CHICAGO
“And yonder where, gigantic, wilful, young,
Chicago sitteth at the northwest gates,
With restless violent hands and casual tongue
Moulding her mighty fates----”
WILLIAM VAUGHN MOODY.
I
A fateful Titan, brooding over a mammoth chess-board, now cautious
in his moves as he shifts his myriad pigmies, now daring, but always
resolute, clear-eyed, steady of hand, and with no thought but
victory--as such a figure Rodin might have visualized twentieth-century
Chicago.
Chicago is not a baby and utters no bleating cry that it is
“misunderstood,” and yet a great many people have not only
misunderstood or misinterpreted it but have expressed their dislike
with hearty frankness. To many visitors Chicago is a city of dreadful
night, to be explored as hurriedly as possible with outward-bound
ticket clenched tightly in hand. But Chicago may not be comprehended in
the usual scamper of the tourist; for the interesting thing about this
city is the people, and they require time. I do not, of course, mean
that they are all worthy of individual scrutiny, but rather that the
very fact of so many human beings collecting there, living cheerfully
and harmoniously, laboring and aspiring and illustrating the pressing,
changing problems of our democracy awakens at once the beholder’s
sympathetic interest. Chicago is not New York, nor is it London or
Paris: Chicago is different. The Chicagoan will convince you of this if
you fail to see it; the point has been conceded by a great number of
observers from all quarters, but not in just the same spirit in which
the citizen speaks of it.
Both inspired and uninspired critics have made Chicago the subject
of a considerable literature that runs the gamut of anxious concern,
dismal apprehension, dismay, and disgust. Mr. Kipling saw the city
embodied as a girl arrayed in a costume of red and black, shod in red
shoes sauntering jauntily down the gory aisle of a slaughter-house. Mr.
H. G. Wells boasts that he refrained from visiting the packing-houses
owing to what he describes as his immense “repugnance to the killing
of fixed and helpless animals.” He reports that he saw nothing of
those “ill-managed, ill-inspected establishments,” though he “smelt
the unwholesome reek from them over and over again,” and observed
with trepidation “the enormous expanse and intricacy of railroads that
net this great industrial desolation.” Chicago’s pressing need, he
philosophizes, is discipline--a panacea which he generously prescribes
not only for all that displeased him in America, but for Lancashire,
South and East London, and the Pas de Calais. “Each man,” he ruminates,
“is for himself, each enterprise; there is no order, no prevision,
no common and universal plan.” I have cheerfully set down this last
statement to lighten my own burdens, for by reversing it one may very
happily express the real truth about Chicago. Instead of the “shoving
unintelligent proceedings of under-bred and morally obtuse men,” great
numbers of men and women of the highest intelligence are constantly
directing their talents toward the amelioration of the very conditions
that grieved Mr. Wells.
Chicago may, to be sure, be dismissed in a few brilliant phrases as the
black pit of perdition, the jumping-off place of the world; but to the
serious-minded American the effort making there for the common uplift
is too searching, too intelligent, too sincere, for sneers. I fancy
that in view of events that have occurred in Europe since his visit
to America Mr. Wells would be less likely to rest his case against
Chicago on the need of discipline alone. All that discipline may do
for a people had been achieved by the Imperial German Government when
the Kaiser started for Paris in 1914; but subjection, obedience, even
a highly developed efficiency are not the whole of the law and the
prophets. Justice and mercy are finer things, and nothing in Chicago
is more impressive or encouraging than the stubborn purpose of many
citizens who are neither foolish nor ignorant to win and establish
these twain for the whole. It is an unjust and ungenerous assumption
that Chicago is unaware of its needs and dangers, or that from year to
year no gains are made in the attempt to fuse and enlighten the mass.
It is the greatest laboratory that democracy has known. The very fact
that so much effort must go into experiment, that there are more than
two and a half million distinct units to deal with, with a resulting
confusion in needs and aims, adds not merely to the perplexity but to
the fascination of the social and political enigma. There is, quite
definitely, a thing called the Chicago spirit, a thing compounded of
energy, faith, and hope--and again energy! Nor is the energy all spent
upon the material and sordid, for the fine, arresting thing is the
tremendous vim this lusty young giant among the world’s cities brings
to the solution of its problems--problems that deserve to be printed in
capitals out of respect for their immensity and far-reaching importance
to the national life. Chicago does not walk around her problems, but
meets them squarely and manfully. The heart of the inquirer is won by
the perfect candor with which the Chicagoan replies to criticism; the
critic is advised that for every evil there is a remedy; indeed, that
some agency is at work on that particular thing at that particular
moment. This information is conveyed with a smile that expresses
Chicago’s faith and hope--a smile that may be a little sad and
wistful--but the faith and the hope are inescapably there.
* * * * *
Chicago is the industrial and financial clearing-house, the
inspirational centre of the arts, and the playground for 50,000,000
people. The pilgrim who lands on the lake shore with an open mind and
a fair understanding of what America is all about--the unprejudiced
traveller--is immediately conscious that here, indeed, is a veritable
capital of democracy.
Every night three hundred or more sleeping-cars bear approximately
4,500 persons toward this Western metropolis on journeys varying from
five to twelve hours in length. From innumerable points it is a night’s
run, and any morning one may see these pilgrims pouring out of the
railway-stations, dispersing upon a thousand errands, often concluded
in time for the return trip between six o’clock and midnight. At
times one wonders whether all the citizens of the tributary provinces
have not gathered here at once, so great is the pressure upon hotel
space, so thronged the streets. The sleeping-car holds no terrors
for the Westerner. He enjoys the friendship of the train-crews; the
porters--many of them veterans of the service--call him by name and in
addressing them he avoids the generic “George,” which the travelling
salesman applies to all knights of the whisk-broom, and greets them by
their true baptismal appellations of Joshua or Obadiah. Mr. George Ade
has threatened to organize a “Society for the Prevention of the Calling
of Sleeping-Car Porters George”!
The professional or business man rises from his meagre couch refreshed
and keen for adventure and, after a strenuous day, returns to it and
slumbers peacefully as he is hurled homeward. The man from Sioux City
or Saint Joe who spends a day here does not crawl into his berth weary
and depressed, but returns inspired and cheered and determined to put
more vim into his business the next morning. On the homeward trail,
eating supper in company with the neighbors he finds aboard, he dilates
eloquently upon the wonders of the city, upon its enterprise, upon the
heartiness with which its business men meet their customers. Chicago
men work longer hours than their New York brethren and take pride in
their accessibility. It is easier to get a hearing in high quarters
in any field of endeavor in Chicago than in New York; there is less
waiting in the anteroom, and a better chance of being asked out for
lunch.
The West is proud of Chicago and loves it with a passionate devotion.
Nor is it the purpose of these reflections to hint that this mighty
Mecca is unworthy of the adoration of the millions who turn toward it
in affection and reverence. Chicago not only draws strength from a vast
territory but, through myriad agencies and avenues, sends back a mighty
power from its huge dynamo. It is the big brother of all lesser towns,
throwing an arm about Davenport and Indianapolis, Springfield and
Columbus, and manifesting a kindly tolerance toward St. Louis, Kansas
City, Detroit, Minneapolis, and Cleveland, whose growth and prosperity
lift them to a recognized and respected rivalry.
The intense loyalty of the Chicagoan to his city is one of his most
admirable characteristics and the secret of his city’s greatness.
He is proud even of the Chicago climate, which offers from time to
time every variety of weather known to meteorology and is capable
of effecting combinations utterly new to this most fascinating of
sciences. Chicago’s coldest day of record was in 1872, when the minus
registration was 23; the hottest in 1901, when the mercury rose to
103. Such excesses are followed by contrition and repentance and days
of ethereal mildness. The lake serves as a funnel down which roar icy
blasts direct from the hyperboreans. The wind cuts like a scythe of
ice swung by a giant. In summer the hot plains pour in their burning
heat; or, again, when it pleases the weather-god to produce a humid
condition, the moisture-charged air is stifling. But a Chicagoan does
not mind the winter, which he declares to be good for body and soul;
and, as for the heat, he maintains--and with a degree of truth to
sustain him--that the nights are always cool. The throngs that gathered
in Chicago for the Republican and the Progressive conventions in
June, 1916, were treated to a diversity of weather, mostly bad. It
was cold; it rained hideously. There were dismal hours of waiting for
reports of the negotiations between the two bodies of delegates in
which the noblest oratory failed to bring warmth and cheer. Chicago did
her worst that week, but without serious impairment of her prestige as
the greatest convention city in the world. Every one said, “Isn’t this
just like Chicago!” and inquired the way to the nearest quinine.
[Illustration: Chicago is the big brother of all lesser towns.]
“The Windy City” is a descriptive sobriquet. There are not only
cold winds and hot winds of the greatest intensity, but there are
innumerable little gusts that spring up out of nowhere for no other
conceivable purpose than to deposit dust or cinders in the human eye.
There is a gesture acquired by all Chicagoans--a familiar bit of
calisthenics essential to the preservation of head-gear. If you see
a man pursuing his hat in a Chicago street you may be sure that he
is an outsider; the native knows by a kind of prescience just when
the fateful breeze is coming, prepares for it, and is never caught
unawares. In like manner the local optic seems to be impregnable
to persistent attacks of the omnipresent cinder. By what means the
eyeball of a visitor becomes the haven for flying débris, while the
native-born walks unscathed, is beyond my philosophy. It must be
that the eye of the inhabitant is trained to resist these malevolent
assaults and that the sharp-edged cinder spitefully awaits an
opportunity to impinge upon the defenseless optic of passing pilgrims.
The pall of smoke miraculously disappears at times and the cinder
abandons its depredations. The sky may be as blue over Chicago as
anywhere else on earth. The lake shimmers like silk and from brown,
near shore, runs away to the horizon through every tint of blue and
green and vague, elusive purples.
II
Chicago still retained, in the years of my first acquaintance,
something of the tang of the wild onion which in the Indian vernacular
was responsible for its name. (I shudderingly take refuge in this
parenthesis to avoid collision with etymological experts who have spent
their lives sherlocking the word’s origin. The genesis of “Chicago” is
a moot question, not likely to be settled at this late day. Whether
it meant leek, polecat, skunkweed, or onion does not greatly matter.
I choose the wild onion from the possibilities, for the highly
unscientific reason that it seems to me the most appropriate and
flavorsome of all accessible suggestions.)
In the early eighties one might stand by the lakeside and be very
conscious of a West beyond that was still in a pioneer stage. At the
department headquarters of the army might be met hardy campaigners
against the Indians of mountain and plain who were still a little
apprehensive that the telegraph might demand orders for the movement
of troops against hostile red men along the vanishing frontiers.
The battle of Wounded Knee, in which 100 warriors and 120 women and
children were found dead on the field (December 29, 1890), might almost
have been observed from a parlor-car window. It may have been that on
my visits I chanced to touch circles dominated by Civil War veterans,
but great numbers of these diverted their energies to peaceful channels
in Chicago at the end of the rebellion, and they gave color to the
city life. It was a part of the upbringing of a mid-Western boy of my
generation to reverence the heroes of the sixties, and it was fitting
that in the land of Lincoln and in a State that gave Grant a regiment
and started him toward immortality there should be frequent reunions
of veterans, and political assemblages and agitations in which they
figured, to encourage hero-worship in the young. Unforgettable among
the more distinguished of these Civil War veterans was General John
A. Logan, sometime senator in Congress and Blaine’s running mate in
1884. In life he was a gallant and winning figure, and Saint Gaudens’s
equestrian statue in Grant Park preserves his memory in a city that
delighted to honor him.
Chicago’s attractions in those days included summer engagements of
Theodore Thomas’s orchestra, preceding Mr. Thomas’s removal to the city
and the founding of the orchestra that became his memorial. Concerts
were given in an exposition hall on the site now occupied by the Art
Institute, with railway-trains gayly disporting on the lake side of the
building. So persistent is the association of ideas, that to this day
I never hear the Fifth Symphony or the Tannhäuser Overture free of the
rumble and jar and screech of traffic. It was in keeping with Chicago’s
good-humored tolerance of the incongruous and discordant in those
years that the scores of Beethoven and Wagner should be punctuated by
locomotive whistles, and that _pianissimo_ passages should be drowned
in the grinding of brakes.
At this period David Swing stood every Sunday morning in Central Music
Hall addressing large audiences, and he looms importantly in the
Chicago of my earliest knowledge. Swing was not only a fine classical
scholar--he lectured charmingly on the Greek poets--but he preached
a gospel that harmonized with the hopeful and liberal Chicago spirit
as it gathered strength and sought the forms in which it has later
declared itself. He was not an orator in the sense that Ingersoll and
Beecher were; as I remember, he always read his sermons or addresses;
but he was a strikingly individual and magnetic person, whose fine
cultivation shone brilliantly in his discourses. In the retrospect it
seems flattering to the Chicago of that time that it recognized and
appreciated his quality in spite of an unorthodoxy that had caused his
retirement from the formal ministry.
The third member of a trinity that lingers agreeably in my memory is
Eugene Field. Journalism has known no more versatile genius, and his
column of “Sharps and Flats” in the _Morning News_ (later the _Record_)
voiced the Chicago of his day. Here indubitably was the flavor of the
original wild-onion beds of the Jesuit chronicles! Field became an
institution quite as much as Thomas and Swing, and reached an audience
that ultimately embraced the whole United States. The literary finish
of his paragraphs, their wide range of subject, their tone, varying
from kindly encouraging comment on a new book of verse that had won his
approval to a mocking jibe at some politician, his hatred of pretense,
the plausibility of the hoaxes he was constantly perpetrating, gave
an infinite zest to his department. The most devoted of Chicagoans,
he nevertheless laid a chastening hand upon his fellow citizens. In
an ironic vein that was perhaps his best medium he would hint at the
community’s lack of culture, though he would be the first to defend
the city from such assaults from without the walls. He prepared the
way for the coming of Edmund Clarence Stedman with announcements of
a series of bizarre entertainments in the poet’s honor, including a
street parade in which the meat-packing industry was to be elaborately
represented. He gave circulation to a story, purely fanciful, that
Joel Chandler Harris was born in Africa, where his parents were
missionaries, thus accounting for “Uncle Remus’s” intimate acquaintance
with negro characters and folklore. His devotion to journalism was
such that he preferred to publish his verses in his newspaper rather
than in magazines, often hoarding them for weeks that he might fill a
column with poems and create the impression that they were all flung
off as part of the day’s work, though, as a matter of fact, they were
the result of the most painstaking labor. With his legs thrown across
a table he wrote, on a pad held in his lap, the minute, perpendicular
hand, with its monkish rubrications, that gave distinction to all his
“copy.” Among other accomplishments he was a capital recitationist
and mimic. There was no end to the variety of ways in which he could
interest and amuse a company. He was so pre-eminently a social being
that it was difficult to understand how he produced so much when he
yielded so readily to any suggestion to strike work for any enterprise
that promised diversion. I linger upon his name not because of his
talents merely but because he was in a very true sense the protagonist
of the city in those years; a veritable _genius loci_ who expressed a
Chicago, “wilful, young,” that was disposed to stick its tongue in its
cheek in the presence of the most exalted gods.
My Chicago of the consulship of Plancus was illuminated also by the
National League ball club, whose roster contained “names to fill a
Roman line”--“Pop” Anson, Clarkson, Williamson, Ryan, Pfeffer, and
“Mike” Kelley. Chicago displayed hatchments of woe on her portals when
Kelley was “sold to Boston” for $10,000! In his biography of Field Mr.
Slason Thompson has preserved this characteristic paragraph--only one
of many in which the wit, humorist, and poet paid tribute to Kelley’s
genius:
“Benjamin Harrison is a good, honest, patriotic man, and we like him.
But he never stole second base in all his life and he could not swat
Mickey Welch’s down curves over the left-field fence. Therefore, we
say again, as we have said many times before, that, much as we revere
Benjamin Harrison’s purity and amiability, we cannot but accord the
tribute of our sincerest admiration to that paragon of American
manhood, Michael J. Kelley.”
III
It must be said for Chicago that to the best of her ability her
iniquities are kept in the open; she conceals nothing; it is all there
for your observation if you are disposed to pry into the heart of the
matter. The rectilinear system of streets exposes the whole city to
the sun’s eye. One is struck by the great number of foreign faces, and
by faces that show a blending of races--a step, perhaps, toward the
evolution of some new American type. On Michigan Avenue, where on
fair afternoons something of the brilliant spectacle of Fifth Avenue
is reproduced, women in bright turbans, men in modifications of their
national garb--Syrians, Greeks, Turks, Russians and what-not--are
caught up and hurried along in the crowd. In the shopping centres
of Wabash Avenue and State Street the foreign element is present
constantly, and even since the war’s abatement of immigration these
potential citizens are daily in evidence in the railway-stations. Yet
one has nowhere the sense of congestion that is so depressing in New
York’s East Side; the overcrowding is not so apparent even where the
conditions are the worst Chicago has to offer.
My search for the picturesque had been disappointing until, quite
undirected, I stumbled into Maxwell Street one winter morning and found
its Jewish market to my liking. The “Ham Fair” in Paris is richer in
antiquarian loot, but Maxwell Street is enough; ’twill serve! Here we
have squalor, perhaps, and yet a pretty clean and a wholly orderly
squalor. Innumerable booths litter the sidewalks of this thoroughfare
between Halstead and Jefferson Streets, and merchandise and customers
overflow into the streets until traffic is blocked. Fruits, vegetables,
meats, fowls, raiment of every kind are offered. Bushel-baskets are
the ordained receptacle for men’s hats. A fine leisure characterizes
the movements and informs the methods of the cautious purchaser. Cages
of pigeons proudly surmounting coops of fowls suggested that their
elevation might be attributable to some special sanctity or reservation
for sacrificial rites. A cynical policeman (I saw but one guardian
of the peace in the course of three visits) rudely dispelled this
illusion with a hint that these birds, enjoying a free range of the
air, had doubtless been feloniously captured for exposure to sale in
the market-place--an imputation upon the bearded keepers of the bird
bazaars that I reject with scorn. Negroes occasionally cross the bounds
of their own quarter to shop among these children of the Ghettos--I
wonder whether by some instinctive confidence in the good-will of a
people who like themselves do daily battle with the most deeply planted
of all prejudices.
[Illustration: The “Ham Fair” in Paris is richer in antiquarian loot,
but Maxwell Street is enough; ’twill serve!]
Chicago is rich in types; human nature is comprehensively represented
with its best and worst. It should be possible to find here, midway of
the seas, the typical American, but I am mistrustful of my powers of
selection in so grave a matter. There are too many men observable in
office-buildings and in clubs who might pass as typical New Yorkers
if they were encountered in Fifth Avenue, to make possible any safe
choice for the artist’s pencil. There is no denying that the average
Chicagoan is less “smart” than the New Yorker. The pressing of clothes
and nice differentiations in haberdashery seem to be less important
to the male here than to his New York cousin. I spent an anxious
Sunday morning in quest of the silk hat, and reviewed the departing
worshippers in the neighborhood of many temples in this search, but the
only toppers I found were the crowning embellishments of two colored
gentlemen in South State Street.
Perhaps the typical Chicagoan is the commuter who, after the day’s
hurry and fret, ponders the city’s needs calmly by the lake shore or in
prairie villages. Chicago’s suburbs are felicitously named--Kenilworth,
Winnetka, Hubbard Woods, Ravinia, Wilmette, Oak Park, and Lake Forest.
But neither the opulence of Lake Forest and Winnetka, nor polo and a
famous golf-course at Wheaton can obscure the merits of Evanston. The
urban Chicagoan becomes violent at the mention of Evanston, yet here we
find a reservoir of the true Western folksiness, and Chicago profits
by its propinquity. Evanston goes to church, Evanston reads, Evanston
is shamelessly high-brow with a firm substratum of evangelicanism.
Here, on spring mornings, Chopin floats through many windows across
the pleasantest of hedges and Dostoyefsky is enthroned by the evening
lamp. The girl who is always at the tennis-nets or on the golf-links of
Evanston is the same girl one has heard at the piano, or whose profile
is limned against the lamp with the green shade as she ponders the
Russians. She is symbolic and evocative of Chicago _in altissimo_. Her
father climbs the heights perforce that he may not be deprived of her
society. Fitted by nature to adorn the bright halls of romance, she is
the sternest of realists. She discusses politics with sophistication,
and you may be sure she belongs to many societies and can wield the
gavel with grace and ease. She buries herself at times in a city
settlement, for nothing is so important to this young woman as the
uplift of the race; and in so far as the race’s destiny is in her hands
I cheerfully volunteer the opinion that its future is bright.
I hope, however, to be acquitted of ungraciousness if I say that the
most delightful person I ever met in Chicago, where an exacting social
taste may find amplest satisfaction, and where, in the academic shades
of three universities (Northwestern, Lake Forest, and Chicago), one
may find the answer to a question in any of the arts or sciences--the
most refreshing and the most instructive of my encounters was with a
lady who followed the vocation of a pickpocket and shoplifter. A friend
of mine who is engaged in the detection of crime in another part of the
universe had undertaken to introduce me to the presence of a “gunman,”
a species of malefactor that had previously eluded me. Meeting this
detective quite unexpectedly in Chicago, he made it possible for
me to observe numbers of gangsters, or persons he vouched for as
such--gentlemen willing to commit murder for a fee so ridiculously low
that it would be immoral for me to name it.
It is enough that I beheld and even conversed with a worthy descendant
of the murderers of Elizabethan tragedy--one who might confess, with
the Second Murderer in Macbeth:
“I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Have so incens’d that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.”
But it was even more thrilling to be admitted, after a prearranged
knock at the back door, into the home of a woman of years whose life
has been one long battle with the social order. Assured by my friend
that I was a trustworthy person, or, in the vernacular, “all right,”
she entered with the utmost spirit into the discussion of larceny as
she had practised it. Only a week earlier she had been released from
the Bridewell after serving a sentence for shoplifting, and yet her
incarceration--only one of a series of imprisonments--had neither
embittered her nor dampened her zest for life. She met my inquiries as
to the hazards of the game with the most engaging candor. I am ashamed
to confess that as she described her adventures I could understand
something of the lawless joy she found in the pitting of her wits
against the law. She had lived in Chicago all her life and knew its
every corner. The underworld was an open book to her; she patiently
translated for my benefit the thieves’ argot she employed fluently.
She instructed me with gusto and humor in the most approved methods
of shoplifting, with warnings as to the machinery by which the big
department stores protect themselves from her kind. She was equally
wise as to the filching of purses, explaining that this is best done
by three conspirators if a crowded street-car be the chosen scene of
operations. Her own function was usually the gentle seizure of the
purse, to be passed quickly back to a confederate, and he in turn was
charged with the responsibility of conveying it to a third person,
who was expected to drop from the rear platform and escape. Having
elucidated this delicate transaction, she laughed gleefully. “Once on
a Wabash Avenue car I nipped a purse from a woman’s lap and passed it
back, thinking a girl who was working with me was right there, but
say--I handed it to a captain of police!” Her husband, a burglar of
inferior talents, sitting listlessly in the dingy room that shook under
the passing elevated trains, took a sniff of cocaine. When I professed
interest in the proceeding she said she preferred the hypodermic, and
thereupon mixed a potion for herself and thrust the needle into an arm
much swollen from frequent injections. Only the other day, a year after
this visit, I learned that she was again in durance, this time for an
ingenious attempt to defraud an insurance company.
IV
In the field of social effort Chicago has long stood at the fore, and
the experiments have continued until a good many debatable points as
to method have been determined. Hull House and Miss Jane Addams are a
part of American history. There are those in Chicago who are skeptical
as to the value of much of the machinery employed in social betterment,
but they may be silenced effectively by a question as to just what the
plight of the two and a half million would be if so many high-minded
people had not consecrated themselves to the task of translating
America into terms of service for the guidance and encouragement of the
poor and ignorant. The spirit of this endeavor is that expressed in
Arnold’s lines on Goethe:
“He took the suffering human race,
He read each wound, each weakness clear;
And struck his finger on the place
And said: Thou ailest here and here!”
And when the diagnosis has been made some one in this city of hope is
ready with a remedy.
When I remarked to a Chicago alderman upon the great number of agencies
at work in Chicago for social betterment, he said, with manifest pride:
“This town is full of idealists!” What strikes the visitor is that so
many of these idealists are practical-minded men and women who devote
a prodigious amount of time, energy, and money to the promotion of
social welfare. It is impossible to examine a cross-section anywhere
without finding vestigia of welfare effort, or traces of the movements
for political reform represented in the Municipal Voters’ League, the
Legislative League, or the City Club.
It is admitted (grudgingly in some quarters) that the strengthening
of the social fabric has carried with it an appreciable elevation of
political ideals, though the proof of this is less impressive than we
should like to have it. It is unfortunately true that an individual
may be subjected to all possible saving influences--transformed
into a clean, reputable being, yet continue to view his political
obligations as through a glass darkly. Nor is the average citizen of
old American stock, who is satisfied, very often, to accept any kind
of local government so long as he is not personally annoyed about it,
a wholly inspiring example to the foreign-born. The reformer finds it
necessary to work coincidentally at both ends of the social scale. The
preservation of race groups in Chicago’s big wards (the vote in these
political units ranges from eight to thirty-six thousand), is essential
to safe manipulation. The bosses are not interested in the successful
operation of the melting-pot. It is much easier for them to buy votes
collectively from a padrone than to negotiate with individuals whose
minds have been “corrupted” by the teachers of political honesty in
settlements and neighborhood houses. However, the Chicago bosses enjoy
little tranquillity; some agency is constantly on their heels with
an impudent investigation that endangers their best-laid devices for
“protection.”
As an Americanizing influence, important as a means of breaking-up
race affiliations that facilitate the “delivery” of votes, Chicago has
developed a type of recreation park that gives promise of the best
results. The first of these were opened in the South Park district
in 1905. There are now thirty-five such centres, which, without
paralleling or infringing upon the work of other social agencies,
greatly widen the scope of the city’s social service. These parks
comprise a playground with baseball diamond, tennis-courts, an outdoor
swimming-pool, playgrounds for young children, and a field-house
containing a large assembly-hall, club-rooms, a branch library, and
shower-baths with locker-rooms for men and women. Skating is offered
as a winter diversion, and the halls may be used for dances, dramatic,
musical, and other neighborhood entertainments. Clubs organized
for the study of civic questions meet in these houses; there are
special classes for the instruction of foreigners in the mystery
of citizenship; and schemes of welfare work are discussed in the
neighborhood councils that are encouraged to debate municipal problems
and to initiate new methods of social service. A typical centre is
Dvorák Park, ninety-five per cent of whose patrons are Bohemians.
Among its organizations are a Bohemian Old Settlers’ Club and a
Servant Girls’ Chorus. Colonel H. C. Carbaugh, of the Civil Service
Board of South Park Commissioners, in an instructive volume, “Human
Welfare Work in Chicago,” calls these park centres “public community
clearing-houses.” They appeal the more strongly to the neighborhoods
they serve from the fact that they are provided by the municipality,
and, while under careful and sympathetic supervision, are in a very
true sense the property of the people. Visits are exchanged by the
musical, gymnastic, or other societies of the several communities, with
a view to promoting fellowship between widely separated neighborhoods.
One has but to ask in Chicago whether some particular philanthropic or
welfare work has been undertaken to be borne away at once to observe
that very thing in successful operation. It is a fair statement
that no one need walk the streets of the city hungry. Many doors
stand ajar for the despairing. A common indictment of the churches,
that they have neglected the practical application of Christianity
to humanity’s needs, hardly holds against Chicago’s churches. The
Protestant Episcopal Church has long been zealous in philanthropic
and welfare work, and Methodists, Presbyterians and Baptists are
conspicuously active in these fields. The Catholic Church in Chicago
extends a helping hand through forty-five alert and well-managed
agencies. The total disbursement of the Associated Jewish Charities
for the year ending May, 1916, was $593,466, and the Jewish people of
Chicago contribute generously to social-welfare efforts outside their
fold. The Young Men’s Christian Association conducts a great number
of enterprises, including a nineteen-story hotel, built at a cost of
$1,350,000, which affords temporary homes to the thousands of young men
who every year seek employment in Chicago. This huge structure contains
1,821 well-ventilated rooms that are rented at from thirty to fifty
cents a day. The Chicago Association has twenty-nine widely distributed
branches, offering recreation, vocational instruction, and spiritual
guidance. The Salvation Army addresses itself tirelessly to Chicago’s
human problem. Colonel Carbaugh thus summarizes the army’s work for the
year ending in September, 1916: “At the various institutions for poor
men and women 151,501 beds and meals were worked for; besides which
$38,779.98 in cash was paid to the inmates for work done. To persons
who were not in a position to work, or whom it was impossible to supply
with work, 111,354 beds and meals, 11,330 garments and pairs of shoes,
and 123 tons of coal were given without charge.”
The jaunty inquirer for historical evidences--hoary ruins “out of
fashion, like a rusty mail in monumental mockery”--is silenced by the
multiplicity of sentry-houses that mark the line of social regeneration
and security. Chicago is carving her destiny and in no small degree
moulding the future of America by these laborious processes brought to
bear upon humanity itself. Perhaps the seeker in quest of the spirit
of Chicago better serves himself by sitting for an hour in a community
centre, in a field-house, in the juvenile court, in one of the hundreds
of places where the human problem is met and dealt with hourly than in
perusing tables of statistics.
At every turn one is aware that no need, no abuse is neglected, and
an immeasurable patience characterizes all this labor. One looks at
Chicago’s worst slum with a sense that after all it is not so bad, or
that at any rate it is not hopeless. Nothing is hopeless in a city
where the highest reach down so constantly to the lowest, where the
will to protect, to save, to lift is everywhere so manifest. This will,
this determination is well calculated to communicate a certain awe to
the investigator: no other expression of the invincible Chicago spirit
is so impressive as this.
V
_Anno Urbis Conditæ_ may not be appended to any year in the chronicles
of a city that has so repeatedly rebuilt itself and that goes
cheerfully on demolishing yesterday’s structures to make way for
the nobler achievements of to-morrow. While the immediate effect of
the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1892-3 was to quicken the civic
impulse and arouse Chicago to a sense of her own powers, a lasting and
concrete result is found in the ambition inspired by the architectural
glories of the fair to invoke the same arts for the city’s permanent
beautification. The genius of Mr. Daniel H. Burnham, who waved the
magic wand that summoned “pillared arch and sculptured dome” out
of flat prairie and established “the White City” to live as a happy
memory for many millions in all lands, was enlisted for the greater
task. Without the fair as a background the fine talents of Mr. Burnham
and his collaborator, Mr. Edward H. Bennett, might never have been
exercised upon the city. Chicago thinks in large terms, and being
properly pleased with the demonstration of its ability to carry
through an undertaking of heroic magnitude it immediately sought other
fields to conquer. The fair had hardly closed its doors before Mr.
Burnham and Mr. Bennett were engaged by the Commercial Club to prepare
comprehensive plans for the perpetuation of something of the charm
and beauty of the fairy city as a permanent and predominating feature
of Chicago. Clearly what served so well as a temporary matter might
fill the needs of all time. The architects boldly attacked the problem
of establishing as the outer line, the façade of the city, something
distinctive, a combination of landscape and architecture such as no
other American city has ever created out of sheer pride, determination,
and sound taste. Like the æsthetic problems, the practical difficulties
imposed by topography, commercial pre-emptions, and legal
embarrassments were intrusted only to competent and sympathetic hands.
The whole plan, elaborated in a handsome volume published in 1909, with
the effects contemplated happily anticipated in the colored drawings of
Mr. Jules Guérin, fixed definitely an ideal and a goal.
This programme was much described and discussed at the time of its
inception, and I had ignorantly assumed that it had been neglected in
the pressure of matters better calculated to resound in bank clearings,
but I had grossly misjudged the firmness of the Chicago fibre. The
death of Mr. Burnham left the architectural responsibilities of the
work in the very capable hands of Mr. Bennett. The Commercial Club,
an organization of highest intelligence and influence, steadfastly
supported the plan until it was reinforced by a strong public demand
for its fulfilment. The movement has been greatly assisted by Mr.
Charles H. Wacker, president of the plan commission and the author
of a primer on the subject that is used in the public schools. Mr.
Wacker’s vigorous propaganda, through the press and by means of
illustrated lectures in school and neighborhood houses, has tended to
the democratizing of what might have passed as a fanciful scheme of no
interest to the great body of the people.
With singular perversity nature vouchsafed the fewest possible
aids to the architect for the embellishment of a city that had
grown to prodigious size before it became conscious of its artistic
deficiencies. The lake washes a flat beach, unbroken by any islanded
bay to rest the eye, and the back door is level with limitless prairie.
There is no hill on which to plant an acropolis, and the Chicago River
(transformed into a canal by clever engineering) offered little to
the landscape-architect at any stage of its history. However, the
distribution of parks is excellent, and they are among the handsomest
in the world. These, looped together by more than eighty miles of
splendid boulevards, afford four thousand acres of open space. The
early pre-emption of the lake front by railroad-tracks added to the
embarrassments of the artist, but the plan devised by Messrs. Burnham
and Bennett conceals them by a broadening of Grant Park that cannot
fail to produce an effect of distinction and charm. Chicago has a
playful habit of driving the lake back at will, and it is destined to
farther recessions. When the prodigious labors involved in the plan
are completed the lake may be contemplated across green esplanades,
broken by lagoons; peristyles and statuary will be a feature of
the transformed landscape. The new Field Museum is architecturally
consonant with the general plan; a new art museum and other buildings
are promised that will add to the variety and picturesqueness of the
whole. With Michigan Avenue widened and brought into harmony with
Grant Park, thus extended and beautified and carried across the river
northward to a point defined at present by the old water-tower (one
of Chicago’s few antiquities), landscape architecture will have set a
new mark in America. The congestion of north and south bound traffic
on Michigan Avenue will be relieved by a double-decked bridge, making
possible the classification of traffic and the exclusion of heavy
vehicles from the main thoroughfare. All this is promised very soon,
now that necessary legislation and legal decisions are clearing the
way. The establishment of a civic centre, with a grouping of public
buildings that would make possible further combinations in keeping with
those that are to lure the eye at the lakeside is projected, but may be
left for another generation to accomplish.
Chicago’s absorption in social service and well-planned devices for
taking away the reproach of its ugliness is not at the expense of the
grave problems presented by its politics. Here again the inquirer is
confronted by a formidable array of citizens, effectively organized,
who are bent upon making Chicago a safe place for democracy. That
Chicago shall be the best-governed city in America is the aspiration
of great numbers of men and women, and one is struck once more not
merely by the energy expended in these matters but by the thoroughness
and far-sightedness of the efforts for political betterment. Illinois
wields so great an influence in national affairs that strictly
municipal questions suffer in Chicago as in every other American city
where the necessities of partisan politics constantly obscure local
issues. The politics of Chicago is bewilderingly complicated by the
complexity of its governmental machinery.
It is staggering to find that the city has not one but, in effect,
twenty-two distinct governing agencies, all intrusted with the taxing
power! These include the city of Chicago, a board of education, a
library board, the Municipal Tuberculosis Sanitarium, the county
government of Cook County, the sanitary district of Chicago, and
sixteen separate boards of park commissioners. The interests
represented in these organizations are, of course, identical in so
far as the taxpaying citizen is concerned. An exhaustive report of
the Chicago Bureau of Public Efficiency published in January, 1917,
reaches the conclusion that “this community is poorly served by its
hodgepodge of irresponsible governing agencies, not only independent
of one another but often pulling and hauling at cross-purposes. A
single governing agency, in which should be centred all the local
administrative and legislative functions of the community, but directly
responsible to the voters, would be able to render services which
existing agencies could not perform nearly so well, if at all, even
if directed by officials of exceptional ability. The present system,
however, instead of attracting to public employment men of exceptional
ability, tends to keep them out, with the result that the places are
left at the disposal of partisan-spoils political leaders.”
The waste entailed by this multiplication of agencies and resulting
diffusion of power and responsibility is illustrated by the number of
occasions on which the citizen is called upon to register and vote. The
election expenses of Chicago and Cook County for 1916 were more than
two million dollars, an increase of one hundred per cent in four years.
This does not, of course, take account of the great sums expended by
candidates and party organizations, or the waste caused by the frequent
interruptions to normal business. Chicago’s calendar of election events
for 1918 includes opportunities for registration in February, March,
August, and October; city primaries in February; general primaries in
September; a city election in April; and a general election in November.
Under the plan of unified government proposed by the Bureau of
Efficiency there would be but three regular elections in each four-year
period, two biennial elections for national and State officials, and
one combined municipal and judicial election. A consolidation and
reform of the judicial machinery of Cook County and Chicago is urged
by the bureau, which complains that the five county courts and the
municipal court of Chicago, whose functions are largely concurrent,
cost annually two and a quarter million. There are six separate clerks’
offices and a small army of deputy sheriffs and bailiffs to serve these
courts, with an evident paralleling of labor. While the city and county
expend nearly a million dollars annually for legal services, this is
not the whole item, for the library board, the board of education, and
committees of the city council may, on occasion, employ special counsel.
The policing of so large a city, whose very geographical position
makes it a convenient way station for criminals of every sort, where
so many races are to be dealt with, and where the existing form of
municipal government keeps politics constantly to the fore, is beset
with well-nigh insuperable obstacles. Last year the police department
passed through a fierce storm with what seems to be a resulting
improvement in conditions. An investigator of the Committee of Fifteen,
a citizens’ organization, declared in May, 1917, that ten per cent
of the men on the police force are “inherently crooked and ought to
be driven from the department.” To which a police official retorted
that for every crooked policeman there are 500 crooked citizens, an
ill-tempered aspersion too shocking for acceptance. The _Chicago Daily
News Almanac_ records 114,625 arrests in 1915. Half of the total
are set down as Americans; there were 9,508 negroes, 4,739 Germans,
2,144 Greeks, 7,644 Polanders, 5,577 Russians, 2,981 Italians, and
2,565 Irish. In that year there were 194 murders--35 fewer than in
1914. Comparisons in such matters are not profitable but it may be
interesting to note that in 1915 there were 222 murders in New York;
244 in 1914; 265 in 1913. Over 3,000 keepers and inmates of Chicago
gaming-houses were arrested in 1915. The cost of the police department
is in excess of $7,000,000--an amount just about balanced by the
license fee paid by the city’s seven thousand saloons. Until recently
the State law closing saloons on Sunday was ignored, but last year the
city police department undertook to enforce it, with (to the casual
eye) a considerable degree of success.
The report of the Bureau of Efficiency recommends the consolidation
of the existing governing agencies into a single government headed by
an executive of the city-manager type. Instead of a political mayor
elected by popular vote the office would be filled by the city council
for an indefinite tenure. The incumbent would be the executive officer
of the council and he might be given a seat in that body without a
vote. The council would be free to go outside the city if necessary
in its search for a competent mayor under this council-manager plan.
One has but to read the Chicago newspapers to be satisfied that some
such change as here indicated is essential to the wise and economical
government of the city. Battles between the mayor and the council,
upheavals in one city department or another occur constantly with a
serious loss of municipal dignity. With deep humility I confess my
incompetence for the task of describing the present mayor of Chicago,
Mr. William Hale Thompson, whose antics since he assumed office have
given Chicago a vast amount of painful publicity. As a public official
his manifold infelicities (I hope the term is sufficiently delicate)
have at least served to strengthen the arguments in favor of the recall
as a means of getting rid of an unfit office-holder.[D] Last year a
general shaking up of the police department had hardly faded from the
head-lines before the city’s school system, a frequent storm-centre,
caught the limelight. The schools are managed by a board of trustees
appointed by the mayor. On a day last spring (1917) the board met
and discharged the superintendent of schools (though retaining him
temporarily), and, if we may believe the news columns of the Chicago
_Tribune_, “Chicago’s mayor was roped, thrown, and tied so rapidly
that the crowd gasped, laughed, and broke into a cheer almost in one
moment.” I mention this episode, which was followed in a few weeks by
the reinstatement of the superintendent with an increase of salary,
as justifying the demand for a form of government that will perform
its functions decently and in order and without constant disturbances
of the public service that result only in the encouragement of
incompetence.
The politicians will not relinquish so big a prize without a struggle;
but one turns from the dark side of the picture to admire the many
hopeful, persistent agencies that are addressing themselves to the
correction of these evils. The best talents of the city are devoted
to just these things. The trustees of the Bureau of Public Efficiency
are Julius Rosenwald, Alfred L. Baker, Onward Bates, George G.
Tunnell, Walter L. Fisher, Victor Elting, Allen B. Pond, and Frank I.
Moulton, whose names are worthy of all honor as typical of Chicago’s
most successful and public-spirited citizens. The City Club, with
a membership of 2,400, is a wide-awake organization whose 27 civic
committees, enlisting the services of 500 members, are constantly
studying municipal questions, instituting inquiries, and initiating
“movements” well calculated to annoy and alarm the powers that prey.
Space that I had reserved for some note of Chicago’s industries, the
vastness of the stock-yards, the great totals in beasts and dollars
represented in the meat-packing business, the lake and railroad
tonnage, and like matters, shrinks under pressure of what seem, on
the whole, to be things of greater interest and significance. That
the total receipts of live-stock for one year exceeded 14,000,000
with a cash value of $370,938,156 strikes me as less impressive than
the fact that a few miles distant from the packing-houses exists an
art institute, visited by approximately a million persons annually,
and an art school that affords capable instruction to 3,000 students.
Every encouragement is extended to these pupils, nor is the artist,
once launched upon his career, neglected by the community. The city
provides, through a Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art,
for the purchase of paintings by Chicago artists. There are a variety
of private organizations that extend a helping hand to the tyro, and
lectures and concerts are abundantly provided. A few years ago the
National Institute of Arts and Letters met for the first time in
Chicago. It must have been with a certain humor that the citizens
spread for the members, who came largely from the East, a royal
banquet in the Sculpture Hall of the Institute, as though to present
Donatello and Verrocchio as the real hosts of the occasion. It is by
such manifestations that Chicago is prone to stifle the charge of
philistinism.
[Illustration: Banquet given for the members of the National Institute
of Arts and Letters.]
With a noteworthy absence of self-consciousness, Chicago assimilates
a great deal of music. The symphony orchestra, founded by Theodore
Thomas and conducted since his death by Frederic Stock, offers a
series of twenty-eight concerts a year. Eight thousand contributors
made possible the building of Orchestra Hall, the organization’s
permanent home. Boston is not more addicted to symphonies than Chicago.
Indeed, on afternoons when concerts are scheduled the agitations of
the musically minded in popular refectories, the presence in Michigan
Avenue of suburban young women, whom one identifies at sight as
devotees of Bach and Brahms, suggest similar scenes that are a part
of the life of Boston. The luxury of grand opera is offered for ten
weeks every winter by artists of first distinction; and it was Chicago,
we shall frequently be reminded, that called New York’s attention to
the merits of Mme. Galli-Curci. Literature too is much to the fore
in Chicago, but I shall escape from the task of enumerating its many
practitioners by pleading that only a volume would do justice to the
subject. The contributors to Mr. Bert Leston Taylor’s “Line o’ Type”
column in the _Tribune_ testify daily to the prevalence of the poetic
impulse within the city and of an alert, mustang, critical spirit.
With all its claims to cosmopolitanism one is nevertheless conscious
that Chicago is only a prairie county-seat that is continually
outgrowing its bounds, but is striving to maintain its early
fundamental devotion to decency and order, and develop among its
millions the respect for those things that are more excellent that is
so distinguishing a trait of the Folks throughout the West. Chicago’s
strength is the strength of the soil that was won for civilization and
democracy by a great and valorous body of pioneer freemen; and the
Chicago spirit is that of the men and women who plunged into the West
bearing in their hearts that “something pretty fine” (in Lincoln’s
phrase), which was the ideal of the founders of the republic. “The
children of the light” are numerous enough to make the materialists and
the philistines uncomfortable if not heartily ashamed of themselves;
for it is rather necessary in Chicago to have “interests,” to manifest
some degree of curiosity touching the best that has been thought and
done in the world, and to hold a commission to help and to serve the
community and the nation, to win the highest esteem.
Every weakness and every element of strength in democracy, as we
are experimenting with it, has definite and concrete presentment in
Chicago. In the trying months preceding and following the declaration
of war with Germany the city repeatedly asserted its intense
patriotism. The predominating foreign-born population is German, yet
once the die was cast these citizens were found, except in negligible
instances, supporting the American cause as loyally as their neighbors
of old American stock. The city’s patriotic ardor was expressed
repeatedly in popular demonstrations--beginning with a preparedness
parade in June, 1916, in which 150,000 persons participated; in public
gatherings designed to unify sentiment, not least noteworthy of these
being the meeting in the stock-yards pavilion in May, of last year,
when 12,000 people greeted Colonel Roosevelt. The visit of M. Viviani
and Field-Marshal Joffre afforded the city another opportunity to
manifest its devotion to the cause of democracy. Every responsibility
entailed by America’s entrance into the war was met immediately with
an enthusiasm so hearty that the Chicago press was to be pardoned
for indulging in ironic flings at the East, which had been gloomily
apprehensive as to the attitude of the Middle West.
The flag flies no more blithely or securely anywhere in America than in
the great city that lies at the northern edge of the prairies that gave
Lincoln to be the savior of the nation. Those continuing experiments
and that struggle for perfection that are the task of democracy
have here their fullest manifestation, and the knowledge that these
processes and undertakings are nobly guided must be a stimulus and an
inspiration to all who have at heart the best that may be sought and
won for America.