In speaking of the group of newspaper writers who formed the
Whitechapel Club, augmented as they were by artists, and musicians
and physicians and lawyers, I would not give the impression that they
were in any sense reformers, or actuated by the smug and forbidding
spirit which too often inspires that species. They were, indeed,
wisely otherwise, and they were, I think, wholly right minded in their
attitude toward what are called public questions, and of these they had
a deep and perspicacious understanding, and it will be easy to imagine
that the cursory comments on passing phases of the human spectacle of
such minds as those of Charles Goodyear Seymour, Finley Peter Dunne,
George Ade, Ben King, Opie Reed, Alfred Henry Lewis, and his brother
William E. Lewis, Frederick Upham Adams, Thomas E. Powers, Horace
Taylor, Wallace Rice, Arthur Henry, and a score of others were apt to
be entertaining and instructive, though they were uttered with such wit
and humor that they were never intended to be instructive.
The club had been founded late in the eighties, and although it endured
less than ten years, it still lives in the minds of newspaper and
literary men as one of the most remarkable of Bohemian clubs. It had
its rooms in the rear of a little saloon, conducted by Henry Koster in
“newspaper alley,” as Calhoun Place was more generally called, near
the buildings of the _Chicago News_ and the _Chicago Herald_, and it
somehow gathered to itself many of the clever men of Chicago who were
writing for the press, and a few intimate spirits in other lines of
work, but of sympathetic spirit. For a while the club was nameless, but
one afternoon a group were sitting in one of the rooms when a newsboy
passed through the alley and cried: “All about the latest Whitechapel
murder!” Seymour paused with a stein of beer half lifted, and said:
“We’ll call the new club the ‘Whitechapel Club.’”
I suppose the grewsome connotations of the name led to our practice
of collecting relics of the tragedies we were constantly reporting.
When he came back from the Dakotas, where he had been reporting the
Sioux War, Seymour brought back from the battles a number of skulls of
Indians, and blankets drenched in blood, which were hung on the walls
of the club. From that time on it became the practice of sheriffs
and newspaper men everywhere to send anything of that kind to the
Whitechapel Club. The result was that within a few years it had a large
collection of skulls of criminals, and some physicians discovered,
or thought they discovered, differences between these skulls and the
skulls of those who were not criminals, or, if they were, had not been
caught at it.
These and the ropes of hangmen and the various mementos of crimes were
the decorations of the club rooms, and on Saturday nights the hollow
eyes of those skulls looked down on many a lively scene.
Admission to the club was obtained in a peculiar way. An applicant
for membership had his name proposed, and it was then posted on a
bulletin-board. He was on probation for thirty days, during which he
had to be at the club at least five days in the week, in order to
become acquainted with the members. Within that time any member could
tear his name down, and that ended his candidacy. When his name finally
came up for voting it required the full vote of the club to get him in.
And then we grew prosperous, and acquiring a building farther down the
alley, we had it decorated in a somber manner, with a notable table,
shaped like a coffin, around which we gathered. But the prosperity and
the fame of the club led to its end. Rich and important men of Chicago
sought membership. Some were admitted, then more, and as a result the
club lost its Bohemian character, and finally disbanded.