Chicago

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CHICAGO

The city of Chicago is in many ways a wonderful barometer of American history, progress, and culture between the years 1880 and 1920. Recovering from the devastation of a massive fire in 1871 that all but destroyed the foundations of the city, Chicago grew at a remarkable rate, spreading along the shores of Lake Michigan and, perhaps more significantly, reaching up into the sky. A combination of hard bedrock and architectural daring meant that Chicago became synonymous with the building of skyscrapers, pushing the limits of new building materials and new models for urban development.

The Home Insurance Company Building, designed by William Le Baron Jenney and completed in 1885, laid the groundwork for this building boom. Use of new methods of construction, specifically the employment of strong but relatively light steel beams for the structural framework, allowed architects to build higher and higher. The skyscrapers led to the image of "cliff dwellers" living in them, an idea at the center of some of the early novels written about Chicago as a major city and commercial center by writers such as Henry Blake Fuller. Rethinking the framework of a building allowed designers freedom in the use of elevators, wiring, and control of the interior climate. While other cities, especially on the eastern seaboard, were still highly influenced by classical Greek and Roman styles, the architects in Chicago were reimagining what public buildings could be. Jenney was instrumental in training Daniel Burnham, William Holabird, Martin Roche, and Louis Sullivan, who went on to mentor Frank Lloyd Wright.

As a junction between East and West, Chicago flourished as railroad traffic increased through the city, and one of its major industries, beef, was a direct result. The enormous stockyards and slaughterhouses in Chicago became central to the meat industry of the nation. Chicago was immensely accessible to both people and industry thanks to improved transportation, including canals that linked the city to the Atlantic Ocean and to the Mississippi River. Blessed by its geographic position, the development of natural resources such as coal, lumber, and ore, and the pathways that met there, the population of the city grew from around 50 settlers in 1830 to 300,000 by the time of the fire in 1871, more than a million by 1890, and double that number by 1910. The World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 announced the arrival of Chicago as a modern city and as a key player on the national and international stage. As industry developed, immigrants from Europe, taking advantage of an unrestricted immigration policy, flooded into the city, choosing it as an alternative to New York. Inevitably the excess of cheap labor led to exploitation and unscrupulous profiteering, often at the expense of public health.

Upton Sinclair spent months talking to the immigrant workers of Packingtown and observing the conditions of meat preparation in the slaughterhouses and stockyards. He made contact with many of them through the settlement houses, and while completing his research, he tried (unsuccessfully) to convert Jane Addams to socialism. His novel The Jungle, published in 1906, led to institutional changes in the handling of meat, but it did not necessarily have much effect on the protection of workers. Sinclair's main purpose was to expose the exploitation of the employees, but as he famously said later: "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach." The furor caused by the novel eventually led to the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and, more immediately, to sweeping changes in the way meat was prepared and handled through the passing of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. Sinclair was one of the new breed of Chicago writers, but some of those associated with the Chicago Renaissance of the late nineteenth century were still very influential as the modern era dawned.

THE CHICAGO SCHOOL OR CHICAGO RENAISSANCE

Placed in the center of this rapid change were writers who were well positioned to document what they saw. Some of them, like Henry Blake Fuller, were descended from the old settlers of the city, while others, like Hamlin Garland, moved into the urban sprawl from rural areas. Chicago pulled writers into the modern world, forcing them to deal with issues like commerce, industry, immigration, technology, and rapid urban expansion. Apart from Fuller and Garland, other writers such as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, Sherwood Anderson, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and Edgar Lee Masters helped document Chicago as a place of "primary cultural consequence" (Smith, p. 3). Not all of the writing about the city was laudatory, however. Writers felt threatened by a city that seemed "inimical or, perhaps worse, indifferent to them," and they often reflect that Chicago "was a dispiriting place to live" (Smith, p. 7).

Literary society in Chicago grouped around a few significant meeting places. Lorado Taft's sculpture workshop on the Midway became a regular salon, and it was here that Hamlin Garland met his future wife, Taft's sister Zulime. Mrs. J. W. A. Young's summer home on Lake Michigan was opened up to artists, who could work or relax there, and older members of the literary circle could spend time mentoring the upand-coming writers. This was known as the Top o' Dunes Club, and Fuller formed lasting friendships with some of the young people he met there, including the poet and dance critic Mark Turbyfill. The Little Room, an informal gathering of writers, artists, architects, and thinkers, met at least once a month, often at the studio of Anna Morgan in the Century Building on the lakeshore. It was inevitable that such a lively and eclectic literary scene developed its own outlets, including the influential literary review The Dial, Chap-Book, Little Review, and Harriet Monroe's Poetry.

Poetry, founded in 1912, began with the purpose of operating an open door policy. Any poet—published or unpublished, famous or undiscovered—was promised access to the editorial board for an honest review. As Monroe wrote in the inaugural issue, the magazine desired to publish "the best English verse which is being written today, regardless of where, by whom, or under what theory of art it is written." Poetry offered a forum for poets such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Wallace Stevens, and it provided the first U.S. publication of T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Monroe and the board of editors and advisers, including Fuller, also championed Carl Sandburg (1878–1967). Sandburg'sChicago Poems captured the industrial and cultural changes of his city in free verse: the city he called the

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders.

(P. 4)

HENRY BLAKE FULLER

Henry Blake Fuller (1857–1929) was heavily influenced by the art, architecture, and literature of the Old World, but he saw a chance for the New World to define its own terms and conditions in aesthetic matters, and he worked toward this aim for the whole of his writing life. Fuller wrote two groundbreaking novels of urban and economic American realism, The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), and With the Procession (1895). Hailed by Theodore Dreiser and William Dean Howells (1837–1920) as one of America's leading and most important novelists of the era, alongside Henry James (1843–1916), Fuller was influential in Chicago literary circles but increasingly as a mentor and adviser rather than as a practitioner.

Fuller called The Cliff-Dwellers "my first essay in 'realism'" ("My Early Books"). He wrote the book, he says, "when the Columbian Exposition helped along a hearing for Chicago fiction" ("My Early Books"). Fuller captured the reality of Chicago as no one ever had, producing a city novel of accuracy and insight, not all of it pleasant or welcome to its subjects. William Dean Howells said of The Cliff-Dwellers and the later With the Procession: "I do not know how conscious Mr. Fuller may have been in his fealty to Chicago when he was writing his story, but it seems to me that I have never read a book more intensely localized, that is to say realized" (Howells, p. 214). Others, however, were outraged by the "warts and all" depiction of their beloved home city. Fuller focused on the conflict between material success and the price paid for it by family, friends, and conventional morality, the driving force of which was Chicago itself. In his obituary of Fuller, Robert Morss Lovett of the University of Chicago reflected that "it was a little disappointing to Fuller's backers that he should choose the World's Fair year for dwelling on the sordid side in The Cliff-Dwellers, but after all, realism was the coming thing" (p. 17). While the book was regarded outside the city as a huge success and Howells and others praised it as the first major work of midwestern realism, Chicagoans themselves were not so sure. It was the first step toward what would become a tempestuous relationship between the city and its first major writer.

In The Cliff-Dwellers (1893), Henry Blake Fuller writes about the underside of Chicago life, showing the growing pains of the huge and expanding city:

Each of these long canyons is closed in by a long frontage of towering cliffs, and these soaring walls of brick and limestone and granite rise higher and higher with each succeeding year, according as the work of erosion at their bases goes onward—the work of that seething flood of carts, carriages, omnibuses, cabs, cars, messengers, shoppers, clerks, and capitalists, which surges with increasing violence for every passing day. This erosion with a sort of fateful regularity has come to be a matter of constant and growing interest. . . .

So many miles of flimsy and shabby shanties and back views of sheds and stables; of grimy, cindered switch-yards, with the long flanks of freight houses and interminable strings of loaded or empty cars; of dingy viaducts and groggy viaducts and dilapidated fences whose scanty remains called to remembrance lotions and tonics that had long passed their vogue; of groups of Sunday loungers before saloons, and gangs of unclassified foreigners picking up bits of coal along the tracks; of muddy crossings over roads whose bordering ditches were filled with flocks of geese; of wide prairies cut up by endless tracks, dotted with pools of water, and rustling with the dead grasses of last summer; then suburbs new and old—some in the fresh promise of sidewalks and trees and nothing else, others unkempt, shabby, gone to seed; then a high passage over a marshy plain, a range of low wooded hills, emancipation from the dubious body known as the Cook County Commissioners.

Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers, pp. 1, 175–176.

Fuller's career shows many lengthy gaps in production sparked by aesthetic disillusion, when he restricted himself to book reviewing and literary articles. Despite praise from his peers, Fuller's name and reputation have been allowed to fade from canonical circles, and he has been wrongly ignored for many years. Part of the explanation lies in his unwillingness to stay with what worked for him. He quickly tired of the novel of realism and tried (among other genres) the short story about Americans abroad, the one-act play, free verse in the style of Edgar Lee Masters, and the shorter modern novel. He effectively committed professional and economic suicide in 1919, when he published Bertram Cope's Year, an openly gay novel, at his own expense. Ironically it is the only book of Fuller's that is still in print. He confined himself to writing periodic book reviews for the next nine years before a final spurt of creativity produced two novels—Gardens of This World and Not on the Screen—in just over six months. The second of these appeared after Fuller's death in July 1929, when he succumbed to heart failure in the middle of a Chicago heat wave.

ROBERT HERRICK

Fuller's friend Robert Herrick (1868–1938) was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); he moved to Chicago in 1893 to take up a post at the University of Chicago. His major theme, the conflict between personal values and the moral ambiguities of capitalistic success, was close to Fuller's concern in his realist works. Although Herrick complained about the teaching duties that consumed much of his time, he still managed to write thirteen novels between 1893 and 1923, when he resigned his position. His major novels include The Common Lot (1904), a thinly veiled account of his own battle to build a house on University Avenue, and Chimes (1926), which depicts the university as a creation of new wealth and a president who is uncultured but enthusiastic. The Web of Life (1900) takes the destruction of the world's fair site as a backdrop to a key scene. Herrick was not a very content man, but he found a niche for himself at the end of his life when his administrative skills earned him the post of governor of the Virgin Islands.

JANE ADDAMS AND HULL-HOUSE

Jane Addams (1860–1935) was one of the most prominent female social activists of her era. In 1889, with Ellen Gates Starr, she founded the social settlement Hull-House on Chicago's Near West Side, a home for the disadvantaged that provided child care, education, language and arts classes, help in finding employment, a meeting place for trade union groups, and facilities for single working girls. As the population of Chicago grew and became more diverse, Addams became aware that support services were needed by the underprivileged. In a time of great racial and ethnic discrimination, Hull-House supported Italian, German, Russian, and Irish immigrants. By the 1920s the area around Hull-House was populated by Mexicans and African Americans who had chosen to settle there, and they joined the cultural mix. As the demand on Hull-House grew, the complex expanded until there were thirteen buildings, including a Labor Museum and the Jane Club for young women.

The aftermath of the World's Columbian Exposition in 1893 brought problems to Chicago. Being a city on the world stage brought an influx of immigrants who were now, more than ever, aware of the city of Chicago, its reputation, and the lure of its promise. Once the fair had passed, so did much of the welcome outstretched to the peoples of the world. The pressures of the city confines, the need for accommodation, and the quest for decent, regular work squeezed the resources of the city and led to economic and social tensions. Robert Herrick set his novel The Web of Life (1900) in and around the ruins of the fair's White City. In the novel he looks back to the days following the closure of the fair and reflects on it in this way:

These days there were many people on the streets, but few were busy. The large department stores were empty; at the doors stood idle floorwalkers and clerks. It was too warm for the rich to buy, and the poor had no money. The poor had come lean and hungry out of the terrible winter that followed the World's Fair. In that beautiful enterprise the prodigal city had put forth her utmost strength, and, having shown the world the supreme flower of her energy, had collapsed. There was gloom, not only in LaSalle Street where people failed, but throughout the city, where the engine of play had exhausted the forces of all. . . . Tens of thousands of human beings, lured to the festive city by abnormal wages, had been left stranded, without food, or a right to shelter in its tenantless buildings. . . . The laborer starved, and the employer sulked.

Herrick, The Web of Life, pp. 135–136.

The experience of working at Hull-House motivated Addams and her supporters to begin a program of political social activism. They saw intrinsic discrimination on a racial and class basis and developed programs to fight this through legislation. In 1893 the Illinois legislature passed a bill protecting the rights of women and children. The Federal Children's Bureau, created in 1912, and the federal child labor laws from 1916 reflected the local efforts of Addams and her fellow reformers. Addams also was directly responsible for the projects that resulted in the Immigrants' Protective League, Juvenile Psychopathic Clinic, and Juvenile Protective Association. She continued to spread her message of social reform through her writing, including Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), and speaking engagements.

The list of organizations that Jane Addams either created or served with is impressive and extensive. These include the National Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers, National Conference of Charities and Corrections, National Consumers League, Camp Fire Girls, and National Playground Association. She was an active supporter for the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (1909) and the American Civil Liberties Union (1920), and she was heavily involved in the campaign for woman suffrage. It seems natural and appropriate that Addams would become a key figure in the international peace movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1915, during the First World War, she and women from both neutral and involved nations met to try and stop the war. She remained a pacifist as the United States entered the war in 1917, and she founded the Women's Peace Party (WPP) to protest the conflict. The WPP became the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1919, and in recognition of her work, Addams was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1931. When she died on 21 May 1935 she was buried in Cedarville, Illinois, her hometown.

FOUNDING OF UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

The American Baptist Education Society and the oil baron John D. Rockefeller founded the University of Chicago in 1890. The university was nondenominational from the beginning and gained a reputation for admitting minorities and women when other major institutions would not. The campus was developed in Hyde Park, a recently annexed suburb of the city, on land donated by the department store magnate Marshall Field. The architecture of the campus copied the English gothic of Oxford and Cambridge, with cloisters, towers, and gargoyles. Under its first president, William Rainey Harper, the university developed a program that combined the undergraduate liberal arts college with graduate study and research after the German model. Classes ran all year, an innovation for the time, allowing students to graduate when they finished the requirements of the degree. By 1910 the university had adopted a Latin motto, Crescat scientia, vita excolatur (Let knowledge increase so that life may be enriched) and a coat of arms bearing a phoenix emerging from the flames.