It is worth a man's life in Chicago to state his unbiased opinion
of Chicago. The city is filled with dirt and vanity. Its
population is the most complex in the world. It has more than
300,000 people who do not speak, read or write the English
language. In certain of its west side districts a sound of the
mother tongue is not heard from year's end to year's end. The
number of bodies within its limits closely approximates
1,500,000. It will be noticed that I do not say "souls." Not a
daily paper published in the city has a bonafide circulation of
100,000 copies, which is, in itself, a striking commentary upon
the character of the people who live in the largest town of Cook
county. A circulation of that size is not thought to be a thing
to be bragged about in New York. In Chicago, its attainment is
the ambition and heart's desire of every newspaper publisher in
the town.
A traveling man who was not from St. Louis, once summarized
Chicago as "a big, dirty, noisy roaring bluff." He was a fellow
who had a just appreciation of the value of adjectives. That is
what it is. It is said of the merchants that in the summer time
they load wagons with empty barrels and drive them about the
streets to simulate business. I don't doubt it. If they haven't
done it, they forgot it. There is no shady trick of commercial
competition that they will not stoop to, nothing short of a
penitentiary offense that they will balk at. Sometimes they do
not stop there.
Chicago has been called "the representative American city." It
is. It represents the America of to-day, because more than any
other municipality, its life is wrapped in the pursuit of the
dollar. A man in Chicago is weighed by dollars. The attractions
of his wife and daughters are judged by dollars. His value as a
citizen, his worthiness as an American, his fitness for public
service, his chances of heaven are measured by the standard of
the dollar.
There is a merchant prince in Chicago whose private life contains
a scandal that is absolutely unprintable. He is looked up to by
men and admired by women. His name is often upon the lips of the
good, although I cannot learn that he gives freely to charity, or
to the city's advancement. He is held up as a model for young men
struggling in the race of life. He is pointed out to girls as an
epitome of brainy American manhood. It cost him $500,000 to hush
up this scandal, or rather to keep it out of print. It is known
to thousands of course, because a matter of this kind can no more
be stilled than the winds and the waves can be stilled. But the
dollars did the work they were designed to do. Not a paper of the
newspaper trust contained a line in reference to it. The man
advertises, you see.
There is another man high in Chicago financial circles. Men tip
their hats to him on the streets. His name appears on the
prospectuses and in the lists of directors in many powerful
institutions. He is a prominent figure at many social functions.
His hair is white with age, but he still has a lust for tender
maidenhood. This man has served a term in the penitentiary for
stealing from his government. As a result of that theft he has
many dollars.
When a man hears of Chicago he is pretty apt to hear of Yerkes.
Yerkes owns all of the north side street railways and is a
dictator in a dozen enormous enterprises. It is the fashion to
regard Yerkes as an octopus who has Chicago grasped in his
strangling arms. It is the custom to hurl abuse at Yerkes and
hold Yerkes responsible for all the many ills of the city. In the
popular mind Yerkes is the Chicago exemplar of the grasping,
soulless, blood-sucking monopolist. This is because the newspaper
trust does not like Yerkes. He began fighting it a long time ago,
holding war to be cheaper than tribute. Up to date Yerkes has a
long way the best of the contest. He has a thick skin. Abuse
glides off him like water off an oiled board. Yerkes, too, is a
jail bird. He has served, it is said, a term in a Pennsylvania
penitentiary. Yerkes went to the penitentiary, it is further
said, because he would not betray his fellow robbers. He took his
punishment, but he kept his mouth shut. In other words, he "did
not peach on his pals." It will be seen that there is a good deal
of a man in Yerkes--much more, in fact than is to be found in any
one of his newspaper publishing traducers; but even his fondest
intimates have never denied that he is a rascal.
There are women high in the society of Chicago who know more
about the services of unscrupulous midwives than they would care
to tell. There are girls still wearing their maiden names whose
white arms and throats flash with the ransoms of princes who will
feel no blush stealing over neck, cheek and chin when they lie
waiting in the bridal bed. Three are mothers of children--many of
them--who have "graduated" from Dwight and whose breaths still
reek with the fumes of whiskey. There are wives whose annual
flitting to the summer resorts means six weeks of unrestrained
lechery. Meanwhile the old man, who is left in the city to
wrestle for some more of the dollars, is not overlooking any
bets. It is possible that he knows his wife is unchaste.
Certainly he makes no pretensions to chastity himself.
Things have reached this pass in "the representative American
city": A youth born, reared and educated there believes that it
is his mission and his duty to get dollars and has no other idea.
A girl born and reared there thinks it her mission and her duty
to marry dollars. If her parents are poor, if she is compelled to
"work out" as stenographer, typewriter, shop-lady, or whatnot,
and if she keeps her virtue, she is a phenomenon. The vaudeville
stage is recruited from her ranks. The bawdy houses are recruited
from her ranks. The fetid river's yearly burden of corpses is
recruited from her ranks.
What is to become of it? What is the natural fruit of such a
tree? What is the legitimate of a million and a half of such
humanity cooped into one space and boiling and seething with ten
million different aims and passions? What part in the drama of
the future is to be played by the 300,000 non-English speaking
residents, many of whom are voters? Men say that the signs of the
times point to revolution. Men behind the scenes say that this
country was dangerously near it in 1896. It needs no prophet to
foresee trouble when the rich are becoming richer, through
scoundrelism, and the poor are becoming poorer, through
drunkenness, idleness, dirt and all viciousness. Of that
revolution when it comes Chicago will be the fountain and the
center. I dare to say that if there are 5,000 open anarchists in
Chicago to-day there are 50,000 anarchists unconfessed. The
trouble is that their indictment against the wealthy ruling
classes contain true counts. They are not worth the powder and
lead necessary to their execution, but are those who sit in the
high places any better?
Preachers on fat salaries may preach in rich churches, scrolled
and cavern and mullion-windowed, then form laisons with
choir-singers; hired writers may write of the goodness of the
times, then pose in beer-joints and denounce God and the
universe. Christian Endeavorers and all the other bands of inane
asses may shout their mawkish hymns, but facts are facts. The
city of the dollar is in a bad way, and it is the "representative
American city."
More men to tell the truth are needed. More men willing to lead
clean lives. One object lesson is worth a hundred told from
books. More women are wanted who will hold their virtue as
God-given and a priceless gem. Such men and such women would be
laughed at for a while as oddities in Chicago, but even the
modern Gomorrah would be affected by them in time. Missionary
boards are spending thousands every year in endeavors to induce
highly moral Chinamen to become immoral Christians; but right
before their eyes in the county of Cook, state of Illinois, is a
more fruitful field than they have ever plowed, a field that is
lying fallow, although there are ministers enough camped on it,
God knows. It is the fashion of the snug missionary board,
however, to see only those things which are far off. It has been
so since missionary boards first tortured savages whose chief
offense was that they worshipped God in their own way, and it
will continue to be so until the last missionary has taken up his
last collection and laid in his winter's coal therewith. The
ICONOCLAST has done its level best to snatch the Chicago brand
from the burning and now and then some Chicago man walks straight
for a little way under the influence of its teaching, but one
journal cannot do the work of a hundred, nor is the whole of
heathendom to be saved by one preacher. Until the great sweeping
time comes around and Chicago is purified in the most cleansing
of all liquids, though each quart of it means a human life, the
money changers will sit in the temple and the bawds and lovers of
bawds drink in the sanctuary.
. . .
Not long ago Chicago had a celebration. It placed a statue to
"Black Jack Logan" on the lake front. This statue, which is by
St. Gaudens, represents a large-moustached man on a slimly-built
horse that has his right hoof elevated to his ear, apparently
endeavoring to paw a fly therefrom. Of course, it is understood
that any natural horse which stood in that way, would fall down
and skin his pasterns and hocks and stifles and barrel and
withers and other parts of him known to the veterinarians. I am
no horse doctor.
The large-moustached man has on cavalry boots which are dug into
the stirrups and his legs are very stiff and calm. He holds a
flag in his right hand--holds it far up and away and its folds
are blown by the wind. Every child knows that a United States
flag and staff weigh only two ounces and a man on horse-back can
swing it around as if it were a feather. These things do not
enter into the rapt dream of St. Gaudens. Nothing enters into his
dream save poetry to be expressed in bronze and the dollars that
are to come therefrom. The statue is well enough in its way. Let
it go at that.
. . .
There was a celebration. Troops came and marched from many
states. Veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic tramped along
and the people cheered them. I suppose that one quarter of the
heroes who are drawing $160,000,000 a year in pensions from the
government were on hand. I have been unable to find out anything
that "Black Jack" did, other than the fact that he came back from
the front in 1863, and legged for Abraham Lincoln, thereby
getting into politics and staying in until he died. Also he
scoured the country carefully and found everybody that was
connected with him by blood or marriage and put him or her into
office. At one time Logan and family were drawing enough money
from Uncle Sam to draw a respectable navy. As the orators were
orating and the cannon were barking and the sweating people on
the sidewalks were shouting, they knew not and cared not for
what, I thought of some lines which opened a Washington letter in
the Boston Globe many years ago, when John A. Logan was in the
United States Senate. There was a tariff discussion on and he
took a part. These were the lines: "Pranced there in, on the
arena of the great debate, like a trick mule in a circus or a
spavined nightmare on the track of a beautiful dream, Logan of
Illinois." They fitted him.
A part of that celebration consisted of fireworks which were
given at the Coliseum, a large building which stands in the
southern part of the city and is used as a place of
entertainment. John T. Dickinson, formerly of Texas, and now of
the earth, is the president of the Coliseum Company, and
engineered the display. It takes money to have fireworks and the
company of "big-bugs" who bossed the entire marksman's contest,
told him so. With that hustle which made him a marked man in
Austin and other large cities in which he lived before he broke
into Chicago, Dickinson rushed out and raised the money. He got
subscriptions from prominent merchants, collected the funds and
turned them over to William R. Harper, who was chairman of the
committee on arrangements and committee on glory and pretty
nearly everything else. The fireworks were touched off and fizzed
and banked and spluttered, and the people cheered some more.
The fellows who furnished the Catherine wheels and sky rockets
and so forth, sent in their bills, which were audited and marked
correct and Harper was requested to settle. He refused. The
fireworks were not a success, he said. The fireworks men
represented to him that whether the display was a success or a
heart-breaking failure sawed no frozen water whatever. They were
not entrusted with the management of the affair. They had
furnished the goods and wanted their money. Harper refused.
Dickinson jumped in once more and carried to Harper testimonials
from the men who had furnished the money, saying that there never
had been any fireworks so good as those fireworks. Harper
refused. Harper was then bombarded with orders from the
subscribers directing him to pay out the $2,500 which he held to
their credit. He refused.
So the matter stands. The fire-cracker men are desolate.
Dickinson has lost thirty of his 250 pounds. Harper has the
money. Chicago has the scandal of a lot of unpaid workmen and
manufacturers who helped to celebrate the unveiling of the pawing
horse and big moustache out on the lake front-the bronze memorial
of "Black Jack" Logan, who never did anything but wed a smart
woman and hold office and beget a son who married money in Ohio.
. . .
These are the components of the Chicago newspaper trust, of which
many people have heard: The Tribune, the Record, the
Times-Herald, the Chronicle, the Post, the Journal and the News.
The object of the trust is to advance the interests of the
proprietors and swell their bank accounts at the expense of
individuals and the public in general. It is an offensive
alliance against decency and fair play. It is powerful. Such
enterprises as it elects to boom are boomed. Such as it elects to
destroy are destroyed. Such men as it cares to advance are
advanced. Such men as it cares to attack are viciously lampooned
day after day and week after week and month after month. It does
not lampoon anyone who pays it. In each of these papers the
editorial room is utterly and thoroughly dominated by the
counting room. It gets its order day by day from the business
counter and it obeys them with a slavish servility. The merchant
with a display advertisement in their columns is safe from
attack, no matter what his crime. From end to end it is one man
journalism, and each of the papers is run for the benefit of the
one man who is its proprietor. The Tribune is owned by Joe
Medill, the Times-Herald and Post are owned by H. H. Kohlsast,
the Record and News are owned by Victor Lawson, the Journal is
owned by the McRae- Scripps league and the Chronicle is owned by
John R. Walsh, a banker.
The effects of the newspaper trust upon the public are so well
known that they need not be further enumerated. Its effects upon
the individual worker in journalism are damnable.
The Chicago journalist belongs to the man who hires him, or he
moves away, or he starves. That is all there is to it. If
discharged by one, he cannot be hired by another. He is
blacklisted until the man who discharges him chooses to reinstate
him. If employed by one paper and does exceptional work, he
cannot go to another one at an increase of salary. This is one of
the strongest rules of the trust. His only chance to get
approximately what his work is worth is to resign and risk being
hired elsewhere, and he will be hired elsewhere in Chicago only
if his former owner does not object. He can, too, go to another
paper at the same wages and take his chance of a raise.
The result of this is not only to peon men, but to pay them
merely living wages. There has never been a time in the history
of America when the pay of a competent newspaper man was so low
as it is in Chicago. Reporters run from $10 to $25 a week, copy
readers get $25 on morning papers, telegraph editors about the
same, editorial writers and paragraphers are paid from $30 to
$35. Wages in other parts of the business "up-stairs" are formed
on a like model. These wages are from one-third to one-half of
what are paid in New York. There is no newspaper trust in New
York. As it is, the list of unemployed newspaper men in Chicago
numbers more than 200. Any one of them would be glad to take a
place at starvation wages if he could get it.
There is one gleam of hope for the Chicago newspaper man. It is
rumored that W. R. Hearst of the New York Journal intends to
start a morning paper there. I do not believe that he will, but
if he does he will force some of the trust members to publish
newspapers or get out of the business. Hearst is called a "yellow
journalist," and what not, and may be he is, but he is a boon to
the workers. There can be no manner of doubt about that. Chicago,
October 15.
* * *
THE AUTHOR OF EPISCOPALIANISM. VERSAILLES, Mo., August
31.--Editor, ICONOCLAST: Will you please inform me who was the
father of Anne Boleyn, second wife of Henry the Eighth, giving
citations. JOHN D. BOHLING.
Anne Boleyn was the daughter of Henry VIII. of England, and Lady
Boleyn. This is so well known to every student of history that
"giving citations" seems superfluous; but of the first that comes
to my mind I'll furnish a few: Dr. Bayley ("Life of Bishop
Fisher") says that before the wedding of King Henry to Anne
occurred, Lady Boleyn addressed to the former these words: "Sir,
for the reverence of God, take heed what you do in marrying my
daughter, for, if you record your own conscience well, she is
your own daughter as well as mine"; to which the king replied:
"Whose daughter soever she is, she shall be my wife." Dr. Sander
("Anglican Schism") says that Henry VIII. was the father of his
second wife, Anne Boleyn. Dr. D. Lewis, in his introduction to
the book, says that both Lady Boleyn and her daughter Mary were
King Henry's mistresses, and adds: "Nothing remains but to accept
the fearful story told, not by Dr. Sander only, nor by him before
all others, and say that, at least by the confession of the King
and both Houses of Parliament, Anne Boleyn was Henry's child."
Van Ortroy (Vic de B. Martyr Jean Fisher") says that Anne was the
daughter of Henry, and that the fact was so generally known that
it was the subject of ribald songs in continental capitals.
William Cobbett ("History of the Protestant Reformation") says
that Anne Boleyn became first the mistress and then the wife of
her father. Gasquet, in his notes on that work, endorses the
statement. By act of Parliament (28 Henry VIII C. 7) Elizabeth,
daughter of Henry and Anne, was declared a bastard; that "certain
just and lawful impediments" were unknown to the King when the
marriage occurred, but had since been officially "confessed by
the said Lady Anne." Archbishop Cranmer, who divorced Henry from
Catherine, also divorced him from Anne, declaring in his latter
decree "in the name of Christ and for the honor of God, the
marriage was and always had been null and void." This sentence
was signed by both houses of Convocation. It was approved by
Parliament. Yet Cranmer, the Convocation and Parliament
recognized Henry's divorce from Catherine as valid. According to
English law, both religious and secular, Henry had no other wife
when he married Anne, she no other husband. The only "lawful
impediments" to the marriage were those stated by Anne's mother.
They were positively known before Anne's marriage to Henry, the
first official head of the Church of England, and who formulated
and enforced its first body of doctrine, and there is every
reason to believe that they were known at that time to Cranmer,
the first archbishop of the parent of Episcopalianism, the
sweet-scented author of the "Book of Common Prayer."
* * *
Dr. Rufus C. Burleson is not a perfect man. He has not always
treated the ICONOCLAST either with Christian charity or courtesy;
but as men go, he's far above the average. While he was president
of Baylor University its students did not get drunk. They were
not encouraged to arm themselves and commit lawless acts of
violence. All the good that is in Baylor University is due to his
untiring efforts and self-sacrifice. There would be no Baylor
University to-day but for Dr. Burleson; yet after nearly half a
century of service, he has been pitched out and humiliated and
lied about by creatures who are not worthy to breathe the same
atmosphere. The Baptist fight is none of mine; but I am the
champion of fair play; and I say here that even in his so-called
"dotage," Dr. Burleson has more brains, more good morals, more
manhood, than have Carroll, Cranfill, and all their scurvy crew.
If the enemies of Burleson triumph at the coming state
convention, then the Baptist sect ought to perish from the earth.
Shake, Doctor; Baylor has treated you a damned sight worse than
it has treated me.
* * *
A GIPSY GENIUS.