, happi11ess, and his disappointments, such as the clay a gr(;al wind storm blew down what was left o( the l\lormon Temple. JI is c.harmi ng story has now been cclitecl by IT. Roger Grant a nd published li y the Illin o is State Historica l Society.

The Icarians, like the Fouricrists, were concerned with man a11d his well-being on earth. They t0ok their name from Icarus, who tr ied to reach the h ca\'e11s 0 11 wings of wax. only to fall in flames when his win g, melted. ¡1 he lcariam thought that, by uying , cry hard and b) being, cry shrewd, they cou ld build a , illagc a long the ,\ fissi,sippi whic.h would be free of human suffering. They planned LO h ,I\ c no th urches , 110 sa loons, no whore hou cs, and no gam bling dens, and they thought they cou ld e liminate i)ot h beggars a nd millionaires . Their lea d er, tlienne C:abct, forbade tobacco but did not object LO th e moderate use of alcoho l. Unfortu nate ly, Nauvoo pro\'cd 110 more enduring a settin g for th e l carian parndise than it had been for the ,\l ormon dream and , after Cabct was expel led from his offic(; in 1856, the wlony disimcgratcd. The "illagc became again a skcp) ri,cr LOwn with only the dimmest memory of its heady past and with no greater cxpcc.lation of exc itement than a good day's fi,hing or the arriva l of th e De lta steamer. /\ certai n pathos hangs over ,d i the uLOpia11 ad, enwres, and yet the stories cast li ght o n our c urrent socia l expcrim(;lll'>. In eac h case there is no ti ceable a ,¡ague restlessness or a sharp dissatisfaction with estab li shed form; , followed by a vision of a "great good place" where love and just ice ca n prevail. But the , ision has an underpinning: it is aucmptcd under a leader who is a comb in a tion of dreamer ,ind doer. The conviction grows that paradi,e is aua i11 alile. ,\ plac(; is found , the beii(;vers settle in. In the beginning, many signs point toward success. But , cry soon the new place becomes much lik e the places left behind, and the people seem full o f the same recogni,al>le treacheries and the same unrecon\lr11ctcd egotism . \\' hat happe ns th e n is not surprising to hi storians: disillusion, a sc 11 sc of betrayal, and the end of the exper iment. \Vhat sur\' i\'CS is th e memory o[ a splendid madness which cou ld find no real home on earth, and the curious co nso lation of some commercial success like the Oneida silverware and the Amana refrigerators.

PAUL EDIEN

Paul Elmen is professor of moral theology and ethics at Seabury-Western Theological Seminary. His biography of Eric Jansson; Wheat Flour Messiah, will be publi hed by the Southern Illinois U ni vers ity Pres late nex t year.

Chicago History

259

Books

Crime in Chicago of Chicago as a gangster's town dies hard. In a Moscow cab last spring, this reviewer was asked by a cab driver, who was trying out his English, where she was from. Hearing "Chicago," he let go of the wheel (fortunately, the traffic was light) , wrned around, grinned, cocked his right hand, and shouted "Bang bang!" He felt he knew all about our city.

In The Legacy of Al Capone, George l\furray suggests that the legend stays alive because it remains fact. In his book, however, fact is difficult to separate from allegation. That is only one of the problems he hands the reader: the first is to discover the true scope of his book.

According to the blurb on the jacket and judging from the author's Foreword, the book is supposed to bring the history of gangsterism-the "empire" created by Capone-up to date. Nor are we undeceived by the book's opening, a cinematic description o[ Capone's funeral. It is only after reading a bewildering series of flashbacks, in chapter after chapter, that we realize that the book's chronology is circular.

Each of the men around Capone had his own history.

Over and over, these histories-if so they be-are woven into and around funeral scenes. Not always; sometimes one is surprised to find that the cemetery has been left without notice, a problem that the camera would solve but the pen does not.

The author believes that organized crime pervades our society-including its politics and its corporate business-so thoroughly that it would take something tantamount to revolution to eradicate it.

He is recommending right-wing action, as he makes clear in the Foreword. In Brazil, "Death Squads" of policemen simply execute on sight any cop-killer or other criminal who has evaded legal justice. The police leave an announcement behind-a handlettered sign or a skull and crossbones-so that the execution will be recognized as such . Murray also adm ires Musso.lini. It therefore comes as no surprise when, later on, by implication and innuendo, Murray involves Presidents Roosevelt and Truman , Attorney General Tom Clark, Supreme Court Justice \Villiam 0. Douglas, and even Eleanor Roosevelt, a "do-gooder" who in her column attacked Westbrook THE LEGEND

The Legacy of Al Capone, by George Murray, Putnam, 1975, $10.95; The Crime of the Century, by Hal Higdon, Putnam, 1975, $10; The Death of the Detective, by Mark

Smith, Knopf, 1974, $8.95 .

260

Ch icago History

Pegler, the author's journalistic hero and the liberal's bete noir. Do-gooders get more than their fair share of comeuppance, but the attack is so vague that one would be hard put to it to enter a defense.

A compariso11 with John Kohler's Capone reveals Murray's lack of documentation. Kobler was also a crime reporter, but he did his homework. It should be said that some of Murray's material-particularly the Bioff gang's rip-off of Chicago movie exhibitors and Hollywood producers-is drawn from official hearings and is not included in Kohler's carefully focused book. Ironically, those conducting the hearings on which he draws (Kefauver and McClellan in particular) are dismissed as "publicity-seeking."

But most of the book lacks such-or any-supportive evidence, and some of Murray's allegations are serious. For example, he claims as fact that Mayor Anton Cermak (whom he calls Anthony) sent detectives to shoot an unarmed Frank Nitti and that Cermak was the target, and not Franklin Roosevelt, when an assassin shot Cermak as he stood talking to the President-elect. Cermak died because itti lived to avenge himself by hiring a sharpshooter, and Roosevelt's life was never really threate ned. This version has long had its believers, but historians have avoided concluding that it is true. Murray makes this and dozens of less important allegations in the same matter-of-fact fashion, but are they also facts? Maybe the crime reporter knows, and maybe the crime reporter is now telling all, but who knows how much of it he learned at the Press Club bar?

Too poorly organized to be good reading, too slanted to provide political insights, too "confidential " to make good history, this rambling and repetitive book is not recommended-either [or the scholar, who will continue to rely on the records of hearings and trials, or for the casual reader who won't be able to distinguish fact from invention.

Finally, a note about the type in which this book is set: it is not the author's fault that the publisher chose computerized type that leaves a thin black line when corrections are made. It is, however, an additional annoyance to the reader and one last reason, should one be needed, not to pay Putnam .')10.95 for this volume.

Quite different is The Crime of the Century, Hal Higdon's sober study of Leopold and Loeb. Incidentally, he takes George Murray to task for his "imaginative" reporting of part of the story in an earlier Murray book. Higdon traces the entire career of the two notorious murderers, followmg the story until all of the major characters have died. Certain mysteries remain unsolved, but Higdon sheds new light on some intriguing questions and he has the advantage of perspective. He writes clearly and keeps his chronology straight. One might say he writes well , except for his annoying use of the verb form "would." The characters "would later say" or "would later recall" several times on each page, when a good copy editor would have changed all that to the simple past tense. Would he had had one!

There is one puzzling omission. While the author seeks to discover why this particular crime was so fascinating to the public, it never occurs to him that one reason might have been that the three partici-

pants-the murderers and the murdered boy-were believed to be Jewish as well as wealthy. AntiSemitism might have entered into it. Actually, on the fact of their total Jewishness, Higdon has a strange misconception. It is not until Loeb lies dying that the author informs us that Loeb was only "half-Jewish," his mother having been a Catholic.

He does not understand why Loeb called upon a Catholic priest to administer the last rites . He should have inquired into the marital arrangements of the cider Loebs, which could have allowed the mother to remain a Catholic if she agreed to rear her children as such. But, whether she did or didn't, her son would not have been considered Jewish unless he had undergone conversion. In the Jewish faith, the descent is matrilinear. By Jews, the child of a Christian woman is a goy. Perhaps it is a small point, but it is one that should not have escaped a sharp investigator. fore crime, but this time a major novel. In Mark Smith's The Death of the Detective (Andy Frain' Pinkerton?), Chicago lives and breathes. Although Riverview Amusement Park. has gone and sk.id row has changed its boundaries, our whole city and its northern suburbs spring to life as a murderer stalks his prey and meets his fate, and as a detective stalks his murderer and discovers himself. The action moves from Lincoln Park to the Loop to the South Side-its immediate cause is a wealthy man in Lak.e Forest-and both minor and major characters meet, party, and consider events on Lake Shore Drive, near a college campus, and at City Hall (the pastiches of the mayor and his coterie are audio-visual gems). Smith, a former undergraduate at Northwestern and now a teacher of literature at the University of New Hampshire, writes in the tradition of Eric Ambler and John Le Carre. He carries his readers along, involving chem in the moral problems of the hunter, the hunted, and the various secondary characters. All have their own inner frustrations, all are groping for solutions and perhaps identity, all involve us and absorb our attention.

Since chis is a family audience, let's note that one character might require a PG racing, yet her behaYior turns out to be symbolic of sexual frustration and not the real thing at all. The only reason most readers won't finish Smith's book at a single sitting is that it is too long and too well written to allow of skipping. If you're lik.e this reader, you'll rush right home after work. to finish it the next night, recommend it to your family, and then lend it only to your best friends . I'm not even going to do the last; it's going into the guest room.

ISABEL S. GROSSNER

Brief Reports Edgar Lee Masters: The Spoon River Poet and his Critics ~JI

John T. Flanagan

Scarecrow Press, 197 I¡ , 6.00.

to be remembered for a single work, the Spoon River poet was, in fact, an indefatigable writer who published some fifty books, including several novels and biographies. Professor Flanagan, a veteran observer of Middle \Vestern literaLUrc, presents a lucid and admirably organ ized account of the critical reception afforded Masters' prolific output. Indispensible to the i\Iasters specialist, this book. is also useful to the student of i\Jiclclle \Vestcrn and Chicago literature and LO those interested in the vicissiLUdes of the critical barometer.

APPARENTLY FATED

ANT!IONY R. GROSCJI

The Middle Western Farm Novel in the Twentieth Century

by Roy TV. Meyer University of Nebraska, 197.;. $2 ..15. the great farm novels appeared during the years when the U nitecl States was becoming an urban nation. Covering the period from Hamlin Garland ("the first authentic farm novelist") in the 1880s through 1962, i\Ieyer analyzes the farm novelise as historian, arbiter of values, socia l critic, and psychologist. \Vritten with affection and care by a farm boy who became a scholar, this book is a classic study of the genre.

IRONICALLY,

A. R. G.

Political Animals: Memoirs of a Sentimental Cynic

by Walter Trohan Doubleday, 1975. $10. of Walter Trohan-the Chicago Tribune's Washington watchdog and resident curmudgeon-suffers for one reason: no matter how hard he cries, Trohan never really conveys to us the sting of the conservative columns that graced the newspaper's pages for so many years. His "history by gossip" approach makes interesting reading, allowing him to portray the more human aspects of his Capitol Hill experiences, but one should also read some of his old columns-for example, on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and on anti-war protesters-for a more complete portrait of the man.

FREDERICK J. NACHMAN

THE AUTOBIOGRAPIIY

Illinois Handcrafts Directory Compiled by Joyce Sprague, photos by Jon Rountree Countryside Books, 1975. $3.95.

ALT!IOUGII far from being comprehensive, the Illinois Handci¡afts Directory provides the most complete listing available on craftspersons and act ivities

Chicago History

261

Books

Indians before Columbus

by Paul S. Martin, George I. Quimby, and Donald Collier University of Chicago, 1975. $6.95.

throughout the state. ::'{o effort is made to assess quality, but even so the book is a treasury of information [or browsers, shoppers, and artisans who want to know the who, what, and where of Illinois crafts.

The 1975 edition has many references not previously included, and Joyce Sprague's efforts to insure the continued growth of the directory desen·e the active support o[ the crafts community. i\'AI\CY LACE

Do Black Patent Leather Shoes Really Reflect Up?

by John R. Powers Rcgncry, 1975• S7.95. \\'E REALLY L0\'ED Powers' first " fictionalized memoir," The Last Catholic in America: not only was it funny, but a friend who went to the very same parochial school of which Powers wrote assured us that e\'ery word was true. His new book, about his high-school days, may also be true in every detail but, alas, it is not funny. Maybe adolescence, which most of us remember as painful, can never be made to sound that amusing-or maybe Powers hasn't gained sufficient perspective. Or possibly recollections o[ pimples, locker-room fights, and unsuccessfl,l attempts to make out with neighborhood girls are funny to men, in which case Powers just has the wrong reviewer.

I. S. G.

Phili p K. Wrigl ey

by Paul M. Angle Rand Mc 1ally, 1975. 8.95.

THERE ARE some good stories in this, Paul Angle's last book-about baseball, advertising, and business, and there are even some good personal anecdotes about the Wrigleys-but this volume is hardly biography in the probing, hard-hitting sense to which modern readers have become accustomed. It is a gentle treatment of a gentleman.

In fact, Angle did not view this effort as a fullfledged biography, preferring to call it "a memoir."

He therefore subtitled it: A Memoir of a Modest Man . Let us be grateful for what he was able to do, because he was probably the only person who could have induced the publicity-shy Wrigley to cooperate at all in a biographical treatment. The two men were friends, and Angle conceived the work as a kind o[ tribute to someone he greatly admired. Baseball fans, in particular, will enjoy having some of the more murky aspects of the Cubs' fate throughout the last fifty years clairfied. It turns out that Wrigley has always cared, and deeply, for the team. But don't expect any night games-for reasons that are wellexplained.

I. S. G.

262

Ch icago History

American Indian Almanac

by John Upton Terrell Crowell, 1974. J-95· w11ERE can the student o[ Chicago history go for insight into this area's earliest inhabitants? Two recent books on America's Indian past shed some light on the subject.

Indians before Columbus, a work originally sponsored by the Chicago Natural History l\fuseum in 19,17, is now in its tenth printing. It is a well-illustrated and highly readable book, wriuen, its authors inform us, "for the interested layman and for students taking introductory courses in anthropology.

Like John Upton Terrell's American Indian Almanac, it is an enlightening collection o[ material "both sciemific and historic."

In both books, Indian culture in North America is examined geographicaly and chronologically.

Indians before Columbus, in addition to separate d1apters on arts and industries, presents its information about each culture under such headings as villages, livelihood, transportation, burials. The American Indian Almanac mixes archeological evidence and population estimates with Indian mythology to present a dramatic saga.

These two books, together with such classics as Blair's Indians of the Upper Mississippi and Quimby's Indian Life in the Upper Great Lakes Region, provide groundwork for the study o[ the various Midwestern Indian cultures. A definitive history of the succession of tribes in the Chicago area has yet to be compiled, however.

PAUL W. PETRAITIS

Symbolic Communities: The Persistence and Change of Chicago's Local Communities bJ• Albert Hunter University of Chicago, 197'!. Si 2.95.

11u:s;TER's STUDY is an attempt to examine the changes whid1 have occurred in the nature of Chicago's communities since Ernest W . Burgess plotted them in the 1920s. His research is divided into three distinct aspects: an attempt to apply a modified ShevkyBell social area analysis to Chicago census data; a simple, unsystematic survey of a large sample of Chicago residents about their definition of and commitment to a local area; and some type o[ a survey of local voluntary organizations. The result is a disjointed effort which adds little to our understanding of social structure in Chicago, nor is it a significant contribution to theoretical issues in urban sociology.

For either purpose, the reader would do better to return to Burgess' original work or to the more recent work of Gerald Suttles and Robert Bailey.

PAUL FRIESEMA

cise: " One of" should haYe preceded "the biggest and most ornate ... ever built." ·while it probably was in 1908 when it was bu ilt, Philadelphia Toboggan built three others of equal si7e. '.\ J any are and "'ere more ornate.

Letters

BARBARA Cll.\RLES

TVashington , D.C . .\1 Griffin replies:

Amusement Parks I especially en joyed the article about River\'iew. I wish that I had all the money that I spent there when I was a high school student!

Thanks [or an excellent magazine.

WARREN \V . WIERSBE, Senior Pastor The Moody Church, Chicago . I just finished reading my first copy of Chicago History , being a new member of the Society. Thanks for the very pleasant surprise.

Riverview is one of my very pleasant memories.

To my memory, however, I rode the Flying Turns at the New York ·world's 17air in 1939, and remember its being brought to Riverview after that fair.

PAUL A. KNEZ

La Grange Park, Ill. Received the copy of your Spring 1975 issue. It is an excellent publication ... but without a doubt the Riverview article was great!

As to Al Griffin, his book is a nice thing to have as so much of that type o[ material is scarce. However, I don't agree with many of his judgements.

Kenn) wood received only two stars; even the New York Times ran an article on its Thunderbolt as being the greatest roller coaster in the USA. I have no connection with Kennywood, but I li ve only four miles from there.

You should be commended [or such a fine magazine.

As for Barbara Charles' carping about my " lack o[ precision," the art icle I did was adapted from the 80.000-word book, and there simply wasn't room for all the data she'd liked to have seen. Yes, I visited the parks ... and rated them according to how I liked them . Size alone does not get an automatic four -star rating from me, if I didn't like the groundskeeping, prices, personnel, crowds, or any of a number of factors affecting my enjoyment of the visit.

The membership directory o[ the International .\ssociation of Amusement Parks she recommends to your readers is avai lable only to members of the Association , advertisers, and the working press, and is not avai lable to the general public. A great deal of the information in any given issue of this annual publication is also a couple of years out of date.

Paul Knez did indeed ride the Flying Turns at the New York World's Fair in 1939, but it was a copy of the origin al at the Chicago World's Fair.

The 1 ew York vVorld's Fair was noted for copying every successful ride at the 1933 Chicago Fair.

Oops!

Your very fine publication is marred by one of the cardinal sins of good reporting. . . . "Chi cago Radio: The Glory Days [Spring-Summer 1974] refers to Ben McCanna of the Chicago Tribune as McGanna. As a Jong-time friend of the executive, I'm sorry to see this error, for h e truly made a great contribut ion to the medium.

MARTIIA K. C II URC II

Chicago

RICHARD L. BOWKER

Pittsburgh, Pa. Just read the article on Riverview Park in your Spring issue, the review of i\fr. Griffin's book, and the book. Are your standards laxer for "popular culture" than other areas of scholarship' . It is hard to believe l\Ir. Griffin could really have visited all (or many) of the parks he rated.

How do Twin Grove and Kennywood Park both get ••? Twin Grove is an incre<libly run-down camp ground ; Kennywood is one of America's finest traditional parks. !L's like comparing a Rea to an elephant.

I[ )Our readers want a guide to parks, I would suggest they ask the International Association o[ ,\m u ement Parks and Attractions for a park member;hip list. . . . That list, without fancy ratings, would be a far better guide than Griffin's book.

Like the book, "Ups and Downs of Riverview Park" is mostly froth . ·where there are facts, sucl1 as about the merry-go-round, they are less than pre-

I & M Canal Harry L. Rinker, director of the Historical Society of York, Pa., and president of the PennsylYania Canal Society, sent us Chicago History, \Vinter 19741975 . This issue is the one which had the fine art icle on the I & l\I Canal, which will be added to our material on that canal in our private r esearch library.

I lived in Chicago for a year immediately following i,Vorld ·war I. ... My aunt. Ruth Austin, for many years head of Gads Hill Settlement, had a summer place at the Indiana Dunes . . . . So you can see, much more than canals was of interest. l\fany thanks.

EMILY A. :--uooE:--, Canal Researching Livonia, New York

Chicago History

263

THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY Clark Street at North Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone : Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, ISL Vice-President J ames R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President

Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary DIRECTOR

Harold K. Skramstad, Jr. TRUSTEES Bowen Blair Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon J ames R . Getz Philip W. Hummer Willard L. King Andrew l\I C1 ally III Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. G ilbert H. Scribner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H . Stern Theodore Tieken l\frs. Philip K. Wrigley

HONORARY TRUSTEES

Ri chard J. Daley, Mayor, City of Chicago Patrick L. O'Malley, Presiden t, Chicago Park District

MEMBERSHIP

The Society is supported almost entirely by income from its endowment, by contributions, and by memberships. Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives.

Classes of membership and clues are as follows: Annual, $ 15 a year; Life, $250; Governing Life, $500; and Patron, $1,000 or more. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazin e, Chicago History; invitations to special programs; free admission to the museum at all times; free reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a JO% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the museum store.

MUSEUM AND LIBRARY HOURS

The museum is open daily from 9:30 to 4:30, Sundays from 12 :30 to 5:30. Our research library is open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:00 to 5:00 (Mo nday through Friday during July and August).

The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

THE EDUCATION OFFICE offers guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special programs for groups of all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen.

ADMISSION FEES FOR NON-MEMBERS

Adults S1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior.Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays.

Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are 2.25 by mail, 2 at newsstands and bookshops .

\

Chicago Historical Society

Customers assembled outside J. G. Baer 's Place at 164 (now 707) W. Randolph St. in 1884. Its proximity to the West Randolph Street Public Market assured the saloon a large clientele of farmers.