Chicago History | Summer 1985 by Chicago History Museum

Detail from thÂŁ cover of tlu!first edition o/With the Procession by Henry Blake Ful/,er, publisfu!d by Harper & Brothers, 1894.

CHICAGO HISTORY, The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

Chicago Historical Society OFFICERS Stewart S. Dixon, Chairman Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Treasurer Philip W. Hummer, Vice-Chairman Edward Hines, Secretary Philip D. Block III, Vice-Chairman Theodore Tieken, Immediate Past Chairman Ellsworth H. Brown, President and Director

TRUSTEES Mrs. Abra Prentice Anderson Philip D. Block III Mrs. Pastora Sanjuan Cafferty Cyrus Colter Stewart S. Dixon William M. Drake James R. Getz Edward Hines Philip W. Hummer Philip E. Kelley Mrs. Brooks McCormick

John T. McCutcheon,Jr. William]. McDonough Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs. Newton N. Minow Richard H. Needham Potter Palmer Mrs. Edward S. Petersen Bryan S. Reid,Jr. Edward Byron Smith,Jr. Dempsey J. Travis

LIFE TRUSTEES Andrew McNally III Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Gardner H. Stem Theodore Tieken

HONORARY TRUSTEES Harold Washington, Ma'}Or, City of Chicago John E. McHugh, President, Chicago Park District 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. Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes of annual member hip 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 films and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10 percentdiscounton books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store. Hours Exhibition gallerie 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 Prints and Photographs Collection is open by appointment only. The Society is closed on New Year's, Thanksgiving, and Christmas days. Education and Public Programs Guided tours, assemblies, slide lectures, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a vai;ety of special programs for all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen, are offered. Admission Fees for Non-members Adults, 1.50; Children (6-17), 50Â˘; Senior citizens, 50Â˘. Admission is free on Mondays.

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FROM THE EDITOR

ON MY OFFICE WALL hangs an old map: Bowles's New Pocket Map of the World, comprising, we read, "The New Discoveries to the Present Time, Particularly those made in the Southern Seas." It was published by Carington Bowles, St. Paul's Church Yard, London, and the "present time" was May 1787. Neither Chicago nor Cairo, Illinois, appears on it. It is a lovely old thing whose purpose-a map of discovery-is clear from its design: two circles, one depicting the "Eastern Hemisphere or The Old World," one the "Western Hemisphere or The New World," touching at the equator somewhere in the South Atlantic. The continents are handsomely rendered, ifto modern eyes a bit oddly shaped, and in the four corners (of the map and the world) are illustrations of what one might expect to find there. Europe is represented by an equestrian gentleman with classical columns in the background and a small globe at his feet. Africa offers two swarthy fellows, ivory tusks, an elephant, and lions. Two caravan-types stand for Asia; a camel and smoking genie's lamp evoking the exotic East. Finally there is America: a befeathered, bare-chested Indian couple perched on a rocky shore where both pines and palm trees seem to grow. However it is not the known, but the unknown that dominates the map itself. Its largest spaces are oceans, or "seas" as the language then had it(the "Great South Sea"), where dozens of squiggly lines chart the latest voyages of explorers and adventurers: "Route of Admiral Anson"; "Bougainville's Track"; "Cook's Track in the Endeavour." The lines are squiggly due in part to the vagaries of wind and current, but for another reason too. Anson, Bougainville, and Cook didn't know, much of the time, exactly where they were going or exactly what was out there. They only knew (and this with much assurance) what they wanted: to make the unknown a little less so by discovering this island or that coast, and thus bringing fame to themselves and glory to their countries. "The unknown" has changed a lot since this map was made. In fact, maps no longer embody the idea. Today they are evidence of how well we have tamed it, of just how well we do know what is "out there," on Earth anyway. Still, this old map is important as more than a nice old thing that fills a pretty frame. Consider tl1is. The European and American cultural establishments are preparing, or at least "tl1inking about" ways to commemorate the 500th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of a new continent where an old one was supposed to be. Not much has come of this so far though there has been a lot of noise, much of it in Chicago whose planned third world's fair recently aborted . Discovery or re-discovery was at least one of the ideas that was to have animated it, but will not. Why? Future historians will surely ponder this at their leisure, but for those of us living history today it is hard not to wonder about it now. Lofty thoughts about "discovery" are dandy for the keepers of culture but probably a bit much for a city that has its hands full just keeping things together. Or what about the fair as a happy civic diversion? Perhaps. Everyone likes a good time (the Ferris Wheel was a chief attraction at the 1893 fair), but it seems harder to amuse people today than in our grandparents' time. Or the incentive of the fair as gold mine? Even this is diminished in an age when everyone publicly waves the standard of fair shares for all. For the third fair to have happened in Chicago would have required more sense of adventure and more civic know-how than the city now can muster. But it might have led to discovery too. Remember that Captain Cook, whose ambition is marked by the squiggly lines on an old map, at least knew what he wanted, if not precisely how to get there. We may no longer know even that with any confidence, let alone how to get there. This is sad because it means that what was Chicago's future too soon became its history. As Gerald George writes about Cairo in this issue of Chicago History: "I fear what happens to history when cities rise no more." TCJ

Cover: Two-tone lithograph by Will Brad ley from the cover of th e May 1895 issue of The Chap- Book.

Summer 1985 Volume XIV, Number 2

CHICAGO HISTORY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

CONTENTS EDITOR TIMOTHY C. JACOBSON ASSOC IATE EDITOR

ASSISTANT EDITOR

MEG WAITE R DESIGNER LISA GINZEL

H. L. Mencken and Literary Chicago ANTHONY GROSCH

R USSELL LEWIS

Chicago Magazines HENRY REGNERY

Cairo and Chicago: Cities at the Center GERALD GEORGE

PHOTOGRAPHY WALTER

W. KR UTZ

"Fra Lorado," Chicago's Master Sculptor PATR ICK REYNOLDS

PA UL W. PHRAIT IS

1ss;-.; 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abs1racted and ind exed in 1-/istorical AbstracLi and America: f-listory and Life

Revi ew Essay/Jon C. Teaford

Book Reviews/Alphine W.Jefferson, H. Roger Grant, Sidney H . Bremer, Me lvin Dubofsky

l'';TRAI 10'\5

Cover, from ThR Clwp-Book ( 1895), CHS, PrinlS and Photographs Coll ection; inside fronl cover, C HS. l.ibrai,; 5, counesr of the Baltimore Sun; 6, CHS, IC Hi-!0968, from Wau-bun ( 1856); 7, counes} of Thomas G. Kern let~ 8 top, courtesy of The Newberry Libra,,·; 8 bottom, C HS, ICHi-19377; 9 left, drawing by Gropper in th e Philadelphia Public Ledger, 1923. courtesy of The Newberry Library; 9 righ1, C HS, Chicago Daily t\'irrvs pho1ograph, DN-64,757, gifl of Field Enterprises; I0-11 top, CHS, IC Hi -19'.{7-I; 10 bo1tom, C HS, IC Hi-19379; II bo1tom left, C HS. IC Hi-19333; 11 bottom righ~ CHS, IC Hi-19378; 12 top, courtesy o f The Newberry Library; 12 bottom, C HS, DN-137, gif1 of Field En1erprises: 13 top, C HS, IC Hi-10342; 13 bottom, CHS, IC Hi-172; 14 1op. C HS. ICHi- 19375; 14-15 bottom , CHS, IC Hi-19!07; 15 top, C HS, Library; 16 top, Willard Motley Collection, Depanmenl of Rare Rooks and Special Collections, courtesy of Nonhen, Illinois University Libraries, copyrigh1 by Sau l Mautiber; 16 bo1tom, C HS, IC Hi-9278; 17 top left, C HS, IC Hi-18994; 17 top right, Special Collec1io ns, Van Pell Library, counesy of 1he University of Pe nnsylva nia; 17 bottom, C HS, IC Hi-1931 I; 18 lef4 counesy of The Newberry Library; 18 right, CHS, ICHi-11 54 7; 19, counesy of Thomas G. Kemle r; 20, from 71,e Smart Set (1966), courtesy of The Dia l Press; 21. counesy of T homas G. Kem ler; 23, courtesy of Thomas G. Kemler; 2-1-25, courtesy of The Newberry Library; 27, C HS, Prin1s a nd Pho tographs Collection; 28 top left, counes) of The Newberry Libra,, ·; 28 lop right, CHS, IC Hi-19376; 28-29 bottom. counesy of The Newberry Library; 29 top. counes)' of The Newberry Library: 30. courtCS) of The Newbe rT) Library; 3 1. C HS, !C l !i-6346; 32, cou r1esy of The Newberry Library; 33. courteS) of The Newberry• Library: 35, C HS; 36. C HS, from 71,e Chc,p-13ook ( 1897); 38-39, from Hi,tory of Cairo, Illinois ( 19 10), C HS, IC Hi-19450; 41. Sketch Exhibiting Pruition of City of C,airo (1837), C HS, ICH i-19451 ; 42, from The Attractiom of Cairo, Illinois (1890). C HS, IC Hi-19.i-18; 43, from The Attractions of Cairo, Illinois (1890), CHS, IC Hi-19446; 44 1np. from Histmy of Cairo, Illinois ( 19 10), C HS, ICHi- 10534; 44 bottom, from Histmy of Cairo, Illinois (19IO), CHS, IC H i- 19449; 46, courteS)' ofJ.M.C. Photo Sen•ice; 47, cou rtesy of the Buffalo and Erie County His1orical Society; 4 7 bottom, cour1esy of The Peale Museum: 48-49, from Where Two Great River., Meet ( 1905), C HS, !C H i-194-17; 50-51, CHS, DN-76,522. gif1 of Field Enteri>rises; 53. C HS, ICHi- 19-108: 55, C HS, DN-55,835. gift of Field Enterprises; 56, CHS, DN-60,199, gifl of Field Enterprises; 57, C HS, from The Craftsman (1913); 58, couneS)' of University Libraries. University of Illinois a l Champa ign-Urbana; 59, courtesy of University Libraries, University of Illinois at

Champaign-lJrha na; 60, C HS, from Th, Amencan Magruine of Art (1928); 62, CHS, DN -72,457, gift of Field Enterprises; 67, C IIS, IC Hi-14868; 72, from About '/obey J-/tmdmade Ft1rnilurr(l906), C HS Library; inside back cover; CHS, Library. Excerpt, page 12, from U'indy 1\JrPhnson'5 Son b\' Sherwood Ander ·on. rep1inted courtesy of H arold Ober. Associates, lnc.

Excerpt, page Hi, from KllOCk 011 Any Door by Willard Mo1 ley. Copyrigh1 1947 by Willard Motle), renewed 1975 by Frederica \.\'es tbrooke. A H awthorn Book. Repri nted b) pennission of E. P. Dutton, a division of New American Libraf).

H. L. Mencken and Literary Chicago By Anthony Grosch

For a brief time in the 1920s, H. L. Mencken championed Chicago as the literary capital of the United States. His romance with the city's literati and in:fluence on subsequent generations of Chicago writers are the subjects of this article.

wm-1 CHARACTERISTIC BOLDNESS and zest, H. L. Mencken in 1917 and again in 1920 startled the literary world with, of all things, accolades to Chicago. The praise came in two newspaper columns, one called "Civilized Chicago," which first appeared in the New York Evening Mail, and the other, "The Literary Capital of the United States," in London's The Nation. The Chicago of Mencken's heyday abounded with literary and intellectual vitality, independence, and strength. Chicago was still new, and Mencken relished its spirit and its remark able literary bloom. To Mencken, Ch-icago represented honesty, freshness, and the true national spirit. Lying out on the prairie at the edge of a giant freshwater lake, Chicago was the center of the hinterland, a word Mencken used with alacrity. Deep in the interior of the continent, Chicago lay in apparent isolation from the refined or dainty influences of the East and beyond. Even its name, having come into American English through the French from the Indian, sounded mi-European, un-English, foreign, exotic. The city rose from native soil like the plant from which comes its name-the sturdy and stinky wild onion. The city also grew like a weed, within a wink of history, leading the novelist Henry Blake Fuller to observe in 1895 that Chicago had risen "from an Indian village to a metropolis of two millions within the lifetime of a single individual." Conceived and nourished by the American nation, Chicago-for Mencken-best exemplified the national culture. In "Civilized Chicago" he boldly asserted: ''.A culture is bogus unless it be honest, which means unless it be truly national -the naif and untinctured expression of a national mind and soul." 0

Anthony Grosch is chairman of the English department at Lincoln Park High School. 4

In antebellum Chicago, Yankee New Englanders and New Yorkers had begun a civilization. Almost as soon as it had been estab lish ed, into Yankee Chicago teemed the youth of the rural Midwest and the immigrants from across the ocean. The city manifested the din and grime of factories, the bellow and stench of stockyards, the bustle and clatter of streetcars and drays, the steam and soot of engines and trains. Disparate people mixed willi disparate things to make a powerful but often discordant society. The result was that Chicago, Mencken declared, "is overgrown, it is oafish, it shows many of the characters of the upstart and the bouncier, but under its surface there is a genuine earnestness, a real interest in ideas, a sound curiosity about the prodigal and colorfu l life of die people of the republic." So from the bowels and babble of raucous Chicago emerged refinement too-a great university, an OI-chestra, museums, libraries, buildings-the spirit of all this shown off so splendidly at the World's Co lumbian Exposition of 1893. Perhaps the exposition was the finest monument to Yankee Chicago, and Mencken may have too eagerly dismissed the New England influence on the city when he said that "the sharp winds from the lake seem to be a perpetual antidote to that Puritan mugginess of soul which wars with civilization in all American cities." Despite Mencken's frequent blasts at die Puritans, d1e professors, and a ll who represented genteel America, the people who belonged to this very class produced in Chicago not only the city's achievements in commerce and industry, but also its first flowering in arts and letters. ln die 1890s-often called Chicago's golden decade-there seemed a harmony in civic cu lture d1at has never been recaptured. Then the tycoons of railroads, lumber, grain, and meat shared an

Born in Baliirnore. journalist Heniy Louis Mencken ( 1880- 1956) ros, lo prominence during a (/owning of American letters in the teens and twenties. Through.out his eclectic cam'r as ,ditm; /1rolific authm; and iconoclastic literary and social critic he cli.am/Jioned the works ofa new generation of writers, eschewing established litermy taste.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 association with architects, wiiters, painters, sculptors, and poets. It was a time when after a Friday afternoon concert by Theodore Thomas's symphony orchestra in the Auditorium, artists and their patrons walked down Michigan Avenue to the Fine Arts Building to join for tea and conversation in an informal gathering called the "Little Room." Here assembled many of Chicago's cultural forebears: Mrs. Arthur Aldis, Mrs. William Armour, Hoban Chatfield-Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Field, Henry Blake Fuller, Hamlin Garland, Francis Hackett, Major and Mrs. Joseph Kirkland, General and Mrs. A. C. McClurg, Han-iet Monroe, Lucy Monroe, Anna Morgan, Mr. and Mrs. Potter Palmer, William Morton Payne, Ralph Fletcher Seymou1~ Louis Sullivan, Lorado Taft, and many others. One of the fruits of this first phase of the Chicago Renaissance in the nineties had a profound effect on the young Mencken in Baltimore. This was an avant-garde littl e magazine ca ll ed The Chap-Book, which boasted among its contributors the likes of Charles T. Copeland, Ralph Adams Cram, Eugene Field, Henry James, H.G. Wells, Max Beerbohm, Paul Verlaine, George Santayana, and Joseph Pennell. Aubrey Beardsley and Will Bradley were frequem illustrators. In 1921 Mencken enthusiastically remembered The Chap-Book and called it a leader in "the movement against the Puritan (and especially New England) hegemony which got under way in Chicago in the middle 90's." But ironically, The Chap-Book was started by two young men of New England pedigree: Herbert S. Stone, whose father had founded the Chicago Daily News, and H.J. Kimball, whose father was a representative in the South for the Pullman Company. Before publishing in Chicago, Stone and Kimball had met and begun The Chap-Book at no place other than Harvard University, the institution that nurtured and spawned Mencken's bitter enem ies of the professoriat-Irving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More, and Stuart Pratt Sherman. Mencken was to fight and win the battle against the oppression of the genteel tradition, but even he was indebted in a strange way to it-at least as it was transmitted in Chicago. The weakness of the genteel writers was a reluctance to depict the indecorous aspects of society and the more disturbing elements of human character. Like Macbeth, they believed in the efficacy of suppression: "Stars, hide your fires, / Let not 6

light see my black and deep desires." Yet their strengtl1 was in their responsibility to the community and in their notion that literature ought to influence human conduct for the better. Writers of the genteel tradition dominated the latter nineteenth century in America and Ch icago, and the literary history of Chicago's first century offers severa l remarkable and noteworthy examples. In 1856 Juliette Kinzie published an eloquent autobiography called Wau-Bun (an Ojibwa word that means "the dawn" or "the break of day"). The book was subtitled The Early Day in the Northwest. Kinzie had come to Ch icago from Connecticut in 1831 as the bride of John H. Kinzie, whose father had settled across the Chicago River from Fort Dearborn in 1804. Remembering the frontier settlement of her youth, Kinzie recalled her hope that in Chicago a civilization might arise in which "Education and Christianity should go hand in hand, to make the 'wilderness blossom as the rose.'" In 1872, the year after the Ch icago Fi re, Ed ward Payson Roe, a Presbyterian minister originally from upstate New York, published a novel called Barri.Juliette Ki11zie ( 1806-1870), pio11eer Chicagoan and /he city sfirst aulh.o,: /-ft,,- wrilings provide glimf;ses into lllirwi1 /;ioneer lift as well as a framework for early Chicago history.

H. L. Mencken ers Burned Away. The book depicts scenes of the Great Fire, during which a German immigrant says: "Men who meet this great disaster with courage and fortitude ... possess an inherent nobility such as no king or kaiser could bestow:' In 1895 Henry Blake Fuller published a novel about Chicago's ruling class called With the Procession. Born in 1857 in Chicago, Fuller was the last male descendant of Samuel Fuller, who had sailed on the Mayflower. Immediately following the close of the 1893 world's fair, a character in the novel looks at the exposition buildings and notes "the universal expectation that the spirit of the White City was but just transfe1Ted to the body of the great Black City close at hand, over which it was to hover as an enlightenment-through which it might permeate as an informing force." Also in 1895 Hamlin Garland, who had grown up on midwestern farms, published Rose of Du.tcher's Coolly, a novel about a Wisconsin farm girl who pursues a writing career in Chicago, where she becomes part ofa cultural circle reminiscent of the Little Room. Here we read that Chicago is "the Napoleon of cities. A city of colossal vices and colossal virtues." Implying that virtue will triumph , the speaker

predicts that "in 1920 [Chicago] will be the mightiest center of the English speaking race." In 1892 when William Rainey Harper organized the University of Chicago, he persuaded Robert Herrick, a Harvard-educated professor at MIT, to come to the new university. Herrick, whose New England antecedents dated back to the 1630s, taught for thirty years at Chicago. He also began publishing novels in the 1890s. In Chimes, an autobiographical novel published in 1926, Herrick asserted that the university ought to be "the home of the human spirit, ... the one withdrawn place of modem life where all the manifestations of humanity could be gathered in essence and-handed on!. .. The enduring, the significant thing was-the Idea, the university itself!"-which was to give its students "the desire to understand, to grope onwards deeper and deeper into the mystery of existence." Obviously people don't Â˝'l;te like that anymore, and we read such things today with some incredulousness. So did Mencken. He, and we, seem more comfortable with what followed from other writers less intent on uplift than a realistic portrayal of lives they had fled (often in the rural Midwest) and

':4 chubby, motYn-jhced familim; a cross between an English Puck and a Gmnan Spi/J.bube. Though he stilt wears the mask of the clown, there emerges the eamest anti-refonner ... the pioneer misader against crmades, " Loui5 Untermeyer wrote of Mencken. Here he sits for a 1927 portrait by Nicol Schattenstein.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 of new lives they had found (typi ca ll y in C hicago). 1 ot that t11 ese realists were necessarily better writers or th at th ey took literature m01·e serio usly, it was just that th ey sa\\· the world rather differentlyand to Men cke n rather refreshingly. Willa Cather, for example, grew up in the prairie village of Reel C loud , Nebraska. The rails of th e Chicago, Burlington a nd Quincy linked Reel Cloud to Chi cago, and a me morabl e event of Cather's yo uth occu1Tecl wh e n a salesman from Ma rshall Field's a rrived with a huge box of fireworks for th e Fourth ofjuly. As a yo ung woman Cather visited Chicago to a ttend th e opera, and "in th e spring of I895 ... she stayed for a week and went to th e opera every night." From such ex pe riences ca me a great nove l in 1915 about a prairi e girl who moves to Chicago and 1ises to become a celebrated Wagn eria n soprano. Cath er call ed it The Song of the Lark, afterjules Bre ton's painting in The Art Institute of Chicago. In Floyd Dell 's 192 1 novel Moon-Calf, a yo ung writer turns his back o n small-town Illinois and yearns for Chicago: He saw again in his mind's eye ... a picture of th e map on th e wall o[ th e ra ilway station-the map with a picture of iron roads from all o ve r th e Middle West cc111e1·ing in a dark blotch in 1.he corner... . "Chi cago'" h e said LO himself. ... thc rhy1.hm of [the] worcl ... sa id it.self over and over in his mind: "'Chicago' Chicago!··

So rhe literary young scattered throughout th e Midwest found their way to Chicago: George Ade from Kentland, Indiana; Edgar Lee Masters from Lewistown, Illinois; Theodore Dre ise r from Warsaw, Indiana; Sherwood Anderson from Clyde, Ohio; Vachel Lindsay from Springfield, Illinois; Edna Ferber from Kalamazoo, Mi chigan; Ben Hecht from Racin e, Wisco nsin; George Cra m Cook from Davenport, Iowa; Ring La rdn e r from 1iles, Michigan; and Carl Sandburg from Galesburg, Illinois. Like Mencken himse lf, many began writing for newspapers, where they learn ed to record the authentic sights a nd sounds of the city. Their titles suggest their subject and style: Fables in Slang, Chicago Poems, Gullible's Travels, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, Tales of Chicago Streets. In such Chicago writing Mencken began to hea r the true speech of the people. But it remained for Th eodore Dre iser, in the first year of the century, to present distinctivel y new content and a thoroughly new attitude in 8

Abovr: A rl'strainl'd and ba/(lnCPd stylt• clwrarterius Wi/1,1 (;(lther'.f ( 1875- /9-17) work. She was partiru[(lr[y interested in 11,P \,\i'sl and its ji,reign-bon,J(lmlf'rs. !Mow: /-frmiet J\lonroe( !860- !936)mrouraged Carl Sandburg (1878- 1967) by /mblishing him in her newlyjinmded jounial Poeti,: A ~lagatine of Verse beginning arowul /9/3. Sumnwding Sandburg in this /9]3 j)lwtogmph rzre his wife (le(l/ed. left) author ,\/ rs. julw Petnkin (sealed, nght) and (standing left lo right), ,111;. Carl I lenrbickson, lite,wy nitir Hmny Butrhn; and I lwriet Monro1•.

H. L. Mencken

Left: Floyd Dell ( 1887- 1969) came to Chicago around 1907 where he became associa.lPd with the then ascendant "Chica.go School " which included Ben Hecht, Carl Sandburg, and others. Right: Versa.tit,, Hecht (1893- 1964) W(LI CLI! integral pa.rt of Chicago's "literary renaissance." Acting as war correspondent and reporter for the Chi cago News between 1914 and 1923, he was also publishing stories in the Little Review and The Smm1: Set. A.1 a playwrite his most fwnous work, Th e Front Page, was a collaboration with Charles MacArthur.

fiction. In his novel Sister Canie, a young girl comes from Wisconsin to Chicago, lives with a traveling salesman , leaves for New York with a manied man, and rises to become a prominent actress almost through pure chance and without any admirable qualities of character. Because such frankness was repugnant to the genteel tradition, Sister Came was suppressed-very few copies were circulated-and Dreiser mightily discouraged. Mencken read Sister Came in 1900 and was bowled over: "It made a colossal impression upon me ... and I became a Dreiserista at once." It stuck with him , and in 1924 he still declared that the American writers of the twentieth century "owe both their opportunity and their method to the revolution that followed Sister Came." Mencken's own influence on Chicago writers was various. As a writer himself, he was admired and imitated , especially by newspapermen like Ben Hecht In his reviews, Mencken often commended Chicago writers and writing set in Chicago. He said that The Song of the Lark was

proof that Willa Cather "was a true professional [novelist]." Mencken likened Sherwood Anderson's Windy McPherson's Son to Dreiser' The Titan, finding the same "gusto of a true artist in it:' Of Dreiser'sJennie Gerhardt, Mencken wrote: "And the scene in which she is set is brilliantly national too. The Chicago oftl1ose great days offeverish moneygrabbing and crazy aspiration may well stand as the epitome of America." In his essays, Mencken battled hostile academic critics such as Paul Elmer More of Harvard, who called the Chicago writers "uneducated people" and said that Dreiser "got most of his education in the streets of Chicago and from the free libraries of this and that town" and tliat Anderson "apparently [owed] his acquaintance with the alphabet to the grace of God." As an editor too, Mencken was receptive to tl1e Chicago writers. Between 1916 and 1923TheSmart Set, which he edited with George Jean Natl1an, published work by Dreise1~ Catlie1~ Anderson, Masters, and Hecht. As a public defender, Mencken's continued on page 18

The foUowing pages offer glimpses of Chicago, both literary and pictorial. The excerpts come from a variety of works of diverse styles; the photographic details were selected to complement them.

When the peke-and-pansy season is past they get one fleeting glint of the City of Light like their world-city out of the books -and know, in that swift homesick moment, that they're as close to home, and as far, as ever they'll be . For Paris and London and New York and Rome are all of a piece , their tendrils deep in the black loam of the centuries; like so many all-year-round ferns tethered fast in good iron pots and leaning always, as a natural plant ought, coward what little light there is. But Chicago is some sort of mottled offshoot, with trailers only in swamp and shadow, twisting toward twilight rather than to sun; a loosely jointed sport too hardy for any pot. Yet with that strange malarial cast down its stem .. But Hustlertown keeps spreading itself all over the prairie grass, always wider and whiter: the high broken horizon of its towers overlooks this inland sea with more dignity than Athens' and more majesty than Troy's. Yet the caissons below the towers somehow never secure a strong natural grip on the prairie grasses. A town that can look, in the earliest morning light, like the fancies t all-round job since Babylon . And by that same night, south down State or north on Clark or west on Madison , seem as though the Pottawattomies had been the wisest after all. Chicago: City on the Make, 1951 IO

Algren (left), poet of Chicago's backstreets and alleys, dedicated City on th e Make lo Carl Sandburg. One revit'wer described it as "both a social doroment and a lovt' poem." Photogra/Jh by Stephen Deutch.

Nelson Algren (1909-1981)

Lefl: Stale Street al night, 194 3. Below lefl: Alley between Cltirk and Dearbom streets. Below right: On North Clark Street, late /940s. Photograph by Arthur Siegel.

Sherwood Anderson (18 7 6-1941 ) Much of Sherwood Anderson's writing refocts the /1 1idwest in transitionfrom an agriculluml to a commercial and industrial society.

It was a wonderful place, that South Water Street in Chi cago where Sam came to make his business start in the city, and it was proof of the dry unrespo nsiveness in him that h e did no t sense more fully its meaning and its message. All day the food stuff of a vast city flowed through the narrow streets . Blue-shirted , broad-shouldered teamsters from the cops of high piled wagons bawled at scurrying pedestrians. On the sidewalks in boxes, bags, and barrels. lay oranges from Florida and California , figs from Arabia , bananas from Jamaica , nuts from the hills of Spain and the plains of Africa , cabbages from Ohio , beans from Michigan , corn and potato es from Iowa . In December, fur-coated men hurri ed through the forests of northern Michigan gathering Christmas trees that found their way to warm firesides through the street. And summer and winter a million hens laid th e eggs that were gathered there, and the cattle on a thousand hills sent their yellow butter fat packed in tubs and piled upon trucks to add to the confusion. Windy McPherson's Son , 1916 PeachÂŁs loaaing, South \,\~ter Street, c. 1903.

Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929)

Nm,y Blal,e Fulll'I" took lime out from a series of novds set in fa,rope lo write his two Chicago works. Wi1h 1hc- Processio n was a somewhat ;alirical look al Chicago soci,ty. Rmh Strei'/ Bridge, /905.

The grimy lattice-work of th e drawbridge swung to slowly, the steam-tug blackened the dull air and roiled the turbid water as it dragged its schooner on cowards the lumber-yards of the South Branch, and a long line of waiting vehicles took up their interrupted course through the smoke and the stench as they filed across the stream into the thick of business beyond : first a yellow street-car; then a robust truck laden with rattling sheetiron , or piled high with fresh wooden pails and willow baskets; then a junk-cart bearing a

pair of dwarfed and bearded Poles , who bumped in unison with the jars of its clattering springs; then , perhaps, a bespattered buggy, with reins jerked by a pair of sinewy and impatient hands . Then more street-cars; then a butcher's cart loaded with the carcasses of calves-red, black, piebald-or an express wagon with a yellow cur yelping from its rear; then , it may be , an insolently venturesome landau , with crested panel and top-booted coachman. Then drays and omnibuses and more street-cars With the Procession , 1894

Robert Herrick (1868-1938)

''I'll give you fifteen to drive a wagon, " he said offhand , In that way I made the second round of the ladder, and went whistling out of Dround 's packing-house into the murky daylight of the Stock Yards . I liked it all Something told me that here was my field-this square plot of prairie , where is carried on the largest commissariat business of the world . In spite of its filth and its ugly look, it fired my blood to be a part of it . There's something pretty close to the earth in all of us, if we have the stomach to do the world 's work: men of bone and sinew and rich blood , the strong men who do the deeds at the head of the ranks, feed close to the earth. The lowing cattle in the pens, the squealing hogs in the cars, the smell of the fat carcasses in the heavy wagons drawn by the sleek Percherons -it all made me think of the soft, fertile fields from which we take th e grain-the blood and flesh that enter into our being. The bigness of it alll The one sure fact before every son and daughter of woman is the need of daily bread and meat. To feed the people of the earth-that is a man's business. My part was to drive a wagon for Drou nd at fifteen a week, but I wa lked out of the Yards with the swagger of a packer 1 The Memoirs of an American Citizen , 1905 14

Although Robert Hen-ick was charactrriud by ffitic, a5 a Âˇâ&#x20AC;˘pionerr r,alist, ., hi5 work still retained some of the romantic and idealistic elemmts typical of the genteel tradition.

ThÂŁ 1905 editian of Herrick's tale of Chicago's meat-packing industry.

Union Stockyards, 1879. Photograph !7J Barnes-Cros!7J Company.

--~--- -

Willard Motley (1912-1965)

Nick turned onto Maxwell Street. Before him stretched the Maxwell Street Market extending between low, weather-grimed buildings chat knelt to the sidewalk on their sagging foundations. On the sidewalk were long rows of stands sec one next to the other as far as he could see. On the stands were dumped anything you wanted co buy: overalls, dresses, trinkets, old clocks , ties , gloves-anything. On what space was left near the curb were pushcarts that could be wheeled away at night. There were still other rough stands-just planks set up across loose-jointed wooden horses: hats for a quarter apiece, vegetables, curtains , pyramid-piled stacks of shoes tied together by their laceseverything. From wooden beams over store fronts , over the ragged awnings, hung overcoats, dresses, suits and aprons waving in the air like pennants. The noises were radios tuned as high as they could go, recordshop victrolas playing a few circles of a song before being switched to another, men and women shouting their wares in hoarse, rasping voices, Jewish words, lcalian words, Polish and Russian words , Spanish, mixed-up English. And once in a while you heard a chicken cackling or a baby crying. The smells were hot dog, garlic, fish , steam cable, cheese, pickle, garbage can, mould and urine smells. Knock on Any Door, 1947 16

Till' New York Times called \Villani Motley "an extraordi1wry and powe1ful new naturalistic" talent. Early in his car,er hr moved into Chicago sslums from till' middle-class neighborhood of his chiIn hood and there disrover,d the subjec/s that moved him to write. Photogmph by Carl Van Vechten. Maxwell Street, 1953.

Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)

Theodore Drei,er was perhaps lhe most influential of America's realistic novelists and a master ofllze delai/s which brought his clwraclers so vividly lo lift.

Mandel Bros. department store, c. 1875. Cift of Mrs. Leon Mandel. Mandel Bros. dej}{lrtment store, c. 1875. Gift of Mrs. Leon Mandel.

r ,, II

There is nothing in this world more delightful than that middle state in which we mentally balance at times , possessed of the means, lured by desire, and yet deterred by conscience or want of decision. When Carrie began wandering around the store amid the fine displays she was in this mood. Her original experience in this same place had giv.en her a high opinion of its merits. Now she paused at each individual bit of finery, where before she had hurried on. Her woman's heart was warm with desire for them. How would she look in this , how charming that wo uld make her 1 She came upon the corset counter and paused in rich reverie as she noted the dainty concoctions of colour and lace there displayed . If she would only make up her mind, she could have one of those now. She lingered in the jewelry department. She saw the earrings, the bracelets, the pins, the chains. What would she not have given if she could have had them all' She would look fine too, if only she had some of these things. Sister Carrie , 1900 17

Chicago History, Summer 1985 continW'd from page 9

relentless championing of artistic freedom benefited all writers in America. He extended all his resources to writers under attack. A notable example was his action when the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had Dreiser's novel The "Cenius"banned in 1916. Mencken worked to persuade "the more conservative and famous authors" in America to oppose the ban. He attracted about four hundred signatures to his protest, which drew national attention to the evils of censorship. And Mencken was a friend. His encouragement and suggestions were invaluable to Dreiser, who told Mencken about many of the other promising writers in Chicago. Dreiser had been befriended by Floyd Dell , who introduced him to many of the habitues of the South Side bohemia at Fifty-seventh Street and Stony Island Avenue. Dreiser then encouraged Mencken to do what he could on their behalf. Mencken's famous salutes to Chicago resulted. The question arises whether these accolades to Chicago were sincere and not just more of Mencken's spoofery. Fanny Butcher, longtime Chicago literary journalist, recalled that "Ben Hecht told me once that Mencken's labeling of Chicago .. .as the literary capital of the United States was one of his bestjokes-a slap at the complacency of His realistic style and clipped sentences ean1Pd George Ade (18661944) the title of humorist and American vemacular philosophe,:

cw York." It is true that his title provoked controversy and infuriated ew York; it was classic Mencken mischief. Yet he meant what he said. He discovered in Chicago the city that best pe1-sonified America. In Chicago stories and novels, Mencken read credible tales of national life in tJ1e American vernacular. In both "C ivilized Chicago" and "The Literary Capital of the United States" Mencken stressed a fundamental point: that in the first two decades of the twentieth century Chicago had made a remarkable contribution to American arts and letters. He cited George Ade's Fables in Slang, Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie, and Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. He mentioned in passing Finley Peter Dunne, Joseph Medill Patterson, and Robert Herrick. In his typically outrageous manner, Mencken announced: "It was Chicago that turned out Ring Lardner, the first American author to write in the American Language." Continuing, he proclaimed: "It was Chicago that produced Henry B. Fuller, the pioneer of the modern American novel. It was Chicago that inspired and developed Frank Non;s, its first practitioner of genius. And it was Chicago that produced Dreiser, undoubted ly tJ1e greatest artist of them all:' Discerning that activities of historic significance \fiche/ Lindsay'., (1879-193 / ) poetry IIXL5frought with symbolism and wrillen lo be chanted, which he did in perfonna11ces while vagabonding around the co11nt1y.

H. L. Mencken had occurred recently in Chicago, Mencken summari zed the city's achievements in theater, poet!)', publishing, painting, music, and architecture: The fit·st a nd best Little tJ1ea ter in America was set up in Chicago [by Ma urice Brown e in 1912]. Out in Chicago you will still find tJ1e first magaz ine [fbet1y founded by Hani e t Monroe in 1912] ever devoted to ... new ver·se, and e ith e r tJie actual co rpse or the plain tracks of four-fiftJis of its best professors, fro m Vachel Lindsay 10 Carl Sandburg, and from Han-iet Monroe to Edgar Lee Masters. It was Chicago ... th at la un ched tJi e Chap Book saturnalia of the nin e ties-th e first of h e r e ndl ess e fforts to break clown formalism in the nation al le tte rs and let in the national spirit. It was Chicago th a t produced tJie "Little Review" [Margare t Anderson's famous literary magazine begun in 1914]. And so in painting, in play writing, in music, eve n in architecture. The only architectural novelty tJ1 at America has ever achieved, tJie skyscraper, was born in Chicagothe fact almost goes witJiout saying.

With his sagacity about America, Mencken recognized the Chicago Renaissance at a time when most of its makers confess they were unaware of it. His two articles remain fresh today, filled with wit and spark as well as observations quoted again and again by writers seeking to capture Chicago. Two quotations are especially memorable. The first, from the beginnings of"The Literary Capital of the United States": Chicago the unspeakabl e and incomparabl e, at once the most hospitably cosmopolitan and tJi e most tJioro ughly American of American cities.

The second, from the closing words of "C ivilized Chicago": I give yo u Chicago. It is not London-and-Harvard. It is not Paris-a nd-buttermilk. It is American in every chitling and sparerib, and it i alive fro m snout to tail.

These animated words ended Mencken's applause for Chicago both in a material and in a spiritual sense. Never again did Mencken himself write about the culture and literature of Chicago.' It was partly because by the early 1920s, the vitality he admired in Chicago had dissipated, and many of the writers earlier associated with the city had moved away. But it was also partly Mencken himself. It is well known that when he left The Smart Set in 1923 and began the American Mercury in 1924 his interest in literature declined a his interest in social and politica l issues rose. As this happened his attitude toward Chicago

Mencken and co-editor George j ean Nath.an (right) published The Smart Set between 1916 and 1923. /Hencken was al the peak of his popularity at this lime, lhe "censor-bailing, freedom-roaring" idol of j a:a. Age youth. Photograph by Broum Bro/hers.

changed, a nd through the pages of the American Mercury, the erstwhile "literary capital of the nited States" felt his sting. It came via a young newspaperman named Samuel Putnam , who had been writing art and literary criticism for the Chicago Evening Post and lamenting Chicago's cultural deficiencies. One day he received a letter from Mencken, which asked, "Why don't you do an article for the Mercury, showing up those phonies out there?" Putnam, in 194 7, recalled: In tJiose clays it was "Mencken givetJi and Mencken taketJi away:' Having crowned Chicago as the literary ca pita l in tJ1e first place, he had decided tJiat it was now time to dethrone it, and, in accordance with the Mercury's poli cy, he preferred a local hatchet man for the job. I was elected and I accepted. An interesting correspondence followed in which Henry L. became very specific, and as the proofs came through, I found tJiat he had tJiought of still more victims whom he wished me to acid to the list. There were certain scalps tJiat he wanted , chiefly those of tJie Daily News-Schlogl crowd. [Schlogl's was a tave rn mat was tJie haunt of newspaperme n a nd other Chicago literary figures in tJie l920s and was the subject of Harry Hansen's recollections in Midwest Portraits (1923).] He was especially bitter toward the late Keim Preston, tJien columnist on tJie News, who it seemed had been guilty of l.ese--majeste. When my articl e finall y appea1·ed in the August 1926 Mercury, it bo1·e tJie startling caption: "Chicago: An Obitua ry." The effect was instantaneous and bordered on r·io t. I was assailed by columnists and literary organizations all over town. A mass meeting was held at which I 19

Chicago History, Summer 1985

UNI-.:. 1922

35 (.;en

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; F:dit11J/J,y

GccrtJeJeiln iVatluln â&#x20AC;˘nd

H. l.~fencke11.

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Th e Smart Set gave M encken and Nathan a forum for presenting the young writers of post-World War I America.

H. L. Mencken

Mencken was forty -nine when he married Sara Powell H aardt whose career as a freelance writer he had helped launch. Photograph by A. Aubrey Bodine.

was all but lynched in effigy[, and] I was read out of the Press Club for my remarks about that institution ....

Anyone who reads "Chicago: An Obituary" can see why the local writers were inflamed. The article lists thirty-six writers who left the city. Following were the names of forty-eight who remained, with the rhetorical question: "How does this list compare with that of the emigres?" So in 1926 Mencken abruptly withdrew the title, "The Literary Capital of the United States," which he had bestowed in 1920, thus ending his formal relationship with literary Chicago. But his spirit remained to inspire the next generation of young Chicago writers. Because of Mencken, they faced fewer of the taboos that had bedeviled their e lders. Alth ough close enough in time to be deeply touched by Mencken's influence, the Chicago writers who came of age between the world wars were neitl1er reviewed nor published by him. In 1938 Mencken himself noted that he read fiction with "decreasing interest." His

friendship with Dreiser had cooled, and he had lost touch with novelists generally. An exception was James T Farrell, whose Studs Lanigan may have reminded Mencken of Dreiser's "naturalism." Farrell and Mencken corresponded, and in his letters Mencken praised and encouraged Farrell. Yet Mencken never reviewed any of Farrell's books. In a 1940 interview Mencken remarked: "Wondeifu l stuff 111 those Chicago tales. Whoever doesn't like Fanell is an idiot or a liar." Mencken was undoubtedly pleased and amused by the fact that his name actually found its way into an episode of Studs Lanigan. Preaching a sermon to the young adults of Studs's parish on the South Side, a priest denounces the books of that fake sage of Baltimore, that man who profits by telling youth to read Nietzsche. I refer to H. L. Mencken. Who is H. L. Mencken? He is a noisy, vociferous, and half-baked little man. What does he say? He says: "Read Nietzsche!"

Mencken was delighted. 21

Chicago History, Summer 1985 The Chicago writers of the 1930s and 40s and of subsequent years possessed characteristics Mencken would have approved. They were often not of Anglo-Saxon stock; they wrote the language as spoken by actual Chicagoans; and they never looked back to the genteel tradition. Unlike earlier writers, who were pilgrims from the hinterland, these writers were often either born in Chicago or reared as youths in its neighborhoods. They tended to find Chicago both depressing and stimulating. Yet Mencken's indirect or direct influence persisted with them too. Saul Bellow recalls that in the 1930s he went to the public library to read the novels and poems of Sherwood Anderson , Theodore Dreiser, Edgar Lee Masters, and Vachel Lindsay. These were people who had resisted t.he material weight of American society and who proved-what was not immediately obvious-that. the life lived in great. manufacturing, shipping, and banking centers, with their slaughter stink, their great. slums, prisons, hospitals, and schools, was also a human life. It. appeared t.o me that. this one thing, so intimately known that not. only nerves, senses, mind, but. also my ve t)' bones wanted t.o put. it. into words, might. contain elements that not. even Dreiser, whom I admired most, had yet reached.

Today, in Bellow's novels stands the evidence of the longings of a boy on the Jewish West Side who received the Chicago literary heritage and went on to make of it more than he had received. And Richard Wright, who came in his late teens from the Deep South to Chicago as part of the great black migration north, felt it too. In Black Boy, his terse autobiography, Wright tells of the impact of Mencken on him. As an adolescent in Memphis, Wright had by chance come across an editorial denouncing Mencken. He was curious about the kind of man the Memphis Commercial Appeal would castigate publicly, and he determined to learn more. Because the Jim Crow laws prevented blacks from using the public library, Wright had to borrow a card from a sympathetic white man, forge a note, and pose as an errand boy even to have the chance to read Mencken. Wright recalls: "I opened A Book of Prefaces and began to read. I was jarred and shocked by the style, the clear, clean, sweeping sentences. Why did he write like that? And how did one write like that?" His reading set Wright to using a dictionary and to asking, "Who were these men about whom Mencken was talking so passionately?" Under Mencken's influence, Wrightfor the first time in his life-began to read seri-

ously. He started reading many of the writers discussed by Mencken. "I read Dreiser's Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie," says Wright, "and tJ1ey revived in me a vivid sense of my motJ1er's suffering; I was overwhelmed. I grew silent, wondering about the life around me." Later, Wright remembers, "I bought a ream of paper and tried to write." Such were tJ1e lonely beginnings of Wright's novel of Chicago's Black Belt, Native Son, publi hed in 1940. With tJ1e novels of Farrell and Wright, Chicago fiction· moved into an exceptional period of literary naturalism. Despite Mencken's retirement from literature, his early feelings toward Chicago carried an implied prediction of literary continuity. "In Chicago," Mencken had said in 1920, "there is tJ1e mysterious something that makes for individuality, personality, charm; in Chicago a spitit broods upon the face of the waters:· This spirit infused Willard Morley's 1947 novel of life on West Madison Street, Knock on Any Door, in which ick "Pretty Boy" Romano goes to his death in the most poignant electt·ic chair scene in American literature and leaves tJ1e reader with tJ1e chilling words: "Live fast, die young and have a good-looking corpse!" elson Algren in 1949 published The Man with the Colden Arm, which depicted the perverse beauty of West Division Street and the plight of a drug-addicted gambler, Frankie Machine, whose poetic epitaph goes: It's all in the 1,nist., with a deck or a cue, And Frankie Machine had th e Louch. He had the touch, and a golden ann"Hold up, Arm," he would plead, Kissing his rosary once for help With the faders sweating it. out. andZing-t.hne it was-Lit.tie Joe or Eightcr from Decatur, Double trey the hard way, dice be nice, When you get. a hunch bet a bunch , It don't mean a thing if it. don't cro s that st.ring, Make me five to keep me alive, Tell 'e m where you got it 'n how eas) it wasWe remember Frankie Machine And t.he ann that always held up.

The notion exists tl1at Chicago literature stopped, if not in the 1920s, then certainly at the end of the 1940s, after the great years of naturalism. By midcentury all seemed finished. Or such was the impression conveyed by Nelson Algren in his ardent yet caustic work of 1951, Chicago: City on the Make, and by A.J. Liebling in his famous New Yorker articles collected and published in 1952 as Chicago: The Second City. Algren lamented that Chicago

H. L. Mencken "used to be a writer's town," and Lieb ling remarked: "For a city where, I am credibly informed, you couldn't throw an egg in 1925 without braining a great poet, Chicago is hard up for writers:' Mencken said that he saw in Chicago "the whole gross, glittering, excessively dynamic, infinitely grotesque, incredibly stupendous drama of American life ." And he saw clearly enough. In the 1950s and 1960s writers representing the city's mixture of racial, religious, and ethnic groups continued to render the va1iegated life of Chicago-novels such as Arthur Meeker's story of Chicago's wealthy in Prairie Avenue, Gwendolyn Brooks's lyric expression of black womanhood in Maud Martha, Meyer Levin's sensitive interpretation of the Leopold and Loeb case in Compulsion, Harry Mark Petrakis's story of the Greek immigrants on Halsted Su·eet in The Odyssey of Kostas Volakis, and Ronald L. Fair's nan-ative of racial violence on the South Side in Hog Butcher. In the 1970s and 1980s the stream continued including Cyrus Colter's account of black family life in The Rivers of Eros, Mark Smith's panorama of social classes and neighborhoods in The Death

of the Detective, John R. Powers's rendition of a South Side boyhood in The Last Catholic in America, Saul Bellow's chronicle ofa literary intellectual in Humboldt's Cift,John Mella's sunealistic vision of the city in Transformations (whose nan-ator, incidentally, asserted that The Newberry Library "housed, deep in its bowels, ... a revolutionary clinic for the study and cure of language disorders, a class of ailments that, among the literate population, was becoming increasingly common"), William Brashler's portrait of Uptown in City Dogs, Shirley Nelson's depiction of the Moody Bible Institute in The Last }for of the War, and Tony Ardizzone's story of growing up on Fullerton Avenue in In the Name of the Father. Further evidence-thus far in the l980s-in novels, short stories, essays, poems, and plays and in the numerous recent books on architecture, politics, history, and social conditions shows an impressive body of writing on Chicago. Almost seven decades after Mencken first told the world about literary Chicago, the city and its writing hold much promise. Indeed , Chicago may be enjoying another renaissance. Of course, if he were alive

Cenwrs in Boston pa!Pd at the /mblication of ·'Hatrack, ·• the American Mercury's study of a j,roslitute, but it gave them the pretext they needed to suppress the magazine. In a thRalrical gesture, Mencken mmnged to sell a copy himself on the streets of Bost mi and on April 5, /926, surrounded by sympathetic Harvard students, he r/id so only to be promptly arrested. The judge ruled in Mencken's favo,: This was but one chapter in Mencken's fight against censorship. Photograph by Acrne.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 today and writing as he had in the first quarter of the century, Mencken in his inimitable style would exuberantly and ruthlessly expose the bogus elements of Chicago's life and letters. Yet Mencken's dominant interest was the American people and their republic, and Chicago served only as a brief and passing example in the corpus of his writing. At the height of his powers Mencken aimed to wrest control of the national culture from those he deemed "Boobus americanus: the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages." Mencken found in Dreiser and other literary realists, many of whom were linked to Chicago, fighters warring against the ignorance and oppression of puritanical America. Today, because of Mencken , the hostility expressed early in the century by the publishing and critical establishment toward Dreiser seems absurd. As testimony to his genius, an observation by Mencken about Chicago in 1920 remains true today and will surely last as long as there is a breath of spirit in the city. It might well be taken as an enduring civic motto: "[Chicago] is colossally rich ; it is Âˇever-changing; it yearns for distinction." For Further Reading Works by H. L. Mencken abound covering a diversity of subjects from the English language to Nietsche. References to Chicago and Chicago authors appear in such pieces as "Civilized Chicago," Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1917; "The Literary Capital of the United States," Francis Hackett, ed., On American Books ( ew York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920); Prejudices: R:rurth Series (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1924); and A Book of Prefaces (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1917). There has been nearly as much written about Mencken as by him . Selected sources include Douglas C. Stenerson, H. L. Mencken: Iconoclast from Baltimore (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1971); Edgar Kemler, The Irreverent Mr. Mencken (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950); Charles A. Fecher, Mencken: A Study of His Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978); and Robert van Gelder, "Mencken on Literature and Politics," Writers and Writing (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1946). Works by other authors relating to the Chicago literary tradition include Bernard Duffey, The Chicago Renaissance in American Letters (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1956); Stanley J. Kunitz and Howard Haycraft, Twentieth Century Authors (New York: H. W. Wilson Co., 1942); and Carl S. Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination, 1880-1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). The editors wish to d1ank Diana Haskell , Modem Manuscripts Curator, The ewberry Library, for helping to locate illustrations for this article. 24

Members of lhe Lillie Room, Chicago '.s lilemry salon of lhe early twenlieth century, galher after a performance of George Ade'.s play, Captain Fry's Birthday Party. Among the many recognizabl.efaces are Howard Van Doren Shaw (standing,Jarright),John T. McCutcheon (standing, third row.Jar right), and Harriet Monroe (seated, second row, third from left).

Chicago Magazines By Henry Regnery

Chicago has been home to many literary and popular magazines over the years. Three that were devoted to literary and social criticism-The Dial, The Chap-Book, and Modern Age-influenced the cultural and intellectual life of their times. DCRINC ITS RATHER C HEC KERED CAREER as

a literary ce nter, Chicago spawned three journals devoted to literary criticism and social commentary: The Dial, founded in 1880, remained in Chicago until moving to ew York in 1918; The Chap-Book, part of the city's literary scene from 1894 Lo 1898; and Modern Age, which, begun in 1957, stayed in Chicago until 1976. All three attained national if not local recognition , and each in its own way had some influence on the cultural and intellectual life or its time. A brief histOt)' of these three publications during their Chicago years tells us something about the times that produced them and perhaps or the fate of cultural aspirations that from time to time have emerged in our vigorous, sprawling city.

The Dial The first issue of The Dial appeared in Chicago on May 1, 1880; Francis F Browne was editor and Jansen, McClurg & Co. was the publisher. It described itself as ''.A Monthly Index of CmTent Literature," which aimed to become "an intelligentguide and agreeable companion to the booklover and book-buyer." The magazine's straightforward and unornamented format fit exactly the honest journal of literary criticism the editor had in mind, and it remained basically unchanged during the thirty-eight years The Dial was published in Chicago. The success of The Dial rested largely on the talents of Editor Browne, who blended New England intellect with western entrepreneurial spirit. Francis F. Browne was born December 1, 1843, in South Halifax, Vermont, into a well-established family that had come to Massachusetts sometime in the early seventeenth century. After receiving a Henry Regnery is chairman of Regnery Gateway, Inc. 26

standard public school education, he spent two years as a volunteer in the Union Army, from which ex perience he never fully recovered his health. He learned the printer's ti-ade in his father's newspaper office and studied law, first in a Rochester, ew York, law firm , and then at the University of Michigan. But it seems probable that he came west with a publishing venture of some sort in mind, affiving in Chicago by steamer in 1867. Within less than a year after his affival he bought a new magazine ca ll ed the Western Monthly. He renamed it The Lakeside Monthly, and soon developed it into a respected and successful litera,)' journal. But after two fires (the second being the Great Fire of 1871) and a decline in Browne's health from overwork, in 1874 publication of The Lakeside Monthly ceased. From the time of the collapse of The Lakeside Monthly to the founding of The Dial, Browne supported himself by writing editorials for va1ious Chicago papers and acting as literary edito1-of the Alliance, another of the many magazines tl1at sprang up in Chicago. But Browne was eager to begin his own literary magazine. Having no capital of his own he sought investors, and with financial backing from Jansen , McClurg & Co. he e tablished The Dial. The first issue of The Dial began with a long review of Richard Hildreth 's recently published History of the United States; there were reviews of books on the histOI)' of religion in England and the theaters of Paris, and one by Editor Francis Browne of a book of poetry by Austin Dobson. orman 0. Perkins contributed an article to the inaugural issue which explained that the original Dial was founded in 1840 by a group of transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson among tl1em, as a place to air their views. As Emerson put it some years after the first Dial had disappeared:

son,,

Being AMISCELIANY or curious and Interesting Ballt1.tls. Tales. nistorics, &c.;adorned With a varie or pictures an_(J .~eJY delightful to read: new1y comp_o.fed by MANY CELEBRATED WRITERS; To

which are annex~ a IAROI: COLLl:CTION of N tices of BOOM ft ..,: J: ..J: ..>: ..>: JI J(,~ e.,l!.,.,J;..

Covers o/The Chap- Book, though Jonna/ m design, often carried free -spiriled images. In this cover illustration from an 1895 issue, Will Bradley ca/>tured the organic and airy essence of the art nouveau movmU'lll.

Chicago History, Summer 1985

H. \'. lluo, l'~•J/dnr.

Broum,e bought the Western Monthly shortly after his arrival in Chicago in 1867. The magazine contained reviews of periodicals and books, essays and poetry.

A modest quarterly journal called the "Dial" under the editorship of Margaret Fuller, eruoyed its obscurity for four years, when it ended. Its papers were the contributions and work of friendship among a nanow circle of writers. Perhaps its writers were also its chief reade1·s. But it had some noble papers; perhaps the best of Margaret Fuller's.

It seems likely that Francis Browne, who, one would gather, was very much the serious, self-effacing New Englander dedicated to learning and a man of high principles, was fully aware of the tradition associated with the name when he decided to call his new publication The Dial. That first issue included a section of short reviews called "Briefs of New Books," among which was a review of Henry Adams's new novel, Democracy (published anonymously), and "Books of the Month," a carefully compiled list of new books. Both of these features were part of the magazine the entire time it was published in Chicago. Another section listing the important magazine articles that had appeared during the previous month was soon added. These three features made The Dial particularly useful to librarians and anyone else wishing to be informed of what was current in the literary world. Looking over back issues gives one the impression ofa thoroughly professional publication. Particularly striking to one accustomed to the contemporary style of book reviewing is the absence of ideology: a book was judged on the basis of its quality, the worth of what it said, and the author's communicative skill, rather than in accordance with the ideological whims of the reviewer. In the twenty-fifth anniversary issue of his magazine Francis Browne outlined what had been the philosophy of The Dial from the beginning: "Its effort has been to achieve distinction

As foundl!r and first editor ofThe Dial, Francis J•: Browne drew from

the intellect of New Engwnd and thP industrial fervor of tlU' West in making his magazine a success. Though subscription prices eventually rose, the Jonna/ of The Dial changed very little throughout its thirty-right year history.

HE two books and the periodical herein dcscribt...t supplement each other admirably, and together constitute not only a complete and compact index to the best In standard and current literature, but a trustworthy mentor in the matter of reading In general and of utilizing to the fullest Advantage the time given to books. No better working tools could be put in the hands of those who wish to get in touch with the b,,,t in classic and contemporary literah1re.

SOME C

RIGHT "THEREissomucl lion, so much ti able for every render h literary impulse w(!re N gioui-:i impulse is in som~

this little volume broade Co111111rrria/ Adt•f'rlUer.

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Chicago Magazines ANNOUNCEMENT.

Jdf.N:,il(}'i. J/1 ,~S>: 1'1. JJct'MU(U tr rtt. announce that en Ma y lat they w !ll !aeue the flrat number

devo:ec!. to LITER ARY NEWS ANO CRITICIS M, t.o be called

"THE DIAL." lt. w ill tea Jo1.:.:-r.al or not lees than a!xteen large pages, p:-lnted on hee·.ry la id pape:-, w ith nee.t and eiegsnt ty~-

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lmpcrt.ant ne•N bocke, with brle!er deecrlpt.lve not.Ices. !:-eel': Jlt.e rary notee and news, :;:ereonal goeelp shout authore. ltete o! the books publlehed during each mon~h. and announce. mente or thoee eoon

to a;ipear: - In brier, a complete

MONTH LY INOEX AND REVIEW OF CURRE.NT

LIT ERATURE ,

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First published in 1880, by 1892 The Dial was one of the most prominent American literary journals.

'INIONS

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k LOVEil uable and carefully prebooks lately issued .... nthu,iastic about books for reading, but his A S to make his readers, r thusiasm." -1:1·,-,,, fork

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THREE NECESSITIES FOR THE BOOK LOVER AND HOW THEY MAY BE SECURF.D AT TRIFLING COST

through consistency and persiste ncy; to be it elf, with its own standards and character; to have its ideals, and live up to them." Twelve years after the first issue appeared, the magazine made an important change. In the September l, 1892, issue A. C. McClurg & Co. Uansen, McClurg & Co.], who had been publishers of The Dial since 1880, announced "to the friends and readers ... that with the present issue their interest is transfe1Ted to Francis F Browne, who has been its editor a nd part owner since its commencement:' This issue's masthead also included a new line: '~ Semi-Monthly Journal of Literary Criticism, Discussion , and Information." An article in the issue entitled "Retrospect a nd Prospect," presumably by the editor, restated the magazine's mission: "The Dial stands preeminently for objective and scientific criticism; it believes in the existence of critical canons, and endeavors to discover and adhere to them:' With the change in ownership The Dial soon switched from bimonthly to monthly publication and raised annual subscriptions from one dollar to two dollars. The magazine, we are told , had paid its financial way from the beginning, and by 1892, when Francis Browne took over the responsibility of publisher, it had won a place for itself as the leading literary journal in the country. Still, one doesn't have the impression that it provided much of an income for the editor. With a large family to support-he had six sons and three daughters-he supplemented his income by working as the book editor for A. C. McClurg, who were then actively publishing books, largely it seems, as a result of Browne's efforts. As his family grew, Browne brought various members into the fo·m. When he became owner of the magazine, a son, Francis G. Browne, worked as business manage1~ In 1905 another son, Waldo R. Browne, became assistant editor and editor in 1913 upon the death of his father. The circumstances that led to the sale of the magazine and its transfer to New York are cloudy, but by the end of World War I, ew York had become the center of American publishing and literary life, which made it increasingly difficult to keep a magazine of The Dial's ambitions in Chicago. Reportedly, before the move to New York The Dial already had considerably more subscribers there than in Chicago. And though it survived in New York only until 1929, it carried on the tradition of true literary

Chicago History, Summer 1985 distinction, being the original publisher of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." That The Dial became the leading American literary magazine of its time is a tribute to the persistence, high standards, and good judgment, both literary and business, of its editor and founder. Historian Frederic john Mosher offered this assessment of Browne's achievement: Browne brought Lhe besl of New England's intellecLUal, spiriLual, and religious ideals wilh him to Chicago, where it was easy to neglect all values other than those in dollars and cents, and courageously advocated the cause of culture in the chief American city of the Philislines. That the ediLor of Chicago's firsL imporLanL publishing house, and Lhe founder and ediLor of the most inf1uenlial magazine of liLerary criLicism in the country was a New England intelleCLual filled with a missionary zeal for the spread of his literary ideals is a fact of great significance in the rapid development of Chicago into one of the nalion's foremost literary cenlers.

The Chap-Book The youthfu l, carefree air of The Chap-Book wou Id seem to make it unsuited for mention in such company as the rather austere Dial. A quality of light-heartedness it certainly had, but The ChapBook also represented a serious effort to come to terms with its time, and more than that, to give its time new life and spirit. The Chap-Book was a product of the aesthetic revolt of the 1890s, which doubtless is the reason why it was so widely imitated. Dozens of little magazines in the same appealing format sprang up just then all over the country: from New York to Kansas City (which had four), Wheeling, Portland, and Salt Lake City. But bright and appealing as the revolt of the 1890s was, it was short lived; the outbreak of the SpanishAmerican War in 1898 and tl1e dawn of a new century marked its end. During the last year and a half of their magazine the publishers tried to adapt it to changes in taste and attitude by adopting a larger format, glossy paper, and photographic illustrations. But the spirit of the original was gone. After the July 1898 issue The Chap-Book faded into a pleasant memory of a vanished era, and the subscription list was turned over to The Dial. The original Chap-Book was a little magazine measuring 7Â˝ by 4Â˝ inches and varying in length from twenty-four to forty-eight pages of text with several pages of advertisements (mostly for books), all printed on unfinished paper. Each issue was carefully and attractively designed and well printed, 30

cAFa,ftous

LuerarY,

Jourti l

____.,

Cover of promotional brochure, c. 1900. Fra,uis F Browne set The Dial '.5 editorial policy from its founding in 1880 until hi1 death in 1913. Control of the magazine then passed briefly to his sons, who sold it in /914 to another Chicago publisher.

usually featuring black and white illustrations, which were always original work. The covers were occasionally illustrated, or they listed the contents, usually in black and red with a black border. It was published bi-monthly with a beginning price of five cents a copy and one dollar a year. Herbert S. Stone and Hannibal Ingalls Kimball were undergraduates at Harvard when they launched their "little" magazine, but it was soon moved to Chicago-Stone was the son of Melville Stone, the founder of the Daily NeM-where it remained for the rest of its short life. The first issue of The Chap-Book included the following notice: "The Chap-Book will have at least one signed review in every number, besides several short notices, and literary essays. In addition to this, The Chap-Book will contain poems and occasional short stories by both well-known and unknown writers." In announcing a price increase to ten cents a copy and two dollars a year in the February 15, 1896, issue, the magazine told its readers:

Chicago Magazines

The Chap-Book wa.rn magazine in which sclwlarly essays and reviews were combined with an artistic flare. It was both a vehic/ÂŁ for criticism and a reflertion of the aesthetic revolt of the 1890s.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 The editors hope by this means to make it a better representative of the younger writers, not only of this country, but of England and France as well. It will make its readers acquainted with the cleverest of the young men, and renew their knowledge of many of the older. ltalso hopes to bring to public notice hitherto unknown authors, and to be a distinctly literary periodical, with the highest standards of taste and judgement.

Besides poetry, short stories, book reviews, and drawings, at the back of nearly every issue appeared several pages of"Notes," which included observations on cuITent plays and books-goings on in the world which were of interest to the editors and which, they doubtless assumed, would a lso be of interest to their readers. Many are witty and very much to the point; others, from the perspective of some ninety years, hint at a now-vanished se lf assurance. But all are well written and reflect the hopes of the editors to b1ing a new, fresh spi1it to literature and the arts. The "Notes" in the January 1, 1897, issue, for example, begin with the following observation: "The University of Chicago, under the impression thatjournalism can be taught like law or medicine, and being in some doubt as to how to set about the business, has turned in its perplexity to the heads of the profession for advice and instruction." This is followed by some witty and perceptive observations on the 1·eplies the university received from the "heads of the profession" at the end of which The Chap-Book's editors remarked with earnestness: The successful journalist is the specialist. If the University of Chicago can bring that truth home to its students it will be doing tJ1em and journalism a great se1·vice. No other teaching that I know of is of any use. The education of a journalist should be the education of every cultivated man.

Not surprisingly, the romantically inclined young editors of The Chap-Book were devoted to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson, who was then at the height of his popularity and reputation. Some of his work had already appeared in the magazine and following his death in 1894 they published a beautiful appreciation of Stevenson by an Edinburgh family friend, Eve Blantyre Simpson. "He would frequently drop in to dinner with us," she writes, and of an evening he had the run of our smoking-room. After 10 l~M., when a stern old servant had gone to bed, the "open sesame" to our door was a rattle on the letterbox. He liked this admittance by ecret sign, and we liked to hear his special rat-a-tat, fo1· we knew we would then enjoy an hour ortwo of talk, which, he said, "is the harmonious speech of two or more, and is by far the most accessible of pleasures ....'·

THE

hap- ook SEMI-MONTHLY

sotn,~•

3Ct,t,/C\ •<II rt'c:- c -..<:~W'ul. IOt\\ 0\/UT LI

Herbert S. Stone, drawn here on the cover ofThe Chap-Book by I-led Richardson (whose illustrations often appeared in lhe littlR magazine), was rditor of the Harvard Crimson beforr graduating to t!U! publishing circles in Chicago.

This old friend describes Stevenson, in spite of the "shrewd Scottish civi l engineering stock" from which he came, as having "a foreign look and a strong touch of Bohemianism in him .... Hi manners, too, had a foreign air with waving gestures, elaborate bows, and a graceful nimbleness of action." How all this must have appealed to those three romantic young men-Kimball and Stone having been joined by this time by their Harvard friend Harrison Garfield Rhodes-trying to edit and publish a literary magazine in the not too hospitable atmosphere of down-to-earth, practical Chicago. Especially appealing must have been the description that followed of Stevenson's elaborate scheme, concocted in the "mellow autumnal days of Fontainbleau Forest., where artists abounded," to sail in leisurely fashion through Europe on a barge filled with talented young artists, their ultimate destination, Venice. "The scene on the piazza of St. Marks on the barge's arrival, and the excited

Chicago Magazines

THE

Chap- Book SEMI-MONTHLY

Hannibal I. Kimball, a classmate of Stone's, collaborated with him in organizing Stone & Kimball, the small but energetic Jinn that began publishing The Chap-Book in 1894.

throng of anxious buyers, the hoary-headed artists, tottering under the weight of canvases, was pictured in glowing colors by their author, when the forest was smelling of the 'ripe breath of autumn."' By 1900 Hannibal Ingalls Kimball had gone to ew York and Harrison Garfield Rhodes to London. But The Chap-Book, short lived as it was, remains a reminder of the creative period in Chicago history that flourished with the world's fair of 1893, when Hamlin Garland was attracted to Chicago from Boston, and thought, rashly perhaps, that Chicago "was to become the second great literary center in America."

Modern Age Just as The Chap-Book miJTored the aesthetic revolt of the 1890s, Modem Age, which first appeared in the summer of 1957, reflected the postwar revolt

against the domination of American intellectual and political life by modem liberalism. Books such as F. A. Haye k's Road to Serfdom ( 1945) and Richard M. Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences (1948) portended the rising revolt, but it was the publication in 1953 of Russell Kirk's highly successful book, The Conservative Mind, that gave the movement coherence and a name. In spite of some initial objections to the label "conservative"-F. A. Hayek, for example, wrote a famous essay "Why I am not a Conservative"-the name stuck, and when the first issue of Modem Age appeared, it unabashedly described itself on the cover as ''A Conservative Review!' The contrast between the aesthetic revolt of the 1890s and the conservative revolt of the 1950s is made strikingly apparent by the two journals that are probably most representative of their positions and aspirations. The aesthetic revolt of the 1890s, which H. L. Mencken once described as "a revolt in pianissimo," was largely concerned with taste and style rather than substance and direction, a distinction which may explain its early demise. In the pages of The Chap-Book one finds few references to politics, foreign policy, or any of the great issues which seem to dominate our troubled time. The rather whimsical appearance of The ChapBook, its small, modest format, and the art nouveau drawings reproduced in its pages, stand in sharp contrast to the solid, wholly unillustrated Modem Age, which makes clear that its editors knew well the seriousness of their mission. Having demonstrated in his book that conservatism was not only an intellectually respectable position, but one with deep roots in the American past offering a true alternative to modern liberalism, Russell Kirk was determined to launch a serious journal that would further develop the conservative point of view. There had, in fact, been discussions for years about creating such a journal-fonner President Hoover had discussed the subject with Felix Morley, former editor of the Washington Post and president of Haverford College-but it was the publication of The Conservative Mind that prepared the way. Starting such a journal required both a publisher who could give the concept concrete form and an organization to act as sponsor. A publisher was found in David S. Collie1~ who had exactly the background, training, and dedication that was needed, while a small Chicago foundation, the Foundation for Foreign Affairs, agreed to provide office space, help with 33

Chicago History, Summer 1985 the financing, and assume organizational responsibility. It was Collier's energy and determination, however, that brought all these things together; without him, there would have been no Modem Age. Under the circumstances of the time, it was probably inevitable that a journal with the aspirations of Modem Age should have been launched in Chicago. Russell Kirk came from Michigan, and The Conseroative Mind was published by the Chicago firm, Henry Regnery Co. (It had been offered to a New York publisher who expressed interest only if it were cut down by about one-third.) David S. Collier had grown up in a North Shore Chicago suburb and had taken his Ph.D. in political science at Northwestern University with William M. McGovern and Kenneth Colegrove, both distinguished in their field and conservative in their point of view. That both McGovern and Colegrove had bucked prevailing academic opinion during the turmoil of the McCarthy era, and that both survived, may well have been at least partly due to the influence on midwestern opinion of the redoubtable Colonel McCormick. In any case, Chicago in the 1950s provided the proper atmosphere for a journal like Modem Age. The influence of Russell Kirk himself was inestimable. The son of a locomotive engineer, he was born and grew up in Plymouth, Michigan, a railroad town near Detroit. He received his early education in the local public schools, where, as his autobiographical writings make clear, something of the moral values and respect for learning of an earlier America still survived. He was not, therefore, a product either of a prestigious private school or of the public schools as they developed under the sway of John Dewey and "Dick and Jane:' He was granted a scholarship to Michigan State, where he had the good fortune to come under the influence of a dedicated teacher,John Abbot Clark, who recognized Kirk's gifts, encouraged his writing, and became a good friend. Clark frequently reviewed books for the old Chicago Tribune Sunday book section. Following Michigan State and a stint in the army, Kirk did graduate work at Duke University and then spent two productive and satisfying years at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where the work on The Conseroative Mind was done, and for which the university granted him the degree of doctor of letters. In his ''Apology for a New Review" in the first issue of Modem Age, Kirk remarks, "The present

issue is our prospectus," and that first issue made unmistakably clear the sort of publication he had in mind and the position he intended Lo take. The first article, "Life without Prejudice," quite appropriately came from Richard M. Weave1; who began, "Everybody is aware that the term prejudice is no longer used in its innocent sense of'pre:judgement: It is used instead as a flail to beat enemies." He concluded his provocative essay with the observation , "Life without prejudice, were it ever to be tried, would soon reveal itself to be a life without principles. For prejudices ... are often built-in principles. They are the extract which the mind has made of experience:' Felix Morley's article, ''American Republic or American Empire," which elicited a sharp rejoinder in a subsequent issue, argued t11at the position of world leadership toward which our country was moving, or being driven, was incompatible with our republican system. "We must eithe1- change our Constitution-openly and honestly-to conform with the imperial policies we seek to follow," Morley concluded, "or we must modify t110se policies to conform to the Constitution as it now stands." There was an aggressive, learned article by Frederick Wilhelmsen accusing histori a ns like Arnold Toynbee, who searched for an inner "meaning to history," of hacking at the roots of civi lization. Wilhelmsen invited them, instead, "to join us in defending the citadel." There were poems by John Logan, Henry Rago, Charles G. Ball, and Galway Kinnell, a Japanese st<>â&#x20AC;˘)' translated by Edwin McClellan, and a symposium-"The Achievement of Ortega y Gasset"-which included two previous!} untranslated essays. "Democracy as democracy-that is, strictly and exclusively as a standard of political equity-seems an admirable thing," wrote the famous Spanish philosopher~ "But over-stimulated democracy, exasperated democracy, democracy in religion or art, for instance, democracy in tliought or ge ture, democracy of the heart or custom, is the most dangerous affliction which a society can contract." Finally, there were the book reviews, which in that first issue of Modern Age, set the high standards that were to become a hallmark of the magazine. The first, by William McCann, reviewed two books on education; one of tliem, Mortimer Smith's The Public Schools in Cri5is, was to have a considerable influence. This wa followed by Rudolf Allers's review of Raymond Aron's great book, The Opium of the Intellectuals (in its original

Chicago Magazines

"The Irish and American Bar, "an illustration iJ,y Henri Tou/,ouse-lautrec for The Chap-Book, sold as a poster and soon became a colliictor's item.

French edition), and Ludwig Freund's review of Reinhold Niebuhr's The Seif and the Drama of History. The next issue published, in addition to articles and reviews, enthusiastic letters from R. A. Nisbet, Duncan Norton-Taylor, Norman Cousins, and Thomas Molnar, among others, welcoming the new quarterly.James Jackson Kilpatrick, then editor of the Richmond News-Leader, contributed a witty editorial in the best Kilpatrick style. In response to Kirk's plea in the first issue for 8,000 to 10,000 subscribers as the minimum to keep the new journal going, Kilpatrick concluded: ''.And if there are not 8,000 to 10,000 thinking conservative readers in the Republic, the Republic, no less than Modern Age, soon or late will cave in:' Even London's Times Literary Supplement acknowledged the new journal in a leading editorial that included the observation: The reviews and poems in the first number of Modern Age are particularly good ... if it takes its stand in its first issue wiLh a little Loo much swagger, and if iL seems to draw for basic conservative insights rather exLensively on European writers like Ortega y Gasset, it has nevertheless started very promisingly.

Although he stayed with Modern Age only until the fall of 1959, Russell Kirk proved to be an imaginative and resourceful editor, giving the ten issues of the magazine he produced direction and character it never lost. He brought in writers such as Austin Warren, Raymond English, Willmoore Kendall, Marion Montgomery, Wilhelm Roepke, Stephen Tonsor, William Henry Chamberlin, and Will Herberg, to mention only a few, and published symposia on education, atomic testing, the humane political economy, intellectuality and wisdom, and the condition of Europe. Poetry remained a regular feature under Kirk, and the book review section maintained its initial high standard. Modern Age clearly offered an alternative to liberalism and infused a new and vital spirit into American intellectual life. Foll owing Kirk's resignation, Charles Lee, who had been editor at the University of South Carolina Press and the Henry Regnery Co., stepped in as managing editor. With the help of a substantial inventory of articles and reviews accumulated by the first editor, an active advisory board, and David S. Collier, Lee had no difficulty maintaining Kirk's 35

DAWN

TH \ T we mo could. u adc 1hc dew And lie on the dew\· lawn, Two Jwcct lovcn come out to woo H erc- on 1hc hill in the 1.faw11 1

0 to h.· prc«d anti $\)fc-carc~,cJ W hih: ,he .1rc m~v-1.i.ccJ, Your col,! litr!c !ingcrs w~rmcJ in mv brc,1._~t, And m•, arms Lipped round yo!.lr wai,n ! 0 for 1hc bh,~ 01 a breathing ki.~5 In Ilic cMl~· Hr;ingl· hird-'-Ong ! A nd ai.u th.ii I ~hould he Jrc,nning this \\.'i1h the mile.; hcl\\'CCn us long !

R uhE Ll. T ..,YLOll,

Unlike The Chap-Book, in which poems and illuslralions evoked a carefree mood, Modern Age had faw if any illustrations and concentrated on the revival of conservatism rifler World War I I.

standards. Beginning with the fall 1960 issue, distinguished writer and editor Eugene Davidson took the helm, coming to Chicago after thirty years at the Yale University Press. While he was editor at Yale, the university press had published controversial books such as David Dalli n's Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, Ludwig von Mises's Human Action, and Karl Wittfogel's Oriental Despotism. Howeve1~ the director of a university press who has strong convictions occupies a very vulnerable position, as Davidson was not the first to discover. That these books did not have the approval of the liberal establishment of the time may have been one of the reasons he was willing to leave Yale to edit Modern Age. Davidson's interests tended more toward foreign affairs than the philosophy of conservatism, but with the help of Eliseo Vivas, professor of philosophy at Northwestern University, and Richard M. Weaver, professor of English in the college of the University of Chicago, the original objective of Modern Age was not obscured. Through the associations he had established while at Yale, Davidson brought a number of writers 36

to Modern Age who added to its reputation and effectiveness. Until his early and unexpected death in 1963, Associate Editor Richard M. Weaver had taken a particular interest in Modern Age's book reviews. He contributed many himself, each conveying his critical judgment in clear, precise prose. Weaver was difficult to replace, but eventually another refugee from liberal ideology, Joseph M. Lalley, gladly accepted the invitation to become book editor. Lalley had been brought to the Washington Post in the thirties by Editor Felix Morley where he eventually became book review editor and was judged one of the best by his peers. But, following Morley's retirement, as the position of the Post veered increasingly to the left, Lalley was reduced to writing editorials on harmless subjects and pieces like the Christmas essay. He was a man of great learning and discerning critical judgment, and had developed a rather ironic, elegant literary style. The following excerpt from his review of Mary McCarthy's novel, The Croup, is a good example:

Chicago Magazines As an artistic effort, the novel must be accounted an almost total failure. The reason is that Miss McCarthy's interest in her fictive classmates does not go much beyond a sharp eye for what they wear and eat and d1Âˇink, the sort of furniture they acquire, and what she imagines to be their behaviour in bathrooms and bedroomsand, where occasion requires, in church .... As a social document, however, and as an index to the prevailing literary climate the book has much interest and importance. Sin ce the days of the chansons de geste, as the late Denis Saurat once poinLed out, women have always determined the character of the imaginative literature of Western civilization .... The inclusion of women in the early nineteenth century schemes of popular education opened the market to the romantic novel, which in turn produced the 1Âˇestless, romantic woman typified by Emma Bovary. Poor Emma's destruction came from wanting"to find out what one meant in life by the words felicity, passion, rapture, which seemed so beautiful in books." Such words are not in the vocabulary of the Vassar South 1ower Group, but the girls of the group are exactly like Emma in the sense that their conduct is determined by imagination and their imagination by what it has fed on-Krafft-Ebing, Freud, Frazer and the rest. Thus it may be that Miss McCarthy has attempted, although vainly, to do for feminism what Cervantes did for chivalry and Flaubert for romanLicism. Joseph Lalley continued to look after the book reviews in Modern Age through 1980. With the winter 1981 issue George Panichas, who had been a frequent contributor, became literary editor and maintained the magazine's high standards. Eugene Davidson remained as editor of Modern Age until the winter 1970 issue, when David S. Collier became editor. This involved no break in the continuity of the magazine since he had been publisher from the beginning and associate edi tor for much of the time. Having been trained in political science, Collier emphasized political theory. Poetry virtually disappeared, but there were still occasional literary pieces, and the book reviews continued as before. In 1976 the difficult decision was made to transfer publication of Modern Age from the Foundation for Foreign Affairs to the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, thus ending its association of some twenty years with Chicago. The Foundation, which had sponsored a number of successful international conferences on foreign relations, eemed a less and less appropriate publisher, and no other suitable Chicago organization presented itself. ISI had a broader base of suppon than the Foundation, and because its work was largely involved with coll ege students, it seemed the logical place for Modern Age.

While it cannot be said that Modern Age ever became closely identified with Chicago, especially during the period of Eugene Davidson's editorship, an effort was made to attract the participation of Chicago writers and others interested in the kind of magazine Modem Age tried to be. John T McCutcheon, Jr., George Morgenstern, Chesley Manly, and Alfred Ames, all from the Chicago Tribune, contributed book reviews from time to time, as did Chicago lawyers Dean TeJTill and Robert V Jones; Edward Wasiolek of the University of Chicago contributed several longer essays; and Gerhart iemeyer and Fr. Leo R. Ward from nearby otre Dame University wrote regularly for Modern Age. But for all that, the life of the city, even its literary life, was not seriously disrupted when Bryn Mawr displaced Chicago as the home of Modern Age. This is sad,just as it was sad when The Dial left town and when The Chap-Book fo lded. And it has nothing to do with ideology, but rather with our city's seriousness about serious things. Such magazines are a measure of this, and their absence here today does not do us much credit. To invite the invidious old comparison: ew York is home to perhaps a dozen magazines devoted to ideas and literature, politics and public affairs, each aimed at an enlightened citizenry and reflecting every shade of opinion-Commentary, Commonweal, Harper's, The Nation, National Review, The New Criterion, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books. And Chicago? It is sometimes difficult not to wonder if the seeds sown by Francis Browne and The Dial did not fall on barren ground among the thorns. For Further Reading The best place to tum for more on this chapter in Chicago's cultural history is to the magazines themselves: The Chap-Book can be found at the Chicago Historical Society and, along with The Dial and Modern Age, at The ewberry Library. On The Dial also see John Frederic Mosher, "Chicago's Saving 'Remnant': Francis Fisher Browne, William Morton Payne, and The Dial (1880-1892)," (Ph. D. diss., University of Illinois, 1950); and on The Chap-Book, Wendy Clausen Schlereth, The Chap-book: AJournal of American Intellectual Life in the 1890s (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1982). The author himself lived through the history of Modern Age in Chicago and knew all of the principals. The editors wish to thank Diana Haskell, Modern Manuscripts Curator, The Newberry Library, for helping to locate illust.-ations for this article.

Cairo and Chicago: Cities at the Center By Gerald George

As unlike as two towns can be, Cairo and Chicago evoke speculation about the rise and fall of cities and the purpose of the historical societies and museums that tell their stories.

::.

-- .

View of Coiro, lllinois, and thÂŁ junction of the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

-:- =--=--- _. -=----

-t..____ -

c \IR0.11.1.1:--01'>. is the historical center of the Vnitcd

States. Tc) persuade oneself of that less than selfevident assertion, one must suspend analytic rigor in favor of a casual visit to Illinois's southernmost city, and particularl)' to the park that lies just below Cairo at what historically seems to have been part of "Bird's Point." It is best to go with a picnic basket, for what one secs there is well wo1·th an afternoon's relaxed contemplation. From a concrete platforn1 resembling the prow of a ship, or from the rock-st1·ewn shore at the extreme edge of the park, which also is the southern tip of Illinois, one beholds the junction-the union-the merger of the mighty Mississippi and Ohio 1·ivers. It is a stunning sight, particulady for history-minded souls, aware of the rivers' important role in t.he European exploration, settlement, and development of the American continent, and aware also of their geographical stretch and sheer physical size. Up the shoreline to one's left is the huge span of bridge over the Ohio River that links Kentucky to Illinois. Orf to one's right, another huge span over the Mississippi River links Tllinois to Missouri. Below Cairo Point the rivers converge into the great waterway that makes its way south to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico. As I paused to behold the intermingling of tJ1esc mighty waters, it grew increasingly clear tllat I stood at the country's historical center. Everything off to the left, on the north side of the Ohio, is more or less the historical North, the land of Yankee traders and midwestern industrialists, of blue uniforms and urban commercial might, of ew York and Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, Cleveland and Detroit. Everything below, on both sides of the mergerswollen Mississippi, is more or less the historical Soutll, the land of plantations and agricultural export, of gray uniforms and the urban exoticism of Charleston and Richmond, Atlanta and Savannah, Miami and Memphis, Little Rock and ew Orleans. Everytliingoffto the right is more or less tlle historical West, the land of cowboys and pioneers, of buckskin clothes and urban wheelerdealers, of St. Louis and Kansas City, Dallas and Denver, Seattle and Salt Lake, San Francisco and Los Angeles. Fed from botli the Alleghenies and tlie Rockies, Gerald George is director of the American Association for State and Local History.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 with help from northern lakes, the two rivers at their merger point roil with currents wonderfully visible and strong-movement it seemed to me analogous to that of time. Succumbing thus romantically to such a mood, I could hardly fail to pose the obvious historical question. If this long strand of land between the watery arteries, this peninsula so similar to Manhattan's island, marks the intersection of the counu-y's great regional divisions, where all traffic up and down tl1e nation's longest central waterways sooner or later must pass, then why was ew York or Chicago not immediately at my back? Why, a mile up the road from ilie little park, was there merely Cairo wiili a population of around 6,000? What happened historically to deprive Cairo of the tall skyscrapers, the cultural glitte1~ the financial and political power iliat seemed its inevitable right on so theoretically superb a site? What happened? Brushing away a fly and wiping my brow from the heat of the river bottom in summer, I gathered up my picnic basket, got in my car, and drove out of ilie park back into Cairo's city limits. And there I went looking for its historical society. Any place this interesting, I reasoned, certainly had to have one. Sure enough, out on a pleasant boulevard called Washington Avenue I found Magnolia Manor, a historic house and museum maintained by the Cairo Historical Association. Actually I'd located it with help from a postcard that described it as "built of Cairo brick in 1869,"addingthat"Ulysses S. Grant made his headquarters here during the Civil War," which seemed a bit puzzling in light of the generally accepted fact tl1at the war ended in 1865. Noneilieless, one could not blame historical societies for postcards. I followed the walk to the porch of the grand old dwelling noting (to quote tl1e Historic American Buildings Survey) its "heavy, ornate, uneasy style of architecture:' A sign invited me to "please ring bell and wait for custodian." I rang. I waited. No custodian came. No evidence of life appeared. As I subsequently discovered, I had simply come at the wrong time; ilie house was open only during set hours of certain days. But in the mood of that late afternoon, the silence of the structure began to suggest a notion that I could not quite define: Had I come not merely at the wrong hour, but at historically ilie wrong time as well? This much seemed clear: Whatever treasures lay pre-

served in Magnolia Manor, they would not likely tell me why Cairo did not become a Chicago. As I walked back to my car, headed out of Cairo, and settled in for the long drive to my own home city, a simple realization grew and would not leave my mind: Histo1ical societies are not founded or maintained to explain what didn't happen. Why ilien do they exist, I asked myself-particularly in our cities? Why do citizens feel compelled to preserve ilieir city's history? What factors have governed ilie growili of urban historical societies? There are any number of cities with historical societies whose histories would help answer these questions-Boston, Cincinnati, Chicago, Buffalo, and Cleveland wiili their long-established institutions; Denver, Atlanta, St. Louis, and San Diego with younger historical societies. But at the risk of further straining the reader's credulity, I have to say that again I sensed that part of the answer still lay in Cairo's history, and it was iliere iliat I began. As fate would have it, my musings about histo1ical societies coincided wiili my discovery of a recent reprinting of A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois, a "classic local history" by John M. Lansden, originally published in Chicago in 1910. Lansden died in 1923 after practicing law in Cairo for fifty-seven years, a career that included terms as city attorney and mayor. Though not a trained historian, Lansden seemed to combine extensive and intimate personal knowledge of much of the town's history with a penchant for truthful attention to controversial issues, which boded well for my purposes. But alas, what the book first taught me was my own lack of originality. Consider the following. As early as 1721, Father Xavier de Charlevoix declared upon reaching the mouth of the Ohio River: "There is no place in Louisiana more fit, in my opinion, for a settlement than this, nor where it is of more consequence to have one." On the same spot in 1836, a traveler named Caleb B. Crumb wrote in his diary: "I seem to see in the place of the two houses which at present constitute this un-named village, a noble and flourishing city...." In 1851 Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Cunynghame published in London an account of his travel to the site. "Geographically speaking, there is perhaps no position in the whole of the United States which would promise better for the site of a large city than that of Cairo:' In Paris in 1859 Jules Rouby published a Guide Americain touting the prospects of ilie "insignificant village" of Cairo "to

Cairo and Chicago N I

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Map of Cairo, 1837, showing its unique geographical position al the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, plausibly the historical center of America.

become some day an eminent city, a colossal center of progres and of business" because of a physical "situation almost unrivaled in the entire world ...." ln short, as Lansden ruefully remarks: "They all seemed to think that at the junction of two such great rivers as the Ohio and Mississippi there ought to be a fine, not to say a grand city." Apparently the first persons actually to act on the notion that the rivers' con0uence offered a good settlement site were French explorers who built in 1702 a fort and tannery somewhere near the present Cairo. But Indians drove them out in what one might call the city's fir t "1-ise and fall." More important are Lansden's reports of early visitors who sensed that the peninsula might not produce a great city. A major obstacle was identified in 1779 by General George Rogers Clark in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: I am happy 10 find 1ha1 rour sentime ms respecting a Fortification at or near the mouth of the Ohio is so agreeable to the Ideas or every ma n or anyjudgment in 1his Department. IL is the spot that ought to be strong

and Fortified , and all the Gan-isons in the Western Country Dependent on it, if the ground would admit it, but the misfortune is, there's not an acre or ground nea,-e r the Point than four miles rise the Ohio, but what i ofte n Ten feet under water.

Rogers built the fort on higher ground downriver. But in time, with the clearing of hosti le Indians, expulsion of both the Engl ish and the French, and organization of the Illinois Te1Titory, one john G. Comegys of Maryland and several associates revived the dream and persuaded the legislature to incorporate the city and bank of Cairo. Stil l, hardly anything happened . Apparently the proprietors lacked adequate capital, energy, or both. Al o, visitors like Major Long on his expedition to the Rockies in 1819 rediscovered how hard it was to find dry ground near Cairo high enough to provide a view of the great rivers converging. Although a few settlers apparently did put up with the peninsula's mosquito swarms, its dense forests with undergrowth of nettles, and tl1e incessant 0ooding, even by 1836 as the age of the steamboat 41

Chicago History, Summer 1985

Late nineleenth-centwy viPlu of Cairo s Ohio River leveP and business dirtrirt.

began and river tTaffic burgeoned, Cairo remained in Lansden's words "a mere woodyard" for steamboat fuel. "The difficulty," he posits, "was obvious enough; a great central position, great rivers coming together, draining a empire in extent, but almost annually claiming dominion over the intervening land they themselves had created." The collapse of Comegy's venture when he died in 1819, and the subsequent forfeiture of his associates' Cairo lands made a second unspectacular "rise and fall." A third began in the late 1830s when Darius B. Holbrook of New York organized a new investment group to take up the dream. Holbrook's renewed hope was inspired by the incorporation of the first Illinoi Central Rail Road company, whose lines were to commence at or near the great rivers' confluence. Almost at once temporary cottages sprang up alongside machine shops, sawmills, foundries, brickyards, drydocks, and the like. By 1841 Cairo had even built at least one steamboat, "The Tennessee Valley." But Cairo's river business didn't increase fast enough to sustain such operations, and bad publicity didn't help the city either. In 1842 Charles Dickens visited Cairo in what Lansden insists was a fit of pique about other things. In his American 42

Notes, Cairo felt his wrath: ... we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping the1-e took in wood, la)' alon1,rside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely helcl togethe1: It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted "Coffee House"; that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi.

But, admits Lansden, "Cairo had a hard name before Dickens saw it. It had a hard name because it was a hard place." Besides the flooding and financial problems, the river traffic brought what Lansden called "ha1-d characters." In 1840 Cairo's population tood at 2,000 inhabitants. By the mid-forties "the town had fully entered upon its decline," and Holbrook, confronted with tJ1e wrath of creditors and citizens alike, worked out a deal in 1846 for eastern trustees to take over the property and the enterprise. The population fell to 242 in 1850, but the railroads finally did arrive. 1hcks of the Illinois Cenu-al and half a dozen other companies eventually traversed the city, and the population grew steadily, albeit modestly, from 2,188 in 1860 to 12,566 in 1900. Some obstacles Lo navigation were removed from

Cairo and Chicago

Rivers put Cairo al the historical center of America. Railroads helfJed bypass it.

the rivers, but more important, both of them were bridged. Rail commerce, not riverboats, would give the city such security as it had. Water, however, continued to threaten that security. The land companies had erected small levees that protected Cairo to some degree against the floods of 1844, but in 1849 and 1858 the Mississippi broke through just enough, apparently, to perpetuate discouragement. In the 1860s and 1870s more floods occurred and neither the trustees nor the railroads seemed willing or able to finance adequate protection. Lansden indicates that the trustees, who had discouraged growtl1 by imposing charges for commercial use of Cairo's wharves and by offe1-ing lots only for long-term lease, not sale, now felt Loo discouraged themselves to risk investment in flood protection. Finally, tl1e trustees gave the existing levees to the city with the requirement tJ,at it also Lake over responsibility for maintaining and strengthening them-a burdensome gift, but it seemed the only real hope for Cairo's soggy citizens. Unfortunately, floods were not tJ1e only water problem. As well as running around Cairo, the great rivers also ran under it, below the sand on which the city was large ly settJed. As Lansden so

graphically desc1ibes: "In times of very high waters in the rivers, the city is much like an empty basin sunken almost to its brim. The minutest opening in the bottom of the vessel will permit a stream of water to shoot up almost to the level of the brim." At low water the seepage receded, keeping Cairo relatively free of malaria and otJ1er swamp-related diseases. But when the rivers ran high, flooding from seepage was something the levees could not prevent. Earth filling was the solution, Lansden insisted, but the city could afford it only under the streets. In the 1870s municipal efforts to finance streetfills through property assessments ran into legal problems, and as a result the city stopped interest payments on its bonds and found itself in litigation, circumstances hardly conducive to urban growth. The litany of Cairo's nineteenth-century problems includes a serious lack of good ferry facilities for commerce across the great rivers, whose breadtJ1 and absence of stable shores made them "walls or barriers," as Lansden says, rather than great sources of prosperity. Political bickering hurt as well: "In these more modern times," Lansden writes, "we often hear it enjoined upon the business and 43

Chicago History, Summer 1985 leading men in the community to get together; but in Cairo for three or four decades such an expression was never heard.'' From 1857 to 1909 the city had seventeen mayors. And in the early twentieth century its reputation as a "wide open town" grew, as an increase in saloon fees in 1909 added substantially to the annual revenues of the municipality. That same year Cairo attracted undesirable noto1-iety over the mob killing of a black man charged with rape and a white man charged with murder; the only extended notice of Cairo in Donald Tingley's substantial history of Illinois from 1899 to 1928 deals with those events. Cairo's story is, of course, not wholly negative . Lansden chronicles the creation of schools, churches, and civic organizations, the construction of some fine residences and public buildings, and the near-heroic efforts of several individuals to overcome the city's problems. And over the long haul, Cairo did not fall; it just never truly rose-except for one brief ascent during the Civil War. Within two weeks of the firing on Fort Sumter, troops mobilized in Chicago rushed south to secure Cairo. From there, the North could exert control over the two rivers and interdict the Oow of contraband south from SL Louis. Fon Defiance went up on the riverbanks as thousands of soldiers came through, eventually including captives from the campaigns to the south. General Grant set up headquarters in Cairo in 1861 and from there and related river ports launched the gunboats and troop movements that ultimately gave the Union control of Tennessee and the Mississippi River, splitting the Confederacy. Mud ran in Cairo's streets, but money ran into the pockets of its citizens. Rents rose faster than buildings, and prices of goods went up faster yet. As Lansden says, " ... Cairo having become a great military station and depot, money soon began to make its appearance in a way never dreamed of by any one in the town, nor, for that matter, by any of the somewhat visionary founders of the place." Among the merchant suppliers of federal troops was flour-miller Charles A. Galigher, who built Magnolia Manor after the war, furnished it lavishly, and entertained ex-President Grant there in 1880. That seems clearly the high point of the whole history of Cairo. And that-the fine house, the grand furnishings, Civil War mementos, and the room where Grant slept-is what is preserved and 44

Abrrue: Fi.I me a ndfortune came lo Cairo when ii became a Umon staging point during 1/U' Civil War. Here Ulysses S. Gran/ poses infronl of /he post office. Below: During /he Civil W-tr gunboats were a common sight at Cairo. Control of the lower Mississippi was key to the norlhem strategy of splillmg th,, Confederacy and winning Lhe war.

Cairo and Chicago exhibited by Cairo's historical society. It may seem harsh to use the trials and tribulations of this much-suffering city to advance a mere speculation; but how much clearer it seems in Cairo than in, say, Chicago, that the role of historical societies may be to celebrate success; not "the fall" but the memorable "rise," even when it was momentary. That hardly goes far enough, however, to make satisfying sense of the matter. Another kind of historical perspective is still necessary. Or so it seemed, at least, on another trip, when I had a chance to sit in Lincoln Park, gazing out at the vastness of Lake Michigan, with the great city of Chicago and the Chicago Historical Society behind me. What actually is the history of such grander societies in such historically more successful American cities? Are they just big Magnolia Manors? In 1791, only a dozen years after George Rogers Clark had told Thomas Jefferson why he couldn't put a fort on the site of Cairo, the war against the British had been won, a new nation was in place with a constitution, and the Reverend Jeremy Belknap and some friends established the Massachusetts Historical Society, the country's first. Its purposes were patriotic: The records of the formation of so hopeful and proud a nation should be gathered. The preserved material would "mark the genius, delineate the manners, and trace the progress of society in the United States," a statement implying that the "rise" would continue. Today, the Massachusetts Historical Society continues to concentrate on manuscript collections and publications about the Founding Fathers and the formative era. It is not a city historical society, but it set patterns they have followed, at least in part. The New-York Historical Society and others in the East soon emulated the Massachusetts model, tending away from urban concerns in favor of more general history. As the new nineteenth-century citi~s blossomed west of the Alleghenies, so did scores of historical societies, each concerned with its own city. By the centennial of the American Revolution, at least seventy-eight historical societies existed, including local or urban organizations. Major examples of the latter emerged in the river and lake cities of the upper Midwest. Cincinnati, which had become "the economic colossus of Inland America" by 1850, enticed the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio to

move south from Columbus to the Queen City in 1849, where it merged with the fledgling Cincinnati Historical Society and eventually took that name. Through the years the Cincinnati Historical Society grew with the city, a continuing expression of civic pride. Other cities showed a similar pattern. The birth of the Chicago Historical Society in 1856 coincided with Chicago's emergence as the world's largest railroad center and reflected a desire by citizens to chronicle the city's meteoric rise. The rise of BuffaJo, ew York, to prominence came with the completion of the Erie Canal, which made the city an entrepot of western commerce and a center of emigration westward. In 1862 fonner President Millard Fillmore and other prominent citizens decided the city should protect its records and founded what is now the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society. Cleveland's historical society was founded as the Western Reserve Historical Society in 1867 after the city had grown prosperous during the Civil War years. The twentieth century has seen the emergence of strong, multi-faceted urban historical societies in relatively young metropolitan areas of the South and the West. The museums of the Dallas H istorical Society (1922), the Atlanta Historical Society ( 1926), the San Diego Historical Society ( 1928), the Historical Association of Southern Florida in Miami (1940), and the Harris County Heritage Society in Houston (1954) are aJI in various stages of development. But whatever their particular characteristics, all such places owe much to the sense that their proud subject matter is "on the rise." In some, such as Denver, San Francisco, St. Louis, Salt Lake City, and Indianapolis, the presence of state capitals or state hist01ical organizations tended to encourage state societies dealing with both state and city history. In others, such as Oakland, Phoenix, New Orleans, and Charleston, museum organizations centered on municipal history. The role of historical societies, I had speculated, has been to celebrate cities' successes. Indeed they themselves appear to be expressions of urban success. Their collections may assert accomplishment and document achievement, but so did their very creation. They came into being as part of the rise of their cities. Trying to stand outside history, they also have been part of it. But is the historical society's role changing? In fact, in the larger, more mature urban societies, has it already substantially changed? More than 45

Chicago History, Summer 1985 one urban historical society today, under the influence of the "new social history" flourishing in academe, is expanding its role to show what city life was like for ordinary citiz.ens, and to consider whether a city's rise was always, for everyone, an unmixed blessing. The Peale Museum in Baltimore, an urban historical society with photographic and print collections as well as artifacts, features an important exh ibition on row houses that exemplifies this trend. Baltimore's row houses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had accommodated successive waves of immigrants drawn to the opportunities for work concentrated around the city's harbor. With the dawning of the commuter age, streetcars and then automobiles made it possible to live farther from w01-k. As subU1-bs began to sprawl, row houses were adapted to satisfy the desires for more space and comfort and increased individuality in one's home. By tracing the evolution of the Baltimore row house, this exhibition convey not only the history of architecture and home furnishings, but also the story of a way of life and a pattern of aspirations. By continuously re-examining both past and present values, historical legitimacy is subjected to a constant scrutiny. Not long ago, in Birmingham, Alabama, I had the opportunity to visit two very diffe1-ent kinds of historic sites. One was Arlington, described as "Birmingham's last remaining Greek Revival antebellum home." The other, the newly opened site of the restored Sloss Furnaces, producers of pig iron for almost ninety years, now serves "as a monument to the thousands who have worked in Birmingham industry." Both sites are now under the contro l of the city of Birmingham, but both have received attention from the Birmingham Historical Society, which has additionally taken an interest in the preservation of historic buildings downtown. The work has not gone on without controversy between those who associate history with the glory of the Old South and those who contend that the "New South's" industrial and urban development also is legitimate history. In more than one urban community, the historical society's ro le has come to include defining historical value, and-an even stranger concept-providing a kind of value mediation. Sometime earlier I also visited the new museum of the Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society in Indiana. Exhibitions there took me from the geographical history of that city's region through 46

Magnolia Manor is now a historic ho1~~e museum maintained by the Cairo Hiwrical. Association. Ulysses S. Grant mue slept here. Photograph by Mike Coles.

various phases of its human past into considerations of what its future might have been but wasn't. In every era, without taking simple sides, the exhibition forced thoughtful questions rather than presenting pat notions of the way to interpret things. Did the early pioneers destroy as well as build? What concepts of "the good" governed them in both? What have we gained or lost in consequence of the victory of their values? Conflicts in values continued to seem visible in certain exhibitions of industrial and social histo1 While one focusing on costumes flaunted fi-111 finery, another acknowledged the gowns and ments of Indiana's Ku Klux Klan. The 1m history of a suppres ed black com mu nit} hen visible only when one pushed a butlon that " vated a slide projector on a blank white wall. maps showing different development plans j.>I posed at different times for Fort Wayne left one contemplating what, for better or for wor e, the city might have become had any one of them actually been adopted. From such experiences I've begun to imagine that historical societies by their historical nature tend to evolve from simple celebrants of their communities into intellectuaJ battlegrounds. Take a simple

Cairo and Chicago

Above: Tiz,, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society is today housed in what was originally the New lvrk State Building al the Pan-American Exposition of 190 1. Below: "Looking al Rowhouses"Jrom the Peale Museum's Rowhouse: A Baltimore Style of Living exhibition.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 but familiar example. Historical societies that originally developed in tandem with grand buildings in their cities have in the last few decades taken to the streets in historic preservation fights to save those same buildings from the developer's wrecking ball. Having once celebrated such visible symbols of urban success, how could historical societies fail to defend them and the historical associations and architectural values embodied in them? In such struggles we often say the historical character and identity of our cities is at stake, not just architecture . Even maintaining a collection from the past is to assert the continuing value of what it represents. But there the mediation role comes in, because we also ask new questions of objects and documents, applying new values and present attitudes in such areas as race relations, labor conditions, environmental protection, military posture, and social status. Should American Indian religious artifacts be exhibited? Was southern antebellum culture really admirable? Was the row house as historically important as Fort McHenry? Did Fort Wayne's civic leaders make the right choices among plans? The assertion of the continued validity of certain past values on the one hand and reassessment of the past in light of present values on the other-these are defining and mediating roles within communities. I think they are major roles of mature historical societies. But what happens to such societies when cities cease to rise? Aren't there fewer preservation battles where there is no growth? Aren't there fewer new questions where new groups are not aniving or arising to disturb a settled citizenry? How much conflict is there to mediate in tl1e absence of significant change? If not growing and changing, would urban centers need, or be able to support, historical societies? Back in Cairo, I think of the question once posed so grandiloquently by Timothy Walker, a founder of what became the Cincinnati Historical Society: Imagine, for a moment, all records of past events obliterated. Retain all other books and monuments, but let those of history be erased, expunged, annihilated-and then look around you. You see the fleeting present; you dimly guess, perhaps, at the doubtful future; but the PAST-the fixed, the mighty, the instructive past-what is it? All blank oblivion. Behind you stretches a dark, unknown interminable gulf, which utterly severs you from the elder world. Across its still and sullen waters

Children pose ato/J a river levee near Cairo, c. 1905.

there comes no welcome voice, Lo greet you as brethren of the great human family which has passed away.

Lansden writes in his book of rescuing papers from a courtl1ouse barrel , but laments the loss of many others: "we have not much reliable information" on pans of Cairo's past. The public library now has much of what there is. As for historic sites and structures, some remain besides Magnolia Manor. But the 1949 American Guide volume on tl1e Lake States speaks of Cairo's historic "Ohio Street," which "was once noisy with traders, steam boatmen, and travelers of all kinds," and is "now lined with deserted taverns, warehouses, and stores ...." Today, much of Ohio Street fronts on gaping vacant lots. The silence that struck me at the historical society's house that day resurfaces somehow with renewed force. Indeed I have not come to Cairo at the right time historically. I return to the point to watch the rivers flow and mingle. And I muse

Cairo and Chicago

again over Walker's lines about the interminable gulf and the still and sullen waters: "Imagine for a moment, all records of past events obliterated ... :' I fear what happens to history when cities rise no more.

For Further Reading On Cairo, the reader can tum to John M. Lansden, A History of the City of Cairo, Illinois (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976), and on historical societies to Walter Muir Whitehill, Independent Historical Societies (Boston: The Boston Athenaeum, 1962). Insight into the Mississippi and Ohio valley regions can be had in George and Ellen Laycock, The Ohio Valley: Your Guide to Americas Heartland (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1983); John Drury, Old Illinois Houses(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977); Donald F. lingley, The Structuring of a State: The History of Illinois, 1899-1928 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980); Henry G. Alsberg, et al, eds., The American Guide: The Lake States

(New York: Hastings House, 1949); and \.\,alter Havighurst, Ohio: A Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton and Company and the American Association for State and Local History, 1976). Louis Leonard Tucker's "Cleo Comes to the Old Northwest," The Cincinnati Historical Society Bulletin, 38 (Winter 1980, 221-32) tells of the beginnings of one of the region's oldest cultural institutions. Harold N. Mayer and Richard C. Wade's Chicago: Growth of a Metropolis (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1969) tells of its greatest city. The author is also grateful to the following individuals for information provided: George Rollie Adams, Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society; Ellsworth Brown and Timothy Jacobson, Chicago Historical Society;John W. Crain, Dallas Historical Society; Barry Dressel, the Peale Museum; Richard R. Esparza, San Diego Historical Society; William C. Griggs, Harris County Heritage Society; Michael C. Hawfield, Allen County-Fort Wayne Historical Society; Randy F. Nimnicht, Historical Association of Southern Florida;John H. Ott, Atlanta Historical Society; Gale E. Peterson, Cincinnati Historical Society; Theodore Anton Sande, Western Reserve Historical Society; and Marjorie White, Birmingham Historical Society.

MOSfCHICACOANSare familiar with the Loop's famous sculptures. Whether we despise or delight in them , Picasso's, Calder's, Miro's, Nevelson's, and Ferrari's works have so startled and intrigued us with their formal modernism-not to mention their scalethat we cannot help but be aware of them. But there is an older body of sculpture in Chicago not as well known, even though the sculptors were eminent artists of their day who captured more than their share of attention in tum-of-the-century Paris salons. Their works constitute a discrete body of sculpture devoted to realistic DÂˇeatment of the human form. They reflect an important development in American history, a time when Americans began to realize that they had the potential for more than just agricultural, industrial , and commercial success, tl1at the nation could express itself artistically as well. Lorado Taft(l860-1936) worked at a time when Chicago was energetically awakening to art. Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Daniel Chester French are probably the best-known sculptors of this period, followed by Frederick MacMonnies, Bela Lyon Pratt, and CyrusDallin. All five are represented in Chicago's collection of public sculpture. Like them, Taft eagerly sought a truly American art, and nowhere did he wish more to see such art nurtured than in Chicago. Based in the city most of his life, he left behind some 140 sculptures, many of tl1em standing in Chicago today as cautionary reminders of a.notller time and anotller art to a city and a society tllat too readily discard tlleir past. Therein lies a great part of Taft's appeal. By bridging the gap between ourselves and our forebears, his sculpture, in its own quiet way, restores some sense of who we are collectively. Lorado Taft was born in Elmwood, Illinois, tile son of Don Carlos and Mary Taft. His father was a minister in addition to being the principal of tile local high school. His mother was, amongotller things, "a finn champion of women's suffrage, and as a small boy, Lorado saw his little mother march ing sturdily up in big meetings to stand in front with the forward-looking women who wanted to vote:' So writes Lorado's wife, Ada Bartlett Taft, in her biography of her husband. Taft himself said of his mother that her "love for art and all tl1ings beautiful is interwoven with my earliest memories." In 1871 the family moved to Champaign, where Patrick Reynolds is a free-lance writer.

"Fra Lorado," Chicago's Master Sculptor By Patrick Reynolds

Bringing beauty to the commercial city has long been a concern of Chicago artists. Lorado Taft's public sculptures are some of the most ambitious to grace the city.

Taft in his studio, 192-1. Model for The Fountain of the Great t~1kes stands in the background.

Chicago History, Summer 1985 Taft's father was to teach geology at the newly founded University of Illinois. The environment proved to be perfect for nurturing Lorado's early artistic ambitions. He recalled that when he was fourteen, Robert Gregory, the first president of the university, gave a lecture on sculpture "illustrated with stereopticon views more beautiful than I have ever seen since. The enthusiasm of the speaker made my blood tingle! Nothing had ever so appealed to me. A new heaven and a new earth were opened up to my imagination. Unconsciously that night settled my fate." Soon after, Gregory toured Europ~ assembling sculpture to form a collection of "real art" that he could bring to the people of the prairies. Unfortunately, most of the sculpture was shattered in transport. Gregory and his close friend Don Carlos Taft set to the work of repairing them with young Lorado eagerly assisting. Taft attended the University of Illinois, receiving both his B.A. and M.A. there. By the age of nineteen he was determined to attend the Ecole des Beaux-,Arts in Paris, which offered the finest training in sculpture to an American of his generation. America's first generation of serious sculptors had been trained in Rome and Florence, bastions of neoclassicism, which idealized the human body in images of ultimate beauty and artistic perfection. But by 1879 the Italian studios were eclipsed by those in Paris, where a kind of sculptural romanticism-marked by naturalism and always concerned with the expressive potential of the human form-was in full bloom. This approach dominated sculpture through the 1890s, and only when the powerful tides of modernism were set in motion by Rodin did this romantic Beaux-Arts style begin to wane. Departing for Paris in 1880, Taft carried a letter of introduction to New York sculptorjohn]. Boyle, creator of The A/,arm (1884), one of Chicago's earliest public monuments, located just north of the Diversey Gun Club in Lincoln Park. Taft soon met Augustin Dumont, head of Boyle's studio at the Beaux-Arts, who told him how to obtain his admission card to the academy. Taft then bought from Boyle, who was leaving for America, a bed, table, and chair; and so equipped, he began his Parisian education in Dumont's studio. Parisian life suited him adequately enough. He struck up several friendships and admired firsthand the work of a few favorite artists. But he was a bit suspicious of Parisian morals, which were, in the words of Mrs.

Taft, "a perplexing revelation to the prairie boy." Eventually he managed to accept the French on the grounds that "Though sensual, they are generous; though principleless, are kindhearted; they would do anything bad to please themselves and anything good to please a friend." To one thing we can be sure he gave much thought while in Paris: Illinois. His letters make this quite clear: How we [Taft and a friend named Bringhurst] do discuss the art prospects of the west! One would think that the entire responsibility rested with us. He is very publicspirited, and together we shall concoct some great schemes for the esthetic redemption of the prairie states.

Taft spent three years in the Ecole des BeauxArts and after a short interim at home went back to Paris for a year's study on his own. Chicago then claimed him; he settled there in 1886, a decade after Louis Sullivan, another Ecole des BeauxArts graduate, had made Chicago his home. The same conditions that helped foster Sullivan's rise to fame prevailed during much of Taft's early career. The effects of the Panic of 1873 had abated by 1878, and the boom that followed was just underway when Taft arrived. Wealthy Chicagoans in the late 1880s were willing to finance works of public sculpture, so that by the mid-decade their civic-minded munificence made possible Boyle's The A/,arm, Ernst Rau's Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1886), Augustus SaintGaudens's Abraham Lincoln (the standing Lincoln, 1887), and Saint-Gaudens's and Frederick MacMonnies's Storks at P/,ay (the Bates Fountain, 1887). At first Taft concentrated on portrait busts, many of them commissioned by admirers of Civil War heroes. Others he did simply because he enjoyed modeling his friends and acquaintances. He taught at the new art school ofThe Art Institute of Chicago, became known in artistic circles, and generally began to make his way. But it was the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893 that gave Lorado Taft-along with many other American sculptors, painters, and architects-the opportunity he craved. The portion of the fair that fell to him was the Horticulture Building, whose main entrance he flanked with two elaborate sculpted groups: The Sleep ojlhe Flowers ( 1892) and The Awakening of the Flowers ( 1892). Art critic James pencer Dicker on, writing in The Graphic, found them among the best sculptures in the entire fair, praising them for "a fragrance of enti-

"Fra Lorado"

The Sleep of the Flowers, seen lu!re in progress in the Horticulture Building of the Worlds Columbian Exposition, was cast only in plaster and does not survive.

ment and poetry which cannot but effect even the most stolid-a fragrance which suggests the flowers and the garden." Sadly it is hard to judge for ourselves. Cast in nothing more permanent than the light staff (a mixture of plaster and straw) used for most of the fair's sculpture, both of the works were lost in the fire and ensuing demolition that ended the White City. However, photographs of The Sleep of lhe Flowers and The Awakening of the Flowers give us a clear idea of what they were like. Perhaps most noticeable are their Beaux-Arts qualities: crisp, precise modeling and an almost academic attention to detail. Taft would later call such details "nonessentials," and their subordination eventually became one of his fundamental goals as a sculptor. Taft remained in Chicago after the fair, teaching at the Art Institute, in the hope that the aesthetic success of the exposition would make Chicago into an important art center. From his studio in the Fine Arts Building on Michigan Avenue he continued his work, exhibiting frequently at the Art Institute as well as in fairs and shows across the country. Taft also increased his lecturing and writing activities, which were to remain an important part of his life. He covered the Paris Exposition of ,1900 for the Chicago Inter Ocean, and eventually lee-

tured in every state of the Union except Florida. Especially well known was his "Clay Talk," in which he demonstrated the process of sculpting with modeling clay. He is said to have given this talk 1,500 times. From these lecturing experiences and his intense desire to educate Americans in matters of art came his History of American Sculpture (1903). The book was the first of its kind, and it is still a useful volume for the student of American sculpture. Another publication, Modem Tendencies in Sculpture (1921), evolved from a series of lectures given at the University of Chicago. Lecturing, writing, and sculpting were not the only means by which Taft shaped American art Hamlin Garland in his Daughter of the Middle Border gives the following account of Taft's studio in the Atheneum Building on Van Buren Street: Here a room had been fitted up with shelf-like bunks that were filled nearly every night with penniless sculptors, several of whom have since become famous. Mr. Taft was an easy mark in those days, a shining hope to all the indigent models and discouraged painters. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty.

Though Hamlin Garland may not have been the most objective observer-Taft was his father-inlaw-his description of the sculptor's generosity 53

Chicago History, Summer 1985 coincides with that of many others who knew Taft But if Lorado Taft was generous, he was also exacting when it came to his art. He was as much at odds with the neoclassicism that preceded him as he was with modernism, which eventually supplanted him and his kind. The dispassionate tone, rigid expression, and inevitable distance of neoclassicism made it a dead form to him , and in his criticism he urged American sculptors to leave behind the poses and costumes of Greece and Rome. Such forms could not bear the emotional weight he sought to express. Of American sculpture's neoclassical period, roughly 1830 to 1876, he wrote that it was alien and impersonal, expressing in no way the spirit of the people nor even the emotions of its authors. The lyric strain was almost unknown; our sculptors were executants, not composers. They thought that they were doing original work, but with most of them it was mere rean·angement and recitation by rote.

Rejecting the stiffness of neoclassicism, he nevertheless remained faithful enough to the conservative principles of Beaux-Arts instruction to avoid the kind of experimental sculpture that was rife by the end of the century. As his style matured he grew away from the detailed , academic precision of the Beaux-Arts and developed a broader, more monumental approach. But his departure from tradition was a controlled one. A modernist he could never be. His feelings about modem art were made clear in his response to the 1913 International Exhibition of Modem Art, more commonly known as the Armory Show. Held first in the Sixty-ninth Regiment Armory in ew York, then in Boston and Chicago, the show introduced the American public to some of the most stylistically aggressive European artists of the era, including Braque, Picasso, Duchamp, Kandinsky, and Brancusi. Taft called the sculptures prevalent at the show "puerile effronteries of harlequins, delighting through their very ineptitude a public avid of new sensations." Of Rodin, perhaps the most important early catalyst in sculpture's turn toward modernism, Taft was at first appreciative. But the later work he saw as gratuitously eccentric, and he deplored Rodin's effect on younger sculptors. Caught chronologically between what he felt was neoclassic frigidity and modern excess, Taft remained true to his own artistic urgings throughout his long and productive life. Some fault him for his 54

coolness to the modern movement But it may be fairer to think of him as one of his few biographers does. "It is possible," writes Lewis Williams, "to challenge the traditions and goals for which he strove, but the consistent and tasteful way in which he represented them still would be enviable. Taft was not a genius. He was a good sculptor:' ln his first attempt to construct a public fountain , a kind of sculpture that intrigued Taft, it seems he underestimated the prudery of his fellow Chicagoans. Still, it was an enjoyable and useful exercise fo1· Taft and his students, and it bears relating as a good example of the kind of public interact.ion on which he tJ1rived. Deeming a fountain a good practice project for his students, he set his class the task of creating one shortly before commencement day, June 16, 1899, at the School of the Art Institute. They produced ten nude fem ales, 7½ feet in height, disporting themselves in the water, splashing each other and laughing. Some of the public did not laugh. The newspapers inform us that Big Harry, the police officer on duty on Michigan Avenue, muttered, "If somebody don't put a screen about them famales [sic] 1'11 resign ; that I will, beclad." Chief Clerk Cobb of the Leland Hotel was so scandalized after his first glimpse that he ordered all the curtains pulled down on the side of the building facing the fountain. Mrs. Susanna M. D. Fry, national secretary of the Women's Christian 'Temperance Union, questioned the employment of nymphs in public works of art. Observing that in mythology nymphs were not exactly renowned for their intellectual virtues, she feared that their sculpted presence on Michigan Avenue was "rather for the sake of nudity than for the sake of art:' And bicycle accidents were reportedly numerous on account of the "e ntrancing vision." There were also admirers. By nine o'clock in the morning (Taft and his students had erected the figure during the night so as to provide a little surprise for the commencement exercises) Ule fountain was surrounded by a crowd six feet deep. And though the Leland's curtains were drawn in disgust, Chief Clerk Keely oftJie Victoria was so delighted that he stood on the sidewalk and gazed at the fountain through field glasses. The overall response was favorable, including that of Mayor Henry Carter Harrison, Jr., whose reaction was reported thus, likely with some license, by the Tri.bune: The sun was low in the west when the mayor anived,

"Fm L orado"

1i_ifl and his model a/Fo untain of Crearion. Onlyfom figu res were completed before his death in 1936 and can be seen today on the campus of the l 'niversity of Illinois in Urbana.

and it s gold e n light te mpe red th e sta rin g white o f th e he ro ic plaste r fi gures. It me llo\\'e d th e ex press ion o f th e nymph s, a nd th ey appea red at the ir best wh e n th e mayo r h o pped o ff his wh ee l a nd tipped his h at forward , to steady his visu al aim , whil e h e scrutini1 ed th e m . Afte r his fi1Âˇst lo ng a nd uninte rrupted loo k h e smil e d , as if h e were amused. Th e n h e shifted his viewpo int a nd studi ed th e gro up aga in . Afte r h e had surveyed th e sce ne fro m bo th sides h e ve ntured an a rt o pinio n. It was tha t th e nymph in tJ1 e bac kgro und , with o ne foo t o n a roc k a nc! he r ha nd s o n he r kn ee, was a bea utiful a nd we ll -posed figure .

H oweve r we ll p osed th e fi gures m ay have been, th e fo unta in was no t p e rm a n e nt. In Ta ft's mind it was a n e xe rcise, a c h a n ce to ske tch o ut in th e ro ugh a fount a in group fo r th e so uth e nd o f th e An Institute. It was a lso use ful for his stude nts. Th a t h e co nsid ered a ll C hicagoa n his stude nts is m ad e clear by his fin al re m a rks o n th e fo untain :

"If o ur plaste r creations serve to set pe ople to ta lking a nd thinking ... to discussing, to considering a rt in any way, to recognizing the possibilities o f bea uty in a commercial city, they will repay again." He e nvisioned other works of ideal sculpture sca tte red near the museum. "Wh a t a lesson it wo uld be in compa ri son , wha t a training in a pprecia tio n ! With such a ids, beauty might come to m ean so m e thing to the toil e rs, a nd in time we wo uld cease asking que rulousl y, What's the use?" A d ecad e and a half later Taft finall y saw a pe rma ne nt fountain erected in virtually the same spot, th e courtya rd so uth of th e Art Institute. It was The Fountain of the Great Lakes (]91 3), the first wo rk o f sculpture fin a nced by the Fe rguson Fund , a milli o n d o lla r trust set up in 1905 to erect public sculpture in C hi cago. Shortly afte r its unveiling, th e Architectural Record called it "th e first purely 55

Chicago History, Summer 1985

"Fra Lorado"

Lefl: Taft at work in his studio, /9/3. Above: Details from The Fountain of the Grear Lakes, representing Su/Jerior (!ÂŁfl) and Ontario.

ideal work erected in the New World, unsurpassed in American sculpture." The Fountain of the Great Lakes is indeed one of Taft's finest creations. Though upon unveiling it faced due south from the southernmost wall of the original Art Institute structure, it was later moved to an equally lovely setting, facing west along the museum's Morton Wing. This offwhite backdrop accentuates the silhouettes of five graceful female figures, each representing one of the Great Lakes. The work draws the eye high in the air, where its overall theme-giving-is symbolized by the water poured from Superior's shell into the outstretched hand of Ontario near the base. These two dominant gestures create a pleasing balance as the figures between them perform a series of motions, their expressions anxious, maternal, and se1ious. They are serious because Taft is serious in the poetry of his forms, expressing his own subjective response to the wonder of the Great Lakes. He admires the transport they afford , their beauty, their breezes, their bounty, and his response is a bronze idealization of these qua lities. The group also displays what Taft called the two

"precious qualities" of sculpture: "The incisive characterization, that intensity of life which unmasks the very soul, and-almost equally important in a great work of art-a masterly subordination of non-essentials." The figure of Ontario-concerned, anxious, yearning-shows how spiritually intense Taft can be in his work. As for the subordination of nonessentials, in The Fountain of the Great Lakes Taft has eliminated complications of costume to draw attention to facial expression and gesture. The flat surfaces of the dresses also help lift the figures into the realm of the ideal, for there is no parti cular era or age which could claim such garb as its own. It is mysterious and transcendent. Intent as Taft was on themes of the New World, it was inevitable that he should turn to the American Indian as a source of inspiration. In this he was not alone among his contempora1ies-for proof we need look no further than Chicago's The Al,arm; A Signal of Peace (1890), by Cyrus Dall in; or The Sun Vow and Jacques Marquette Monument(l926), both by Hem1on Mac Neil. But Taft went after the theme as few ever have, as the forty-three-foot behemoth that he placed high atop a limestone bluff overlooking

Chicago History, Summer 1985 the Rock River near Oregon, Illinois, still testifies. Called Black Hawk , it memorializes one of the last chiefs to wage war in defense of ancestral lllinois land . The monument was placed on the bluff largely because Taft and an assortment of sculptors, painters, writers, musicians, and various friend and acquaintances spent their summers at an artists' colony nearby. His motive was characteristically straightforward. The monument grew out of his interest in and respect for the famous Indian chief. He built it simply because he wamed to and was paid nothing for it. He wamed the monument to be visible for miles around, but such prominence was possible only by making a sculpture of colossal proportions. A project of such magnitude raised some interesting structural problems. Bronze was too costly for Black Hawk , but Taft thought concrete rnight work. (He remembered that concrete statues had been found in the ruins of the Roman Palatine, good evidence of its durability.) He was more convinced when he observed two fifty-foot concrete chimneys being constructed for the heating plant of the Art Institute. If engineers could manage that, then surely they could manage a statue of similar height. So he decided on concrete as the material for Black Hawk, even though he was, in his wife's words, "happily ignorant" of the engineering problems involved. These he left to friends like John Prasuhn and Leland Summers, engineers who were generous enough to assist. Arms crossed beneath the massive folds of a long robe, his noble face intently peering down river as if in search of a lost nation , the image of Black Hawk is an inspiring sight. Completed 111 1911, the statue's massiveness was described 111 detail in a 1924 issue of Western Architect: Its foundations go down 15 feet to solid rock into which the steel reinforcing rods extend two feet. It required two tons of twisted steel reinforcing bars, 238 cubic yards of concrete, twenty tons of pink granite screenings for the surface, 65,000 gallons of river water pumped to the concrete mixing machines, 412 barrels of PortJand cement and two steam boilers for heating the interior while the cast was made-the weather being around 0 at the Lime of casting. It took just ten days and nights to make the final cast. The head and shoulders alone weigh 30 tons.

When he tackled Black Hawk, Taft had for some time been headquartered, artistically at least, in a studio on the Midway Plaisance,just south of the University of Chicago. It eventually numbered

1afl 's forty-three-foot statue of Chief Black Hawk required an elaborate plaster and frame mold that received 265 tons of concrete. The head was cast separately in t/11' studio and attached late,:

Âˇ'Fra Lorado" thirteen separate tudios that served about twenty sculptors, tudents, and assistants. Here all worked and lived in a spirit of cooperation, sometimes refeJTing to Taft as "Fra Lorado" because of his resemblance to a Renaissance master suJTounded by his aspirants. It was on the Midway Plaisance that Taft planned his greatest sculptural scheme. He had visions of turning the nearly mile-long double boulevard into a sculpture park. Down the center would run a canal spanned by three b1idges: the Bridge of Arts, the Bridge of Sciences, and the Bridge of Religions. Adorning the canal would be statues of the world's great idealists and thinkers. At the east end of the canal would be the Fountain of Creation, a n ideal sculpture based on the Greek myth of Deucalion and Py1Tha, whose tale is reminiscent of Noah's. Having survived their flood , they stand atop Mount Parnassus and ask the oracle how to repopulate the earth. The oracle instructs them to throw over their shoulders the bones of their mother, which they interpret to mean stones. From the ground crude human fonns begin to rise. The poet HaJTiet Monroe describes Taft's conception: Mr. Taft shows us the moment when these stones ... are changing into men and women, rising out of the clog and flood and fog into life and light. The composition begins with creatures half formed, vague, prostrate, blindly e me rging from the shapeless rock; continues, at a higher leve l of the mountain crest, with figures fully developed and almost erect, but still groping in darkness, struggling, wondering; and reaches its climax with a group at the summit, of beings complete and glorious, saluting the dawn.

Taft described the work as "the evolution of man from a clod to something exalted." Especially noteworthy in Fountain of Creation is Taft's depiction of the daughter of Pyrrha who crouches with hands clasped over her head. The heroic size emphasizes the travail of her mythic birth. The forearms and fingers, even more noticeably huge, are raised in a fearful gesture that accentuates the teJTible mystery of it all. Unfortunately, Fountain of Creation was never completed as planned , though Taft worked on it from about 1909 until his death in 1936. Four of the figures, however, were completed: two stand at the south entrance to Urbana's University of Illinois Library, and two at the entrance to the auditorium on the same campus. Together they show just how far Taft eventually strayed from the detailed, academic Beaux-Ans approach. Perhaps 59

Chicago Hi.story, Summer 1985

"Fra Lorado "presides at th;, noon rnealwith stUllents and assistants in his Midway Studio at the UniversityofChirago. 7'lzeShaler Memorial Angel looks on.

the theme itself, the human form swelling up from the very earth, dictated the rough-hewn treatment. But whatever the motive, it is clear from the sketches of the complete work and the four figures in Urbana that Taft's more mature work verges much closer on modern expression than earlier works. They suggest a willingness to experiment. Though Fountain of Creation never saw completion, Taft's Fountain of Time (]922), an unforgettable burst of sculpture at the west end of the Midway Plaisance, was the one element of his grand Midway scheme that did become a reality. Taft called it "my greatest work-my best thought:' Fountain of Time, like Black Hawk, is a fascinating collaboration of artist and engineei: To erect this major sculpture, 14 feet deep, 120 feet long, and 17 feet high, Taft relied on the building skills of John Joseph Early. Early had developed a system of pouring concrete which brought the aggregate particles to the surface rather than the gray cement

paste which adhered the aggregate particles together. Perhaps even more important, Early's mixture was fluid enough to pour into the farthest recesses of a complicated mold like the one required for Fountain of Time. Without Early's concrete, the sculpture could not ha,Âˇe been built. Today the piece is as impressive as ever despite the need for some repairs now being considered by the Ferguson Fund Committee, the group responsible for its original construction and continued maintenance. A knowledgeable engineer who has studied it thoroughly says "it will outlive us all." Containing !03 separate figures, the final version was unveiled on ovember 15, 1922. But in February of 1921 Taft erected a machette of the group to test public response. Many considered it too somber and obsessed with thoughts of death. Taft responded to these charges in a brief address to the crowd gathered at the unveiling of his model, saying, "I am trying to portray mystery-the mystery of life in which we are all involved."

"Fra Lorado" Rruntain ojTirnÂŁ, based on a couplet by the English poet Austin Dobson, "Time goes, you say? Ah, no/ Alas, time stays; we go," is among Taft's most poetic works. In it the sculptor conveys his own sense of the onward sweep of humanity, a process Taft imagines as wave-like. No doubt, as many have suggested, his proximity to and fondness for Lake Michigan had a powerful influence on his vision . In lending the human body such an aqueous fonn the sculptor says much about the uncertainties of existence. Even the lovers are suffused with son-ow and never stand to face each other, for the hooded and ominous figure of Time controls their destinies. Yet their role is crucial, as Taft himself indicated: "Then more lovers; lovers all along the way to keep things moving." Had Taft's Midway plan been executed in its entirety, it would have been unique in American sculpture; a fitting expression of what might be called the Chicago mentality, that strange mixture of immense ambition and envy of the East's cultural distinctions. It was this mentality that gave the world the skyscraper; that prompted Chicago to wrest the 1893 world's fair from the hands of the more established eastern cities; and that turned that fair into a riot of bigness for its own sake. The scale of Taft's Midway plan reveals the influence of this Chicago ethos. But more than being unique and expressive of its time and place, the completed Midway would have been wonderfully cyclical. The crouching, earth-born children of Pyn-ha eventually do reach the light. They then move through the centuries buoyed up by various idealisms, catching at religions and philosophies along the way. But in the end all are inexorably swept back into their beginnings: Pyn-ha's children rose from oblivion; in Fountain of Time, an old man greets it with outstretched arms. Taft created many pieces for Chicago sites. In the Garfield Park Conservatory companion pieces Idyll (1913) and Pastoral (1913) are at first glance light in mood and theme. "They have no great burden of significance," Taft informs us. "They represent carefree maidens and faunlike youths as they might idle and play in the forests of Arcadia." In these works we sense the lyricism that Taft in his criticism so often demanded of other sculptors. Human love is set forth in exuberant images captured in marble, the whiteness of which is accentuated by the riotous green foliage of the conservatory. Pastorafs entwining figures form a

simple tableau of spiritual oneness and harmony. In Idyll the emotions are more complex, despite what Taft may have said about it lacking any "burden of significance." There is a curiou and unresolved conflict in the movement of the young woman, for although her left arm rests upon the arm of her lover and her right arm reaches up to draw him near, she still turns away from him with her head and shoulders, and most of all with her eyes. Again, limbs entangle, but tensely. Just inside the main entrance of the Art Institute is another of Taft's marble sculptures, The Solitude of the Soul (1911). The burden of roughly hewn marble borne by the four figures bespeaks the solitude each of us must bear, and is perhaps equally symbolic of the weight of modernism pressing upon the sculptor himself. The human form, modeled with so much love, care, and awe by nineteenth-century sculptors is no longer sure of itself. It hesitates to step fully out of the stone, as if it were aware of the suspicion with which modern eyes view it. Its eye downcast, its brow and lips son-owful, it no longer confronts its audience with the serene and bold stare of its neoclassical predecessors. Graceland Cemetery provides the setting for one of Taft's better known works. Eternal Sil.ence (1909) marks the burial plot of the Dexter Graves family. This monument bears considerable similarity to Augustus Saint-Gaudens's Adams memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C., which must indeed have inspired Taft's memorial. But that in no way detracts from the beauty of the cloaked and hooded figure that so ominously guards its shiny black marble slab in Graceland. The marble's black, the bright green patina of the bronze, and the white of snow combine to create a brilliant image on a winter day. Only toward sunset does the face emerge from the shadow of the hood. Taft has striven to keep this work "white," a term he defines in Modern Tendencies in Sculpture as another way of describing the subordination of nonessentials, the suppression of dark shadows, the emphasis of the mass. Obviously this is advantageous from several points of view; not least of these being the elimination of purely realistic and insignificant details, with consequent enhancement of essentials.

The one place where deep shadows are employed is in the face, where they evoke a strong feeling of mystery. In the sculpture gardens of the Midway Studios 61

Chicago History, Summer 1985 there is a Taft piece that has never found a real home. It is known officially as the Shaler Memorial Angel, and its 01iginal bronze version is in Waupon, Wisconsin, where it has marked a tomb of the Shaler family since 1923. Chicago's version is a copy of the original authorized by Taft when Theodore C. Burgess, president of Bradley University in Peoria, requested one for the family cemetery plot. Vandalism caused its eventual removal from the grave it marked, and the monument simply sat in storage until 1969. It was then given to the University of Chicago for placement in the Midway Studios, a registered National Historic Landmark. So, back in Chicago, the Shaler Memorial Angel is now a monument to the man who created it. It reminds us of Taft's other works,

and those of confreres Daniel Chester French and Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who more or less settled on a particular female type to serve as the embodiment of whatever lyric notions laJ behind their work. But there is a wholesome, mid western quality about Taft's particular angel-the roundness of the face, tl1e cleft between lower lip and chin, the hair drawn back in a sort of bun and hovering about the head like clouds, the full and beautifully modeled breasts, the prominent nose. Ultimately this figure is the physical representation of Taft's romantic emotions and imaginings. In seeing the Shaler Memorial Angel, we are re minded of a theme his mind so often turned to, that"sounding of the human soul, questioning the future and longing for light:'

The Fou 11 ta i 11 of Ti me, completed in 1922, graces the west md of tfU' Midway Plaisance and still rookes, as Taft said it should, a considerable sense of "111yste1y."

"Fra Lorado"

This is only a portion of Taft's story, and the works mentioned merely a fraction of his total achievement In add ition to his career as an artist, he also wrote three books and about thirty-three articles for various arts journals. As a lecturer he was in constant demand. He believed that art was one of the things in life most worth living for; and he wou ld go anywhere to introduce or better acquaint people with it. In 1919 his missionary zeal even took him to France with the YMCA, where he talked about art to the American servicemen still stationed there after the ann istice. It was this almost quixotic fervor that made him such an extraordinary individual, one whose favorite quotation, from Spinoza, inspired many of his actions: "I am certain that the good of this life cannot lie in the possession of those things which for one man to possess is for others to lose, but rather in those things which all may possess al ike, and where each man's prosperity increases his neighbor's:' As a sculptor he progressed steadily over a period of about fifty years, his work evolving from the naturalistic poetry of the flower groups at the Columbian Exposition to the more monumental and less cleanly articu lated forms of Fountain of Creation. He experimented with new materials, and he eagerly collaborated with other artists and craftsmen. He learned much at the traditionbound Beaux-Arts, but before he left it, he was convinced that an artistmustbe"ofhis times,"that "The real, thinking, creating sculptors have in all times given visible expression to the trend of national life; their works are, intentionally or not, the record of the ideals of their day:' He cou ld not embrace abstraction. It seemed too frivolous, and his conception of art was more exalted than that: "I cannot think of art as a mere adornment of life-a frill on human existencebut as life itself' He and the conservative sculptors of his school were consequently passed by as fashions in the art world changed. In Fountain of Time we find an image of Taft in transit as it were: in the west face of this monumental work he has included a full length self-portrait, just as the Renaissance masters might have done. "Fra Lorado" was indeed an appropriate nickname. Taft was interested in the lyric qualities of scu lpture, be lievingthatscu lpted forms can be as expressive as the verbal forms of a poet. He was a dreamer of incredible schemes, some of which were realized whi le some were not. He was naturally disap-

pointed when plans went awry, but eventually he could write, "To be able to meet disappointment without 'souring' is something to be gratefu l for. I have fallen short of almost everything I have undertaken, but what a good time I have had in fai ling!" We may or may not admire Taft aestheticall yperhaps the stylistic chasm that yawns between the late nineteenth century and our own time is for some too great to be bridged. Others bridge it gladly, adm iring Taft and his contemporaries because, as art critic Franz Schulze has suggested, "the narratives they related and the images they wrought still communicate more meaning to the average citizen, sti ll rely more on a shared mythology, than do all the titanic abstractions that tower over whole city blocks." Schulze's remarks appear in his introduction to the recently published A Guide to Chicago '.5 Public Sculpture, a book whose cover is graced by a photograph of Taft's Fountain of Time. The legacy Taft left us is indeed a rich one, not only in terms of the "shared mythology" to which Schu lze refers but also in light of Taft's own remarks on the Chicago scu lpture that preceded his: Chicago's scu lpted memorials are comparatively few but are already sufficient to mark the changing tastes of a primitive, sturdy people. Something like the waves of our great inland seas which build and destroy, the incessant surge of the years has begun to leave upon L,ke Michigan's sandy shores its records of western enthusiasms. Such records are of profound significance. Sculpture is a difficult and expensive craft; monuments are not erected by a community without good and sufficient reason. How unfailingly expressive they are of their time-how unerringly they mark the average culture.

For Further Reading Three Taft biographies cover different aspects of his life. The classic Lorado Taft Sculptor and Citizen (Greensboro: Ma1y Taft Smith, 1946) was written by his wife Ada Bartlett Taft. Lewis Williams's unpublished dissertation for the Univers ity of Chicago, "American Scu lp tor and Art Missionary," ( 1958) is a comprehensive critical biography. Allen Weller has published the most recent study, Lorado in Paris (Urbana: University of lllinois Press, 1985). Taft's own books, The History of American Sculpture (1 ewYork:TheMacMillanCompany, 1930)anc1Modern 1endenciÂŁs in Sculpture(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1921), lend insight into his artistic ethic. On Chicago public scu lpture in general two publications stand out: Ira Bach and Mary L. Gray, A Guide to Chicago's Public SC1.tlpture (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983) and James L. Riedy, Chicago SC1.tlpture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981). 63

REVIEW ESSAY Jon C. Teaford assesses recent investigations of urban political power and new ideas about who has governed the city and for what purposes; FROM 1955 TO 1976 Chicagoans equated municipal rule with one man, Richard Daley. In the minds of many, "Boss" Daley was Chicago's city government. Compliant aldermen rubber stamped Daley's every wish, civi l servants did as the Democratic chieftain ordered, and proposals carrying His Honor's imprimatur were quickly implemented. Chicago was supposed ly the city that worked, and Daley was the man who made it work. Since Daley's death in 1976, however, Chicagoans have confronted a more complex and strife-tom scenario of urban rule. Aldermen have bolted their harnesses, and political contenders have thumbed their noses at the Democratic organization while unplowed snow has clogged the chuckho le-ridden streets of the city that formerly worked. In less than a decade the o ld system of urban rule in Chicago has disappeared as powerful executive leadership has yie lded to factionalism and stalemate. Chicago's recent experience dramatically confirms what historians have increasingly discovered about past city government in the United States as a whole. The story of urban rule is not a simple tale of boss politicians dictating appo intm ents and policy to servile stooges and loyal underlings. It does not conform to a standard plot line in city after city from one decade to the next. In tead, it is a complex story of shifting power and factionalized battles over policy. The black-and-white accounts of bosses versus reformers, once so popular, no longer satisfy those searching for the true roots of American municipal rule. Like Chicagoans, historians have realized that boss rule, factionalism , bureaucratic infighting, and pluralistic freefor-alls are all elements of the urban political tradition, and that a multitude of factors may influence the determination of public policy. Thus in recent years scholars have pushed beyond the traditional tales of powerful political bosses pulling the strings of urban rule and have

Jon C. Teaford teaches history at Purdue Univers ity.

delved deeper than the front-page stories of bribery and corruption. They have questioned longstanding assumptions and have renewed inquiry into who has governed the city and for what purposes. What was the role of chambers of commerce, real estate boards, municipal engineers, labor unions, and neighborhood associations in the government of the city? Who determined policy regarding such pedestrian but vital subjects as water, sewerage, fire and police protection, and street paving and lighting? Forty years ago in Lords of the Levee, a clas ic tale of Chicago's aldermenbosses "Bathhouse John" Coughlin and "Hinky Dink" Kenna, Herman Kogan and Lloyd Wendt revealed much about the colorful underside of the urban political tradition. But such works sketched on ly part of the picture of city government. During the past decade, a new generation of historians has embarked on less amusing but more significant investigations of the distribution of political power and the molding of public policy in the city. Coughlin and Kenna have recently attracted less attention than sober chamber-ofcommerce presidents, and attention has turned to the development of municipal services with only side glances at the corrupt ch icanery of saloonkeeping-politicians in the First Ward. Most prominent among those searching for more sophisticated answers to the question of who has governed the city are Carl V Harris and David C. Hammack. They do not assume that powerful political machines governed America's cities, challenged only occasionally by often ineffectual goodgovernment groups. That assumption was one of the bromides of journalists and popular historians. Harris and Hammack instead trace their intellectual ancestry to the work of social scientists of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1953 sociologist Floyd Hunter published an investigation of decisionmaking in Atlanta, finding local political power concentrated in the hands of the social and economic elite. Eight years later, however, Robert A. Dahl's study of tl1e distribution of political power

Review Essay in New Haven argued that power was widely dispersed and that pluralism was more characteristic of American local government than Hunter suggested. Harris and Hammack have followed in the path of these social scientists, attempting to determine from the historical evidence whether Hunter or Dahl was right. Was political power concentrated or dispersed in American cities, and who exactly exercised that power? In Political Power in Birmingham, 1871-1921, Harris offers a detailed study of Alabama's largest city. He carefully examines who influenced taxing policies, the allocation of municipal services, and decisions regarding the regulation of social and economic behavior. After dissecting Birmingham's power structure, he finally refuses to award the victor's laurel to either Hunter or Dahl. Instead, Harris offers the pallid generalization that "among the groups which found the issues highly salient, greater political success went to groups of greater economic power." A broad range of persons and groups influenced municipal policy during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But when the wealthy clashed with the less wealthy over an issue of importance to those in the upper income brackets, the wealthy generally won. Harris finds no power elite in Birmingham between 1871 and 1921. Nevertheless, money did count in the political arena. Whereas Harris contends with power in a middle-sized southern city, David Hammack in

Power and Society: Greater New York at the Tum of the Century chooses to wrestle with decision-making in the nation's greatest metropolis. Yet Hammack makes his task more manageable by limiting his examination to the years 1886 to 1903. And he focuses specifically on only four areas of controversy: the nomination of mayoral candidates, the creation of Greater 1ew York, the planning and financing of the city's first subway line, and the centralization of the public school system in Manhattan and the Bronx. A lengthy and detailed account Âˇof each of these topics reveals who exercised clout and which groups made local government policy. Like Harris, Hammack finds that many groups wielded power but the wealthy had disproportionate political capital. According to Hammack, "power was concentrated not in one or two but in several distinct economic, social, and political elites ... [which] engaged in a shifting complex of alliances ... and sometimes made impor-

tant concessions to secure the support of other elites and of wider publics." Nevertheless, "the distribution of power in Greater New York at tl1e end of the nineteenth century was considerably less dispersed than the political scientists found it to be fifty years later." Neither HatTis's Birmingham nor Hammack's ew York offer any encouragement to devotees of the power-elite school. Nor was either city a model of perfect pluralism. Readers may find these tepid conclusions less than startling and hardly worth the effort of perusing hundreds of pages of scholarly prose. But while mapping the distribution of power in New York and Birmingham, both authors uncover information of great value to students of municipal rule. Harris's chapters on municipal revenues are excellent forays into a little-explored field. Similarly, Hammack offers tl1e best published account of mayoral politics in New York and sensitively identifies the forces influencing the selection of mayoral nominees. His chapters on the creation of Greater New York, the centralization of school administration, and the planning of rapid transit also expose the realities of urban decision-making in a way unmatched by other works. Hammack's concluding chapter may not glitter with brilliance, but there are golden nuggets embedded elsewhere in his work that should enrich the minds of all students of the urban past. While Harris and Hammack endeavored to chart the power structure of the American city, a number of other historians have recently attempted to identify the forces and influences molding the evolution of individual municipal services. Like Harris and Hammack, these historians do not focus on the old tales of graft and corruption, the colorful stories of ballot-box stuffing, and the chestnuts inherited from Lincoln Steffens and his fellow muckrakers about cities prostrate before all-powerful bosses. Instead, tl1ey recognize that municipal services were significant elements in the city-building process, and that cliches about corruption and bossism will not suffice in explaining the development of municipal water supplies, sewerage systems, park networks, and public health departments. During the past decade the list of books and articles on the history of municipal public works has grown especially long. Among the leaders in this field has been Louis P Cain. In his Sanitation

Strategy for a Lakefront Metropolis: The Case of Chicago and a series of related articles, Cain describes the 65

Chicago History, Summer 1985 Windy City's struggle to achieve both adequate sewerage and a pure water supply. With freshwater Lake Michigan at its doorstep, Chicago had no difficulty locating a source of drinking water. The problem was how to dispose of the city's sewage without destroying the purity of the Lake Michigan water supply. The answer, of course, was to reverse the flow of the C~icago River and construct the Sanitary Drainage Cana.I. Cain admirably examines the various steps toward the realization of this drainage scheme, discussing the problems posed by Chicago's flat terrain and the alternatives suggested by the city's engineering staff. In marked contrast to traditional works on city government, he devotes little attention to politics. According to Cain, politics played only a small role in determining Chicago's sanitation strategy. Economics, engineering, and topography were much more significant. Unfortunately, Cain provides no comparative perspective in his study of Chicago. Though cities throughout the nation were struggling with the problems of water supply and sewerage during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cain keeps his focus fixed on Chicago and avoids the broader context. Yet there are detailed studies of urban water supplies elsewhere in the nation. Both Abraham Hoffman and William L. Kahrl have recently recounted Los Angeles's efforts to tap the water of the Owens River Valley and the significance of this scheme in the economic development of the city. In the arid West access to a distant source of water could mean the difference between success and failure for urban boosters and real estate speculators. Owens River water transformed the San Fernando Valley into a garden and quenched the thirst of the booming California metropolis. Fern L. 1esson in Great Waters: A History of Boston's Water Supply has examined the water politics of New England's hub. Unlike Los Angeles, Boston enjoyed a humid climate and abundant rainfall, but unlike Chicago it bordered on saltwater rather than freshwater. Thus Boston had to develop inland reservoirs, tapping the rivers and ponds of rural Massachusetts. The case studies of Chicago, Los Angeles, and Boston reveal the significance of differing climate and topography on the development of municipal services. In his sprawling Public Works and the Patterns of Urban Real Estate Growth in Manhattan, 1835-1894,

Eugene P. Moehring attempts to tackle the whole range of municipal public works in the nation's largest city and the relationship of public works to real estate developmenL and machine politics. Offset printed for only a small professional audience, Moehring's work probably will not have the impact of more widely circulated volumes. But his chapters on the creation of Central Park and the Croton waterworks and the consequent effect on real estate values and urban growth merit serious consideration. The task he assumes is monumental, and his courage in confronting the awesome relationship between public works, private business, and urban politics deserves applause. His achievement approaches that of Carl Condit whose two volumes, Chicago 1910-1970, describe the city-building process in tl1e Illinois metropolis. Condit does not focus exclusively on municipal works and the role of city government in creating an urban infrastructure. Yet the municipal rulers are among the actors in Condit's drama, and students of public works policy should not ignore his classic studies. Not only is the body of literature dealing with municipal works growing, so is the list of studies focusing on other local government services. During tl1e 1960s and 1970s historians produced one volume after another on the subjects of police protection and urban schooling. Both these services have been the object of harsh criticism in recent decade , and these attacks have in pired historians to examine the evolution of educational and police bureaucracies in the nation's cities. Likewise, in the wake of the recem upsurge in concern over environmental issues, historians led by Martin Melosi have begun to focus attention on the problems of waste collection and disposal and ai1~ water, and noise pollution. City governments have been trying to cope with these problems for decades, and by the 1980s scholars were beginning to examine the history of municipal efforts. John Duffy's two-volume History of Public Health in New York City surveyed tl1e development of municipal health services, and during the past decade Stuart Galishoff has followed Duffy's example by examining public health reforms in Newark at the beginning of the twentieth century. Judith W. Leavitt has authored a study on the city health department of Milwaukee. Still others have studied the evolution of municipal transportation policy. In Moving the Masses:

Review Essay

'fuming waler into the Chicago Sanita,y and Shi/1 Canal, 1900. Called the Main Channel, the twenty-eight-mile canal was designed to collect the city s sewage and cony it into the Des Plaines River and thus keep Lake Michigan, Chicago ssource of drinking water, free of pollution.

Urban Public Transit in New 'tork, Boston and Philadelphia, 1880-1912, Charles W. Cheape has described the efforts of municipal leaders to create rapid u-ansit networks in the nation's largest metropolitan areas and has shown how the city governments of New York and Boston were forced to construct underground systems when private entrepreneurs balked at the magnitude and expense of the task. Paul Barrett in The Automobile and Urban Transit: The Formation of Public Policy in Chicago has examined Chicago's transition from a streetcar city to an automobile metropolis and the role of the city government in adapting to this change in transportation technology. In From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planning and Urban Transportation, 1900-1940, Mark S. Foster has likewise surveyed public policy with regard to transportation developments of the early twentieth century. Unlike Barrett, howeve1~ Foster does not confine his study to a single city but seeks to generalize for the nation as a whole. Foster and Barrett together with Leavitt, Melosi , Cain, and Condit are producing the building blocks for a reinterpretation of city government. These students of public policy together with Carl Ha1Tis, David Hammack, and others concerned witJ1 community power are clearly moving away from the traditional perspectives on urban rule. Each is moving beyond tJ1e urban political histories of bosses and reformers. Each recognizes the need for a broader, more sophisticated under-

standing of the evolution of city government and public policy. Thus the foundation is growing, and yet the edifice remains unbuilt. We are increasingly knowledgeable about the distribution of power in the city and the formulation of public policy with regard to urban transportation, health, water supply, and sewerage. Now historians should begin fitting these pieces together into a new synthesis of urban rule. How do the community power studies mesh with the public policy studies? And when joined together what is the resulting synthesis? These are questions for the coming decade. The old boss-reform, corruption-good government approach does not satisfactorily convey what in the past decade we have discovered about local power and public policy. Also unsatisfactory are the more recent characterizations of American urban government as a perpetual struggle between the urban core and the metropolitan periphery or between centralized business control and decentralized ward power. Neither Hammack nor Harris lend much support to such generalizations, and the findings of Cain, Condit, Moehring, and Cheape likewise do not fit into these conceptual frameworks. At present, however, no one has offered a worthy substitute. The continuing flow of specialized studies should mark the way to valid generaiizations. If so, the creation of a new synthesis must rank high on the agenda of urban historians in the 1980s and 1990s.

Book Reviews Making the Second Ghetto by Amo/,d R. Hirsch Cambridge: Cambridge Un iversity Press, 1983. $24.95

Making the Second Ghetto is an important book because the author dares to raise issues and ask questions usually slighted in race relations research. This book analyzes the correlation between racism and violence in Chicago during the crucial decades between 1940 and 1960. Professor Hirsch claims that just as the modem civil rights movement was beginning in the South, northern cities were becoming more segregated. Though one is immediately tempted to criticize the book as another history of blacks as "the acted upon," it is more a history "about the white tribe for the white tribe," to borrow a phrase from C. Vann Woodward, tJ1an a work in Afro-American history. As such, Mr. Hirsch does not challenge (or even question) the inherent racism of white ethnics in Chicago. This is a story about whites (elites and nonelit.es) and their respective roles in the creation of the second ghetto. The central theme of this work is that most racial violence is both caused by and associated wi.th shifting residential patterns. Un like the original black ghetto, the second ghetto, Hirsch argues, emerged as a conscious compromise between the interests of the downtown business e lites and their politicians and the wishes of the working-class ethnic whites forced to remain in the city. "Fresh decisions, not the mere acquiescence to old ones, reinforced and shaped the contemporary black 0 metropolis," the author writes. While Hirsch notes tJrnt most whites of o ld and new immigrant stock joined the postwar trek to the suburbs, many could not and did not. Those who stayed helped to shape modem housing policy and decide the issue of public housing on both local and national levels. Changes in politics, economics, demography, and social out.look during this two-decade period combined to heighten racial tensions in Chicago and reshape the city. With urban renewal and redevelopment transforming the physical character of Chicago, white etJ111ics became isolated as factories, expre sways, and largescale institutional development fragmented historically all-white communities. As larger numbers of whites left the city, those who remained developed even greater concerns about tJ1e ever-creeping Black Belt. Resid ential patterns thus take on an extraordinary dimension in Chicago. "The special saliency of the housing issue," Hirsch argues brilliantly, "is striking when compared to other points of racial contact This coupling of housing to the larger parameters of racism and discrimination, which Professor Hirsch clearly understands, is a crucial linking of Afro-American and urban history. "Rioting

was undertaken for particular reasons," he explains, "and not as a generalized expression of racial hostility." These outb1Âˇeaks of racial violence always occurred when blacks moved into white areas. In discussing white resistance to black in-migration, Hirsch calls attention to an interesting dichotomy. On one hand white ethn ics used what he calls "negative power"-arson, assaults, bombings, and riots-while on the other hand white el ites exercised "positive power" -bank loan denials, city ordinances, extended powers of eminent. domain, and harrassment by building inspectors to prevent encroachment. The second ghetto therefore emerged with government sanction and support in response to white ethnic demands to keep blacks confined and the desire of the downtown e lites to protect, preserve, and rehabilitate tJ1e central business district. The urban renewal efforts of the e lit es became, to a large extent, "Negro removal"; thus threatening white areas with black displacees. As a result, public housing became the arena of compromise which served the interests of both groups of whites. With the rapid suburban ization oftl1e white population, public housing changed its original focus from providing decent housing for whites at first, and then war-indusu-y workers and veterans, to becoming the dumping-ground for displaced blacks. When additional public housing was needed , Chicago created a five-mile stretch of vertical slums along State Street exclusively for blacks. For a time, this slowed the housing crunch, sati fied white ethnics, and "saved" downtown for gentrification. This compromise was ach ieved not on ly through tJ1e skillful balancing of the "powers" of the two white groups but also because blacks were so ill-housed, tl1eir leaders were forced to app laud this increase in Chicago's segregated housing stock. This compromise decided the housing options for black Chicagoans for the next rwo decades and also set tl1e patterns and standards for urban renewal and public housing nationally. Making the Second Ghetto is a li vely and well-written book; yet, it has some glaring fau lts. On the mundane level, tl1e entire work would have benefited greatly from more rigorous editing. It is excessively repetitious and sometimes confusing in both chronology and organization. At times Hirsch's sustained attention to detail borders on tl1e glorification of minutia; and, in several instances, the style is inconsistent. Intellectually, this is a book and a subject tl1at would have been enhanced immensely by the skillful utilization of oral history. Oral sources wou ld have added a greater humanistic dimension to the work and given a more concrete framework to tl1e many themes in the chapters. Though Professor Hirsch makes many profound points and draws some important conclusions, his book suffers one obvious weakness. He raises tJ1e question of the dynamics of class versus race several times, but fails to address this important issue fully. In fact, the autl1or repeatedly passes up the opportun ity to ana lyze race and class as co-existent factors in housing discrimination a nd racial vio lence. Yet, he remains aware of its importance and says, for example, that the blacks entering Hyde Park "were not met by howling mobs but by

building inspectors." In a stimulating discussion of the perceptions of white ethnics about the elites who suppon open housing, Hirsch backs away from extending the class-race dichotomy. His quote from one ethnic newspaper's commentary ("More [over], the wives and daughters of these 'do-gooders' were 'sa fe in the suburbs while the common people who cannot afford to live in these communities have to live the hazardous lives of city-dwellers .... "') is revealing, but unfortunately he does not extend the discussion any further. Although Making the Second Ghetto would have broken new ground with a more elaborate analysis of the classrace issue, it is still a significant work. It is a courageous treatise because it links racial violence with housing. Hirsch is conect when he suggests that "a ll the riots ... in the immediate postwar period had a common impulse. Each resulted from the shifting of racia l residential boundaries in modern Chicago." White ethnics will work with blacks, shop with them, and share limited recreational facilities; however, they will not live with them. Housing is the single most important linkage between Afro-American and urban history. Where a person lives, to a large extent, determines what that person becomes. Blacks and whites do not have th e same opportunities because they do not live in the same communities. There are a few exceptions. These exceptions, usually restricted to blacks of middle-class status, suggest a level of racial harmony and social interaction that is, at best, limited and supedicial. Professor Hirsch notes that for an entire fony-year period violence was prevalent. He even documents "a persistent under-cunent of violence (which] lurked beneath the headlines,just beyond the recall of popular memory." Before the 1960s most mainsa·eam newspapers were skimpy, if not silent, in their coverage of racial violence. It was not until the 1951 Cicero riot that a wider audience saw the manifestations of discrimination in hou ingas television shocked the nation. The problem still exists in somewhat different circumstances. Professor Hirsch 's book has not received the attention it deserves, and one local newspaper refused to review itearlierthis year. Yet, the stoI)' must be told and th is work goes a long way in analy7ing the va1;ous fol"Ces and factions that shaped the second ghetto. Ai.Plllt-.E Sot..r1 Hf.RN

W. j f FFERSON

Mf. 1110D1S1

UMvERSin'

Technological Utopianism in American Culture by Howard P Segal Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984. Cloth 30.00, paper l•l.115

,., 1 Hf 1111 f <11 1Rn lti.VtA1-',, Howard Segal's book is an examination of technological utopianism in American life. Its core covers the fifty-year period between 1883

and 1933 when the nation undenvent a permanent transfo1mation from a largely agricultural society to an industriali7ed and urbanized behemoth. During this time the United States was flooded with a rash of publications that extolled current technology and eagerly anticipated its future application to society. Segal examines twenty-five authors whose works confidently argue that technology could be harnessed for the betterment of humankind. The e enthusiasts expected electricity, mass production of indusu·ial and consumer goods, improved communications, transportation, and the like to solve such chronic problems as hunger, disease, and wa1: They believed that with elimination of these ancient curses, humankind would greatly improve. In their minds unwholesome traits such as aggression, rudeness, and nervousness would surely vanish. As Segal writes, "The growth and expansion of technology would bring utopia; and utopia would be a completely technological society, one run by and, in a sense, for technology .... Technology seemed to them a far more effective instrument of progress than tl1e va1;ous panaceas proposed by other contemporary utopias:• Who were these technological utopians? Generally, they did not hail from the "lunatic fringe." Rather, these no-nonsense men of good hope tended to be well adjusted and successful. "[They]ought not to be dismissed as mere crackpots." Few became famous. although journalist Edward Bellamy, author of the best-seller, Looking Backward: 2000-1887, and inventor-entrepreneur King Camp Gillette, the "safety-razor czar" and author of The Human Drift, gained considerable national, indeed international recognition . The vast majority of these technological futurists, however, remained obscure. Only a handful of historians can readily recall the careers (01· published works) of businessman Charles Willard Caryl, "the one who dares to plan," and educator and jack-of-all-trades Henry Olerich . Initially the American public proved responsive to the messages of technological utopians. After all, most citizens of the day embraced the gospel of progress and tended to look expectantly to the future. Bellamy's Looking Backward, which described in elaborate imagina1)' detail life in Boston in A.D. 2000, took the counlJ)' by storm. Thousands knew that they would not see the dawn of the twenty-first century, and so they formed "Nationalist" clubs, a phenomenon that peaked in the early 1890s. Bellamy's descriptions of pleasant factories and comfortable homes tantalized readers, and they liked how these futuristic Bostonians spent their considerable leisure time. Later, howeve1; elements of technological utopianism caused unresL One leading illustration is tJ1e application of scientific management. Many a factOI)' operative resented the time and motion studies employed by Frederick W. Taylor and his enthusiastic disciples. More recently, as Segal shows, "many now see technological progress and social progress not as an equation but as an antithesis. R.atl1er than leading to utopia, technological developments have been seen by some critics as leading to a dystopia." So this durable concept has changed markedly; the idea of technological change has evolved

Chicago History, Summer 1985 from one once thought to be good to one with negative, even evil overtones. In his final analysis of the technological utopians Segal surmises that they would probably have mixed feelings about the overall condition of contemporary American life. While these individuals might find the possibilities of nuclear or solar power exciting, they likely would discover less than ideal contemporary social and cultural conditions. Argues Segal, "the individual and collective happiness that technological utopians assumed would inevitably follow has proved elusive." Thus while the twentieth century has meant technological advances, the good life, at least the types envisioned by earlier writers, has not been universally realized. Electric toasters and microwave ovens have not necessarily produced happier, more content or more connected households. Howard Segal has written a major study. His coverage of largely ignored technological utopians is sensibly organized and his arguments about their historical significance are cogently presented. Segal is at his best in showing that these utopians placed human rights ahead of property rights; they sincerely and rationally sought to improve the quality of life. Indeed, he logically concludes that this breed of social critic is needed today. "I wish to defend the contemporary usefulness ... of serious utopianism, particularly in written form. Utopianism is a legitimate criticism of existing society in order to improve that society." The only weakness in the Segal book-and it is minor-involves its illustrations: unfortunately, they are too few and are not particularly well produced. One thing that should strike the reader immediately is tl1e remarkable depth ofSegal's research. Eighty-two pages of notes graphically attest to this fact. And he has further strengthened his volume with an appendix on the backgrounds and writings of his selected subjects and a comprehensive bibliography of secondary sources. Technowgical Utopianism in American Culture is not only stimulating reading but a valuable research work as well. H. ROGER GRANT THE UNIVERSITY OF AKRON

Sister Carrie: The Pennsylvania Edition

by Theodore Dreiser, ed. john C. Berkey et al. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981. $40.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

Sister Carrie has long epitomized America's image of the dynamic, unsettling city, which took shape in turn-ofthe-century Chicago novels. Now the Pennsylvania Edition offers a "new" work that challenges the authenticity of that old familiar. Thirty-six thousand words longer than the standard edition, it restores the "original" man70

uscript as it stood before the author's schoolteacherwife Sara White Dreiser, his writer-friend Arthur Henry, a typing pool , and unfriendly publishers "corrupted" it with "layers of censoring, culling, editing, and error." The Pennsylvania Edition bows Lo Dreiser's authorial excision of 5,000 words on his own, but it reverses his editorial judgment to accept changes and cuts intitiated by others. Upholding a romantic standard of noncollaborative, instinctual authorship, the editors claim tl1at Dreiser's original is a "richer, more complex, and more tragi c" novel. It is certainly a different novel. Because the chapter titles were apparently th e work of Dreiser and Henry together, they have disappeared, along with their wonderfully mythic map of Carrie Meeber's pilgrimage LO magnetic, mate1·ial Chicago and on Lo the walled city of New York and arl's kingdom of the spirit. Gone, too, is the familiar ending, the rocking-chair coda LO Carrie's vague longings always for more than what she has, because Sara Dreiser apparently had a heavy hand in its w1·it.ing. Instead, the Pennsylvania Edition ends with George Hurstwood's suicide, where Dreiser dated the first completion of his manuscript. In addition, from first to last, Ihe Pennsylvania Edition reinstates many loosely philosophical, naturalistic commentaries on the power of hunger, instinct, desire, etc. to shape human life. The resulting structure of plot and language is not necessarily tragic, but it is bleak. Within this less mythic, more unequivocal frame, however, the Pennsylvania Edition offers valuable additions to our literary understandings of Chicago and American urban expe1·ience. Importamly, residential life is given fuller play in Dreiser's original. Dispersed commercial areas are clearly linked Lo the impoverished neighborhood of Carrie's sister, to elegant residential boulevards like P1·airie Avenue, and to the middle-class apartment dwellings around Ogden Place-and all are thickly peopled in contrast to the standard Sister Carrie, in which commerce is cent.rali1ed, individual 1·esidences are isolated, and a very few characters maneuver around each other in a social void. The Chicago of Dreiser's 01·iginal is socially well textured , bringing it closer to the city depicted in lesser-known novels by local residents like Henry Blake Fulle1~ Edith Wyatt, Clara Laughlin, and Elia Peauie. And the centricity of women's social netwo1·ks to such a residential image would be clear here, too, if tl1e Pennsylvania edito1·s had reinstated several passages on Carrie's relationships with neighbm;ng women, which a1·e among the pre-original cuts that Dreiser himself initiated. The Pe nnsylvania Edition also extends ou1· more common images of the city as a place of economic activity, of danger and excitement, of material and cultural elaboration. The specte1· of poverty, the hard work of job hunting, and the mental strain of legal and financial details all emerge as major, continuing themes in the Pennsylvania Edition. It also su1faces sexual threats to Carrie as a female job applicant and worker along witl1 her consciousness of sexual attraction fi1·st as a way out of poverty, then as a desire that goes beyond material interests. Moreover, Dreiser's original manusc1·ipl

Book Reviews brings sharply into focus the cultural symbolism of Chicago and ew York. It delineates Chicago's material, progressive character specifically as a railroad city...:..a key element in most turn-of-the-century Chicago novels by mobile men-and its importance as a railroad gateway to other cities. In conu·ast, it establishes celebrity, fame on top of fortune, as New York's defining characteristic-with a plentitude of historical namedropping. Such textual features gain additional value by virtue of the excellent appendices developed by the editors. "Sister Canie: From Manuscript to Print" clarifies the marketing concerns that censored Dreiser's fuller text to a quicker pace and more elusive sexual content, and it provides excellent analysis of the more naturalistic characterizations in the original. John C. Berkey's and Alice M. Winters's maps of both Chicago and New York meticulously locate the many su·eets, buildings, parks, and waterways named in Sisler Carrie, tracing the precise physical shape of Dreiser's cities. Well-chosen photographs from the Chicago Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York also provide visual counterparts for the major public settings of work and pleasure in the novel's cities. The "HisLOrical Notes" are exceptionally thorough, too, annotating the many references to factual events, individuals, places, and popular culture materials like songs, and also noting the ways in which Dreiser turned them to his own fictional use. Finally, the "Textual Commentary and Apparatus" are both articulate and well 01·ganized, so that no doubt can remain as to the reasons for-or the critical limits of-the editors' judgments. And now, will the real Sister Canie-as Theodore Dreiser intended it-please stand up? SIDNEY

BREMER

UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN GREEN BAY

Working-Class America: Essays on Labor, Community, and American Society edited by Michael H. Frisch and Daniel J. Walkowitz Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982. Cloth 29.95, paper $8.95

Wilhelm Liebknecht, Letters to the Chicago Workingman's Advocate edited by Philip S. Foner ew York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1982. $32.50

DLIRIN(; 111r 1.As1 DECADE social history has blossomed into one of the mo t exciting fields of scholarly study. Some of our brightest young historians have w1·itten their dissertations on aspects of American working-class history, and some of their fine scholarship has recently begun to appear in prinL Much of the best new work, however,

remains unpublished. In Working-Class America, professors Frisch and Walkowitz have succeeded grandly in selecting examples of tl1e best scholarship available, essays that not only illustrate the methods and contributions of the so-called "new" labor history but also cover the broadest possible time period and the widest variety of subjects. The ten essays in the collection span the time from the late eighteentl1 century to tile end of World War II, and they examine such diverse topics as the family and early industrialism, artisan rituals and 1·epublicanism, working women and children, working-class leisure and recreation , female departmentstore labor, and the triumph of trade unionism among ew York City transit workers. What threads, if any, tie together such an eclectic set of essays? First, to be sure, tl1e introduction by Frisch and Walkowitz, which contrasts the "new" to the "old" labor history, points out themes common to all of the essays, reminding the reader that uneven development and diversity are at the heart of American working-class history. Second, all the authors seek, some more fully than others, to establish working-class people as historical actors in their own right, to illustrate how workers made their own history within the limitations set by tile heritage of the past, their various cultures, and material circumstances. Third, as tl1e editors remark in their introduction, the essays "demonstrate the heightened capacity of working-class history to offer insights into tl1e very nature of American society and the processes of capitalist transformation." And finally, the entire collection reveals the enormous scope of sources available to those scholars who wish to recreate the history of the American working classes. Each historian in his or her own way partly succeeds in illuminating one or more of these themes. In his essay on "The Social System of Early New England Textile Mills,"Jonathan Prude offers much new data on a long-neglected sector of the textile labor force, the family workers as contrasted to the mill girls of Lowell and Lawrence. Prude's working-class parents and children waged a persistent war with their employers who sought to subject their employees to the rigors of industrial discipline. But Prude interprets this labor-capital struggle within the context of the school of modernization theory, which has been much criticized in recent years. "What early textile employers and employees taught themselves," he writes, "was how to respond to one anotl1er. They deciphered ... the rules of the game for being industrial employers and employees." And under these new rules he concludes that managers acted forcefully to achieve their goals while workers behaved as a class for themselves only to a limited extent. Sean Wilentz and Christine Stansell examine quite different aspects of life and labor in early nineteentl1-century New York City. Wilentz focuses on the cultural, political, and work traditions of artisans, the city's working-class e lite, whose once solidaristic culture shattered under the blows of capitalist development. Yet Wilentz discloses that tl1rough the 1830s, while economic development divided masters from journeymen, the two groups continued to share a common republican political heritage. By contrast, Stansell describes the world of exploited female and 71

Chicago History, Summer 1985 child workers who provided lhe cheap labor lhat enabled lhe city's economy to develop rapidly. Her essay hints at lhe origins of a segmented labor force in which women, children, and racial minorities held the most marginal, unstable, and ill paid jobs. The late nineteenth century and lhe industrial age proper are introduced with Leon Fink's essay on the Knights of Labor. This essay is best read in conjunction wilh Lawrence Goodwyn's work on lhe Populists because Fink argues that the Knights created a "movement culture" which lhey expressed in local politics and that lheir ultimate defeat weakened democratic impulses in the United States. 'The pervasive bureaucratic state," writes Fink "has not only hampered effons to implement radical change but has stifled even the vision of democratic alternatives." The next essay by Francis Couvares addresses lhe milieu of working-class recreation and leisure in the 1880s and 1890s, one in which Pittsburgh-area bourgeoisie and workers clashed over the proper use of leisure time. Seemingly defeated at work and in the public arena. Couvares's "immigrants and their children developed an intense loyalty to baseball, movies, and other commercial amusements precisely because ...they offered freedom from regimentation and reform." Elizabeth and Kenneth FonesWolfs essay on the "Labor Fonvard" movement shows lhat t11e Protestant evangelical u·adition Herbert Gutman found so widesp1·ead among late nineteenth-century workers still lingered among the craft unionists of lhe AFL between 1912 and 1916. The Federation's "LabOJ· Forward" movement used evangelical appeals and tactics to reawaken trade union commitment among skilled American-born, Protestant workers, but it failed to elicit a comparable response among lhe more rapid I)' g,·owing numbers of thei1· nonskilled, immigrant, non-Protestant counterparts. Another rapidly expanding group of workers, female departmem store clerks, is tl,e subject of Susan Porter Benson's essay. She explains how, in the absence of trade unions and formal worker institutions, saleswomen developed an autonomous work culture within the department store, one which enabled them LO resist management's most noisome work rules. The final three essays-Steve Frnser on lhe Amalgamated Clothing Workers, Joshua Freeman on the Transpon Workers' Union, and Nelson Lichtenstein on auto workers cl uring World War II-reflect labor history's more traditional concern with unions, strikes, politic , and formal institutions. In addition, all lhree illustrate lhe "new" labor history's interest in ethnicity, shop floor work culture, and rank-and-file behavior. Labor history, as written by Fraser, Freeman, and Lichtenstein, encompasses class, culture, politics, and institutions. This book, tlien, represents a much needed progress report on lhe work of young labor historians. It proves how much fine work they have already completed and it anticipates lhe essays, monog1·aphs, and books lhat are yet to come. Wilhelm Liebknechl, Leners lo the Chicago Workingmans Advocale represents the work of a senior labor historian, Philip S. Foner. In lhis slender book, Foner has reproduced a series of letters by a German conespondent 72

which first appeared in tlie Workingman'.!- Advocate, the era's most important labor newspape1~ between November 1870 and December 1871. Through diligent detectjon and careful use of circumstantial evidence, Foner has identified tlie correspondent as Wilhelm Liebknecht, one of lmperial Gem1any's most important Marxian socialists. He also provides, in a brief introduction to the letter , a note on t11e American labor movement in tlie 1860s, a history of tlie Advocate and its editor, Andrew C. Cameron, and a biography of LiebknechL The letters lhemselves focus largely on t11e Franco-Prussian War of 1870, the Paris Commune of 1871, Bismarck's politics and diplomacy, and the growth of socialism in Germany. Fonerannotates lhe letters fully, and he identifies names, events, and concepts perhaps unfamiliar to most contemporary American readers. This collection should be of interest primarily to lhose eage1· to know more about Liebknecht and Gem1an socialism. For tl1ose concerned with American labor history, it offers some evidence of the international dimensions of late nineteenth-cenLUJ) working-class history and suggests also the central role played by Gennan immigrant workers in the 1860s and 1870s, especially in Chicago. MHl'n: Dt·11ms1,., SUNY-B,:...c.11.,~, IOS

A cabinetmaker embellishes a sofa frame in the Tobey & Christiansen CabinPt Co., Chicago, 1906.

Detail from the cover of 1001 Afternoons in Chicago by Ben Hecht, a collection of short columns which first appeared in the Chicago News, published by Convici-McCee, 1923.