Chicago History | Summer 1975

A fire shortly after the close of the World's Columbian Exposition destroyed The Triumph of Columbia, the colossal group of four horses atop the central arch scu lpted by Daniel Chester French and Edward C. Potter and known as the quadriga.

Chicago Historical Society

Chicago History

THE MAGAZINE OF THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A lot was happening in Chicago around the tum of the century. The ]ungu, Upton Sinclair's muckraking book about Chicago's meat-packing industry, became the most famous novel about our city.

Anthony R. Grosch tells you about it and some othen hich also dealt with important issues.

Henry Regner, takes a close look at two young publishers who flourished during this same period-Stone and KimlMllltl'-"'''° set publilhinf ttaildarils that haff been~

Chicag o Historical Society

Some of the distinguished members of the Chicago School of Television at an NBC studio about 1950: left, Kukla, Fran, and Ollie; center, the cast of " Studs' Place " ; rear center, far left and far right, Charli e Andrews and Ted Mills; at the windows , Walt Durbahn of " Walt's Wo rkshop" and Cliff Norton; and, at the couch , Jules Herbuveaux, weatherman Clint Youle , and Dave Garroway.

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

SUMMER 1975 Volume IV, Number 2

Cover: Chap-Book advertising posters by Will Bradley. Right, The Pipes , June 1895. Left, The Twins , May 1894, which some art historians believe is the first art nouveau poster made in the United States. Bradley, who worked in America , is less famous than the British Aubrey Beardsley, but is considered by many experts to have been the greater artist.

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CONTENTS

SOCIAL ISSUES IN EARLY CHICAGO NOVELS/68

by Anthony R. Grosch

PLAY THAT PLAYER PIANO/78

by Lester A. Weinrott

STONE, KIMBALL , AND THE CHAP-BOOK /87

by Henry Regnery

SOCIAL HISTORY THROUGH THE MIRROR OF FASHION/96

Isabel Grossner, Editor

by Elizabeth Jachimowicz

Frederick J. Nachman, Assistant Editor

SCULPTURE AT THE COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION/99

Mary Dawson, Editorial Assistant

by James L. Riedy

TELEVISION TOWN/108

by Jo el Sternberg

FIFTY YEARS AGO/ 118

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

Printed by Hillison & Etten Company Chicago, Illinois 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 America : History and Life

BOOK REVIEWS: PERSONALIZING CHICAGO'S HISTORY/124

by Laurence Hall

BOOKS FOR REGIONAL AND LOCAL TRAVELERS/ 125

by Grant T. Dean

BRIEF REPORTS/ 127

Social Issues in Early Chicago Novels

BY ANTHONY R. GROSCH

It's" a city ef colossal vices and virtues," as Chicago's novelists discovered way back in 1895. of the nineteenth century and the first decade of this one, a large range of novels with a Chicago setting was produced.

And, seventy or eighty years ago, the novelists who wrote them were exploring social problems that are ours today- women's liberation, political corruption in Chicago, the causes of criminal behavior, unionism, the virtues and vices of big business, and even the generation gap.

Let's start with women's liberation. In 1895, Hamlin Garland seems to have been much preoccupied with that burning question. That was the year Stone & Kimball published Th e Rose of Dutch er's Coolly.* Rose wants to be a writer, but she is a farm girl and beautiful, and "her sex was so emphasized, so insisted upon by her first day's experience in the world."

Rose looks critically at the women around her: "They loved and bore children, and ground at the corn mills and died as the female bison IN THE LAST DECADE

Anthony R. Grosch, lecturer at Harper College, became interested in social issues in early Chicago novels in the course of preparing his doctoral disSC'rtation for Northwestern University. The novels he discusses are: Hamlin Garland, The Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 1895; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie, 1900; Henry B. Fuller, With the Procession, 1895; Arthur J erome Eddy, Canton & Co., 1908; Will Payne, The Money Captain, 1898; Frank Norris, The Pit, 1903; R obert Herrick, The Memoirs of an American Citizen, 1905; Clarence S. Darrow, An Eye for an Eye, 1905; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle, , 906; Isaac Kahn Friedman, The Radical, 1907.

*For more information about these fascinating young publishers, see Henry Regnery's article in this issue.-Ed. 68

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died, ~nd other women come after them to do like unto them, to what end?" Rose sees that submitting to marriage in the rural Midwest "meant flinging herself to the immemorial sacrifice men had always demanded of women." She goes to college and then, because- "This was the age of cities. The world's thought went on in the great cities"-she h eads for Chicago in search of self-fulfillment.

Through a letter from a university friend , Rose is introduced to Isabel Herrick, a Chicago physician. A model of the liberated woman, Dr. Herrick is the intellectual and professional equal of the men in the cultured circle to which Rose Dutcher is admitted. Under Isabel's guidance, Rose becomes aware of that special union of art and commerce that Garland and others felt characterized the city at that time. A businessman cheerfully remarks, "Saturday night finds us ready to enjoy an evening of art."

In her ci rcle of artists and intellectuals, Rose meets a Chicago newspaper editor. He criticizes her poetry, shows her that it is imitative, and inspires her to write in her own voice. With his encouragement, Rose struggles until her verse is authentic. Then she feels "the splendid peace which comes when the artist finds at last the form of art that is verily his." At the end of the novel, Rose and the editor are to begin what we would call an "open marriage." He states the terms of their relationship: "I want you as a comrade and lover, not as subject and servant, or unwilling wife. I do not claim any rights whatever over you. You can bear me children or not, just as you please .... You are at liberty to cease your association with me at any time, and consider yourself perfectly free to leave me whenever a ny other man comes with power to make you happier than you are with me." A proposal no liberated woman could decline, even today.

Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie is more famous than Rose. Carrie also comes to Chicago-and, again, she comes from Wisconsin. Dreiser

explains that that's how it was in 1889, when Chicago was already a "giant magnet, drawing to itself, from all quarters, the hopeful and the hopeless- those who had their fortune yet to ma ke and those whose fortunes and affairs had reached a disastrous climax elsewhere."

But Carrie is a very different woman from Rose. She is uneducated and it doesn't bother her that much: what she is after is material success. It is this need that dominates her, rather than any need for self-fulfillment or self-discovery. Nor does she have Rose's principles or moral convictions-they would only get in her way. Carrie does meet an intellectual man who encourages her to take up dramatic acting rather than musical comedy as a career ( there must have been a lot of liberated men at the turn of the century ), but the suggestion does not fall on fertile soil.

St. Louis newspaperman Theodore Dreiser at 22. Two years earlier he had worked for the Chicago Globe, one of his many reporting jobs.

Courtesy Theodo re Dreise r Collection, University o f Pennsylvania Library

Early Novels

What makes Dreiser's first novel so important is, in fact, that it implies that free will is a myth and that people are not re ponsible for their fate . Dreiser portrays Carrie as the passive pawn of circumstance. In other words, Carrie was almost born to make her way to the top. Equally, her lover is doomed, almost by force of inevitable circumstance piled upon inevitable circumstance-somewhat like a Thomas Hardy character.

In the end, Carrie's is an empty successempty because it is not self-fulfilling. Empty because she herself is empty. Empty because of Dreiser's belief in "scientific" determinism rather than in free will.

Interestingly enough, Sister Carrie was suppressed because her affair with a traveling salesman goes unpunished, but The Rose of Dutcher's Coolly apparently sai led serenely on with her editor.

The same year that Hamlin Garland's liberated Rose and Isabel made their appearance, , 895, Henry B. Fuller was concerned with the generation gap in Chicago. In With the Proces-

sion he tells a familiar story. The father, a success[ ul merchant, occupies himself only with business. His artistic son-after two years at Yale and three on the Continent- returns to Chicago, "the only great city in the world to which all its citizens have come for the common avowed object of making money." A generation gap ensues. The son fails to understand that art thrives on the wealth and leisure that business creates. The father fails to under tand that business cannot satisfy every human need. To the merchant, "Art was not an integral part of the great frame of things; it was a mere surface decoration." The son resolves the conflict like many other Chicago artists. He expatriates himself.

The merchant's oldest daughter seeks only to elevate the family's social status. She goes to Chicago's social queen ( probably modeled on Mrs. Potter Palmer ) for advice. "Keep up with the procession," say the matron, "and head it if you can."

Fuller also occupies himself with other questions arising from his own social status. Unlike Dreiser and Garland, Fuller was born in Chicago. And whÂŁ'n he was born, in , 85 7, Fuller was a third-generation Chicagoan. IIis New England WASP family belonged to the class that began Chicago. "Aborigines," they proudly called themselves. Their loss of political control to the immigrants was a real problem to them.

Fuller's fictional family lives on respectable South Michigan Avenue, but within the nctorious First Ward. Four blocks west, a stroller would arrive at "Hinky Dink" Kenna's saloon.

By the time With the Procession was published, "Bathhouse John" Coughlin was the First Ward's alderman.

Although writers call this era "colorful," Fuller's characters arc dismayed. One says, "Our

Henry B. Fuller, third-generation Chicagoan and author of With the Procession , in 1896.

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ward hasn't elected anything but crime brokers for the !~st ten years." Under the lid of Fuller's Chicago seethes a "hell broth- thieves, gamblers, prostitutes, pawnbrokers, saloonkeepers, aldermen, heelers, justices, bailiffs, policemenand all concocted for us within a short quarter of a centu ry." As we shall see, Fuller's civic concerns were, as political corruption still is, important to other writers of his time as well.

The generation gap also figures largely in Arthur J. Eddy's Canton & Co. John Canton, who is probably modeled after Philip D. Armour, is a man of gargantuan energy, vision, and competitiveness, and he wants his firm "to be greater than all other packing compan ies taken together and to extend his control over the slaughtering and packing industry until the world depended on him for meat."

But Canton's consecration to business estranges him from his two sons and from his socia l class as well. Will, the older son, works in the Canton offices but spends most of his time at private clubs and social gatherings.

Despite his father's observation that " the success ful man finds pleasure in his work, and a man can't be successful unless he takes more pleasure in his work than anything e lse," Will thrives on wine, women, and stock-market speculation. J ohn, Jr., attending an eastern university, yearns to be a writer and loathes the family business- to the extent that he can rarely cat meat. Compared to their meat-baron father, the sons are too effete for the real world of the stockyards. Eddy presents Chicago society and cl ub li fe, for which Canton has no time, as "exhausted and stale."

Canton is flawed- he bribes city officials and union officers alike-but Eddy respects him just the same. He is a trong, straightforward man doing essential work. Canton's "brains, his industry. and his genius had built" hi organization.

The rea l vi ll ain of the piece are the labor unions. They are "potent organizations, trying offenders in secret and executing them in al-

Chicago Hisloricol Socie1y

Advertising poster adapted from the frontispiece of Ganton & Co.

leys, in the streets, even in the street cars-anywhere and everywhere the thug and the slugger could reach." Eddy has Allan Borlan, a young, idealistic competitor of Canton, refuse to bribe union leaders to delay a strike to a time advantageous to the packers. Canton simply wants to pay the bribes and to get on with production.

Singlehandedly, Borlan tries to expose the corrupt leaders to their membership, a nd is killed.

Staggered, Canton perceives Borlan's moral superiority. Had the packers stood united against the unions, young Borla n would be alive. This is the only time that the gruff packer has any self-doubt.

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Canton leads his company until his death, when the generation gap is finally closed in fine Chicago style. John, Jr., realizing his responsibilities, returns to take command. Less dynamic than his father, but possessed of refinement and perspective, he proceeds to lead the packing industry, which financed so many of Chicago's hospitals, universities, and cultural institutions.

Civic corruption, an element in With th e Procession, emerges as a full-blown theme in Will Payne's Th e Money Captain, published three years later. Seeking to monopolize Chicago's natural gas franchises, the protagonist becomes known as "The Duke of Gas." Like Canton, The Duke works endlessly and, like Gan ton, he resorts to bribery: his success actually stems from his bribery of Chicago's aldermen. But unlike Canton, he considers himself dedicated to civic improvement and the growth of the city.

Payne does not judge his hero harshly. While condemning The Duke's methods, Payne defends business as a natural outcome of democracy. The Duke, "for all his success, was a figure in the common democratic foreground of business; he was intimately and solely of the great warp and woof of toil."

Possibly Payne modeled The Duke after Charles T. Yerkes, the famed traction magnate who finally lost his grip on the City Council in 1898, the year of The Money Captain's publication. The Council's corruption was well known ; in 1896, The Municipal Voters League reported that fifty-seven of sixty-eight members were "crooks," and one of Payne's characters leaves the City Council chamber feeling that "not even the caryatids under the gallery were innocent."

In addition to illustrating apparently timeless problems, turn-of-the-century novels often provide perspectives for aesthetic judgments. As one of Payne's characters walks down J ackson Boulevard toward La Salle Street, "to the left loomed the dismal and vast facade of the Monadnock, like the gigantic projection of a mud 72

Chicago History

fence." That building, then only seven years old, is now recognized as one of the treasures of the Chicago School of Architecture. One wonders whether critics seventy-five years hence will see merit in our own steel, glass, and concrete "Kleenex boxes."

The businessman, so influential in the growth of cities, fascinated Chicago novelists. Although they criticized the businessman, Fuller and Payne treated him with respect, and Eddy admired him .

In Th e Pit, published in 1903, Frank Norris did more: he elevated the businessman to a titan struggling against universal forces. Norris' hero, Curtis Jadwin, possessed of "the grim humor of the suddenly successful American," becomes a clandestine speculator in the Chicago wheat pit. The experience is so challenging and Jadwin is so masterful that he develops an obsession for cornering the world's wheat market. He is doomed from the start because his goal is impossible-and even wrong. As a ruined speculator remarks, "the world's food should not be at the mercy of the Chicago wheat pit."

Literary critics have been astonished by Norris' treatment of Jadwin's megalomanic quest.

Floyd Dell, for example, observed that Norris "fell into a curious attitude of unthinking admiration before Jadwin, the wheat speculator, the typical Chicago hero of the period, and his insane way of doing business on the Board of Trade."

Norris depicts Jadwin as a man totally convinced of his own morality, with strength in his very simplicity. A follower of the evangelist Dwight L. Moody, whose legacy, the Moody Bible Institute, stands today as one of Chicago's leading religious institutions, Jadwinconfident that "business principles are as good in religion as they are in LaSalle Street"finances a Sunday school for several hundred poor "micks." In his cosmic struggle in the pit, Jadwin labors magnificently, giving up his home life, falling asleep from exhaustion at his desk ,

Early Novels

a model of concentration and attention to combat. His supreme dedication makes him a forerunner of the heroes of radical capitalism in Ayn Rand's novels, with the vital difference that her heroes triumph and Jadwin is crushed.

But Jadwin is not defeated for little reasons.

He is vanquished because he battles natural forces, symbolized by the wheat, which no man can conquer. The Board of Trade Building ( then a shorter edifice, but at its present location) symbolizes the forces that have defeated Jadwin. Ruined, Jadwin and his wife leave Chicago, passing for the last time the Board of Trade: "black, monolithic, crouching on its foundations like a monstrous sphinx with blind eyes, si lent, grave-crouching there without a sound, without a sign of life, under the night and drifting veil of rain." The image still seems valid.

If there was one Chicago novelist who saw no heroism in the businessman, he was Robert Herrick. A Harvard graduate and English professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Herrick in 1893 heeded William Rainey Harper's call to teach at the University of Chicago-but he enjoyed neither the city nor the job.

The Memoirs of an American Citizen has a typical beginning. A penniless Indiana village boy, Van Harrington, migrates to Chicago and works in the stockyards. As his hero begins to rise in the meat-packing business, Herrick establishes a counterpoint between ethics and commercial expediency. Harrington always chooses expediency, and his principal adviser assures him that "no one asks, if you succeed." In Herrick's Chicago, business success comes in direct proportion to the businessman's lack of ethics.

Herrick portrays his corrupt businessman in relation to two major events of the Eighties and Nineties: the trial of the Haymarket anarchists in 1886 and the "embalmed beef" meat-packing scandal of the Spanish-American War of 1898.

"String 'em up to the nearest lamppost, as they do out West," is H arrington's reflection on the anarchists. Then he becomes a juryman and 74

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plays his part in convicting the anarchists. In retrospect, he admits that the "famous trial of the anarchists was engineered from the beginning by famous mcn" -a charge that still has not been laid to rest.

In the meat scandal, Harrington- like the real packers- denies any guilt and asserts that it was careless handling of the chilled beef in the sultry Cuban climate that caused the spoilage.

As the novel ends, he buys a United States Senate scat from the Illinois legislature, which "generally did what it was told by its real bosses ... the railroad interests, the traction and gas interests, and the packers."

Van Harrington's success is not complete, however, because he has lost the respect of decent people- like his brother Will and his sisterin-law May. Because he could not condone dishonest business practices, Will had refused to keep working for Van. His health ruined, Will is struggling to launch a labor weekly while Yiay takes care of their impoverished family on the West Side. Van makes offers to them, but this honorable couple cannot be bought off.

"We don't belong together," Will Harrington tells Van. "May and I are of the people- the people you fatten on." Herrick's Chicago in The Memoirs of an American Citizen offers stark choices: virtuous poverty or corrupt success.

While Fuller, Eddy, Payne, Norris, and Herrick wrote about Chicago businessmen, other turn-of-the-century novelists depicted the lives of the working class. Among them was Clarence Darrow, better known as an attorney than as a novelist, and for good reason. In An Eye for an E)'C, Darrow argues for the abolition of capital punishment, a cause to which he was devoted.

The setting is the old County Jail and Criminal Courts Building, which still stands at Dearborn and Hubbard streets and now houses the Chicago Police Department's traffic division.

Inside on death row sits Jim Jackson, condemned to hang on the following morning for killing his wife. In a long monolog, Jim talks

of his life to his friend Hank, who symbolizes the uninformed and unsympathetic public which views murderers not as human beings driven in desperation, but as demonic animals. Hank stays the night to listen to Jim's narrative.

Feeling that he is himself a victim, Jackson says, "I don't believe I ever would have done it if I hadn't been so poor." Raised in South Side's Bridgeport, Jim observes, "The only ones that I can think of that growed up down there and amounted to anything is the alderman and Bull Carmody, who went to the state legislature." Jim 's schooling ended in the sixth grade, and he went to work in the stockyards. Later, he coupled cars in the freight yards ( dangerous work) and eventually, to support his wife and child, he peddled potatoes from an open wagon in the relentless damp and cold of Chicago winters.

Jim is abandoned by the apathy of his own people and misguided by a pretentious middle class. The settlement ladies to whom Jim and his wife went for counseling were unmarried and laden with bourgeois values irrelevant to the Jacksons' critical situation. A priest denies the Catholic couple the divorce that would have saved two lives and left a child unorphaned .

Darrow paints a classic picture of courtroom corruption and community hysteria: the jury lacks workingmen, Catholics, atheists, or foreigners; doctors attempt to extort high fees for defense testimony; and a gallery of ladies "with perfectly grand clothes" enjoys the spectacle, which is fanned by newspaper sensationalism.

An Eye for an Eye represents Chicago as a hypocritical Christian society whose real motive is neither help nor forgiveness, but naked revenge. Doomed by forces beyond his control, Jackson laments, "It kind of seems to me that I never had a very good chance."

Upton Sinclair also wrote of the worker's life.

Where Herrick had sought to expose the packing industry from the top down, Sinclair went at it from the bottom up. In Th e Jungle, which gainC'd immediate fame when it was published

m 1906, we see not a great city but a quite different Chicago--"a great sore of a city" that "spread itself over the surface of the prairie."

His characters, an extended family of Lithuanian peasants headed by Jurgis Rudkus, comes to the Back of the Yards neighborhood. Lured by false promises, it is crushed by the brutal might of American civilization, "an order devised by those who possessed it for the subjugation of those who did not." Jurgis' response to being swindled by real-estate men, to being overworked, underpaid, and brutalized by injury, starvation, and poverty is, "I will work harder."

It is only after his wife has died in childbirth and his son has drowned that Jurgis gives up.

He drifts into crime. His cousin, Marija, left to care for the rest of the defeated family, resorts to prostitution and drugs. Sinclair's explanation of crime was a criminal society.

In Canton & Co., competition was a capitalist virtue. Sinclair held that "Packingtown was not really a number of firms at all, but one great firm, the Beef trust." This corrupt monster" from top to bottom it was nothing but one gigantic lie"-strangled Chicago. The cartel bought off politicians, duped the newspapers, and stirred racial strife by bringing blacks from the South to break strikes.

Sinclair calls for social revolution in his novel.

Jurgis finds salvation at a socialist meeting. A speaker arouses his class consciousness, and Jurgis is converted. The Jungle ends as the socialists chant: "Chicago will be ours!"

Sinclair's readers, although unswayed by h is plea for socialism, were literally sickened by his descriptions of meat packing. The result was that The Jungle led to the passage of the first pure food legislation rather than a socialist America. Disappointed, Sinclair made his famous remark: "I aimed at the public's heart and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

Sinclair sought a better society through socialism. I. K. Friedman sought the same goal through progressive legislation. Probably Chicago's first Jewish novelist, Friedman blended Chi ca go History

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sympathy for the underdog with aristocratic tastes. His stories told of the poor, but he frequented the Little Room, a club hosting Chicago's artistic and social elite. After hearing Theodore Thoma conduct the Chicago Symphony at the Friday matinee in the Auditorium, the Little Roomers strolled up Michigan Avenue to gather in the Fine Arts Building for tea and conversation. There Friedman's companions included Henry Fuller; Hamlin Garland; Harriet Monroe, founder of Poetry magazine; sculptor Lorado Taft; architect Louis Sullivan; and other artists and patrons. Friedman's interest in both the humble and the grand surfaced in the fictional world of The Radical, published in 1907.

His hero, Bruce McAllister, is Lincolnesque in appearance and symbolizes the ideal democratic man. The son of a drunken political lawyer, McAllister became head of a family of four at sixteen and, from his early occupation, earned the appellation "Butcher Boy" that endeared him to the working class. McAllister is elected to the City Council; there he represents ¡'the poor, and the lowly and the foreign- those who toil and spin during their youth and in their old age were neither fed by the fruits of their labor nor warmed by the fabric of their spinning."

Friedman has an almost religious faith in democracy and a buoyant confidence that the vested interests could be defeated through the democratic legislative process. His methods for alleviating the miseries of the poor were different from Sinclair's, but they shared the same optimistic outlook.

From alderman, McAllister's political career moves to Congress and finally to the Senate, to which he is elected by the Illinois legislature.

Friedman agrees with Herrick's An American Citizen that corrupt politicians are the source of American misgovernment, but he optimistically sends an honest man to the Senate, while Herrick, the pessimist, elects a debased meat

packer. In Washington, McAllister battles for his anti-child labor bill, which will protect "the children of his people, pale, hollow-eyed, driven by the whip of Greed along the hideous road that lies between the homes of want and the mills of Mammon." The conflict in The Radical lies between McAllister's bill and the entire national government, a "ponderous complicated mechanism" run to serve "the great god of commerce," personified by "Sir" Anthony Wyckoff who, behind the scenes, manipulates all things in Washington, from President to Senate page.

Well, McAllister succeeds, but the Supreme Court finds his labor bill unconstitutional.

Thwarted and exhausted, he resigns; and yet he is romantically fulfilled. He will marry a beautiful Chicago socialite. The class conflict in Th e Radical symbolically dissolves with the marriage of democracy to aristocracy. As McAllister and his fiancee leave Washington, they look back upon "the city of hope- the true capital of the coming democracy of the morrow."

These ten turn-of-the-century novels speak to the contemporary Chicagoan. The problems they dramatize arc still our problems. Today's Chicago is essentially the same industrial, urban giant it was in 1910, at the end of the twentyyear period during which these novels were published. Then as now- as one of Hamlin Garland's characters says- Chicago is "the Napoleon of cities. A city of colossal vices and virtues." That Chicago endures in fiction finds testimony in the perennial paperback publication of (along with Chicago classics of later periods ) Sistn Carrie, Th e Pit, and The jungle.

And all the others, except Canion & Co., have recently been reissued. Whatever interpretations our Chicago novelists make, their task has been and always will be to tell us of our "colossal vices and virtues" and to add re. s themselves to eternal issues- as have these turn-of-the-century writers.

Play that Player Piano

BY LESTER A. WEI NROTT

Would you like to hear "Hearts and Flowers?))

Or" The Stars and Stripes Forever?)) No? How about music from The Sting? Just put another roll on the player piano or another nickel in the slot.

COLLECTORS OF ANTIQUES are seeking out Tiffany lampshades, milk glass, moustache cups, Coca Cola trays-and player pianos. In Chicago, the reconstructed, refurbished instruments are pursued, purchased, and proudly displayed by hotelkeepers, tavern owners, ice-cream parlor proprietors, and ordinary citizens, all caught up in the rebirth of the mechanical piano craze that swept America at the turn of the century.

The origin of the player piano is obscure, and no one inventor can be ingled out either for credit or for blame. The principles upon which the mechanical piano is based derive from the skills of European watchmakers combined with the talents of the foreign artisans who perfected the organ. Watchmakers won favor with royal families and the nobility by constructing elaborate music boxes--and, basically, the music box has the same mechanism as a watch. It is wound up, and the music it plays comes from a eries of pin or nubs sticking out of a small cylinder. As the cylinder is turned, impelled by the watch spring, the protruding pins strike against pieces of metal arranged in a scale of musical notes. When the pins are placed in proper sequence, they strike the metal teeth and create a melody. Such a cylinder, enlarged, put into a piano, and propelled by bellows inflated by foot pedals, constitutes the basis of the player piano. The compressed air turns the cylinder, and the effect is essentially that of a large music box.

Lester A. \,Veinrott, a devoted student of Chicago's history and a public relations c:onsultant, is a frequent contributor to Chicago History .

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Chi cago History

J

By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the crude machines had been improved to the point where they were acclaimed as musical marvels. Called orchestrions, they included drums, horns, and pipes which combined to create the sounds of a military band. The most memorable of these instruments was the Panharmonicon, created by Johann Maelzel. Ludwig Von Beethoven became enraptured by the sounds of the machine and it is believed that he wrote W ellington's Victory, an opus commemorating the Englishman's victory over Napoleon, especially for the Panharmonicon. This instrument toured the United States with great success in the 1820s.

Germany was the heart of the industry that sprang up and flourished as the instruments improved. First, the metal cylinder was replaced by a wooden one, both less expensive and lighter in weight. Then came a breakthrough-a perforated paper roll which replaced the wooden cylinder. This invention was coupled with improvements in the bellows necessary to compress and push the air through the perforations in the paper rolls. The paper rolls were light, inexpensive, easy to store, and provided a great variety of musical selections.

Historians accord to Joseph Marie Jacquard the creation of the perforated paper roll for use in silk looms, and another Frenchman, Seytre, is recognized as applying the principle to the player piano. It was American ingenuity, however, that brought the player piano to the masses.

Today, examples of the early music makers may be seen at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on Wacker Drive; at Doctor Jazz, a nostalgia-

Chicago Historical Society

The Cable-Nelson Player-Piano, Style C, as illustrated in The Cable-Nelson Story, 1916.

oriented ice-cream parlor on West Montrose Avenue; and at Svoboda's Nickelodeon Tavern in Chicago Heights. Interest in player pianos by private owners in the area is evidenced by the current listing of nine companies offering repair services in the Yellow Pages. In and about Chicago, five companies in the Yellow Pages al o offer to provide piano rolls.

The advertising copywriters who convinced Americans to make substantial investments in player pianos used the same motivations that advPrtisers use today. Happy families were pictured around an automatic instrument; renowned artists such as Ignace Paderewski, Victor Herbert, Rudolph Ganz, Percy Grainger, and George Ger hwin were shown listening to their own performances; composers Claude Debussy and Edvard Grieg endorsed the instruments that played their compositions automatically. Snob appeal was generated by ads that told of Mussolini's player piano in his

palace in Rome and one in the Elysee Palace in Paris. The Hapsburgs endorsed an instrument in Vienna, and so did the Khedive in Egypt.

Perhaps the most outrageous advertisement of the day was one that featured Alexander Woollcott, dramatic critic of the New York World. The headline read, "Becomes So Engrossed in the Ampico That He Neglects to Perform His Literary Work." In the accompanying conversation, Woollcott avowed that his player piano so captivated him that he begged for its removal so he cou ld get back to his work.

There was even a National Player Piano Week, complete with slogans that declared "Happy People Accomplish the Most" and "Music Means Health."

Not every voice was raised in praise, however.

John Philip Sousa, America's foremost band leader and composer of military marches, objected to the player piano, calling it "A machine that tells the story day by day, without variation, without sou l, barren of the joy, the passion, the ardor that is the inheritance of man alone." Furthermore, he prophesied that it would cause "a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, ... " The critics were obviously in the minority and the industry prospered. The first player pianos were operated by muscular force, the feet pushing on pedals which operated bellows and turned the music roll on which the notes had been marked by perforations. This model was succeeded by one which operated electrically.

"As Simple as Turning On a Light" v.-as how the Cable Company, at Wabash Street and Jackson Boulevard in Chicago, described its new Euphona Home Electric: You han¡ mrrely to insert thr music roll of your rhoirr and to prPss a lever. ThPn you may dance. you may sing, converse or listen as you choose. For it \\'ill play eVPry composition ever written for the Chicago History

79

Chicago Historical Society

Ignace Paderewski and Victor Herbert were among the many composers who were depicted in player-piano advertisements as l istening to their own performances.

The Cable-Nelson Story portrays the happiness of the family that is fortunate enough to own a player piano.

Chicago H istorical Society

80

Chicago History

Player Pianos

piano as perfectly as th<' most accomplished musician.

And whrn it has finished it will automatically re-roll the music sheet and shut off the motor without a finger's touch from you .

The Euphona was a triple-threat instrument.

Its advice to the prospective owner continued, "It is in truth three pianos in one-a perfect upright piano for hand playing, a perfect pedal operated Inner-Player, and a perfect electrically operated player-piano."

By the first decade of the twentieth century, Chicago had become a center of the playerpiano business, and there was soon to be vigorous competition in manufacture, sales, and promotion. One of the most famous Chicago companies was the Gulbransen-Dickinson Company at 3242 West Chicago Avenue. Its trademark, the Gulbransen Baby, became one of the most famous symbols in the mechanical-music field, ranking with the Victor Dog. One ad for the Gulbransen Player-Piano featured the baby crawling to reach the pedals. Gulbransen advertised nationally and supplied dealers with papicr-mache models of the celebrated baby for their display windows.

The Cable-Nelson Piano Company at 209 South State Street also made several player pianos. Their r 9 16 brochure called the CableNelson Player-Piano "the most wonderful, most fascinating, 'plaything' ever invented." Like many manufacturers, this company tried to appeal to all members of the family: "for the business man, who may now lose himself in music of his own making," "rejuvenation for the mother and housewife who, unable to 'keep up her practice,' can still master the music she loves," and "Here is early musical appreciation, the cs cntial part of all up-to-date mu ical instruction, for the 'kiddies.' " Melville Clark was a pioneer in many aspects of the player-piano industry. Advertisements for his Apollo called it "the first player piano with the full range of the piano keyboard , 88 notesthe first player piano to play all music exactly as written." Other Chicago manufacturers

stressed their unique qualities. An example is the Thompson-U'nette Piano Company at 2652 West Lake Street, makers of the U'nette PlayerGrand. Their "very latest development" was a player piano "contained in a baby grand of the smallest 'Honeymoon Flat' size."

A natural progression for the electric piano was the addition of a coin box into which a nickel could be inserted to trigger a performance. Such instrÂľments were obviously capable of producing revenue for restaurants, bars, and other public places. Even so-called houses of ill-repute were good customers for the coinoperated piano, for it could replace the professional piano player known as "The Professor,'' eliminate his salary, and bring m revenue besides.

Two of the most famous manufacturers of coin-operated player pianos, the J. P. Seeburg Piano Company and the Mills ovelty Company, were based in Chicago. These two companies arc still operating, albeit under different names and as makers of different products. In the halcyon days of the player piano, th ey were aggressive promoters, particularly of the coinoperated machines.

The J. P. Seeburg Piano Company was formed in 1907 by Swedish immigrant Justus P. Seeburg (Sjoberg ) , who had worked for a couple of player-piano companies before realizing the business potentialities of the electric coin-operated player piano. He did so well that he soon moved his operations to a large plant at the intersection of Clybourn and North avenues and Dayton Street.

Seeburg equated its "automatic instruments" with the leading inventions of the century. In its 1917-18 catalog, the company described its contribution as follows: \\Ir live in a remarkable age. Forty years ago the telephone was being laughed at as an inventor's dream, the typewriter was unheard of, the electric strrrtcar was unknown. Twenty years ago the automobile was in the first stages¡ of experiment, the inrande. crnl electric light was undergoing developChicago History

81

Player Pianos

mrnt, the talking machine was a dream, the moving picture did not exist, the automatic musical instrument was hardly thought of. Today all of these revolutionary inventions arc common factors of our everyday life, bringing profit, comfort, safety, efficiency, convenience, pleasure and recreation to millions of people every hoUt¡, and forming the basis of great industries giving employment to millions of persons and using thousands of millions of capital.

Seeburg manufactured a wide . variety of player pianos. Most were finished in oak or mahogany-walnut cost slightly more-and many were decorated with "ornamental art glass." There was Style "X"- the "Expression" - a straight piano "reproducing expression, almost human in accomplishment," and Style "B"- "The Artistic Automatic"-which contained a mandolin attachment. These two were the same size and both weighed goo pounds when shipped. More elaborate was Style "H"the "Solo Orchestrion." This 1 ,Boo-pound "Masked Marvel" contained not only a piano, but a xylophone, 68 pipes, mandolin attachment, bass and snare drums, tympani, cymbal, triangle, castanets, and also the simulated sounds of violin, piccolo, flute, and clarinet.

The other famous Chicago manufacturer, the Mills Novelty Company, at Jackson Boulevard and Green Street, had the singularity of its Violano-Virtuoso officially acknowledged in 1909, when it was selected for exhibition at the U.S. Patent Office display at the Alaska-YukonPacific Exposition in Seattle. It was a commercial success, too: some four thousand were sold at $3,200 each. The outstanding feature was a real violin which was operated by a mechanical bow and whose notes were triggered by small mechanically worked fingers. One can be seen in action at Doctor Jazz.

The Mills Company was also famous as a manufacturer of slot machines and other gambling devices. Quite naturally, therefore, it offered among its products the Race Horse Piano.

T h is instrument was a Mills Expression Piano to wh ich a horse-race device was added. A mov82

Chicago History

ing belt below the pictures of race horses moved them toward the finish line. Apparently the mechanism triggered a varied rotation of winners. The advertisement for the piano announced "Making Money AutomaticallyThrilling and Amusing-Big Money Maker."

I ts operation was described as follows: Six numbered horses line up at the miniature judges stand and start around the race track ... They disappear around the bend in the track only to appear a few srconds later dashing clown the home tretch.

It's thrilling- fascinating- keeps the crowd on their toes with excitement. They can' t wait for the next race. They deposit nickel after nickel while the same piece is bring played . A few seconds complctrs a race so the crowds can have ten or fifteen races while one piece of music is being playrd. Every time a nickel is drpo ited the horses start on another race so this in trument may take in 50¢ or 75¢ while a single srlec-tion is bring rcndcrrcl.

Frirndly groups tand around trying to guess the winnrr rach time. If their favorite doesn't win the first timr, they arc anxious for another race. They want to guess the winner, and they play it again and again. They not only drop nickel after nickel into the instrument, but also liberally settle their arguments with drinks, cigars, and other merchandise.

The Mills Novelty Company offered to install the machine on a profit-sharing basis in the establishment of prospective purchasers unable to buy the Race Horse Piano outright, the purchaser receiving from 25 to 40 percent of the gross receipts. Monthly earnings from $150 to $300 were promised. Western Electric Piano Company manufactured a nearly identical machine- The Derby. Its advertisements called it the " Greatest of all Musical Money Makers" and promised that "Few investments equal the money possibilities that this piano offers." Such gambling devices were illegal in many states and municipalities, but many were apparently willing to take the risk.

Another music cum gambling machine was offered by the Rock-Ola Manufacturing Company, also of Chicago, called the Profit Sharing Player Piano. Rock-Ola did not manufacture

...

Style KT, the Midget Orchestr.ion, manufactured by the J . P. Seeburg Piano Company and currently on display in their Chicago office. This model contains , besides the player piano , a mandolin , a xylophon e, castanets, a triangle, and a tambourine .

Chicago H istorical Sociel y

Th is Cremona , made by the Marquette Piano Company, was one of the few to feature a tune selector. The mach ine also had automatic speed control that enabled it to switch from a waltz to a foxtrot without difficu lty.

Courtesy Svobodo's N ickelodeo n Ta ve rn & M useu m

Chicago History

83

Player Pianos

player pianos: the company bought pianos from the Operators' Piano Company and installed a mechanism that allowed brass tokens marked "Good for Music Only" to be returned occasionally. Rock-Ola's advertisements declared, "The Only Automatic Piano Made With Slot Machine Features," "Overcomes All Objections - Declared Legal Everywhere," and "The Possibilities Are Unlimited , If You Arc A Live Wire Operation." The Profit Sharing Player Piano was just as illegal as the horse-race machines, and very few were actually manufactured after its development in 1926 and 1927.

There were numerous other Chicago playerpiano manufacturers, including Marquette, which marketed a line called Cremona; NelsonWiggcn, formed by two ex-Sceburg employees; Western Electric, no relation to the telephone manufacturing company; and Operators'. The Western Electric Piano Company, manufacturers of the famous Derby machine, was formed in 1924 by two executives from the Marquette Piano Company. Shortly thereafter, Seeburg purchased Western and continued its operation

Ch ica go His loricol Society

John Philip Sousa, "The March King," took a dim view of the player piano even though it helped make him wealthy.

as an autonomous division which served as pseudo-competition to the Seeburg line and helped the parent company secure a larger portion of the market.

The Operators' Piano Company at 71 5 North Kcdzie was especially aggressive in advertising its Coinolas. An advertisement run during Prohibition days stated: "In dry territories everybody now has more money to spend legitimately.

Therefore the nickels are flowing into COINOLAS in the mo t respectable places. We cater

A closeup of the violin section of the world-acclaimed Violano-Virtuoso player piano, made by the Mills Novelty Company and now in operation at Doctor Jazz. The strings are fingered by keys which are actuated by electromagnets.

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.

If w e could btalk to you in this advebrtisement ~s we can personal 1y, and ring out all the valua le points m

"Kure Silent Notes" To i11trod111..·P-tw o pumps-a small and a hr,,· OOL-for th e price of one-$'2.50, nil Im~•·, pr,•paid.

,,,

W

, you would not be without it another day. It is positively the most efficient device for removing the dust from the player mechanism.

Sm1·th & K1.dd,

H

331 Plymouth Ct., ch·c I ago

lei r.J a

fl R li

·····:··::::::::::::::;::::::t"'.:··;:.:::::::::::::wi:z;r.:i:·;:j1··:::i:i1:;;::;:n:::::i::::u::i;::::1:11:r.:1::n::1:uiir:1;;:::ill!mi1:::1:u1tt1:;1uuUG;.::mmnmi~:-J::;::rm11:ii::;::::::::1:::::;:::~:u:;::m11mm1lfiffiilililliluu1mmmmrumtL1nnJiiliill:t!ill~ Chicago Historical Society

L·sµecially to the regular piano dealer. There's money in our proposition for him." Whether this logic worked is lost in history, but a cloudy proposition offered by Seeburg certainly must have had a broad appeal. In a bulletin to its dealers, Seeburg an nounced: You ca n offe r this piano FREE to any Cafe, Lunch Roo m, Confect ionery, Billiard Parlor, C lub room, D ance Pavilion or R oad House. Get FOUR TI~rns IT S COST and secure a va lid sales contract. Where is th e sales resistance to such an offrr? That's what makes for sure dea l and positi ve profits in selling and operating SEE BURG AUTOi\lATI C PIANOS and ORCIIESTRIO NS.

It was an instrument like Seeburg's Solo Orchestrion that turned my head when I was a small boy in M oline, Illinois, shortly after World War I. A playmate and I succeeded in getting work with a traveling roller-skating rink tha t was about to set up on the outskirts of our town. Our job was to skate around the rink, scatter paraffin from a shoulder bag, and then skate over it- again and again-until the surface was as smooth as glass.

I t was a tough job, as it turned out. When the boss told us we would be paid with free skati ng a ll week, we were less than enthusiastic.

However, we decided to circle the rink once more. \,Ve ·were half way aro und the track when it happened- the glorious, magnificent, earshattering sound of the biggest, loudest marching band I had ever heard.

Do-it-yourself repairing. One of the many accessories designed to cure the ills which inevitably afflict even the most marvellous of inventions.

The sound was coming from a player piano, a very la rge one. An elderly man stood next to it, listening and adjusti ng its complicated m echanism. The entire front of the piano had been stripped off and I could see its working parts.

The black and white keys depressed themselves and then resumed their positions like magic.

The hammers within struck the taut strings firmly and accurately. And its bottom half con tained two drums, a bass a nd a snare, playing automatically! Drumsticks, held by unseen hands, beat a sharp tattoo on the snare, another set of sticks clicked out rim hots, and a single padded stick thumped the big bass drum, as cymbals clashed.

F ascinated, I watched the technician go about his tasks. H e put the faca de of tained glass in place, placed clear glass over the percussion sections, adj usting things here and there and, lastly, pulled the switch that made the variable lights fl ash on and off. Now, there was sound and light! M y magic piano was whole, my enchantment complete. The music the roller-rink played was Sousa's " Stars and Stripes Forever."

It wa a grand tune, a stirring march, a great skating song. It is ironic that Sousa's "Stars and Stripes Forever" should remain in my memory as the one song associated with the player piano he inveighed against.

Not un til I entered the University of Illinois Chicago History

85

Player Pianos

m 1924 did I again really notice the mechanical pianos. It was during this decade that the nickelpiano made its last stand in restaurants, bars, and other public places. There was a full Chinese dinner to be had in downtown Champaign for 40( The restaurant was dimly lit, had booths along the wall, and each booth had a coin instrument, ready to receive nickels that " ¡ould activate the nickelodeon. One of my classmates was in the engineering school, and he devised a system of short-circuiting the player piano coin device by gently cutting the wiring insulation with a penknife. He would make a half-dozen slices with his knife and we enjoyed free music throughout our meal. I have since wondered how the owner felt about those empty coin boxes.

Before talking pictures came along to change the face of the motion-picture industry, a sizeable manufacture of automatic pianos designed solely for movie theaters had developed. These machines had music rolls designated for various moods. One might signal the villain's pursuit of the heroine, another herald the cavalry charge against the marauding Indians, and a third provide the sentimental strains suitable for a love scene. These instruments also had various manual devices for specialty effects, gadgets which were activated by pull-cords which hung from the top of the piano. Lyon & Healy had a school in Chicago where photoplaycr operators could sharpen their skills.

Cue sheets were furnished with the motion picture, and the operator, at the specified moment, pulled the proper lever or cord to sound a hunting-horn , a locomotive whistle, a Chinese gong, broken dishes, an explosion, thunder and lightning, and so forth. The advent of the talkies made all such devices obsolete. And radio, of cour e, sounded the real death knell of the home model.

In their time, however, player pianos were the newest. most modern form of home entertainment. Among those who possessed an intricate instrument was Dion O'Banion, a former 86

Chicago History

altar boy who became a prominent Chicago gangster in the 1920s. In 1924, the press noted that he married Miss Viola Kaniff and rented a fancy apartment on Pinc Grove Avenue, furnished with fine furniture and oi l paintingsand a $14,000 player piano as well as a console radio.

The player piano is now a museum piece.

Disneyland has a collection, and an excellent grouping may be seen and heard at the Mekanisk Musik Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark. Commercial collections exist throughout the United States and private collections continue to grow. And, as interest in the revival of the player piano has grown, so too have artisans arisen who can rebuild and restore the old instruments. They contend that the older models a re far superior to those made more recently and speak reverently of the craftsmanship of the original builders.

Inflation has not lagged far behind. Sotheby Parke-Bernet, the cw York fine-arts auction gallery, recently sold for $31,000 a two-ton Wurlitzer 180 Concert Band Organ which was originally priced at around $8,000 in 1920. More modest models arc available, however, for much smaller sums. An advertisement in a recent issue of Tiu Antiqul' Trader offers the following: "Symphonion ( coin op. ) 12" $665; Symphonion 8" $450; Polyphon IO " $41 o." The same issue contains a splendid offering of 'Jumbo Duo-Art Rolls" for your selection, should you decide to purchase a player piano. Among the music rolls on hand for immediate delivery are "selections from Th e Sting Part One and Th e Sting Part Two.'' Or. if your taste runs more to the classics. you might be interested in Beethoven's ¡M oonlight Sonata, played by Paderewski. If you have a player piano for sale, a number of eager purchasers advertise that they will buy it, regardless of its condition, altogether the sign of a healthy revival.

So, if you really want to, you can still "Put another ni-ckel in, in the ni-ckcl-odeon." And dream of 40¢ dinners.

Stone, Kimball, and THE

Chap-Book

sy

HENRY REGNERY

When these young men from Harvard arrived in Chicago zn 1894, literary publishing in the Midwest began to hum. literary publishers to have graced Chicago, certainly one of the most creative and imaginative was the short-lived firm of Stone & Kimball. Founded in 1893, the firm and its successor, Herbert S. Stone & Company, survived only until 1906. Yet, in the barely thirteen years of their existence, these two publishers made a substantial contribution to the cultural life of their time.

Herbert Stuart Stone, born in Chicago in 187 1, probably developed his interest in publishing through his father, Melville Elijah Stone.

Melville, bucking the tradition of his family, did not become a Methodist minister even after the Great Fire of 187 1 destroyed his recently purchased foundry. Instead, he went into journalism and founded the Chicago Daily N ews in 1875. Melville Stone was also responsible for bringing to Chicago the poet-journalist Eugene Field, who became a close friend of the family and no doubt a source of inspiration for young Herbert Stone.

Stone's association with Hannibal Ingalls Kimball began at Harvard University in 1890. \Vhen Stone, nineteen, entered Harvard as a freshman after a year or two of schooling in Europe, Kimball, three years his junior, entered the same class. Both joined the staff of the Harvard Crimson: Stone became editor and Kimball , business manager.

OF THE MANY

IIrnry Regnery is chai rman of the board of the Chicago publishing firm that bea rs his nam e. Much of the information in his article is based on A History of Stone & Kimball and H erbert S. Stone & Com/Jany, by Sidney Kramer, published by Norman Forgue in 1940 and now out of print.

An rxhibit devoted to Th e Chap-Book and its advertising posters is currently on view at the Society.

Kimball, a lthough born in Massachusetts, had been educated largely in the South where his father had settled soon after the Civil War. The senior Kimball, an aggressive, successful businessman, was a representative of the Pullman Company. His son perhaps inherited some of his talent for, in 1893, Stone wrote to his family that young Kimball was an excellent businessman and added, "I am sure he will make money for himself and for me if he gets half a chance."

Kimball's chance-or, more properly, his chance to gamble on himself-came in 1893, when the two Crimso n staffers organized the partnership of Stone & Kimball and published First Editions of American Authors, a bibliography compiled by Stone with an introduction

by Eugene Field, and C hie ago and the World's Fair: A Popular Guide, a reprint of Stone's 1 892 guidebook.

Their first list, brought out in December 1893, included Main Travelled R oads and Prairie Songs by Hamlin Garland, The Building of the City Beautiful by Joaquin Miller, The Holy Cross and other tales by Eugene Field, and Pagan Papers by Kenneth Grahame. The following May, while both were still undergraduates, the first issue of their now almostlegendary magazine Th e Chap-Book appeared.

There was some objection from Harvard about the effect of such strenuous outside activity on their college work, but Stone-who, from all accounts, was an extremely persuasive, charming young man- was able to convince the dean that they should be given the same academic consideration as football players, since what they were doing would be of equal credit and honor to the university.

The work of the two young entrepreneurs, I think it would be fair to say, reflected the Chicago History

87

The Chap-Book

aesthetic movement of the r 8gos. It was their identification with the idealism and aesthetic aspirations of their contemporaries and their skill in expressing the spirit of the time which explain the phenomenal immediate success of their publishing. They were inexperienced, to be sure, but such an adventurous undertaking could only have been attempted by men who were young, idealistic, and unfamiliar with the realities of the marketplace. They soon ran into such inescapable facts as balance sheets and operating statements, but their real interest, as their careers demonstrate, was in breaking new paths and establishing new standards of excellence. Here, they were eminently successful.

The first number of their magazine appeared May 15, 1894: 24 pages, 4½ x 7½ inches, 5¢.

"The Chap-Book will have at least one signed review in nearly every number," it was announced in that first issue, "besides several short notices and literary essays. In addition to this, Th e Chap-Book will contain poems and occasional short stories by both well-known and unknown writers." In a letter to his family, perhaps to calm their nerves, Stone wrote, "To speak plainly the Chap-Book is no more nor less than a semi-monthly advertisement and regular prospectus for Stone & Kimball." Their success in · speaking for their contemporaries is attested to not only by the immediate success of their magazine, but by the large m1mber of imitations that sprang up like mushrooms all over the country, to disappear almost as quickly.

Kansas City was particularly prolific with four: Th e Baton, The Lotus, Pierrot, and Post er Lore.

H. L. Mencken later called this eruption the "pianissimo revolt of the nineties." Even Wheeling, West Virginia, had a "dinky magazine," as they were called, as did, among other cities, San Antonio, Salt Lake City, New York , Portland, and Washington. Of one such imitator, the editor of Th e Chap-Book wrote: vVith a certain reminiscent interest I see the first issue of "CHIPS, from Literary Workshops," a five 88

Chicago History

The Newberry library

Herbert S. Stone.

cent monthly with decklcd edges, cover in red ar,d black, ctr., etc. It will doubtless be a most admirable publication, but is it not somewhat superfluous to announce in No. 1, Vol. I that "Back numbers cannot be supplied ... "?

By the end of its first year, The Chap-Book had expanded to thirty-six pages and had a circulation of 12 ,206. Kimball and Stone chose, on that first anniversary, to explain the somewhat mystifying name of their magazine. Chapbooks originally were small, cheaply made, popular book with rather crude, wood-cut illustrations. They were sold by peddlers in eigh-

teenth and early nineteenth-century England.

Our young Chicago publishers evidently had a somewhat romantic view of such literature, to wit: They took their nam e from the pedler, or Chapman, who, carrying them, with other goods, wandered from village to village, from farm house to farm house, an ever welcome guest, who could retail the last news of th e countryside, and whose pack contained an omnium gatherum of delights, unattainable except by a visit to the market town.

Th e Chap-Book soon established a definite place for itself and became much more than "a semi-monthly advertisement for Stone & Kimball ," although its excellence and originality no doubt attracted both attention and authors to the firm. Almost as well known as the magazine itself were the art nouveau posters that were produced to advertise it, one by Toulouse-Lautrec, which were sold separately and soon became collectors' items.

Just one hundred issues of the magazine appeared during its life from May 15, 1894, to July 1, 1898 ; the original small format was kept until the issue of January 15, 1897, when the size was increased to 1 1 x 14 inches. For the first two years, the covers followed the same rather formal design-a black border around the name and contents of the magazine which are in black and red and set in Caslon old-style type. Toward the end of 1895, the publishers began to use different covers, occasionally with drawings, but always in unobtrusive good taste.

Even after more than seventy-five years, the issues of the magazine, especially those of the first two or three years of its life, have a wonderfully appealing quality of high spirits and of pleasure in the better things of life. The first number includes poetry, a story, a literary essay, and a nnouncements of the forthcoming publications of Stone & Kimball: a ten-volume complete edition of Poe; twelve essays on art, Crumbling Walls by H amlin Garland; and a novel, L ow Tide on Grand Pre, by Bliss Carman.

THE

Chap-Book SEMI-MONTHLY Contents for May 15, 1895.

\'ALLOTTON

Q

The Newberry Library

A portrait of H. I. Kimball drawn by Fred Richardson on a copy of The Chap-Book.

Among contributors to later issues of Th e Chap-Bo ok were writers Charles T. Copeland, Ralph Adams Cram, Eugene Field, Henry James, H . G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Paul Verlaine, George Santayana, and Joseph Pennell, a nd there were frequent illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley and Will Bradley.

An especially attractive feature was the "Notes" column that appeared in most issuescomments by the editors on art and literature interspersed with amusing little anecdotes, all reflecting, but without a trace of pomposity or arrogance, their own strongly held aesthetic Chicago History

89

The Chap-Book

views and sense of mission. There was also a fair amount of advertising, for soap, for bicycles, by the railroads for their passenger service and, as time went on, by other publishers, showing that the magazine was taken seriously and had a readership worth reaching. The Chap-Book, it must be said, was, from the very first issue brought out by two Harvard undergraduates, a thoroughly professional performance. It was also irreverent, publishing such thoughts as Carolyn Wells' "1'.1ixcd Maxims."

A M an is known by the trumpery he keeps.

N ever put a gift cigar in your mouth.

The la ck of money is the root of all evil.

Where wisdom is bliss ' tis folly to be ignorant.

A pitch in tim e saved th e nin e.

Chain up a child and away he will go.

Virtue is its only reward.

The co urse of fre e love never did run smooth.

A bird in the hand lays no eggs.

All that a man hath will he give to his wife.

M any hands like light work.

It's a wise child that owes his own father.

Poli cy is th e best honesty.

The rolling stone catches th e worm.

Osculation is th e thief of tim e.

A thirsty man will catch at a straw.

Absinthe makes the hea rt grow fonder.

Straws show whi ch way th e gin goes.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," and this world lies a bout us wh en we a re grown up.

The woman who collaborates is lost.

It is not good for man to give a loan.

The wages of sin is debt.

Every dogma must have its day .

In August 1894, a few months after the launching of Th e Chap-Book, the firm moved from Cambridge to Chicago and located in the Caxton Building on South Dearborn Street, close to the printing and publishing district. Harrison Garfield Rhodes, a fellow student who came to Chicago as assistant editor of the magazine, contributed substantially to the success of the firm , which soon became a ga th ering place for Chicago literati.

In an account written many years later and possibly colored by the passing of time, Hamlin 90

Chicago History

Da ily New s Co llecti o n Ch icag o Hist orical Societ y

Melville E. Stone, Herbert's father, brought Eugene Field to write for the now defunct morning edition of the Daily News. Field is shown at his desk in 1893.

Garland wrote the following description of the impression made by the three young publishers after their arrival in Chicago: . . . when , of an af ternoon these three missionaries of cu lture eac h in a long frock coat tightly buttoned, with cane, gloves an d shining silk hats, paced side by side down the Lake Shore Drive they had th e effe ct of a n est hetic invasion, but their crown ing audacity was a printed circul a r which anno un ced that tea would br served in their office on Saturday a ft ern oons. . . . Culture on th e Middle Bord er had at last begun to hum!

The three young men not only had a strong se nse of mission and high standards in litera ture and design, but there seems every reason to believe that they enormously enjoyed wha t they were doing. Tea was served in their office on Saturday afternoons, as Garland said. There were also other forms of pleasant entertainment

- "public reading of manuscripts," according to Sidney Kramer, "book and picture exhibitions, 'Chap-Book Teas' and V audevilles." They very quickly made themselves a lively and much appreciated addition to the life of the city, and gave it something which was long remembered and often spoken of.

They also worked hard. In the year and a half after their move to Chicago, besides getting out Th e Chap-Book twice each month, they published some forty-five books, including their promised ten-volume, complete edition of Edgar Allen Poe, beautifully produced and still considered the standard edition; The Land of H f' art's Desire, by William Butler Yeats ; Robert Louis Stevenson's Ebb-Tide, M acaire, Vailima L etters, and Th e Amateur Emigrant; Th e Golden Age, by Kenneth Grahame; Th e Plays of Mau rice Ma eterlinck; Ibsen's last play, Little E)â&#x20AC;˘olf; Poems of Paul Verlaine ; Hamlin Garland's Rose of Dutcher's Coolly;* and Laurence Stern's Tristram Shandy. Early in 1896, they brought out the most successful book published under Stone & Kimball's imprint, Harold Frederic's Th e Damnation of Th eron Ware, which sold twenty thousand copies. They moved to a larger office in the Caxton Building on March 1, 1896, and Kimball opened a New York office.

The publication of the Poe had apparently overstrained their capital. Raising the advance payment of $2,900 for Stevenson's Ebb-Tide and the option on his subsequent work led to differences between the two partners. When Stone's father demanded liquidation of some of the firm's titles to case the financial strain, Kimball bought Stone's interests and took everything except Th e Chap-Book with him to New York in April 1896.

Kimball published thirty-six titles after taking the firm to New York, and although his books maintained his high standards, he too

*Fo r more information about this ground-breaking book, see Anthony Grosch's article in this issue.-E<l.

was terribly short of cash. He sold Scribner's the two novels that Stevenson had left unfinished when he died: Weir of H ermiston, already in type, and St. Ives. Then, on October 2 1, 1897 - only ix months after he had bought it- the firm was liquidated at public auction. Herbert Stone had meanwhile been joined by his younger brother, Melville E. Stone, .Jr. , and had set up the new firm of Herbert S. Stone & Company. At the auction of the Stone & Kimball assets, the Stones bought most of the copyrights, printing plates, and unbound pages, and were therefore, in every respect, the successors to Stone & Kimball.

The new firm continued Th e Chap-Book and resumed the publication of books. Their first authors, for the most part, were contributors to The Chap-Book, but they also published a book of travel sketches by H. C. Chatfield-Taylorand a novel by Gabriele D'Annunzio. In 1897 and 1898, the firm published, among other books, Henry .James' What Maisie Knew, and three books written by George Ade and illustrated by John McCutcheon, Artie, Pink Marsh, and Doc' Horn e, collections made at Herbert Stone's suggestion from the column "Stories of the Streets and the Town" Ade had been writing since 1890 for the Chicago R ecord. Stone, an innovative publisher, became George Bernard Shaw's first American publisher, bringing out his first three plays, two novels, and a volume of criticism, and he became Shaw's first American agent as well.

Stone's greatest success was George Barr McCutcheon's romantic novel Graus/ark, published in 1901 , which sold 150,000 copies by the end of the year. This came in as an unsolicited manuscript, written while McCutcheon was working on a small newspaper in Indiana.

It req uired considerable editing by the publisher, who apparently drove a rather hard bargain- a member of the McCutcheon family reports that the author made only $500. There were two other George Barr McCutcheon novels, both successful and both, like the first, Chicago History

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The Chap-Book

skillfully promoted, Castle Craneycrow and Brewster's Millions. Then the author, as so often happens to Chicago publishers, transferred his allegiance to New York. The same thing happened with George Ade: following the success of his collections of columns, the firm brought out two volumes of his Fables in Slang, which made Ade a national figure and convinced him that he now needed a New York publisher.

In 1898, Herbert S. Stone & Company moved into a new office, a rebuilt carriage house at the rear of the old Willoughby mansion at Michigan Avenue and Twelfth Street. It must have been an attractive place--fireplaces, brick floors, deep yellow walls, dark green woodwork, a picket fence, and a row of sunflowers to screen off the outside world- and also, like its predecessor, a gathering place.

The move was made at the crest of the firm's fortunes. In 1899, Herbert S. Stone & Company published fifty new books, which placed it among the larger American publishers. In 1898, Stone had also taken over the publication list of Way and Williams, a Chicago firm which had published twenty-six handsome books- several designed by Bruce Rogers- since it was launched in 1894. Two years later, however, Stone sold this list to Doubleday & McClure in New York, apparently to raise capital. In 1900, the number of newly published books began to decline sharply; only thirty new books were published and, in the five-year period from 1901 to 1905, only thirty-seven.

It was in 1898, the year of the outbreak of the Spanish-American War, that the publication of Th e Chap -Book was discontinued , and it was in that year also that Harrison Garfield Rhodes left Chicago to live in London. Besides representing several American newspapers there, he was to keep in touch with English publishers on behalf of Herbert S. Stone & Company.

Rhodes was much respected as a discerning critic, and had undoubtedly contribu ted substantially to the success of The Chap-Book and 92

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Chica go H is toric a l Soci et y

Stone & Kimball's books were noted for their beautiful covers. Prairie Songs, from the company's first list, is stamped in gold ; Will Payne's The Money Captain is appropriately decorated with dollar signs.

to the quality of the publications of both Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Stone & Company, for he had been a close associate from the beginning.

During the last year or two of its existence, the editors of The Chap-Book obviously struggled with the problem of making it into a more conventional literary journal. The size, with the issue of January 15, 1897, was increased to 11 x 14 inches, and the descriptive subtitle changed from "A Semi-Monthly" to the more prepossessing "A Miscellany & Review of Belles Lcttres." The "Notes" changed their tone entirely, becoming rather ponderous comments on the political issues of the day-free silver, the situation in Cuba, political candidates, and so forth. No longer could one read such reports as the following: Skirmishing on the subject of costumes, ( which old Fuller so sweetly says are "but the remembrancers of our lost innocency") I have occasion to recall an advertisement which actually appeared sans hyphen recently in a London daily, to wit: Mr. and Mrs. Nathan Levi, having cast off clothing of every description, invite an early inspection. (! ! !)

Most of the space was devoted to stories, essays, and serious, well-written book reviews.

The magazine was still attractively designed and well-printed. The lightheartedness, however, was missing: one has the distinct impression that the spirit had gone out of it, especially with the February 15, 1898, issue, when the paper stock was changed from unfinished to glossy, so that half-tones could be used. When pictures of victorious American admirals appeared, it was clear that the magazine was about finished.

The Chap-Book of July 1, 1898, was announced as the last. Times had changed, and the editors of The Chap-Book could not, in the end, go along with such events as the SpanishAmerican War, Manifest Destiny, the Rough Riders, and all the rest, as one of their last editorials clearly shows: "The sulphurous vom-

itings of the yellow journals since the blowingup of the Maine bear out Senor Castelar's recently expressed opinion that nowhere in the world is there a calamity comparable to the American daily press." In the last issue, the editors told their readers that: ... it was not felt that it was necessary to continue The Chap-Book longer to demonstrate that a good literary magazine could be published in the West, and receive critical sanction of the whole country. . .. They believe furthermore, that The Chap-Book has been the strongest protest we have had in America again t the habit of promiscuous over-praise which is threatening to make the whole body of American criticism useless and stultifying.

Herbert Stone did some of his most successful and significant book publishing after 1898, but as the number of published titles began to decline, one has the impression that his own enthusiasm was declining also . So apparently, was his financial status. "When he had to cut down expenses and could not make the beautiful books he loved, he lost interest," is the way one of his former editors, Lucy Monroe Calhoun, explained it.

Herbert Stone's last book was published in 190.5; the only book he published that year, Historic Styles of Furniture by his associate on House Beautiful Virginia Robie, has become a classic. On March ro, 1906, the firm, including copyrights, plates, sheets, goodwill, and contracts, was sold to Fox, Duffield & Company in New York. The lists of this firm, in turn, were sold in 1934 to Dodd, Mead & Company.

Kimball had begun a successful career in advertising layout and printing, and Stone became a magazine editor.

It is interesting to consider why this firm, which started so brilliantly and left an indelible mark on book making in this country, should have survived for so short a time. True, young Stone and Kimball devoted more attention to satisfying their own high standards than to the marketplace. Their books were so beautifully Chicago History

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The Chap-Book

Chicago Hisloricol Society

George Barr McCutcheon's Graustark was Herbert S. Stone & Company's best seller.

Like Mccutcheon, George Ade found a New York publisher after the success of Fables in Slang earned him a national reputation.

Chicago Ht~loricol Society

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Chicago History

produced that they are now prized by collectors, and one can be quite sure that their beauty was not justified from a strictly business point of view. Stone and Kimball seemed a lways to lack for capital, but it appears likely that they could have raised the money they needed had they been willing to make the concessions that a commercial operation required.

There arc, of course, other reasons as well.

Herbert S. Stone had the problem of every trade publisher who operates in Chicago, namely, that Chicago is not New York. This must have been made strikingly apparent to Stone when his two most successful authors left him for New York publishers, and all the more so in view of the fact that he had made them famous. The reviewers, the agents, the magazines were then, as they still arc, all in New York; New York is the center from which ideas are disseminated in our country, as it was in the early ,goos; it is the magnet that has an almost irre istiblc atraction to those who have, or think they have, something to say and the talent to express it.

In the last issue of Th e Chap-Book, there is the comment, "The Chap-Book has never depended in any special way upon the West for support; indeed, it is probable that in proportion to its size Chicago had fewer subscribers than any other large city." Chicago, we must face it, has not been a congenial place for book or magazine publishers.

All the reasons I have already given for the short life of Stone & Kimball and Herbert S. Ston<' & Company played their part, but the chief reason for their short life may well have been another: they had outlived their time and their rca on for existence.

Stone and Kimball, as we observed at the out et, reflected the aspirations and idealism of thPir time. This was the principal reason for their immediate success. By 1905, all this was past. The aesthetic revolt of the Nineties was a revolt against the extreme materialism and commercialism of the nineteenth century as well

as a revolt against its artistic sterility. When the United States went into the SpanishAmerican War and annexed the Philippinesto a large extent because of the popular hysteria created by that "calamity," the popular pressit entered the arena of world power politics.

The century of the big corporation, big government, big labor unions, the mass press, and world wars had begun. The aspirations which Stone and Kimball represented had been passed by and largely forgotten, but that in no way detracts from their aims or their achievements.

They established a standard of quality and integrity in publishing which will stand for a long time, and for this we remember them with respect and admiration.

An 1894 advertising poster, designed by Thomas Meteyard , for a book which helped deplete Stone & Kimball's resources.

Chicag o Hist or ical So ciet y

Robert Louis Stevenson's NEW STORY

PUBLISHED BY STONE & KIMBALL

Price, $1.25

FO l{ ~f\ L' Chicago History

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Social History through the Mirror of Fashion

BY ELIZABETH JACHIMOWICZ

LA S T Y E AR, the Chicago Hi storical Society mounted an exhibition enti tled Chicagoans in Pa ri s, which showed costumes acqui red by Chicago women from French couturiers. It is not onl y the fa brics a nd workmanshi p of the outfi ts whi ch fasc ina te, but also the extent to which a hundred years of cha nging styles reflect underl ying socia l ch a nge.

Carriage dress , 1866. The Industri al Revolution created a new monied class , and wealthy Americans , eager to gain tone and social status , increasingly made the " grand tour" to Europe and visited the French court of Napoleon 111 and his Empress Eugenie. In the 1860s, breadth of skirt was a symbol of social position , as shown in this green silk dress by Worth for Mrs. Silas B. Cobb (nee Marie Warren).

Mrs. Cobb was a true pioneer who came to Chicago in a covered wagon in the 1830s. Her husband worked for John Kinz ie and later opened his own saddle and harness business which , together with rea l-estate transactions , made him a mill ionaire.

E lizabe th J achimowi cz is cura tor of cos tu mes of th e C hi cago Histori cal Society.

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Chicago History

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The 1880s ushered in the great age of opulence. The wealthy industrialist had arrived and for the next thirty years busied himself with acquiring culture , collecting art , and building magnificent homes. His wife dressed with suitable opulence , to distinguish herself from the steadily growing group of nouveaux riches. This dress of gray silk velvet brocade , worn by Mrs. Timothy B. Blackstone, is trimmed with an applique of velvet , cord , chenille , and ball fringe , proving that she was no newcomer to wealth when she wore it about 1885. Her husband was president of the Chicago & Alton Railroad , and Isabella Blackstone was active in social and philanthropic works . Among their later philanthropies was the donation of their Prairie Avenue house to the Presbyterian Training School .

Before World War I, wealthy ladies wore feminine dresses of rich fabrics which emphasized their S-shaped curves. These were the elegant, pampered, refined ladies of a leisured way of life. Harriett Pullman's dress, worn about 1912 when she was married to Francis Carolan , is a late and therefore modified version of this style. It is an afternoon dress of black velvet and white satin stripes , trimmed with needle lace-worn, perhaps , to the Ascot races. Harriett Pullman lived in Paris much of her life , owned an extensive wardrobe, and preserved many of her clothes.

What emerged after World War was a girl ready to kick up her heels on the dance floor , drive fast cars, and participate in every aspect of life-the flapper. The functional , streamlined clothes of the 1920s express her mood. This evening dress, worn by Mrs. Howard Linn (nee Lucy McCormick Blair). is of black net over black satin, trimmed with monkey fur.

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Fashion as History

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'

Despite the Depression , haute couture continued and indeed was capable of producing a dress as extraordinary as this evening costume , worn by Mrs. Charles B. Goodspeed (nee Elizabeth Fuller) in 1937. Made by Schiaparelli with embroidery by Jean Cocteau , the ensemble is of pale pink nubby crepe. The jacket is embroidered with the profile of a woman whose hair of gold bugle beads flows down the sleeve and whose hand extends across the front.

After the lull in fashion which accompanied World War II came a return to femin inity and the romantic look-a complete rejection of the austerity of the war years . Christian Dior's New look, with its curves and longer skirts , exemplifies this mood , which continued well into the 1950s. His strapless dress of mustand-colored moire , complete with long stole with a winding sleeve , was worn by Mrs. Robert D. Graff (nee Marjorie Sawyer Goodman) in 1952.

By the 1960s, it was time for a new break with tradition . This was the space age , the day of the miniskirt, the celebration of youth which ended in the youth cult. Andre Courreges symbolizes the new tempo in a daytime dress of white and navy blue cotton window-pane plaid , trimmed in navy blue and made in 1968.

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Sculpture at the Columbian Exposition

BY JAMES L. RIEDY

The aesthetic accomplishments of the World) s Columbian Exposition are widely acknowledged) but letJ s take a closer look.

public sculpture in Chicago begins in 1876-five years after the Great Chicago Fire.

That year the Soldiers' Monument-the first piece of statuary to be erected in the area-was dedicated in Oak Woods Cemetery.

It was not, however, the start of the city's love affair with outdoor sculpture. That year, the Chicago Tribune reported that some park commissioners were considering purchasing statuary.

The paper expressed its disapproval editorially:

THE STORY OF

We have no park which has reached the point where expensive artificial embellishment ought to be introdu ced to any great extent. Whatever funds are at the disposal of the Commissioners would better be devoted to the production of grass and trees and those broad features which confer the park-like character.

Fifteen years later, the city still had less than a dozen public statues.

Among those few works, however, were the famous standing figure of Abraham Lincoln at North Avenue and Stockton Drive, which made its sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, worldfamous in 1887, and his Bates Fountain sculpture, Storks at Play, which stands south of the Lincoln Park Conservatory, for which the relatively unknown Frederick William MacMonnies, a pupil of Saint-Gaudens, had created statues of playful boys.

Only for the great occasion of the World's Columbian Exposition, held in Chicago in 1893, did it seem that quantities of "expensive artificial

Jam <'s L. Riedy, assistant professor of humanities at the Mayfair Campus of the City Colleges of Chic.ago, is preparing a full-length pictorial guide to Chicago's sculpture.

embellishment" were necessary. Saint-Gaudens, probably the greatest of our national sculptors, was chosen to supervise the creation of sculptural projects and he m~de sure that sculpture so prodigiously adorned the grounds and the architecture that no American event before or since has rivaled it.

Art critic William Howe Downes credited the half-year long, May through October spectacle of 1893 as beg1nning "our American rebirth in sculpture." Saint-Gaudens declared that it had brought to Chicago an assemblage of sculptors the likes of which had not been seen since the great days of the Renaissance.

Yet in terms of architectural history, the importance of the total sculptural work commissioned for the Exposition-all $866,ooo of it- seems to have been nil. To Louis Sullivan, the eminent late nineteenth-century Chicago architect, it was actually a step backward that would result in damage lasting "for half a century ... if not longer." The architecture of "White City," as the Exposition was called, was neo-Venetian-Graeco-Roman-Renaissance, and the sculpture that enlivened it was of suitable style.

Had the fair occurred a decade or two later, one might have seen some evidence of the modern sculpture that was then only emerging, sculpture that was to break with the classical tradition and rebel against the realism, romantic attitudes, and sentimental themes that were ennobled at the Exposition. But at the 1893 spectacle, the most obvious influence was the European academies, principally the Ecole National Suj1erieure des Beaux-Arts, that renowned and powerful Paris institution where ideologies challenging tradition rarely found fertile soil.

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Saint-Gaudens had studied there, as had MacMonnies and Chicago's own Lorado Taft, whose first great success was the sculpting of two groups for the entrance of the Exposition's Horticultural Building. Olin L. Warner, who provided some of the sculptural decoration for the Art Building, was one of the first to bring the Beaux-Arts influence to the United States.

And Edward C. Potter, one of the Exposition's animal sculptors, was an Easterner who had been under the guidance of Maurius-JeanAntonin Mercie, who continued the classic tradition. Potter also fashioned the horse under Daniel Chester French's George Washington, a sculpture which still stands in Washington Park at Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Drive and .5, st Street.

Architect Henry Van Brunt, who contributed one of the buildings to the Court of Honor, believed in the importance of using the Exposition to demonstrate the approved academic styles of the United States. Art historian James M. Dennis summed it up: "With this as their basic practical purpose, the buildings on the Court of Honor, dominated by the Administration Building, were designed and decorated."

The Court of Honor-whose focal point was French's ixty-five-foot gilded Statue of the Re public----,impressed. The Court was one "of the JoyeJiest landmarks of artistic exaltation in my experience," wrote Downes. Waxing eloquent, he added: "Where outside of our dreams of the golden age of Greece did the sunlight ever bathe white colonnades, terraces, domes, basins, fountains, porticos and pediments with a sweeter, softer, more majestic glamour?" The statue facing this spectacle was said to be the largest ever made in America up to that time: The RejJUblic was a female figure fifteen feet from her chin to the top of her head, her arms were thirty feet long, and supposedly there was room on one hand to hold four persons.

Even so, Chicago had not fallen in love with public sculpture. In October 1893, when the Exposition came to a close, a considerable 100

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Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

number of sculptors reportedly remained in Chicago hoping for further commissions. Unfortunately these were not forthcoming and, according to Taft, they "withdrew with one accord to a more congenial environment." With so much talent readily available, one might argue that Chicago could have become the sculpture capital of the nation, with works by many whose names will become much more widely known during the nation's celebration of its Bicentennial. As it was, sculpturally the city benefited but a trifle by the fair. Although sculptor Gutzon Borglum believed that the Exposition "gave the country at large its first big impulse to better things" regarding the use of sculptural decoration on buildings, it did not happen here. Lamented Taft: "Architectural sculpture, so conspicuously introduced, had failed to take root."

Regardless of the measure of interest in the visual arts and the aesthetic ambitions of the city , economic woes at the time understandably precluded granting outdoor sculpture priority over more utilitarian concerns. Even before the end of the fair, so many workers had been laid off in Chicago that the trade unions were demanding a program of public works. Reported Ray Ginger in his Altgcld's America:

... on October 30 the Exposition closed and poverty poured over the city in a deluge . . . . The swirling mob of unemployed grew and grew. . . . M en, wom en and children trudged to the garbage dumps in search of food. By D ecember the floors and stairways of the City Hall were littered nightly with sleeping m en. Every police station in the city was sheltering from sixty to one hundred des titute peopl e.

Such difficulties overshadowed any immediate interest in arranging for amenities like public sculpture, as Hermon Atkins MacNeil quickly discovered. MacNeil, who had created statues for the Electricity Building at White City, was one of those who decided to remain.

"After the close of the exposition I stayed in Chicago for three years," he said, "and almost starved to death."

On the street one day he met a Sioux named Black Pipe, who had appeared with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and also decided to remain in town . Taking pity on the Indian brave who, as MacNeil described him , looked "hungry and cold," the sculptor took him to his studio, fed him, and then set to work modeling his head. The acquaintanceship between the two men had lucky consequences. For a year-anda-half Black Pipe remained with MacNeil and posed for him. Among the resulting works was Th e Primitive Chant, which the sculptor considered one of his best-known Indian studies.

Such efforts led to MacNeil's first significant commission: the exterior panels and lobby portraits of Indians for the Marquette Buil.d ing at 140 South Dearborn-another of Chicago's notable structures destined to be demolished unless efforts to preserve it as an architectural landmark are successful. MacNeil also did the monum ent paying tribute to Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet at Marshall Boulevard and 24th

The Statue of the Republic, by Daniel Chester French, the focal point of the Columbian Exposition's Court of Honor. A smaller replica stands in Jackson Park at 65th St. Chicago Hislo ricol Sociely

.

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Sculpture

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Chicago Historical Society

Workmen building sculpture in a studio in the Horticultural Building in 1892. The group in the foreground is Lorado Taft's The Sleep of the Flowers.

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Street. I! shows the two explorers with an Indian. Other works by MacNeil can be found from East to West, including the east pediment of the United States Supreme Court Building and hi s Coming of the Whit e Man in Portland.

He also designed the I g 16 U.S. quarter.

A number of the artists whom Saint-Gaudens assembled for the Exposition ascended to the ranks of America's leading sculptors, and the work they did in Chicago provided a significant boost to their careers. Lorado Taft went on to create the noteworthy 1 20-foot-long Fountain of Time at the west end of the Midway on the city's South Side and the poetic Fountain of the Great Lakes at the Art Institute. Though Taft is now relatively unknown outside of Chicago, his works exist in many places-from Washington, D.C. , to Seattle.

Another sculptor who benefited from the Exposition was Bessie Potter, Lorado Taft's pupil.

About her, Taft wrote: "When she came to us at the Art Institute her fingers were already ski llful and her imagination had begun to recognize beauty in the casual incidents and groupings of daily life. The Columbian Exposition brought new revelations and new enthusiasms.

From that time her pathway was clear." Hardly more than twenty, she went on to gain enormous popularity for her intimate groups of young mothers and infants and groups of children at play.

It was at White City that French, an Easterner, gained national prominence as a sculptor of heroic subjects. His later works include the seated Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. By collaborating with French at the Exposition , animal sculptor Edward C. Potter gained his first prominence. His best-known work is probably the lions guarding the New York Public Library's Fifth Avenue entrance.

Up to the time of the Exposition , MacMonnies, another Easterner, was generally unknown. but his ornate Columbian Fountain- a stately ship rowed by nymphs and attended by sea

/I

Chicag o Hi storica l Socie ty

Bessie Potter, one of Lorado Taft's students who gained national popularity after the Exposition. This crayon sketch by Frank Holme appeared in Brush & Pencil, April 1898.

horses and dolphins, which Saint-Gaudens called "the most beautiful conception of a fountain in modern times west of the Caspian Mountains"- brought him national repute. H e went on to achieve eminence both in the United States and in Paris a nd to become, along with Saint-Gaudens and French, one of the leading scu lptors of the period.

Bela Lyon Pratt's first public commissions were for two colossal groups at the Chicago spectacle. Subsequently his work became fami liar to visitors at the Paris Salon, the Library of Congress, and at public edifices and parks throughout the land. Two of his statues are in Chicago: Nathan Hale, a replica, in the court of the Tribune Tower, a nd Alexander Hamilton, north of the Art Institute.

Others as well profited by exposure at the Exposition. The work done by Karl Bitter, an Austrian who came to this country some three years before the Columbian Exposition, was his fir t introduction to the general public. He went on to win commissions for the Buffalo and St. Louis expositions and for notable public buildings, including New York's Metropolitan Mu eum of Art and the Wisconsin State Capitol.

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Frederick Saint-Gaud acMonnies' Colu mb1an . Fountai~o Chico ~ttri . fountain inMens called " them hcol Socielv modern time s west ost , ic ofbeautiful the Ca conception of a sp1an Mountains."

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Sculpture

Edward Kcmeys and A. Phimister Proctor, both sculptors of animals, were also brought into prominence by the Exposition. For White City, Kcmeys created a pair of bisons and other groups of animals. Important works by Proctor - famous for the Parisian restraint of his animal studies- include the tigers for Nassau Hall at Princeton University. Other sculpture by him can be found from Washington, D.C., to Salem, Oregon.

Additional sculptors whose work for the fair advanced them professionally were Philip Martiny, Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, and William Ordway Partridge. Martiny, who came to America around 1880, did most of the groups, figures, sculptured pediments, and caryatids at the Exposition's Agricultural Building. His relief panels decorate the Art Institute building and a mong his later important works are the doors for St. Bartholomew's Church in New York and the McKinley monument in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ruckstuhl, who won a medal for his sculpture Evening, exhibited in the Exposition's Fine Arts Building, soon became one of the nation's widely known scu lptors. He participated in projects for the Library of Congress, as well as for the appellate court building and customs house in New York. Partridge, whose important sculpture includes his Shakespeare in Lincoln Park, began his career as a sculptor with the exhibition of that work and others at the Exposition.

Another sculptor, Henry Augustus Lukeman, only twenty at the time of the Exposition_, gained valuable experience there and proceeded to create a number of Civil War memorials, including figures for the famous Stone Mountain relief outside Atlanta.

If Chicago couldn't hold on to a number of those who had come to embellish White City, One of two groups called Genius of Discovery by Bela Lyon Pratt, located at either side of the Exposition's great central arch.

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Sculpture

at least it did retain a few sculptural mementos of the Exposition.

As a souvenir, the most important- though not actually a remnant from the fair- is the reduced-size replica of the Statue of the Republic, located in Jackson Park opposite 65th Street.

The work suffers by being viewed without the awesome setting for which the original sculpture was conceived. The replica, about half the size of the original, was unveiled May 11, 1918, to commemorate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the opening of the Exposition. The golden lady has been characterized as a "smart dresser"; her second 18-carat gold-leaf attire cost over $10,000.

Also on the South Side is Tubal-cain, the biblical prototype of blacksmiths, a massive bronze and copper figure personifying the ironworking industry that was part of the imposing display in the Exposition's Mines and Mining Building. The robust figure, made in Germany and sent here for the fair, moved from one owner to another, and finally became the property of Walter Dries. It has adorned the exterior of the Dries and Krump Manufacturing Company at 7400 South Loomis Boulevard for the last twenty years.

In an old Italian quarter on Chicago's nearWest Side stands another sculpture from the Exposition. After being exhibited in the Italian Pavilion, the statue of Columbus by Moses Ezekiel was moved to a niche above the entrance of the Columbian Memorial Building on State Street. Possibly the only work of art in the city to have been blessed by a pope, it was removed to a lumberyard when the building was demolished in 1958. Years later a Tribune article disclosed the existence of the homeless statue, which has been described as "without doubt one of the finest statues of Columbus in this country." Eventually it was adopted by the city's Italian-American community and placed in a specially created plaza at Loomis and Polk streets.

Ezekiel, although largely forgotten today, was 106

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Fire Controlled by Karl Bitter, executed for the Administration Building.

one of America's more prolific and widely acclaimed sculptors. Knighted by three European monarchs, he was responsible for the B'nai B'rith monument to religious liberty in Philadelphia and statues of eleven of the world's leading painters and sculptors, which he created for the exterior of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in the nation's capital.

In two West Side parks are additional sculptural reminders of the Exposition. A pair of bulls with robust-looking maidens who successfully symbolize Plenty, located at the west entrance to the flower garden in Garfield Park, are reduced-size replicas of the twelve-foot plaster casts that overlooked the Grand Basin. These figures resulted from the collaborative efforts of Potter and French. Paying tribute to an almost extinct species and reminiscent of the Old West are Kemey's life-size bison-a bull and cow- at the east entrance to the Humboldt Park rose garden.

Cyrus E. Dallin's widely publicized Signal of Peace in Lincoln Park at the foot of Diversey Parkway, portrays a Sioux chief whose right

hand grasps a spear held with its point upward -a signal of peace. First shown at the Paris Salon of 1890 and later at the Columbian Exposition, it was the first of four statues in a connected series that portrays the complete, tragic racial history of the American Indian.

Further south in Lincoln Park, at the foot of Belden Avenue, the Bard of Avon relaxes with book in hand. Partridge's plaster replica of the Shakespeare statue, along with the Dallin work, was part of the American display in the international fine arts exhibit.

That is about all that is left. Most of the works were made of staff, a reinforced plaster designed to last months, not years. Still, following the close of the Exposition, there was strong feeling among many that the Court of Honor must indeed be preserved. Lorado Taft, for one, voiced objection to its demolition: More impressive to my mind than the majesty of the architecture even, and the revelations of the Art palace, is the astounding discovery that Chicago should be willing to let that dream of beauty be wiped from the face of the earth. The Court of Honor presents such a picture of architectural unity as cannot be found elsewhere in the world. This harmonious work of America's architects, sculptors, and painters was after all the triumph of the exposition.

The destruction of these buildings before their time would be a disgrace and loss unparalleled excepting in the history of war.

But any hope of the Court's preservation was destroyed without official decree the night of January 8, 1894, when fire destroyed a large part of what remained of the Exposition. That included French and Potter's colossal quadriga group, The Triumph of Columbia, atop the great central arch. Those reading the Tribune's report the following day were given this graphic account of the destruction of one of the fair's majestic sculptural works: ... the great cloud of sparks that had been floating down upon the lagoon shifted suddenly northward for a moment, the mute faces in the triumphant char-

Chicag o Hist orica l Societ y

The impermanence of even the most imposing of the Exposition's sculpture was lampooned in World's Fair Puck, a 10¢ weekly published in Chicago during the Exposition.

iot were lighted up as though a search-light had been turned on them for a single instant, then a dense pall of smoke hid them from view. They were seen no more for a few moments, then a thundering crash on the bridge across the lagoon told that the Quadriga was no more.

Tragic as the fire seemed to some, there were those who saw beyond the charred ruins of the once white city to certain supposed benefits of the fair that hopefully would be longer-lasting than that half-year spectacle. The hub of the universe had been transferred from Boston to Chicago, declared one writer. Another was equally convinced that the Exposition had "widened the horizon of our appreciation for what is beautiful in painting and statuary." And someone else wrote that it was "safe to estimate" that our advance in the liberal arts had been "moved forward by a quarter of a century." Forward? Or backward, as Sullivan had declared?

One indisputable fact was that the more than twenty-five million persons who had gone to see the Exposition included a very young John Storrs, who had been taken there on several occa ions to view the art. Chicago-born, he was to become within two decades the most original and daring sculptor in the nation. We still have his Ceres atop the Chicago Board of Trade Building, his one remaining link with his native city.

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Television Town

BY JOEL STERNBERG

When Chicago was Television Town J commercial programs were creative and not just more of the same.

Anything could-and did-happen) and it happened" live."

CHICAGo's HISTORY is rife with artistic development of many kinds, most notably, journalism, literature, architecture, and radio. In each area, and for a period of time, Chicago has either led the way or contributed significantly, and then declined. And each "School" that has developed and the people who created it, have become legendary. The Chicago School of Television, like other Chicago Schools before it, is long closed.

Chicago's School of Television developed as the great days of its radio broadcasting declined.

By the end of World War II and even earlier, Chicago was a broadcasting ghost town. It was still a vigorous sales center for the radio networks, but nothing creative was happening now that the "glory" programs had departed for the East and West coasts. By September 1948, the grim fact was that Chicago had not added a single new national radio show to its lineup in over a year. Radio actors and production types were either following the programs to New York and Hollywood, going into other lines of work, or simply becoming unemployed. A fourth alternative, for those more venturesome, was television. In 1948, the moment was right for the venturesome, they seized it and, almost at once, Chicago was on the cultural map again.

Huge audiences were soon happily watching such zany and original television programs as "Garraway at Large," "Studs' Place," "Kukla,

Joel Sternberg is assistant professor in the Department of Speech and Theatre of the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. This article is adapted from his doctoral dissertation.

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Fran and Ollie," and dozens of others. In 1949, for C'xample, with an initial budget of $40, a character named "Cactus Jim" went on the home screen to amuse the nation's children with a cowboy act. He was Clarence Hartzell, an old radio character actor who also played Uncle Fletcher in radio' s "Vic and Sade." One year later, his show was more popular than New York's "Your Show of Shows," which starred Sid Caesar, Imogene Coco, and Carl Reiner. Frances Horowitz's "Ding Dong School" was elling three million dollars of advertising within three months of its debut, and when ¡' Miss Frances" showed her preschool audience how to make animals out of pipe cleaners, the country suffered an almost instant epidemic of dirty pipes.

It was a short-lived School, as Chicago Schools go ( it lasted only into 1953, by most reckonings), and maybe it was born, as some think, out of the challenges of too little of everything- too little money, small studios, and even smaller names- but it was a genius period. It was during those years that Fred Allen, who came to Chicago at his own expense to appear on "Garraway at Large" and see how it worked, announced, "They ought to tear down [New York's] Radio City and rebuild it in Chicago and call it Television Town." During those years, Chicago was television town.

The actual history of television in Chicago is as long as in other American cities. In 1929, for example, Milton Berle performed on a closedcircuit telecast in Chicago for the American Television Corporation, an appearance during which he introduced Trixie Friganza, an oldtime vaudevillian. Said Berle of this event, "We

did a show which was watched by about four people." That same year, strictly on a hunch, National Broadcasting Company (NBC) engineers wired their studios in the Merchandise Mart for television. Then, in 1930, the network made its first television transmission, to about a dozen receivers, via experimental station W9XAP. The scanner system used produced a 45-line picture, and the day's programming consisted of interviews, the Whitney String Trio, Hal Totten talking about a prizefight, and Irene Wicker, the Singing Lady. It should be noted that 45 lines produced a pretty fuzzy picture.

American TV screens now contain 525 lines, sti ll considered low by European standards, which vary from 600 to upwards of 800.

Other television events followed. Iri 1931, images were picked up from Chicago at an unemployment relief bazaar in Ottumwa, Iowa, 250 miles away. Like other major cities, Chicago had a long list of experimental television stations in the 1930s, but the first video broadcast of relatively high definition was officially logged toward the end of the decade- on March 30, 1939, on Zenith Corporation's independent W9XZV. The April 15, 1939, issue of Broadcasting magazine reported: Rc-cc-iving sets of the firm's officials were located \\'ithin a radius of 12 to 15 miles from the transmit1c-r atop the Zenith plant at 6001 Dickens Avenue-.

The- quarter-hour program featured the Hoosier SodBust ers of WLS, Chicago, with Don Kelley of WLS as nu. According to J. E. Brown, chief engineer of Zrnith , the 441-line transmission was highly successful.

Successful or not, Zenith was not to televise on a regular schedule. Commodore Eugene F. McDonald, Jr., founder and president of Zenith. felt that television was not ready for the public in 1939 since "even Government tandards are not yet established ." McDonald was himself ahead of his time. In the early 1950s he became one of the country's earliest experimenters in pay-TV, trying out a system ca lled Phone-

Chicago Historica l Society

Commodore Eugene F. McDonald, founder and president of Zenith Corporation . Under his leadership, the company televised the first clear picture in Chicago and experimented with pay-TV.

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Television Town

v1s10n (because it was hooked up to the telephone company and you paid along with the phone bill). He put Phonevision into 300 Chicago households and even solved some problems that look so newfangled nowadays: he scrambled the picture and, when clever viewers foiled him by playing a fan in front of the screen, thus seeing the program for free, he scrambled the sound a lso.

At just about the time that Zenith was experimenting on W9XZV, the Balaban and Katz Corporation, a subsidiary of the Paramount Production and Distribution Company ( Paramount Pictures), also began experimental broadcasts via two Chicago-based stations, one of which, W9XBK, persevered. Balaban and Katz's engineers started with audio signals in October 1940 and added video signals the follow;ng January. In March, W9XBK produced thirteen minutes of televised programmingand then, under the call leters WBKB, went on to become the first Chicago station to meet the Federal Communication Commission's (FCC) requirement of twenty-eight broadcasting hours per week. It also became one of the first six stations in the United States to operate commercially. Other WBKB "firsts," as reported in November 1949 by Broadcasting, include the first telecast "of any consequence" made outside a studio-the Shriner's parade in Chicag<rand the first full-length dramatic production ever telecast in "its entirety, with costume and setting." It was also the first station to introduce theater television. Whether they simply strung cable, we don't know ; as we shall see, their executive, Captain William C. Eddy, was much interested in microwave transmision. Other first telecasts found worthy of mention by Broadcasting include a midnight Mass from the Holy Name Cathedral, an Easter sunrise service from Cook County Hospital, the use in the Midwest of ticker tape in presenting TV news, a baseball telecast from Wrigley Field, an inter-city relay of a golf tournament, a Northwestern University football game, and so on.

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WBKB's achievements in those early years of telecasting are directly relatable to the vision, energy, a nd innovative personality of one manCaptain Eddy. Hired by Balaban and Katz to direct the operation of their television station activity in 1939, Eddy held more than a hundred television, radio, and electronic patentsincluding one for the Eddy Sound Detector, which became standard equipment on American submarines. With the help of A. H. Brolly, the station's chief engineer, Eddy constructed WBKB's first transmitter out of parts from two dismantled police radio stations. Europe was at war, and materials were being allocated mostly for military production. With the entrance of the United States into World War II, Eddy offered the station's and his own services to the navy and subsequently trained more than eighty-six thousand radio and radar technicians in the WBKB facilities at 190 North State Street, the present home of WLS-TV. After the war, Eddy developed an executive training program to provide personnel for television stations throughout the country.

Eddy's main interest, however, was in the creation of networks of television stations that would be served by microwave relays, rather than by American Telephone and Telegraph's ( A TT ) long coaxial cables. Reported the December 17. 1947, issue of Variety: It's understood that Capt. Eddy isn't thinking in trrms of a transcontinental network at this time. His immediate plans seem to envision Chi as the tcle nerve center of some 1 5 states between here and the rast coast. Construction of tele stations in this region is expected to boom because of the comparatively low cost program service that WBKB offers.

Indeed, Captain Eddy had figures to show that microwave service would cost less than half of A TT's leased coaxial cables. He was also convi nced that their central location would make Chicago and WBKB ( Channel 4) the hub of television in this country. Of this, Eddy

Ch icag o H i storica l Society

C hica go H ist orica l Sociely

Capt. William C. Eddy, head of Chicago's first major television station. Somewhat of a psychic as well as inventor, he dreamt that his biplane was defective-which, upon examination, it turned out to be. The photo is a reconstruction of his dream.

Marlin Perkins, curator of the Lincoln Park Zoo and host of "Zoo Parade," with dingo pups.

was certain. But A TT's long-distance cables already existed, which gave it a powerful edge.

Eddy continued his work until the late summer of 1 948. Then he suddenly resigned to take over the leadership of Television Associates, Incorporated, a firm involved in electronic experimentation, consulting, and the manufacture of products developed from Eddy patents. When he was replaced at WBKB by theater manager John Mitchell, rumor had it that Eddy had been forced out because Balaban and Katz's officials were tired of operating in the red.

Within a year, with Eddy's microwave relay network scrapped, \VBKB began to show a profit.

Perhaps WBKB's biggest contribution, after Mitchell's takeover, was in the area of theater television. Balaban and Katz, of course, had a natural tie-in to the motion-picture industry via Paramount Pictures. Barney Balaban, president

of Paramount Pictures, informed his stockholders that the relationship between television and the motion picture must be taken into account, and that Paramount had developed a "system of large screen television which enables us to photograph the image from a television receiver and project it on a large screen within 40 seconds of the occurrence of the event which is portrayed."

To demonstrate Balaban's new system, a premiere Midwest Theatre Television event at the Chicago Theatre was arranged for June r6, 1949. It was also WBKB's eighth anniversary year, so there was much in the way of hoopla and press agentry. "Beautiful blondes, who must be bashful" were sought out to publicize the movie Beautiful Blonde from Bashful Bend, then playing at the Chicago. The Sun-Times held a contest to find out whether Chicago's television sets were a "boon or a bother" to Chicago History

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those who owned them and offered cash prizes for the best letters on the subject. It also ran a special television section celebrating the opening of WBKB's new transmitter on June 15, r 949. The following evening, a three-hour show on the Chicago Theatre's stage played to a capacity audience of citizens and celebrities.

The audience was photographed by television cameras as it entered the lobby-and, as they took their seats, the customers could see themselves on the screen. Variety summed it up: "Anni party was a fat triumph for WBKB." WBKB's plans called for weekly telecasting of the Chicago Theatre's stage show at a budget of $6,500. In addition, Variety reported: Prrsrnt plans call for theatre TV catching major emergencies, spot news, etc., for Chicago Theatre patrons, events important enough to warrant stopping th e program then running. Affairs which can be planned ahead, such as football games, city and federal elections, and major celebrations, will be screened at the State-Lake Theatre, probably after a 1 5-min. time lag to allow processing of Teletranscriptions.

However, while experiments with theater television continued for a time, they eventually subsided and were ultimately shelved when the Paramount Production and Distribution Company announced that, pursuant to a government anti-trust order, it was selling its theater firm, Balaban and Katz. In 1953, WBKB was sold to the Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), which promptly moved the station into the old Chicago Arena on McCiurg Court where it operates today as WBBM-TV. WGN-TV, WENR-TV, and WNBQ-TV all appeared, one after another, in 1948, and Chicago found itself with four major television stations on the air before the FCC "froze" the licensing of new stations. The seeds of the Chicago School of Television had been planted by Captain Eddy, and each of the stations made its contribution. Nevertheless, it took the catalytic leadership of Jules Herbuveaux, who was 112

Chicago History

appointed director of television of NBC's Midwest division in 1948, to bring it into full flower.

With an extensive background in show business and broadcasting, H erbuveaux quickly drew to WNBQ ( Channel 5) a group of creative people who were willing to try anything.

H erbuveaux became their editor, telling them that "you can't make a ten dollar idea out of a two dollar idea. But you can take a ten dollar idea a nd bring it down to a budget in some way and without hurting it too much." Under his leadership, Marlin Perkins, curator of Lincoln Park Zoo, produced "Zoo Parade" ( Perkins still does " Wild Kingdom" ). Don Herbert became " Mr. Wizard," fascinating America's children by taking their scientific questions seriously and performing amazing experiments for them.

Wayne King headed up a musical variety show whose budget, and therefore sets, varied wildly, depending on how much of the sponsor's money they had already spent. Walt Durbahn donned a pair of overalls, sat down at a workbench, and made things in "Walt's Workshop." Robert Breen, a professor of English at Northwestern University, would set the stage for "Short Story Playhouse" by beginning to read and letting a repertory company take it from there, his voice fading back in again at crucial points in the story. " Portrait of America" took you into the homes of Chicagoans with interesting family problems, which they discussed in person-topcrson fashion. Then there was "Five Star Final,'' which closed NBC's Chicago day. It was an hour-long show, playing from 10 to r r P.M., which included weather forecasts, consumer advice, news, sports, and nostalgic piano music. Some of the names still ring a bell: Dorsey Connors, who gave advice to homemakers on the show, is still, at this writing, doing TV commercials in Chicago; Clifton Utley, who did the news, was replaced by his wife Fran when he became ill ( their son Garrick carries on the family tradition for NBC ); and Tom Duggan, who did the sports-

One of the more spectacular experiments performed for young viewers by " Mr. Wizard" (Don Herbert) .

Television Town

casting, stirred up enough controversy to become the Howard Cosell of his time. And the list of programs could go on and on.

Not all the programs worked. There were a few surprising failures, such as "Vic and Sade."

Even though Paul Rhymer continued to write it, it didn't catch on as a seen program. Perhaps the audience already had too clear a mental vision of the characters after hearing them on radio for so many years. On the other hand, "The Quiz Kids," taken over from radio with just as few changes, did well. It transferred around from WNBQ to WBKB and back again, but it stayed on network television, originating from Chicago, from 1949 until the fall of 1956.

The three major contributions to come out of the Chicago School of Television were "Studs' Place," "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," and "Carroway at Large." In all three, one can observe the major elements of the Chicago style at work. As Arch Oboler, the legendary writer and producer of radio's "Lights Out" and other Chicago School of Radio programs, wrote in Theatre Arts in July 1951, "While Hollywood rushes to film, and New York frantically tries to force the theatre through the cathode tube, Chicago alone has recognized a new art form in the television medium." He also observed that "where Chicago radio discovered that the listener was as close to the performer as the microphone was lo the performer . . . so Chicago television underlines a similar truth-that the television viewer is only a handful of feet from the performer," concluding that "Intimacy, again, is the keynote."

"Studs' Place" had that intimacy. Created and "written" by Charlie Andrews, one-time advertising copywriter who later "wrote" "Carroway at Large," it featured four peopleStuds Terkel, blues piano player Chet Roble, folk singer Win Stracke, and actress Beverly Younger as Gracie the waitress-who portrayed essentially themselves. There were no scriptsonly, at most, a two-page outline. The "actors" 114

Chicago History

put plot situations into their own words, making the program a half-hour of real time with no need for flashbacks or pages falling off a calendar to indicate passage of time. Of "Studs' Place," Bill Fay said in Collier's in March 1951 , "No yak. No belly laughs. Just quiet, natural talk from likable people in plausible situations."

"Probably," he observed, "the most true-to-life group of characters extant."

The Chicago School of Television was intimate, improvisational, visual, and happening now. and it also possessed the magic of theater.

Of "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," Jack Gould wrote in January 1949, in the New York Times, "The puppets, manipulated by Burr Tillstrom, arc astonishingly lifelike and informal in their bantering with Miss Allison, who has a knack for treating them as humans yet always keeping her tongue in cheek." Tillstrom, interviewed by Collirr's in 1950, explained: "If I ever plotted exactly what I was going to say or do, Kukla and Ollie wouldn't work for me. They don't like cut-and-dried stuff. Fran wouldn't be able to talk to them, either. After all, you don't need a script when you're talking to your friends."

And, said Fred Allen, "When you sec Kukla, Fran and Ollie come alive on that little screen, you realize you don' t need great big things as we had in radio."

When the show got panned, which happened infrequently, its characters could retaliate.

Philip Hamburger of The New York er reviewed the show unfavorably and complained that it didn"t have enough action, so the one-toothed dragon and his button-nose friend "read" his review to their audience and then proceeded to stage a wrestling match for Hamburger's benefit. Perhaps that was the kind of "action" the ew York critic wanted?

Herbuveaux told Broadcasting in 195 1 that --TV is the most honest thing in the world, and there's no fakery in it. Be honest, put on a good show and the camera will take care of the rest."

Well, perhaps the magic of inspired puppeteering shouldn't be called "fakcry," but there were

Kukla, Fran, and Ollie with Burr Tillstrom. They will all return to Chicago this fall.

Cou rt e sy Noti o na l Broad castin g Company

plenty of shenanigans on Chicago- BC's most famous show of all, "Garraway at Large." The format of the show sounds simple in these days of large productions. It was produced by Ted Mills and had as its first director Don Meier, who later produced "Wild Kingdom." Garroway worked with a rather large cast: vocalists Connie Russell, Betty Chapel, and Jack Haskell; comic Cliff Norton; the Joseph Gallicchio Orchestra; directors Bill Hobin and Bob Banner; and a production crew. The sponsorless Garraway roamed "at large" around NBC's small studio within the Merchandise Mart, tying everything together by discoursing on such ridiculous subjects as "the ruby-polishing industry of Siam" or "the construction of eleven-foot poles for touching people you wouldn't touch with ten-foot poles." Stagehands removed or added scenery behind performers on screen.

Acorns were planted and full-grown oaks appeared within minutes. Baseballs traveling in a series of loops and parabolas swept past the then-awesome Chicago White Sox slugger Eddie Robinson. Then there was the time when, by the use of a "girl multiplier," Garroway's cameraman showed sixty-four simultaneous images of one vocalist. NBC's New York executives demanded an explanation of that one, and the story goes that they were satisfied only when the glass brick through which the picture was taken was delivered for inspection. The truth is that Garroway's production crew included two magicians, Herbuveaux's protestations about "fakery" notwithstanding.

And then, of course, there were simply the inspired stunts that the "Garraway at Large" staff thought up. Cameras focused on other cameras as they photographed the action, or chased each other around the studio, and once Carroway stopped one musical number and had it played backwards, note by note. And always that one wonderful last line-"This program came to you from Chicago, where-" and then anything could, and did happen: for example, ¡'where people can trust each other," and then Chicago History

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Carroway would turn his back to the camera and the ·handle of a dagger would be sticking out of it.

In December 1949, after Variety had called "Carroway at Large" "perhaps the most imaginative show on the air at the moment," contracts were signed for sponsorship by Congoleum Nairn, Incorporated- a floor and wall-covering firm. With a nationwide audience near three and a half million, the series' eight-month-long wait for a sponsor had been a surprise to many.

Some had feared that Garroway's approach might be too unconventional for the "average viewer," but with the signing of the contract such fears were laid to rest.

Not for long, however. Throughout 1950, as television became more and more of a commercial success, rumors about the stability of the Chicago School began flying. It was doubted whether the network would continue to allow its biggest programs to originate in Chicago. In April 1951, it even appeared doubtful that Congoleum would renew its sponsorship of "Carroway at Large." Popular as the program had become, it was losing its New York audience; at the very same time, ironically, the other ten network centers-the stations across the country that were hooked up for "live" telecasting-wanted more money for the show: an increase from $12,000 to $18,500 a week because it was so popular in the rest of the country. Congoleum hesitated and NBC stepped in and took the time-Sunday evenings, 9 to 9: 30- away. Variety reported the event on May 16, 1951 : " 'Kick in Teeth' to Chi Seen in Grab of Carroway Time," but nothing could be done about it. Armour Foods thought about picking up the series and showing it on Wed nesday evening, but television was not yet geared to seasonal advertising: films were cycled from the eleven network centers to forty-seven local stations for rebroadcast, so that Armour's Easter hams might well have been advertised on a local station in August, which didn't make sense.

Carroway ultimately moved to New York where

he originated NBC's "Today" series and, in 1953, he revived his old program under the title "The Dave Carroway Show." It had a sponsor, and much the same crew, but its revival was short-lived. The good years for the program had been left behind in Chicago.

Perhaps the best explanation for the shortness of the happy life of the Chicago School of Television appeared in Time magazine in the fall of 1951: Most of the advertising agencies who pay TV's biggest bills have headquarters in New York; with large sums at stake, they prefer to have their programs produced and staged close at hand where they can krC'p a firm finger in the pie. And Manhattan, with big salaries and amp le studio facilities to offer, can usually lure the talent it wants.

By 1954, the Chicago School of Television was so thoroughly licked that Variety summed up the situation as follows: Back in radio's more bounteous days there used to be a Aip retort by some of the more candid, success[ u I broadcasters which read something like this: "Gi\·e me six hustling salesmen and who needs a program director?" If such is the badge of succrss and maturity then television, Chi style at least, has arrived."

Except for the fact that Chicago always was, and still is, a good center for sales, there is no commercial television to distinguish this city from any American city you can name, as long as you don't name New York or Los Angeles, where most TV network programs now originate.

The only news lately is that NBC is bringing "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" back to Chicago this September. Burr Tillstrom will again "work" the puppets and Fran Allison will again be their hostess. The prize-winning program garnered the Peabody A ward and several Emmys during its former career. Let's see what it does back home when this program· again comes to you from Chicago where-anything can happen?

Chicago History

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Fifty Years Ago

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

1925 June 5. Albert D. Lasker, former chairman of the U.S. Shipping Board and head of the Lord & Thomas advertising agency, sells most of his stock in the Chicago Cubs to William Wrigley, Jr., leaving Wrigley the owner of 75 percent of the team.

June 6. In an apparent challenge to the Committee to Enforce the Landis A ward, the Building Trades Council informs the city's architects and contractors that henceforth work must be done by union men only. The Committee has been running its own employment agency since Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis' settlement of the general building strike in 1921, which provided for arbitration of all labor disputes and forbade all strikes, in effect returning the open shop to the building trades.

June 10. Cardinal Mundelein forbids church rites for slain beer runner Walter O'Donnell in what is construed as a stand against sanctification of lavish mob funerals. Decisions on such rites were formerly handled by parish priests.

William Wrigley, Jr. (right), who became majority owner of the Cubs on June 5, at Cubs Park with Albert D. Lasker and Mrs. Fred Upham .

June 17. Over two hundred heavily armed policemen conduct an unsuccessful search for a gunman believed to have taken refuge in Chicago's freight tunnel. The man is thought to be the last member of the Genna gang, who killed two policemen four days ago in a shootout that prompted Chief of Police Morgan A. Collins to declare, "We have reached a time when a policeman had better throw a couple of bullets into a man first and ask questions afterward."

June 24. On the grounds that Cook County deserves five more seats in the Illinois state legislature, which hasn't been redistricted since 1 go 1, the City Council unanimously votes for the secession of Cook County and the formation of a State of Chicago. Earlier in the month, the county's Board of Commissioners voted to withhold tax money from the state, claiming that Cook County pays over $35,000,000 more in taxes than the rest of Illinois combined.

June 28. Capt. Marie Frawley, commander of a squad of nineteen plaincloth~swomen who have been patrolling the Lincoln Park beaches, claims that both sexes need protec-

tion at the beach. Originally formed to discourage "mashers," the unit has become aware of women in "too short bathing suits" who "invite the leers of low-minded men."

July 3. "A municipal housecleaning by a woman mayor" is the slogan of School Board member Johanna A. Gregg as she announces her quest for the Republican nomination. Men "have lacked the stamina and moral courage to repel the ever-encroaching demon of graft," she declares, and "cannot be depended upon to exterminate the social vipers who poison the streams of public virtue."

July 4. According to the "most efficient and observant picnic grove reporters," Chicagoans have plenty of good beer to help them celebrate today's holiday. The price of alcohol is now so high that some bootleggers are importing European beer instead.

July 1 1. WGN is granted the exclusive right to broadcast the Scopes evolution trial in Dayton, Tenn., the first trial ever on radio, and Judge John T. Raulston alters the layout of the courtroom to allow the microphones to pick up all remarks.

The most crowded sections of Chicago are Chicago History

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50 Years Ago

losing population, according to a study done at the municipal reference library. An earlier study has indicated that almost nine thousand people are leaving the city altogether each year for the suburbs, a rate exceeded only in New York and Boston.

The Chicago Tribune lashes out at a proposed equal rights amendment to the Constitution, stating that it "ignores the facts of women's nature" and embodies "a theory of equality which can never be reached." Members of the Women's National Party who are lobbying for the amendment are branded "a small ... and somewhat abnormal minority."

July 12. The Illinois Manufacturers' Association denounces the numerous fees paid by Chicago businesses and warns that many companies will leave the city if the City Council continues to demand license or inspection fees for ventilating systems, fire escapes, revolving doors, and other building features.

July 1 7. Opening ceremonies are scheduled for Liberia, a black city to be established just east of Joliet, but local white property owners claim they have a temporary lease on the town site and have hired deputies to keep the newcomers off the land.

July 18. The largely Protestant town of Area changes¡ its name to Mundelein in honor of the Cardinal's earlier establishment of St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, which has brought economic prosperity to the town. In turn, Cardinal Mundelein presents the town with a fire engine.

July 25. Thirteen federal agents use crowbars to open lockers inside former Mayor "Big Bill" Thompson's Fish Fans' Club, located in a boat moored in Belmont Harbor and recently refurbished with city money, and find that nearly every locker contains liquor.

Illinois Prohibition Director Percy B. Owen, ex-director Ralph W. Stone, and seven others are indicted in Chicago's sacramental wine scandal. Owen is charged with extorting 120

Ch icago History

$200,000 from wme dealers; the others are charged with extortion and illegal possession and transportation of wine.

July 26. Bill Tilden defeats Bill Johnston to capture the Illinois state tennis championship at Skokie Count1y Club in Glencoe before 7,500 spectators, by far the largest tennis audience yet in the Chicago area. Charlotte Hosmer defeats Helen Jacobs to win the women's title.

July 28. The Grain Marketing Company, the largest farmers' cooperative ever, is out of business. The company, capitalized at $4,000,000 last year by four large grain handlers, failed to sell enough stock to its farmer members.

Aug. 1. The Cemetery Employees' Union, the nation's first, is chartered by the American Federation of Labor in Chicago. The thousand-member union includes grave diggers, caretakers, attendants, and "all others who labor in the cities of the dead." Cemetery workers currently earn from $4. 75 to $5-40 for a nine-and-a-half-hour day.

Negotiations for purchase of the first 600 acres of the new Dunes Park in Porter County, Indiana, have been completed; the remaining goo acres will be acquired by condemnation.

The entire tract, which includes three miles of lakeshore, will cost about $525,000.

Aug. 5. Movies around town this week include D. W. Griffith's Sally of the Sawdust, with Carol Dempster and W. C. Fields; The Naked Truth (for adults 21 and over); The Desert Flower, with Colleen Moore; Not So Long Ago, with Betty Bronson and Ricardo Cortez; Manhattan Madness, with Jack Dempsey and Estelle Taylor; and The Manicure Girl, with Bebe Daniels.

On stage are the Duncan Sisters in Topsy & Eva, Shirley Booth in Laff That Off!, James Spottswood and Wanda Lyon in The Lady Next Door, and The Cat and the Canary, "with a great cast." Comedian Ben Blue is at the State-Lake, and Aunt Jemima at the

St. Mary of the Lake Seminary, the reason the town was renamed Mundelein on July 18.

"Big Bill" Thompson's Fish Fans' Club in Belmont Harbor.

On July 25, the members were found to be well fortified .

Doily News Collection Chicago Historical Society

Do,ty News Co!lecrion Chicago Historical Society

50 Years Ago

Palace. At Ravinia this week: Lakme, with Tito Schipa; Manon, with Lucrezia Bori; Madam Butterfly; The Mask ed Ball; Barber of Seville; Rigoletto; and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra with violin soloist Jacques Gordon.

Aug. g. AFL President William Green warns black union members not to attend the American Negro Labor Congress, to be held in Chicago on Oct. 25, alleging that it is being organized by Communists. "Communism in America is comparable to the boll weevil in the cotton fields," states Green, warning that the organizers, "who work under the direction of Moscow," will use the meeting to arouse racial hatred.

Aug. 13. A search of Col. Will Gray Beach's Atlantic Hotel apartment and Rush St. warehouse yields a myriad of treasures: a $5,000 jeweled jade opium pipe, a gold-plated syringe, a topaz necklace, a new white gold watch, bottles of fine whiskey, six stacks of cocaine, a bundle of obscene photos, and other interesting items. Col. Beach, chief agent for the federal narcotics division in northern Illinois, and three of his assistants were arrested three days ago in what federal authorities called "the biggest exposure of a dope ,:ing ever made in the United States."

Aug. 15. Over 75,000 attend Chicago's first rodeo, held in Grant Park stadium. On hand to witness the broncho riding and calf roping arc Vice-President Dawes and Chauncey McCormick, a director of the Anti-Cruelty Society, who is loudly applauded as he enters on horseback.

Bill Tilden , tennis ace who won the Illinois men's state championship on July 26 .

Da ily N ews Col lec tion Chicago H is torica l Soc ie ty

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Chicago History

Doily News Collec ti on C hicago H is to ri cal Society

Col. Will Gray Beach (center), federal narcotics agent, needed his own lawyers on Aug. 13.

Max Mason, named president of the University of Chicago on Aug . 18, at his inauguration.

Doily News Collection Chica go Historical Societv

Aug. 18. Max Mason, professor of mathematical physics at the University of Wisconsin, is named president of the University of Chicago, succeeding the late Ernest DeWitt Burton, who died in May. Dr. Mason, the first nonfaculty member to become president of the university, is the inventor of the Mason hydrophone, which was used to detect submarines during World War I.

Aug. 19. Victor F. Lawson, editor and publisher of the Chicago Daily N ews, dies at age 74.

Lawson, a founder of the Associated Press, purchased the paper in 1876 and also published the Record-Herald until 1914.

Aug. 24. Standard Oil of Indiana cuts its price from 21 ¢ to 19¢ a gallon to meet competition from cheap and allegedly inferior gasoline which is flooding the Midwest.

Aug. 28. Federal officials in Chicago issue warrants for five men, including Chicago exbarber Jacob Factor, for a million-and-ahalf-dollar swindle in Florida land. Many Chicagoans who bought land have found their property under water.

Aug. 31. Babe Ruth arrives in Chicago to appeal to Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, but finds him on vacation in Michigan. Yankee manager Miller Huggins has suspended Ruth and fined him $5,000 for "conduct unbecoming a national h ero," reportedly including late-night orgies with wine and women. Since the slugger earns $52,000 a year, it appears unlikely that he will be traded.

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Books Personalizing Chicago's History about local political history and you're bound to be regaled with stories about colorful heroes and villains. Judging by these four books, Chicago's history continues to be tied to individual personalities. Herc we have Mathewson's independent precinct worker; Adelman's Saul Alinsky, the inspirational leader of community organizers; and Knauss' Jesse Jackson. The title of Mathewson's book, Up Against Daley, sums them up best because, like so many books about Chicago's politics, these focus either on Daley's success or the failure of his opponents.

The explanation of Daley's success is best handled

by Len O'Connor in Clout: Mayor Daley and His City . O'Connor understands Illinois and national politics enough to know that a mayor who would gain control of Chicago must possess more than the chairmanship of the Cook County Democratic Party.

He must a lso have some control over the governor's office and the state legislature ( before 1970, power over municipa lities was vested in the legislature), must control the Cook County Board ( which has power to zone and fund), and must be able to exert power on the national level ( a significant portion of the city budget is federal money). O'Connor has taken the time to analyze Mayor Daley's power in these various political arenas, and it is this understanding that makes Clout stand out from the rest.

Like all good books on successful political figures, Clout provides the student of political life with helpful hints for political survival: ASK ANY CHICAGOAN

The unwavering loyalty of one's personal associates is the requirement in Chicago for gaining power and keeping it.

Outmanned in the number of jobs he has available, the Mayor_of Chicago is nonetheless a more powerful figure than the goYernor because the political impact of the smaller number of jobs in a smaller area is much greater than the impact of the larger number that has to be spread over the entire state.

While Clout puts us a step ahead in our understanding of Mayor Daley's ability to gain and hold power, Peter Knauss' book Chicago: A One Party State is a step backwards. It is a poorly organized,

C/011/: Mayor Daley and His City, by Len O'Connor, Regnery, 1975, 10; Chicago: A One-Party State, by Peter R. Knauss, Stipes Publishing Company, 1974, 3.95 (paperback); Up Against Daley: The New Politics in lllinois, by Joe Mathewson, Open Court, 1974, $9.95; No l .oaves, No Parables: Liberal Politics and the A merican Language, by Clifford Adelman, Harper's Magazine Press, 1974, $7 .95 .

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poorly researched, poorly written, and even poorly typeset book. Knauss begins by stating the hypothesis that: Ch icago and Cook County, Illinois, is a virtual "oneparty state." In firm alliance with big business and big (local) labor, the Catholic hierarchy and the Black "sub-machine," the local mass media and the upper levels of the university, health and welfare bureaucracy of the ciry and county, and sometimes in covert alliance with a supplicant Republican Party, the Regular Organization of Democratic Party of Cook County still decisively control "who gets what, when and how" in Chicago in 1974.

For proof, Knauss relics on vignettes, articles from Chicago nrwspaprrs, and information taken from term papers written by his students at the University of Illinois.

One of Knauss' hypotheses is that the killings of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark in 1969 will lead to Mayor Daley's downfall because it sparked the emergence of the black anti-Daley vote. However, he damages his ability to prove his possibly worthwhile hypotheses by submrrging his evidence under rhetoric.

Although the book brings together interesting political stories and case histories, the limitations of the ana lysis that surround these case studies seriously damage the book's value.

In Joe Mathewson's book Up Against Daley, his heroes hold center stage. They are the people who have represented the opposition to the Mayor for the past twenty years or so--leaders such as Robert Merriam, Paul Douglas, Adlai Steven on III, Bill Singer, Dick Simpson, and Dan Walker, and also followers such as precinct worker Zina Berman. Together they makr up what Mathewson calls the third force in politics: Sometimes between the two major parties, sometimes to the left of them, this force is bringing new blood and new vitalit} into politics and government in Chicago and Cook County .. . . This third force can be adapted to local or state-wide conditions anywhere in the country. In the next few years, as trends towards political independence and ticket-splitting grow, the third force may hecome a greater force 1han the parties.

Mathewson, who has been a television rcpo~ter and a press secretary to former governor Richard Ogilvie, carries the reader through some of the major anti-Daley campaigns with an easy style that mixes storytelling and useful facts about the Illinois political system. In this book, Daley is not a villain, as one might expect, but rather a highly pragmatic politician who has the ability to beat those who oppose him.

The difficulty of sustaining a strong independent movement in Chicago is made inescapable. Any independent political movement needs issues that can set it apart from the regular parties, strong charismatic leaders who have organizational ability and who can arbitrate among many factions, and an army of ward and precinct workers. In Chicago, it must also be

mad e :.ip of peopl e wh o can survive frequent defeats and lead ers who can mainta in th eir independence once th ey a re elected.

Th e story that Mathpwson tells of the Chicago independ ent movement is one of strong but temporary orga niza ti ons, glorious but oft en short-lived success, a nd leaders wh o sometim es tire of th e constant uphill ba ttl e a nd sometim es defec t. H e pa rticul a rly mourns Adl ai Stevenson Ill's alliance with M ayor D aley during S tevenson's campaign for th e U.S. Senate, seeing it as the loss of the only chance the independents had for mounting a m ajor anti-Daley ca ndid a te.

C lifford Adelma n, in N o L oaves, No Parables, not only tri es to explain why the libera l m ovement fails in C hi cago but why it fail s everywh ere. The book begins with Adelman walking th e Chicago area streets on behalf of Euge ne M cCa rthy in th e spring of 1968 and ca rri <.'s us through the cru shin g d C'fcat of G eorge M cGo vern . His heroes, peo pl e like Jimmy Breslin and Norm an M ailer, exercise wh at Adelman believes is la rgely a los t art in liberal poli tics-th e ability to spea k a la nguage that th e voting majority will understand. They a rc cha mpi ons of straight fo rwa rd liberal language who foll ow cl osely th e political philosophy of anoth er of his heroes, Saul Alinsky. Adclman's th esis on politica l language is summ arized in a quote from Alinsky's Rules for Radicals: An organizer can communicate onl y within th e areas of experience of his audi ence; otherwise there is no communica tion .. . . He learns the local legends, an ecdotes, values, idioms . .. . H e refrains from rhetoric foreign to th e local culture . . . . He should search for and use th e wrong reasons to ac hi eve the right goals . . . to use irrationality in his a ttempts to progress tow ards a rati onal world . . . yo u don't communicate with an yone purely on th e rati onal facts or ethics of an issue.

Ad elm an believes th at George M cGovern 's campa ign falt ered beca use of th e inability of th e ca ndida te to explain himself in a cl ea r and acceptable wa y to th e pO[!llllacc.

These four books, whi ch recount history through the acti ons of politica l figures, m ake interesting reading.

H owever, th eir perspec tive is too limited. Such personalizC'd history pl aces too mu ch emphasis on the poli tica l procC'ss and its actors, and too little on the und erlying iss ues. It traps us into trying to und erstand the cha rac ter of the cit y through th e chara cter of its politi ca l leaders. True, th ey may refl ect that la rge r cha ra cter- but not always and not co mpl etely -and to impl y tha t th ey do is a disservi ce to th e people of Chicago. Moreover, to attempt to view C hi cago's politica l history from th C' perspective of individua l personalities without th e coo peration of thC' politi ca l fig ure wh o has domin a ted it for the past twrnty-five years is a lmos t se lf-defe a ting. U ntil Ri chard J. Da ley is willing to pa rti ci pate in thr historical a na lys is, it will rema in a gurss ing ga me.

Laurence Hall Lau rence Hall is associ ate dea n at th e School of Social Servi ce Administrati on of th e L' nivcrsity of Chicago.

Books for Regional and Local Travelers Tw s E SSAY will treat the books in the order listed

below, sta rting with the largest, the Grea t Lakes a rea, and endin g with the sma llest, the Chicago Loo p. The first is a desc riptive work and the last is little m ore than a list: th ey a re not guidebooks, like so me of th e ot hers, but th ey are of interes t to travelers.

L and of th e Inland S eas is an evocative work whi ch desc ribes th e geology, clima te, history, and present cha racter of tha t la rge area whi ch is the watershed of th e Great Lakes and their outlet to th e ocean, the St. Law rence River. The description of th e geologic bac kground is good, but it would have been better had th e illustrations and text been better rela ted. An r xa mpl c showing rid ges res ulting from th e lowerin g of L ake Michiga n ove r th e ages might have been more meaningful if it had been shown, or even sta tr d, that the fo rm a tion of this kind of ridge continues und er th e present water. A nice color photogra ph of miscell aneous-sized bould ers and p ebbles on th e wate r's edge cannot be described as exciting a nd shows only one small aspect of glacier action.

T oo much space is devoted to th e history- to the Indians, th e French, th e British, th e Americans, and th r im migrants-whi ch eventually m ade the a rea the conglomr ra tion it now is. It is a handsome book with a grrat dea l of information, but it leaves all sorts of qu es ti ons un answered and is hardl y worth the effort fo r a kn owl edgeabl e inhabitant .

Fodor's Mid-W est: Ohio, Illinois, Wis consin, Indiana, Minn esota, Michigan, I owa, is one of those nuts and bolts guid es, with no washers, tha t tells you m os tly about wh ere to eat and sleep. It givC's little inform ati on about what to do and see except what th r loca l travel bureau or commerce assoc ia tion wants you to see. Even so, wh en using hotels and motels, a cha in is usu ally a better choice than picking a new one every night. The sta te parks for campers

Land of the Inland Seas: The Historic and Beautiful Great Lakes Country, by William Donohue Ellis, Ameri can West, 1974, $20-00; Fodor's Mid-West, eds. Eugene Fodor, Stephen Birnbaum, and Robert Fisher, McKay, 1974, $4.95 (paperback) ; Doing the Dunes, by Jean Komaiko and Norma Schaeffer, Dunes Enterprises, r 974, $2.50 (paperback); Illinois: a Descriptive and Histo rical Guide, New rev. ed ., ed. Harry Hansen, Hastings House, 1974, $12.95 ; Land between the Rivers: The Southern Illinois Country, by William Horrell, Henry Dan Piper, and John W. Voight, Southern Illinois University Press, 1974, $18.95; Growing up in Goose Lake, by William S. Miller, Open Lands Ptoject, 1974, $3 .95 (paperback); Evanston Architecture, Evanston Planning Department, 1974, Sr .oo; Chicago Landmark Structures: an Inventory, Loop Area, Landmarks Preservation Council and Service, 1974, $3.50 (paperback).

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Books

arc only sporadically listed and described, and eating is completely without adventure. For anyone to travel through southern Michigan and not stop at a single one of the small but excellent chain of Win Schuler restaurants seems almost ridiculous. The scale of price ranges-expensive, moderate, and so forthseems based on the penury of the classifiers. From my own experience, I can say that their "expensive" is the next person's "moderate." Alma, Michigan, the rcvic\\'ers' home town, is listed as a place to stay.

It is perhaps a good overnight stop for a traveler from Columbus, Ohio, headed for Mackinac Island, Michigan, but Alma certainly holds little interest for the ordinary traveler. So this guide fails on several levels, not least on seasonal events which arc easily missed by the casual visitor. The first that comes to mind is a visit to the Horicon Reservation in Wisconsin in late October, when the geese are there in the thousands-sensational.

Subtitled What to Do and See from Lake Michigan to the Kankakee, Doing the Dunes is a guidebook for the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and the vicinity within a hour's drive of it. It is essentially a daytime guide with little about where to stay, except for a few campgrounds. It is a little too inclusive: cemeteries and golf courses can be accepted, but movie houses? A local newspaper or the Yell ow Pages would seem more appropriate. Despite the authors' disclaimers in the Preface of "prejudice and prefrrence," they list antique shops in quantity, but not a single one of several interesting secondhand book stores.

The new edition of Illinois is a welcome updating of one of the best products of the Federal Writers Project of the late 1930s. Though a similar work was clone for the Illinois sesquicentennial, anyone used to earlier editions can only be pleased with this familiar format. The book is basically historical in orientation, and it has little information on where to eat and stay overnight. Tours, mostly starting from the Chicago arra, are interesting and detailed, and highway information is well updated. There are a few lapses which make one slightly apprehensive for the tourist -Cass Street, for example, has been Wabash Avenue long enough to be recognized as such.

T he Land between the Rivers is a reprinting of a handsome publication issued in 1973, which the Southern Illinois Un iversity Press allowed to go out of print in a disgracefully short time. We congratulate the Southern Illinois University Centennial Publications Editorial Board for choosing to reprint it and so repairing the situation. It is not a guid ebook, but rather a won derful expository description of the 126

Chicago History

area with a great many photographs that expand the text. The history is incidental and helpful, and the authors do not omit the unhappy and unpretty things that have happened or are now happening in the arra. The past travails of Williamson County mining wars and bootlegging have not been ignored, nor has thr present practice of strip mining. Illinois law now rC'quirrs the rehabilitation of strip mining residue arras, so one can have hope for the ruined areas.

NC'v<'rth<'lcss, there is still a great deal of unspoiled and intrresting country to be seen in southern Illinois.

This useful volume should go with you when you visit the region.

Grtting closer to home we have, from Open Lands, Jnr., a prime mover in making Goose Lake, south of !lforris, Grundy County, Illinois, into a state park, a nostalgic remembrance of a former resident, cal!C'd Growing up in Goose Lake. As a child at the turn of the century, the author lived on a farm bordering thr lake. He recalls many of the activitirs of farm life when horsepower meant horses: early experinwnts in crop rotation, animal husbandry, the major tasks of harvesting, which took group endeavor and, of course, the home garden and orchards that produr<'d nearly everything needed for the home table.

TTr also writes of the one-room schoolhouse and rural rC'rrcation. There is not much about the lake rxcept that his grandfather, father, and brother, who all worked the farm, left some of the farmland in its original state. Never having been plowed, it can still bC' called prairie, and that is what the park is all about. It is amazing that the farmers around the small lake left it alone and that unspoiled prairie is still there to be looked at more than a hundred yrars a ftcr intense agricultural activity started in the area.

The Evanston Planning Department has put togrthcr a small pamphlet detailing three tours of Evanston Architecture. All of the tours are of interest. Short enough to be walking tours, they can also be made by car. The more interesting buildings are illustrated and described. Many other buildings are list<'d, and details-such as architect, style, whm built, occupants, or name of person for whom the house was built-are given, when known. Covered hrre is a tour of a medley of architectural styles in th(' eastern part of the city, another tour of Prairie School architecture to the west of Ridge Avenue, and a tour of churches which are mainly clustered between downtown Evanston and the campus of Northwestern University. It is a model of ,vhat such booklets should be, small enough to slip in the pocket and containing excellent maps and good illustrations. The planning department is continuing its study of architecture in Evanston and preliminary reports on other areas have been prepared. It is hoped that these studies will res ult in similar tour guides.

Finally, there is yet another publication on the buildings of the Chicago Loop area. This is intended to be the first of a series of booklets on Chicago landmark buildings to be issued by the Landmarks Preservation Council and Service and is titled Chicago Landmark Structures: An Inventory, Loop Area. It is a listing of buildings with descriptions of what the counci l calls "premier landmarks," with short descriptions and illustrations of intcrc ting facades and interiors. A second listing, of "other select landmarks," . gives salient information about arch itects and dates of construction. This is not a guidebook at a ll , but rather a polemic designed to goad the city into acting to preserve most or all of these buildings from the wrecker's ball. Some of the buildings are already under the protection of the Commission of Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks, and others arc on its agenda, but no such statements are' made. The format chosen matches the public docum ent called Chicago 21, which makes it awkward to handle. A smaller format with a tour arrang<'mcnt would have broader appeal.

Grant T. Dean

Considering the cost of books today, thC'sf' arc bargains. However, neither is a true mu icological study.

The Ch icago Symphony also nerds a cholarly book written by a historian of the orchestra, one comparable to Philharmonic: A History of New York's Orchestra. Couldn't John S. Edwards, the manag<'r of our own great orchestra, write a simi lar study?

Polly Hutchins

The Town of Pullman, Rev. ed.

by Mrs. Duane Doty Pullman Civic Organization, 1974. $10-00 cloth; $5.00 paperback.

A Summary of Information on the South Pullman District Commission on Chica.go Historic and Architectural Landmarks, 1972. $1.00.

Macmillan, 1974. $12.95.

aficionado, Mrs. Doty, a residC'nt "since the town was founded," provides a description of the social and economic features of nineteenth-century Pullman as well as the physical features. This facsimile of her 1893 history is supplemented by a new series of illustrations prC'parC'd by Charles Simmons and CHS photographer Paul Pctraitis. The series of twenty-four J. W. Taylor photographs from the Art Institute libra ry's collection is reproduced in its entirety . Everything is arranged in alphabetical order for handy reference. Appendices to this edition include biographical sketches of the designers of Pullman, architect Solon Beman and landscape arch itect Nathan Barrett.

A forty -four page monograph, A Summary of Information on the South Pullman District, provides a good background for seeing and appreciating Pullman "as a living study of orderly town planning, well thought out architectural scale and continuity and ... a distinctive cohesive urban community." It contains historical background, many photographs and descriptions of residential, commercial, and public buildings, and a selected bibliography.

Mary Dawson

The Chicago Symphony Orchestra

by Thomas Willis; photographs by Robert M. Lightfoot

Strange Adventures of the Great Lakes

by Dwight Boyer

Grant T. Dean is assistant librarian of the Chicago Historical Society and has resided in Michigan and Illinois most of his Jjfe. He is a habitual user of guidebooks and maps, and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Commission on Chicago Historical and Architectural Landmarks.

Brief Reports Season with Solti: A Year in the Life of the Chicago Symphony

by William Barry Furlong

Rand Mc ally, 1974.$12.95.

HERE ARE TWO books, long overdue, which complement each other-two musts: The Chicago Symphony Orrhestra with text by Thomas Willis and photographs by Robert M. Lightfoot, who has worked with the symphony for seven years, and Season with So/ti by William Barry Furlong.

Although found on the non-fiction shelves, Season with So/ti reads like a novel. Even those who are not interested in classical music will be enchanted by Furlong's description of each musician, and of Solti who, with his warm personality and charm, commands great respect from his 1 1 o colleagues. The Willis-Lightfoot book, with its lifelike photographs, gives a true picture of the <'Veryday life of the players, their disciplines, dedication, and devotion. It brings the orchestra to you, is attractively put together, and is a beautiful "coffee table book" that would be hard to duplicate. My on ly criticism is that Mr. Willis did not write more.

FOR THE REAL PULLMAN

Dodd, Mead & Co., 1974. S7.95. volume is better than it reads. The uninspired text-cluttered by cliches, slowed by repetition, and burdened by a wealth of adjectives-nonetheless contains nautical folklore of interest and even some charm. ,,Vindy but \\'Orth while.

A. A. Dornfeld THIS PAINSTAKINGLY RESEARCHED

Chicago's Spanish-Speaking Population: Selected Statistics Department of Development and Planning, City of Chicago, 1973. Free.

PUBLISHED IN BOTH English and Spanish, this collection of statistics supplies much-needed information about the origins, socio-economic characteristics, and geographical distribution of the 247,000 Chicagoans who make up the nation's fourth largest-and most diverse-Latino population. Although the group's diversity is masked by the label "Spanish-

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THE CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Books

Clark Street at North Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614 speaking," the volume is a welcome indication of the city's growing awareness of its Latino residents and should prove useful to concerned agencies and inter<'Sted citizens alike.

Louise A. Kerr

In the City of Men: Another Story of Chicago

by Kenny J. Williams Townsend Press, 1974. S12.50.

IT's A PITY that this well-res!'arched volume on the development of Chicago Kultur is so dull. Dr. Williams uses architect Louis Sullivan and writer Henry B. Fuller as prime examples of how Chicago's unique position as a prairie metropolis influenced the growth of the arts. Her account, however, is very unevensometimes racing through the history of an era only to later spend pages belaboring a single point. The abundant use of excerpted material, while at times interesting, makes the book read like a college term paper. Except for a superb bibliography, City of Men is not for beginners wishing a history of Chicago.

Frederick J. Nachman

Treasures of America and Where to Find Them by the editors of the Reader's Digest Pleasantville, New York, 1974. S11.97. only by armchair this compilation might be of interest, but it can only frustrate those in motion. The United States is divided into nine major areas. Illinois is split up and treated within three of these regions, but even within a region there does not appear to be any systematic arrangement.

Though the book is heavily indexed, you will have to know what you are looking for in order to find it.

The category "Marine museums" does not list Mystic Seaport in Connecticut, for example, though an illustration on the dust jacket came from there.

Grant T. Dean IF YOU TRAVEL

A Self Guided Loop Hiking Trail to the Chicago Portage National Historic Site Illinois Country Hiking Guide, 1973, $ .95.

Illinois Country Canoe Trails Illinois Country Outdoor Guides, 1974, $1.25.

Starved Rock Trails: A Hiker's Guide to the Trails, Geology, and Botany of Starved Rock All by Philip E. Vierling

Telephone: Michigan 2-4600

OFFICERS Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, ut Vice-President James R. Getz, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stem, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary DIRECTOR Harold K. Skramstad, Jr.

TRUSTEES Bowen Blair Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon James R. Getz Philip W. Hummer Willard L. King Andrew McNally m Mrs. C. Phillip Miller

Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Gilbert H. Scnl>ner, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Hermon Dunlap Smith Gardner H. Stem Theodore Tieken Mrs. Philip K. Wrigley

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 dues are as follows: Annual, 15 a year; Life, 250 (one payment); Governing Life, 500 (one payment); and Patron, 1000 (one payment) Members receive the Society's magazine, Chacago History, invitations to all special functions held by the Society, and periodic notice of new exhibitions.

Members and their immediate families are admitted free to the mweum at all times.

Illinois Country Outdoor Guides, 1974, $1.50. paper-covered pamphlets will be of interest only to enthusiasts. They are unattractive and often read like technical manuals. Mr. Vierling does, however, explain clearly how to get from point A to point B and has packed his texts with a great deal of historical and natural science information. If you are a nature buff, stuff one of them into your knapsack.

Neal J. Ney THESE THREE SMALL

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Chicago History

SUBSCRIPTIONS Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are 2.25 by mail, 2 at newaatands and bookshopa.

Subscriptions are Io for 4 iaaues.

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