A good deal of nonsense is talked about the personality of towns. What
most people enjoy about a town is familiarity, not personality, and they
can give no penetrating account of their affection. "What is the finest
town in the world?" the New York reporters recently asked a young
recruit, eager for him to eulogize New York. "Why," he answered, "San
Malo, France. I was born there." That is the usual reason, perhaps the
best reason, why a person likes any place on earth. The clew is
autobiographical.
But towns do have personality. Contrast London and New York, or Portland
and Norfolk, or Madison and St. Augustine. Chicago certainly has a
personality, and it would be obscurantism of the most modern kind to
pretend that there was no "soul" in Chicago either to like or to
dislike. People who have never lived in Chicago are usually content with
disliking it, and those who have seen it superficially, or smelled it in
passing when the stockyard factories were making glue, can seldom
understand why Chicagoans love it. Official visitors, of course, profess
to admire it, with the eagerness of anxious missionaries seeking to make
good with cannibals. But except for men who knew Bursley or Belfast, and
slipped into Chicago as into old slippers--men like Arnold Bennett and
George Bermingham--there are few outsiders who really feel at home.
Stevenson passed through it on his immigrant journey across the plains,
pondering that one who had so promptly subscribed a sixpence to restore
the city after the fire should be compelled to pay for his own ham and
eggs. He thought Chicago great but gloomy. Kipling shrank from it like a
sensitive plant. It horrified him. H. G. Wells thought it amazing, but
chiefly amazing as a lapse from civilization. All of these leave little
doubt how Chicago first hits the eye. It is, in fact, dirty, unruly and
mean. It has size without spaciousness, opportunity without
imaginativeness, action without climax, wealth without distinction. A
sympathetic artist finds picturesqueness in it, though far from gracious
where most characteristic; but for the most part it is shoddy, dingy and
vulgar, making more noise downtown than a boiler works, and raining
smuts all day as a symbolic reproach from heaven. It is not for its
beaux yeux that the outsider begins to love the town.
But a great town is like the elephant of the fable; one must see it
altogether before one can define it; one can believe almost anything
monstrous from a partial view. Time, in the case of Chicago, is
supremely necessary--about three years as a minimum. Then its goodness
passeth all pre-matrimonial understanding; its essence is disclosed.
Mr. H. C. Chatfield-Taylor has qualified, so far as time is concerned,
to speak of Chicago, and I think it would be churlish not to agree that
from the standpoint of the old settler he has done his city proud. All
old Chicagoans will recognize at once why Mr. Taylor should go back to
the beginning, and they will be delighted at the clarity with which the
early history is expounded, as well as the era before the Civil War.
They will also understand and rejoice over the repetition of grand old
names--Gordon S. Hubbard, John Kinzie, Mark Beaubien, Uranus H. Crosby,
Sherman of the Sherman hotel, General Hart L. Stewart and Long John
Wentworth. In every town in the world there is, of course, a Long John
or a Big Bill, but Chicagoans will savor this reference to their own
familiar, and will delight in the snug feeling that they too "knew
Chicago when." Mr. Taylor is also dear to his townsmen when he harks
back to days before the Fire. In those days the West-siders were a
little superior because they had the Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter
and Paul, and the church-going folk could hear the "fast young men"
speeding trotting horses past the church doors. Such performances seemed
fairly worldly, but later did not Mr. Taylor himself drive his
high-steppers to the races at Washington Park, and did he not woo the
heart of the city where gilded youth cherished a "nod of recognition
from Potter Palmer, John B. Drake, or John A. Rice." The dinners of
antelope steak and roast buffalo at the Grand Pacific recall a Chicago
antedating the World's Fair that left strong traces into the twentieth
century, a Chicago that is commemorated with grace and kindliness in the
fair pages of this book.
But this is not enough. If Mr. Taylor's heart lingers among the
"marble-fronts" of his youth, this is not peculiarly Chicagoan. Such
fond reminiscence is the common nature of man. And a better basis for
loving Chicago must be offered than the evidence that one teethed on it,
battered darling that it is. Mr. Taylor's better explanation, as I read
it, is extremely significant. He identifies himself fully and eagerly
with the New Englanders who made the town. Bounty-jumpers and squatters
and speculators, war widows and politicians and anarchists and
aliens--all these go into his perspective, as do the emergencies of the
Fire and the splendors of the Fair. But the marrow of his pride in
Chicago is his community with its origins in "men, like myself, of New
England blood, whose fathers felled our forests and tilled our prairie
land." Since the time he was born, he tells us, more than two million
people have been added to the population of Chicago. Only a fifth of the
Great West Side are now American-born, and the Lake Shore Drive was
still a cemetery when Mr. Taylor was a boy on that dignified West Side.
This links Mr. Taylor closely to the beginning of things. Hence he likes
to insist in his kindly spirit that Chicago's puritan "aristocracy" is
the source of Chicago altruism, that "the society of Chicago [is] more
puritanical than that of any great city in the world," and that "back of
Chicago's strenuousness and vim stands the spirit of her founders
holding her in leash, the tenets of the Pilgrim Fathers being still a
potent factor in her life.... She possesses a New England conscience to
leaven her diverse character and make her truly--the pulse of America."
Every bird takes what he finds to build his own spiritual nest.
Personally, I love Chicago, ugly and wild and rude, but I prefer to see
it as an impuritan. Its sprawling hideousness, indeed, has always seemed
a direct result of the private-minded policy that distinguished
Chicago's big little men. The triumvirate that Mr. Taylor mentions had
no statesmanship in them. One was an admirable huckster, another an
inflexible paternalist, the third a fine old philistine who carved a
destiny in ham. But these men gave themselves and their city to business
enterprise in its ugliest manifestation. The city of course has its
remissions, its loveliness, but the incidental brutality of that
enterprise is a main characteristic of the city, a characteristic barely
suggested by Mr. Taylor, not clearly imagined by Mr. Hornby in his
graceful drawings, so beautifully reproduced.
One would like, as a corrective to Mr. Taylor's pleasant picture, some
leaves from Upton Sinclair's Jungle, Jack London's Iron Heel, Frank
Norris's Pit, H. K. Webster's Great Adventure, the fiction of Edith
Wyatt and Henry Fuller and Robert Herrick and Will Paine and Weber Linn
and Sherwood Anderson, the poetry of Edgar Lee Masters and Carl
Sandburg, the prose of Jane Addams. No one who looked at the City
Council ten years ago, for example, can forget the brutality of that
institution of collective life.
They called the old-time aldermen the "gray wolves." They looked like
wolves, cold-eyed, grizzled, evil. They preyed on the city South side,
West side, North side, making the shaky tenements and black brothels and
sprawling immigrant-filled industries pay tribute in twenty ways. One
night, curious to see Chicago at its worst, four of us went to a place
that was glibly described as "the wickedest place in the world." It was
a saloon under the West side elevated, and a room back of the saloon. At
first it seemed merely dirty and meager, with its runty negro at the
raucous piano. But at last the regular customers collected; the sots,
the dead-beats, the human wreckage of both sexes, the woman of a fat
pallor, the woman without a nose.... They surrounded us, piled against
us, clawed us. And that, in its way, is Chicago, Stead's Satanic vision
of it revealed.
But the other side of that hideousness in Chicago is the thing one loves
it for, the large freedom from caste and cant which is so much an
essential of democracy, the cordiality which comes with fraternity, the
access to men and life of all kinds. Chicago is a scrimmage but also an
adventure, a frank and passionate creator struggling with hucksters and
hogsters, a blundering friend to genius among the assassins of genius, a
frontier against the Europe that meant an established order, an order of
succession and a weary bread-line. In Chicago, for all its philistinism,
there is the condition of hope that is half the spiritual battle,
whatever stockades the puritans try to build. It is that that makes one
lament the silence in Mr. Taylor's pleasant book. But the puritanical
tradition requires silence. Polite and refined, self-centered and
private-minded, attached to property and content within limitations, it
made visible Chicago what it is.
[1] _Chicago, by H. C. Chatfield-Taylor. Illustrations by Lester G.
Hornby. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co._