Chicago History | Spring 1983 by Chicago History Museum

ÂŁL Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Spring 1983 VOLUME XII, NUMBER 1

Timothy C. Jacobson Editor

CONTENTS 2

Roberta Casey Assistant Editor

Russell Lewis Assistant Editor

Prairie State Utopia: The Spirit Fruit Society of Chicago and Ingleside by H. Roger Grant

Sowing the Seeds of Reform: The Chicago Tract Society, 1889-1910 by Thomas J. Dorst

Karen Kohn Designer

Lisa Ginzel Design Assistant

Walter W. Krutz Paul W. Petraitis

44 Claude A. Barnett and the Associated Negro Press by Linda J. Evans

Photography

Cover: looking north on State Street from Madison Street, c. 1910. Painting by Harold Harrington Betts, gift of the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad. Inside covers: sample pages from typesetter's stylebooks. Front, Type Faces, 1925; back, Prefered Type Faces, 1913.

0272-8540

Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life

Whose City? Public and Private Places in Nineteenth-Century Chicago by Perry Duis

Reviews

The Society A Word from the Editor

Whose City? Public and Private Places in Nineteenth-Century Chicago By Perry Duis

The rise of the industrial city raised new questions about the nature of urban space, about who might use it and for what. Notions of what was public and what was private-and of what fell in between-found new definition as life in the city changed. Chicago, which grew tremendously in these years, offers an instructive example. AN 1897 Chicago Tribune feature worried aloud: "Why Chicago Millions Go To Other Cities." The article pointed out that each year the city's wealthy, worth some $130,000,000, spent most of their time abroad, on the east coast or in other parts of the nationeverywhere except the metropolis where they had made their fortunes. Such prominent family names as Field, Leiter, Nickerson, and Armour were among the "absentee landlords." Local booster and real estate broker Dunlap Smith exclaimed that only the idlers left town, but most of those interviewed by the paper believed that well-to-do Chicagoans fled because of the city's unpleasantness. The extremes of the seasons were one factor, but the reasons most often mentioned were noise, smoke, congestion, and physical danger. "People ... refuse to stay where they are suffocated in smoke and soiled in dust; and where their eyes are offended in filthy streets, their ears deafened with clanging bells on the level or roaring trains overhead; and where they can go out with safety only in the most circumscribed limits." The Tribune feature was but one in a string of complaints about a conspicuous failure of the American city generally: the sense of danger and unpleasantness that pervaded

Perry Duis is assistant professor of history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. This article is drawn from his forthcoming book, The People of Chicago.

urban public places. While the streets and parks in many other countries were regulated and adorned as symbols of civic spirit, Americans have tended to find much more utilitarian uses for them. The streets of the earliest colonial cities quickly became places of commercial exchange and advertising. Store sweepings and waste water added to the problem of manure left standing in the absence of street cleaners, while the deserted byways of the night became the common setting for muggers, "night-walkers" (prostitutes), and "night-sneaks" (burglars). With this as part of its legacy from the older urban areas of the East, Chicago was destined to reproduce the same problems. The reasons for the maltreatment of urban spaces were many and complex. The strong tradition of free commerce demanded free access to the streets as places to make sales, post advertising, and cart goods. Alsu, the poorest urbanites had nowhere else to live; if citizenship provided little else, common ownership of the city's public spaces at least carried with it the right-within the limits of vagrancy and loitering laws-to live on the street. Thus while the transient male might have been largely invisible in rural hobo ''.jungles," in the city the homeless family and the denizen of Skid Row were glaring exceptions to the general prosperity of the land and a disquieting sight. Another cause was

Whose City? rooted in the stringency of city budgets and the fact that the demands placed on the street by heavy traffic often exceeded building technologies. Wood planking, the first hard surface, did not appear in Chicago until 1849, while limestone blocks and Nicholson pine blocks, set grain end up, were first installed in 1855 and 1856, respectively. Mud, muck, and potholes were everywhere, and pedestrians had to remain on small paved paths to cross to another block. And, in lieu of adequate city services, store owners paid youthful "crossing sweepers" to keep them clean. Finally, the malaise of the public street was also directly related to the way urbanites, including Chicagoans, differentiated city space according to the degree of public access. The city as a spatial entity has always been divided into three parts, the interrelationships of which reveal much about the evolution of urban social life. First, there were the streets, sidewalks, parklands, river surface, public buildings, and the sky; these constituted the public space, owned by all citizens in common and open, in theory at least, to everyone. At the opposite end of the spectrum were private homes and other types of property that were closed to public access. An outsider who entered did so as a guest or by the power of a court order. The third category of urban space was a hybrid of the others and can be labeled semi-public. This category was the most fluid, and its definition, control, and use generated many controversies because it was privately owned but open to public use. The numbers and types of these spaces proliferated during the last part of the nineteenth century in the form of stores, depots, and other institutions. And as the numbers of citizens using these areas grew, questions arose about safety, police control, etiquette, and morality. What rights did the visitor or customer enjoy? How much access did police officials have? How did the semi-public place differ from the club? As life in the city grew more complex and crowded, Chicagoans had to face these difficult new questions. Preceding Page: The unpleasant aspects of Chicago's-and indeed many other cities'-public places in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are reflected in this view of Dearborn Street, looking south from Randolph, about 1909.

The Pre-Modern Public City The story of Chicago's transformation from a rural trading post to an industrial metropolis can be found, to a large extent, in the evolution of city nuisances. While boosters puffed with grandiloquent pride, the everyday grumbling and the intervention of the city's Common Council revealed how the citizenry really felt about their town. This story has several parts: the transformation of the city's space from undifferentiated to specialized uses, the search for greater speed and efficiency of movement within the city and its effect on street life, the tightening definition of what was public and what was private, and, finally, the growing realization that the city was a corporate social entity in which everyone had a stake in the common environment. The most obvious unpleasantnesses involved survivals from Chicago's semi-rural past. Initially, the problem was dumping. The city's 1833 charter empowered its government to "prevent and remove nuisances," and the first public health ordinance prohibited the disposal of dead carcasses in the Chicago River. Four years later the city incorporation act allowed the Council to specify that "No dung, dead animal or putrid meats and fish or decayed vegetables [were] to be deposited in any street, avenue, lane or public square." Throughout the next four decades the city's anti-dumping powers were expanded and refined, but conditions still worsened. Visitors described the streets as nearly impassable with mud, manure, and garbage, while the river had become an open sewer. Franc Wilkie, a local newspaper humorist, described the stream in 1860: The river referred to is deep and sluggish. lt can not be forded. It can not be crossed in small boats on account of its exhalations. These are a combination of sulpherated hydrogen, the odor of decaying rodents, and the stench of rotting brassica [cabbage].

The unseemly nature of urban streets was an accepted fact of Chicago life through the 1880s. On occasion, an angry letter or editorial would appear in the press, but concern never reached the level needed to sustain a reform movement. The most blatant barnyard survival in in-

Whose City?

Above: Before the introduction of pav ing blocks in the mid1850s, Chicago's dirt streets became virtually unusable after each heavy rain. Be low: A more serious problem was the garbage, manure, and animal carcasses that accumulated in streets and alleys despite numerous city ordinances and vigorous clean-up attempts.

dustrializing Chicago was the presence of livestock and its odors within city borders. Although housed on private property, hens and milk cows also shaped the character of nearby public areas. Carter Harrison II described the neighborhood around Ashland Boulevard and Jackson Street in the 1860s as "semi-pastoral," with vegetable gardening, small farm animals , and a "smokehouse in the back yard ." Franc Wilkie's tongue-in-cheek commentary described North Siders as consisting of "men, women, children, dogs, billygoats, pigs, cats, and fleas ." Although it was more famous for its alleged role in starting the Great Fire of 1871 , Mrs. O'Leary's cow was also significant because it was a milk cow supplying neighborhood needs , located just a mile from the center of the business district. For most pre-Fire Chicagoans, the primary use of public spaces was commercial. Yet, while residents of St. Louis, Boston, New York, and other older cities flocked to large, convenient, and orderly public markets, the growth of such facilities in Chicago was stunted almost from the beginning. Initially, many shoppers of the 1830s traded at Mark Beaubien's Eagle Exchange inn or trapped wild animals themselves. Sometimes a citizen

Whose City?

M erchants gradually encroached on public spaces as they placed vast numbers of their advertising signs on the rooftops and sides of buildings and used sidewalks as display areas for their merchandise.

The Randolph Street Market at Randolph and Halsted opened in the early 1850s. As residents moved away from the West Side, the market became a place dealing in animal feed-hence the name "Haymarket Square. "

who had butchered an animal would peddle it to outlying houses. Finally in 1848 the Common Council voted to erect a public market hall. A substantial brick structure with thirty-two stalls on the first floor and a public hall on the second, the new public market was designed by the city's first professional architect, John Mills Van Osdel, and conveniently located in the middle of State Street near present-day Randolph Street. Taxpayers however were unhappy, and the council members had to defend their supposed extravagance by pointing out that city government would no longer have to rent space in the Saloon Building. The arrangement proved less than satisfactory within a few years as the small town began growing across the prairie to the south and boat traffic on the busy Chicago River impeded travel from the North and West sides. The solution was dispersal: four districts, each with the power to levy a tax to support a municipal market, were defined to reflect the different needs of the expanding city. Along with the original State Street Hall, an additional market was opened in 1851 to serve the Sou th

Division of the city at Market (now Franklin) and Washington streets; another was erected at Hubbard and Dearborn streets to serve the North Side; and a fourth opened for West Siders at Randolph and Halsted streets. Accompanying laws created strict regulations, with a ten-dollar fine for each time a farmer or retailer cheated on weight or quality. Market managers were empowered to verify the scales, mediate disputes, and lease stalls to the highest bidders. The municipal market plan soon fell victim to "suburbanization," and the Market Street and State Street exchanges both closed by the mid-1850s after their customers moved to other parts of the city. Shortly after they folded , an informal open-air market appeared on South Water Street at the river's edge. Meanwhile, the Randolph Street Market became a "haymarket," where Chicagoans bought food for their animals. The last official market on the North Side had to share its facilities after 1866 with a precinct police station. Thus, a local real estate journal, The Builder, could claim in 1868 that Chicago sadly lacked the impressive market halls of

South Water Street Market, c. 1900. While residents of New York and Boston had enjoyed open-air markets for many years, they did not appear in Chicago until 1848, and then did not last long. By that time the city's population was dispersing outward, and thus central marketplaces were becoming less convenient.

older cities because it was dispersing so rapidly that the distance between home and municipal trading areas was too great for regular shopping. Instead, Chicagoans were virtually captives of a few privately owned exchanges and local butchers and grocers. That situation became even more bleak when the Great Fire destroyed the Hubbard Street Hall. Never again would Chicago have a public market building. Street trade helped to fill this gap. Mobile services and sellers first appeared during the town's infancy, but by the 1860s hundreds of peddlers had become a food lifeline between markets and residential districts. Pushcart merchants bought produce from farmers who had started to appear near the Randolph Street haymarket and along South Water Street. As items neared their spoiling point, the prices fell and peddlers acquired wagonloads for pennies. Because the pushcart trade had a quick turnover, the retailers of the streets could be sure of selling their load before it rotted. And because many of the customers, particularly the indigent ones, had little or no space to store food , it was

consumed quickly. The curbstone grocers were joined by many other services that used the public spaces of the city as salesrooms. Hacks plied the streets by the early 1840s, caring at first for the needs of local citizens and passengers arriving by boat. Ragpickers and scavengers who rummaged through alley trashboxes not only provided a living for themselves but also performed an important economic function in the city by recycling cloth for paper, grease and oil for candles and soap, and many metal items of value. The markets and street trades were obvious commercial uses for public spaces, but a third was more controversial. This was the forest of advertising signs that lined rooftops and hung from stores over the sidewalks. When weather permitted, merchants piled their goods on the sidewalks to catch the attention of passersby. By 1857 this practice had become such a nuisance that Mayor "Long John " Wentworth issued a special decree demanding that merchants withdraw to their property lines. When the offenders failed to comply, Wentworth organized a raid. Under 7

Whose City ?

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Chicago's reputation as a rough, untamed frontier town gained momentum in the East with the publication of several illustrated books, including Tricks and Traps of Chicago, 1859 (below), and Chicago After Dark, 1868 (above).

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cover of darkness, he personally tore down dozens of sidewalk obstructions, described by the press as "show-cases, milliners' bonnetblocks, merchants' boxes, grocers' barrels, barbers' poles, saloon signs, literary depot advertisers , and other articles too numerous to mention. " Wentworth's personal crusade proved futile in the long run, for by the late 1860s whole sides of buildings had become signboards, and huge banners hung across streets. Commerce had triumphed in the public place. Although streets and sidewalks were busy commercial centers in pre-Civil War Chicago, many citizens still regarded most public places with great trepidation. Open, brazen crime -footpads (today's muggers) , rowdies, and prostitutes-helped create the negative image of the city as a predominantly violent and lawless place. Initially, the problem was the makeup of the population, a "frontier town" of unattached young men in frequent conflict with soldiers at Fort Dearborn. Many of the Irish immigrants who arrived to work on the Illinois and Michigan Canal were of similar status and also contributed to the impression of widespread public disorder. With great frequency the press reported instances of victims accosted and beaten on the

Whose City? streets or dragged from carriages and robbed in broad daylight. Inebriation was a constant problem, as the number of liquor retailers multiplied under the reign of cheap licenses and lax inspection. In 1853 the Daily Democratic Press felt compelled to complain that, "This vice seems to have a strong foothold upon our city." Bands of reveling marauders prompted the Chicago Daily journal to editorialize: ROWDYISM-A number of enthusiastic individuals succeeded in raising quite a disturbance last evening ... which redounds greatly to the advantage of glaziers and crockery stores, as well as to the scandal of the city. Some of the party mistook windows for doors, and others transformed decanters into shillalahs. No heads were broken on account of their elasticity.

Even the events that were supposed to instill municipal patriotism often turned to disorder. Clashes between supporters of national political parties were a regular election-time event, and rival volunteer fire companies were frequently more interested in arriving first at the scene of the conflagration than they were in extinguishing the flames. The losers in both cases frequently picked fights with the winners. As early as the 1850s Chicago newspapers began complaining about the presence of youth gangs on the streets. When they were not brawling or vandalizing public property, they were pawning stolen goods or selling them to junk dealers. The town and earliest city charters called for the election of constables in each ward to enforce laws and instill order. Since they were dependent on the support of constituents, the constabulary tended to reflect the character of each ward. Gradually, the prevailing disorder forced centralization, beginning with the town-wide election of the first city marshall in 1842 and the creation of the first professional police department in 1855. In order to respond quickly to emergencies, the force was divided into precincts originally housed in market buildings and later in their own halls. Despite a jurisdictional dispute between the governor of the state, who controlled the Chicago police through appointments to a commission from 1861 through 1876, and the mayor, city officials agreed that

police on the street should become more visible symbols of authority. In 1858, Mayor John C. Haines equipped the force with standard blue uniform coats and stars; his successors retained the tradition. The notion of using public spaces to display the might of the law was further strengthened by the practice of hanging criminals in prominent locations. City-wide authority and concern about the public environment was also demonstrated by the presence of George White, the town crier, who strolled the streets calling out the time, reuniting lost children with their parents, and checking the condition of the streets. The public city of the pre-Civil War era was homely and utilitarian. Little effort was expended in the beautification of public places. Chicago's nickname, "The Garden City," was derived from the landscaping-and vegetable plots-on private land. There was a small fountain in Court House Square, and young women strolled Sundays down an informal "promenade" along a pleasant stretch of Michigan Avenue. Parks were designed to improve generally the quality of life in the community, but they were often too small and inadequate. The semi-public places-privately owned commercial property of public access-were similarly unattractive in early Chicago. The earliest inns were social centers during the village years, but they were small, filthy, and noisy. Only gradually did standards improve. The Lake House, built at Kinzie and Rush streets in 1836, was the exception. Its furnishings were grander, and it reputedly introduced napkins and a printed bill of fare to Chicago. But even these features could not make it pay, because its location was inconvenient to the business district. Aside from the theater and a few traveling circuses that erected tents, there were few places established specifically for amusements or commercialized leisure. The town's taverns provided rudimentary space for amusement. A few residents played the fiddle for others, but most activity consisted of talking, fighting, and playing cards. When warm weather allowed it, amusements moved outdoors and back to public space. Wolf hunts were a common recreation in the 1830s, and 9

Whose City?

residents thought that this activity also served a useful purpose in protecting livestock. Another favorite pastime was horse racing along the lake shore. Indians from the surrounding area and soldiers from Fort Dearborn often participated. By the 1840s, however, Chicagoans' taste in amusements was showing signs of changing. They not only were displaying a willingness to be entertained as spectators rather than as participants, but they also began showing signs of an appetite for the bizarre and unusual. In 1844 the first museum of oddities opened, and four years later 112-year-old David Kennison opened his collection of freaks and historical memorabilia. As the last survivor of the Boston Tea Party, Kennison himself was probably the most important attraction. The most promising sign of change in Chicago amusements, however, came in 1849, when the first "panorama" arrived for a short visit. This was a gigantic painting on canvas, some four hundred feet in length, 10

that was unrolled from one huge spool across a stage and onto another gigantic spool. Chicagoans paid half a dollar to see such works as "The Funeral of Napoleon," described by the Chicago Daily Democrat as "a combination of mechanical and artistic skill which has produced a perfect moving and life-like representation of every incident which occurred in this most gorgeous pageant of modern times." Other panoramas that drew large crowds in Chicago depicted "The Conflagration of Moscow," "Panorama of Pilgrim's Progress," "Macevoy's Grand Panoramic Mirror of Ireland," "Bullard's Panorama of New York City," and "Prof. Andrieu 's Panorama of Chicago." During Chicago's earliest years the distinction between public, semi-public, and private spaces was crude. The inn was much like an extension of the household, and the selfgenerated pleasure of conversation was a comfortable feature of the general stores. But Chicago was growing rapidly, from 4,170 people in 1837 to 29,963 in 1850. This popu-

Whose City?

Above: The 1,605-foot Washington Street tunnel under the Chicago River, completed in 1869, eliminated delays caused by river traffic. The tunnel provided separate passageways for carriages and pedestrians.

Left: Built in 1856, the bridge on Rush Street was the first iron swing bridge in the West and the prototype f or the city's bridges for many years to come.

lation growth would allow general stores to become specialty retailers. At the same time, the beginning of the railway network as well as the influx of easterners began to bring new ideas about stores, amusements, and the way citizens should use the public and semi-public spaces of Chicago.

City Space in Transition, 1850-1870 Despite the city's bucolic holdovers, the two decades between 1850 and the Great Fire brought the beginnings of a technological revolution to Chicago's public places. The change was not sufficiently significant to alter immediately citizens' perceptions of the street and sidewalk and park; most Chicagoans still regarded common ground as a place for business and continued to view it as somewhat hazardous. But changes were beginning to take place that would dramatically alter the public city in coming decades. The first change was in the street itself. With the installation of Ellis Chesbrough's

sewer system, new water pipes, and gas mains, the earth beneath most raised-grade streets became a utility core. The addition of Nicholson paving blocks, uniformly cut and treated with a preservative, gave vehicles a smooth wooden surface on which to travel. The 1860s marked a new concern with the quality of city streets. In 1862, only $42,635 was spent on roads and sewers; in 1870, thanks to a new tax levy law, that item in the city budget had risen to $2.8 million. Technological change was visible above the street surface as well. In 1849 the Chicago Gas Light and Coke Company was chartered, and on September 4, 1850, the first gas street lights flickered on. The new system, which introduced the lamplighter to the army of those employed in the streets, was more reliable than the older oil lamps. By 1848 telegraph wires began to appear on some major streets, and within a decade the demand for instant communication across the nation and to the other side of the city made these fragile strands a common part of the urban landscape. The growing demand for rapid responses from police and fire departments prompted the installation of alarm boxes in 1864, which also became familiar sidewalk fixtures. Chicago's bridge development underwent a similar change from simple to complicated technology at mid-century. Various styles of wooden bridges along the river ultimately gave way to an iron swing bridge at Rush Street, the first built in the West. That was in 1856, and its success made it the prototype for several decades to come. The fact that the new metal bridges were much more expensive, however, placed great strain on the legal tradition of nearby property owners sharing the construction costs. The following year, the new iron bridge at Madison Street became the first constructed entirely at city expense. By 1870 there would be twentyseven bridges in the city. While these structures were considered marvels in their time, they still did not solve the problem of making easy connections between Chicago's three land divisions. In 1853 engineers began studying the possibility of going under the river. Twice, companies 11

formed to accomplish that feat failed before 1867, when work finally got underway at Washington Street. On January 1, 1869, the 1,605-foot tunnel was complete. It provided a separate walkway for pedestrians and was illuminated by gas lights. More important was the fact that travelers could cross without the interruption of being "bridged" by passing boats. City officials were so impressed that on November 3, 1869, contracts were let for a second tunnel at LaSalle Street. This opened on July 4, 1871, just in time to provide emergency egress for those fleeing the Great Fire on October 8 and 9. The most important technological innovation of mid-century was, however, the least imaginative. During the early 1850s Frank Parmalee and Warren Parker began operating omnibuses on Chicago streets. These were little more than urban versions of stage coaches, and they encountered great difficulty negotiating streets before the days of Nicholson paving blocks. Attempts to operate wheeled vehicles over planks set in the mud usually failed. The obvious solution was to install rails in the streets, an idea introduced two decades earlier in New York. In 1854 a pair of Illinois Central Railroad employees attempted to construct a horse railway, but 12

they ran out of money. The intervening Panic of 1857 delayed the first successful line until April 25, 1859, when Frank Parmelee and Henry Fuller's Chicago City Railway Company introduced the technology of mass transit to the city. The equipment was primitive by later standards, although some tinkerers attempted to attach spring mechanisms to push the car to a more rapid start. At the same time, street railway interests on the periphery of the city were experimenting with miniaturized steam locomotives. City officials predicted havoc from frightened horses and exploding boilers and banned the use of "steam dummies" within the municipal borders. Thus, by 1870 the street was well on its way to becoming a machine, a collection of systems with the principal goal of moving people and goods about the city. At the same time, the new technologies of spaces were beginning to alter public attitudes about streets, sidewalks, parks, and public buildings. The transitions were subtle, often merely hints of ideas that would mature later, but they were important. The first could be called a sense of crowding, a notion that activities appropriate in rural areas interfered with the rights of others in cities. The growing number of nui-

Whose City? assist in making any improper noise, riot, disturbance, breach of peace, or diversion, or who shall use any threatening or abusive language toward any other person, tending to a breach of peace, in the streets or elsewhere in the city, and all persons who shall collect in bodies or crowds for unlawful purposes, or for any purpose for the annoyance or disturbance of citizens or travelers, shall be severely subject to a fine of not less than one dollar, nor exceeding one hundred dollars.

As public attitudes changed toward public places, people felt less inclined to tolerate smells and noise. City officials received complaints about the Union Stockyards from all parts of Chicago.

sance complaints through the mid-century years indicated that Chicagoans were growing less tolerant of loud noises, smells, and unsightly structures on someone else's property. This led not only to a determined drive to rid the city of farm animals, but also to widespread complaints about the Union Stockyards. Although far removed from urban settlement when it opened in 1865, by the late 1870s it was engulfed by workingclass neighborhoods. And as the volume of livestock handled there grew in the postwar decades, the complaints about the "Bridgeport Smells" poured into City Hall from widely scattered parts of the South and West divisions. The sense of crowding also involved the regulation of personal behavior. Obviously, all statutes shared that goal, but by the 1880s the list of potential infractions had grown to include possession of explosives and concealing a weapon (carrying it openly was permitted). An 1873 ordinance book warned: Any person who shall make, aid, countenance, or

By 1866 Chicago also had a law prohibiting kite flying. Other regulations excluded activities considered to be lewd or disgusting. These involved a sensitive division between private property and places of public access. In 1872 the Common Council banned the sale of books "of any immoral or scandalous nature, or calculated to excite scandal, immorality, or disturbance of the peace, or public tranquility .... " Enforcement was difficult, however. Indecent exposure in theatrical performances was another matter, as was nude swimming in Lake Michigan, which was officially outlawed in 1881 because of complaints by Illinois Central Railroad passengers. In June 1884, property owners were prohibited from posting "any advertisement containing pictures or illustrations of an obscene or immoral character ... so that the same can be seen from the streets, alleys or other public places of said city ... ." The Council even enacted a law providing that "Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated, or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object ... shall not ... expose himself or herself to public view." The creation of these statutes was largely a social reaction to the growth of the city from a tiny village in 1830 to a major metropolis with more than 300,000 citizens by 1870. They were the moral equivalent of traffic regulations, which also had multiplied in the burgeoning city. Between 1850 and 1870 the Common Council not only specified speed limits, but also enacted other restraints on the actions of drivers. In large part, these laws were meant to help prevent or at least untangle traffic jams. In June 1855, for instance, a law determined which vehicles had precedence in crossing bridges. Those running direct could go first, those on side streets to 13

Whose City? the right went next, and the last were those to the left. Seen in a larger context, the individual driver was required to sacrifice a bit of freedom in order to use city streets. It was significant that railroads were responsible in several ways for altering the use and perception of city spaces during this decade of innovation. Rail passenger traffic multiplied many times during those two decades, introducing tens of thousands of strangers to the streets. What happened to them only reinforced the stereotype of danger. Improved travel helped make Chicago a major center for professional criminals. A quick rail exit from other cities brought them likely as not to the new metropolis. Travelers meanwhile helped spread the city's bad reputation across America. Farmers coming to town to sell livestock were victimized by thugs and con artists. The budding convention business, also an offshoot of rail service, brought in other easy prey. Hackmen were often co-conspirators. As early as 1859 the city's reputation inspired a New York publisher to issue Tricks and Traps of Chicago, a guide that warned of "sandbaggers," real estate speculators, and the attractive "grisettes," or waitresses at saloon halls. "Scalpers" met trains and persuaded travelers into rides to over-priced hotels. One man, "Allspice," was lured into a cab and taken to a rough district where he was forced to buy an expensive bottle of wine, then drugged and robbed. A similar volume published in 1868, Chicago After Dark, perpetuated the city's crimeridden reputation. The railroads also were responsible for transforming the semi-public places of the city. By 1870 depots already had left behind the era of small, wooden shanties and moved toward the notion of the "terminal," a symbolic as well as practical end of the journey. In such structures as the Illinois CentralMichigan Central Depot on the lakefront and the Galena and Chicago Union Station built in 1864 at Kinzie and Wells, the train shed covered passengers while the waiting room was gradually becoming more commodious and elaborate. The depot was beginning to evolve from the merely utilitarian to the decorative as well. 14

Chicago's central location meant that no trains operated through the city; they only began or ended there. Travelers on their way through the city not only supplied the "transfer trade" for hacks or Frank Parmelee's coaches, but they also provided a clientele for the city's large hotels. By the late 1860s hotels were emerging from an atmosphere of utility to one of elegance. The Grand Pacific Hotel, for instance, opened in 1870. Its coowners were the Lake Shore and Michigan and the Rock Island railroads, whose depot was nearby. The elegant hotel, which covered most of a square block at Clark, Quincy, LaSalle, and Jackson, was adorned with a conservatory, several posh dining rooms, and elevators to all floors. Each of the 550 rooms was equipped with a "new electric annunciator." But the most significant feature of the building was the glass-domed court, under which the carriages unloaded. This enabled travelers to avoid the unpleasantness of the street and the numerous "baggage smashers" who gathered outside hotels and offered to cart travelers' luggage. Thus, a privately owned place with public access could screen its visitors and provide elegant accommodations for selected strangers. Chicagoans' fascination with technology and the creation of new semi-public places also began reshaping leisure activities in the years just before the Fire. Special events and holidays, like July Fourth, were marked by such spectacular events as balloon ascensions, the first unmanned version of which took place in 1854. A large crowd watched from Dearborn Park (later the site of the public library) as a lantern attached to the basket marked its upward course. A year later, one of the nation's best-known aeronauts, Silas M. Brooks, became the first airborne human in Chicago history. He had been paid $1,000 in advance to rise from a West Side lot, but his moment of glory lasted only a few minutes before high winds tore the "envelope" filled with lighting gas free from its basket. Brooks landed safely, but his $1,000 balloon was ruined. Although promoters of future balloon ascensions attempted to collect admissions from spectators who wanted to be near the launch site, it was difficult to stop those

Above: Horse-drawn omnibuses, Chicago's first public transportation, appeared in the 1850s but were not entirely successful until the installation of paving blocks on city streets. Right: Chicago After Dark, a novel publi.shed in 1868 in New York, told the story of lri.sh Mollie, the "Courtesan Queen," who came to Chicago a pure and unsullied girl but was soon led astray by scalawags and bad women. Below: Waiting room of Chicago's first Union Station, 1905. The tremendous increase in rail travel brought about construction of larger depots with essential services and elaborate amenities for travelers and commuters.

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Whose City? across the street from witnessing the event for free. Chicago's entrepreneurs soon discovered that the way to profit from residents' desire for amusement was to create specialized semi-public places for recreational purposes. These had been lacking in earlier decades when "museums" simply rented a few rooms in a downtown building or traveling panorama companies rented a theater or even space in City Hall. But during the 1860s such places as Colonel Woods' Museum opened with great fanfare. Housed in its own building, which was covered with banners and signs, it was a department store of curiosities that filled three floors. There were Egyptian mummies and The Great Zeuglondon, reputedly the skeleton of a hundred-foot-long prehistoric whale, among the hundreds of extraordinary objects on display. Thus, for an admission fee of twenty-five cents, visitors could see first-hand what they once had only dreamed of. Some specialized outdoor amusement places opened German-style beer and picnic gardens. That ethnic group had been most responsible for introducing Chicagoans to the idea of the "Continental Sunday," a day of family leisure that often included outdoor dining, drinking beer, and listening to a band. A few resorts began as private ventures. Sharpshooters Park, for instance, opened in 1869 as a rifle range for the Jaeger [Sharpshooters] Corps. at what is now Western Avenue and Belmont. At first only the riflemen who had served the German monarch could use it, but the superior facilities and unspoiled grove of shade trees led to inquiries from others wanting to rent it. Eventually it became a commercial grove similar to Sunnyside Park in Ravenswood and more than a dozen similar places on the periphery of the city. Outlying inns and taverns that once had catered to travelers and farmers going to and from market now found patronage from Chicagoans in carriages or on bicycles. For a fee, visitors could enjoy band music and either purchase food from booths or rent picnic tables for their own food. By 1870, organized outdoor sports such as racing and baseball began to attract crowds 16

willing to pay an admission fee. Baseball especially captured the public's imagination after it was first played in Chicago in 1856. The earliest teams were semi-professional, but in 1869 Potter Palmer, George Pullman, and General Philip Sheridan joined other investors in forming a professional team, the Chicago White Stockings. It was so popular that the following year a victory of 15 7 -1 over Memphis brought out a crowd of over 100,000-a third of the city's population-to greet the team's return home. Since larger crowds meant more revenue, the club erected a ball park at 22nd Street and the lakefront. Meanwhile, the throngs that attended the city's two racetracks-Garden City and Brighton, which were specialized recreation spots-allowed promoters to offer large purses, something that drew even larger crowds. One other large, commercial attraction of this type also drew the condemnation of the community. In 1869 boxing ceased to exist in Illinois as a spectator sport open to legal general admission. In future years, bouts would either be held secretly or be open to members of "clubs" that patrons ''.joined" merely by purchasing a ticket. This technically made the ringside area a private, rather than semi-public commercial place, and exempted it from the ban on boxing. Finally, by the late 1860s, the developments in architecture that allowed railroads to construct large, open trainsheds brought large-scale amusements such as skating rinks indoors and aided a mid-century fad for physical fitness. The German Turners were most responsible for developing athletic facilities; they built complete gymnasia and sponsored teams that competed with rivals in fencing, gymnastics, and other sports. These facilities were seldom open to non-members, but by 1871, similar commercial ventures were competing for patronage. The middle decades of the nineteenth century were an important transitional era in the use of urban space. Technology became a visible part of the streetscape for the first time, with wires, tunnels, and street railways creating an outdoor museum of invention. But technology could not provide answers for the problems created when more and more

Whose City?

Left: Large-scale amusements like skating and sports competitions came indoors in the I 860s. The German Turners, an athletic club, built several gymnasia and sponsored fencing and gymnastics teams. Below: Sharpshooters Park, one of the city's first outdoor amusement places, opened in I 869 as a private shooting range for a group of German riflemen but later became a commercial picnic park.

Whose City?

The grand staircase of the Palmer House, 1876. Chicago's hotels featured not only comfortable and lavishly appointed public rooms, but they also offered guests rnany other services-such as hairdressers and newsstaruis--as an added convenience.

people and activities tried to use urban spaces that could not expand rapidly enough. One answer to the problem was to limit the freedom of one person in order to preserve the rights of another. While few laws regulated behavior in private places, Chicago's legal code saw a growing list of restrictions on conduct in public ones. But even so, the city developed a reputation for streets filled with dirt and danger. By the time of the Great Fire, however, Chicago was ready to enter a new era in which semi-public places came to symbolize the city to the rest of the world. And as the streetscape seemed to become more unpleasant and crowded, the controlled atmosphere of these new institutions seemed all the more attractive.

The Golden Age of the Semi-Public City "Wherever the name of Chicago is known throughout Europe and America, that of the Palmer House is linked with it as one of the striking evidences of the pluck and energy of the great metropolis of the West." That bit of 18

advertising puffery was typical of 1887, but it was also indicative of an important fact about Chicago's social life during the last three decades of the nineteenth century: the world of commercial spaces, privately owned but open to the public, had come to symbolize the rising city. Chicago had no great cathedrals. Its city hall and courthouse were architecturally undistinguished and shoddily built. Its museums were still small with modest collections. There were, in fact, no large and magnificent public buildings. Instead, Chicagoans poured their talents, energies, and money into the construction of magnificent private commercial buildings, soaring office towers, large department stores, impressive railroad stations, and grand hotels. There was money in attracting crowds, and the competitive atmosphere demanded that each new structure be more elaborate than the last. The hotel was the archetypal semi-public place. Rebuilding on the Fire ruins, contractors worked around the clock to construct replacements. The Grand Pacific, the Palmer

Whose City? House, and the Tremont House tried to turn disaster into advantage by introducing appointments even more lavish than those in their pre-Fire hotels. Palmer, for instance, initiated a private coach line that greeted guests at the railway stations and delivered them to an elegant entrance adorned with statues said to be "the most costly and elaborate works of art ever used to ornament any building in the country." There was a grand staircase-increasingly relegated to an ornamental role by elevators-and a grand entryway rotunda, whose overhead balconies became "popular places of resort for both ladies and gentlemen and from which the busy scene below can be enjoyed." There was also a huge domed restaurant, ballrooms of several sizes, and a richly furnished billiard parlor for men. In the search for comfort and grandeur, hotels added barber shops, hairdressers, newsstands, and other services that made it unnecessary for travelers to venture outside for basic needs. The rise of the department store marked a similar tendency to provide lavish indoor appointments and bring together a great many goods and services under one roof. Architectural innovations helped make this possible. More spacious floor areas with improved lighting and ventilation followed the introduction of iron and steel frames to building construction . Electricity brought merchandise under uniform illumination in all parts of the store and at all hours, and escalators and elevators made it possible to stack floor upon floor of departments. New services-restaurants, waiting rooms, offices to purchase theater tickets or to arrange travel plans, beauty parlors, dentists' offices, parcel check rooms, and even a day nursery where children could romp on real grass and sand-added to the competition and allowed shoppers, especially women, to arrive downtown by commuter train, do their shopping, and never set foot on the public street. But most important of all, by bringing together a city full of stores, reducing the size of each to efficient design and offering the most popular merchandise, the department store made shopping a recreation. The aisle became, in effect, the replacement for the public street.

During the post-Fire years the city's railway stations underwent a similar transition. The growth of passenger traffic gradually forced railroad lines to shift their freight operations to the city's periphery. Competition for passengers, the growing size of the ridership on both intercity and suburban trains, and the entrance of new trunk lines into Chicago which shared the burden of new construction costs, all prompted the rebuilding of rail stations during the 1880s. The element of boosterism was present also. The press complained loudly about the condition of the West Side station of the Chicago & Alton and the Pittsburgh, Ft. Wayne and Chicago. The Tribune reprinted the unkind comments of the Toledo Blade: Chicago is a great city, and its buildings as a whole are massive and grand, but the worst hovel in all that great city, and the one that causes an exclamation of contempt.to escape the beholder's lips each time he sees it, is the depot . . . . The paint has long since been worn off by the action of the weather, and the woodwork on the inside is thickly covered with a deposit of grease and dirt that makes it very variegated in appearance. The floor is covered with a thick, three-ply carpet of tobacco-quids . ... It is almost a disgrace that those roads should consent to use such a depot.

The foul little building was eventually replaced by a new Union Station in 1881. Not to be outdone, two groups of railroads constructed new depots of their own: Dearborn Station on Polk Street in 1883 and a Grand Central Station at Wells and Harrison in 1890. To the north, the Chicago & North Western built its new Wells Street Station in 1882. All were elaborate brick structures that became "gateways" to the city, but they were virtually cities in themselves. In these stations and in the Illinois Central Depot (1892), LaSalle Street Station (1905), and new North Western ( 1911) and Union ( 1925) stations, the services essential to travelers and commuters were brought indoors. Clothing stores, food services of varying prices, laundries, and apothecaries were often combined with a jail and a small hospital. The new North Western Station was arranged IO cater to the different needs of its three major types of passengers: long-distance travelers benefitted most from the large waiting room and 19

Whose City? small sleeping rooms; short-haul passengers arriving in the morning were able to nap before departing in the afternoon; and commuters in need of freshening up before an evening on the town could also take advantage of these facilities. This last group had a separate concourse that allowed them to escape the lines waiting at the gates for longdistance trains. Finally, there was a separate immigrant waiting room with attendants who spoke various languages, a safe haven from the wily hack drivers and others trying to bilk the innocent foreigners. Of all these impressive structures, the greatest monument to the crowd was the Auditorium Building. Everything about it reflected the most favorable attitude toward semi-public places. It was huge, one of the tallest and most massive buildings in the world when it opened in 1889. It was also fireproof, an important consideration in a city where flames had done so much damage and at a time when catastrophes in other cities made Chicagoans fearful of another conflagration. Despite its enormous seating capacity, the structure was extremely versatile. An advertising book described the future uses of its giant theater as "political and trade conventions, concerts by maennerchors and choral associations and master orchestras, mass meetings, lectures, operatic performances of every kind, balls, promenade concerts, charity fairs, etc. etc." To maximize the building's money-making potential, its ground floor spaces were to be used for commercial purposes while a luxurious hotel and an office section provided other steady sources of revenue. "Externally, the building is almost Roman," boasted the promoters, "but internally it is American, and one may go further and say Chicagoan." The Auditorium Building became the prevailing symbol of civic progress in Chicago, and promoters boasted (and some might have believed) that "Chicago, as a city, only became artistic when the Auditorium created a demand for very superior work .... " Its observation tower was the tallest point in the city, its restaurant and hotel were luxuriously appointed, and the acoustics in the theater, which was one of the largest rooms in the

world, were reputedly near perfection. The building's promoters had also tried to relate the building's interior functions to the best characteristics of the city outside. Michigan Avenue was still "the great social artery of Chicago," with traffic that consisted mainly of carriages rather than drays. The lakefront park, though still hardly elegant with Illinois Central trains operating nearby, was at least open. Bicycle clubs congregated weekly at the Auditorium, and the nearby harbor contained the yachts of the wealthy. There was still hope that the smoke nuisance could be solved, and there was a general belief that the new building would have an inspirational and beneficial effect on the physical environment near it. Thus, the privately owned Auditorium was a multi-functional "department store" of physical comforts open to all who could afford its rates. Like other semi-public places, arenas of commercial amusement proliferated, prospered, and in time became more specialized. The evolution of theaters was typical of this transition. The Great Fire had wiped away most stages, which had been concentrated downtown, and through the years their replacements seemed to be less willing to accommodate a wide spectrum of offerings. Instead, a few concentrated on serious drama, while others turned to uncultivated musical acts in vaudeville and burlesque. Still other places, whose builders had once held high hopes of acclaim, finally became "concert saloons." The larger of these houses attracted lowlife from Chicago and out-oftown patrons with striptease shows, gambling, prostitution, and other imaginative vices. For the visitor and local resident alike, one of the numerous city guidebooks became an absolute necessity to avoid stumbling into one of Chicago's more undesirable theaters. During the latter decades of the century, the number and variety of competitors for citizens' leisure expenditures tested the imagination, and many entrepreneurs continued to employ technology in novel ways to draw crowds. Billiards, which had become a popular participatory activity in the late 1860s, became a spectator sport when huge mirrors were suspended over the tables to reflect the

The Auditorium Hotel lobby, c. 1880. A restaurant, a theater, and a large hotel located under one roof in the Auditorium Building made this structure for many years the outstanding symbol of Chicago's civic progress.

action of special matches to grandstands set up in hotel ballrooms. Similarly, balloon ascensions evolved from feats of crude daring into major races for large prizes and international records. In 1875, when P. T. Barnum came to town and set up his Hippodrome in Dearborn Park, the central attraction was not the circus acts or misshapen people, but a major balloon ascension in quest of a world mark. This particular affair, however, was marked by tragedy; the pilot and the balloon disappeared, and the body of his passenger, a local reporter, washed ashore in Michigan. Balloon ascensions were visual attractions that drew crowds because the craft was unusual and the feat was dangerous. Descriptions of these events always referred to the "atmosphere of excitement" and the mood of

the scene. That same kind of entertaining spectacle was captured in an indoor setting through the creation of a new type of panorama in the 1880s. These elaborate, round buildings, skillfully designed by the best architects in the city, featured a huge floor-toceiling painting that was completely wrapped around its interior. Patrons entered through an underground tunnel that led to an observation tower in the center of the room. The painting depicted a 360Â° view of some important event, such as Civil War battles, the Crucifixion of Christ, or the Chicago Fire, while the space between the walls and the tower was filled with sculpture, plantings, and other scenery that blended in with the background. The effect was reportedly stunning, a three-dimensional reproduction of a 21

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Whose City? dramatic scene that captured the proper mood. Three large panoramas competed for visitors by 1890, and the crowd's insatiable desire to be entertained this way generated an industry. Dozens of painters, principally German immigrants working in Milwaukee, were kept busy turning out spectacles, which toured the country on a traveling circuit. The panoramas were escapist fare, a dime or quarter sojourn away from the ordinary. While not a new trend, they were typical of the people's quest for novelty entertainments. By the late 1880s, when the city's bid to host the World's Columbian Exposition seemed headed for success and many other tourists were arriving just to see the mushrooming metropolis, a number of more bizarre novelties appeared. The Eden Musee, a wax museum, offered the fabulous collection of Charles Gunther, a local candy manufacturer. He had the old Libby Prison, in which hundreds of Union troops had been held, removed brick-by-brick from Richmond and shipped to South Wabash Avenue. The collection of curios, war memorabilia, paintings, and the reconstructed building itself opened in September 1889. A competitor quickly countered with the engine house from Harper's Ferry, West Virginia, where John Brown took refuge in 1859 during the raid that made him famous. But it failed to attract visitors and was out of business soon after the exposition opened. When the historic building fell into disrepair, local black leaders, including Ida B. Wells, Ferdinand Barnett, and John Jones raised money to move it back to West Virginia. While the freak shows and panoramas drew crowds indoors, baseball was well on its way to dominance as the city's favorite outdoor pastime. Like other semi-public activities, it employed specially constructed buildings that were privately owned but open to the public for an admission charge. And, like the Auditorium Building, a baseball team could come to symbolize a city. Until the early 1870s the game was still casual and often Balloon ascensions became popular because they were both unusual and daring.

corrupt. William A. Hulbert, a grain trader, bought the White Stockings in 1876 and set out to remake the game by applying business principles to sport. That year he persuaded the owners of other teams to systematize the rules and form an intercity competition with a schedule of games. The result was the National League of Professional Baseball. Hulbert then hired Albert Spalding to manage his club and to pitch for the team. Spalding managed the White Stockings until 1897, but he achieved greater fame and success through the establishment of a sports equipment company which mass-produced sporting goods from hides from the stockyards. Hulbert and Spalding also discovered an important principle of commercial entertainment: crowds loved "stars." The more an amusement catered to grandstand audiences, the more the fans turned players into heroes. But unlike Washington or Lincoln or other political and cultural heroes, athletic personalities were "public," available to any audiences for an admission fee. Players like Adrian "Cap" Anson and William A . "Billy" Sunday became familiar to thousands through the press, which reported their personal lives in great detail. The success of Hulbert's National League eventually attracted competitors. In 1894, Charles A. Comiskey, son of an early Chicago alderman, and Byron "Ban" Johnson founded a new Western League. Comiskey operated a franchise in St. Paul because he thought that Chicago was not yet ready for two teams, but in 1900, despite intense opposition from White Stockings management, he leased the former Chicago Cricket Club grounds at Thirty-ninth and Princeton. When the White Stockings changed their team name to the Cubs the following year, Comiskey jumped at the chance of using their old appellation. In 1901, the Western League became known as the American League, and despite a 1903 agreement that recognized the two associations as equals, they were never friendly rivals. The American League quickly grabbed 111 players from the National League teams, with Comiskey signing Cub greats Clark Griffith, Sam Mertes, and James Callahan.

Whose City? The Cubs and the White Stockings (later shortened to White Sox to accommodate sportswriters) drew enormous crowds. In 1884 the Cubs outgrew their South Side stadium and moved to Wood Street on the West Side. Meanwhile, Comiskey also realized that his team needed more room, especially after the 1906 World Series. That pairing of the Cubs and White Sox-the latter won, four games to two, despite the nickname of "hitless wonders" -drew a total audience of 100,000 for the Series, and thousands had to be turned away. The following year Comiskey purchased property at Thirty-fifth and Shields and began construction on Comiskey Park, which opened in 1910. Baseball operated under a system of franchises, exclusive rights to operate in a particular city, rights not unlike those granted to utilities and transit lines. But sports franchises were not granted by governments, and that fact generated a controversy that ultimately brought a new home and management to the Cubs. In 1913, a group of investors decided to establish a third baseball circuit, the Federal League. Two Chicagoans, a coal dealer named James A. Gilmore, and Charles Weeghman, who owned a chain of restaurants, were the major backers. The Chicago Whales*, one of the six teams formed in the new league, soon signed Joe Tinker, part of the Cubs' famous "Tinker to Evers to Chance" trio, and announced plans for a new park on the North Side. Work began at Clark and Addison in March 1914. While construction was proceeding, the financial interests of the Federal League decided to sue the rival circuits under the Sherman Anti-Trust Law. The settlement, which was finally resolved in 1915, allowed Federal League backers to buy into American and National league teams while these more established leagues bought out $385,000 in contracts with Federal League players. Weeghman, along with meat packer J. Ogden Armour and chewing gum magnate William Wrigley, bought the Cubs from Charles 0. Taft, brother of the former President, for half a million dollars. The Whales were, in effect, merged into the Cubs, *See Chicago History, Spring 1981.

who then took possession of the new park, later renamed Wrigley Field. Major league baseball parks were not only architectural innovations, specially designed structures employing concrete and steel framing in new ways, but much like panorama buildings they were also semi-public monuments to Chicago's quest for leisure. Gradually, the numbers and types of such commercial amusements multiplied. During the 1880s roller skating became enormously popular, and several large indoor rinks were built, displacing racquetball as the current fad: The opening of the Chicago Roller-Skating Rink, corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, is unquestionably the most notable event in the amusement and social history of Chicago, in inaugurating in our own city on a scale of plain magnificence a social pleasure that implies a physical regeneration in its beneficent exercises, and which in London and Paris has with the aristocratic, the cultivated, and the polite classes taken precedence of the ball room and left other amusements in the shade. It is the proper amusement of our intellectual social century, is so regarded by the social leaders of the modern world , and its inauguration in Chicago, under a most decorous and exacting social regime, has already the countenance of the best classes, and is assured of a most brilliant career.

By the end of the decade, however, a guidebook to the city could describe indoor baseball as "of Chicago invention" and note that it "followed what came to be known as the 'Roller Skating Craze.'" Several skating rinks were refitted with baseball diamonds for what later became known as softball. A city-wide organization paired teams from an "Indoor League" and a "Midwinter League." What was most important about skating, handball, and indoor baseball was the fact that they were amateur and participatory sports played in facilities provided by someone for a profit, or in other words, a semipublic place. By the end of the century there were commercial natatoria-Kadish's indoor pool at Jackson and Michigan was the most popular-and gymnasia. Bowling, which had originally been an outdoor sport, moved under roof in 1870, but the greatest surge of enthusiasm took place after 1895, the year the American Bowling Congress was founded

Battle of Gettysburg Panorama, c. 1901. Panoramas, precursors of motion pictures, were typical of urban amusements that developed in the 1880s and nineties to satisfy the public's growing demand for novelty entertainment.

in New York. Within a decade there were estimated to be over 30,000 bowlers in Chicago alone , a wave of interest no doubt increased by the first national bowling tournament held in the city in 1901. The idea of commercial amusements involving physical participation reached its most sophisticated form with the construction of special leisure parks. Such places as The Chutes and later Riverview and White City resembled the old picnic parks, but with machines to help provide the fun. The Chutes consisted of tall inclines down which water flowed carrying small boats filled with people. There was also a small zoo that allowed visitors to touch and ride camels and other exotic animals. The most elaborate places, however, were the giants of the North and South sides, Riverview and White City, both built between 1904 and 1905. The three parks were derivations of the Midway of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. This strip of rides and reproductions of foreign villages was laid out along the Midway Plaisance, part of the original 1869 park plan. Added as almost an afterthought to the fair, it proved to be an enormous attraction and a popular counterbalance to the more serious cultural pursuits in Jackson Park. The gigan-

tic Ferris Wheel was a theater of technology, one of the largest machines ever constructed. Each of the thirty-six cars held forty passengers for a ride lasting twenty minutes or two revolutions. At the top of the revolution, some 275 feet high, riders could see for miles around. Thousands of electric lights added to the visual drama. In the fifteen years following the exposition the mechanical amusement park reached maturity. The Chutes (1894) was followed by White City, also on the Sixty-third Street leg of the South Side Elevated. Built on land owned by J. Odgen Armour, it incorporated The Chutes and added a roller coaster and other rides thatjolted the senses. Meanwhile, Sharpshooters Park at Western and Belmont was being transformed into Riverview by William Schmidt and George Goldman. A small picnic ground survived, but in the shadow of a roller coaster, chutes, and dancing pavilions. In 1908 still another competitor opened when the owner of a picnic ground in Forest Park, west of the city, made arrangements with a trolley company to provide service to a new amusement park he was building. It had the usual roller coaster and chutes, and the added attraction of a Pneumatic Tube, a combined linear haunted

Crowds watch a Cubs game at West Side Park in 1908. Baseball parks, like theaters, were semi-public places-privately owned places that offered entertainment for a fee.

house and a "tunnel of love." Despite their mechanical and commercial nature, these amusements did involve participation on the part of the customer. Swimming pools, racquetball courts, and even the roller coaster were also indicative of a trend toward physical sports and exercise in Chicago that began to appear during the last decades of the century. As early as 1876 advocates of "pedestrianism" were competing in hundred-mile walking races. Chicago participants Sam Cooper and Henry Forre~t even hired trainers in their quest for prizes of $500 Âˇ or more. But nothing could compete with the bicycle. Daring young men tried it first and introduced it to the rest of the city through races. The "wheels" were not only difficult to ride but also expensive, as much as $175 in 1870, or more than most workers made in a year. By the 1880s wheeling had become a fad. Riders organized exclusive clubs-such as the Saddle and Cycle, the Washington Cycling, and the Lincoln Cycling clubs-many with posh quarters for winter meetings. These groups competed in highly publicized races wearing team colors. Some took place in semi-public spaces, such as six-day races at Grenier's Garden on the West Side. Park

lanes and city streets were soon filled with cyclists, especially when mass production and competition among manufacturers lowered prices. Theaters, saloons, and virtually all other forms of commercial amusement lost patronage to bicycles on pleasant Sunday afternoons during the 1880s. The bicycle fad had already begun to wane in the following decade, especially among the wealthy who objected to seeing working-class riders adopt the machine for commuting purposes. Instead, those with the time and the means turned to another outdoor amusement device, the automobile. Like the "wheel" that it displaced, the horseless carriage was first introduced to the general public through racing. In 1895, the Chicago Times-Herald sponsored America's first auto race between the old exposition grounds in Jackson Park and Evanston,* and soon a few daring owners were testing their "machines" in the larger parks. By the early 1900s, Chicagoans who might otherwise have joined cycling clubs were enjoying jaunts in their cars. The new recreation covered more territory more quickly and was a bit more isolated from the environment of the street. Also, like *See Chicago History, Fall and Winter 1982.

Whose City? cycling or swimming, the automobilist required a special wardrobe. And in some proper circles the slight smell of gasoline on the clothes was a status symbol. The rise of the automobile after the turn of the century by no means signalled the end to other amusements. Physical activities, such as archery andÂˇ hiking, were in vogue, while the auto was also of obvious use as a means of getting to other entertainments. Golf, for instance, had been introduced to the West in 1892, when a Lake Forest resident, John B. Farwell, had a small seven-hole course installed in his estate. There were twenty-six courses in the area by 1900. By the latter part of the nineteenth century, Chicago was beginning to pay the price for maturity. Factories filled rhe skies with smoke, and the noise of commerce roared in the streets. The public ways presented an image of bustling prosperity, as well as an air of maturity that the citizens of the young metropolis were so anxious to generate. As if to isolate themselves from the unpleasantness outside, Chicagoans eagerly flocked to an expanding array of semi-public places. If the streets seemed dangerous and populated by the homeless poor and the unassimilated immigrant, the admission fee of the ball park or the theater screened the crowd. The posh decor of department stores intimidated many of the poor, and when that did not work, loitering laws and the refusal of service kept access restricted. Black Chicagoans found that even an 1875 state statute requiring equal access to public accommodations was easily ignored in everyday practice. Thus, the semi-public space tended to develop in a very different direction from the evolving public city outdoors. The former was entrepreneurial in nature. People did not open their property to others to use without the prospect of profit. The element of competition often prompted the expenditure of large sums to outdo rivals. The aim was to be attractive, to cater to the tastes of the customers, and to make them comfortable. By contrast, the public city outdoors remained utilitarian, except for parks and a few boulevards. There would be no sustained effort to beautify most other public places until the famous

Burnham Plan of 1909. And instead of the positive attractiveness of the department store, depot, and theater, a series of prohibitive laws regulated behavior in public places and attempted to create a new sense of urban discipline. This is the first of two articles.

Suggestions for Further Reading of the information for this article was gleaned from hundreds of newspaper stories, still the best source on everyday life in the city, there are a few general sources the reader might peruse to obtain a background. After reviewing general histories of the city by Bessie L. Pierce and A. T. Andreas, examine the evolution of legal controls over public conduct and the changing governmental powers in Chicago, Ordinances, with various compilations, under slightly different titles, dated 1837, 1851, 1851-53, 1866, 1873, 1881, 1887, 1890, and 1894. Chicago, Department of Public Works, Fifteenth Annual Report, 1890, pp. 411-540 is a handy compilation of municipal activity to that date and is somewhat more useful than Chicago Public Works: A History (Chicago: Rand McNally & Company, 1973). On urban health problems in the 1837-1880 period, see Constance Bell Webb, A His_tory of Contagious Disease Care in Chicago Before the Great Fire (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1940) and G. Koehler, "Annals of Health and Sanitation in Chicago," Report and Handbook of the Department of Health, 1911-18, pp. 1467-83. Little has been done on markets, but see "Early Chicago Markets," Chicago City Manual, 1912, pp. 69-75. R. David Weber, "Rationalizers and Reformers: Chicago Local Transportation in the Nineteenth Century," (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1971), is still the best general work on transit, as is its police counterpart, George Ketcham, "Municipal Police Reform: A Comparative Study of Law Enforcement in Cincinnati, Chicago, New Orleans, New York, and St. Louis," (Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, The University of Missouri-Columbia, 1967). Annual reports of the police department are also essential. On recreation, the venerable Chicago Recreation Commission, Chicago Recreation Survey (5 vols., 1937) is still the best summary. The rise of baseball is most reliably traced in David Voight, American Baseball: From Gentleman's Sport to the Commissioner System ( orman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966). For dime museums and panoramas, see Perry R. Duis and Glen E. Holt, "Chicago As lt Was: Cheap Thrills and Dime Museums," Chicago Magazine 26(October 1977). Âˇ WHILE THE BULK

Prairie State Utopia: The Spirit Fruit Society of Chicago and Ingleside By H. Roger Grant

Deep religious conviction often prompts distinctive kinds of behavior. In the nineteenth century the varieties of Christian experience were many and led Americans along several different paths toward the Christian life. Radically different examples of the faith in action are the subject of the following two articles in this issue of Chicago History. For adherents of the tiny Spirit Fruit Society, Christianity led away from the city and engagement with their fellows to an isolated communal farm in northern Illinois. For members of the Chicago Tract Society, Christianity called for a sustained ministry to the city's immigrant population whom they hoped to make into productive citizens in a morally well-ordered city.

has called the nineteenth century "the golden age of community experiments" in America, a time when men and women of good faith withdrew from the larger society and launched their own particular forms of community. Most attempts occurred prior to the Civil War, when the nation's communitarians, such as the Shakers of the Northeast and Midwesi:, the Harmonists of Pennsylvania and Indiana, and ihe Perfectionists of New York flourished. Some groups followed their religious dictates and sought either to build heaven on earth or to prepare for the millenium; others built more secular communities based on various theories of industrial cooperation. Both sectarian and secular brands of American utopianism commonly shared similar sorts of organization ranging from outright collective ownership of property to more generalized cooperative arrangements emphasizing the sharing of economic, social, and intellectual life. In the leaders, a charismatic HISTORIAN MARK HOLLOWAY

H. Roger Grant is professor of history at the University of Akron. His /,atest book is Self-Help in the 1890s Depression (Iowa State University Press, 1983).

personality and a strong sense of organization increased the chances of success and a few created communities that long outlived them. In the nineteenth century, Illinois's fertile yet relatively inexpensive prairie land attracted its share of utopians seeking their own peculiar redemption apart from the rest of America. At Bishop Hill and Nauvoo, Swedish Pietists and Mormons prospered for a time, and at Icaria, a colony located in Nauvoo for several years after the Mormons left, members followed Etienne Cabet's detailed blueprint for building the ideal settlement. But utopian communities were not limited to rural places alone, though it is there that the most famous left their mark. Chicago has hosted several utopian experiments over the years, including the Spirit Fruit Society, which was founded in Lisbon, Ohio, and which later passed through Chicago before moving on to a rural setting in Ingleside, Illinois, its home for more than a decade. While the Spirit Fruit Society shared characteristics common to other contemporary

Jacob Beilhart with his nephew, Robert Knowdell, 1906.

sectarian ventures, its founder made it distinctive. Jacob Beilhart, the organization's creator, and his small band of loyal followers embraced a world view that lacked a rigid orthodoxy. Indeed, the Society's beliefs may have confused members themselves, and outsiders certainly found them vague or nearly formless. The best insights into this puzzling sect can be found by studying the writings and career of "Brother Jacob." Beilhart was born on March 4, 1867, on a modest farm in Columbiana County, Ohio. He grew up in a strong, though mixed religious environment; his father supported the tenets of German Lutheranism while his mother practiced Mennonite teachings. The former faith triumphed, for Jacob and his nine brothers and sisters were christened and confirmed as Lutherans. Typical of farm youth of the day, he received little formal education, and when he was nineteen years old, he left the family farm for a relative's nearby harness shop. He soon moved to Kansas with his employer. Shortly before his twentieth birthday,Jacob switched occupations, leaving harness mak-

ing for shepherding. The family for whom he worked enthusiastically supported the Seventh-day Adventist faith, and Jacob became interested in their doctrines: "They read the Bible to me and I could see that I had not read it right before; and on many doctrinal points, .. . I could see that they were right in their beliefs." He later wrote: "I accepted their doctrine in its entirety." Jacob decided to dedicate himself totally to the Adventist church, and he soon left his sheep to serve as one of its full-time representatives. Although he had not been ordained, he disseminated denominational literature throughout the central plains. Later he recalled, "I broke all the records of all the canvassers which they ever had selling the books-thirty orders in a day being the highest mark, which I took fifty." But he paid a personal price: not only was life on the road hectic, but his intense religious commitment came between him and the people he loved, even his mother, "for to all of them I was 'lost'." After a term at the Seventh-day Adventist college in Healdsburg, California, Beilhart returned to the field as canvasser,

Spirit Fruit Society first in Ohio and then in Kansas. He did so well that church officials soon granted him a preacher's license and sent him out with a tent. He was twenty-one years old. Even though Beilhart excelled in his ministerial duties, he soon lost interest in them. "Two years of preaching alternately with another man, meeting every evening, and then one season alone brot [sic] me to the time when the 'Brethren' decided they needed me in more difficult fields to teach their doctrines, so they decided that I should go south." He refused, sensing that he had a greater calling. "I must be able to be of help to the sick and thus get into homes and hearts deeper than mere talking would get me." Beilhart's determination to assist the physically ill led him to enroll in the nursing program at the Seventh-day Adventist Sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The 1300mile buggy ride that he made from Kansas seemed well worthwhile; he found his new home and life enormously satisfying. After completing the course of study which stressed natural health remedies, Beilhart remained at the institution as a staff nurse. He worked closely with the sanitarium's founder, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, one of America's foremost health propagandists and the originator of flaked cereals. While employed at the Battle Creek Sanitarium, Beilhart underwent a second religious conversion. Continued Bible study convinced him that the sick could be ma<le better, and often cured through prayer rather than diet. In an autobiographical sketch he related the event that wholly convinced him of the possibilities of faith-healing. One day I was called to see a sick girl who had heard me tell of my faith in healing by prayer. She had typhoid fever and was very sick. Doctors had but little hope for her. I went to see her, and she asked me to pray for her to be healed. This I did, annointing her after the instructions of James, 5: 14. She was healed immediately; the temperature going from 104Â˝ to about normal in a few minutes. She got up and dressed, drank some milk and retired for the night in about an hour. Uacob Beilhart: Life and Teachings, 1925]

Jacob's continued faith-healing activities and his rejection of the Adventists' strict vegetari30

an diet ("My stomach would not digest the grains and vegetables") prompted sanitarium officials to demand his resignation. Shortly before his departure, Beilhart nursed C. W. Post, operator of the La Vita Inn of Battle Creek, an institution devoted to healing by mental suggestion. Post, who would later become wealthy as the manufacturer of Postum and Grape Nuts cereals, introduced Jacob to the Christian Science faith. Like many religious utopians, Jacob Beilhart experimented with more than one or two faiths, and after a period of studying Christian Science, he turned to Divine Science, Spiritualism, and Theosophy. None of these doctrines held his interest, however, and he concluded that "All these theories are very nice, but it is hard work to run the universe when you know as little about it as any of these folks seem to know who claimed to be teachers." Thus he decided to found a religion based on his own beliefs. "I will submit myself to Life, or God, or whatever it is that creates and sustains things. I do not know who or what He is, or where He is, but He must be somewhere. I will take my highest sense of momentary duty and obey it." By the late 1890s Jacob Beilhart began to organize his religious thoughts into what he commonly called "Universal Life." In reality this nebulous theology more closely resembled Christian Science than any other established faith. Beilhart repeatedly contended that "Jealousy, doubt, and fear of losing love, are the causes of more disease than all healers can ever cure." Yet radically different from the Mary Baker Eddy world view that condoned wordly gain, he blasted materialism: "Oh! Do you know the joy of willingly giving up all that self holds dear?" Rejection of possessions, according to Beilhart's way of thinking, became a principal means of achieving the "fruit of the universal spirit," or simply, oneness with God. His writings also stressed that God is found through love. "The Spirit Fruit is no more than love, my God, ... and that is Universal Life." Jacob remained in Battle Creek while he formulated his religious perspectives. In 1893, he married "because of my religion, that I might better work for the Lord," and

Spirit Fruit Society

Colony women and visitors dressed in bloomers f or the day's work. From left, Evelyn Beilhart (seated); visitor Nora Leef e; Mary Beilhart; visitor Stella Farrar; Kate Waters; visitor Maude Jacobs, Emily Leanhardt; Belle Norris; Virginia Moore; and Robert Knowdell (seated).

within several years fathered two children, one of whom was mentally retarded. Jacob's odd jobs like harness-making supported the household, but he longed to devote all his energies to what he considered his life's purpose, the spreading of good will. "So why not go to the root of all things and remove the first cause of all discord?" he asked. "Redeem man and woman from selfishness and all the work that needs to be done in this world is finished." Not surprisingly, Jacob opted for a communal existence and a life of self-renunciation. Thus in 1899 he left Michigan for his native Ohio, selecting acreage immediately north of Lisbon, the Columbiana County seat. Here a stately and substantial twenty-two-room brick dwelling, complete with steam heat, acetylene lights, and four bathrooms, comfortably accommodated this infant utopia.

Initially, the Spirit Fruit Society consisted of Jacob, his wife Loruma, their children Harvey and Edith, and Jacob's younger sister Mary. Soon, however, their ranks grew, due mostly to Jacob's intermittent preaching and to the impact of two occasional periodicals, Spi,rit Fruit and Spi,rit's Voice, published by the Beilharts and distributed by them at public lectures or mailed to followers. Twelve more people joined between 1901, when the colony received a charter from state officials "to teach mankind how to apply the truth taught by Jesus Christ," and 1904, when the sect vacated Ohio for the Chicago area. The recruits included Virginia Moore from Lisbon; Ralph Galbreath from a nearby farm; Canadian-born Edward Knowdell, an itinerant plumber; David Standforth, a roving cook; Emily Leanhardt, owner of a needlework shop in Charleston, South Carolina; 31

Spirit Fruit Society Frederick Reed, a teacher at the Boston Latin School, and his blind wife Rachel; and Carol Noel, "a spinster," also of Boston. Four Chicagoans enlisted: Kate Waters, an 1897 graduate of the University of Chicago and a trained physician; Belle Norris, daughter of a Congregational minister, Katherine Herbeson, a "beautiful, well-educated, musical and independent" woman; and Eugene Clarke, a businessman. The Society also attracted scores of regular and casual visitors. The permanent members united with Jacob for various reasons. They liked him and his simple communitarianism based on mutual love and respect, but other factors also explain their action. A common theme seems to have been an individual's previous sense of personal loss, a disconnectedness with life. Kate Waters is an example. She had been engaged to a fellow physician who died suddenly from an "epidemic disease" contracted from a Chicago hospital patient. The shock was enormous, and Waters turned to narcotics and alcohol to relieve her grief. She became increasingly disenchanted with medicine, largely because of "the animosity of many of her male colleagues toward having a woman in the profession, and also because she found that the moral ethics of many of her fellow doctors were inexcusable and in direct conflict with the Hippocratic Oath, which she had taken so seriously." Fortunately, Waters ended her chemical dependence and accepted an appointment on the faculty of Campbell University in Holton, Kansas. While she was teaching there, a friend introduced her to Beilhart's writings, sparking her to visit the colony and, subsequently, to join the Society. Life at Lisbon was pleasant. These industrious folk easily kept body and soul together with income generated from the sale of their agricultural produce (mostly truck and dairy products) and to a much lesser degree from publications. Gifts from friends also helped considerably to sustain them, and a sense of warmth, trust, and even joy permeated the place. In particular, Jacob's daily talks and regular Sunday sessions, usually attended by visitors, satisfied nicely the colonists' desire for fellowship.

Although internal matters continued to be quite satisfactory for the membership, outsiders' disapproval of the Beilhart band eventually caused major disruption. Lisbonites praised the colonists for their constant toil, and they admired the Spirit Fruit home -"[It] has been elegantly remodeled and surrounded with verandas, and the yards and grounds are beautiful"-but they had heard rumors that the "inmates" had failed to uphold village virtues. They were horrified to learn that Mary Beilhart had given birth to two children out of wedlock: Evelyn Gladys, born on August 28, 1900, fathered by Ralph Galbreath, and Robert, born on May 13, 1904, fathered by Ed Knowdell. The latter event coincided with the appearance of several sensationalized stories on the sect. The Pittsburgh Gazette, Cleveland Press, and Chicago Herald-American, especially, argued that Beilhart taught "the doctrines of 'free love,' 'sex obliteration,' and the 'communistic ownership' of everything from chattels to human souls," and suggested that the colonists' unorthodox behavior threatened the very fabric of American life. The Lisbon newspaper, The Buckeye State, reprinted these pieces on its front pages and launched its own crusade to rid the community of this "public nuisance." Pressures on the colonists grew, and in November 1904, Jacob and his com patriots announced their decision to leave. Rather than seek another Ohio site, they moved to Chicago. The choice of the nation's second largest city made sense: for some time Jacob had maintained an office in Chicago's National Life Building, while a number of Chicagoans had joined or visited the Lisbon colony. Upon arriving in their new home, the Society's members moved into rooms at 81 Clark Street, but difficulties with the owner -probably over the group's reputation-led Jacob to find new meeting quarters over a vinegar factory at 381 West Lake Street. The group lived nearby. Although the proceeds from the sale of the Lisbon property and the generosity of supporters like Irwin E. Rockwell, head of Idaho Consolidated Mines, did much to maintain the band during this period, they obviously needed some other location, one that could create income and also

Spirit Fruit Society provide a pleasant, peaceful setting. Jacob found such a place forty-five miles northwest of Chicago-a ninety-acre parcel of land on Wooster Lake, near the town of Ingleside in Lake County. The site was close to the main line of the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, and thus offered easy access to the ci'ty, which was important both as a base of operations for Jacob and as a marketplace for the colony's expected truck and dairy products. Moreover, the colonists found their new neighbors friendly and helpful and less prone to the pettiness that characterized their Ohio neighbors. After securing a loan for the land, the Society set about building its new home, a huge cement and steel colony house called the "Spirit Temple." When completed in 1906, the edifice, which "could not be built on contract for less than $18,000," was spectacular: its two and one-half stories and full basement contained forty rooms with oak floors, plastered walls tinted with alabastrine, and pressed metal ceilings. Like their Ohio home, this one also had sophisticated steam heat, illumination, and plumbing systems. The group faced several disadvantages at the project's outset. With the exception of Ed Knowdell, the Society's members lacked architectural and building training, although Jacob had become familiar with similar types of structures during his years in Battle Creek. Also, the sect was few in number-seven men, seven women, and two children. Loruma and her children had left the Society (her marriage to Jacob had ended in divorce in 1904), as had Belle Norris and Kate Herbeson. The only permanent members were Virgini2 Moore's elderly mother, Linnie "Ma" Young, and stepfather, B . S. Young. Sheer determination made the Spirit Temple possible. As a reporter from the Cleve/,and Leader observed in mid-1905, "Both men and women are working on the building, the men in brown duck overalls and the women in bloomers. The women help screen the sand and carry water, and some of them are doing the full day's work of a stout, healthy man, beside doing a portion of the household work of the entire family." Their construction materials made the task even more difficult. The

colonists chose cement instead of wood, probably because of the availability of free, highquality gravel from a nearby pit. After hauling 500 loads of stone from the pit on sleds, they used hand-made molds to fashion long, heavy construction blocks, then transported the blocks in a primitive elevator system to the top of the building's exterior walls. Once completed, Jacob and his flock would enjoy a solid structure-"built for the ages"-that would be both fire and wind resistant. While the Spirit Temple was under construction, members fortunately had adequate shelter. The men slept in an existing granary while the women stayed in an old farmhouse on the property, where they all dined communally. When the colonists were not building their new home or doing their daily chores, they planted fruit trees, berry bushes, gardens, and field crops, and they began to raise pure-bred dairy stock, which led them to construct a barn. Yet the Ingleside utopia was more than merely a working farm; it was a loving, spiritual family, "where we have all things in common, and no one owns anything." Members endorsed Jacob's contention that for human beings to be free, to let the "Spirit Voice" within each emerge, they must reject the traditional world to allow their higher natures to find their true outlets. While the adult members may have grasped the meanings of Jacob's teachings, Evelyn Beilhart Hastings and her half brother Robert Knowdell, both children at the time, found them baffling. "I find Oacob's] writings repetitious, vague, and almost meaningless," Mrs. Hastings recalled in a recent interview. "We never were indoctrinated and we are certainly not exponents or examples of the Spirit Fruit principles. We don't reject them-really we don't know how to describe them." This vagueness produced various responses. Hundreds of visitors came to Ingleside once the home was completed, for Jacob hosted regular weekend seminars and lectures. Some were curious, wanting to know more about his teachings; others believed that the colonists embraced heterosexual free love. Still others thought that Jacob's messages advocated homoerotic practices, for at 33

Spirit Fruit Society

The Society's Spirit Temple, completed in 1906, was constructed by the sixteen- member community with hand-made concrete blocks.

various times the Spirit Fruit Society leader contended that he possessed a dual naturepart male and part female-and that both forces required expression. Indeed, his discussions of male and female energy contain an understanding and appreciation of the poetry of Walt Whitman and the writings of Edward Carpenter, a contemporary English socialist and well-known proponent of homosexual love. There is little to suggest that the Spirit Fruit Society practiced any form of free love. The Ingleside dwelling, which resembled the one at Lisbon, offered a floor plan that reflected pre-existing family relationships. While Mary Beilhart gave birth to two illegitimate children, members thought of her as a married woman. In later years her son wrote: "While no [marriage] fee was paid and no recorded license was legally obtained, Jacob while preaching for Seventh Day Adventists' Church was ordained a minister ... and thus 34

qualified to perform a marriage ceremony, and it is my understanding that he considered his sanction of that union [actually two] was am pie justification for our births." Moreover, in a day when birth control practices were rather ineffective, abstinence from sexual relations became necessary. There were no additional births among the members, and according to Robert Knowdell , "Kate Waters [the colony's physician and long-time member] told me that there was never an abortion while she was with the group." The question of homosexual activities in the colony is more difficult to answer. The words of Jacob's friend , philosopher and craft industry proponent Elbert Hubbard, explain why Jacob might have condoned such practices: "He only asks you to live your own life-express yourself according to the laws of your own nature." If the Society's leader had such proclivities, he was then bisexual, for he married and fathered offspring.

Spirit Fruit Society The gentle Jacob Beilhart assumed his role as colony head with understanding and tolerance-characteristics central to his religious views. Unlike some utopian leaders, he never acted arrogantly or dictatorially. Members could say or eat what they liked and use alcohol and. tobacco if they wished. The essence of Jacob's style was captured in his statement to a Waukegan Daily Sun reporter: "I give a yell and then if any of the boys feel like getting up to help it is all right, but if they don't, nothing is said." In 1908, Jacob's sudden death at the age of forty-one brought an end to this phase of the colony's existence. Stricken with appendicitis on November 19, he was taken to Waukegan the next day for medical attention. Although he underwent surgery, his appendix had ruptured, and he died early on the morning of November 24 after "intense suffering." The colonists claimed his body and, in keeping with their abhorrence of materialism and symbols of individualism, buried him in an unmarked grave near the house. As so often happened with uptopian communities, the tiny Spirit Fruit Society did not fade away with the loss of its leader, but it did begin to lose its vitality. The Chicago contacts ended; the public sessions at the house stopped; and the presses quit. "After Oacob's] death his work ceased," wrote an admirer in the mid-1920s. "There was no one to take his place and may not again for many centuries." Inertia partially explains the Society's persistence after Jacob's death. The "happy family" of earlier years survived for a time and was modestly prosperous. The colony's remaining members, however, testify that it was primarily Jacob's memory that sustained them. According to Robert Knowdell, it seemed that the survivors instinctively looked to Virginia [Moore] to assume the burden of titular head, along with her mother "Ma" [Young] because of her unique clairvoyant endowment. There is no question in my mind that they all believed that the spirit never dies, and Ma's daily writings, as she sat in a trance, with closed eyes, were accepted as their link between the present and the hereafter .... At any rate, this ritual continued daily (unless there was strange company present), as all sat in silence around the dining

table after the noon meal until Ma concluded the "Message of the Day," which would then be read aloud by Virginia.

The Society's members did stay together at Ingleside until January 1915, when they set out for Santa Cruz County, California, to launch the third and final Spirit Fruit colony, "Hilltop." The most likely reasons for the group's relocation were growing financial difficulties, the labor-intensive nature of maintaining the Illinois property, and the desire for a more temperate climate. Their departure marked the end of nearly fifteen years in the Chicago area, and although the Beilhart band had never attained large numbers and had failed to become a permanent settlement, these men and women of good intent showed that it was possible for a time to live an ideal life based on love and mutual respect without benefit of a closely defined theology.

Suggestions for Further Reading For a review of nineteenth-century American utopian experiments, see Arthur E. Bestor, Backwoods Utopias: The Sectarian and Owenite Phase of Communitarian Socialism in America, 1663-1829 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950); Robert S. Fogarty, Dictionary of American Communal and Utopian History (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1980); and Mark Holloway, Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680 -1880 (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1966). Readers seeking additional material on utopianism in Illinois, see Philip L. Cook, "Zion City, Illinois-The Kingdom of Heaven and Race" (Illinois Quarterly 38, Winter 1975); Paul Elmen, Wheat Flour Messiah: Eric Jansson of Bishop Hill (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976); Lawrence Foster, Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981); H. Roger Grant, ed., An /carian Communist in Nauvoo: Commentary by Emile Vallet (Springfield: Illinois State Historical Society, 1971); and James E. Landing, "Cyrus R. Teed, Koreshanity, and Cellular Cosmogony" (Communal Societies I, Autumn 1981). The privately published writings of Jacob Beilhart are available at the New York Public Library. The Ohio Historical Society holds Robert J. Knowdell's account of the Spirit Fruit Society. The author holds related correspondence from Knowdell and his half sister, Evelyn Beilhart Hastings of Lawrence, Kansas. Âˇ 35

Sowing the Seeds of Reform: The Chicago Tract Society, 1889-1910 By Thomas J. Dorst

1889, as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr were opening Hull House, ten men gathered in the Grand Pacific Hotel and founded the Chicago Tract Society to address many of the same problems of contemporary society. The meeting was prompted by concern for the welfare of the nation and the perceived threat to its social order posed by Chicago's growing immigrant population. In their approach to the immigrant problem, the Chicago Tract Society followed a tradition of religious reform that was already well established. Like earlier reformers, they emphasized the primacy of Protestant values to American society, but they departed from this tradition in their way of making their message known. The religious tract, a popular tool of Protestant evangelism in the nineteenth century, was adapted and modified by the Chicago Tract Society to reach different ethnic groups in their own languages. What made the Chicago Tract Society important among late nineteenth-century reform efforts was its practice, as historian Paul Boyer writes, of "transmitting a traditional moral message by untraditional means." The New York Religious Tract Society, founded in 1812, shared with other groups like the American Bible Society and the Sunday School Union a strong commitment to establishing a moral foundation for the growing nation. Denouncing vices such as gambling, prostitution, profanity, and Sabbath breaking, Protestants sought to reaffirm sobriety, restraint, hard work, and the doctrine of free will as guiding principles for Americans. In 1825, the New York society merged with the New England Tract Society to form the American Tract Society (ATS). The advantages of using tracts to conIN OCTOBER

Thomas J. Dorst is assistant university archivist at Northwestern University.

vey a religious message to a large audience were quickly recognized, and this literature became an early mainstay of Protestant evangelical efforts on the nation's expanding frontier and in her burgeoning cities. Tracts were cheaply printed, easily transported and distributed , and quickly read. The distribution of the literature produced by the ATS was undertaken by a group of local affiliate societies like the New York City Tract Society, founded in 1827, and a similar organization that began working in Chicago in 1838 when it was still a frontier town. Each affiliated society contributed financial support to the American Tract Society and looked to ATS district secretaries for some direction in their activities. The local affiliates, however, retained considerable autonomy in the selection of the groups they wished to serve. Affiliates in large urban areas frequently directed part of their efforts toward the poor, though not necessarily the immigrant poor. Tract organizations continued their work in major cities throughout the nineteenth century, but by the 1870s some Protestant leaders felt the need to focus more attention on the poor and to deal with the pressing problem of urban immigrants. After a successful tour of the British Isles in 1874-75, well-known evangelist Dwight L. Moody returned to America and with renewed vigor led a series of highly publicized revivals in Chicago, New York, and other major cities. In Chicago, George Clarke's Pacific Garden Mission, founded in 1877; the Chicago City Missionary Society, established in 1882; and the Armour Mission, which opened in 1886, were part of the nationwide city mission movement that worked directly with the immigrant population and attempted to convince them to accept the Protestant faith. Despite these vigorous and enthusiastic ef-

Infant Welfare Society nurse visiting immigrants, c. I 9 11 . Home visits were carried out by several reform groups, including the Chicago Tract Society, as an alternative to settlement houses.

forts the results were disappointing. Moody's city revivals largely attracted middle-class Protestants, not the immigrant poor whom he wished most to reach. And though the city mission's neighborhood location increased the reformer's opportunities to reach the poor, very few immigrants actually converted to Protestantism. Religious reform among immigrants in the late nineteenth century was largely unsuccessful because of a fundamental reordering of society that emerged as America became a modern, industrial nation. Both the working class and the middle class grew rapidly during this time and new social relations developed that often created tension and occasionally open conflict. The new task facing all reformers around the turn of the century was to incorporate different values and ideas from the various segments of

society into the creation of a new social order. In the late 1880s, Jane Addams, Ellen Starr, and Stanton Coit challenged the tradition of religious reform and established settlement houses for the poor in Chicago and New York. Settlement house advocates did not believe that religion was the primary factor in character development but instead followed more recent theories that emphasized the role of the environment in shaping behavior and morals. They usually took up residence in a poor neighborhood and established a home for immigrants both as a refuge from the problems of the city slums and as a model of a middle-class household. Addams's main goal was to restore communication between all members of society, and Hull House brought the poor and the middle class together to learn about each other. Jane 37

Chicago Tract Society Addams and Ellen Starr taught classes in English, literature, and art and responded to the immigrants' more pressing needs for improved living and working conditions. The Chicago Tract Society differed from settlement houses in its adherence to traditional Protestant beliefs and its faith in the power of religion to shape one's values and life. But it departed from earlier religious reformers' practice of using only one standard message and approach in their work with the poor. The Society shared with settlement house reformers an eagerness to know more about the immigrants in order to achieve the common goal of assimilating them into American society. By working with immigrants in their own languages, the Chicago Tract Society soon grew to understand the differences among the various ethnic groups and developed accordingly a variety of sophisticated, yet pragmatic, evangelical programs based on the particular characteristics and needs of each group. The founders of the Chicago Tract Society and those who became its members and supporters were predominantly Protestant middle-class Chicagoans with little political, economic, or social influence. Of the ten founding members, Frederick W. Cahlmann, J.P. Hale, John D. McCord, and George Whitefort were ordained ministers with churches on the West, Northwest, and Southwest sides of the city; John C. Everett practiced law; V.G. Tressler sold real estate; Karl Kraft was a shop clerk; J.F. Bartlett and W.S. ÂˇDavis's occupations are unknown. The tenth founder, Elwood M. Wherry, also a minister, was the district secretary of the American Tract Society. Between 1889 and 1910, about 250 men and women became members of the Chicago Tract Society each year. Most of the Society's members were clerks, tradesmen, and laborers who lived in neighborhoods with growing immigrant populations and who worshipped in Protestant churches with ministers who were active in religious tract work. Membership in the Society was granted to anyone donating ten dollars or more annually, and in the wake of the national depression of 1893, the membership donation was reduced to five 38

dollars. The average donation to the Society was less than twenty-five dollars and although prominent family names like Armour and McCormick appeared on the membership lists, they contributed only a few hundred dollars. Consequently, the Chicago Tract Society was never well endowed. Its average income was about $5,000 a year for the period 1889-1910. Unlike the settlement house movement, there were no women among the Chicago Tract Society founders , and few attained leadership roles in the organization. The leaders of the Chicago Tract Society were ministers, small businessmen, or professionals who were often involved in other reform movements, though not usually in leadership roles. The Reverend E.A. Adams, for example, served as an executive committee member and vice-president of the Society for more than two decades while his own church was overseen by the Chicago City Missionary Society. The president of the Society was essentially a figurehead position, and the three men who held the post between 1889 and 1910 were chosen primarily because they were prominent Chicagoans. Homer N . Hibbard, a state circuit court judge, served as first president from 1889 to 1897, and lawyer Joseph N. Barker held the position from 1897 to 1902. The Society's third president, Luther Laflin Mills, was its most famous leader. As Cook County state's attorney in 1886, he had helped conduct the prosecution's case in the Haymarket trial. The Haymarket Riot was viewed by many Americans as tangible evidence of the immigrant threat to social order. Mills, whose family was guarded by federal troops during the trial , and whose home was surrounded by sandbags for some time after the trial, surely must have felt an acute sense of alarm. Yet neither Mills nor the Chicago Tract Society ever resorted to nativistic denouncements of Chicago's foreign-speaking population, nor did they advocate any kind of immigration restrictions. Tract Society members, like settlement house advocates, accepted the city's immigrants and maintained that they were essential to furthering the progress of the nation.

Chicago Tract Society

Luther Laflin Mills, president of the Chicago Tract Society, 1902 - 1910. Society officers and members did n ot participate in fi eldwork, but instead employed paid colporteurs.

The executive committee and secretary of the Chicago Tract Society provided focus and direction to the organization's activities, but the tract work itself was not undertaken by Society members as it had been in many of the older, eastern societies. Instead, work among the immigrants in Chicago was carried out by a corps of paid visitors, known as missionary colporteurs, who conducted personal interviews in the immigrant's native language and distributed foreign-language religious tracts. Even more than the literature they distributed, the tract workers were the Society's best weapon in its campaign to convert and assimilate the immigrant. The overwhelming majority of the colporteurs were immigrants themselves, who with the zeal of recent converts determined to lead their fellow countrymen into full participation in American society. They helped explain in the immigrant's own language, the value of embracing Protestantism in a Protestant country. Beyond that, they themselves were examples of Protestant conversion as the route to assimilation. From 1889 to 1910, seventy-four men and four women worked for at least one year as

Chicago Tract Society colporteurs. Many of the m were poor, unskilled laborers or tradesmen who distributed tracts on a part-time basis. This work enabled them to demonstrate the conviction of their new faith and earn additional income as well. As the Society's efforts gained momentum after the turn of the century, full-time colporteurs became more common. The type of person called to be a tract worker also changed; by this time they were more likely to be small businessmen , clerks, and ordained immigrant ministers. A missionary usually gave up his job to do full-time tract work. At the end of a year or two he would have fulfilled his obligation made at the time of his conversion and would resume his former vocation. Many immigrant ministers did tract work prior to being called to a pulpit or embarking on foreign mission work. The Reverend Christo Papadopoulos, for instance, founded a Greek-language church after completing his service with the Chicago Tract Society. Unlike the field staffs of the Chicago YMCA and the Chicago City Missionary Society at the turn of the century, the colporteurs of the Chicago Tract Society represented a wide variety of nationalities: Constatine Antoszewski worked among the Poles, Anees Baroodt the Syrians, Gustav Blomgren the Finns, Louis Bucalette the Italians, Kevork Jorjorian the Armenians, Xenophon Lapsanis and Christo Papadopoulos the Greeks, Vaclav Shulders the Bohemians, and Vladimir Todoroff the Bulgarians. The major advantage of using immigrant agents to carry out tract work was the understanding of ethnic diversity gained by Society members. This knowledge allowed Tract Society leaders to direct programs where they would have the greatest impact, ensuring that the Society's limited resources would be most efficiently used. It also helped allay Society members' fears about a monolithic immigrant threat to America. Society members believed that urban immigrants who became Christians were potential assets to American society, and they foresaw great progress and prosperity in the nation's future if only the problems of urban life were not allowed to overwhelm what they saw as highly volatile immigrant populations. Tract Society Secre39

Chicago Tract Society tary Reverend Jesse Brooks succinctly expressed the Society's convictions in 1909, writing: This [Society] is the instrumentality and method through which these multitudes may be reached and won to the Savior, and thus be made upright and worthy of citizenship in a free country; and the work of the Society among these people is something that is worthwhile-something that is telling mightily for the future of Christ's kingdom in America. [Chicago Tract Society, Annual Report, 1909]

They realized too that the great diversity among urban immigrants meant there was no single, simple way to foster assimilation. This challenge was far more complex than earlier Protestant reformers had thought; what worked for one ethnic group might not work for any others. Much of the Society's work was devoted to searching for the most appropriate means to assimilate each ethnic group. The combination of traditional Protestant morality and a willingness to create tailormade programs for each ethnic group was the foundation for what may be called the Chicago Tract Society solution. The Chicago Tract Society's solution to the immigrant problem included five interrelated parts: a belief in Protestant Christianity; the use of moral suasion alone to convert immigrants to Protestantism; interdenominational cooperation to carry out tract work; bringing the Gospel message to the immigrants in their native languages; and visiting the immigrants in their own communities and adapting Society programs to match the special needs of each ethnic group. Their approach did not directly address the political or economic needs of the immigrants, as Jane Addams did, but Tract Society members believed that it provided the essential elements needed for the immigrants to participate fully and usefully in American society. This was a fundamental approach to the assimilation of the immigrants and therefore, they reasoned, made more likely the melioration of poverty, exploitation, and ignorance. The most important element of their solution was a belief in Protestant Christianity. Common to tract work generally, the Society followed a literal interpretation of the Bible 40

and was committed to spreading the Gospel message through evangelism. By 1889, much of the religious fervor of earlier Protestant reform efforts had diminished, yet Tract Society members still felt that the millenium would not come without such efforts as theirs. Religious conversion was the primary task of the Chicago Tract Society, but for them, conversion was not meant to be the emotional public display of faith commonly associated with revivalists like Dwight L. Moody or Billy Sunday. Under the guidance of a missionary colporteur, immigrant conversion to Protestantism came as the result of intense personal reflection and prayer and heed to the Society's call to break the "Priestly tyranny" over the right to the exercise of free will. The foundation of the Tract Society followers' religious convictions was the belief that man came to God only through the exercise of free will. This was the basis of their view that no secular solutions forced upon the immigrants would guarantee their good citizenship; only the personal acceptance of God's saving grace provided the necessary foundation for the development of a stable society. They believed that only when the newcomers surrendered themselves to the truth and salvation of the Protestant message would they establish their right to full access to the opportunities of American society. This reliance on the exercise of free will reinforced the Society's conviction that the roots of the solution to modern urban problems lay in the charge to all Protestants to "love thy neighbor" and to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." If these tenets were accepted by all classes of people in a nation unified in its religious beliefs, it followed that the nation could not help but prosper. Thus religious conversion at once would make possible the solution to the immigrant problem and further America along the path of Christian progress. The second part of the Chicago Tract Society solution grew naturally from the members' Protestant point of view. Advocates of tract work showed an unshakable faith in individualism and the power of moral suasion to accomplish their goals. The most significant difference between the Tract Society

Chicago Tract Society reformers and their Progressive counterparts was the Society's sole reliance on moral suasion to convert the immigrant. The Progressives argued that the causes of urban strife were environmental and would be solved only by changing the institutions and the interrelationships between the social classes in the city. The tract workers however clung to the doctrine that each individual was responsible for his own situation in life. They never doubted the power of religion to shape men's values and the character of their lives, and thus they strongly believed that the program of the Chicago Tract Society would ensure a stable society as surely as would settlement houses, good government movements, or progressive legislation. "Surely this work will yield a hundred fold return," wrote a Society leader in 1907, "and the men of foreign speech that are now a heavy burden will become an army of useful men." The Tract Society's solution to the immigrant problem was founded on Protestant Christianity and its doctrine of free will, but nearly as crucial to the Society's efficacy as a reform group was the interdenominational character of its tract work. The Society did not favor one particular view of Protestantism over others but instead chose to emphasize "the great truths wherein Christians are agreed and ... refrained from emphasizing those minor matters wherein [they] sometimes differed." On several occasions during the Society's first two decades, a group strayed onto the path of denominationalism and received sharp admonitions from Society officers. In 1892, members of the Woodlawn Methodist Episcopal Church placed an invitation to attend their church and statements about the advantages of Methodism in the tracts provided by the Tract Society. The executive committee immediately directed the secretary "to convey to Mr. Sherman the suggestion that if an invitation to attend the Woodlawn ME church were furnished in the tracts, it should contain words amounting to these: 'if not attending other Evangelical churches, you are invited.'" Denominationalism became a greater problem in the first decade of the twentieth century and mention in Society reports of efforts to combat the

problem increased markedly after 1907. The majority of the membership, however, adhered to an interdenominational approach to immigrant reform throughout the period. As part of this approach, the Society followed a policy of taking only temporary housing within immigrant neighborhoods. The Chicago Tract Society built no buildings, established no churches (with the lone exception of a Greek congregation in 1910), and provided no social services to the immigrants. Its leaders did not believe that interdenominational cooperation would survive the creation of Tract Society-sponsored churches in Chicago neighborhoods, and the Society simply did not have the financial resources to compete with recreational facilities, the Chicago City Missionary Society's churches, or settlement houses like Hull House. The directors of the Society were convinced that immigrants responded more favorably to the personal visit of the colporteur than to an imposing edifice. Jesse Brooks, speaking for the Society, asserted that: Little account is made of pulpits or conventional forms, but each man goes out to preach the Gospel in the half minute testimony to the family or individual, perhaps more effectively and certainly much more frequently than in the half hour sermon to the larger congregation. [Chicago Tract Society, Annual Report, 1907]

The Chicago Tract Society was itself an institution with the missionary colporteurs an everpresent manifestation in the neighborhoods, but when compared with the scope of activities of other organizations at work in the same period, the Tract Society appeared to be singularly unstructured and personal in its approach. The use of foreign languages by Society missionaries during their visits to immigrants represented a novel, farsighted method among reformers at the turn of the century. The colporteurs, in addition to speaking the various immigrant tongues, aiso translated the tracts into many languages. After 1900, this practice created conflict between the Chicago Tract Society and the American Tract Society. Along with disputes over finances and disagreements about the work of colporteurs, this practice was a contributing 41

Chicago Tract Society factor in the decision of the Society officers in 1909 to sever their formal ties with the parent body and to continue work in Chicago alone. Unlike other reformers who argued that good citizens spoke English and advocated English-language classes for the immigrants, the tract workers believed that the true American citizen was one who understood and practiced Protestant Christianity. The language in which the immigrants received the Gospel message and practiced its doctrines was unimportant to Society members who saw no compelling need to strip immigrants of their entire cultural heritage in order for them to become good citizens. The Society was in fact eager to learn as much as possible about the different cultural heritages and social customs of immigrant groups. Colporteurs provided the leadership with information that was used by the Tract Society to develop programs tailor-made to each group's special needs and characteristics. The typical tract worker's message, used for all immigrant groups, outlined the steps in an individual's transformation from alien to American through Protestant conversion. Who received these tracts and by what method was something that varied substantially with each nationality. Because Poles immigrated in family groups to America, the Society geared its Polish program to include the entire household. Colporteurs made individual, house-to-house visits and tried to involve family members in prayer, Bible reading, and discussion of tract messages. During these visits the colporteurs stressed the damage done to family life if the father frequented houses of prostitution, gambling dens, or saloons, or if the parents refused to accept the Americanizing influence of Protestant Christianity. Home visits and stress on family virtues in the work among the Poles contrasted with the Society's approach toward the Bulgarians. The Bulgarian population consisted almost exclusively of young, single men working to earn passage to the United States for their families overseas or to save enough money to start families in this country. House-to-house visits were impractical because the majority of the Bulgarians lived in boardinghouses and 42

spent very little time at home. To attract the Bulgarians the Society employed a colporteur to set up a mission, yet it did not furnish food, lodging, or material aid commonly provided by other religious missions. The Chicago Tract Society mission was established because in this case it was the only way that a colporteur could carry out his face-to-face efforts to convince young Bulgarian immigrants that they could succeed in America if they embraced the Gospel message. Among the Syrians, Anees Baroody, and then his brother Eliya, gave up personal visits in favor of spreading their Gospel message to gatherings of their countrymen . They also spent considerable time corresponding in Arabic with Syrians interested in Protestantism. This was not a common method of reaching the immigrant population among other colporteurs because of the high rate of illiteracy in most ethnic groups. Among the Greeks yet another approach prevailed . Beginning in 1906, large audiences forced the Society to convene open-air meetings to preach the Gospel in Greek. Before long there was enough interest to begin a mission modeled after the Bulgarian approach. This grew into weekly Bible classes and a mid-week service, and in 1910, a Greek Protestant congregation emerged from the Society's efforts with their colporteur, Reverend Christo Papadopoulos, as its minister. The founding of the Greek Protestant church was unique. In the Society's first twenty years no other group sought to establish a congregation under Society auspices and the interdenominational character of the Society clearly dampened such efforts. The Society demonstrated flexibility in this instance, however, since no Protestant church in the city was prepared to welcome the Greeks and minister to them in their native language. The entire thrust of the Society's efforts was aimed at converting Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and even atheists to Protestantism. Yet the colporteurs, and to a lesser extent the members of the Society, hardly ever became aware of their successes. The stress on personal conversion and the noninstitutional nature of the method meant that the individual immigrant often came to Christ out of the

Chicago Tract Society sight of the Chicago Tract Society. A colporteur reported: We have no means of knowing the number of hopeful conversions that have resulted from the work ... during that year. Our work is essentially that of seed s9wing rather than harvesting. [Chicago Tract Society, Annual Report, 1906)

There was however one important benefit for Society members who worked to solve the immigrant problem. Because "seed sowing" rather than confirmed conversions was the measure of success, members drew strength from the substantial effort devoted to helping the poor. They believed that they were providing an effective Americanizing influence, and this helped diminish their own fears about immigrants. In all reform movements the beneficial results of reform work on the reformers themselves is crucial to the effectiveness of that movement, and the members, leaders, and colporteurs of the Chicago Tract Society were surely more confident and secure about the nation's future as a result of their participation in tract work among the immigrants. Understanding the story of the first two decades of the Chicago Tract Society focuses attention on one crucial question: how could the Society be so similar to Progressive reform and yet be so very different at the same time? Compared to the better-known efforts of Progressive reformers in Chicago, the Society's "seed sowing" could be taken as an inadequate response to Chicago's immigrant population. But the goals and attitudes of each approach were strikingly similar. The Progressives became the champions of a collective, secular approach to reform that contrasted to the Tract Society's personalized religious work, yet both attempted to create a foundation that would enable the immigrants to become stable, productive, citizens ready to take advantage of the opportunities America offered. Whether the foreign-speaking were helped toward becoming Americans through English classes, day care, health and hygienic instruction, or religious conversion, the Chicago Tract Society shared with many reform groups a common sense of enlightened self-interest and a moral obligation to

see the immigrants assimilated into American society. The Chicago Tract Society did not share in the acclaim the settlement house movement received, nor did any of its leaders develop a loyal following as did Jane Addams. By its nature the Society's reform work was quiet and subtle and to many it may have seemed old-fashioned in its approach. But if the Society's major work among the poor is largely forgotten today, it is not because their efforts were any less vigorous than other reformers'.

Suggestions for Further Reading The Annual Report of the Chicago Tract Society is the most complete source of the year-to-year activities of the Society. For further information on church attitudes and activities in the Chicago area at the turn of the century, the reader may wish to consult the Northwestern Christian Advocate newspaper at the Library of the Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. Readers interested in additional material on religious reform in the city, see Theodore Abel, Protestant Home Missions to Catholic Immigrants (New York: Institute of Social and Religious Research, 1933); Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in America, 1820-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978); Robert D. Cross, The Church and the City (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., I 967); Roy Lubove, The Professional Altruist: The Emergence of Social Work as a Career, 1880-1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965); and Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, I 971 ). For a review of Progressive reform, see Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1964), and Twenty Years at Hull House (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1910); Emmett Dedmon, Great Enterprises: 100 Years of the Metropolitan YMCA of Chicago (New York: Rand McNally & Co., 1963); Richard Hofstader, The Progressive Movement (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963); Richard Jensen, The Winning of the Midwest: Social and Political Conflict, 1888-1896 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971); and Pau l W. McBride, Culture Clash: Immigrants and Reformers, 1880-1920 (San Francisco: R & E Research Associates, 1975). A particularly helpful discussion of the transformation of American society during the period of rapid industralization is Robert W. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New Yo"rk: Hill and Wang, 1967). 43

Claude A. Barnett and the Associated Negro Press By Linda J. Evans

AP, UPI, and Reuters-the names of the great news services-are household words to millions of newspaper readers across America and around the world. ANP-Associated Negro Press-is less famous, but in its heyday in the 1930s and 1940s it reached into the homes of thousands of black Americans. With an effective mixture of reforming zeal and business acumen, Claude Barnett, its founder, built ANP into a major news-gathering network that helped to heighten black self-esteem long before the civil rights revolution of the 1960s. For years, the ANP's home was a small office on Chicago's South Side. THE ASSOCIATED NEGRO PRESS (ANP) was the oldest and largest black press service in the United States. Founded in Chicago in 1919 by Claude A. Barnett, a young, black entrepreneur who remained its director for the next four and a half decades, the Associated Negro Press supplied news stories on affairs concerning black citizens, opinion columns, feature essays, poetry, book and record reviews, cartoons, and occasionally photographs to black newspapers throughout the country. The ANP's service enabled its members, which included nearly all of the major black newspapers in the United States as well as many of the smaller ones, to offer their readers detailed coverage of activities within black communities across the country and the latest news about national trends and events. In the 1960s the World News Service division of the ANP served more than one hundred African newspapers as well. Yet the significance of the ANP was not widely recognized in its own time, and it usually receives only passing reference today in the growing number of scholarly studies of

Linda J. Evans is associate curator of the Society's Manuscripts Collection.

the black press. This neglect arises, in part, from the nature of the organization itself. The Associated Negro Press was a nationwide channel for news about black Americans, but it rarely drew attention to its own operations. Each of the member newspapers of the ANP was free to shorten, rewrite, or ignore the many news items that it received from the press service every week. ANP articles did not necessarily appear in identical form from city to city, and newspapers often failed to include a credit line when they printed stories or columns provided by the ANP. Many readers did not know that some of the articles in their local newspapers were provided by the Associated Negro Press. Although he was not a well-known public figure, Claude Barnett was one of the outstanding journalists of mid-twentieth century America. As founder and director of the Associated Negro Press, he provided a unique service for the black community through forty-five years of enormous social change. He established the ANP with almost no capital investment and maintained it for years on little more than personal promotion and will power. It was never a commercial success, but it served other purposes. The

ANP helped create a national black culture and increased black awareness of trends and events in the nation at large. It provided a national forum for black leaders, set professional standards of news writing for the black press, helped to stabilize many small black newspapers , and enabled many black journalists to gain reporting experience at the beginning of their careers. The ANP was successful in another way as well: it placed Claude Barnett at the center of a national information network, introduced him to black leaders throughout the country, and thus made him a valuable ally to those who sought to shape modern black life. Claude Barnett was born in Florida in 1889 to William Barnett, a hotel worker who divided his time between Florida and Chicago, and Celena Anderson Barnett, who supported herself and Claude by working as a housekeeper in the homes of wealthy Chicagoans. While growing up, Claude attended elementary schools in Chicago and in Mattoon, Illinois, where he lived for varying periods with his mother's family. Thus he derived his sense of close family ties from his mother's relatives. Between 1902 and 1904, Claude attended Oak Park High School while he worked as a houseboy in the home of Richard W. Sears, co-founder of Sears, Roebuck & Company. Mr. Sears favored the youth with extra privileges, such as tickets to plays and concerts, and later arranged a job for Barnett with his company. But Celena wanted her son to continue his education, and in September 1904 she sent him to Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. At Tuskegee, Barnett finished the advanced course in only two years, but one can scarcely overestimate the influence of Tuskegee on the rest of his life. During his time there, he came to share his mother's admiration for Tuskegee's founder and president, Booker T. Washington, and the principles he taught: self-help, moderation, respectability, vocational training, and black capitalism. Barnett also gained a heightened awareness of the rural agricultural heritage of many of his classmates and the majority of the southern

As a student at Alabama's Tuslugee Institute, Claude Barnett came to admire Boom T. Washington and his teachings.

Associated Negro Press black population. Coming from an urban background, Barnett otherwise might never have learned to understand the rural poverty and humble aspirations which prevailed among many black people who looked to Tuskegee for leadership. In time Barnett began to identify with the goal that united all of Washington's disciples-the building of a firm economic foundation for black equality in the United States. Other Tuskegeeans who shared this approach to racial progress -classmates, staff, and alumni-formed a network of associates that Barnett would find congenial and helpful throughout his career. After graduation, Barnett returned to Chicago and took a job with the post office, where his duties included sorting the many publications sent regularly through the mail. Later he would write that the time he perused the newspapers and magazines was well spent, for he developed an eye for good writing and advertising that proved invaluable in his journalism career. When a bout of ill health forced him to leave the post office in 1916, Barnett tried his hand at several ventures. He set up his own advertising agency; dabbled in sales of photographs of famous black men and beautiful black women; and helped organize the Kashmir Chemical Company, manufacturer of Nile Queen cosmetics. While most of his partners' investments were financial, Barnett's contribution was his advertising acumen gained from his years with the postal service. In 1918, his talents were again useful when he attempted to pay for a visit to California, where his mother was living with her second husband, by selling advertising on commission for the Chicago Defender at train stops along the way. On that trip, he sought out black editors throughout the Midwest and West and discussed their needs. When he returned to Chicago, he opened the Associated Negro Press. The ANP symbol, an owl holding a scroll bearing the words "Progress, Loyalty, Truth," aptly summarized the path that Barnett marked out for his organization. The creation of a news service like the ANP was almost inevitable. Since the turn of the twentieth century, the black migration from the rural South to New York, Chicago, and

other ot1es had generated new concentrations of black population and new financial and cultural resources. Before and during World War I, the Chicago Defender heavily promoted the opportunities in Chicago for well-paying jobs and social dignity. Wherever the Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other major black newspapers circulated in rural areas and across the South, black people read about different patterns of race relations, an emerging black urban culture, and accomplishments by black men and women. Chicago's black population had grown by more than 250 per cent, from 30,150 in 1900 to 109,458 in 1920, making it one of the nation's major centers of black culture. A new middle class made up of black business and professional people responded to this expanding population, eager to provide the services demanded by the largely segregated black community. A similar process throughout the country was producing new or greatly enlarged institutions controlled by black leaders and serving a black constituency: businesses; schools; hospitals; professional, fraternal, and political organizations; churches; and newspapers. Some of the most successful new enterprises, especially the life insurance and cosmetics companies, greatly boosted the advertising income of the black press. By the end of World War I, black newspapers were firmly established in many centers of black population. Some of these were among the most influential publications of the next fifty years. Besides the Defender and the Courier, they included the Norfolk journal and Guide, the New York Age, the Amsterdam News (New York City), the Afro American (Baltimore and other cities), the Philadelphia Tribune, the Houston Informer, and the Black Dispatch (Oklahoma City). In addition, many small black communities throughout the country supported local black newspapers with more limited circulations. As their readers grew more prosperous, better educated, and more cosmopolitan, these newspapers both reflected and helped to shape a new social milieu. Because most of the black newspapers published once a week, the ANP was a mail service rather than a wire service. The ANP's

Associated N egro Press

Shipping room, Kashmir Chemical Co. , Chicago. Early in his career, Barnett was a partner in the Kashmir Chemical Company. His main contribution to the partnership was the development of advertising for Nile Queen cosmetics, the company's major product line.

Chicago office sent news releases to ANP member newspapers two, and in later years, three times a week in order to meet their weekly deadlines. In return, the members agreed to pay a modest fee for the service, to print an ANP credit line with each news item from the releases that they published, and to act as a local correspondent for the Chicago office of the Associated Negro Press. At their offices on Chicago's South Side, Barnett's small staff of experienced journalists sifted information from these reciprocal reports and from the daily newspapers, black newspapers, government news releases, public relations announcements from foundations and organizations, and reports from ANP correspondents throughout the country. For background information they referred to the ANP's morgue containing topical files of clippings from old newspapers and from past ANP releases. From these sources

they compiled the ANP's news releases, which varied in format from fifteen to forty or more legal-size mimeographed sheets of typewritten articles. ANP members received much more material than any single newspaper was likely to publish. These news releases included two somewhat different types of news. First the ANP tried to cover events, trends, and personalities within the black community that would interest a national audience. This material included news about black churches (particularly the National Baptist Conventions and the African Methodist Episcopal Church), colleges, fraternal organizations, politicians, social leaders, athletes, criminals, inventors, entertainers, business men and women, and union organizers. Claude Barnett was always partial to success stories-the first, best, newest, oldest, the "most" of any respectable achievement-and these were 'held up as

Associated Negro Press examples for racial pride and emulation. The other kind of news that the ANP supplied to its membership was similar to the news articles found in the daily press, except that the ANP always focused on the aspects of the important news of the day which affected black people. In later years, when the daily newspapers were reporting on New Deal relief and recovery programs, the Associated Negro Press carried stories on the number of blacks employed in the programs and the kinds of jobs they were allotted. While the dailies reported a massive flood relief effort in the South, the ANP surveyed the distribution of aid to black families . When Congress passed new legislation, the black press wanted to know what black politicians thought about it, whether black civil servants would be involved in administering it, and if it would affect blacks substantially. Claude Barnett wrote a number of the stories contained in the ANP news releases using his many contacts to verify details or check on interpretations of reports received by the editorial office. But much of his time was spent in routine administration, arranging for local correspondents to cover conventions and other news events around the country, cajoling publishers to pay overdue service fees, soothing irate editors, recruiting new reporters and columnists, and persuading new publications to join the Associated Negro Press. In addition, he traveled extensively and served on numerous political, philanthropic, social, and educational committees. Barnett relied heavily, therefore, on the ANP's editors and on Irene Roland, who was his secretary for nearly thirty years, to run the office during his absences.* In the beginning, the press service met with a wide range of reactions, as quoted in the ANP Annual of 1920, the first and only annu*In the I 920s, ANP editor Percival L. Prattis carried much of the day-to-day burden of running the ANP. Prattis was responsible also for promoting The National News Gravure, a weekly rotogravure supplement for black newspapers. Other ANP editors over the years included Frank Marshall Davis, a respected poet a,1d jazz expert; Albert G. Barnett, son of Chicago's first black editor, Ferdinand Barnett of the Conservator, and Ida B. Wells Barnett (but no relation to Claude); and in the 1950s and 1960s, Eddie L. Madison, J.H. Randall, Enoc Waters, and Lee Blackwell.

al report published by the ANP. A number of white as well as black leaders praised the service's constructive attitude, patriotism , and usefulness. Prominent among ANP supporters were Secretary of War Newton D. Baker, the editors of several major newspapers, and Robert R. Moton, who had succeeded Booker T. Washington as president of Tuskegee Institute. William Pickens wrote a terse statement on the significance of the black press :

The truth neve r will be told about a disadvantaged minority by the general press of an y country , whether that minority be racial , political or religious-Negroes in Georgia , Socialists in New York or Jews in Russia. If such a minority does not express itself thru organs of its own, it will not be expressed . The Associated Negro Press, therefore, belongs, in interest, to every colored person of the country. It is our only hope of shoveling ourselves out from

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under the avalanche of lies that are annually let loose upon us. Every Negro who is financially able and refuses to take at least one of his local Negro papers and one of the big national Negro periodicals is a slacker in the ranks.

The Annual also carried U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer's caveat denouncing "agitators of the Radical Socialist Revolutionary conspiracy [who] have devoted time, money, and thought toward stirring up the spirit of sedition among the Negroes in America." The little pamphlet was really a public relations piece rather than an analysis of the ANP's financial structure. All of the report's testimonials were carefully phrased not only to impress black editors-who presumably could judge the quality of ANP service for themselves-but also to reassure white leaders as well as blacks that a national channel of

communication devoted to the interests of blacks did not pose a threat to national wellbeing. Barnett launched his press in 1919, in the midst of a period of labor and racial unrest and the Red Scare following World War I. In that year, 76 black men were lynched across the nation, and there were some 20 race riots, the largest of which occurred in Chicago, where an estimated 38 persons died and more than 500 were injured. By the end of its first year, the ANP claimed eighty-eight member newspapers, including some of the larger ones. Other members were little more than newsletters, and a few were nearly identical newspapers issued by a single publisher for distribution in several different towns under local titles. By 1944, Barnett estimated that ANP member newspapers had a combined circulation of more than 800,000 with about 2,400,000 readers a week -the readership being considerably larger than the number of newspapers sold because the major, big-city newspapers often circulated informally from hand to hand, like popular magazines, in small towns. Even with a growing membership, the success of the ANP was not assured. Barnett usually had difficulty collecting his service fees, and as late as 1927, he claimed that the ANP produced so little revenue that every worker in the Chicago office held an extra job in order to earn a living. He managed to institute a graduated fee structure by which the newspapers with larger circulations paid higher rates for service, but the larger, wellmanaged newspapers would not support ANP expansion. They were nearly always unwilling to contribute extra funds for coverage of special events. For them, the ANP was only a convenient adjunct to their regular news sources. Indeed, several newspapers maintained their own national network similar to the ANP's system of stringers and voluntary local correspondents. One of Barnett's special concerns was the ANP's relationship with the Chicago Defender. The ANP drew some of its editors from the staff of the Defender, and this is one explanation for the friction between the two organizations. It was logical for him to seek new employees from the pool of talent provided 49

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by the great national black newspaper with offices just down the street. Whether or not he lured them with the promise of higher salaries is unclear. Certainly a significant attraction of the ANP editorship was the vision of what the service might become if it could afford to offer its members extensive coverage similar to that of AP or UPI. Despite sincere and strenuous efforts by many men and women in the black press, black newspapers never achieved the kind of harmonious arrangements enjoyed by AP or UPI. Paradoxically, the better the ANP became, the greater the challenge it posed to the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the handful of other newspapers that circulated nationally among blacks; maintained their own networks of correspondents throughout the country; and in effect competed with the small, local newspapers that depended heavily upon the ANP for their national news reports. This conflict of interests surfaced frequently in the relations of the ANP and the Chicago Defender. In the 1920s, 50

the Def ender cancelled all ties to the Associated Negro Press and refused to renew them, a situation analogous to a major daily paper such as the New York Times refusing to cooperate with a wire service like UPI. In the midl 930s, Barnett was one of a group of investors who hoped to buy the Chicago Defender until the publisher arranged to continue his family's control of the newspaper. In the early 1940s, Barnett attempted to arrange a merger of the ANP and the Negro Newspaper Publishers Association in order to expand the news service. Negotiations broke down when it appeared to Barnett that some of the larger newspapers hoped to absorb the ANP, alter the rate structure to favor themselves, and generally revamp operating procedures so as to make the press service commercially viable at the expense of the small newspapers that Barnett had carried for many years. The NNPA then set up its own news service in competition with the ANP. It lasted only a few years. Later, some of the larger publishers organized a different

Associated Negro Press NNPA-the National Newspaper Publishers Association-and established another press service, which closed in 1960. During all of this jostling for position, the ANP lost few members to the rival organizations. Some newspapers belonged to both, with the ANP retaining the larger membership. In addition to the ANP's Chicago staff, Barnett employed a Washington, D.C., correspondent on a regular salary, plus correspondents in Hollywood, New York, and other cities who were paid space-rates according to the number of inches of publishable material they submitted. There were also voluntary correspondents scattered throughout the country who contributed occasional stories on local events in exchange for the privilege of carrying an ANP card and the gratification of seeing their writing in print. In 1939, when Alvin E. White became the ANP's first full-time Washington, D.C., representative, Barnett began applying for Congressional press gallery credentials for the ANP but was denied. During World War II, Ernest Johnson represented the ANP in Washington, also without full credentials. It was not until 194 7, after Alice Dunnigan had taken over the ANP position, that black press representatives were regularly accredited to the White House and the Congressional press galleries. Louis R. Lautier, the Washington representative of the NNPA, was the first black press representative admitted to the Congressional press galleries; Alice Dunnigan of the ANP was the first accredited at the White House. The ANP also distributed by-lined opinion columns with the kind of personal commentary on current events that it tried to avoid in its regular news stories. Many authors of these columns received no pay for their contributions; yet the ANP attracted a variety of distinguished writers who sought a national forum for their ideas. One of the most provocative was William L. Pickens, field secretary of the NAACP, whose articulate, seemingly uninhibited, and often witty commentary on American race relations made his articles a popular ANP feature. Gordon B. Hancock, a Baptist minister and leader in founding the Southern Regional Council,

Associated Negro Press,. Serving Newspapers in the U. S. and Africa

REPORTERS PASS The Associated Negro Press appreciates any courtesies extended holder of this card in the performance of his duties as a Reporter, but emphasizes that this does not authorize holder to obligate the Associated Negro Press in any way.

Director

Associated Negro Press reporter's pass. Volunteer correspondents throughout the nation contributed local news stories in exchange for the privilege of carrying an ANP reporter's card.

Opposite: This idealiud vision of the Negro press as a beacon of black achievement appeared in the ANP's first and only annual report published in 1920.

wrote an ANP column entitled "Between the Lines" for twenty-five years. Other columnists included President Frederick D. Patterson of Tuskegee Institute, founder of the United Negro College Fund; noted sociologist and president of Fisk University, Charles S. Johnson; and in later years, Barnett's old colleague, P.L. Prattis of the Pittsburgh Courier. Although Barnett managed to draw upon many talented journalists and black leaders for contributions, the wide variety of articles provided by the ANP was not enough to keep all of its members satisfied. The black press was traditionally an advocacy press whose purpose was to speak for as well as to the black community. It was often strident and contentious, and there was little agreement among the various newspaper publishers on editorial policy. Naturally they were concerned with thorough and accurate reporting. But they also sought to promote the welfare of the black community as they perceived it-and sometimes to advance their own personal influence or political ambitions as well. Many publishers saw their newspapers as vehicles for advancing their own power and prestige as well as the more general aspirations of the black community. The editors of the ANP themselves, however, could not afford the luxury of using the news service for personal aggrandizement. 51

Associated Negro Press To keep the ANP's diverse membership satisfied, ANP news coverage had to conform to objective, middle-of-the-road standards (although its signed opinion columns frequently offered more controversial fare). The ANP release of November 14, 1932, boasted: The staff of the Associated Negro Press takes pardonable pride in calling the attention of the membership papers whom we serve to the type of service rendered during the past political campaign. We endeavored and we think succeeded in presenting the news views and opinions of all parties, groups, and factions so that editors might choose and pick that which suited the editorial policies of their papers . ... On our staff is a Republican, a socialist, a Democrat, and a communist, but so far as the service was concerned no partisanship obtruded.

This exuberant editorial note probably revealed more about the personal opinions of the ANP staff than Barnett considered appropriate. Later editorial comments merely asserted that the ANP was nonpartisan. Even after taking such conciliatory measures as these, all of Barnett's skills of personal diplomacy were required to hold his organization together. The member newspapers were quick to suspect bias. They accused Barnett of favoring large newspapers over small ones in membership privileges, or of distributing news stories that favored Republicans over Democrats; northern interests over southern; sophisticated urban attitudes over small-town and rural concerns; sensational crime over respectable achievements; civil rights demonstrations over coverage of the regular social, fraternal, church, and college activities in the black community-and vice versa. The essence of Barnett's achievement lay in his ability to balance the rival interests that challenged the ANP. Barnett never forgot that the AN P needed the support of many of the smaller black newspapers as well as the larger ones in order to survive. Unfortunately, many small newspapers operated on a very slim margin of profit and were beset by the difficulties that commonly plagued small busines3es-undercapitalization, low credit ratings, and a lack of basic training in bookkeeping. In some cases, a small part-time staff with little journalism experience put together each issue of the 52

newspaper from whatever sources were available in their town, and they depended on the ANP for their national news coverage. Barnett was generally reluctant to cut off membership for nonpayment of service fees, and carried many members on credit for months. The ANP survived its early years because Claude Barnett added a key innovation: he linked the press service to an advertising exchange. While most newspapers did not have ready cash, nearly all had "white space," unused advertising space in their publications which they readily allocated to Barnett in return for ANP service. Barnett then sold this space to advertisers through other companies that he owned-the Associated Publishers' Representative and later, the National Feature Service. Barnett looked to the black community and its new black companies for advertising business. At first he arranged an advertising exchange with his own firm, the Kashmir Chemical Company. But when Kashmir failed after a dispute with the manufacturer of Cashmere Bouquet toiletries over their similar brand names, Poro College beauty products, one of the first million-dollar black cosmetics companies, replaced it as Barnett's first major advertising client. His advertising service attracted more clients, including several other black cosmetics companies. Through this exchange system, advertisers reached local markets wherever the black population was large enough to support its own newspapers. The newspapers enjoyed the benefits of ANP service in return for publishing the advertisements, and the ANP secured a steady income from the advertisers -who could pay-rather than from the newspapers-who often could not. Barnett worked assiduously to expand the amount of advertising carried by the black press and to promote black business in general. Because black magazines and newspapers attracted far less advertising revenue than "white" or general audience publications, black publishers were more dependent on income from subscriptions and newsstand sales. To improve the quantity and quality of its services to the black community, the black

C.A.BA~NJ;TT ADVhRTISING 3423 Indiana Avenue Phone Douglai5 3741 REP~EsENTINc.

CHICAGO

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Letterhead f or Claude Barnett's advertising service. By accepting newspaper space as payment f or use of his news service and then selling it to advertisers, Barnett was able to promote both black journalism and black capitalism.

press needed a stronger financial base. In 1925, Claude Barnett persuaded Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, whom he knew through work with the Republican party, to create a position in his -department for a black adviser to small business. Barnett's hand-picked candidate got the job. Barnett also participated actively in the National Negro Business League which was headed by his old friend Albon Holsey of Tuskegee Institute. They saw the 1930 federal census as a chance to document the considerable economic gains made by black citizens over the previous decades and thus to gather official evidence that a substantial egro market existed in the United States. Because census takers usually missed a significant portion of the black population, Barnett coordinated an informal effort by black advisers in predominantly black areas across the country to make the census as complete as possible. He hoped that better statistics would persuade major national advertisers that they could reach a worthwhile audience of potential consumers by placing their ads in the black press. Unfortunately, the Depression deepened and cut short this expansion program, and soon Barnett relinquished his own advertising companies. Poro College beauty products went bankrupt. A lawsuit against Barnett by the W.B. Ziff Company of Chicago, which was then the main clearinghouse for advertising in black newspapers, was settled out of court in 1934. Barnett's advertising exchange was dead . In later years the A P continued to receive a little income from public relations programs, but Barnett carefully protected the reputation of his news service by insisting that products or services that advertisers

asked him to mention in ANP releases have some sort of news value. Despite the fact that his own direct financial stake in promoting advertising had declined, Barnett continued to believe that increasing this source of income was essential for the black press in general. In the early 1950s, Barnett finally achieved some success with a new version of his ~fforts to interest national advertisers in the Negro market. He persuaded Liggett and Myers to finance a series of short films on Negro achievements in education, science, entertainment, and other noteworthy activities. The films also contained ads of prominent black Americans, including Claude Barnett, praising Chesterfield cigarettes (much to the amusement of Barnett's friends who knew that he preferred cigars). As his advertising income dwindled in the 1930s, Barnett reorganized his news service to become eligible fo; new forms of financial aid. By registering the ANP as a not-forprofit agency and clarifying its tax status with the IRS, Barnett qualified to receive donations and grants from various organizations and individuals who were usually designated "associate members" of the ANP. In return, these supporters received ANP news releases (although not as frequently as the newspapers because there was no need to meet a publishing deadline) and, occasionally, Barnett's advice on their public relations programs as well. The associate members included Tuskegee Institute, North Carolina College at Durham, and other schools, philanthropists, several churches, and fraternal groups. Often the administrators of these organizations were Barnett's frie.nds, persons 53

Associated Negro Press

In the early 1950s, Barnett was able to interest national advertisers in the Negro market. H e persuaded one finn, Liggett and Myers, to finance a series of slwrt films on Negro achievements in edv.cation, science, and entertainment.

whom he had met in the course of many years of political and philanthropic activities. This arrangement created potential conflict of interest problems for the ANP. It could not afford to appear biased. Above all other considerations, the Associated Negro Press had to assure its member newspapers that ANP news releases were reliable. As the ANP's reputation grew, Barnett broadened the scope of his own activities. The ANP's first editor, Nahum D. Brascher, had introduced Barnett in 1920 to the world of black Republican politics. Since the era of the Civil War, the Republican party had been more open to black participation than the Democratic party, accrediting black delegates 54

to its national conventions and later appointing blacks as national committeemen and committeewomen. At the 1920 Republican National Convention, held in Chicago, Brascher and Barnett campaigned so effectively for candidate Leonard Wood that even though he did not receive the nomination, they attracted favorable notice from party leaders. Barnett's Republican party activities culminated in 1928 when he served as secretary of the national publicity committee of the Colored Voters Division of the Republican National Committee during Herbert Hoover's presidential campaign. In 1932, Claude Barnett was elected a trustee of Tuskegee Institute. He and Richard H. Harris of Mont-

Associated Negro Press gomery, who was chosen the same day, shared the honor of being the first graduates of Tuskegee to sit on its board of trustees, on which Barnett would serve for the next thirty-three years. In the 1930s, Barnett's other activities continued to expand. He served as president of the board of trustees of Chicago's Provident Hospital, became a director of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance Company, and devoted considerable time to inspection tours of the South as an unpaid adviser to the Agricultural Adjustment Administration on the impact of government programs on black farmers. He also persuaded the Conference of Presidents of Negro Land Grant Colleges to sponsor a comparative study of the amounts of government money distributed to black and white colleges. The report, compiled in 1936 by Horace Mann Bond, documented inequities more clearly than ever before. In 1934, Claude Barnett married Etta Moten, a well-known concert singer and actress. Her career immediately became another factor in his many travels and promotions. Prominent black men and women whom Barnett met through the ANP, Tuskegee Institute, the National Negro Business League, and other organizations often sponsored her annual concert tours. Although her career soon outgrew his ability to manage it on a part-time basis, he continued to offer suggestions to her professional theatrical agents. For several months in the early 1940s, the Barnetts lived in New York while Mrs. Barnett sang the lead in Porgy and Bess on Broadway. During World War II, Barnett expanded ANP news coverage, emphasizing black participation in the war effort. The ANP, like most of the black press, publicized cases of racial discrimination in the armed forces in hopes of pressuring the government to modify its policies. Barnett defended only two segregated facilities: the black veterans hospital and the air corps training base located at Tuskegee, Alabama. The pilot training program at Tuskegee was segregated, he acknowledged, but even a segregated opportunity seemed better than none at all. Claude Barnett also worked on local national Red

Cross committees and later served on the Red Cross's national board of governors. The subject that claimed much of his attention during the war years was federal agricultural policy. Tuskegee Institute and several other black universities in the South trained and sponsored local agricultural extension agents. In 1942, the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture appointed Claude Barnett and President F.D. Patterson of Tuskegee Institute to serve as his special assistants. Barnett and Patterson used their inside knowledge to improve black access to USDA jobs; to educational, health, and insurance programs for farmers; and to federal aid for agricultural colleges. Renewed by succeeding secretaries, their appointments finally expired in 1952 with the outgoing Democratic administration. Also during the war years, Barnett became a trustee of the Phelps-Stokes Fund. This foundation sponsors programs for better race relations in the United States and helps support the Booker T. Washington Institute in Liberia. In 194 7 Claude Barnett made his first trip to Africa, primarily to inspect the Liberian school (which was set up originally with assistance from Tuskegee Institute advisers), and he and his wife traveled extensively on the African continent. Their enthusiasm for African art and culture-as well as for business opportunities in Africa's developing nations-was overwhelming. Barnett reported to the Phelps-Stokes Fund on his impressions of the Africans he had met: "They look like us-they act like us-they are us." The Barnetts began to collect and exhibit African art-eventually donating much of it to Tuskegee Institute. Mrs. Barnett added African songs and costumes to her concert repertoire, and the Barnetts gave many speeches about Africa before American civic, religious, and fraternal groups. Over the next seventeen years Barnett traveled to Africa fifteen times and gathered a wide range of friends and acquaintances among African political leaders, educators, clergymen, editors, and businessmen, and American diplomats and businessmen stationed abroad. The Associated Negro Press began to carry more news stories on African affairs-so many, in fact, that a few of the 55

Associated Negro Press ANP member newspapers complained that they could not possibly devote so much of their space to foreign events. In 1959-60, Claude Barnett organized some of his many African contacts into a World News Service (WNS). This service, operating out of the Associated Negro Press offices in Chicago, provided African newspapers with news releases in English or French. It lasted three and a half years. By the early 1960s, the Associated Negro Press faced growing pressure as the entire structure of the national news media changed. During the years of the civil rights movement, television news as well as newspapers began to offer more extensive coverage of events involving black Americans. Some of the more prosperous black newspapers joined the wire services and thus had immediate access to the latest news. In 1956, the Chicago Defender began to publish a daily edition, and the Afro American published twice weekly. Other black newspapers that were unable to compete with the dailies in national news coverage tried to retain their audience by emphasizing purely local news that was not available anywhere else, even in the ANP news releases. The ANP's bi-weekly news releases were still useful, of course. They not only covered the national news-including the civil rights movement in considerable detail-but they also provided copy that was edited to focus on black interests, and it was ready to print. Barnett estimated that ANP releases could save a member newspaper the equivalent of one employee's time in rewriting news stories from other sources. Yet, one by one, the ANP's members were falling away or failing to pay their fees. Although Barnett's editors attempted to revitalize the organization, it became ever clearer that, ultimately, the fate of the Associated Negro Press depended on the man who had bargained, arranged, cajoled, and maneuvered to maintain it for nearly half a century. In 1963, Ebony magazine ranked Barnett among the one hundred most influential black Americans, yet at seventy-four years of age, Claude Barnett suffered increasingly from ill health and could no longer personal56

ly call on the vast range of contacts that had enabled him to sustain the ANP for so many years. His wife and friends urged him to lighten his work load and enjoy the rich memories of his exceptional career. Thus, when Claude Barnett reluctantly retired in July 1964, the Associated Negro Press closed its doors. He began writing an autobiography and traveled again to Africa, but his health problems continued, and he suffered partial paralysis from a stroke that kept him home in Chicago. He died on August 2, 1967. Although Claude Barnett's continual involvement in promotions of one sort or another-publishing, advertising, and politics-might seem to imply something of a free-wheeling character, his contemporaries described him very differently. To them he appeared to be a quiet, dignified man who was basically conservative in his beliefs and actions. Much of his success came from his ability to balance innovative ideas with tactful but persistent advocacy. He used publicity to spotlight cases of racial discrimination whenever he thought public attention could improve the situation, but fundamentally, Claude Barnett was a pragmatist who inclined toward quiet diplomacy rather than public confrontation.

Suggestions for Further Reading The Claude A. Barnett Papers at the Chicago Historical Society contain 320 boxes of correspondence, news clippings, and other papers for the years 1918-67, and 107 boxes of Associated Negro Press news releases from 1928-64. Readers interested in additional material on the Associated Negro Press see Lawrence D. Hogan, A Black National News Service: Claude Barnett and the Associated Negro Press, 1919-1945 (C.-anbury, .J.:

Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, forthcoming); Richard L. Beard and Cyril E. Zoerner III, "Associated Negro Press: Its Founding, Ascendancy, and Demise" Uournalism Quarterly 46, Spring 1969); and Roland E. Wolseley, The Black Press, U.S.A. (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1971 ). For background on the social milieu of the Associated Negro Press see Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920

(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967); and St. Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City

(New York: Harper and Row, 1962, revised and enlarged edition).

Reviews Chicago history is only a part of the larger field of urban history, which over the last twenty-five years has seen publication of a vast array of books and articles. Understanding the history of any one city is enhanced by our knowledge of the histories of others and of the field generally. Therefore we offer you in this issue reviews of three books-a college textbook covering the broad scope of urban history in America; a study of the influence of eastern businessmen and investors in the Old Northwest including Chicago; and a book on the historical background of one of the city's most persistent problems, pollution-which we hope will help you view Chicago's history as part of the processes, problems, and possibilities that have shaped the urban past.

Urban America: From Downtown to No Town by David R. Goldfield and Blaine A. Brownell Boston: Houghton-Mifflin Company, 1979. $14.50 paper.

the field of urban history has been fertile ground for the textbook writer. As urban studies became the vogue on college campuses over the last fifteen years, publishers rushed to fill the need for undergraduate course materials. The appearance of these historical surveys reflects the coming of age of a new field where enough ground has been broken to produce broad, synthetic treatments of the subject. Yet each of these primers still retains unique, individualistic qualities because the story behind the growth of American cities remains for the most part untapped. The homogenization characteristic of the textbook has not yet flattened the rich contours of urban history to fit into a standardized mold. Goldfield and Brownell claim to have written "the first comprehensive, imerdisciplinary history of urban America," and they achieve their goal to a remarkable extent. IN RECENT YEARS,

Drawing on the work of geographers and economists, the authors organize the subject around four successive urban forms: the cluster, marketplace, radial center, and vital fringe. Each of these spatial arrangements between and within cities corresponds to distinctive periods of city building from the colonial era, early nineteenth century to 1870, industrial age to 1920, and more recent times. The major topics are broken down into separate chapters on economics, society, and politics. Although the first half of the book draws heavily on the social sciences, the generous insertion of literary references in the second half restores a sense of human drama to the process of urbanization. Overall, the authors' conceptual focus on the city as container succeeds in giving a balanced treatment to the four periods as well as to the various geographical regions of the country. In comparison, other textbooks generally provide adequate treatment of neither the colonial origins of preindustrial cities nor the later growth of urban centers in the South and the West. This book's unique conceptual framework clarifies how modern cities have evolved, as 57

Reviews Goldfield and Brownell put it, "from downtown to no town. " The authors emphasize the role of transportation technology in reshaping colonial town "clusters" into highly specialized districts that were dominated by commercial activities at the center. They also show how steamboats and railroads gave rise to a hierarchical pattern of urban growth across the continent from the Atlantic seaports to the West. In the twentieth century, the trolley and the automobile sharply accelerated the centrifugal movement of people and industry into the suburbs. The city as container broke down, spilling its contents over a sprawling area that still has not reached any clearly defined limits. According to Goldfield and Brownell, Americans are paying a mounting price for running headlong in pursuit of a suburban ideal, "searching for a lost Eden through a windshield." After 1945, the loss of a dynamic equilibrium between core and periphery has brought decay and abandonment in the wake of the suburban migration. This spreading blight, the authors conclude, is already evident in many inner suburbs that are suffering from the same ills afflicting the city: crime, drugs , faltering public services, and strapped school budgets. The fragmented structure of metropolitan government makes a concerted attack on these common urban problems .mlikely in the foreseeable future. Instead, public policy and business strategy both seem to point toward a continuation of the decentralization of urban areas and Âˇof the inter-regional shift from the Northeast to the Sunbelt. As textbooks go, this is a good one. Goldfield and Brownell effectively express their committment to the city by forcing us to confront today's cities. They do not shy away from exposing the illusion that escape to the suburban fringe or beyond to exurbia will somehow solve all the failures of a complex urban society. They are also careful not to blame technology for our current problems. On the contrary, they show how modern inventions have been merely the means of achieving the goals consciously promoted by civic and business leaders. Goldfield and Brownell use history to help make intelligent 1

choices for the future . Urban America is an excellent introduction to the history of the city. HAROLD L. PLATT LOYOLA UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The Investment Frontier: New York Businessmen and the Economic Development of the Old Northwest by John Denis Haeger Alba n y: State University o f New York Press, 198 1.

$39.00 cloth, $ I 2.95 pape r.

FEW CHARACTERS in American history have enjoyed a more checkered reputation than the land speculator. Prominent on all American frontiers from colonial times forward , speculators were attacked by historians earlier in this century for slowing development, profiting enormously at the expense of settlers, and destroying the Jeffersonian vision of a nation of small farmers . More recently, they have been praised by a school of revisionist historians as efficient promoters of settlement who made only moderate profits and provided crucial capital for western growth. The problem is that "speculation" was imbedded in the larger process whereby the West was integrated into eastern markets, so that it cannot be assessed in isolation from that context. John Denis Haeger makes this clear in The Investment Frontier. Haeger focuses on Arthur Bronson and Charles Butler, two of the most prominent eastern speculators of the 1830s who began their western investments with a journey to the Old Northwest in 1833. They eventually found themselves in Chicago, a town of a few hundred inhabitants, which Butler nevertheless described as "the nucleus of a great city." Over the next several years, each established investment operations in Chicago and elsewhere that were typical of other speculators and other cities. They thus became what Haeger calls "pioneers of capital." Bronson and Butler conducted their western land business through agents. In Chicago, these included such prominent citizens as Walter Newberry, who worked for Bronson, and William B. Ogden, who moved to Chica-

Reviews go at Butler's behest. The investor provided all capital while the agent, who knew the land, managed all transactions. In this way, westerners with little money gained access to venture capital for major promotions. Such promotions included not only investments in property, -but also in services designed to increase property values: canals, railroads, hotels, and banks. Because of this integrated investment process, Haeger argues that the activities of capitalists like Bronson and Butler necessarily aided western growth. The virtues of the book are several. It provides a close-up view of how individual eastern investors operated in the West, and shows how much speculators differed in their strategies. Bronson was a cautious investor who held land for short periods and sold out riskier purchases before the Panic of 1837 seriously threatened him. Butler, on the other hand, was a promoter caught up in his own booster fantasies of rapid growth, for whom the Panic came as a disastrous blow. Haeger reminds us that these differences between speculators derived not only from their economic circumstances-Bronson had a great family fortune while Butler, along with most western investors, relied on connections with men like Bronson to create his wealth-but also from their philosophies. Bronson's conservatism was consistent with his banking policy, just as Butler's risk-taking followed directly from too deep a faith in rapid growth. Haeger's awareness of these philosophical issues unfortunately creates one of the book's structural problems. Although he creates parallel chapters to shuttle between the western activities of his two protagonists, he is less successful at connecting these to Bronson's trust companies and banking reform efforts. The Investment Frontier thus sometimes feels like three books straining to be one. A related difficulty flows from Haeger's judgment that speculation was largely benign. He has a biographer's empathy for his subjects, and, having accepted the revisionist view, he gives much more attention to Bronson and Butler than he does to those who attacked them. He rightly points out that many who criticized eastern speculators were

agents, themselves wealthy western businessmen trying to escape their debts. But the discussion centers solely on elites: wealthy capitalists and wealthy agents. Both were speculators, and their relation to the settlement community is left obscure. The book is in no sense a history of how westerners at all levels interacted with eastern capital, so that its title in some ways is misleading. To understand fully "the investment frontier" will require that we analyze the positive and negative aspects of speculation in terms of the community it helped create. To say this is not to detract from Haeger's book. Narrative problems aside, it is an exemplary monograph, scrupulously researched and unashamedly institutional in its approach. As such, it is part of a salutary reaction to an overly econometric "new economic history." In seeing the eastern investor as a central actor in western development, Haeger helps us understand how cities like Detroit, Toledo, and Chicago came to be agents for that development. WILLIAM

CRONON

YALE UNIVERSITY

Pollution and Reform in American Cities,

1870-1930 edited by Martin V. Melosi

Austin: University of Texas Press, 1980. $17.50.

Pollution and Reform probes a critical, if unattractive, side of American urbanization. Editor Martin V. Melosi's able introduction previews the contents of seven essays and provides the broad outline of the root causes of and responses to urban pollution from the Civil War to the present. The first five essays cut across a wide spectrum of environmental concerns: water supply, water quality control, air pollution, solid waste disposal, and urban noise. Two concluding articles examine the group response to environmental problems by municipal engineers and women. Collectively, these essays reinforce the view that late nineteenth-century urban life in America was fraught with severe health hazards for all and was aesthetically unpleasant 59

Reviews for most. The reader is led through refuse and garbage-strewn streets in New York, hideously unsanitary meat and produce markets in Boston, and the frightening babel of Chicago's Loop. The smoke problem in Cleveland was so severe that autopsies revealed that anyone who had resided in the "Forest City" for a period as brief as a month had black lungs. Each of the essays suggests that nearly everyone exposed to the late nineteenth-century city for any length of time suffered varying degrees of psychological trauma. Several unifying themes connect these essays. Environmental reformers took a generally conservative approach to pollution; they did not fundamentally challenge the rapidgrowth mentality of urban boosters, and they agreed that some pollution was inevitable. A positive outgrowth of their conservatism was that their campaigns appealed across class and interest lines. On the other hand, the effects of reforms were often marginal. The essays also probe the relative influence of reformers versus technology in solving urban pollution. They conclude that most problems were approached effectively only when a combination of economic incentives for pollutors and technological breakthrough made improvements possible. For example, significant strides in smoke-abatement occurred only when cheap electricity and natural gas replaced bituminous coal as the primary industrial energy source in the early twentieth century. Stanley K. Schultz and Clay McShane argue, however, that bureaucratization of urban government and the emergence of professional engineering provided the framework to harness the creative energies of reform-minded individuals. Several other interesting ideas are examined in Pollution and Reform. Urban dwellers' concern over environmental issues was, as a general rule, inversely proportional to their physical distance from problems. Once an offensive situation was removed from the immediate presence of urban dwellers, their concern waned. For example, they clamored for sewer lines to remove wastes from water closets, but they tolerated contamination of distant streams and lakes for decades. Signifi60

cantly, the lower class was active in campaigns to improve urban conditions, since it was most directly exposed to the worst environmental pollutants. An important idea probed in several essays was the crucial role played by women in combatting pollution. They sharply challenged the image of upper-class "Lady Bountiful" reformers. In fact, women provided much of the backbone of the movement. Individuals such as Ellen Swallow Richards, who conducted important research in sanitation engineering, and Caroline Bartlett Crane, a tireless promoter of effective municipal organization for the advancement of public health, were tough, pragmatic reformers. Clubwomen from the middle and upper classes worked with groups of men and women from less fortunate classes who complained of problems they could not escape. Many such clubs earned respect, even affection , from less privileged groups , after a number of upper-class women gathered data to support specific demands; monitoring smoke pouring from industrial plants and documenting careless and neglected street cleaning and garbage collection are just two exam pies. It is difficult to find fault with Pollution and Reform. Editor Melosi has collected the initial efforts of several promising scholars who will undoubtedly produce more complete studies in the future . This book stands both as a state of the craft work and as an introduction to a number of stimulating ideas that clearly merit further research. One might wish for more, since the essays raise additional questions about connections between pollution and reform. For example, what impact did visual pollution, or the generally depressing overall physical appearance of the late nineteenthcentury city, exert upon environmental reform efforts? What short and long-term effects did reform pressures exert in advancing research on possible technological responses? Pollution and Reform succeeds because it sparks additional inquiry. It is a brief, concise book that will make an excellent text for urban studies courses. MARK

FOSTER

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT DENVER

The Society A Word from the Editor is the voice of the printed page. It comes in many shapes, or "faces," whose use is governed by aesthetics, technology, custom, and whim. Typographers, designers, and readers judge its effectiveness by widely varying standards and tastes. Some feel that the type and the printed page it composes should be so well matched to the meaning of the text as to be figuratively invisible. Others, more radical, find in type an independent language capable of conveying its own special experience quite apart from the meaning of words. In between fall any number of philosophies of how type best can be used. Type in Chicago History, as you might suspect, is intended to be, if not quite "invisible," then unobtrusive and subservient to the words. The magazine is currently set in Baskerville, a typeface designed in the mideighteenth century by an English printer named John Baskerville. Baskerville's design was enduring, and his renown as one of the world's master type designers was unequalled. In its various forms, Baskerville type remains one of the most popular of all typefaces. Thus the type on a page of Chicago History today looks much as it did a decade ago and indeed like type in use more than 200 years ago. But the type you are now reading differs importantly (though I hope invisibly) from its predecessors. While the aesthetics of its designs and letterforms undoubtedly would have been familiar in another age, the technology that produced the type-a digitalized photocomposer-is new and used in Chicago History for the first time in this issue. For computer afficionados, this particular type is generated from computer data on an eighty megabyte storage disc capable of holding hundreds of different typefaces in many sizes. Corrections are accomplished through on-line video terminals that display the type

TYPE, IT IS SAID,

on a TV screen (or in computer jargon, a "CRT," for cathode ray tube). In a few months when the Society's new word processors are installed, copy for Chicago History will actually cease to be copy in the traditional sense of typed manuscripts marked with typesetters' specifications. Instead we shall give the typesetter only a magnetic tape onto which we shall have keyboarded edited manuscripts and which will be compatible with his photocomposer. It will all be very modern. But the old way of setting type, gone with our last issue, deserves some memorial. In 1886 Ottmar Mergenthaler unveiled the first Linotype machine, a later version of which was used up to now to set the type for Chicago History. The Linotype is a wonderful mass of moving metal parts weighing approximately three thousand pounds. It enables a single operator typing at a keyboard to produce a whole line of type cast as a single metal slug. The machine automatically assembles the matrices (or molds), fills them with molten metal (usually a combination of lead, tin, and antimony), and within seconds deposits the finished slug at the bottom of the machine. Individual lines are then manually assembled in a frame in an oblong metal tray or "galley" to form a page of type. This then is used to produce paper proof copies, or "galley proofs." Even though the smallest error means re-setting an entire line, the Linotype's speed and the fact that it can be operated by one man quickly established its superiority for newspaper and magazine work. Although the Linotype itself is not quite 100 years old and is now thoroughly outdated, the fundamental principles behind it reach back at least half a millenium. Wood block printing reaches much further back than that, probably to eighth or ninthcentury China or Korea, but the true beginning of typesetting as we for years have known it came in the West and was tied 61

Left: Monotype-single letters instead of full lines of typewas the predecessor of Linotype and is still used for display purposes. fl was stored in a sectioned wooden tray and assembled into words by hand. Below: Operator at Linotype typesetting rnachine. Note, on the lower left, the metal ingots which were melted as needed and, at the touch of the key, changed into lines of metal type.

The Society

M etal galley for the title page of Chicago History, Fall and Winter 1982, the last to be set in hot type. The masthead characters were cast separately; the Contents were cast by the line on a Linotype machine. The metal is a lead alloy. The lines of type read in reverse and are held together in a metal frame tied with string. The galley, which is the size of a page in Chicago History, weighs 18Â˝ pounds.

closely to the state of metal technology. Though probably invented in Holland, moveable type cast in metal was perfected about 1440 by a German goldsmith,Johannes Gutenberg, who was the first to devise a method for accurately casting large quantities of type. His great Bible, which consisted of 1296 pages, is the oldest surviving book printed in the western world. Moveable and thus reusable type revolutionized the way words could be used, quickly rendering obsolete old methods of hand-copying and establishing one of the conditions of a more literate world. Still, the production and use of moveable type remained for centuries a laborious manual process. In order to cast type, it was first necessary to cut by hand a steel punch for every character (letters, numerals, punctuation marks, and special signs) . This punch

was used to produce in softer metal a mold (often copper) , which then received molten lead and formed the type. It all required a great deal of highly skilled labor, something tha t drastically limited the number of typefaces that could be produced. Little funda mental changed until the late nineteenth century when two American machines finally mechanized this old process. In 1884 Linn Boyd Benton invented the punchcutting machine, which meant that the steel punches used to make the molds no longer had to be cut by hand. Two years later Mergenthaler's Linotype machine made hand-held molds obsolete and even made possible quick composition of entire lines. It was the perfection brought to an old idea by a new technique. With it, things rested until the computer revolution of recent times. This development has broken the 500-year bond between type and hot metal as decisively as Gutenberg broke with the scribes who once had copied books entirely by hand on parchment or vellum. Recently the editor visited the typesetting shop where Chicago History has been set for a number of years. It was being dismantled, and all but one of half a dozen Linotypes were silent and being sold for scrap, and the lead furnace which melted down old type so the metal could be used again was about to go cold. Though the thought occurred that an old Linotype machine would make a truly historic addition to the editorial offices, it would have left regrettably little room for the editors. But another, perhaps more fitting artifact from that vanishing age of typesetting was salvaged and is illustrated for you here. It is the metal galley of the title page of the Fall and Winter 1982 issue of Chicago History - the last to be set in hot metal. It weighs 18 Â˝ pounds, is tied together in the customary manner with string, and reads in reverse. As we master the new technology, we shall try to see that your future issues of Chicago H istory reliably read forward. We shall also try to see that type-the voice of these printed pages-continues to enhance their meaning and your enjoyment of Chicago History. TC] 63

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

Director Ellsworth H. Brown

Trustees Bowen Blair Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Philip D. Block Ill Mrs. Brooks McCormick Cyrus Colter John T. McCutcheon, Jr. 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. Edward Hines Gardner H. Stern Philip W. Hummer 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 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 I :00 to 4:30. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.

Life Trustees Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith

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

Honorary Trustees Jane Byrne, Mayor, City of Chicago John E. McHugh, President, Chicago Park District

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

ILLUSTRATIONS WHOSE CITY?: 3, CHS, ICHi-04191 , gift of John I. Tucker; 5 top, CHS, ICHi-01866; 5 bottom, CHS, ICHi00798, gift of the University of Chicago Settlement House; 6 left, CHS, from Chicago Real Estate; 7, CHS, lCHi-15609, photograph by William T. Barnum , gift of the Lake Bluff Public Library; 8 top, CHS, ICHi-17266, from Chicago After Dark (1868); 8 bottom, CHS, ICHi17264, from Tricks and Traps of Chicago (1859); 10, CHS, ICHi-00160, gift of Horace A. Brown; 11, CHS, ICHi05566, gift of Mr. George S. Titur; 12-13, CHS, ICHi01869, gift of the University of Chicago Settlement House; 15 top left, CHS; 15 top right, CHS, ICHi17265, from Chicago After Dark (1868); 15 bottom, CHS, CRC-1426, photograph by Charles R. Clark; 17 top, CHS, ICHi-14858, photograph by Schollz; 17 bottom, CHS, ICHi-03968; 18, CHS, ICHi-14466, from. Seven

Days in Chicago (1878); 21, CHS, ICHi-00588, gift of Arthur S. Cummings; 22, CHS, ICHi-14897; 25, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-266, gift of Field Enterprises; 26, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, SDN-6864, gift of Field Enterprises. SPIRIT FRUIT SOCIETY: 29 & 30, courtesy of the Evelyn Hastings Collection; 32, courtesy the Robert J. Knowdell Collection. CHICAGO TRACT SOCIETY: 37, CHS, ICHi03827; 39, CHS, ICHi-17280. ASSOCIATED NEGRO PRESS: All illustrations gifts of Mrs. Etta Moten Barnett. 45, CHS, ICHI-17330 ; 47, CHS, ICHi-17328 ; 48, 49, 50 & 51, CHS; 53, CHS, ICHi-17235; 54, CHS, ICHi17329. THE SOCIETY: 62 left, CHS, ICHi-17288, gift of Rand McNally & Co.; 62 bottom, CHS, Chicago Daily News photograph, DN-1443 ; 63, CHS.