Chicago History | Fall 1981

The Chicago Historical Societys 125th Anniversary Issue

Members of the Chicago Historical Society photographed by Alexander Hesler in 1858, two years after its founding. Top row : Van H. Higgins, Benjamin F. Carver, Cyrus Bentley, Robert H. Clarkson , Luther Haven , Thomas Hoyne, Horatio G. Loomis , John Harris Kinzie, Gustav Unonius, George Manierre, George F. Rumsey, Edward I. Tinkham . Bottom row : Samuel D. Ward , Isaac H. Burch , William Barry, William H. Brown,1John M. Wilson , Franklin Scammon, Jonathan Burr, Dr. John H. Foster, Samuel Stone. CHS, gift of Gustav Unonius.

Dear Members: With this issue, the Chicago Historical Society celebrates 125 years of its own history. While much has changed in the Society since 1856, its essential purpose remains the same. The original twelve members have become almost five thousand.

The Society, privately endowed and supported, remains an independent institution, but one that serves a much broader public. Above all, now as then, the impetus comes from a deep respect for the importance of preserving and understanding our past.

Theodore Tieken President

Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Fall 1981 VOLUME x, NUMBER 3

Fannia Weingartner Editor Gail Farr Casterline Associate Editor Roberta Casey Editorial Assistant Karen Kohn Designer

CONTENTS 130

To Be the Central City: Chicago, 1848-1857

by William J. Cronon

141

The Pursuit of Culture: Founding the Chicago Historical Society, 1856

by Byron York

151

The Collections

Walter W. Krutz Paul W. Petraitis Photography

Cover: Chicago in 1857, from a lithograph by Charles Inger after a drawing by I. T. Palmatary, published by Braunhold & Sonne, Chicago. See page 130. CHS.

Copyright 1981 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historica l Abstracts and America: History and Life

152

Architectural

155

Costume

158

Decorative Arts

161

Graphics

164

Paintings and Sculpture

167

Manuscripts

170

Printed

173

Special

176

Washington's Farewell Address: An Eighteenth-Century "Fireside Chat"

by Garry Wills

180

Directions for American Historical Societies

by Richard Rabinowitz and Sam Bass Warner, Jr.

184

Education and Public Programs

187

Publications

190

The Society: Preserving and Interpreting the Past

To Be the Central City: Chicago, 1848-1857

By William J. Cronon

"This history [of Chicago Jwill be the history of one of the most remarkable facts in the growth of communities) which our nation, perhaps the world)furnished. )) Chicago Magazine, March 7857

IF ANY SINGLE YEAR can be said to mark the end of Chicago's existence as an outpost of the frontier, that year is 1848. To set such a date does not mean that the place suddenly became "urban" in that year, since with 20,000 inhabitants it was already the largest town in Illinois, having displaced Galena from that position around 1842. It was the major port of Lake Michigan, and served as home for several major manufacturers. The distribution of wealth within the town was so skewed-with the top one percent of the population owning over half the city's wealth-that it surpassed much older cities such as New York for inequality. Yet Chicago was far from having left all of its frontier trappings behind : most of the streets were still unpaved, filled during wet months with famously unplumbable mud. Even where planking had been laid down, it could scarcely conceal the pools of standing water which at times covered nearly three-fourths of the city's area. Drainage was virtually non-existent, so that sewers which emptied directly into the streets joined refuse and horse manure to create the city's summer stench, its fever, and its cholera. The rawness of the frontier and the haphazard expansion of settlement in these early decades would stay with Chicago for many years.

But 1848 nevertheless marks a boundary. It was a year of failed revolutions in Europe, a year followed by decades which, in the words

William ]. Cronon is Assistant Professor of History at Yale University. H e is currently engaged in research on Chicago's relationship to its hinterland during the second half of the nineteet h century.

130

of historian E. J . Hobsbawm, consolidated "the global triumph of capitalism" and opened much of the Western world to industrial expansion and agricultural transformation. Chicago was integrally a part of-indeed, it was created by- these changes. Revolution in Germany would send to Chicago crowds of "FortyEighters" and others who nearly doubled its German population in the decade ahead and contributed to the growth of ethnic neighborhoods, beer gardens, and foreign-language newspapers, as well as to a new vision o[ radical politics. By 1850 over half the city's population would be non-native to the United States. Continuing famine in Ireland brought a similar influx from that country and added to a rising European demand for breadstuffs (initially unleashed by the repeal of the English Corn Laws) which was critically important to Chicago. The events of that year, and the possibilities they represented, gained their importance from the way in which they served to make Chicago the chief link between the developing region of the upper Mississippi valley and the metropolitan economy centered on New York, Liverpool, and London. 1848 saw the frontier pass beyond Chicago for the same reasons that the frontier came increasingly to center upon it.

We can itemize the key events of 1848 in one of those lists of Chicago's "firsts" so popular with the city's early historians. On January 15, the first telegram was received in Chicagofrom Milwaukee-and on April 6 a telegraph message was relayed via Detroit from New York itself, taking less than a day to arrive. On

I. T. Palmatary's bird's-eye view of Chicago in 1857 encompassed what was already being hailed as the "great Central City of the Continent." CHS, ICHi-05664.

March J, Lhe Galena & Chicago Union Railroad Company let a construction contract for its first 32 miles of line; by November, the road was completed as far as the Des Plaines River, 10 miles west of Chicago. On October 10, the railroad's first locomotive, the Pioneer (now housed al the Chicago Historical Society) arrived by sailing ship and was put into service.

On March 13, the Chicago Board oI Trade was established by the grain dealers and commission merchants of the city, meeting in a set of rooms above Gage and Haines's flour store on South Water Street. On April 16, the Illinois and l\-lichigan Canal, Lhe construction o( which

had begun twelve years earlier, was officially opened, enabling boats to travel from Chicago to LaSalle and on down the Illinois River to St. Louis. In May, the construction of the Southwestern Plank Road, the first such road in Illinois, was started. It would eventually reach the area of Naperville in 1851, allowing teams and wagons to cross the wet prairies and marshes surrounding Chicago without battling the mud. On June 27, in a moment more symbolic of future than of present possibilities, the first ocean-going steamship, the Ireland, arrived from Montreal, putting Chicago, at least in a single instance, in direct communi131

Chicago 1848-1857

~=-- ..-:.===.=

-

THE FLO OD OF I 849 .

The Chicago River was crucial to the city's commercial life and the destruction of bridges and shipping in the 1849 flood was a great calamity. Engraving based on a daguerreotype. CHS, ICHi-02060.

Right: The railroads spurred the development of many downstate areas. In the mid-1850s the Illinois Central distributed hundreds of thousands of pamphlets advertising "long credits" on the purchase of its farmlands. Map and cover from The Illinois Central Railroad ... [pamphlet], 1858.

CHS, ICHi-16116 and ICHi-16114.

cation with the Atlantic economy. The year 1848 also saw two important new structures added to Chicago's built environment: the city's first stockyard, "Bull's Head," located near Ashland Avenue and West Madisdn Street; and Captain R. C. Bristol's steampowered grain elevator, the first in Chicago, completed in September with an unheard-of capacity of 80,000 bushels.

Canal, railroad, stockyard, elevator, telegraph, Board of Trade: it is too easy in the midst of such lists to lose track of the changes they represented. Contemporary promoters of Chicago had no such problem. For them, these things were linked together in a vision of inevitable empire. As transportation routes made their way out into a waiting countryside, a wealth of rural productions would descend upon the city destined to receive them. In his report for the Chicago River and Harbor Convention in 1847, Jesse Thomas wrote that the 132

canal and railroads would "at once, and by magic, change the condition and prospects of our city; increase its population; introduce capital to operate in our staples, produce, provisions, lumber, &c; enlarge every avenue of commerce, and promote the growth of manufactures." History and the tributary countryside would conspire to make Chicago an imperial city.

Real estate speculators in every city in the West engaged in promotion of this sort, and the more determined by nature a city's future could be made to appear, the more likely would it be that Eastern capital would invest in that city's manufactures, markets, and real estate. It was a vision of economic growth with which Chicago boosters were particularly taken. So insistent were they in predicting Chicago's destiny as "the great Central City of the Continent" that the Detroit Free Press felt compelled to report that the Chicago Common

Chicago I 848-1857

ILLINOIS

CENTRAL RAILROAD COMPANY OFFJ.:RS t'ot: S AU:

Over 1.500.000 Acres S EL E CTED

FARMING AND WOOD

LANDS IN TRACTS OF FORTY ACRES AND UPWARDS, TO SC IT l't:-ltCIIAS EttS,

ON LONG CREDITS AND AT LOW RATES OF INTEREST, ,

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Council would soon vote "to extend the limits of that city, so as to take in all east of the Rocky Mountains; all south of fifty-four degrees of latitude, and all north of Patagonia."

The Chicago Tribune had tongue only halfway in cheek when it replied that Detroit had better be on good behavior if it hoped to become a suburb.

Wisconsin, Iowa , and downstate Illinois were never to become suburbs of Chicago, but they were to be more or less bound to it by economic relationships which were most visible in the transportation network. During the canal's first season of operation, corn shipments from Chicago multiplied eightfold. Clearly, shipments to Chicago had increased as well, and the canal would become the city's chief source of this grain until after the Civil War. Lumber receipts at Chicago from the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin nearly doubled, and one-fourth of this lumber continued on

clown the canal to be used for houses, fences, and farm buildings. Perhaps most interestingly, receipts of hogs at Chicago actually declined in 1848, despite all expectations that the canal would instantly augment thi! portion of the city's trade. Ironically, the reason for the decline lay in Chicago's salt market, for the city shipped 32,000 barrels of salt clown the canal in 1848 to towns which promptly used it to increase their own packing operations at Chicago's expense.

Wha t the canal accomplished was a significant reorientation, toward Chicago, of downstate communities which had previously found their chief market in St. Louis. Until the opening of the canal, the only way farm produce could arrive in the city was by horse teams, and those who had access to water transportdownriver to the Mississippi towns-generally used it. But Chicago's stock of manufactured goods and its superior prices, made possible 133

Chicago 1848-1857 by its access to New York via the lakes and the Erie Canal, lured farmers from remarkable distances. It was not unusual for one to three hundred wagons to arrive daily in the city, bearing wheat and corn which would be traded for dry goods, groceries, hardware, and salt.

In peak season, the opening of a bridge on the Chicago River could create quarter-mile-long traffic jams of these wagons. Farmers making such a journey often took two weeks to do so, and they could not make it often . The canal gave at least some of them cheaper and more rapid access to the city, and convinced many to abandon St. Louis as their chief shipping destination.

But it was the railroads which cast Chicago's net across the entire Midwest and encouraged many farmers to stop using water transit altogether. The l 0 miles of railroad entering Chicago in 1848 had expanded to more than 3,600 miles by 1856. By that year, the railroads had reached the Mississippi River at no fewer than eight points, and had bridged it at one, Rock Island. Each such intersection drained additional trade from St. Louis, which could only seek to prevent bridgings of the river wherever possible. In the decade following l 848, Chicago gained rail access to virtually all areas in Illinois, soutl1ern Wisconsin, and eastern Iowa, with enormous consequences for both city and country.

Even in 1852, with only 125 miles of line completed, the Galena & Chicago Union was already bringing more wheat to Chicago than the canal and the farmers' wagons put togeth&.

In the course of the decade, the railroads surpassed the canal in virtually all commodity receipts but corn, and increasingly became the primary carriers for Chicago's manufactured goods as well. In 1850, the chief markets for Cyrus H. McCormick's famed reapers were concentrated southwest of Chicago, along the canal, the Illinois River, and the Mississippi River. Ten years later, those markets had veered north and were now located due west of Chicago, along the railroads leading into Iowa. What was more, reapers were being sold to points all the way across Iowa and Minnesota, whereas in 1850 they had been limited to counties bordering the Mississippi and Missouri rivers. In the interim, Chicago's hinter134

View looking northeast from the dome of the Chicago Court House, photographed by Alexander Hesler in 1858. The main business district (near the river on Lake and Water streets) appears in the distance. CHS , ICHi-05740, gift of Dr. Otto L. Schmidt.

land had grown by hundreds of miles.

The railroads did not simply extend the range of Chicago's hinterland; they transformed its whole way of doing business.

Previous to their arrival, merchants located in, say, a town on the Iowa bank of the Mississippi, did most of their business directly with St. Louis, Philadelphia, and New York.

They often sold a full range of retail goodshardware, shoes, clothing, groceries, agricul.tural implements-and, in turn, bought grain, hogs, and other produce from farmers. Many deals were carried out by barter, and merchants extended long-term credit to customers as an unavoidable expense of doing business. When the Mississippi froze between November and April, business virtually ground to a halt. A merchant had to spend a substantial amount

Chicago 1848-1857 f<. bo ·t~. eds .....• 1,hot, lb~ •...••..•• Roap .•••.••••••••

5;270

12fi40

Staves •••......•• 6,855,800 2,934 Stone, tons •....• 5,272 Stoves & h. wart>.

37ti.700 Sugar, lbs •.•..••• Tallow .•••.••.••• Tar, &c., bbl11 ••••

•.• 2-26

25,804 1.',e ,. no .•.••.. .•. 'l'imber. ft •.....• 2,088,791

'l'obacco, lbs ••••• Water Lime, bbls Wheat, bu ..•.••• v;hite Llilad, lbs •.

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Other artl el's, p•~. h " tons.

Cattle, no •••. . •.

Horses ••••.••••••

ii:589

837 501,200 61,631 8,400

401,013 17,009

... ~6

is:iloo

138,954

207)i72 1,174:886

33,757 28

•

•

• 6/.170

13.:lOO

4,385:549

11,241,34~ 210,52:l 27~ 5,5.51 2,921,900 4,473,485 16

......

·.;:228

42,372 1.803,148 207 171 i0:i6:i 21,9-'iO 14,204

174,515 19,621

Hoirs •••.•.•...••.

Sheep .•••••..•...

33,757

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5.1,()54 .••••• 101,877 .•• • . • 6,477 1,655 830.326 7.737,197 167.5.18 22,707

266.0!).(

25,304

2,lt!l,845

101.877 19,721

8,568,360 66e,738

88.566 1,852,9\lO

401.220

27,881

21,95()

14.840 174,615 111.~

SHIPKJINTS.

D.scritpt,i,on,,.

Ag. lmp'ts, lbs...

Ag. Products •••• Ale and.Beer,bbls

Apples............

Ashes, lbs.........

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bu........

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Beer, b ls........

Lakd.

467,000 • ••• • .

77 1,454

688,435 •• ••. .

• ••• • • 2,748,654 13 217 5,154 ••. • 66,717 •;.;o· 1,146,088 •. . .

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296 230,300 ,t:i;oo 7,045

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Brick, no.........

69,500 Broom Corn, bal's 888,400 Bug's, & Wag's,11,1 35,000 Butter............ 249 .850 Cheese............

49,880

Coal, tons........

367 Coffee, lbs.........

23,520 Corn. bu ......••• 11,079,490 Cranberrie~. lbs..

Doors k Sash, lbs.

Dried Fruit.......

EgiB, J,'i11ll, bbls........

doz.........

Canal. Rauroad1. Total.

•. . . ,t,560 206

952,467

•. •.

93,886

657,IHll

.. ..

• ..• • 48.ll\18 600 167,497 201 16,t93

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2,500

5i(of>ii

19,420 .. . .

132

1.155,43i

2,748,6i4 29f

!5,608 66,717 1,146,088 19,051

4,546

23 7~ '295

241,S.0

l,67!J,til6

3/!8,400 128,886

298.248 217,877 lli, 161

4(678

24,470 11,129,008

&4:4ii

flli,05i 83,gjl ,t,560

29,0ii3

2!l.Of!3

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This portion of "Total Receipts and Shipments" for 1856 from the Chicago Review of Commerce shows that the city was already becoming the clearinghouse for agricultural products from the West and manufactured goods from the East. CHS, ICHi-16118.

of money just to store the fall harvest until spring, ancl there was no telling what would happen to prices in the meantime. On occasion only the backing of a friendly capitalist in the East or in St. Louis saw a dealer through hard times. It took a person with a sizable amount of capital, shrewd business sense, and personal connections stretching halfway across the continent to survive for long under such circum• stances. As a result, a handful of merchants usually dominated the business of any given place.

The coming of the railroads changed all of this. In the words of J. M. D. Burrows, a merchant in Davenport, Iowa, they "revolutionized the mode of doing business" and "rather bewildered" merchants who had been accustomed to older methods. Now, someone

possessing as little as $250 could set up in business as a commission merchant by engaging a railroad car one morning, buying enough grain to fill it, and shipping it off to Chicago by mid-afternoon. This not only did away with the costs of hiring workers, maintaining a store and warehouse, and offering credit, but allowed a small amount of money to turn over much more rapidly than it had in the past.

Older merchants with large fixed investments in buildings and stock had trouble competing with such operators, and either had to specialize, change their scale of business, or go out of business. Transportation services no longer ceased during the winter months, so that marketing was spread out over the entire year, giving merchants continuing access to the cities where they bought their goods.

This railroad transformation of country merchandising had an equally significant impact on Chicago. The more rapid movement of grain at harvest time and the relative decline in the importance of country warehouses helped increase the storage facilities of the city warehouses. By 1857, the grain elevators of Chicago had a total storage capacity of four million bushels, and each of the three biggest elevators was nearly ten times larger than the one erected by Captain Bristol in 1848. Comparable increases had taken place in the produce and lumber storage capacity of the city.

At a place where so much was stored, wholesaling (as well as manufacturing) was bound to become a key economic activity. By 1854, the city's editors were labeling Chicago "The Greatest Primary Grain Port in the World."

The centering of a dozen railroads on Chicago by 1856 not only brought in great quantities of goods; it made the city the central point of exchange between Western and East· ern railroads. Moreover, competition with lake transport kept Chicago's rail rates lower than those at other points. Midwestern rates were established to Chicago and from Chicago, so that shippers came to regard that city as the destination of first resort. Concentration bred more concentration. In few other Midwestern cities could a merchant do as much business in as many different lines of commerce as in Chicago. In the past, buying trips to New York or Philadelphia could be undertaken by coun135

Chicago 1848-1857 try merchants only once or twice a year, each trip taking from six to eight weeks. Now dealers could travel by rail to Chicago once or twice a month. This allowed them to reduce their total stock and respond more quickly to their customers' demands. Little wonder that I. D. Guyer, one of the city's early boosterhistorians, could write that "Railroads are talismanic wands. They have a charming power. They do wonders-they work miracles.

They are better than laws; they are essentially, politically and religiously-the pioneer, and vanguard of civilization."

What could a person find in Chicago on a buying trip in 1856? To answer this question is to define the city's hinterland and its role as frontier entrep6t. Corn from the Illinois valley and Iowa, and wheat from southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois, sat in the city's elevators and freight yards awaiting the sh ips in its port. Lumber in the yards along the South Branch of the Chicago River came from as far away as Saginaw, Michigan, but principally from mills at Muskegon , Michigan, and Green Bay, ·w1sconsin, many of which were already dominated by Chicago capitalists.

Livestock raised in Illinois, Missouri, and Iowa and fattened in the feedlots of northeastern Illinois could be purchased at Joho B. Sherman's new thirty-acre stockyards on the lakeshore between 25th and 31st streets, which could house as many as 5,000 cattle and 30,000 hogs . At the city's wholesaling houses, country retailers could find an endless range of dry goods, furniture, books, canned goods, and other wares, some of which were imported from the East, some manufactured right in Chicago.

Perhaps most important, anyone needing workers, whether to harvest the year's crops, to cut the forests of Michigan and Wisconsin, or to run the ships of the Grea t Lakes, came to Chicago as the chief labor market of the region . On the docks of Chicago, men looking for work, and men looking to hire, found each other and struck their contracts.

What was being created at Chicago in the 1850s was a new kind of market. The concentration at one point by a new technology of so many commodities from so large an area meant that purchases and sales at Chicago tended to set prices for the entire region . At no other place in the country, other than per-

Panora ma ph otog ra ph ed by A lexan der Hesler from Sturges, Bucking ham & Co. grain elevator, 1858.

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Chicago 1848-1857 haps in New York, was so much information on the conditions of agricultural supply available.

The telegraph, which had arrived in 1848, had preceded the railroad in penetrating the countryside, and now it brought constant news of crops in the West and markets in the East.

"It seemed," wrote the Reverend J. P. Thompson of the telegraph network he saw while traveling in Iowa, "like the nervous system of the nation, conveying, quick as thought, the least sensation from extremity to head, the least volition from head to extremity." Drought in Iowa and war in the Crimea deserved equally rapt attention. If on those wires, as Thompson thought, one "could hear the sharp quick beating of the great heart of New York," it was also true that none listened harder to that heart than Chicago.

It was here that still another creation of 1848 had come to play a major role by 1857.

The Chicago Board of Trade was a slow starter. Practically moribund by 1851, its daily meetings were occasionally held with no one at all present, grain sales being conducted entirely in the streets of the city. The increasing amount of grain brought by the railroads, how-

ever, and the handling of its bulk in elevators, necessitated that some agency take control and supervise Chicago's markets. The Board of Trade did this in 1857 when it adopted standardized inspection and grading procedures for the city's grain. Although the revolutionary effects of this grading system-the futures markets with their attendant speculative possibilities-would not be fully apparent until after the Civil War, the concentration of information flows was immediate. More and more, Chicago's trading-and hence a goodly share of the trading for the entire region-was done on the floor of the 'Change, as it was known. . A city so completely focused on its markets was bound to bear their mark. The more or less invisible transformations of economic institutions were matched by changes in the visible world of Chicago as well. If one takes the lofty perspective of artist I. T. Palmatary's bird's-eye view of Chicago in 1857-a vista no human being in that year could see in real life, akin to the imperial visions of the city's boosters-one can begin to picture the place.

By 1857, the population of the city had risen to more than 93,000-a more than fourfold

The Illinois Central Railroad complex dominated the lakefront at Randolph. CHS, ICHi-13888, gift of Harry T. Dunn.

CAGQ /LL/NO/S. 1858.

••

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137

Chicago I 848-1857

Terrace Row, on Michigan Avenue between Congress and Van Buren, was designed in 1856 by W.W. Boyington for eleven prominent Chicagoans, including one of the Society's founders , J. Y. Scammon. CHS, ICHi-04427 .

increase since 1848. Their habitations and places of work, slowly being lifted from the mud in an endless process of grade-changing, stretched beyond Fullerton to the north, Western to the west, and the bend of the South Branch to tHe south. On the hazy line roughly defined as the city's edge, prosperous farmers did market gardening, cut hay, and grew orchards, as much a part of Chicago's world as the downtown. By 1860, Cook County accounted for 13 percent of Illinois's total market gardening-twice as much as any other county-all to supply Chicago's food.

Where country lanes turned into the grid of city streets, rapidly erected balloon-frame buildings housed the city's workers, already defining themselves into areas of concentrated working-class and ethnic residence. To the north, alongside the cemetery which would one day become Lincoln Park, was the largest concentration of Germans. To the south, along 138

the far side o( the river and lining the canal they had helped build, lived the Irish, in an area already regarded by the "better classes" as one of the roughest in the city.

But it was when one crossed the river, amidst a forest of ships' masts which were visible even from the prairie, that one found the Chicago which seemed so different from the world o( the farmers and small-town merchants who traded there. At the center of all was the river, cluttered with bridges and ships and canal boats. Its mouth was marked on the north by a breakwa ter to stop the southward march of the too sandy shoreline, and on the south by the great looming shape of Sturges and Buckingham's 700,000-bushel grain elevator.

Fanning to meet the elevator and its own impressive station, the Illinois Central Railroad occupied much of the land between the south bank of the river and the shore of the lake, land it had gained after a vehement struggle

Chicago 1848-1857 in the Council in 1851-52. The railroad entered the city on a trestle in the lake paralleling Michigan Avenue, which still marked the water's edge. Trees and prominent residences lined that street, one of the most elegant in the city, as they did the well-to-do neighborhoods on the Near North Side.

Walking west from the Illinois Central station, one found oneself amidst the frenzy of South Water Street, center of Chicago's wholesaling activities. With the buildings on its north side fronting the docks of the river, the street formed a key break-in-bulk point for merchandise arriving from the East. One block south, on Lake Street, was the principal retailing district. But business overflowed these streets and filled much of the downtown, creating traffic which rivaled that of any street in New York but Broadway's. If there were now fewer farmers' wagons bringing produce directly from the country to help clog the streets, their absence was more than made up for by the carts and wagons of the city's teamsters, shuttling goods between warehouses, railroad terminals, and the river. The motions of business and exchange were everywhere.

What did such a city mean? Local boosters returned perpetually to Chicago's markets, the volume of goods passing its clocks and railroad staLions, the crowds on the streets and bridges, and above all its possibilities for future growth.

But its very newness made it seem somehow temporary, a creation of the moment which lacked the refinements of an older, more Eastern, civilization. A writer in Putnam's Monthly described it as one of Emerson's "representative towns," but made his reader unsure of just how much of a compliment this was. "It is the type of that class of American towns," he wrote, "which have made themselves conspicuous, and almost ridiculous, by their rapid growth." Almost ridiwlous. The phrase bespoke a certain Eastern contempt. A town with its eyes so much on the main chance, said Putnam's writer, was bound to experience "a lack of those healthful restraints which exist in an older community," something which had "undoubtedly, combined to weaken and lower the moral sense of the people, in regard to business transactions." Chicago's unrestrained market, as this New Yorker saw it, threatened

to destroy the city's moral universe.

By 1857, Chicago's leaders were beginning to resent such demeaning comparisons, and to feel the tug of their own high cultural possibilities. The same confidence which allowed boosters to promote the city as an economic rival of New York led professionals and men of wealth to ponder whether Chicago ought not to acquire a few of New York's cultural appurtenances as well: monumental buildings, learned socieLies, even a history commensurate with future greatness. Perhaps this was one reason why Chicago elites began to look to their own past in the 1850s. For those who re~ected upon how much had been accomplished by the generation then living, comparisons with Chicago's own past helped mute invidious cultural contrasts with cities like New York and Boston.

When, in 1857, Zebina Eastman launched his Chicago Magazine: The West As It Is, he sought to make it an oracle which would serve as "a go-between, carrying to the men of the East, a true picture of the West." A chief means for accomplishing this end was to preserve the unwritten history of places like Chicago, "before the men now living, in whose memory it is treasured, shall die, and the record perish." Although the Magazine lasted barely half a year, every issue contained a chapter on the history of Chicago, telling of Marquette and Jolliet, the Fort Dearborn massacre, and the first visions of the canal, in the loving detail of the historian who was also myth-maker. The story had barely reached l 830 when publication of the magazine ceased.

But the men who treasured Chicago's memory as their own were not content to let their story die with them. That was why, on April 24, 1856, a small group of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen gathered in the law offices of Scammon & McCagg at Lake and LaSalle streets to found a historical society.

Among them were men who had lived in the city during fur-trading days, who had helped direct construction of the canal, directed the first railroad, led the assault on Chicago's inadequate drainage and water supply, and held key offices in city government. They were men who had grown wealthy or at least prospered as the city grew, and through whose offices, in 139

Chicago 1848-1857 February 1857, the Chicago Historical Society was incorporated to honor their city and state, "to collect and preserve the memories of its founders and benefactors, as well as the historical evidences of its progress in settlement and population, and in the arts, improvements and institutions which distinguish a civilized community."

It was no doubt a particular version of the past which these men sought to preserve, one which saw Chicago's early growth in terms of heroic achievement and great men. Though Chicago's real transformation had occurred in scarcely ten or fifteen years, carrying the ci°ty of 1856 worlds away even from that of 1848, they tended to look farther back for their "historical evidences," to the 1820s and 1830s, when the place that would be Chicago was little more than a speculation in real estate.

Theirs was a history of first things. When they thought of the canal, they remembered not the anonymous thousands who had dug it or the many more whose lives had been permanently altered by it, but the few who had first thought of it in 1816 or 1826-presumably because they found in those earlier thoughts a vision which paralleled their own. Discovering the earliest origins of a canal or a railroad or a line of business, and identifying the first authors of each, thus served to explain and legitimate the city accused of having no past.

The filiopietism inherent in this use of history was something which the prominent men of Chicago shared with many of their nineteenth-century contemporaries, and it inevitabl'y constrained their sense of the past. The revolution in social and economic organization which had conspired to change Chicago in the short time between 1848 and 1856 was perhaps too recent, too authorless, and too collective a creation to be recognized as genuine history by such men. For them, it too was heroic, and they were its most likely heroes. Little in the past of the 1820s or 1830s could have predicted the growth of Chicago in the 1850s, however inevitable the boosters might try to make that growth appear, and no one man or group of men could claim responsibility for the city's transformation. Yet that transformation had made the city. The historical society these men founded, in outliving their memory, came 140

to be the chief witness of a place changed beyond recall by a history they did not see.

Selected Sources Andreas, A. T. History of Chicago. 3 vols. Chicago, 1884-86.

Atherton, Lewis E. "The Pioneer Merchant in MidAmcrica." University of Missouri Studies 14 (April 1939).

Belcher, Wyatt W. The Economic Rivalry Between St. Louis and Chicago, 1850-1880. New York, 1947.

Buettinger, Craig. "Economic In equality in Early Chicago, 1849-1850." Journal of Social History 11 (Spring I 978).

Burrows, J.M.D. Fifty Years in Iowa. Davenport, Iowa, 1888.

Chicago Democratic Press. Annual Reviews of Commerce, 1853-58.

Chicago Department of Development and Planning.

Historic City: The Settlement of Chicago. Chicago, 1976.

Chicago Herald. Chicago as it Appeared in 1858.

Chicago, 1894.

"Chicago Historical Society, 1857-1907: Celebration of the Fiftieth Anniversary of its Incorporation, February 7, 1907." Chicago, 1907.

"Chicago in 1858." Putnam's Monthly 7 Uune 1856).

Chicago Magazine I (1857).

Chicago Tribune, 1849-1857.

"City of Chicago, IJlinois." Hunt's Me1¡chants Magazine and Commercial Review, 18 (1848).

Colbert, E . Chicago, Historical and Statistical Sketch of the Garden City. Chicago, 1868.

D. B. Cooke & Co.'s Directory of Chicago for the Year 1858. Chicago, 1858.

Curtiss, Daniel S. Western Portraiture and Emigrants' Guide .... New York, 1852.

Guyer, I. D. History of Chicago . ... Chicago, 1862.

Hobsbawm, E.J. The Age of Capital, 1848-1875. ew York, 1975.

Jones, William, Jr. & Co., publishers. "An Address to the Merchants of the N. West Setting Forth the Advantages of the City of Chicago as the Central Mart of the Union .... " Chicago, 1856.

C. H. McCormick & Co. Agency Records. State Historical Society of Wisconsin.

Paxson, Frederic L. "The Railroads of the 'Old orthwest' Before the Civil War." Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 17 (1914).

Payton, John Lewis. Over the Alleghenies and Across the Prairies. London, 1869.

Pierce, Bessie Louise. A History of Chicago. 3 Yols.

New York, 1937-59.

"Report of Jesse B. Thomas as a Member of the Executive Committee Appointed by the Chicago River and Harbor Convention, of the Statistics Concerning the City of Chicago." Chicago, 1847.

Taylor, Charles H., ed. History of the Board of Trade of the City of Chicago. 3 vols. Chicago, 1917.

Wing, Jack. The Great Union Stock Yards of Chicago.

Chicago, 1865.

Yetter, Ruby. "Some Aspects of the Commercial Growth of Chicago, 1835-1850." M.A. thesis, University of Chicago, 1937.

The Pursuit of Culture: Founding the Chicago Historical Society, 1856

By Byron York

For one founder) William Barry) the Historical Society was a way to preserve the fragile and ever-threatened present)¡for yet another) Isaac Arnold) it was an institution needed to improve a great city with a vast future.

who founded cultural institutions in mid-nineteenth-century Chicago were deeply concerned about the relationship of culture and materialism in both their own lives and the life of the city. As men of means and some refinement, they saw about them, in the Chicago of the J850s, a tremendous imbalance of these two forces: everywhere men seemed obsessed with money-making schemes, leading lives that were impoverished by a neglect of literature, art, and music. These civic leaders were not aesthetes repulsed by economic opportunism-they were themselves largely responsible for their city's tremendous growth. But they believed that an overly acquisitive nature could be the ruin of a man, and the same held true for a city. Their ideal citizen was one who distributed his energies in many areas o( civic endeavor, and their ideal city blended economic, cultural, social, and political advancement.

The Chicago these men saw around them was far from their ideal. In an overwhelmingly commercial city, life would be at best rude, at worst dangerous. What Chicago desperately needed was a cultural counterweight to balance its impressive economic expansion. The city must have "culLure, taste, beauty, art, literature," Isaac Arnold, a founder o( the Society wrote, "or there is clanger that our city will become a town of mere traders and money getters ; crude, unlettered , sharp, and grasping." It T H E PU13LIC-SPJRJTED MEN

Byron Yor'1 i a graduate stude nt al the University of Chicago, w here he is worliing on a dissertation i11 Amnicon history.

was to avert this dismal prospect that these men founded their city's early cultural institutions.

As Arnold's comment illustrates, advances in all areas of the arts were thought necessary to provide the balance Chicago needed. All art refined and uplifted , but in this period history was perhaps the most didactic of the arts. An intense national interest in historical topics in the first half of the nineteenth century centered around the particular qualifications of history to instill those values-patriotism, virtue, reverence for God-which leaders (elt were needed for the growth of a healthy republic. It was natural, then, that one of Chicago's early cultural institutions was a historical society.

The ideal city that Arnold and others envisioned would include a society devoted to the proper study of the past.

Although in 1856 Chicago had no old, native upper class, the men who founded the Chicago Historical Society in that year came as close to that distinction as was possible. Of the twelve founding members-William Barry, Mason Brayman, \t\Tilliam Brown, John Harris Kinzie, Ezra l\JcCagg, George Manierre, fahlon Ogden, William Ogden, Charles Ray, J. Young Scammon, Mark Skinner, and Samuel Wardhalf were originally from New England, the others from New York. At the time of the Society's founding, their ages averaged forty-five, and this, along with an average residence in Chicago of thirteen years, placed them among the community's oldest and geographically most stable inhabitants.

141

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On April 2, 1856, this invitation went out to several prominent Chicago businessmen . The group met at the law offices of J. Y. Scammon, located in the Marine Bank Building at the corner of Lake and LaSalle streets (shown below) , and took the first steps to organize the Chicago Historical Society. Left : CHS. Below : CHS, ICHi-01012, photo by Alexander Hesler.

Founding the Society The group was characterized, above all, by occupational and economic prestige. Seven were lawyers, two were wholesale merchants, and of the remainder one was a real estate developer, one an editor, and one a minister. In several cases these labels are misleading because the money-making activities of these men reached beyond easy categorization. Brown and Scammon, for example, originally lawyers, were heavily involved-along with William Ogden-in banking and the Chicago & Galena Railroad.

Scammon in particular had virtually abandoned his legal practice for other business by 1856. These ventures often yielded substantial fortunes. William Ogden's net worth in 1860 was $2,500,000, making him the richest man in Chicago. Walter L. Newberry, the city's second richest citizen, joined the Society in its first year.

Three other original members claimed estates of at least $100,000 in 1860.

The rest of the founders, while not as spectacularly wealthy as Ogden or Newberry, were affluent enough to have time for cultural, social, and political activities. Almost all of them, for example, were members or officers of at least one of the city's cultural organizations: the Young Men's Association, a library society founded in 1841; the Chicago Academy of Sciences (1857); or the Chicago Astronomical Society (1862). Many of the same men were involved in the city's early social reform organizations, including the Chicago Relief and Aid Society (founded 1857) and movements promoting common schools, improved municipal sanitation, and temperance. They devoted their energies to Free Soil and Republican party politics, the occasional holding of state and local political offices, and, during the Civil War, the Northwestern Sanitary Commission, which had been established to do relief work among Union soldiers.

The interlocking and varied involvements of the men who founded the Society illustrate their devotion to the concept of the balanced city. But a more fundamental motive lay behind their activities. Aware of and involved in several movements that were national in scopefor example, the Sanitary Commission-they mixed this sophistication with a sense of duty toward the creation of an ideal city. "I do not admit that any man who endows the Chicago

Historical Society, the University of Chicago, the Academy of Sciences, the Chicago Astronomical Society, or any other of our public institutions is a mere donor to the public good," J. Young Scammon told members of the Society in 1868. "Every man who has made his fortune, or found his home, his prosperity, or his happiness in this land, owes it to the public, owes it to Chicago ... owes it to his duty and his God to see that those institutions, which it is our duty now to found, are placed upon a sound basis."

Thus men like Scammon presumed it was their duty to lead Chicago in all facets of its li~e. This mixture of noblesse oblige and Christian stewardship spurred the devotion that many of them felt toward the cause of creating an ideal Chicago. That one man, Scammon, could found a historical society, finance a railroad, support homeopathic medicine, serve in the state legislature, work for common schools, establish a Swedenborgian church and not be particularly unusual in his scope of involvement suggests that a common goal motivated these activities and those of his peers. The paths to the balanced city were necessarily many, and the Historical Society figured as one of these.

The Society's new members exhibited characteristics similar to those of the founders. Perhaps the two most prominent men to join the Society in its first year were Isaac Arnold, lawyer, Free Soiler, and Lincoln biographer, and ,valter Newberry, the railroad president and banker who left half his estate' to establish the Newberry Library. In its early years, the Society counted among its members a large percentage of men who were notable in all areas of the city's activities: John Farwell, Cyrus McCormick, Joseph Ryerson, John Crerar, and Marshall Field. From this selective listing it seems obvious that participation in the Society, apart from one's interest in history, was deemed a proper activity by the men who ran Chicago.

It is perhaps misleading to speak of more specific goals and policies in terms of the entire group of founders, for the motives of any group of men, even in the establishment of a single institution, are probably diverse. In the case of the Society, one individual, more than any other, set the course for the new institution.

143

Founding the Society ¡william Barry, a retired Unitarian minister from Massachusetts and an enthusiastic promoter, zealously kept the Society alive, and most of what can be learned about its early history came from his pen in the form of correspondence, minutes, and annual reports.

Barry was born in Boston in 1805. Educated at Brown and Gottingen, he entered the Unitarian ministry in Massachusetts, holding pastorates in Lowell and Framingham. History was his avocation throughout his ministerial career; a member of both the Massachusetts Historical Society and the American Antiquarian Society, he published a history of Framingham, Massachusetts, in 1847. Plagued, like an inordinate number of liberal clergymen of the time, by frequent failures of health, Barry left his first calling and came west in 1853 after one such collapse. In an earlier history of the Society, Paul M. Angle writes that Barry came to Chicago "with the intention of devoting himself to charities, scientific studies, and cultural pursuits . ... Having leisure, he made the formation of such an organization [the Society] his own concern."

Barry was both the quintessential liberal minisler and antiquarian. As historian Ann Douglas has written of the ministry of this period: "the self-appointed role of the liberal ministers was the conservative one of cultural custodian." That was precisely the position Barry assumed in Chicago. Intellectually, too, his interests reflected the secularization of his profession in the mid-nineteenth century; while passionately involved in local history, he seemed to have had little interest in theology.

In his historical work, Barry also embodied most of the traits of nineteenth-century antiquarianism. He was, above all, stricken with "documania," the uncritical fascination with obscure primary sources that characterized all antiquarian activities. This meshed well with his natural tendency to be something of a packrat; he seemed constitutionally unable to throw anything away. He was also devoted to the period's most frequently repeated antiquarian rationale: his work would "rescue from oblivion" important local history that might otherwise be lost in the reckless advance of progress.

Finally, he was, like many of his peers, sensitive about the antiquarian's image. He knew 144

that as an antiquarian compiler of historical material he would never be considered a true historian; he thus sometimes felt underappreciated. "Indeed," he wrote, "the world poorly measures Lhe service of the simply historical collector, who is complacently smiled at for his hobbies, gently ridiculed for his conceit, or charitably pitied for his monomania."

Nevertheless, Barry pursued his interest energetically. He sought three things for the Society: books and manuscripts, the recollections of old settlers, and money for a permanent building. (Until 1868 the Society met and stored materials in rooms donated by members.)

Toward these goals he directed an energy remarkable for a retired minister of broken health, as well as a considerable ability in public relations. Continually making requests for any or all of the three, he displayed, whether dealing with an old settler or a wealLhy lawyer, a boundless capacity for flattery. "To one of your quick and profound sensibility," he wrote a fassachusetts minister, "Knowing how well you comprehend our work ... it occurred to me how pleasant and pertinent a thing it would be if, for instance, the good people of Medford could make a donation for us."

The goals to which Barry clevoled the later years of his life illustrate the set of cultural priorities around which he attempted to build the Chicago Historical Society. In his first annual report to members, Barry, after duly congratulating them on their first year's activities, set forth the purposes for which the Society had been formed. There were, he said, three basic aims for the Chicago group. First was the examination of the mysterious and rapidly disappearing "aboriginal history" of the Northwest, that is, the history of its Indian tribes.

Second was the investigation of Illinois history from the earliest French settlement and the history of Chicago from its founding. Third was the "foundation of a Public Library of historical, documentary, and literary works--of the most comprehensive character."

Barry's first two goals came from a classically antiquarian impulse-the desire "to rescue from oblivion." The phrase stated concisely the central antiquarian concern. Passionately devoled to local matters, and fearful that the details of their region's experience would be lost

Founding the Society

A Unitarian minister from Massachusetts, William Barry was also a keen ant iquarian. He was the driving force behind the organization of the Chicago Historical Soc ie ty . CHS, ICHi-16172.

One of the first goals Wil liam Barry set for the Society was the study and preservation of the vanishing Ind ian cultures. This list of Indian names, found among his papers , incl udes notes on pronunciation . CHS.

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Founding the Society in the wake of larger historical forces, antiquarians worked to save local history from irrevocable neglect. It was crucial to them that the grand patriotic histories of the day remember the part their locale played in the country's development and that the histories of American localities not be judged, as Barry wrote, by "false standards of glory and merit."

This sympathy with the potentially forgotten fueled the local historian's fascination with Indian affairs. Barry was intrigued by the "mysterious monuments of an anterior race," and the first objective he set for the Society was to study them. After an unsuccessful effort to enlist the help of the Illinois Geological Survey to begin an Indian study, he remained concerned that "the swift inroads of modern improvement should mar, or utterly destroy" all vestiges of Indian life. Barry saw the fate of Indians in terms of one of the most prevalent romantic literary conventions of the day-the eulogy for the dying race. What was obliterating the Indian past was the advance of civilization and the "common destroyer, time."

Thus, although he felt the Indians were clearly savages, Barry was nevertheless sympathetic to their plight, perhaps because he saw them falling to the same forces that he feared might destroy so much of the history of his own time.

The Indians were not, however, the only group vulnerable to the "common destroyer."

All of local history, Barry believed, was subject to the same force that was inexorably dimming the memory of the Indians. In accordance with this, his second goal for the Society was th~ collection of all relevant minutiae concerning the history of Illinois from its earliest French settlement through the Chicago of 1857. This undertaking had one advantage that investigations of the Indians did not: many of the principal actors of western settlement were still alive when the Society began its work. With this in mind, Barry zealously solicited the recollections of old settlers. "v\Te want all you know," he wrote one downstate resident. "You know we have no documentary information.

We must rely upon the faithful memory of intelligent men." Fascinated with neglected details, Barry traveled around the state making similar requests.

Barry's antiquarianism suggests an ambiva146

Isaac Newton Arnold, a founding member and early president of the Society, was an attorney by trade. He was also a member of the Illinois House of Representatives and The Royal Historical Society of London. CHS, ICHi-09427.

lent attitude toward progress, and in this he differed significantly from the other members of the Society. For Barry, the advance of civilization was destined to spread across the continent, but it obliterated much of the valuable past in its wake. Thus he took the role of historical as well as cultural conservative. The other members, however, were more directly involved in the march of progress. They firmly believed the city they were building was destined to be a great American metropolis. "What is done here," Isaac Arnold wrote, "in this great central city of the continent . . . is to influence, for good or evil, our whole country . . .. The responsibility of a vast future is upon us." Arnold did not worry about being lost in the advance of civilization for he and the others felt they were leading that advance.

For Barry, the Historical Society was a way to

Fo111 lfli11 g ti,,, Socfrt y

Ezra B. McCagg, ono of th o Society 's found ers, was also a ch rt r mombor of sovoral oth or c ultural Institut ions In Chicago. Upon his doa th th o Tri bun e noted : " It con bo aid of him with truth th at h was a pu blic spiri t d m n." CHS, ICH1 16173

pt<'Wt V<· th e fr ag ile a11cl c·vc·r tht l':1t 'tl('cl pr · sc·nt ; 101 111olcl , it was a11 i11 s1i1111io11 11 '•cl ·cl t() i111p1 me a g1(•a1 r i1 y with a vas1 f111111 e.

Bar I y's 1lri1d goal , tire· (•s 1a1Jlish111 c11L of a lil,rar y, 111 m t a11rac 1t d th e a11, ·111io 11 o f th<' Soc ic· ty's 111e111l)('r ., f1ip . I Iere, 1;11 11101e th:111 th · '> j>Ol hO I 111g o f a hi stor ic al s111cl y, was ,1 1a 11 gil>le ma11 ife.,1a 1io 11 o l th eir JHIIJ)0'><'. A lib1.11 y wa, 1I w 1111e '>y rnbo l of 1cf111 c•111 ·111 , 1,o ili i11 a man 's p1 iva 1c· life a11d in 1h c ci 1y's p11bl1 c life. ·1 he book was the principal instrum ent of culture, a ncl for the refined man in a coarse environment like Chicago th e library was an invaluable refuge. In keeping with thi s, m a ny members of the Society m aintained large libraries in their h omes. One contemporary wro te of E zra l\IcCagg's house, "Among . . . m an y attractions p erhaps the fine libra ry co unted first. A large, sta tely room , lined with books almost from

ll om lo fl oor, wa'> tit <· .1,111 r/ 11111 11111r / m111n o f Mr . McC:1gg." Sca n11t1or1 , ;\ 111o lcl , a11d O gcle11 W<'t <' :ill 11 olt·d lrn 1h(' i1 i111p1<·.,, ivc• lilJ1 a1ics. ;\ 11d 101 Ma rk Ski1111 e1 tire· d<''> ll1tCli o11 of hi s lil,1a1 y in 1ltc· Cr c·:11 Fire was " a s11bj ec 1 011 wlti cIt llC' co11ld not spc·a k 11111110 vcc l. " See in g c11lt111 (' "" i11<·x 11i calil y link<·d to tir e: possl's'>io 11 of books, t!H'S<' 111(·11 suppor i('d 1h c idc·a o l :1 hi sto ri ca l lil>l':11 y. It c rnbodiC'd lo t 1h cm w ll C'c ti vel y IIH' sa rn c· va l11 .., tlt ;,t Wl' H ' int pot ta111 10 lh t' llt i11di vid11 a ll y. B111 Ba r I y sa w a fa t 11101<' 111 ge11t 11 ·cd fot a liI,1 a1y th a n 1he prn vi.'> io 11 of gc 111lc111 a11l y lei sure. "' I (1(' inipor 1a11c c.: of a p11hli r lih1 a1y of 1ltis ... ch ata<l('t ," Ir e wro1c·, "n11111 01 he: ovc·1cs1irn a1cd . 11 is <Ir 111 a11d cd l> y a hi glt 1H·c ·ssi1 y 10 shap · 1hc· y('I 111tl o1tn <'cl 111i11d of a 11 a l1 cad y vas t a nd in <r ·as ing JH> Jn ilatio11 , ,ollc·, l('d front t<·mol<· and un ass i111il ;r 1cd so ur«·s, in a ll rit e vigot a nd pass ion of yo1111 g !if (', a11cl S(' I ft('(.' from !h t ( ll SIOITl :11 y l(•s1r.1it1 h o f a11 c·s 1a l,li slt t d civili, a ti on and soci a l ord e1." Tir e <il y, 1ltc11 , pla yC'd a nucial role i11 Ba11 y's w 11 c<· p1 of rit e duti es o f a hi s 101ic a l soci(·1y. By 1857 ro ughl y half o f Chi ca go \ i11lt a 1Ji1 ;1111 s had h(· ·11 bot II ouhidc· Llw lJ11i1 cd S1 a1cs. 111 addi1io11 , 11t • 11 a 1i vt lx>111 po p11l ;11io11 had <Olli(' ft0111 all ovc·t 1h · countr y, :111d Ba rr y IC'a rc·d 1h a1 l,0 !11 slt a rcd a 11 obsess ion wi1h p<·c 1111ia1 y g:1i11 . Su,li a <0111bi11 a tio11 fo 1111 t d a po l(' t1li a ll y da 11gC'to11 '> situ a tion ; in it , :1s Ba11 y wrn lt, in hi s fi1 s1 a nrrn:tl t t potl , " th · spi1i1 ol r:1cli c,tl i1111 ova 1io11 fi11cl '> ·111 1111iillli1C·d 11 ·Id fo r 1ft · di ssc·mi11 a 1ion of pla11 '> ihlc 1h ·oril's suli vC' rsivc o f th e cs ta lJli slH·d cone fu sion of a ll p as l wisdonr ." T o ltim a kn ow1<·dge of 1lt c.: p:1st w:1s dc·,p ·1a 1C'l y ll t ('d ·d 10 prove th(' foll y of racli ca l 1ltougltt. ·1 ltu s facc·d witlt a fluid and pt rlt a ps volatile si 1u a1io11 , Ba 11 y ass 11111(·cl 1lt · cl ass ic lil>cral 11 1i11i '>l<T's to le·, 1lt a1 of "cuft111al <U'> IOdi a n ."

Th e Soc il'ty co uld , Ir e 1ho 11 glt1 , slo w ill(' vt l()( i1 y of soc 1,rl < ha ng<· a nd 1h11 s pt t'><'t VC va lu a l>le in st itution s. " A good library," he wrote, " is emin ently conservative." The historical library, a storehouse of the lessons of the past, would provide " documentary testimony outweighing all the decl amation of the socialist, the visiona ry, the enthusiast. " Specifically, the library would inculcate national and religious values .

This, Barry believed, would strengthen devotion to the country's civil and religious institu147

Founding the Society lions; the Society's ultimate goal for an incomprehensibly varied population was the assimilation of American values. The library was to be, he wrote, "essentially, although not exclusively, American." By properly training the dangerous elements of the growing city's population, it would teach good citizenship.

What did Barry mean by this? Did he assume that the unassimilated, potentially radical elements of Chicago's population would actually use the Society's library? Did he conceive of the library as the refuge of gentlemanly leisure or as a school for the socially disaffected? Most members of the Society leaned toward the former view: they had no particular desire to spend their leisure with coarse men. But they could resolve the conflict without rejecting either concept. The cultural institution did not have to reach out directly to the lower classes to improve society. Instead, its existence as an example of refinement would steadily, if indirectly, elevate the population as a whole. By a sort of cultural percolation the benefits that members reaped from the Society's activities would seep down to the lowest ranks of the community.

Henry Ward Beecher, the most influential popular liberal minister of the day, expressed this attitude in Star Papers, published in 1860.

To his way of thinking, any cultural endeavor, no matter how limited in scope, would benefit all of society. "An astronomical observatory," he wrote, "may seem to have no relation to the welfare of the community." But, Beecher argued, this was not the case; the few men woo actually used such an institution would benefit, and "through them, but diluted and not recognized, the next class below will be influencednot by astronomy, but by the moral power of men who have been elevated by astronomy."

William Barry's thought echoed Beecher's.

"If society is to be elevated," he wrote in 1863, "it must be lifted up at its apex, as well as its base." While Chicago had rendered admirable assistance to its underprivileged, what, Barry asked, "has it yet done for the high interests of science, for the advancing culture, refinement, the organized utilization of the maturer and really responsible elements of its population?"

These elements needed institutions for their cultural interests; their refinement would, in 148

turn, elevate the whole. In the Society "men of cultivated minds and enlightened tastes" would find the "means of rendering their refinement and leisure conducive to social refinement, the improvement of society."

Thus Barry believed that the study of history, even if undertaken by a few, would benefit the whole city. With this in mind, he emphasized that popularity and a large membership would never be goals of the Society. At its formation, the group set a membership limit: in the first two years the number should not exceed thirty, with sixty as a permanent ceiling.

For the cultural growth of the community, quality was far more important than quantity.

Noting the Society's small membership, Barry called them " 'fit though few'-they are chiefly from our oldest, most respected citizens."

Barry's rather exclusive policies were adopted by the group, although there was occasional dissent. In I 870, as the Society met to discuss a revised constitution, membership procedure dominated the conversation. According to the minutes, "A considerable discussion prevailed when the section relating lo the three black balls defeating any candidate was before the house." Apparently members voted on all prospective members by casting balls, and if any three members vetoed the candidacy, signified by their casting a black ball, i l was defeated. Thomas Hoyne held that the society had hitherto been too exclusive, while Mr. Arnold maintained that the only exclusive privilege of its members had been that o( meeting its expenses. Both Judge Skinner and A. H. Burley defended the necessity o( protecting the society from the introduction o( unworthy persons as members.

While the definition of "unworthy" is not clear, the Society's method of selecting members suggests a cliquish atmosphere. Further attempts to widen the scope of the Society were specifically for the purpose of raising money.

In terms of finances, the Society's membership fees were substantially higher than those of almost all other American historical societies at the time. Its constitution created two kinds of membership: the annual governing membership, for $25 per year, and the associate membership, which for $10 per year gave its owner the right to use the Society's facilities but have no hand in its actual operation. (By contrast,

Founding the Society dues in all but a very few of the nation's historical societies ranged from $ l to $5.) Moreover, in 1864, at Scammon's suggestion, the Society instituted a $300 life membership for the purpose of fattening the group's building fund. This put the Society on the financial scale of an institution like the Boston Athenaeum, [or which a life membership could be purchased for$ 100, or $300 i ( inheritable.

Despite such restrictions, the Society grew substantially in its first three years-twenty new members in 1856, twenty-three in 1857, and sixty-five in 1858. After that year the number of new memberships dropped precipitously--only sixteen new members joined in a five-year period. There was, in addition, a change in the type of memberships. All those who joined the Society in J 856 and 1857 did so as annual governing members. 0( the sixty-five who joined in 1858, only nine were annual governing members, and the remaining fiftysix were associate members. After that year, however, the associate membership almost dis-

Largely through Barry's efforts, the Society raised enough money to build its first permanent home at Dearborn and Ontario streets in 1868. Although the structure was supposedly fireproof, it was totally destroyed by the Fire of 1871. CHS, ICHi-16192.

appeared, and it was later dropped altogether.

The number of memberships began to rise after 1864, with virtually all new members joining as annual or life members. Of these, a substantial number made additional financial contributions to the Society's coffers . .Judging from these figures it seems safe to say that after an initial policy of accepting large numbers o[ members paying low dues, the Society restricted its membership to those who would make a substantial financial contribution to the organization.

After membership qualifications, however, the question remained as Lo what such membership actually involved. The character of the monthly meetings suggests a primarily social orientation. William Corkran, a young librarian from New York hired after Barry's retirement, described a Society meeting in a memoir of his Chicago experiences. Although he apparently developed a strong dislike for several Society members, his description is nonetheless valuable. A Chicago Historical Society meeting, he wrote, was "generally a very staid, still affair." Reports and correspondence were read by the Secretary followed by suggestions for the activities of the Society.

These suggestions were generally referred to a committee of men who, according to Corkran, "never gave the subject a thought." He noted that after this business, the character of the meetings changed: "A general discussion was generally entered into, either upon religious subjects, transactions in real estate, or little interchanges of mutual admid1 tion especially passed upon the wealthier members . . . . [A] large amount of seH-approbation . . . reigned amongst all."

Corkran's description is probably incomplete.

By emphasizing the purely social aspects of the meetings, he neglected to mention that there were topics of intellectual interest being discussed. These men, after all, did see themselves as gentlemen of some learning. The topics at meetings-"The Israelites in Chicago," "The Anti-Slavery Movement in Illinois," and the languages of Ind ian tribes-did furnish the cultured seH-improvement so important to Barry.

Despite this, however, the Society's membership was not particularly active. Barry was often dismayed by the members' lack of interest 149

Founding the Society in the Society. Describing an effort to persuade them to undertake a specific project, he vented his frustration: "As usual," he wrote, "few were present." Early on he began listing in the minutes the names of those who had missed several meetings. Mahlon Ogden, for example, failed to attend thirteen consecutive monthly meetings. The activities of the Civil War years presented another problem. Barry complained that Ezra McCagg, normally one of the group's most supportive members, was so busy with the Northwestern Sanitary Commission that he had no time to assist the Society. Even after the war years, interest remained low. Barry's immediate successor, T. H. Armstrong, noted that visits to the reading rooms were few, book contributions were clown, and often a quorum was not present at meetings for the transaction of business. It was during Armstrong's tenure that the Society changed its monthly meetings to quarterly sessions.

But if members did not zealously support the institution's historical projects with their time, they did give their money. Sixty-eight members contributed $100 or more for the construction of the Society's building in 1868; Newberry gave $4,100; Ogden and Skinner $3,500 each; George Smith $2,500; Arnold and Brown $2,000 each; Henry Farnum $1,500; and Scammon, McCagg, and Cyrus McCormick $1,000 each.

Still, Barry often complained of a lack of money for operating expenses, and it was only after Scammon initiated the life membership that the organization was on its feet financially.

Barry wrote one correspondent that "this Society has never yet given me power to buy, at my option, a dollar's worth of books." His frustration at having to curb his book-buying urge was intensified when he saw the Society's members giving large sums of money to other institutions. "The day of our abundance," he wrote, "has not yet come. Chicago has just raised $25,000 for an Astronomical Observatory-and chiefly from gentlemen, members of this society. Mr. W. B. Ogden gave $5,000."

Rather than pushing too hard for books and operat ing expenses, however, Barry directed his promotional abilities toward the acquisition that would fully institutionalize the Society: its own building. He campaigned relentlessly for the building fund . "Let [a build150

ing] be imagined," he told members, "of sufficiently ample dimensions, architectural taste, and in a tranquil ... locality ... affording a pleasant and attractive rendezvous for the intelligent of both sexes in our city ... how soon would its effects be marked! What the Athenaeum has been and is to Boston . .. would such a reading room be to Chicago." After outlining the civic benefits of such a building, Barry, keenly aware of his audience's wealth, stressed the personal benefits of philanthropy.

"Who, on entering some time honored Library and seeing above its well fitted and venerable alcoves the inscribed names of individuals whose generous benefactions filled those shelves ... has not warmed toward those long buried benefactors." The Chicago Historical Society, Barry assured its members, would be a lasting monument to their character.

After years of similar statements, Barry was successful. In 1868 the Society dedicated a large, supposedly fireproof, building at the corner of Dearborn and Ontario streets. After twelve years Barry had established the Society as a viable and visible part of the cultural life of the city. This success, however, proved to be short-lived. As with so much o( the city, the Society's building and collections were destroyed in the 1871 Fire.

The type of organization that Barry and fellow members established illustrates some important characteristics of their concept of the ideal city as it existed at that time. The evidence presented here suggests that the institution they established was a decidedly elitist one. Its clues were high; a secret society-like method was used for the election of new members to keep out unworthy elements; and its activities were directed toward those whom the members perceived to be the best citizens of the city. Its programs reflected Barry's concern for Chicago's unassimilated masses only so far as their benefits were indirect. This indirectness, however, did not present a conflict for Barry because he relied on a classic assumption of the Victorian elite: when the refined man improved himself, be it by history, art, or mansion building, he also improved society.

The gap between financial and personal support on the part of members sheds more light

(continues on p. 175)

The Collections

The By-Laws of the Chicago Historical Society, published in 1856, made provision for a Librarian and Cabinet-Keeper to have charge of all manuscripts, papers, and documents, and to keep a record of all donations of "books, manuscripts, tracts, antiquities or relics." In 1863, when the Society issued a printed Biennial Report to the Governor of Illinois, the growth of the collections was tabulated as follows:

ToOct Nov'er 1856.

1857.

Bound books ......... .. . ....

Unbound pamphlets ... . ... . .

Rare newspapers ...... . .... . .

Files of periodicals ....... .. ..

Files of newspapers ...........

Maps and charts ........ .....

Prints ... . .... ...... .. ......

Manuscripts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Collections of miscellanies .....

Cabinet ................ . ...

390 717 19

50

3,576 5,555 67 14 455 119

12 1

32 2

Total .......... . ........

1,189

9,820

1858.

1859.

1860.

1861.

1862.

Total.

2,369 5,025

1,235 4,905

229 69 278

86 48 16 2 5

1,158 6,056 52 120 90 263 20 134

1,416 9,622 95 310 188 185 45 148 9

1,680 10,233 47 617 122 78 47 150 23 29

11,824 42,113 280 1,376 972 989 114 481 35 29

7,970

6,297

7,893

12,018

13,026

58,2] 3

The Great Fire of 1871 destroyed almost all of the collections, and another conflagration in 1874 took what had been collected in the aftermath (mostly in the form of donations from libraries and historical societies outside of Chicago). Once again the Society set out to reconstitute its holdings. The paucity of Cabinet items compared to paper collections persisted until the Society's decision, in 1920, to purchase the collection of widely assorted historical materials put together over many years by Chicago entrepreneur Charles F. Gunther, a trustee of the Society for twenty-one years.

Since that time all the collections have grown enormously. The single Librarian/ Cabinet-Keeper has been replaced by a curatorial staff of more than twenty, and the Society's holdings are now ordered into eight collecting areas . In the following pages, members of the curatorial staff discuss the collections in their care. It is worth noting that all of the Society's major activities-from research and exhibits to public programs and publications-stem from the collection and interpretation of these holdings.

151

Architectural Collection The Architectural Collection was established in 1976 in cooperation with the Chicago chapter of the American Institute of Architects to document the "built environment of the greater Chicago area and the work of Chicago-based architects, engineers, and builders both in and out of the Chicago area." Although carefully selected building fragments are included, the bulk of the collections comprises traditional records such as correspondence, drawings, renderings, photographs, and books.

THESE FLAT COLLECTIONS have grown at a phenomenal rate since the accession of the first major collection, the Papers of Harry Weese, in 1978. The Chicago Architectural Archive is now one of the largest collections of its kind in the United States.

As it first came to the Society the Wee e collection occupied some 700 linear feet or 1,680 document cases 5"xl0"xl5"! When it was realized that no institution in the country had dealt with collections of this size, the Society proposed that the Weese collection be used as a model to determine how the bulk of contemporary collections could be managed. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded the Society $25,000 to assemble a group of experts to study this question. The project's report was issued in 1980 and led to the weeding of over half of the Weese collection. Publication of the report in an archival journal is expected to assist other archives in the United States and abroad.

While the Archive moved to manage its bulky collections, it also began to exploit their rich content for public exhibition.

The huge collection of Holabird &: Root was mined to discover its key artifacts. These were then mounted in a major interpretive exhibition which was accompanied by a long essay by guest curator Robert Bruegmann (see

152

Chicago History, Fall 1980). Both the essay and the exhibition showed the central role that the firm Holabird & Roche / Holabird &: Root played in the construction of the physical fabric of the city and the firm's important contribution to an architecture of the skyscraper. The national importance of this collection was recognized by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission given to assist the Society in processing the collection for scholarly use.

The scale of the ¡weese and Holabird collections set them apart from other collections in the Archive. Together they document many of the aspects of the history of building technology in the city for almost a hundred years. Thi~ full record o[ many building techniques, a central purpose of the collection , frees the Archive to be more selective in what it retains in the future.

It must be stressed that the Archive collects to serve history and not lo preserve the physical fa bric of the city of Chicago: that gargantuan chore remains the responsibility of individual building owners.

Smaller in bulk but o[ great importance are almost a score of other collections. The collection of 3,500 drawings and other records of architect Barry Byrne is one of these smaller gems. Byrne began his career in the studio o[

Frank Lloyd Wright around 1901 and remained in practice until 1967. During this long career he executed several remarkable buildings in the Prairie style and then moved in his later work to a clearly individual style. This is best seen in the Cathedral of Christ the King in Tulsa , Oklahoma. Byrne's conscious efforts to integrate the liturgy of the Catholic Church with contemporary forms is a splendid example of how the architectural collections can enlarge our understanding o[ the past beyond aesthetics and building technology.

Byrne's work, together with the recently acquired collection o[ John Lloyd Wright, will be the subject of an exhibition in the late spring of I 982. Wright, like Byrne, began his career in the studio o[ Frank Lloyd Wright. i\[uch larger than either Byrne or Wright is the collection given

by Friedman , Alschuler & Sincere. Jn addition to the work o[ that firm, the collection includes many of the buildings of A. S. Alschuler and the work of the firm in association with such architects as Morris Lapidus and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Alschuler was a commercial architect of great ability, many of whose structures not only delight the eye but are still in use today. Perhaps of equal importance, however, is the smaller volume of work that he did as an architect of synagogues.

Th e Collections

John Lloyd Wright , a son of Frank Lloyd Wright , designed distinctive homes in Indiana and southern California. This drawing of the Alfred Ney residence in Escondido , California, 1958, combines elements of California and Prairie style architecture . CHS .

Alfred S. Alschuler (of Friedman, Alschuler & Sincere) was well known as an architect of loft and commercial buildings. He was also the architect for several synagogues in the Chicago area.

Shown here is a detail from his design for Congregat ion Am Echod in Waukegan , 1927. CHS, ICHi-16234.

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153

The Collections

The Andrew Rebori Collection documents not only his distinguished residential and commercial work but also his less well-known planning projects.

Among the latter is this drawing of the Outer Drive from Grant Park to Lincoln Park, done in 1930 for the Chicago Plan Commission.

It was part of an unrealized lakefront development program which included an airport.

CHS, ICHi-16232.

This rough sketch made by Jack Hartray in 1972 is one of the first stages in the planning for Washington's renowned metro system designed by Harry Weese & Associates. CHS, ICHi-16233.

Like Byrne's churches, these buildings give us a special view of the expression of spiritual values in architectural form. Although Mies van der Rohe's drawings are held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, researchers are fortunate that many of Mies's important projects in Chicago are documented in the working drawings in the FAS collection. These include several buildings at the 154

Illinois Institute of Technology and 900-910 Lake Shore Drive.

The Chicago Architectural Archive is, however, more than a collection of records and drawings of major monuments. A conscious effort is made to include a thorough cross-section of all building types, ranging from the elegant residences of Chicago's North Shore to public housing projects in the city center, plain commer-

cial lofts and storefronts, as well as the refined skyscrapers of Holabird & Root or Andrew Rebori.

It is to document a wide selection of vernacular structures and the finest examples of architecture in the Chicago area that the Archive seeks to enlarge and enrich its present holdings.

Frank Jewell, Curator of the Architectural Collection

Costume Collection The Costume Collection comprises some 14,000 items of clothing and accessories for men, women, and children as well as periodicals, illustrations, fJhotographs, and other materials documenting the history of fashion as revealed in the clothing of Chicagoans.

Fashion in Chicago

This American-made dress of pink, gold, and pale blue changeable silk taffeta is probably from the 1872 trousseau of Elizabeth Holmes (Mrs. William S. North). Gift of Sidney G. Haskins. CHS.

IT IS OFTEN ASSUMED that Chicago at mid-nin~teenth century was a place far removed from the world of fashion. However, the evidence offered by the Society's Costume Collection shows that from the very beginning of the westward movement, the clothing of some Chicagoans reflected what was most fashionable at the time on the East Coast and, indeed, in Europe. As the city

grew and prospered and its population became more affiuent and sophisticated, Chicagoans began to demand increasingly better quality in the clothing and accessories available from local merchants. Their needs were met by such entrepreneurs as Potter Palmer, l\larshall Field, and others who established comprehensive dry goods stores in the city and made it their business to

stock them with the finest merchandise imported from New York and, eventually, also from abroad. As Chicagoans who traveled abroad became familiar with European styles and quality, they came to expect the same standards at home.

Best known among the Chicagoans who bought their clothes directly from Paris was l\frs.

Potter Palmer, who set a style for Chicago in more than one area of life. Fortunately the Society possesses a fine collection of her French gowns, many of them from the prestigious House of vVorth. The attraction exerted

by Parisian fashion for Chicagoans continued after the turn of the century. Anita Carolyn Blair, for instance, purchased a gown from Parisian designer Paul Poiret in 1913, which is also part of the Society's collections. Featuring a narrow-draped skirt and a bead-embroidered lampshade tunic inspired by the Orient, this gown was widely illustrated in French journals.

In the days before mass-manufactured clothing became readily available, most clothes were custom-made whether by a fashionable dressmaker, an itinerant seamstress, or in the home. And all turned to ladies' magazines for guidance on what to wear. Among the most popular of these was Godey's Lady's Book, which

155

The Collections showed illustrations of "Americanized Parisian Fashions." Stores like Marshall Field & Co. imported Parisian styles and adapted them to American taste.

As early as 1869, but especially after the turn of the century, Marshall Field & Co. played an important role in bringing the best of European couture to Chicago in a series of fashion presentations. This offered Chicagoans an opportunity to buy the height of Parisian fashion in their own city and stimulated local taste and design in clothing. Specialty stores like Marguerite Pick and Stanley Korshak also imported and translated French couture for the Chicago market.

At the same time the direct connection to Paris also continued. In the I 950s, for example, Mrs. H. H. Windsor purchased many gowns from the House of Jean Patou. So that _Mrs. Windsor could make her selections without leaving home, the design house sent sketches and swatches of fabric to her in Chicago. In 1976, Mrs. Windsor presented the Society with three volumes of Patou sketches as well as with some of her Parisian gowns.

Some fashionable Chicago women have chosen to patronize local dressmakers and designers, and these have responded creatively to the demanding tastes of their clients. The Society's collection abounds with examples of Chicago-made gowns from the nineteenth century to the present. In fact, the Society has continued to collect clothing and accessories by contemporary Chicago designers such as Becky Bisoulis, Sharon Harris, Mark Heister, Billy Falcon, Noriko, and Catherine Scott, to mention but a few. Many of the new young Chicago designers show a great interest in the use of fabric, surface detail, and decoration.

So much so, that at times these 156

This magnificent platinum filigree choker, set with 1,236 diamonds, was worn by Mrs. Potter Palmer at the turn of the century. Gift of Mrs. Gordon Palmer. CHS.

Mary R. Casey of Michigan Avenue designed this gown for Mrs. Alfred D. Kohn in 1897. It is of striped green faille and black satin woven with a warp-printed floral print. Gift of Mrs. Clarence Loeb. CHS.

The Collections

Piederit of Chicago made this gold and black sequined gown about 1916. It was worn by Mrs. Daniel J. Schuyler, Jr. Gift of Daniel M. Schuyler.

CHS. Georges Lepape's illustration entitled " Laquelle?" depicts the dress called "Sorbet," designed in 1913 by Erle for couturier Paul Poire!. Anita Carolyn Blair purchased this gown for the debut of Gladys High, later Lady Birney. CHS.

LAQUELLE !

Rob. Jâ&#x20AC;˘ .oiNe P...u.l Poin.t

seem to be even more important than line. In this area they are carrying on a tradition which was evident in the gowns created by many of their nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century counterparts, who paid a great deal of attention to detail, ornament, and fabric.

Some of the designers Chicago has produced went on to attain international fame. Among them was Charles James, whose highly constructed designs have a distinctive sculptural quality. A retrospective of his designs is in the planning stage. Another Chicagoan , Mainbocher, designed the uniform worn by WAYES during World vVar II with the same sense of style which characterized the gowns he designed for his famous clients, not the least being the Duchess of Windsor. The milliner, Benjamin Green-Field, known as Bes-Ben, created unique, imaginative, and whimsical hats worn by countless socialites and internationally known personalities, including Hedda Hopper.

The Chicago Historical Society boasts of an extraordinary collection of Bes-Ben millinery given

by Mr. Green-Field as well as by many of his distinguished clients.

Though not a native Chicagoan, Halston began l,iis millinery career here and has since become a famous dress designer.

The Society's Costume Collection includes examples of the work of all of these designers and of other domestic and European couture. It also has a cross-section of clothes worn by the diverse citizens of Chicago, including uniforms of nurses, stewardesses, servants, police, and firemen. In all, the collection reflects the discerning and individual tastes of Chicago c1t1zens and has a uniquely Chicago flavor .

Elizabeth Jachimowicz, Curator of Costumes

157

Decorative Arts Collection The Decorative Arts Collection includes the Society's holdings of all the threedimensional objects other than costumes, paintings, and swlpture. Of particular interest are the growing collections of metalwork, ceramics, glass, and furniture made in Chicago.

Chicago Furniture

Headboard from bed made in the factory of W .W. Strong for State Suite of the Palmer House when it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1871. Elaborately draped with green damask, lace, and fringe, the bed is one of five pieces from the suite being restored for the exhibition . CHS.

the Society's Decorative Arts Collection from American to Chicago history in recent years, has led th is curator to a more comprehensive study of the history of the city's manufacturers and artisans in a variety of fields. For in a historical museum, objects play an important role as primary documents, often becoming the key to a fascinating interplay of

THE REFOCUSING OF

158

economic, sociological, technological, and aesthetic de,¡elopments.

Since 1977, Chicago-made metalwork, ceramics, and glass ha\'e been systematically studied and exhibited, and basic research techniques as well as a context for one of Chicago's pioneer industries-the manufacture of furniture-have been established.

Numbering seven in 1839, Chicago's earliest furniture makers

turned out simple wooden chairs, couches, and coffins, for they often combined the skills of undertaking with those of cabinetmaking. After 1877, however, paralleling Chicago's emergence as a major metropolitan center, the furniture trade assumed tremendous proportions. By the end of the century the city's many factories were producing an amazing variety of goods: rattan

The Collections

Bears, cows, Indians, and other symbols of pioneer Chicago are carved on this armchair made from logs secured from the second Fort Dearborn by an unknown furniture maker. It was commissioned b-y Chicago merchant Levi Z. Leiter around 1880. Gift of Thomas Leiter. CHS. Cover from the catalog of Edgar S. Boynton, whose factory specialized in inexpensive, machinecarved easels, tables, wall brackets, and stands during the 1870s and '80s. CHS.

and wicker chairs, tables, and baby carriages; .patent rockers, bedsprings, a nd barber chairs; school and office desks; church pews and altars; bedroom, parlor, and dining room sets; tables for kitchen, parlor, library, and pool hall. By 1885, Chicago was a leading producer of parlor furniture, with annual sales of upholstered goods and frames which equalled those o[ New York,

Boston, and Cincinnati combined. Besides being sold locally, Chicago's furniture was distributed via railroad and mail-order houses throughout the West.

Large-scale manufacturing continued into the twentieth century. By 1900 Chicago was also becoming known as a center for modernistic furniture designs, like those created by Frank Lloyd 'Wright and other Prairie School

architects. Under the impetus of the Arts and Crafts Movement, which was highly influential in Chicago, interest in original design and fine craftsmanship revived. Numerous small workshops as well as large retailers such as the Tobey Furniture Company produced handmade and Missionstyle furniture. Beginning in the I 920s architects in particular turned to designing streamlined l\foderne and International-style furniture, and many local factories followed suit using tubular steel, formica, and other new material. During the Great Depression years, furniture manufacturing, like most Chicago manufacturing industries, began to decline. Nevertheless Chicago retains an important role as one of the country's centers of furniture marketing and distribution.

Researching the various aspects of the Chicago furniture industry's history could easily become a lifelong task. Therefore, members of the Society's newly organized Decorative Arts Committee have been called upon for help in locating examples of Chicago furniture as well as in doing the research itselÂŁ. Compiling company histories; taking notes from periodicals, books, and newspapers; searchin&' patent records; locating and interviewing descendants of manufacturers; and making slides and maintaining the burgeoning furniture files are among the tasks being performed

by Committee members. A wealth of original source material, including directories, trade catalogs, newspapers, and census records, is available in the Society's Printed Collections. But several of the specialized trade periodicals are located in other libraries, necessitating travel within the city as well as to the East Coast.

Other Committee members act as "eyes on the street," keeping alert for good pieces of Chicago 159

The Collections

furniture and for clues to the whereabouts of manufacturers' descendants and other sources of artifacts and information.

As examples of Chicago-made furniture have been located and photographed for possible exhibition, it has become clear that the original fabric coverings on most of the upholstered pieces have been replaced and their silhouettes altered to reflect the tastes of later generations. This has led to additional research in the area of late-nineteenth-century upholstery fabrics and techniques, and to the decision to publish a separate reference manual on 160

Side chair from a set of thirteen Moderns pieces designed by Able Faidy fo[ Charles and Ruth Singletary in 1927. CHS. Chromesteel and glass table designed by Wolfgang Hoffman for the Howell Company in 1935.

Gift of the Estate of William Mccready. CHS.

this topic in the near future.

At present, an exhibition detailing the history of the Chicago furniture industry is planned for the fall of 1983. Since all research must be completed and all objects chosen by the fall of 1982, you have six months to check your attic, basement, and living room for labeled examples of Chicago furniture that might be suitable for the Society's exhibit.

You too are invited to participate in the discovery of Chicago's decorative arts tradition.

Sharon S. Darling, Curator of Decorative Arts

Graphics Collection The Graphics Collection comprises approximately three-quarters of a million images, including photographs, negatives, prints, posters_. films, and other types of images.

These provide a visual commentary on Chicago from the beginning of its history to the present. The following focuses on one part of the collection, the Chicago posters given to the Society by the estate of Joseph T. R yerson .

Chicago Posters when the goals of a museum and its staff correspond to a particular interest on the part of one of its major patrons. Such was the relationship enjoyed by Joseph T. Ryerson and the Chicago Historical Society. While most Chicago patrons of the arts tended to spend their energy and money to bring works of art from "back East" and Europe to the city, Ryerson recognized the unique accomplishments of Chicagoans. The legacy he left reflects not only a fierce pride in Chicago's greatness, but an astute awareness of the historical importance of events, individuals, and the documents and works of art they produced.

The name R yerson has long been associated with Chicago. It was in 1842 that the first Jose ph Turner Ryerson (18 13-83) came to the city and founded what wou ld become the nation's large;t independent steel and iron service corporation . His grandson and namesake (1888-1947) worked in the fal')'lily business until his retirement in 1929. In his memoirs, th e younger Ryerson revealed that his interest in collecting Chicagoana began at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, when he acquired every issue of the Fair Edition of the New York magazine Puck, printed at the exposition.

It was not until several years IT IS A HAPPY C IRCUMSTANCE

Advertisement by Will Bradley, 1895. Gift of the Estate of Joseph T . Ryerson. CHS.

later, however, when he saw a display of the Columbian Puck at the Chicago Historical Society, that Ryerson decided consciously to collect materials related to Chicago. During the 1920s he actively began to acquire rare and valuable books, maps, prints, posters, and photographs covering the city's entire history. By 1930, his collection had grown to the point that he commissioned architect

David Adler to design a special 5th-floor addition to his residence on Astor Street to accommodate not only the collection, but also the numerous people who came to study it. In I 931, the "Old Chicago Room" was completed and Joseph Ryerson let it be known that he could be found there on Saturday mornings by any students, lecturers, or writers who could make use of his collections for their varying fields of research . Over 2,500 books and pamphlets, 200 prints, 300 posters and numerous other photographs, maps, and manuscripts were gatherecl, stored, and made accessible.

An illustration of the significance of R yerson 's collection can be found by examining one small portion of his gift: a group of posters dating from the last years of the nineteenth century, which came to the Society with the rest of his collection in 1948.

Posters produced during the last decade of the nineteenth century clearly show that Chicago was a leader rather than a mere participant in the poster craze that swept Europe and America in the 1890s. While the process of color lithography necessary for mass production had been availab le for some time, its application as a creative art form had been largely ignored. However, under the gu iding inspiration of Jules Cheret in France, young artists such as Alphonse Mucha and 161

The Collections Toulouse-Lautrec were by the early 1890s designing posters which contributed to entirely new sty Jes and radically altered traditional ideas of advertising. The public responded immediately and its enthusiasm for collecting posters grew into a veritable mania. Advertisers saw the value of the added publicity and profit to be derived from this situation and ordered thousands of extra posters for sale as well as display.

Even this was not enough; soon small-format reproductions of posters were being printed to help meet the demand and to combat the nighttime theft of posters from the streets of Paris and the bribing of young bill-posters to relinquish their stock before they had had a chance to paste the posters to walls and fences.

The collection of approximately 300 posters which Joseph Ryerson amassed shows that fine art posters began to be printed almost simultaneously in Chicago.

While the posters date from 1894 on, their fine quality reveals the high state of the art of printing in the city by that time. Chicago was the city of the first mail-order catalogs, a huge map-printing establishment, and producer of vast quantities of printed material for the burgeoning railroad industry. As the demand for fine art posters grew, Chicago's presses were well equipped to meet the challenge. At the same time, _the sheer volume of printing stimulated pioneering developments in production and distribution.

Not only did Chicago publishers have the capacity to print fine posters, the city also had an artistic community closely in touch with the latest European developments in the arts. In this favorable climate Chicago's book and magazine publishers commissioned artists and designers to create posters to advertise publications such as The Chap162

Advertisement for Aetna Dynamite by Edward Penfield, 1896. Gift of the Estate of Joseph T. Ryerson. CHS. Advertising poster for the Carson-Pirie Monthly by an unknown artist, 1896.

Gift of the Estate of Joseph T. Ryerson .

CHS, ICHi-16142.

The Collections

Advertising poster for an issue of The Echo by Frank A. Nankivell, 1895.

Gift of the Estate of Joseph T. Ryerson. CHS. Advertising poster for The Inland Printer by Joseph C. Leyendecker, 1897.

Gift of the Estate of Joseph T. Ryerson.

CHS, ICHi-16146.

July Now Ready

Price Twenty Cents

book, Echo, International, and The Inland Printer. Soon other products, ranging from bicycles, tonics, and soaps to cash registers, were being advertised in daring new ways . Theatrical performances, horse shows, art exhibitions, and even poster exhibitions all had lively posters to catch the public's eye. As in Paris, the demand for posters was great; while issues of The Chapbook sold for 5¢, copies of its monthly poster and back-issue posters sold for five to ten times as much!

Given this impetus, artists felt free to experiment with an amazing variety of new styles, as well as with innovations in type faces and design. From flowing Art Nouveau curves, decorative medieval-inspired borders, and J apanese-influenced flatness and simplicity, to the starkly realistic mode of French artists such as Lautrec and Theophile Steinlen, styles and sources were adapted to every imaginab le poster use.

Will Bradley, a leader of the Chicago as well as of the national poster movement, was only one of a host of designers which included, among others, Joseph and Frank Leyendecker, Will Carqueville, Ethel Reed, Blanche Ostertag, Frank Hazenplug, and Claude Bragdo9-. A whole group of illustrators with roots in the newspaper business, including John T. McCutcheon, Will Denslow, and George Ade, combined caricature and arresting lettering to create distinctive images.

Entirely new type styles, many invented by Will Bradley and Frank Goudy, soon became standard in the printing industry.

Such was the richness of the moment which Joseph T. Ryerson chose to collect and preserve.

The collection still delights the public and challenges the scholar.

Trudy Victoria Hansen, Assistant Curator of Graphics 163

Paintings and Sculpture Collection The Paintings and Sculpture Collection comprises some 1,200 paintings and some 200 pieces of sculpture. Among the most interesting p_ieces are 80 paintings by an artist whose subjects ranged from King Louis Phillippe of France and Pope Pius IX to numerous prominent Chicagoans.

Paintings by G.P .A. Healy WHEN WILLIAM B. OGDEN, Chicago railroad builder and first mayor of the city, visited George P. A. Healy's Paris studio to sit for his portrait in 1855, Healy was already established as a portrait painter with an international reputation. He had been court painter to King Louis Phillippe of France, interpreter of the royal families of Europe, and portrayer of outstanding American statesmen.

Born in Boston on July 15, 1813, Healy spent most of his early life working at odd jobs to supplement his family's small income. Although he did not attend art school, he became interested in painting at the age of sixteen when he began coloring prints for amusement. Before long he was spending all of his time sketching and painting anyone who would sit for a portrait.

Through painter Gilbert Stuart's daughter Jane, Healy met portraitist Thomas Sully, who encouraged him to make painting his profession. When Healy persuaded a leading Boston socialite, Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis, to sit for him, other commissions soon followed.

Like many American artists, Healy felt a need to go to Europe for further study and training. By 1834 he had saved enough money to help support his family and to travel to Paris, where he studied with a well-known French painter, Baron Antoine Jean Gros. Six months under Gros's

164

tutelage would be Healy's only formal training in art.

Throughout the next five years Healy spent his free time traveling in Europe. While visiting England he met and married Louisa Phipps, who returned to Paris with him in 1839. There, Lewis Cass, then United States minister to France, persuaded King Louis Phillippe to sit for Healy. The king's patronage was most helpful to Healy's career, though it ended when Louis Phillippe was deposed in the Revolution of 1848.

It was during the late 1840s that Healy finished his wellknown painting (now in Faneuil Hall in Boston) which depicts Daniel Webster replying to Robert Y. Hayne. A few years later, his painting showing Benjamin Franklin before the court of Louis XVI won a gold medal at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, the highest honor awarded an American artist in France at the time.

William B. Ogden used all his persuasive powers to try to lure Healy to Chicago. When Healy demurred because of the lack of a studio, Ogden responded by inviting him to stay at the Ogden home for a year. This Healy could not resist.

Healy was not impressed by his first sight of Chicago. Years later he would liken it to an "overgrown youth whose legs and arms are too long for his clothes and who scarcely knows how to dispose of his lank,

awkward body . . . the city stretched along the lake shore and out on the prairies, unfinished, ragged and somewhat uncouth as yet." However, he found "hospitality in the young city [so] . . . charming and its home circles [so] .. . full of kindly feeling and of high culture" that he sent for his wife and children and settled in Chicago for the next twelve years.

It soon became a mark of social distinction to sit for Healy, and his output was prodigious.

He painted over five hundred portraits of Chicago families, including the Arnolds, the Blairs, the Blatchfords, the Kinzies, the McCaggs, the McCormicks, the Newberrys, the Sheldons, the Skinners, and the Wentworths.

Yet he also found time to do commissions in the Southern states and along the Eastern seaboard. During the Civil War he painted Grant, Sherman, McClellan, Sheridan, and many other Union generals. President Lincoln sat for him. Although much of his Chicago work was destroyed by the 1871 Fire, a number of paintings survived.

Like the people who sat for him Healy became a participant in the city's development, organizing art movements and exhibitions, and helping found the Chicago Academy of Design , forerunner of the Art Institute. Together with sculptor Leonard W. Volk he helped organize the city's first art exhibition, held under

The Collections

Anna Reubenia McCormick (1860-1917), daughter of William Sanderson McCormick and niece of Cyrus H. McCormick, married Edward T. Blair in 1882. The Blairs owned a home at the northwest corner of Superior and Cass (Wabash) streets. Gift of William McCormick Blair. CHS.

165

The Collections

A self-portrait by G.P.A. Healy, 1867.

Gift of Ezra B. McCagg. CHS. Edward Burling (1819-1892), architect, came to Chicago from Newburgh, New York, in 1843. His important buildings were the pre-Chicago Fire U.S. Post Office; the Tribune Building at Dearborn and Madison; the First National Bank; and the Nickerson Mansion. Gift of Mrs. Sarah E. G. Wheeler. CHS.

the auspices of the Chicago Historical Society in 1859.

In 1867 Healy returned to Europe where, with occasional trips back, he remained for the next twenty-five years. Chicagoans now sat for him at his studios in Rome or Paris. He also painted important European figures, including French statesmen Louis Thiers and Leon Gambetta; Pope Pius IX; King Charles and Queen Elizabeth of Roumania; and the celebrated pianist and composer Franz Liszt.

In 1892, at age seventy-nine, Healy, always the American, decided to come home. That he chose Chicago surely suggests that he cherished fond memories of 166

the time he had spent here. He died in Chicago two years later.

As a painter of portraits Healy can well be called a recorder of history. J\fuch of his enormous output--over 1,000 recorded paintings-remained of interest to historians and biographers even when it temporarily lost favor with the art critics. Admittedly, his work was uneven in quality; some of it was uninspired and stiff. But at its best, when he was able to establish a particular rapport with his subject, the paintings had great strength, charm, and even brilliance. l\fany of his early works were somber in tone but toward the middle of his career he began to use a striking

variety of fresh color.

On occasion Healy, in his later works, combined his more traditional painterly approaches with elements derived from the impressionists. In recent decades the aesthetic quality of Healy's paintings has received renewed recognition.

Good work and bad, Healy stands as one of America's most successful nineteenth-century portrait painters. For over a ha[[ century he painted the great and near great of two continents and in so doing brought prestige to American art at home and abroad.

Joseph B. Zywicki, Curator of Paintings and Sculpture

Manuscripts Collection The Manuscripts Room staff cares for all of the unpublished, written holdings of the Chicago Historical Society, including letters, minutes, reports, account books, clippings, and scrapbooks, as well as audio recordings.

IF GERTRUDE STEIN were alive today and remarked that "a manuscript is a manuscript is a manuscript," she would be on firm ground. Letters, diaries, reports, and other forms of written intercourse have remained pretty much the same since human beings first recorded their thoughts for daily communication, for their own personal records, and for posterity. Indeed, discovering the continuity of human experience is one of the constant pleasures of reading the unique unpublished letters that compose our oldest collections. During the founding decades of Chicago, our first residents wrote courtship letters to the girls or boys they left behind, plaintive appeals to "Dear Mother," terse business notices to their partners and fellow merchants, detailed descriptions of prices and living conditions to family and friends in the "old country," glowing reports of the booming trade and rich land in which they hoped Easterners would invest, and occasionally, an irate letter to a politician who displeased them.

But if Stein were to assert that "a manuscript collection is a manuscript colleqion is a manuscript collection," she would be in serious need of enlightenment.

The character of th ese collections has undergone extraordinary change in the twentieth century.

They have increased greatly in size, in complexity, and in the kinds and amounts of information they contain. In addition, the medium and format of the

records have begun to change.

Besides files of traditional written materials, modern manuscript collections often contain large numbers of photocopies as well as audio recordings on reels and cassettes and even computer print-outs.

Generally, nineteenth-century collections differ from modern collections in two ways. First, they never were large bodies of documentation by comparison with the records output of our twentieth-century bureaucratic society, equipped with large clerical staffs, typewriters, photocopying machines, and, now, word processors. And in the second place, the older collections typically contain only a fraction of the original papers compiled by nineteenth-century men and women. Before these materials arrive at the Historical Society, various owners and caretakers have often moved them from one storage place to another (attics, basements) and occasionally have discarded materials that they considered to be too bulky or fragile or dirty or wet or, simply, uninteresting. Often by chance, they have determined what later generations will be able to learn about their predecessors.

A brief look at one of our nineteenth-century holdings highlights the contrast between old and new. William B. Ogden (1805-1877) was a dynamic businessman, politician, and philanthropist-the largest resident landowner in the city during an early period and, later, an in-

vestor in and organizer of several railroads; a popular leader who moved from being a Jacksonian Democrat, when he served as Chicago's first mayor in 1837, to being a Civil War Republican by the time he represented Chicago in the state legislature. Yet, the extant records of Ogden's remarkable career amount to only twelve folders of correspondence and deeds and three faded letterbooks (copies on onionskin paper) of outgoing letters. Moreover, historians are fortunate that even this material has survived because most of the records created during the first decades of Chicago history were destroyed when the Great Fire of 1871 wiped out over three square miles of the central business district and older residential areas.

Although we continue to acquire small lots like the Ogden Papers-and are pleased to receive these personal collectionstypical moderi{ collections are much larger. By comparison, the papers of one twentieth-century political leader, Senator Paul H. Douglas (Democrat, Illinois), amount to nearly 800 linear feet of shelf space and include his correspondence with constituents and his research files containing a virtual cornucopia of information on political concerns and foreign and domestic affairs. Another prime example of a modern collection is the Papers of Claude A. Barnett (180 linear feet). Barnett established the Associated Negro Press (ANP) in Chicago in 1919 to disseminate 167

The Collections

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""''"' George I. Robinson, a young man newly arrived in Chicago , wrote to his mother in 1858 on stationery depicting shipping on the Chicago River. Gift of Robert Gillies. CHS.

news about black life in America to black newspapers throughout the country. His manuscript files include not only thirty-five years of news releases of the ANP but also his voluminous correspondence with and about persons of African ancestry from the 1920s until his death in 1967. w·e also collect records of businesses and organizations, such as the files of the Welfare Council of Metropolitan Chicago (300 linear feet), which range from the I 920s to the I 970s and contain data on a myriad of public and private agencies that gathered under this umbrella organization and information on nearly all aspects of social service. The diversity and scope of our hold168

Form letter prepared by the Chicago headquarters of the Associated Negro Press proudly announcing expansion of its service through the establishment of a Washington , D.C. , office in 1939. Gift of Etta Moten Barnett. CHS.

ings are apparent from a bri ef listing of some of the other major collections acquired since the mid-1960s. They include the papers of the Chicago Teachers' Federation and Chicago Teachers Union, Illinois Manufacturers' Association, Catholic Interracial Council, Open Lands Project, Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights, Chicago Women's Liberation Union ; plus personal collections of industrialist and philanthropist Sterling Morton and other members of the Morton family, peace activist and author Sidney Lens, former 5th Ward Alderman Leon M. Despres, Studs Terkel, and newsman Len O'Connor. The research value of each collection is en-

hanced a nd multiplied by its association with the records of a person's fri ends and rivals or by the fil es of sister organizations a nd their subagencies.

In judging the historical value of manuscripts, we consider primarily their usefulness for research purposes and for interpretive exhibitions. The persons who consult our collections usually are writing articles, books, school term papers, dissertations, pla ys, television programs, film documentaries, genealogies, or exhibition scripts relating to the Chicago area. Thus we give precedence to records which describe in detail a multitude of experiences in the daily life of the metropolitan area, and we

The Collections

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Transcript of interview with Win Stracke for Studs Terkel's book Hard Times . Oral history, preserved in the form of audio recordings and as transcripts of interviews, is a growing field . Gitt of Studs Terkel. CHS.

seek not only the papers of persons whose achievements are well known but also the records kept by more "ordinary" residents of th is area. Just as our older collections arc consulted by persons interested in the early fur trade and the Civil ,N'ar, in entrepreneurs and immigrants, researchers into modern periods seek information about lifestyles from communes to condominiums; feminists and antifem inists; environmental, recreational, and industrial issues; the most recent urban in-migration and the continuing process of suburbanization ; management methodologies and labor representation; social welfare and social protest. Our decision to acquire the papers of

l'cnr broH.u,

Many of the items in the collections have national significance. This letter from Cesar Chavez asked Rabbi Weinstein of K.A.M . Temple, Chicago , to support the United Farm Workers. Gift of Jacob J. Weinstein . CHS.

a person or organization does not represent an endorsement for a particular political or social viewpoint. Our holdings are most valuable to researchers when they offer many different perspectives and interpretations-even conflicting ones .

The accelerated collecting program of the past fifteen years has increased our manuscript holdings from 350 linear feet of records in l 966 (the equivalent of 175 file drawers of materials) to approximately 8,500 linear feet of records today. Moreover, by acquiring the office files of organizations, businesses, and individuals, the Historical Society conti nu es to expand its holdings of other materials that often are

included within manuscript collections: photographs, handbills, posters, films, pamphlets, newsletters, blueprints, and occasionally museum objects. Clearly, in creased storage space-and a microfilming program to make the best use of that space-will be necessary if we are to continue to preserve such an inclusive record of the history of the Chicago area . An aggressive and expansive collecting program is essential in order to fulfill our mission, and future researchers will expect no less.

Linda Evans, Assistant Curator of l\Ianuscripts, and Archie l\Iotley, Curator of l\fanuscripts 169

Printed Collections William Barry fmrsued with vigor the charge in the Society's first Constitution for "The establishment of a library of books appropriate to such an institution . ... " Eventually, the Society came to concentrate more on another of the original "Objects of the Society," namely, "To collect and preserve in particular such historical materials as shall serve to illustrate the settlement and growth of the City of Chicago."

Today, with the exception of exhibition objects, this is the main f OCHS.

THE PRINTED COLLECTIONS, like the others, collect material to enable us to know the past and allow us to evoke and experience it as a physical and emotional event.

Printed material gathered for these purposes is of three overlapping and related sorts: the selfconscious histories of the city, its communities, institutions, groups, and individuals ; the printed products created as part of the daily business o[ living, which are the sources o[ new history; and printed objects whose associations, typicality, or particularity conjure up the past as an independent reality.

The best-known parts of the collections are the reminiscences, biographies, narratives, and analyses consciously created to describe and interpret the past.

These works range from large, multivolume works of the kind written by Alfred Andreas and Bessie Louise Pierce to brief pamphlet histories, and constitute our conscious memory. l\fost of the volumes published by commercial and academic presses are widely held in the city's libraries.

The bibliogrnphical treasures in this part of the collection, therefore, are more often those works written for a smaller audience whose short runs and narrow distribution would condemn them to obscurity or total loss without the Society's efforts . The account o[ Local 130 of the Plumbers Union shown here is a strik ing exam-

170

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Spec ial histories like this one might be lost were it not for the Soc iety's collections .

CHS , ICHi-16096.

pie of such histories . But it is on ly one of thousands of this nature acquired by the Society since the Third Presbyterian Church issued its two-page History and M anua l in 1852.

If the above histories are the conscious memory of the city, then the city directories, reports, catalogs, guidebooks, advertising pamphlets, timetables, and a vast diversity of other materials are its

subconscious. They are unverified, particular yet diffuse testimony of the city's complex life.

By themselves the individual sources are usually distorted or meaningless. It is the essence of the historian's craft to weigh their reliability and significance and combine their evidence with other sources-manuscript, graphic, and physical-to create truthful descriptions and sound interpretations. These primary sources thus allow us to enlarge our knowledge and understanding of the past, assess the validity and completeness of existing accounts, and create new history.

Use of these sources includes the whole range of historical methodologies. Students of social mobility, for example, may enter whole runs of city directories (the nineteenth-century phone book) into a computer to analyze the residential "persistence" of certain groups of people. The dir ector ies thus manipulated by machine and corrected by arcane statistical formulae can be made to speak to the reality or myth of the American Dream. In other, more traditional stud ies, historians pore over the multitude of printed sources to establish a body of particular facts which are organized into coherent narrative and analysis through literary sources and historical interpretation. Mayer and Wade's Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis is a particularly important

The Collections

Originally acquired for their analysis of conditions in the city, these works have now become valuable as primary evidence of the important intellectual movement known as the Chicago School of Sociology. At the same time the typography and design of the books reflect the aesthetic of the late 1920s and 1930s and make them interesting objects for special exhibitions. CHS , ICHi-16097.

Sales catalogs become crucial sources for researchers into social history, technology , and , in this case , the decorative arts. CHS , ICHi-16095.

171

The Collections

One of the most important objects acquired by the Printed Collections in the past few years is this first printing of the Bill of Rights found in the Journal of the First Session of the Senate of the United States of America , 1789.

Only five copies sur v ive of th is document, created as part of th e process of securing in law those rights declared in 1776 and won on the battlefields of the Revolution . It affords the museum visitor a tangible contact with the creation of the new nation.

CHS , ICHi-16094.

Another significant acquisition , this one pledged to the Society as an anniversary gift, is the earliest known printing of an act "To regulate trade and intercourse with the Indian tri bes, and to preserve peace on the frontiers," which at that time included Chicago. Pledged by Mrs. William A . Boone. CHS , ICH i-16091.

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exa m ple o f the uni on of traditi onal n arra tive with ex tensive and im ag in ati ve expl o ita ti on of graphi c ev id ence.

Th e produ ct o f mos t hi storical resea rch is a no th er histor y. Just as th e zoologica l text is no substi tute fo r the zoo, however, so no histori ca l monogr aph is a substitute for th e muse um. Printed ma teri als are thu s actively so ugh t (o r potenti al ex hibitio n use. The b ulk of pr im ary doc umen ta ti on which req uires large stora ge areas a nd much staff support limits the Socie ty's co llectin g fo r r esear ch p urposes to m a teri als rela ted to Chi cago. Most of th e printed arti[ac ts o f the city's past are acqui re d as a n atural p ar t of this co llecting a nd h ave value as informatio n and ex h ibitio n object,.

In acco rd an ce w ith th e Society's decis io n-or ig in ally m ade in 1945 a nd co nfirmed aga in in 1947 a nd 1977- to m ai nta in p erman ent ex hibi t ion galleri es of America n history, the P r in ted Collect ions are also cha rged with th e acquisiti on of objects whi ch im prove th e qua lity o f perman ent exhib it io ns in th e p eriod from the ea rl y ex plorat ions to the Civil Wa r. Wh en collected solely as objects of America n history, p rinted p ieces m us t h ave those phys ical qual it ies a nd assoc iatio ns which allow a d irect experie nce o f a n im porta n t even t or process in the past. They must always be rea l objects, an d freq uen tly co nd it io n, proven an ce, editio n , and priority of iss ue are crucial co nsideration s as well. It is a tri b ute to the fo resight of the Soc iety's fou n ders and the ir successors that the printed objects in th e coll ections are as ab le to evoke a sense of the pas t in visitors to th e Society's galleri es as th e r esear ch coll ections evo ke in sch olars.

Frank J ewell , Curator of th e Printed Collectio ns 172

Special Collections Special Collections carries out collecting projects which culminate in exhibits, publications, and public programs. It also gathers ephemeral materials such as theater and concert programs.

THE COLLECTING PROJECTS conducted by Special Collections focus on specific subjects important in the development of Chicago .

Each project includes systematic efforts to identify the important organizations and individuals in that subject area ; to locate and obtain a full range of research and exhibit materials from three-dimensional artifacts and photographs to manuscripts, scrapbooks, and printed ephemera; to plan and produce exhibits, catalogs, and related public programs; and to organize the collections for subsequent research use.

The rationale for these special collecting projects evolved from ideas discussed in the micl-1960s by the Chicago Area Historical Records Committee, composed of libraries, which planned a survey to identify and describe manuscript and archival collections concerning Chicago.

Subsequently, the writer, who had served as a consultant on this project, worked on plans for a Chicago Survey of Organizational Records to be jointly sponsored by the Chicago Historical Society and the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle. It was assumed that once the survey had identified the kinds of records that were available from private organizations, research libraries would be eager to add them to their holdings.

Although the survey was not carried out for lack of funding, the creation of a Special Collections unit at the Society

makes it possible to combine a survey project with a collecting and publishing program.

Such projects help fulfill the Society's mission to provide comprehensive interpretive programs for the general public as well as research collections for scholars.

The first project centers on the Music in Chicago exhibit, scheduled to open in 1984. This exhibit, embracing all forms of serious and popular music from the 1830s to the present, will include areas devoted to such topics as symphonic and chamber music, brass bands, opera and choral societies, gospel, blues, jazz, Chicago com posers, music publishing, instrument manufacture and sale, music education, and the music of Chicago's ethn ic groups. The Society is now obtaining complete files of newsletters and programs from musical organizations based in Chicago, correspondence and scrapbooks of Chicago musicians and organizations, and a variety of other materials from photographs and posters to musical instruments associated with important performers. In connection with the exhibit, the Society plans to publish an illustrated book on the history of music in Chicago and to offer a series of associated public programs including lectures, concerts, and films.

Subjects under consideration for similar projects in the future include an exhibit, publication, and public programs concerning the history of theater in Chicago.

The Society already has thousands of programs for Chicago theaters dating from the 1840s to the present, together with many theater scrapbooks, photographs, and other sources as the basis for what could be an outstanding research collection and a fascinating exhibit. The Society expects to identify other important subject areas that need similar treatment.

From its earliest years the Society has collected a broad variety of ephemera to supplement the printed sources usually found in research libraries. As a result the holdings now include thousands of programs for theaters, concerts, and other events from the 1840s to the present, restaurant menus, trade and advertising cards, sheet music, brochures, and other miscellaneous publications issued by Chicago organizations. Such materials acid an interesting dimension to exhibiJ:s and provide information for researchers that is not readily available elsewhere.

Theater and concert programs, for instance, provide data on casts and repertoires and sometimes include photographs of performers, biographical sketches, and histories of organizations. Restaurant' menus provide striking illustrations of changes in taste and price levels. Trade cards often include engravings depicting buildings occupied by important firms.

( Illustrations p. 174) Robert L. Brubaker, Curator of Special Collections 173

The Collections

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CHS , ICHi-16121 .

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174

DGCTORJAZZ

Founding the Society (continued from p. 150) on this. The fact that most members of the Society gave more generously of their money than of their time indicates that they felt the concept of the ideal, as a goal, could be realized largely through monetary encouragement. Actual participation was not as important as financial support. The Historical Society was something the ideal Chicago ought to have, and as such it deserved the support of wealthy and culturally enlightened citizens regardless of their interest in history. Its existence was perhaps as important as its function. The ideal city could be created not so much by the vigorous self-improvement of the best men as by the building of monuments of culture that would create an atmosphere of refinement in a busy city.

After the destruction of its building in I 871, the Society had a difficult time re-establishing itself. A second fire in 1874 destroyed most of the gains made since the Great Fire, and after 1877 any new collections were stored in a temporary building. It was not until 1896 that a new, permanent building was completed. By that time, new institutions, such as the Art Institute, had become more oriented to public patronage, and the earlier cliquish nature of the Historical Society seemed outdated.

Aware of this, the Society changed with the times. "I wish to emphasize the fact," librarian Caroline Mcilvaine wrote in 1906, "that the Chicago Historical Society is a public institution, though founded and maintained by private funds." The ideal city now involved far more popular participation than Barry could have envisioned. This shift in emphasis from private to public was dramatically underscored by the Society's acquisition of the Gunther Collection in 1920. The purchase of this large collection of Americana, as Walter Whitehill writes, "effectively put the Chicago Historical Society, hitherto chiefly a library, into the museum business." The collection made another new building necessary, and after its completion in J932 the museum came to play a major role in the Society's activities. No longer having as its goal the provision of refined leisure for the true gentlemen, the Society now frankly ap-

pealed to the popular approval that William Barry believed should never be the goal of a cultural institution.

Selected Sources There arc few published works that deal specifically with the history of the Chicago Historical Society.

Paul M. Angle's "The Chicago Historical Society: 18561946" (Chicago History, Spring 1946) is a good short narrati,·c, especially when used in conjunction with Angle 's The Chicago Historical Society: An Unconvenlional Chronicle (I 956), a documentary history based on a \'aricty of primary sources. Throughout his tenure as director of the Society (1945-65), Angle \\TOle many other pieces focusing on Barry, William Corkran, CHS founders a nd members, and the growth of the collections. Da\'id Libbey's unpublished master's thesis, "The Library of the Chicago Historical Society" (University of Chicago, 1948) gives some information on the Society's origins, while Robert L. Brubaker's "The Deve lopment of an Urban History Research Center: The Chicago Historical Society's Library" (Chicago History, Spring 1978) traces major trends over a 120-year period.

After the Fire, the Society made an effort lo collect and presen·c manuscript and printed items related to its history before 187 I. Although CHS minutes were destroyed in the Great Fire, the Society's secretary was able to gather and transcribe reports of Society acti\'itics which appeared in the Historical Magazine published in New York dur ing the pre-Fire period .

W illiam Barry's annual reports, a ,·al uablc source for this paper, also sur\'ived. Barry's correspondence, although filling just two manuscript folders in the CHS archi\'es, has also been useful. Finally, William Corkran's memoir, written after he left the Society in the early I 870s, offers a valuable picture of both Chicago and the Society in its early years.

Material on the cultural development of Chicago can be found in several sources. The best published account is Helen Horo\\·itz's Culture and the City (Uni,·ersity Press of Kentucky, I 976). Although the bulk of her work. deals with cultural philanthrop¼ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is valuable also (or the general motives behind the earlier developments. For sheer amount of information, Gwladys Spencer's The Chicago Public Library (1943) is very informati\'c on several cultural activities in the city.

For those interested in the general history and de,·clopmcnt of historical societies and historical writing in the . S., the best work is Da\'id D . \'an Tassel's Recording America's Past (1960). Another is George Alcott's History in the United States (1970). l'or sun·eys of historical societies, sec Leslie Dunlap's American Historical Societies, 1790-1860 (1944) and Walter Whitehill's Jndepe11de11t Historical Societies (1962). finally, Paul Goodman's "Ethics and Enterprise" (American Quarterly XVIII, Fall 1966); Ronald Story's "Class and Culture in Boston: The Athcnaeum, 18071860" (American Quarterly XXVII, February I 975); Daniel Walker Howe's "Victorian Culture in Americ.a" as well as other e says in Victorian America (1976) edited

by Howe; and Ann Douglas's The Feminization of American Culture (1977) trace the emergence of several important cultural attitudes in the nineteenth century .

175

Washington's Farewell Address: An Eighteenth-Century "Fireside Chat"

By Garry Wills

In honor of the Society)s 125th Anniversary) The Guild has pledged a rare first edition of Washington)s Farewell Address to the Collections.

There is much to be learned from a careful reading of "the most important statement made by the most important figure at our nation)s founding.))

September 19, 1796, in the autumn of his second term as president, George Washington left Philadelphia for his home in Virginia. Several hours later, Philadelphians opened Claypoole's American Daily Advertizer to read, on pages 2 and 3, a lengthy article with the headline, "To the PEOPLE of the UNITED STATES." Washington had given the editor this message, correcting proofs of it over the weekend, improving punctuation "in which he was very minute." This was the fruit of many years spent pondering the use he should make of this opportunity. Throughout his career, surrender of power had been a pledge of disinterested regard for his country.

While making further demonstration of that disinterestedness, Washington meant to promote views he considered crucial to the young republic's preservation.

One way to deepen his words' impact was to disappear before they could be read. He must place himself beyond any pleas to reconsider. If his message was to be given full attention, he told James Madison, the occasion of its delivery should not "be construed into a maneuver to be invited to remain. " He had rejected the idea of informing Congress of his decision while delivering the annual address to that body. In its ON A MONDAY MORNING,

Garry Wills is H enry R. Luce Professor of American Culture and Public Policy at Northwestern University. His many books include Inventing America (1978), a work on the Declaration of Independence which won several awards, and the more recent Explaining America: The Federalist (1981). He is also a syndicated newspaper columnist.

176

formal reply, Congress was bound to express regret at his withdrawal, and that "might entangle him in further explanations." A prolonged process of disengagement would blunt the force of his final appeal. Washington foresaw the kind of problem Lyndon Johnson faced in 1968, when he withdrew from the presidential campaign. Washington left no room for debate whether he really meant to resign. He presented the nation with a fait accompli.

To do so, he devised a novel form of communication, speaking not to the people's representatives, through normal channels, but to the people themselves, with an intimacy that foreshadowed the "fireside chats" of radio and television days. Others quickly agreed to call Washington 's message his "farewell address, " but he gave it no more formal title than the republican salutation: "Friends and fellow citizens."

No doubt Washington would have hesitated to go "over the heads of Congress" with a direct appeal to the citizenry if he were not resigning office at the same time. In the eighteenth century, such a procedure could be considered demagogic. But, for use this once, he liked Madison's suggestion that he speak to the people, "who are your only constituents," by way of the commercial networks of his time.

Madison said it is through "the independent channel of the press" that the people "are as a constituent body usually addressed."

This procedure was a departure even from Washington's own practice as a revolutionary leader. In the farewell address, he reminded his fellow citizens that he had issued a plea for unity

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This is the rare first printing of Washington's " Address to the People of the United States," 1796 (commonly known as Washington 's Farewell Address) pledged to the Society by The Guild.

CHS, ICHi-16092.

when resigning his military commission in 1782.

But that "Circular Letter" was just the most formal of many notices sent to state governors, each of whom was addressed as "Your Excellency." Furthermore, as Commander-in-Chief of the revolutionary armed forces, he held himself subordinate to the civil officers before as well as after surrendering his commission. But now he was addressing the citizens as their highest elected authority, and returning power to them as the ultimate sovereign of a republic. This solemn act gave his words a testamentary weightiness compared, at the time, to a deathbed deposition. The letter had an immediate effect more profound than the Declaration of Independence or the Gettysburg Address enjoyed. This was the most important statement made by the most important figure at our

nation's founding-and even though Washington descended to controversial <ietails of policy, he swayed opinion by his bold mode.

Washington released the authorized text to one newspaper, but he knew other papers would reprint it instantly. Three Philadelphia journals ran it later in the afternoon of Claypoole's release. The next day in New York, the Minerva and Mercantile Advertiser could boast of its enterprise in getting the text to its readers.

Some papers printed special editions or supplements containing the message. The Courier of ew Hampshire alerted its buyers to the historic document they held in their hands: "We recommend to our customers a careful preservation of this week's paper, and a frequent perusal of its contents." (The Courier, by the way, deserves credit for first calling Washington's 177

Washington's Farewell Address text his "farewell address.")

Still others had realized, from the outset, that Washington's considered words should be given a more dignified and less perishable home than the daily press. The very day after Claypoole released the text, two different printers in Philadelphia brought it out in pamphlet form. The rarer of these first book editions out of Philadelphia is represented in the Chicago Historical Society's copy. There had been "best sellers" in America before 1796-notably Thomas Paine's Common Sense. But that work was put out by one firm. Washington's address was in the public domain, and printers vied with each other in giving it suitable form for the widest readership.

Washington was a master of the successful political gesture-that 1782 Circular Letter had grown out of his effective "propaganda campaign" for the war effort. Yet he was never more successful than in the "orchestration" of his culminating act as president. And what were all the dramatic moves meant to say?

What was the content of this artfully delivered admonition?

Washington's master theme-here, as in 1782 when he resigned his commission, as in 1792 when he first tried to resign his office and was dissuaded-was national unity. In 1782, that meant a plea for a more energetic central government than the Articles of Confederation could provide. In 1792 and 1796, that meant a plea against the ideological division of America along Anglophobe / Francophobe lines. England and France were imperial systems locked in the first truly global war for world supremacy. That war, ranging from India through the Caribbean to all the corners of Europe, was waged, with variations of intensity, from 1756 to 1815, from the Seven Years' War to the Congress of Vienna. America's birth as a nation took place in the interstices of this struggle.

The Seven Years' v\lar in its American version (the French and Indian War) removed the French threat from Canada and brought on a crisis in colonial relations with England. The American Revolution forced on England a choice between protecting its Caribbean colonies from France or retaining the rebellious coastal colonies. The War of 1812 was America 's late and reluctant entry into the final Napol178

eonic struggle that reached its resolution at the Congress of Vienna. Strong feelings toward the superpowers-either of attraction or repulsion-threatened to tear America apart.

No American was in a better position to see America 's stake in this worldwide struggle than George Washington. Without realizing it, he had led the attack (at Fort Duquesne) that occasioned the world war in the first place.

After serving with the English officer corps in this early stage of the struggle, he served with the French-with Rochambeau and d'Estaing and de Grasse-in the Revolution. He knew winning our independence had to wait on French supremacy in the Caribbean and the dispatch of a fleet to combine with French and American land troops at the victory of Yorktown. To search for a modern parallel to his experience, we would have to imagine the leader of a new African country who had served with both the Russian and the American armies.

It is not surprising, given the parallel, that Washington believed America should be "nonaligned" with regard to the superpowers of his day. To be drawn into either country's orbit would reduce America to a satellite of its system, would expose a new nation to reprisal from the other superpower, and would divide its citizenry. Furthermore, though a military man himself, Washington knew that the republican ethos could not be formed in freedom if the demands of war were continued throughout its early years.

This is the background of Washington's most famous plea in the farewell address-that America "steer clear of permanent alliances with any portion of the foreign world. " This has been misrepresented over the years as a defense of isolationism. But Washington knew that America could not be isolated from a world that included English troops in Canada and French troops in Louisiana. Indeed, he says that "we may safely trust to temporary alliances for extraordinary emergencies." Though he wrote that Americans should not "interweave our destiny with that of any part of Europe, entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition," he did not use the phrase so often "quoted" from the farewell address, "entangling alliances." Those words were di-

Washington's Farewell Address

c,lOllGIO

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Anton Canova, sculpting Washington as a Roman soldier, joined his two great acts-surrendering his military commission, and writing the Farewell Address-in one symbolic pose. Commissioned by North Carolina, the statue was lost when fire destroyed the capitol at Raleigh.

State of North Carolina, Department of Cultural Resources.

rectly linked in Jefferson's inaugural address of 1801, where he adopted the Washingtonian policy he had earlier criticized. 路w ashington was not arguing for isolationism but for the avoidance of a permanent place in either of the competing world systems of his time. Anglophiles and Francophiles wanted to pledge America's loyalty to one or the other power center as a matter of principle. 路w ashington condemned thi indulgence of "permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations and passionate attachments for others." He recommended instead a "non-aligned" status that would encourage "just and amicable feelings toward all." America had profited by the struggle of the superpowers because it had not become permanently identified with either of them-after fighting with the English in the I 750s, we were allied with the French in the 1770s.

Washington used spokesmen for the Francophile and the Anglophile tendencies in America while drafting his address. Madison wrote

the rough draft for the message to be delivered in 1792 (before the president was persuaded to run for a second term). Hamilton was asked to draft the 1796 address from Madison's earlier sketch and from 路washington's own notes. Hamilton implicitly argued, here, against the very Anglophile tendencies he had favored when speaking in his own voice-as, earlier, he had suppressed misgivings about the Constitution to write the "Madisonian" arguments of The Federalist. Washington saw farther than any of his contemporaries, and transcended the advice given him by the factions within his own administration. Indeed, his message is relevant even now.

American foreign policy has in recent years assumed the solidarity of opposing blocs (communist or anticommunist), whose "inveterate antipathies" become the basis of our diplomacy.

China's attachment to Russia and antipathy toward America were assumed, and helped prompt our entry into the Korean and Vietnamese wars. But the assumption of such inveteracy, whether of antipathy or attachment, was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Only at great length did we surrender in part our inveterate antipathy for China and form a partial (not a "passionate") attachment that has served both nations.

George 路washington was not an isolationist.

To hope for freedom from contact with the external world is purist, and feckless. He was a realist-the leader of the first modern revolution, and the most successful one. The farewell address deserves study not only as an exercise in piety toward our past, but as a guide to safety in our future-which was Washington's concern when he gave us his masterpiece.

Selected Sources The essential book is Victor Hugo Paltsits, Washington 's Farewell Address (New York , 1935), which has a facsimile of ,vashington 's final manuscript, along with all drafts and correspondence related to the writing and issuing of the address. A good collection of the various interpreta tions of the document is Burton Ira Kaufman, Washington's Farewell Address: The View From the Twenti eth Century (Chicago, 1969). Paltsits lists the early pamphlet editions of the address, including that represen tcd in the Chicago Historical Society's copy (sec Paltsits, p. 320). For the priority of this dated pamphlet, see Joseph Sabin, Bibliotheca Americana as completed by R. W. G. Vail in 1936, rnlume 23, p. 378.

179

Directions for American Historical Societies

By Richard Rabinowitz and Sam Bass Warner,

Jr.

"The goal ... ought to be to help visitors move from their own store ofpersonal experiences outward to some knowledge which would let them form human identifications with other parts of their community and with people remote from themselves in time as well as space." but we want to start with a Chicago story. A visitor entering the Chicago Historical Society in November 1973 was instantly impressed with the light, open spaciousness of the new addition. After a moment, however, his eyes were caught by a curious centerpiece for the front hall, a large statue depicting the Fort Dearborn Massacre, once placed at the site of the event and now relocated to ornament the Historical Society's entrance. But even more curious was that beneath the bronze figures-a white maiden eternally frozen in fear as the tomahawk of a bloodthirsty savage hung in green-gold suspense over her bosom-a little basket of fruit and corn was placed on the floor. And Scotchtaped to the bronze was a handwritten note, saying "Let this food symbolize our intentions to record an aspect of Red-White relationships which the Historical Society has failed to record. In the Spirit of Brotherhood we have spoken!"

What tricks history plays on its devotees!

When the first American historical societies were founded in the century after Independence, they eagerly sought to collect Indian artifacts. The American Philosophical Society, for example, received in 1797, in addition to a "specimen of petrified supposed Buffalo WE ARE NOT CHICAGOANS,

Richard Rabinowitz is President of the American History Workshop in Boston, a nonprofit organization which brings scholars and designers together to produce historical ex hibits, films, and other public programs. Sam Bass Warner, Jr., is William Edwards Huntington Professor of History and Social Science at Boston University, and author of The Urban Wilderness (1972).

180

dung from the Rapids of the Ohio, and an American Swan's foot, stuffed," "a pair of Indian boy's leggings from the Missouri, and eight of the arrows commonly used by the Miami and neighboring Indians." But from the juxtaposition of these objects we can see clearly that the learned members of such societies never expected to expend much concern on the surviving members of the Miami Indians. o, like the swan and the buffalo, the Indian was interesting chiefly as a curiosity. He was an oddity, a testament to the Creator's gigantic capacity for diversity among natural and hu man specimens. By his being lodged near mastodons and meteorites, the Indian was made distant in time and space, extinct, inert, historically obsolete. So, interestingly, were his conquerors, the trapping and trailblazing and pioneering white men who settled orth America. Pioneer artifacts, too, were collected and saved as specimens of some distant, unreachable time. In Plymouth and Salem, Massachusetts, the bicentennial of English settlement was celebrated by the founding of two of our longest-lived local historica l societies in 1820 and 1821.

The subjects, and the objects, of our early historical societies were thus far off, detached from the present circumstances of the visiting public. That was their allure. Small wonder that they soon had to compete with museums of even less well-connected oddities, like P. T. Barnum's in New York. An 1865 broadside from the Boston Museum advertised displays "containing half a million curiosities-birds, quadrupeds, fishes, reptiles, insects, statuary,

An impromptu exhibit records "an aspect of Red-White relationships" that the monument to the Fort Dearborn Massacre fails to document. CHS, photo by Paul W. Petraitis.

paintings, engravings, coins and medals." And furthermore, for only twenty-five cents, these wondrous things could be capped off by a fiveact anti-slavery drama, a dance, a short farce, and on Saturday evening, a recitation of Hiawatha.

The last thing wanted in all this was a context for understanding these strange and wonderful miscellanies. Historical societies offered not so much a historical experience, a way of measuring one's own time carefully against the details of an earlier age, as an escape from history altogether by leaping into oddity so bizarre that it denied interpretation of any sort.

What followed over the next century was professionalization, and a series of attempts by the new professionals to impose order and system upon their collections. Paradoxically, this professional activity-the work of the curators, archivists, and librarians who superseded the amateur dilettanti who first ran these learned

societies-did not itself increase the opportunities for historical understanding on the part of the visitors. Their work revised the prevailing view of collections as assemblages of objects too bizarre to explain rationally, to a new vision of objects classified so that one piece could be compared and contrasted to its compeers. But sti11, no one suggested that one set of aboriginal leggings was related to a particular sort of spear point or stone bowl.

The first step taken by the professionals was to organize the objects they had inherited chronologically. The curator, like the professional archaeologist, art historian, or historian, came into being as a specialist possessing the skill to ascertain and guarantee the authenticity of historic objects and to attribute them to a region and a date accurately.

Faced with an odd mixture of artifacts, each claiming to be the first this and the earliest that, or the particular thing used by some famous personage in some famous exploit, the local history professional became an appraiser, someone who ran an assay office for the nuggets of local lore. Did Washington really sleep here?

Were these really his teeth? Was this the axe with which he cut down the cherry tree?

For professionals standards begin as things to stand on and end as things to wave. They can never be too high. So there was an inevitable tendency, once America's history was being given over to the professionals around the turn of the century, to edit upward. The signed and dated piece of furniture or document of political activity becarfie the greatest good of historical societies. Instead of oddities, these pieces were the choicest of the lot: epitomes. Instead of the first rude bench made in Chicago (assuming that it could be found), the curators sought the very best example of a Duncan Phyfe sofa. In the 1920s, the great collections at Winterthur, Colonial Williamsburg, and the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art expressed these elevated standarcls for assessing American artifacts.

Where Barnum's museum had, higgledy piggledy, arranged everything under its separate glass case-here a "Feejee" mermaid, there a diorama of Gulliver at Lilliput-refusing to integrate or interpret any of them, the professional history museum and historical 181

American Historical Societies society put groups of things in the same case: guns, quilts, Revere bowls, niddy-noddies, and so on. And where the objects (like furniture) were too large to be so grouped, they could be arranged in rooms in which the fourth wall was glass.

The more highly professionalized history museums became, the less they appealed to the public. Period room settings are always unreal: their polished surfaces always deny the possibility that real babies might have spit up on them, that their floors were muddy and cold, that kitchens always have a lot more labor than labor-saving devices. These rooms make us feel impoverished by what we lack in our own houses instead of enriched by what our forbears owned in times past. Formal collections in exhibit cases are often boring to all but the connoisseurs (and to well-heeled connoisseurs at that), who are well able to stand and read haughty label prose for hours at a stretch.

We can say today that neither the museums of oddities nor the museums of epitomes, though both contain historical objects, really offer historical experiences to their visitors.

Although they are entertaining, oddities say little about people like us. Although they are beautiful, epitomes seldom belonged to people like us.

Can museums give visitors a real sense of their own history? We think they can. The goal of all exhibits and educational programs in a historical society ought to be to help visitors move from their own store of personal experiences outward to some knowledge which would let them form human identifications with other parts of their community and with people remote from themselves in time as well as space. History, above all other disciplines, offers people a chance to enlarge their personal experience by learning to connect themselves to diverse traditions of human thought and activity.

In the past three decades, many historical societies and museums have begun to meet the challenge. Museum villages and living historical farms have provided vivid re-creations of the work lives of ordinary people. Interpretive exhibits like the brilliant CHICAGO: CREATING NEW TRADITIONS, and those to be found in the 182

permanent Chicago History Galleries at the Historical Society, put objects into deeper, more meaningful contexts. Urban museums like those in Grand Rapids and Oakland have made a special effort to reach out and interpret the lives of ethnic minorities in contemporary culture. Even the well-worn period room, as it was recently revived to show a workingman's house in the 1920s in A NATION OF NATIONS exhibit in the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution, can now be a brilliantly evocative memoir of family life.

The objects in these new interpretive exhibits are no longer unique, nor are they always the best of their kind. Now they are most likely to be typical-machine-made, ordinary, worn, inexpensive-things anyone could have owned. And the themes of these exhibits are the great universals of human history: how we worked, worshipped, grew up, lived together, and even in some recent exhibits, how we died.

Historical agencies these days are identified less by their collections than by their questions.

This is why they have been able, as in Chicago, to go out into the city at large through walking tours and neighborhood guides, and devote the same kind of energy and intelligence they used to give only to the cherished artifacts in "the collection."

A building or a neighborhood always reflects historical movement. It always reflects its own peculiar succession of occupants and their activities. If no one uses a building, or if a block is abandoned, it soon disappears. Therefore in describing any building, or street, the new tours must not limit their information to the familiar construction date ;md original occupant. The guide must know and describe the evolution of the place: what its successive uses have been, who its occupants were. When visitors are allowed to see that "historic buildings" have been altered as people required different things of them, they will be more apt to realize that changes they have seen in "old houses" in their own towns reflect history, too.

Despite this progress, there are dangers even in this new approach. Museums can all too easily become comfortable castles of reverie and nostalgia. An exhibit on ethnic diversity can soon degenerate into a pleasing rainbow of

American Historical Societies

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When the Society dedicated its new building in 1896, a local newspaper cartoonist envisioned this future "cabinet of antiquities" filled with objects of everyday life. Many of these itemsincluding a beer "growler"-now appear in the Society's Chicago History Galleries. Gift of the Estate of Mrs. Charles J. Harpel. CHS, ICHi-16137.

colors and shapes, masking the real historical tensions of an awkwardly pluralistic society. A demonstration of cooking on the hearth or blacksmithing can become an exhibition of art and love rather than an encounter with commerce and toil.

It is not enough for visitors to smile at the way a boy carries a market basket or wears funny pants in an 1890s photo, or at the long striped skirt and apron being worn by the woman he is shown passing in that street scene. Indeed, we want visitors to see that these characters are people like you and me.

But more, we want the visitor to confront the harder questions: does it matter that the boy is Irish, the woman Ukrainian? How did poverty or comfort influence their lives? Where did they come from, a day, a year, ten years ago? What are they moving toward? And what kind of Chicago did such lives make?

How do their lives connect to such important elements of the myth and tradition of Chicago as the skyscraper, immigration, railroads,

strikes, settlement houses, and crime? How does that Irish errand boy's life compare with that of the black fellow who followed him on these streets sixty years later?

The challenge of the historical society in the future is to combine the probing inquisitiveness of the best historians â&#x20AC;˘ with the specificity and the concern for detail of the best curators.

That is why the "exhibit" of Indian food at the monument to the Fort Dearborn Massacre was, by chance, the most powerful display in the Chicago Historical Society that day in 1973, although it was also a little embarrassing. It had a lot to teach: among its lessons we see that European-Indian relations have changed over time (despite the monument's being cast in bronze), that the objects celebrating ordinary people as well as official patrons have their place in the museums, and most important, that history really matters, for better or for worse, to the peoples of Chicago.

183

Education and Public Programs From the outset the Society presented a variety ofprograms) but in the early years these were for members and their guests only. In more recent times our programs have been directed at all who are interested in history.

EARLY MEETING of the Chicago Historical Society, three old settlers leapt to their feet in an impromptu demonstration of Potawatomi and Sac dance. "Imagine an old grey haired veteran, doubled up as if he had colic, his hands akimbo, his legs stretched out as wide as they could go . . . ," wrote William Corkran, the Society's librarian from 1868 to 1871. The dancing aroused "intense" excitement, Corkran reported, though most of the Society's meetings were "staid, stiff, and uninteresting" affairs marked by reports, suggestions, correspondence, and small talk.

By the 1880s, however, the Society was offering a surprisingly varied array of programs for members and their guests. In addition to business meetings there were portrait presentations, bust unveilings, and commemorative events to mark historical anniversaries, but most of all there were lectures. These were given by members as well as by noted scholars and visiting dignitaries. Frequently the programs were illustrated by lantern slides, stereopticon views, or photographs. Scores of lecture notices tucked away in the Society's scrapbooks reveal the members' enduring interest in such recurring themes as exploration; Indians; United States presidents (especially Abraham Lincoln); wars; and, of course, local history. A random sampling of program titles might include "A Lecture on the Norse Discovery of America" (1888), "The Music of the American Indian" (1922), "The Obscuration of James K. Polk" (1909), "Personal Recollections of Abraham Lincoln" (1890), and "The Republic of Texas as a Menace to the United States" (1912). Nor were the topics confined to American history.

"The Wild People of the Philippines" (1920s) and "Recent Researches in Egypt with special reference to Lake Moeris and the ancient AT AN

184

Arabic Traditions relating to the Patriarch Joseph" (1889) were among the more exotic subjects to be discussed.

Young people were not forgotten-in 1913, for instance, there was a special course of three lectures for members' children. By the 1920s the Society's programs included a "story lady," tours for school groups, and regular Saturday morning children's programs. In I 928, very much part of the times, the Society took to the airwaves to broadcast a series of talks on historical subjects over WMAQ radio.

As the Society grew, so did the variety and number of its public programs. One of the most dramatic changes was in the types of audiences for these events. In earlier years most of the occasions were arranged exclusively for members and their guests, but after the turn of the century the Society began to address a broader public. Now the Society uses a quarterly Calendar of Events and the media to invite all Chicagoans to participate in its activities. Moreover, the programs have become in good part closely focused on the Society's intensified collecting and exhibit activities. Within that framework a whole cluster of special programs are planned to meet specific needs and interests.

Another major change has been the development of a variety of program formats: while the lecture lives on, panel discussions, workshops, walking tours, bus tours, gallery talks, films, music, dance, drama, and other activities now play a role in helping our audience to a deeper understanding of the past. During the past two years, for example, the Society has presented an original historical drama on an episode in the life of black-rights advocate Ida B. Wells; a series of panel discussions entitled "The Writer and the City: Chicago," in which writers examined the influence of our city on

Schoolchildren view exhibits at tho Society 's building on Dearborn and Ontario streets, 1911. Among tho featured artifacts was I. T. Palmatary's lithograph (shown on tho cover of this Issue). now In tho Chicago History Oallorles. CHS, ICHl- 16178.

Actor Frank McOlynn and CHS librarian Carolino Mcllvalno talk to Mr. and Mrs. Frank Logan (left) at tho Society following a porforman co of John Drlnkwater's Abraham Lincoln at tho Blackstono Theatro, 1920.

CHS, !CHI 16170.

Visitors to tho Socloty's opon houso, hold In 1956 to celobrato Its centennial, tourod a variety of oxhlblts, Including a turn-of-tho-century drugstore containing the stock ond furnishings from an apothecary on South Halstod Stroot. CHS, ICHl-16t81 .

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Education and Public Programs

Demonstrations of traditional crafts by volunteers in the Society's Illinois Pioneer Life Gallery draw eager audiences of all ages. CHS, photo by Eric Futran.

Scene from CHS premier of To Save A Kinsman: Ida B. Wells in the Case of Steve Green, by Kathleen Lombardo , 1979. CHS, photo by Lauren Deutsch.

their work; and a program of dance on American themes performed by the Hubbard Street Dance Company. Such special programs have been presented in collaboration with the Illinois Humanities Council and the Chicago Council on Fine Arts. The demonstrations of frontier crafts in the Illinois Pioneer Life Gallery, opened in 1973, continue to draw fascinated groups of young and old.

Those who come to the Society during the school year see droves of students from elementary school through high school visiting the exhibits. For this audience, too, the programs have a new look. Each weekday morning staff and docents stationed throughout the galleries invite students to participate in a variety of interpretive activities, including a Revolutionary War soldier's drill, colonial songs and dances, a Chicago trade card game, Lincoln Play Party games, Civil War songs, and a Sears Catalog Auction game.

History carts carrying authentic artifacts which are keyed to specific galleries are used for object demonstrations. The students may touch the objects and discuss their use in former times. The themes for these carts include: Chicago Fire Fighters, Art in Everyday Life, Grandma's Kitchen, Parlor Pastimes, Spring Cleaning, and a You Guess It Cart. Students of all ages enjoy the chance to try and recapture the past by trying on a hoop skirt or working a wooden butter churn .

Other popular activities are the demonstra-

tion of Revolutionary War and Civil War weapons and the unpacking of the contents of a Civil War carpetbag. Characters from history are re-created by costumed clocen ts who speak with the students about "My Friends Abe and Mary Lincoln" or introduce them to "Mrs. O'Leary."

Guided tours of the galleries are available in the afternoons. Advanced placement United States history classes from Chicago public high schools come to the Society for a clay of instruction in the use of primary documents and research materials. Selected 8th grade students from Chicago public schools attend a once-aweek program of museum studies. Visitors of all ages enjoy special hands-on experiences in the Adolph Marx Education Gallery.

There are special programs for other groups as well. Senior citizens are invited to share memories of the "Century of Progress World's Fair"; hearing-impaired groups may arrange for sign-language tours of the galleries; and unsighted visitors have access to braille and large-type materials.

Yet with all the changes, the purpose of the Society's programs remains the same: to foster an interest in history, to enlighten members and visitors about various aspects of history, and to give them pleasure in discovering their city's, their region's, and their country's past.

186

Judy ¡w eisman, Head of Education and Public Programs, and Nancy Lace, Assistant Head

Publications A glance at the history of the Society's publications shows that, as with so many of our activities, the past provided clear and rich precedentfor the present.

Engraving of Morris Birkbeck (1764-'1825). who aided George Flower in establishing the colony described in the first book published by the Society, Flower's History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (1882). Frontispiece from that book. CHS , ICHi-16250.

are familiar with the recent publications program-quarterly issues of Chicago History; exhibit-related books like Chicago: Creating New Traditions, Chicago Metalsmiths, Eight Chicago Wom en and Th eir Fashions, and Chicago Ceramics & Glass; and reference works like Chicago: A Historical Guide to the Neighborhoods and the Chicago Bibliography. l\Iany, however, may be unaware of the fact that the Chicago Historical Society's commitment to publications dates back to its original Constitution and By-Laws.

These provided for "A Committee on Publication , to select and prepare all articles, papers, or essays proposed for publication by the society and with its approval, and to superintend the printing thereof." One hundred and twentyfive years later, the Publications Office does just that. Between that initial resolution and our present program lies a long list of publications.

The very first publications sponsored by the Society were transcripts of addresses presented at the Society's meetings and published by an enterprising and erudite local printer and SoMOST OF THE SOCIETY'S MEMBERS

ciety member, George H. Fergus. Beginning in 1876 and continuing until 1903, the Fergus Historical Series eventually comprised some 40 pamphlets and several books. Among them were the text of An Historical Sketch of the Early Movement in Illinois for the Legalization of Slavery, read at the annual meeting of the Society in December 1864, by Hoo.. William H. Brown, Ex-President of the Society (32 pages, 25 cents), and The Last of the Illinois and a Sketch of th e Pottawatomies, presented in December 1870 by Hon. John Dean Caton, L.L.D., Late Chief-Justice of Illinois (56 pages, 25 cents).

Anticipating by ninety-nine years our "Frontier Chicago" issue of Chicago History, Fergus published Early Chicago-Fort Dearborn (112 pages at 75 cents) in 1881. The first book published by the Society itself appeared in 1883.

Entitled History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois, and written by George Flower, it was based on a manuscript which was the only item in the Society's collections to survive the Great Fire. Publication 187

Publications

The Society's quarterly, Chicago History, made its debut in 1945 as a 32-page pamphlet written and edited by Director Paul M. Angle. It assumed its present format in 1970. In its 36-year history, it has sported the four logos shown here. CHS. For its 75th anniversary in 1931 , the Society pub! ished this booklet showing plans for the new building to be erected in Lincoln Park. The cover, in tones of deep green , blue, and orange, showed strong elements of Art Deco design. CHS, ICHi-16202.

MJLESTONES fH JSJORY 0

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Publications

was made possible by Levi Leiter, partner in the dry-goods store of Field & Leiter. The title page noted ambitiously that this was Volume 1 of the Chicago Historical Society's Collection, and, indeed, between 1883 and 1928 the Society published a total of twelve volumes in that series. Among them were the four volumes of The Diary of James K. Polk, edited by Milo M. Quaife, then Professor of History at Lewis Institute (1910), an important work that sold very well, and The Illinois and Michigan Canal, by James Putnam, Professor of Economics at Butler College (1918). Based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the University of Wisconsin and published with a University of Chicago Press imprint, this book remains one of the basic works on the subject.

In 1888 the Society began to publish its first periodical, the Chicago Historical Society Proceedings, which continued to appear until 1907.

Reporting the regular quarterly and annual meetings of the Society, the Proceedings also incorporated occasional articles, such as the paper on Father Marquette presented by Franklin MacVeagh on April 3, 1900. The Proceedings were succeeded by a Yearbook which usually contained the annual report and information on new acquisitions.

Between 1922 and 1939 the Society published, several times yearly, a magazine called Chicago Historical Society Bulletin. Carrying notes on new acquisitions, programs, and special events, and eventually some articles, it also served as a money-raising tool. In May I 922, for example, it publicized Milo M. Quaife's eloquent appeal for money to help the Society pay for the Charles F. Gunther Collection.

Following the acquisition of the Gunther Collection, the Society began to publish catalogs of its collections and exhibits. In 1931, the Society's 75th anniversary was commemorated by an elegantly illustrated brochure entitled Milestones of Histo1y, showing its plans for the new building to be erected in Lincoln Park, "free from dust and fire hazards." With the modesty typical of promotion pieces it stated that "This building will be the finest of its kind in the United States," and promised that "In this new building you will be able to see the story of our local and national history clearly visualized in a manner never before attempted."

The late 1930s and 1940s saw the publication of a series of illustrated guidebooks to the museum, as well as several catalogs like the one devoted to the Pictorial Poster Exhibit from the Collection of Joseph T. Ryerson (discussed elsewhere in this issue). That exhibit opened in January 1944.

The appointment of Lincoln scholar Paul M. Angle to the directorship of the Society in 1945 ushered in a new era in publications. It was Angle who established the quarterly Chicago History in its initial 4" x 7" (32-page) format, characterizing it as "An informal publication devoted in the main to the Society's museum, library, and activities." Angle wrote and edited the entire magazine himself. He was also the author of Th e Chicago Historical Society, 1856-1956: An Unconventional Chronicle, published by Rand McNally & Company in 1956, and of other works published by the Society. Best known among the latter are his second edition of The Great Chicago Fire, a wellillustrated volume of eyewitness accounts published in l 971, and a book of essays, On a Variety of Subjects, published jointly with the Caxton Club in 1974.

The current physical and substantive formats of Chicago History were established in the Spring of 1970 with the publication of Volume 1, Number 1, New Series. Heavily illustrated, the new Chicago History published articles on Chicago-related topics by a number of authors.

The first article in that issue was by anthropologist-historian James A. Clifton, whose most recent contribution appeared in tire Summer 1980 issue. The New Series was published only twice a year until 1974, when Chicago History became a quarterly once more. When the Publications staff was augmented by a designer in 1977, it became possible to design and produce the magazine and most of our other publications in-house. We go outside for typesetting and printing services.

Though a dozen decades have brought new projects and subtle changes, the responsibility of the Publications Office remains the sameto present Chicago's history and the work of the Chicago Historical Society through the printed medium both to its members and to the public.

The Editors 189

The Society Preserving and Interpreting the Past A birthday is a good time to look back and see how far one has come and why.

MRS. CLARK WAS a second-generation Dakota pioneer and, quite appropriately, a member of the board of the first museum where I served as director. She came to me one day to insist that we exhibit what had once been, apparently, one of South Dakota's largest sunflowers. I resisted: sunflowers were not a pioneer crop; and anyway, this one had shrunk. She went away without a word, angry-as often happened. Two days later I discovered that the sunflower had mysteriously appeared in the exhibit!

One can learn much about the Chicago Historical Society from the story of Mrs. Clark and her sunflower. Her spirit and determination were shared by the early founders of the Chicago Historical Society, who were convinced that a rude, young city could not mature until it had established certain institutions and until the benefactors of the Society adhered to the assertion of founder Scammon that "Every man . . . owes it to the public, owes it to Chicago . . . to see that those institutions, which it is our duty now to found, are placed upon a sound basis."

Mrs. Clark's sense of the important was shared by the founders of the Society. The liberal preacher Barry relied on an antiquarian's collecting instincts, just as she trusted her own values. Several generations later the fascinating if indiscriminate collecting urge of the Society was satisfied by the purchase of the Gunther Collection which, while supplying new three-dimensional holdings, also provided such choice items as a piece of the skin of the snake which tempted Eve. It is easy to make sport of Mrs. Clark, and those before her time at the Society, but I am not one to do so. There is something very necessary about such passion: the intense interest in things past, an unquestionable conviction that what has happened must be saved, studied, and

190

seen. This kind of firm character founded the Society and laid the basis for the growth, change, and greater sophistication that otherwise could not have occurred.

That the Society does go about its business differently now than at first would be hard to deny. A principal change has been the increased professionalism with which objects, records, and documents are collected and cared for. The preceding articles in this issue speak to this point. As you read, observe the number of different curatorial departments which now exist, including several established relatively recently. Notice the questions which some curators raise regarding scope, focus, and the significance of particular collections to Chicago.

The Society has gone far beyond mere collecting, even beyond astute collecting, however, and it increasingly concerns itself with interpreting what it holds. Thus the issues raised by Rabinowitz and Warner in this issue are important to us as well. For example, many of our recent exhibits focus on important aspects of daily life. The newly renovated Chicago History Galleries contain a surprising variety of materials-not only a formal parlor or two (actually, the gallery includes two parlors of very different types) but also the products of the Judd Laundry Machine Company; a prohibition-era still (if not its product); coveralls from a worker for Boeing Aircraft; a newsboy's wagon; the badges of union workers; and Jazz-the actual music!

The exhibits are the visible part of what the Society does. They are not necessarily the most important part, but they do provide a medium beyond the published word, in which the concerns and objects kept, catalogued, and used by curators can reach a public otherwise inaccessible. They, like publications and other public programs, cross many curatorial lines and in-

It was an "intense interest in things past" which led to the acquisition of many of the Society's most outstanding holdings, including Chicago's first fire engine, "Fire King No. 1." Located in Wisconsin

by Walter Wyman-a representative of the Society who was said to have "traveled through a zero gale by sled to track it down " -the engine was purchased and brought to Chicago on October 1, 1924, just in time for the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire.

This photograph , taken at the Society's 68th annual meeting , shows several of the officers with the "Fire King" in the background. Included are (I. to r.) William Bush, Charles B. Pike , Mrs. L. Hamilton McCormick, George W. Dixon, Mrs. George A. Carpenter, Dr. Otto L. Schmidt (president of the Society , 1923-1927), and Robert C. Fergus. CHS, ICHi-16177.

terests. And in concert with our research and collecting activities, they fulfill the Society's essential mission: to preserve and communicate the things of the past.

Many challenges remain. The scope of the Society's activity is being goaded into focus by the gargantuan dimensions of the city's material culture. The sheer volume of materials still being collected suggests that space is becoming even more precious and that our walls cannot contain us indefinitely (not surprising, when one considers that our present facility represents the Society's third "permanent" home). It is

also a challenge to raise the funds needed to support the increased activities mandated by new standards and the desire to interpret our collections to members and the public by a great variety of means.

I like to think, however, that after 125 years and because of the determination of our founders, because of continuity interlocked with change, and because of the skills which the Society has gradually acquired, we-like Mrs. Clark-will always succeed in the end.

Ellsworth H. Brown Director 191

The Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: 312-642-4600 Officers Theodore Tieken, President Stewart S. Dixon, 1st Vice-President Philip W. Hummer, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H. Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary

Director Ellsworth H. Brown

Trustees Bowen Blair l\Irs. Frank D. Mayer Philip D. Block III Mrs. Brooks l'vfcCormick John T. Mccutcheon, Jr. Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Andrew McNally III Stewart S. Dixon Arthur E. Osborne, Jr. Mrs. Paul A. Florian III Bryan S. Reid, Jr. James R. Getz Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Philip W. Hummer Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken

The Chicago Historical Society is a privately endowed institution devoted to collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look to its members and friends for continuing financial support. Contributions to the Society are tax-deductible, and appropriate recognition is·accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the director's office to discuss the Society's needs.

Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of annual membership and dues are as follows: Individual, $25; Family, $30. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events listing Society programs; invitations to special programs; free admission to the building at all times; reserved seats at movies and concerts .in our auditorium; and a 10% discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store.

Hours

Life Trustees

Exhibition galleries are open daily from 9:30 to 4:30; Sunday from 12:00 to 5:00. Research collections are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:30. The Graphics Collection is open from 1:30 to 4:30. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith

Education and Public Programs

Honorary Trustees Jane Byrne, Mayor, City of Chicago Raymond F. Simon, President, Chicago Park District

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

Admission Fees for Non-members Adults, $1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays.

Single copies of Chicago History, published quarterly, are $3.00 by mail; 2.50 at newsstands, bookshops, and the Museum Store.

From the Chicago Historical Society's archives ( counterclockwise from top):

In November 1926 crowds lined the streets to greet Queen Marie of Roumania on her arrival at the Ch icago Historical Society, then located at Dearborn and Ontario streets. In the ceremony wh ich followed , the queen was presented with a copy of the first edition of Juliette Kinzie's Wau-bun (1856) . CHS, ICH i-16163.

Mayor Richard J. Daley and Andrew McNally 111, at that time first vice president of the Society, join a young visitor at the centennial open house in 1956. CHS, ICHi-16180.

Chicago Historical Society Director Paul M. Angle and Mary Frances Rhymer, then Curator of Prints and Photographs, at the Society's 100th anniversary open house with a copy of The Chicago Historical Society 1856-1956: An Unconventional Chronicle, written

by Angle. CHS, ICHi-16182 .