Chicago History | Spring and Summer 1990

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CHICAGO HISTORY The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society

EDITOR

Spring and Summer 1990

RUSSELL LEWIS

Volume XIX, Numbers 1 and 2

ASSOCIATE EDITOR CLAUDIA LAMM WooD

ASSISTANT EDITORS ROSEMARY ADAMS PATRI C IA BERECK

CONTENTS

WEIKERSHEIMER

DESIGNER

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BILL VAN NIMWEGEN

The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago Ross MILLER

ASSISTANT DESIGNER TED GIBBS

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PHOTOGRAPHY

The Business of Culture CAROL BALDRIDGE AND ALAN WILLIS

JOHN ALDERSON jAY CRAWFORD

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EDITORIAL INTERN

Bessemer Park MAUREEN O'BRIEN WILL

JENNIFER SCHIMA

70 Copyright I 990 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, IL 606 14

Battling the "National Sin" jAM'ES PYNE

DEPARTMENTS

ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal arc abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life.

Footnoted manuscripts of the articles appearing in this issue arc available from the Ch icago Hi storical Society's Publications Office.

Cover: Norman Rockwell 's Mrs. Catherine O'Leary Milking Daisy (c. 1935). Oil on canvas, 37 x 30 mches. CHS Painting and Sculpture Collection.

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From the Editor

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Yesterday's City

Chicago Historical Society OFFICERS Philip W. Hummer, Treasurer Philip D. Block III , Chairman Mrs. Newton N. Minow, Secretary W. Paul Krauss, Vice-Chairman Stewart S. Dixon, Immediate Past Chairman Richard H . Needham, Vice-Chairman Ellsworth H. Brown, President and Director

TRUSTEES Lerone Bennett,Jr. Philip D. Block III Laurence Booth Charles T. Brumback Mrs. Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon Michael H. Ebner Sharon Gist Gilliam Philip W. Hummer Richard M.Jaffee Edgar D. Jannotta Philip E. Kelley

W. Paul Krauss Mrs. Brooks McCormick William] . McDonough Robert Meers Mrs . Newton N. Minow Richard H . Needham Potter Palmer Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Edward Byron Smith, Jr. Dempsey J. Travis John R. Walter Mrs. Abra Prentice Wilkin

LIFE TRUSTEES Bowen Blair John T. McCutcheon,Jr. Andrew McNally III Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Gardner H. Stern

HONORARY TRUSTEES Richard M. Daley, Mayor, City of Chicago Richard Devine, President, Chicago Park District The Chicago Historical Society is a privately endowed, independent institution devoted to coll ecting, interpreting, and presenting the rich multicultural history of Chicago and Illinois, as well as selected areas of American history, to the public through exhibitions, programs, research collections, and publications. It must look to its members and friends for continuing financial support. Contributions to the Society are tax-deductible, and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts.

Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's goals and activities. Classes of an nual membership and dues are as fo llows: Individual, $30; Family, $35; Student/ Senior Citizen, $25. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago Histo1y; a quarterly newsletter, Past-Times; a quarterly Calendar listing Society programs; invitations to special events; free admission to the bui lding at all times; reserved seats at films and concerts in our auditorium ; and a l 0 percent discount on books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store.

Hours The Museum is open daily from 9:30 A.M . to 4:30 P.M. ; Sunday from 12:00 NOON to 5:00 P.M. T he Library and the Manuscripts Collection are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 A .M. to 4:30 P. M . AJ I other research collections are open by appointment. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving Days.

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Suggested Admission Fees for Nonmembers Adults, $3.00; Children (6-17), Students (17-22 with valid school ID), and Senior Citizens, $2.00. Admission is free on Mondays.

Chicago Historical Society

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Chicago, Illinois 60614

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FROM THE EDITOR "I am not suggesting that the path of history .. . has been entirely dominated by numbers," wrote Fernand Braudel, the well-known French historian. "But numbers have mattered throughout the centuries and we would do well to remember it." Today, numbers seem to matter more than ever. The census is a prime example of the power of numbers in American society. Politically, participation in the census determines congressional representation as well as the allocation of billions of dollars of federal, state, and local funds for social programs.

But the census is more than a decennial rite of citizenship. The census has become essential to forecasting future trends and to planning by federal, state, and private agencies, and it is central to market research and advertising. Census data has also become critical to historians and other researchers, especially in recording the growth of urban America: the 1920 census documented the closing of the frontier, and the 1970 census the rise of suburbia. The 1990 census may be the last of its kind , however. Amid growing criticism for undercounting, biased questions, and inefficiency, the Census Bureau is considering changes that radically depart from its two-hundred-year-old tradition .

The Chinese have kept track of their population longer than anyone else. Since the Zhou Dynasty some three thousand years ago, they have maintained a complex household registration that records, for example, that the nation 's population in 1741 was more than 100 million.

The Western world has no comparable records of such duration and accuracy. The earliest attempts to count populations in Europe were tied to taxation and inventories of goods and valuables, such as the hearth taxes of fourteenth-century France. These enumerations were always selective, however. Tax collectors excluded women and children from their rolls and frequently limited their counting to heads of households or males of military age. For most people throughout history, being counted has meant more taxes or military service, not better government.

The United States was the first nation to provide for a census by law, enacted both to establish a truly representative government by apportioning members of the House of Representatives according to population, and to determine equal taxes among the citizens to relieve the war debt, a plan that was eventually abandoned. Included in the first census in 1 790 were free persons and slaves (who were counted as three-fifths of a person); American Indians were not counted. It was more than a headcount, however. Census takers also gathered data they deemed in the national interests: heads of families, the number of people in a household, and the number of free white males over sixteen years old, an index of the country's military and industrial potential. The 1790 census listed just under four million people and slightly more than half a million households.

Two hundred years later, the census is at a turning point. Despite a workforce of more than 300,000 census takers assisted by 570 microcomputers, millions of Americans will not be counted this year. Part of this oversight can be attributed to the magnitude of the project.

But the problem is also rooted in the public's lack of cooperation; less than 50 percent of Chicagoans returned their census forms this year. While many officials ascribe this behavior to ignorance or laziness, many Americans may simply view the census as an invasion of their privacy. Living in a world of mobile telephones and facsimile machines interconnected through worldwide communication networks has its price. For many, the price is their privacy, and they are increasingly wary of any further invasions. The census will continue, but as long as it threatens the right of privacy, its value will be questioned. The issue of privacy more than anything else will shape how we conduct future censuses, and that in turn will affect our written history profoundly. The great attraction of census data for historians is that it gives a voice to the anonymous American citizen . But for many Americans that anonymity is greatly prized, and they are unwilling to sacrifice it even for history.

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The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago

by Ross Miller

A lthough the Great Fire left the city in ruins, many welcomed the chance to build a modern Chicago.

Chicagoans embraced images of heroism engendered by the fire .

A young woman risking her life to save that of her sick sister is depicted in George Barclay's Das Grosse Feuer in Chicago (fhe Great Fire in Ch icago) (above). Some people interpreted the fire in Biblical terms, as exemplified in this depiction of the destroying angel, which appeared in Every Saturday, November 4, 1871 (right); God sent the angel to destroy Jerusalem but changed his mind in compassion.

Editor's note: The facts of the Great Chicago Fire are well known. During the week of October 1, 18 71, a succession of fires broke out in Chicago.

After almost three months without rain, the parched city was primed for disaster. On October 7 a planing mill on Canal Street between Jackson Boulevard and Van Buren Street caught fire, and a foursquare-block area burned. The following evening, at about 8:45 P.M., a small fire started in the barn behind the O'Leary cottage at 13 7 DeKoven Street, and a strong southwest wind quickly turned the fire into an inferno. Exhausted by the previous night's fire, the men of Chicago's inadequate fire department could not contain the blaze. The fire moved quickly in a northeasterly direction; it engulfed the downtown area in flames and jumped across the river, leaving the North Side in ruins. By afternoon on Monday, October 9, the Great Chicago Fire was over. But the story of the fire and the belief that it was a turning point in the city's history was just beginning.

If the fire left the city in ruins, it also released Chicagoans from their past and allowed them to reimagine their city. Modem Chicago was born the day after the fire when the idea that the calamity was an opportunity to build a better Chicago took hold.

The fire reinforced Chicago's inclination to define itself through its ability to triumph over adversity.

This inclination, tempered with a selective memory or transformation of the city's grittier elements, lies at the center of the myth of Chicago.

The city's quick rebuilding after the fire was not only an understandable response to trauma but an evasion. Chicago had always had a "double history," which it preferred not to acknowledge. Its raw frontier beginnings did not mesh well with the world-class city it was becoming. The fire challenged Ross Miller is a professor in the department of English and the program in comparative literature at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, and an editor of Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 Chicago's need to imagine itself refined and socially harmonious. The ruins mocked pretensions to refinement and exposed the rich to their fear of the poor.

In rebuilding quickly Chicago could believe itself triumphant.

Chicago boosters, writing "boosterature, " shaped the facts of the fire to conform to and advance the myth of an ever-improving Chicago. Writing was used to tame the fire's meanings and associations; at least one writer reduced the fire to a "show, " and in 1880 Harper's claimed that no lives were lost.

Both fiction and histories reflected Chicago's need to imagine itself reborn. Writers of such works, however, occluded the truth of the disaster and ignored Chicago's double history in seeking to obliterate the city's grittier side. They portrayed the fire as a democratizer and a moral tonic.

But the fire was not a democratizer; it exposed the city's social divisions but did not mend them. Sarne blamed the fire on the poor, for whom Mrs. O'Leary was a symbol. Class harmony in Chicago degenerated further with the Haymarket Affair (1886) and the Pullman Strike (1894 ). At a time when anarchist publications taught readers how to create explosives, the myth of a unified and ever-improving Chicago began to fray.

The height of Chicago's efforts in self-creation was the 189 3 World's Columbian Exposition, which was designed to highlight the grandeur of the new Chicago. The fair's incongruous architectureneoclassical facades on modern steeljrame structures-suggested both Chicago's yearning for the respectability, refinement, and history of an established city and its more dynamic, though admittedly dark, modern core. While the exposition aspired to portray Chicago as grand, it in effect set off in stark relief Chicago's darker side, thereby highlighting the city's dual identity.

The following exce1pt from Ross Miller's American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago offers a new perspective on an old Chicago story.

From American Apocalypse: The Great Fire and the Myth of Chicago by Ross Miller. © 1990 Ross Miller. Used with permission of The University of Chicago Press.

Fanned fry a strong southwest wind, the fire blazed out of control and soon engulfed the bllSiness district and much of the North Side. Like this woman carrying her crippled hllSband, Chicagoans fled for their lives and had to leave most possessions behmd.

From Barclay·s Das Grosse Feuer in Chicago.

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The Great Fire of October 8, 1871, provided Chicago with a convergence of fact and myth.

In truth, the city suffered a terrible calamity.

Frederick Law Olmsted, sent by The Nation to observe the damage, reported: "It will be seen that a much larger part of the town proper was burned than a stranger would be led to suppose by the published maps." But even Olmsted, the acclaimed landscape architect, not given to gushing pronouncements, was taken with the fire's mythic proportions: "Very sensible men have declared that they were fully impressed at such a time with the conviction that it was the burning of the world." Within days, the fire replaced the Fort Dearborn Massacre of 1812 and the frontier trials of the city's founders in the 1830s as Chicago's seminal moment. And whereas few alive in the 1870s had any firsthand memory of the massacre and only a few select families could count themselves founders, the fire included everyone. It was a universal experience, in which simple survival was made to seem heroic. An eyewitness recalled the scene as a "chapter of horrors that can only be written as it was, with a pen of fire."

Chicago was quickly transformed, even before any of the rebuilding began; it became the only American city whose myth of founding and development was absolutely contempora-

Chicagoans escaping the burning city head north along the lake through the Catholic cemetery located just south of North Avenue in this engrav ing made after a sketch by Theodore R. Dav is.

neous with its modern condition. Boston's origins went back to the Puritans, New York's, to the Dutch, and Philadelphia's, to a large English land grant. As a result, the roots of Eastern cities were emotionall y remote from most of their nineteenth-century citizenry. This was not true of Chicago. A Chicagoan needed to look no further back than October 8, 1871, for his city's origins. The fire allowed him to think of himself as both pioneer and modern.

It so compressed time-making the heroic past seem present and the present appear immediate ly part of the mythic past- that a Chicagoan might, if he chose, be released from his own history. History was thus so personalized that the city's resurrection seemed directl y to appl y to him. Through one dramatic act, the present was no longer necessaril y subordinate to the past.

What separates Chicago's history of emerging modernity from that of other nineteenthcentury cities is the clarity of its imagery. While others suffered the modern through a host of

neurasthenic symptoms-their bodies if not their minds agreeing with Marx 's sense o f the era's airlessness-Chicagoans felt its freeing possibi lities. Their initial view of the modern was positive. From the omnipresent engravings of the phoenix rising from the ashes to the apocalyptic talk of preachers and reporters, Chicagoans had a way to picture the way they felt. And because these images were not the mere fanc y of artists and intellectuals, but ideas supported by the materiality of change seen everyday in the tons of rubble and shells of new buildings, each Chicagoan had a way to authenticate his sense of the transformation. But the question remained as to how long the city would be able to maintain its heady sense of common fate and enterprise before the specter of Chicago 's double identity-as both queen of the inland lakes and gritty frontier city on the make- haunted it again. Because it is precisely this doubleness, even in the face of the postfire city's ever more dissonant realities, that provides modern Chicago with its character-a 7

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 doubleness observed and systematically denied, that is as old as the city.

At the time of the fire, Chicago had just recently consolidated its position as the West's preeminent city. The opening of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848), and the founding of the Galena (1850), Illinois Central (1851 ), Michigan Southern, and Michigan Central (1852) railroads, which transformed the city from a retailing market into a prominent wholesaling center, were not far in the past. In fact, Chicagoans were nearly as close in time to their city's beginnings as a town in 1833 as they were to its recent renown. But Chicago always seemed to encourage visionaries who were less concerned with immediate realities than future opportunities. It was little more than a glorified army outpost when Charles Butler, one of the city's earliest financiers, arrived in 1833, but there was still something compelling enough about the place for him to invest one hundred thousand dollars and declare, "The experienced observer saw the germ of a city, destined from its peculiar position near the head of the Lake and its remarkable harbor formed by the river, to become the largest inland commercial Emporium in the United States."

Butler was looking back fifty years when he recorded these impressions. His brother-in-law William Ogden, Chicago's first mayor, was another of the city's early prophets who turned a profit on land investments. The infant city's heady promise coexisted with the base realities of a muddy western settlement. The visionary emporium of Butler and Ogden was a spot where "wolves during the night roamed all over where the city now stands." Chicago always contained such contradictions. One had to look beyond the present condition or back into an idealized past to locate a consistent reality. Had Butler's vision of Chicago materialized, it might well have resembled Thomas Cole's painting The Architect's Dream (1842) or the Court of Honor at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. The vision of the city's founding appeared to be unified through the fortunes of its dynastic families, like the trader Kinzies, realestate baron Palmers, and packer Swifts. The desired singleness of purpose always seemed to compete with the gritty actuality at hand.

This duality between vision and reality be8

came, at a very early date, the way Chicagoans saw themselves. As long as a unified vision of a progressive modern c ity was denied, they would look to the future or the past to avoid the present, dress richly to forget recent poverty, and build grand facades for show on firetraps and structurally flawed buildings. An ingrained and finally institutionalized schizophrenia was, in part, compensation for the strains of the city's meteoric growth and expansion. Although a visitor in 1857 could declare, "Truly there is but one Chicago," he could not avoid mentioning progress's mixed results.

"Miserable hovels are mixed up with the most beautiful and costly stores and edifices, such as I never saw in any other place." The "one Chicago" frustrated devotion; the costs of development, both material and human, were too apparent. "The only drawback, perhaps, to the comfort of the money-making inhabitants, and of the stranger within the gates, is to be found in the clouds of dust and in the unpaved streets and thoroughfares, which give anguish to horse and man."

Chicago's incongruities became a part of any portrait of the city. Praise, set off by examples from the city's other side, began to structure the ways people thought and wrote about Chicago. It was not as if Chicago was the only American city with dark recesses. Cable's New Orleans and Norris's San Francisco were just as bleak. Only in Chicago's case there was a certain pride in the city's divided nature because of its faith in an eventual coherence that would vindicate its struggles. Here was a city founded and developed from a dialectic of forces; as in America itself, unity would emerge from diversity. The mud, foul weather, and depravity, which in lesser places would resist civilization, gave Chicago's development its special character. A city that seemed perpetually divided was employing its inherited contradictions to prevail. A local commentator reported: "The wickedness and the piety of Chicago are, in their way, marvelous. It is a city of churchbuilding, church-going people, and yet contains more people who are not church-going in Ruins of the Masonic Temple on Dearborn Street. The destructive power of the fire was enonnous; the entire central business district was leveled and vwre than eighteen thousand buildings burned.

Photograph try Jex Bardwell.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 proportion to the population, than any other place. The Sabbath day in Chicago is, so far as the eye can discover externally, as quiet and orderly as in any New England city; yet, all laws for Sunday observance have been repealed, and in no other American city are there so many people who devote the day to festivity.

Everything undertaken here is done promptly and on a grand scale."

J. W. Sheahan, a Chicagoan who later published an account of the fire, writing in the September 1875 issue of Scribner's Monthly, employed the contemporary idea of a divided Chicago. Where others used the contrast between hovels and mansions, Sheahan divided the city between churchgoer and religious truant. But there is a critical difference. Sheahan noticed none of the cultural anxiety expressed in earlier accounts. Something had happened that changed the ways Chicagoans presented and perceived themselves. Not that the facts were different; only the attitudes toward development had changed. Chicago had found a way to see itself. Instead of trying to resolve its divisions like the cities of the East Coast and Europe, it would make its conflicts the basis of its identity. The differences of tone and attitude that Sheahan reported would never have amounted to much more than the Although the loss of life was small given the scale of the calamity-fewer than three hundred people died in the blaze-about ninety thousand were left homeless. This image of unsheltered women captures the suffering many experienced in the aftermath of the fire.

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"Fiends in human Fonn, detected in Acts of Outrage are, without ado, hanged by the Citizens." Criminals who took advantage of the chaos caused by the fire were fnm i.1hed swiftly and harshly.

Images such as this recalled morality plays in which good overcomes evil. From Barclay's Das Grosse Feuer in Chicago.

stuff of Sunday supplements, if not for the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

The fire provided substance for the inchoate sense of Chicago's uniqueness. For instance, Sheahan discovered in the events of the fire substantiation for the city's four-decades-long claim to "greatness." Others viewed the calamity as a dramatic justification for the posturings of its pioneer generation. The fire became the key to understanding the city, so that an event that did nothing to resolve the city's deep divisions along class and ethnic lines did something more radical by providing a model for initiative and innovation. It implied to Chicagoans that their history would not evolve in millenia, like the history of European cities, nor in centuries, like that of established American cities, but in bursts which liberated individuals to do their best. Divisions that might paralyze other places provided the very condition for Chicago's existence. Change on the largest scale was to be permanent in modern Chicago.

Starting on the Southwest Side's DeKoven Street on the evening of October 8, the fire raged late into the next day and night, ending

Myth of Chicago

in the northeast on Fullerton Avenue, frustrated finally by Lake Michigan and a persistent rain shower. Two thousand acres were lost.

Eighteen thousand buildings were destroyed and ninety thousand people were left homeless.

City coroner Stephens and Cook County physician Dr. Ben C. Miller estimated deaths at nearly three hundred, noting the difficulty of identifying bodies charred beyond recognition.

Clearly, the fire was a major disaster, but the city could consider itself lucky because so few lives were lost, in large part due to the wind's consistent northeast heading. Although the winds never achieved a velocity of over thirty . miles per hour, the blaze was aided by a convection effect, or "fire devils," which greatly added to its destructive energy.

The eyewitness accounts understandably stressed the dramatic and life-threatening aspects of the disaster. Chicago's "sluggish river

seemed to boil." The event was immediately made to take on mysterious powers. "The wind blowing a stiff gale has possession of the flames, and the beautiful buildings, Chicago's glor-y, lay before them ... and within an incredibly short space of time nearly a mile of brick blocks was consumed as if by magic." Not only the act of nature it surely was, the culminating act of a ninety-eight-day drought during which less than two inches of rain had fallen since July fourth, nor the result of the carelessness of man, who had overbuilt the city with flammable materials and protected it with a spectacularly inadequate fire department; the fire took on the attributes of a full-blown act of God or the devil, complete with Biblical overtones. An account published in the Post of October 1 7 suggests the tone of the response: "From the roof of a tall stable and warehouse to which the writer clambered, the sight was one of unpar-

Col. James Fisk, Jr., drives a team of six-in-hand through the streets of New York City, collecting provisions to send to Chicago. News of Chicago's devastation spread quickly, and cities across the country and abroad responded with relief efforts.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 alleled sublimity and terror. He was above the whole fire. The crowds directly under him could not be distinguished because of the curling volumes of crimsoned smoke, through which an occasional scarlet rift could be seen.

He could feel the heat and smoke and hear the maddened Babel of sounds, and it required but little imagination to believe one's self looking over the adamantine bulwarks of hell into the bottomless pit." The Great Fire was a one-anda-half-day apocalypse, an enormous event that instantly confirmed the city's importance both to its citizens and to all outsiders who watched or heard about its trials, a disaster comparable in their view to the destruction of Rome , Babylon, or Troy. But this was a particularly American apocalypse. Instead of leveling the city and destroying forever man's vainglories, this act of magic, devil, or God was decidedly latitudinarian. The Kingdom of God to which Chicagoans awoke the next morning was not among the angels in heaven, but still in Chicago. Twenty years after the fire, the Chicago evangelist David Swing wrote, "When we awoke we were in a new world . . . the tens of thousands of sleepers sunk away in weariness and grief, but when they awoke they saw around them a Nation full of kindness, and a great circle of states and empires all colored deeply by an un-

dreamed of civilization." Swing echoes here an idea of worldly trial and redemption that has its American roots in William Bradford's OJ Plymouth Plantation (1630), itself a retrospective account of a great human test.

What the Puritans found in the trials of a sea voyage, Chicagoans like Swing and Kirkland discovered in the fire. The Puritans' tabula rasa was simply projected onto Chicago's cooling ashes; the fire was to be a repeat of the initial American apocalypse in which all dissonance had vanished, only this time not so that the righteous could claim the next world but so that all could have a new chance to prosper materially. Chicago perhaps could finally after the fire shed the ragged image of a western town, the contradictions and persistent double identity as a place of rare highs and frequent lows , and begin its own urban idyll. This was a popular form of late nineteenth-century urban pastoral. Darker Theocritan pastoral images appeared later as writers confronted the more fragmented reality of the city. Like those who survived the ocean's perils that claimed so many lives aboard Bradford's ship, Chicago's survivors were extraordinary individuals who "resisted beastly drunkeness" and overcame the rage of their fellow citizens "maddened by the sight of pillage or arson who fell upon the

Myth of Chicago

Melted goblet, plates, and forks (left) and the remains of Field, Leiter and Co., 778 Washington Street (above), illustrate the fire's destructive power. Glass fused, iron melted, and limestone turned to powder in the fire .

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View from the corner of Randolph and Markel streets after the fire.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

CIICAID ON FIBI! ·10,000 BUILDINGS BURNED, Pl • P. l;f.TILL a-1.~1,u,

MAIi MIITINI OBNTRAL RINI \,\, ILL RI H•,LIJ \T 1 lll,

At 3 O'clock To-Day, TO 'I' \HE A(.:'J'IO~ TO AID

Chicago's Suffering People

HELP, IELk'. HELP CITIZENS, TUU~ OUT!

F. W. PELTON, Mayor.

Monday,October 9th, 1871.

Chicago's own massive relief effort by the Relief and Aid Society was reinforced by contribu lions from other towns and cities (above). Speaking trumpet used by policemen and firemen in the Ji.re (below).

miscreant and beat him to death." Talcs of the fire began to read like a modern morality play in which good, it seemed, was destined to overcome evil. The difference was that this was living theater which threatened to get out of hand.

A sense of impending chaos led the federal government to call out the army. Although

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General Sheridan denied that there was any widespread civil unrest, his presence helped insure order. His confident show of force was a sure sign to outsiders that Chicago was going to survive intact. In response, there began almost immediately a tremendous outpouring of aid from other states, foreign countries, and national businesses. Within hours of the fire, Chicago began rebuilding, content with its new notoriety, and finally confirming to others the greatness it had projected for itself nearly four decades earlier. So it was quite natural to find in the first comprehensive report of the fire, Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin's Chicago and the Great Conflagration, language linking the city to America's beginnings. The authors declared that reconstruction would issue from the "firm foundation rock of her business, the Plymouth Rock of her society." This was a time to start over, like the country's first settlers had.

The authors exploited the ancient precedents: "Let any man figure to himself what he would endure if he were stripped not only of everything that may make him conventionally 'respectable' or eminent, but of the wherewithal to supply the first conditions of physical existence-food and shelter-and all his neighbors stripped of all that could alleviate his sufferings, and he will form a notion, faint and far off indeed, but far truer than description, however ample, could give him, of what has befallen, and for many days to come will befall, myriads of men as capable as himself to suffer and enjoy." The city's swift recovery lent support to such self-important analogies. Chicago had been tested-its people stripped to essentialsand had been found more than equal to the challenge. Some wrote unlikely improvisations on Biblical myths concerning the end: "That

Myth of Chicago towering wall of whirling, seething, roaring flame, which swept on and on-devouring the most stately and massive stone buildings as though they had been the cardboard playthings of a child." Others like Swing wrote of the beginning of a "new world." In all local accounts, the fire established Chicago as the most American of American cities. Instantly, it became the newest O ld city of the New World, incarnating in microcosm the country's century-long westward expansion.

Facts of the initial reconstruction only gave further substance to the city's boast. Within days of the disaster, the General Relief Committee was established to provide refuge and create distribution centers to handle the influx of donations and charitable aid. In answer to the Chamber of Commerce's October 10 call to rebuild immediately, there were already on November 18th over five thousand cottages completed or under construction. And by October 1872 there was over thirty-four-million dollars worth of new building on the South Side, almost four-million on the North , and nearly two-million on the West. Trade quickly increased, and real estate values inflated to a level at or above prefire assessments. Chicago's forty years of constant development had paradoxically made the land more valuable without structures than with. Expensive buildings constructed before the fire were now more valuable as rubble. Potter Palmer, the city's most successful and flamboyant real estate speculator, recouped and extended his fortune after losing all his buildings to the fire. The city even grew, using debris from the fire as landfill to extend its boundaries.

While Chicago's physical plant was severely affected, its importance as a commercial and industrial hub remained essentially undisturbed.

It still had unrivaled geographic superiority for railroad , canal, river, and lake travel. Grain , lumber, and stock, according to the Chicago Board of Trade, was 75 to 80 percent intact.

Almost 90 percent of manufacturing, machinery, and products was unaffected.

Within a year after the fire , Chicagoans were planning a memorial to their city's aborted destruction. Although the memorial was never completed, only two years after the fire the Inter-State Industrial Exposition (September

West entrance of the Cook County Cou rt House, bounded '7y LaSalle, Randolph, Clark, and Washington streets, after the fire.

All records were destroyed.

25-November 12, 1873) was held to celebrate Chicago's material progress since the fire. The Exposition's exhibits were offered as factual evidence for the city's maturing mythology of resurrection. Even visitors caught it. A British traveler (quoted in the Chicago Tribune, January 18, 1874) called Chicago the "concentrated essence of Americanism," America reborn .

Fairs, plans for memorials, and reconstruction's impressive statistics were- only the palpable manifestations of a phenomenon attributable to the fire . The conflagration was made to validate Chicago's claim to uniqueness. Here was a city that not only could survive adversity but welcomed such a powerful event to clean away the negative aspects of development. On the Sunday following the fire , Henry Ward Beecher, preaching at Chicago ' s Plymouth Church, declared that the city "could not afford to do without the Chicago Fire." Beecher, like Swing, used the fire, strongly dramatic in its effects , as a model of change. This American apocalypse was a scene of great disruption , but 17

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Rebuilt Clark Street bridge. Chicago began rebuilding within hours of the fire 's end.

one that would create both material and moral opportunities. Chicago's use of this idea was especially stunning because the transition from bad to good news was almost instantaneous.

Chicago's experience with disaster secularized the Biblical idea of history's end and incorporated it into a growing civic mythology. Chicagoans had survived their city's fortunate fall into the future.

This secularized theology freed the city from doubt and gave its citizens a way to view positively two decades of cyclical reversals, including financial panics and labor unrest. Such a 18

faith became the conceptual underpinning of all who would come to think and write about Chicago. Perpetuated around the time of the fire was a myth that proposed to exclude the city from history's ravages: Chicago was conflict's beneficiary, not its victim. Initially just in sermons but later universally, the city began to be seen as fortune's child, the happy survivor of the "day after," and the future's pride. Chicago was the American city that was not only free of a long and deadening history, like its western counterparts, but was also released from its own past mistakes. Illustrators por-

Myth of Chicago

trayed it as the phoenix rising. If they could seize the opportunity, Chicagoans thought themselves in a position to regain the energy represented by Butler's pioneering generation without the attendant problems. The fire then could be viewed as modernization's necessary hygiene, a cyclical fact of modern life . What men could not correct, nature would. Could anything stop a ci ty that had successfully resisted a test of Biblical severity that was enough to "reverse the Westward current of human migration and unsettle the busines s of the world?" Swing had the answer: "Twenty years would transform a painful experience into rather a pleasing dream."

• The fire's immediate legacy was that Chicago would not be allowed to get old and decadent.

Even Colbert and Chamberlin adopted the developing apocalyptic tone. Future visitors to the city "will find her changed from the Chicago of yesterday in such manner as the wild and wanton girl, of luxurious beauty, and generous, free ways, is changed." The earliest speculators and developers had provided the original impetus for improvement, which left alone was fast becoming detrimental to the city's moral development. A change was required. "The people of Chicago were, before the fire, fast lapsing into luxury-not as yet to any degree as the people of New York-but still more than was for their good. The fire roused them from this tendency, and made them the same strong men and women, of the same simple, industrious, self-denying habits, which built up Chicago, and pushed her so powerfully along her unparalleled career. All show and frivolity were abandoned, and democracy became the fashion ." In one great act, the American promised land had arrived on the streets of Chicago. Tired men and women were transformed. Young again like the city, they could now get back to work and abandon their "dawdling lives." Viewed in this way, the fire became a timely moral corrective. And given Chicago's more earthy interests, it also aided in the "correction of besetting faults , which it is fair to assume would not have been corrected if the city had not been burned."

The "Great Awakening" after the initial Puritan settlements took three long generations to develop; in Chicago, the awakening after the

fire occurred almost immediately. Thirty-six hours of flames and hot winds were more than equal to Jonathan Edwards's words: "If God should only withdraw his hand from the floodgate, it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury." Chicagoans had seen the "fiery floods," and their experiences made Edwards's rhetoric palpable.

The city made metaphor literal by the very materiality of its history. Through the fire's urgency, Chicago was compelled to experience in microcosm the eighteenth-century American passage from a sense of spiritual degeneration to attempted purification. Only what were once words and images to Edwards's congregation were now facts. Chicago could see itself not only in terms of its own particular history but Title page from Frank Luzeme's Through the Fire and Beyond, 1872. Luzeme 's book includes accounts of "startling, thrilling incidents, frightful scenes, hair-breadth escapes, in<lividual heroism, self-sacrifices, personal anecdotes. "

19

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

In History of Chicago, fonner Lieutenant Governor William Bross provided an upbeat report of the fire.

as a paradigm for the larger development of America as a nation. In no small measure, the city was the national testing ground for abstractions through which the country was coming to know itself. The local commentators all took advantage of their rush to prominence. The moralists and theologians among them argued the fine points, but all initially appeared to agree that any city that survived such a calamity would in the end, like Edwards's parishioner contemplating his nasty fate, be better off. The facts supported such optimism. On a strictly economic and political basis, Chicago in the months and years after the fire could be shown to have made a startling correction for four decades of nearly random, unplanned development. To this end, Colbert and Chamberlin wrote that real-estate speculators who had suffered severe losses might in the future be less reckless; their buildings would be made of better materials. The fire because it "checked the two [sic] rapid spread of the city in all directions" would lead to a rebuilding of the city's central business district. In addition, by getting rid of failing or marginal businesses, the fire could be seen literally as a "purifying" act. In

20

fact, the politicians, including Mayor Joseph Medill, who immediately after the disaster ran on a "Fire-Proof" ticket-arguing for a strict building code which included the elimination of flammable architectural ornamentationwon by a five-to-one margin.

Colbert and Chamberlin's report, pub lished within months of the fire (December 1, 1871), was the document of record. Chicago and the Great Conflagration combined authoritative facts and figures describing the disaster graphically with more evocative chapters like "Good Out of Evil" and "The New Chicago." As a resu lt, the authors articulated an instant history, a seemingly objective account that gave people a way to view a common experience. Instant history is now a common phenomenon; a population comes to learn how it feels by reading about itself. Primary experience is thus distanced and is made somewhat suspect until given the authority of interpretation. For instance, by reading about the damage done to "individual fortunes," the population was encouraged to bemoan its own bad luck and at the same time consider the city's greater destiny.

By doing so individuals were spared painful personal introspection and encouraged to sublimate their own fate to Chicago's. The city's recovery then could be thought of in the same dramatic terms as its aborted destruction until the question became simply one of "how long it will require for the country to produce the bricks and the stone to lay up her walls." To Chicago's worldly believers, restitution was expected in this world, not the next. After assembling their contributors' eyewitness accounts, the editors of Harper's Weekly ( ovember 4, 1871) added their own imprimatur to the city's increasingly sophisticated mythos: "It will all come back again in time, if not to every loser, certainly to those who believe in the future of Chicago. It will be made a better city than it ever could have become but for this fire.

A better building system, a more shapely development, a spirit of enterprise and determination, literally tried as by fire, will bring all these results."

Let the rest of the country wait for Judgment Day, Harper's editors implied, for Chicago had already had its, and had wound up on the other shore potentially in better shape than ever. All

Myth of Chicago

Rebuilding the Chamber of Commerce. In response to the Chamber of Commerce's October IO call to rebuild immediately, more than five thousand cottages were built or under construction lry November 18.

the elements were in place. Tried by fire, Chicago merely lacked a gifted enough interpreter to consolidate the myth of its apocalypse with the facts of its extraordinary trials. Chicago found him, though, conveniently enough in the person of William Bross, Illinois's exlieutenant governor and an eyewitness to the fire. In the guise of a formal history, Bross provided seemingly objective language to describe the city's first modern decade. More civic propaganda than were the later artistic attempts of the eighties and nineties , his History

of Chicago (1876) cleverly fit four decades of free-form growth to the fire's thirty-six hours of violent change.

Although there had been prefire efforts to understand the city in terms of its larger history, most notably Judge Henry Brown's History of Chicago(] 844) and Juliette Kinzie's novel Wau-Bun (1856), they were largely anecdotal or broadly autobiographical. Bross personified the city and centered the story directly on Chicago. He had intuited a new fact of urban life.

Whereas the West had formerly depended on 21

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Ruins of the first Palmer House at the northwest comer of State and Quincy streets. Potter Palmer lost all of his buildings to the fire but recouped and enhanced his fortune.

.•

man to name and frame it, very much in the spirit of James Fenimore Cooper's pioneers, Chicago in the 1870s reversed this defining practice. The city now bestowed fame, and did not need to borrow it from the celebrity of its visitors. Bross tried to argue that Chicago, like Paris and London, could now claim to make individuals significant by their mere presence on its streets. But unlike the fancy European cities that cultivated class and position, Chicago gave equal status to all those who survived the fire.

Bross's upbeat report of the event and the city's immediate rush to rebuild encouraged the growing romance of how Chicago was to be after the fire.

22

Bross in his History simply affirmed and gave language to a newly experienced sensation of urban identification. Individuals, in this formulation, were immediately aggrandized by their association with the city in which they lived. Bross hoped that "Chicagoan"-given the heroic agency of the fire-would one day soon rival "Parisian" and "New Yorker" for the mystery and romance of its associations. A contemporary preacher put it this way: "You could tell a Chicagoan in any city in the world, for he would not talk a minute scarcely until he would let you know he was from Chicago." A man's identity became in the nineteenth century subordinated to the city in which he lived. More

Myth of Chicago

important than family or religion, the city was central in the 1870s. Credit Bross that he saw this critical shift of allegiances as one of the dominant aspects of modern life. His History is an attempt to establish Chicago's claim to such radical dependency, not with a comprehensive account of the city but with highlights of its accomplishments augmented by facts and illustrations to support his claims. He writes for a new Chicagoan who needs a language to understand his home. By understanding the city's mythos, the anonymous individual-emigrating from the countryside in ever-larger numbersmight find mirrored his own rationale for existence and striving.

Brass's work, soon supplanted by A. T. Andreas's comprehensive three-volume History of Chicago (1884-86), was a crucial document if only because it provided a conceptual bridge between what Chicago was and what it wanted to become . Using the fire as a dramatic demarcation dividing the city's past from its future, Bross established, for the first time, a grammar for the 1870s. His History focuses on the fire as the culmination of a forty-year-long reorganization of man and materials. The negative side of such mass development can surely be extrapolated from Brass's statistics, but the overall impression for the author was decidedly positive. Positive, not because Bross neglected familiar Chicago contradictions but because he was skillful enough to manipulate an individual sense of trauma toward an identification with the commonwealth. He recorded the displacement of farm land caused by the sale of hundreds of thousands of new city lots (25 x 125 feet each) he duly noted a thousandfold population increase in just over four decades; and he correctly projected that such an influx of people would severely strain existing services and resources. But when he made these observations or considered the growing gap between rich and poor, success and failure, he provided his reader with a higher rationale, implying that it would be a mistake to think of Chicago as being determined by even its recent history.

The fire had seen to that by leveling all in its way. It is a theme Swing picked up in recalling the day of the fire: "This was not a poor man's fire . It smote the rich and the middle class. After destroying six hundred great business

houses, great churches, hotels, and theatres, it crossed the river and attacked the most fashionable homes in the North Division. " So too did the novelist and historian Joseph Kirkland echo the theme of unity out of chaos in his own retrospective account when he observed, "After all the ages of men's alienation , isolation, enmity, the race is at last one, in heart; and it needed the Chicago fire to make patent the blessed fact."

Both Swing and J{jrkland were merely repeating-admittedly in their own personal terms-Brass's formula for the events. Swing, without mentioning the October 7 West Side fire of a day earlier, was quick to point out the universality of suffering. This was not a "poor man's fire," unlike the one preceding the Great Fire which did an estimated one-milliondollars worth of damage. The Great Fire was different because, in J{jrkland's words, it ended the "ages of men's alienation" and made the race "at last one ." Substitute Chicagoans for "race," excusing J{jrkland's elevated diction, The song "From the Ruins Our City Shall Rise" proclaims that Chicago will become "Queen of the West once more. " The title of another of Root 's songs, " Passing Through the Fire," suggests that Chicagoans emerged f rom the ordeal unscathed.

from tha Ruins Our City shall Bise, ~ SO'NG AND CHO~US,~

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CLEVE L A ND·

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s. B R,\I NARD S SoNs, 203 ~upcnor Si ~ I ~,it;;-----·----·-·""-····--·---- -·-~~ Publ!Shed b)

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 and you can understand how successful Bross was in promulgating his own ideas about Chicago and the fire. For it was Bross's aim in his History to universalize suffering and triumph.

He wished to see Chicago (like the Puritan's Plymouth) after the calamity as a blank slate, a place to make new arrangements, educated but unbound by history. The ex-lieutenant governor's tone is characteristically direct and practical: "There has not been, for the last twenty years, so good a time for men of capital to start business in Chicago as now. Thousands anxious to locate in this focus of Western Commerce have been deterred from doing so for the reason that the business in each department had become concentrated in comparatively a few hands. With few exceptions, all can now start even, in the race for fame and fortune. The fire has leveled nearly all distinctions."

All the facts were there to support the city's ascendancy in all areas of urban development, from railroads, manufacturing, heavy industry, and trade, to numbers of hotels and domestic buildings. Bross wrote that all could point with "confidence and pride" to their combined accomplishments. But the story was not all in the facts . Facts might be enough for the Bostons, New Yorks, and Philadelphias. Bross called them "finished" cities. Like their older European models, the East Coast urban centers were no longer developing. In Bross's view, they were culturally set in place. But not Chicago. Chicago was unfinished and being made over every day.

Bross's implications were clear. Here was a place dynamic enough to welcome disaster rather than to suffer the stultifying stratification of other cities. The fire "leveled nearly all distinctions" and instantly provided new opportunities for growth. William Bross was important because his was the first "official" account of the Chicago legend, one repeated, embroidered, and improved upon, but not essentially altered. It reads: Out of periodic adversity, from the original calamity, the Indian massacre at Fort Dearborn, through financial panics and economic reversals, to the Great Fire, Chicago not only survived but prospered.

Bross simply extended the legend to include Chicago's most recent history and described it in modern language.

24

Chicago, in his view, became the archetypal American city, going through the usual urban growth process, only dramatically faster and more efficiently. While it had taken the oldest American cities centuries, and Chicago initially decades, to transform from frontier to metropolis, in the 1870s it took only years. Bross reminded his readers: "It should be noticed that what I predicted would be accomplished in five years was mostly done in three, and much of it in two. The unsightly acres still to be seen on State street, Wabash avenue, and some portions of Michigan avenue, were burned over by the disastrous fire of July 14th, 1874. Nearly all the open spaces made by the great fire of 18 71 are now covered with buildings." Within three years the city was repaired and responding to the opportunity created by yet another fire.

The legend implied that Chicago was special and disaster-proof. The apocalyptic moment provided it with a serial necessity for starting over. It was its special identity, a stimulant to dynamic change unavailable to all those "finished" cities back East and in Europe. For Chicago, devastation, manmade or natural, became merely opportunity's mother, allowing all to "start even, in the race for fame and fortune."

Change, the modem's defining characteristic, was what Bross called the city's "permanent impulse." Chicago's condition in the 1870s was a paradox-change was permanent and the search for permanence frustrated. This modern feeling of being temporary was keenly experienced by individuals, who alternately experienced the sensation as stimulating and depressing. It was to become, in many ways, the driving emotional force behind the city's art and a prod to two decades of intense creative expression, culminating in the great architecture of the late 1880s and the 1890s.

Edward Payson Roe was the city's first novelist to combine Chicago's growing sense of a unique identity with the anxieties occasioned by life after the fire. More a melodrama than a fully developed work of fiction, Roe's Barriers Burned Away (1872) is the emotional counterpart to Bross's history. Where Bross showed Chicagoans how to see the fire, Roe suggested the ways they might feel. Their accounts are remarkably similar.

Myth of Chicago

Before and after views of the home of George, James, and Chauncy Bowen at 124-6 Michigan Avenue show the extent of the destruction.

After the fire politicians passed a building code that forbade the use of flammable architectural ornamentation.

Structured as a conventional sentimental tale complete with righteous and tragic deaths, noble poverty and empty wealth, Roe's novel uses the fire in a clever way. Other nineteenthcentury American novels were conveniently resolved through war, pestilence, suicide, and other deus ex machina devices; Barriers Burned Away employs the fire as a perfect indigenous solution to the characters' differences of sensibility, class, and ambition. The novel ends with Chicago ruined. Its population, rich and poor, is left nearly naked to wander the beach. Christine Ludolph, a spoiled American with an inherited title, has lost her father and possessions to the flames, but she feels oddly free. In the heat of the fire she declares, "I wish to take leave to-night of my old life-the strange, sad past with its mystery of evil; and then I shall set my face resolutely toward a better life-a better country." Her "utterly pagan" room in ruins, Christine feels liberated. She can now embrace Dennis Fleet, the poor but honest young man

who has been working in her father's art business and who has distinguished himself over time as a responsible and talented artist. In hours, the fire accomplishes reconciliations that for years have seemed impossible. Christine declares, "Love has transformed that desert place into the paradise of God." But the author has us understand that, although the result is unchanged, Christine has cause and effect reversed . Love does not "transform" Chicago; rather the city in its blasted state makes it once again possible for people to make elemental connections. Precisely because people are left wandering on the beach, stripped of inessential possessions and pretenses, are they suddenly in a free environment. The fire is seen as a necessary precondition for love.

E. P. Roe in Barriers Burned Away simply fictionalized prevailing attitudes about the fire and Chicago's modern condition. Along with other eyewitnesses to the calamity, he saw the fire as a fortunate fall in temporal terms.

25

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

D I

(ll<'FT<'lc OF "THE I<mBY," No. HOO Ron-ru :\lonuA~ STRtE.T1 ('HirJ\GO, 11,L., (h.:tohcr 14, 1$71 To OuH Ao'E~t"d A.Nu l!'1uxNuil, C:tNT1 J;'1i'N The atnry of krrible destruction hy liro in this oii~, from la::tt Sa.t,ut"l:~y night to ~l uwla.y mght, cann(lt, have fatlod t,,> rc:wh you. \Ve- dat"f i\ttct-opf. 110 {l1•~1•r1ptfrm of it. 'f\To bhit(wy will ,~vcr he wtitt('n, no p1otnrt' on:r pn.intCfl that will con,.·ry t(1 thnac wbll did not \\ itnci;s. it, moro tQan a faint rc>nlliaUon of its utt-e,

dcva.sta.tiQn,

,vo 11rint this on <l1 1l" fit.tic press in onr own o(flnc:, as ~111• mo~t asn.ilablc lllllans of m· fo1ming y1m th1it wr. AIU' ~.u·i;:; th~"t, tho firo wa.!-3 not in tJa• ,·icinlty of our w~\l'chnuRCt-, nn<l our only loi,t~eij aro through othur pn.rta~ wbq nro stiffurer:-:.

We art! aildin~ our'' mite!" to tho bc,un1eQll'i <:har1 y ot the• wltul!.! wnl'l\\ f11. aitl uf tlt • :iuffcring, arnl hope to pro111ptly l'vCC:ivc from all who qro 1n,lchtc1l to \\!i-\:-.:h \\llc,l \tiY "<o'l' RUn•P.n1:R:4 that \\ hh.•h is tlµc. lhn11ttaoceR, r,,r t.hc prcscnl, 8hn11lcl hr nia.<lo i11 t 'l1l'l'l'lH.!Y liy F'\Jffc.-.~, )ha.its on ~\.:'" Yot·k, 1it in Poi;t f)fJico Or,lcrs; ns all Dra.fts nn Chit·11.g-1) fot a, ti111 • will llC~~tl tn h,• l''< qn·nod, C?t\Using grPO.t ,lch\y, incon\·c11it:ncc a111l }ot;8 of the \l"'l' Q. n11,111•y \ 'cry n·s11cctf11l1y.

D. M. OSBORNE & CO,, By n.\:"'riICI n.,l{:-iu,1.

26

Chicago was eager lo return lo the business of making money; businesses reopened as soon as possible (left). Workers labor lo o/1en a bank vault al the Merchants Savings, Loan, and Trust Company, Lake and Dearborn streets, in this engraving made after a sketch by Theodore R. Davis (below). Many bank vaults opened after the fire contained only ashes.

Myth of Chicago

Christine Ludolph is Roe's example of a character who rises to a "higher life" through severe moral and physical tests. Chicago in ruins is her paradise.

Yet such a fortuitous accident was not merely a product of Roe's imagination. As we have seen, positive views of disaster were prevalent after the fire. Roe simply employed them as his characters' reactions. A Presbyterian minister, he gave authenticity to the twisted emotional logic of the time. Although the fire was by all indices a material catastrophe, it was viewed widely as ultimately good. His book became a bestseller in 1872 because Roe succeeded in capturing the city's longing after meaning. He confirmed his audience's sense of having survived something extraordinary. The book works at achieving a strong sense of reality, an objective accomplished through a selfconscious echoing of contemporary reports.

Roe struggles to express the fire's sounds. He recalls that, "The rush and roar of the wind and flames were like the thunder of Niagra, and to this awful monotone accompaniment was added a Babel of sounds." Compare Roe's fictional treatment to the Harper's account published a few months earlier: "Every one knows how inadequate is human language to expres_s the grandeur of Niagra-we can only feel it.

And yet N iagra sinks into insignificance."

Out of the fire's Babel, Roe found an adequate language, one with which Chicagoans were already conversant.

The novel's struggle for authenticity made it part of a general movement to establish the fire as a universally accepted emblem of Chicago's modern state. Whereas the sublime was formerly only to be found deep in nature, it now could be discovered in the urban core. To Bross's later metaphor of the city's "permanent impulse," Roe offered a collateral image. For Roe, the fire was the culmination of an extended time of change, "a chaotic period-the old world breaking up," and the beginning of new social and cultural arrangements. His own decade of the 1870s would be a concentrated time of "breaking up, " in which the fire only hastened transformations that were slowly occurring anyway and simply heightened existing conflicts, inherent in modern life, to the point of explosion.

Temporary office of N . P. Iglehart and Co. After the fire businesses operated from temporary wooden buildings and even parlors of homes.

Roe's work is important not only because it is the first fiction of the period but because Barriers Burned Away is itself, like the city, balanced precariously between old and new. In many ways the work embodies standard Victorian conflicts: battles of influence (pious mother versus worldly, beaten father); conflicts of ambitions (success versus the good); and the virtues of the country pitted against the dangers of city life. However, influenceg by the real example of Chicago after the fire, Roe gives an importance to place that is at least embryonically modern.

Roe stresses the generational differences between Dennis Fleet and his parents. The elder Fleets had moved west from Connecticut and had found enough initial prosperity to support Dennis's first three years at college, "under the great elms in Connecticut." But life on the prairie gets bad. The father, driven to drink and depression by his failure to achieve, settles into paralyzed inaction. The mother survives through inspired resignation, imagining "to herself grander things which God would realize 27

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 to her beyond this earth." When Dennis arrives home, forced to leave college, he is surprisingly optimistic. In the first of a series of displacements, Roe simply exchanges Chicago for Dennis's mother's city "beyond this earth." While she waits for-and is soon dispatched to-the "celestial railroad," Dennis takes the "express train ... toward the great city." "The world was all before him, and Chicago, the young and giant city of the West, seemed an Eldorado, where future, and perhaps fame, might soon be won."

The second major displacement occurs when Dennis enters the city. Although his father followed the earlier lure of self-sufficiency in the West, Dennis knows better. Roe's novel is a counterpastoral in which money (Dennis only has two dollars in his pocket) is the "ample seed corn . . . for a golden harvest." Money displaces the idyllic land. Unlike anti-urban novels of the period, Roe's views Chicago, particularly after the fire's general hygiene, as the West's inevitable center. Although Dennis, having abandoned his legal studies and all hopes of becoming a refined professional, has trouble learning the rules of "practical Chicago" and considers a "return to pastoral life," he stays because "even in the midst of a great city the sweet odor of spring find their way." Roe has transposed the acts of pioneering and discovery from the western prairie to the heart of the city.

Dennis's struggle, for this and other reasons, is distinct from his parents'. While they have succeeded or failed through their attempts to flee the city, Dennis's success is measured by the degree to which his values-true art and virtue-can be made to prevail in town. His forced retreat from a practical career and his choice to become an artist illuminate Roe's sense of modern Chicago. In this sketchy portrait of an artist, the author attempts to portray the growing conflict between enduring spiritual values which proved lethal to the older generationthe legion of Mrs. Fleets in nineteenth-century sentimental fiction-and the developing secular religion of business and commerce. Dennis, like many other Chicagoans of the century's last decades, is caught between the high culture-religious ideas of the good and artistic ideas of the beautiful-that inspires him and

28

the energizing low culture of the burgeoning city. The novel's most interesting aspect is , in fact, Roe's insistent attempt to reconcile, through his portrait of Dennis's and Christine's difficult love, the undeniable power of Chicago street life with a series of higher ideals not formerly associated with the new American cities. The fire's extraordinary reality accelerated the process of reconciliation. The excitement of the apocalyptic moment created the appearance of a larger social compact which proved over time to be as impermanent as the fire's damage .

Life before the fire was perceived as bifurcated . There was an older generation of "aborigines" who had brought with them to Chicago a mix of piety and ambition. Seen from a distance , pioneers like Butler and Ogden became models of respectability, combining Eastern education with the demands of Western sett I em en t. They became the Chicago establishment. Set up in fine houses and rich enough for philanthropy, Chicago's first generation had time for pieties and church-going.

Fortunes already in hand, they looked for ways to spend their money and perpetuate their newly minted good reputations. Their sons and daughters, with the pressure of making money removed, lacked any direction. Beginning in the 1870s, Chicago literature is marked with portraits of dissolute young men-often prodigal sons who before it's too late come to their senses-and airy young women. Playboys and dilettantes, especially before the fire, appeared to be Chicago's legacy.

However, there was another important group of young people. If Christine Ludolph, before her conversion on the beach, represents the former, Dennis Fleet is emblematic of the latter. Eastern-educated and full of ambition, like the city's first generation, Dennis only lacks opportunity. To Roe, Dennis and Christine are the two halves of Chicago's future. Christine's friends include the children of robber barons.

She is always off to parties at brewer Brown's home; like Christine, "his daughter seemed to be living in a palace of ice." Miss Ludolph and her friends represent opportunity without ambition, while Dennis and young men like the poor son of his painting teacher have ambition without opportunity. Roe saw Chicago's di-

Myth of Chicago vided generation as endemic to the city's accelerated development. There was something defective about such a vital place where those most able to lead were systematically excluded from power. Roe offers an explanation, through a gentle criticism of Dennis, "The defect in his religion, and that of his mother too, was that both separated the spiritual life of the soul too widely from the present life with its material, yet essential, cares and needs."

Roe's criticism eventually led him and his contemporaries to embrace a pragmatic code that comfortably balanced the imperatives of the spirit with the more anarchic energies of a gritty city. And because of this it is no accident that Chicago literature of the late nineteenth century is filled with characters who are either accomplished or aspiring artists. For the artist, particularly a practical one like an architect, seems most suited to express the city's complex identity. Roe's Barriers Burned Away, with all its stylistic deficiencies, presents the archetype for the modern Chicagoan, and in many ways the model for the ideal American. Roe recognized that his central character could not simply be heroic. Rather, he looked forward and tried to imagine the qualities necessary for the city's future: a composite character blending feminine piety with the power of male ambition.'

Through the eventual alliance of Dennis and Christine, Roe suggests the qualities necessary for any whole individual in the coming decades.

However, these qualities, which were genderspecific in Chicago's first generation-witness the lives of god-fearing Mrs. Fleet and the beaten father-were no longer so in the 1870s. This marriage of essential qualities does not come about only through love (which distinguishes Roe's novel from other, pure melodramas) but through a natural disaster.

Before the fire Christine Ludolph "believed in nothing save art and her father's wisdom."

Her father, a dealer in objets d'art, deals with art as a commodity. Roe has us understand that as long as Christine is under his sway she will never create anything of value. In fact, she comes to realize this herself and winds up copying Dennis's more original paintings. But Dennis, too, is incomplete, although he possesses "a rare sensitivity to beauty. While others exclaim it, he savors it." It is not until Dennis ded-

icates himself completely to art by studying with the master Bruder that his elevated sensibility becomes more than a self-destructive taint. The older painter Bruder eventually dies in poverty, even with his superior talent, because he lacked the more "practical" skills Dennis learns and because he was unable to "work more from the commercial standpoint than the artist's." At the time of the fire, both Dennis and Christine have reached dead ends.

Dennis has become practical. Painting to please others, he is rewarded with a two-thousanddollar prize; Christine has confronted the emptiness of her former existence and views herself as a failure: "I have attained my growth, I can never be a true artist." Dennis's prize-winning painting illustrates the impasse. Roe describes the improbable narrative: "The whole scene was the portrayal, in the beautiful language of art, of a worldly, ambitious marriage, where the man seeks more beauty, and the woman wealth and position, love having no existence."

Interestingly, the "language" of the painting, the characters' frustrated state, was also Colbert and Chamberlin's sense of the entire city before the fire: "The fire roused them from this tendency, and made them the same strong Trinity Church on Jackson Boulevard facing north between Wabash and Michigan avenues.

29

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

The Relic House at 900 North Clark Street was constrncted of fire debris such as melted sewing machines and dolls ' heads. Opened in 1872 and torn down in 1929, the establishment offered patrons refreshment and a palpable history lesson.

I

men and women . .. which built up Chicago."

The fire recreated Chicago's initial condition of a frontier town; it destroyed old arrangements and, like the frontier of four decades past, provided a low-resistance environment for change.

Roe's scenes on the beach are those of a new wilderness, created instantly by the fire's ferocity. "Here again was seen the mingling of all classes which the streets and every place of refuge witnessed. Judges, physicians, statesmen, clergymen, bankers were jostled by roughs and thieves. The laborer sat on the sand with his family, side by side with the millionaire and his household .. . . In the unparalleled disaster, all social distinctions were lost, levelled like the beach on which the fugitives cower." Dennis's and Christine's coming together is part of this same process. All physical and social barriers are burned away. Dennis's painting and his two thousand dollars are lost. Christine is orphaned; her father has died in a vain attempt to rescue his burning property at the "Arts Building." Both young people must start again in this place where "all social distinctions were lost." Dennis begins happily, sweeping ashes

30

with the newly humbled Christine at his side.

Without the le ngthy tri als of Bradford's sea passage, the wo rthy citize ns of Chicago were ins tan tl y transported b ac k to their frontier origins and forward towards a promised future of even greater prosperity. A new, improved Chicago was imagined, where the simple material drive of men like Mr. Ludolph would be married to the practi cal artistry of charac ters like Dennis Fleet. By creating the possibility of a new class, the disaster imitated the land's barren condition when it was first settled and provided Dennis's and Christine's ge neration with its own heroic ide ntity. Neither rapacious, like the robber baron , nor effete, the new Chicagoan would emerge in this legend, tested by fire and ready to " meet this great disaster with courage and fortitud e, and hopefully set about retrieving it. " The young Fleets and Ludolphs had the opportunity to merge their own destinies to Chicago's. The city's fate became theirs and offered them an " inherent nobility such as no King or Kaiser could bestow."

E. P. Roe's Barriers Burned Away is a forwardlooking novel that added to the ongoing Chi-

Myth of Chicago

cago mythos. While the eyewitness and historical documents discussed above provided a factual basis for the modern city, Roe offered his suspicions about how the modern individual might feel. He understood that the fire not only altered and enhanced the city architecturally but changed the way people experienced time.

An accelerated temporal sense, earlier associated only vaguely with the move from country to city, became after the fire completely identified with life in Chicago. Dennis Fleet reflects the change. When he first came to town " it seemed to him that he had lived years in those two days." However, it was not until the fire that he realized these impressions were essential elements of modern Chicago, where "on that awful night events marched as rapidly as the flames, and the experience of years was crowded into hours, and that of hours into minutes." The fire simply made explicit what he had been experiencing all along.

Time was different in the city. The fire, to Roe, was the emblem of a modern fact. He wished to view it simply as a palpable reminder of Chicago's almost perverse delight in change.

While Europeans resisted change to the point of revolution and Easterners measured movement in centuries, Chicagoans thrived on their everyday possibility. For Roe, the fire was the· physical fact of Marx's description of the modern-"all that is solid melts into air." But Roe's Chicago, after having gone through the fire, was a step ahead of such theory. A theoretical problem for Marx was every Chicagoan's new reality.

The fire generation, which identified completely its own destiny with the city's, was initially composed of eager modernists; it would take little time before a pronounced reluctance began to emerge. Yet, wildly stimulated by the fire's excitement, even conservative Christine Ludolph, a victim herself of the flames, dressed in tattered clothes and blackened with soot, is finally prepared to change: "AJI I possess, all I value, is in this city. It was my father's ambition, and at one time my own, to restore the ancient grandeur of the family with the wealth acquired in this land. The plan lost its charms for me long ago-I would not have gone ifl could have helped it-and now it is impossible. It has perished in flame and smoke. Mr. Fleet, you see

before you a simple American girl." Resolutions she was unable to keep are made inevitable, and Christine is instantly transformed, as if by an alchemist's flame, into that "simple American girl" she had "perversely" resisted becoming. Thus, the Chicago fire efficiently seemed to erase the past. The actuality of suffering was immediately subordinated to the myth of an ever-resurgent city.

For Further Reading For firsthand accounts and photographic documentation of the fire see Paul M . Angle, The Great Chicago Fire (Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1971) and David Lowe, The Great Chicago Fire in Eyewitness Accounts and 70 Contemporary Photographs and !Llustrations (New York: Dover Publications, 1979). Mabel Mcllvaine, Reminiscences of Chicago During the Great Fire (Chicago: The Lakeside Press, 1915), includes an account by William Bross. For a narrative of the fire see Elias Colbert and Everett Chamberlin, Chicago and the Great Conflagration (Chicago: J. S. Goodman & Co., 1871). For a broader perspective read Christine Meisner Rosen, The Limits of Power: Great Fires and the Process of City Growth in America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Relief efforts and rebuilding are described in Karen Sawislak, "Smoldering City," Chicago History, (Fall and Winter 1988-89, vol. XVII, no. 3-4). Reports of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society ( 1871, 1873) can be found in the CHS Archives and Manuscripts Collection. William Bross, History of Chicago (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1876), and Edward P. Roe, Barriers Burned Away (New York, Dodd & Mead, 1872), are sources that form the foundations of the author's thesis.

Illustrations 4, CHS, ICHi-15762; 5, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection ; 6, CHS, ICHi-15621; 7, CHS, ICHi-02881 9; CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; IO bottom, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 10 top , CHS, ICHi-14421; I 1, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 12, CHS Decorative and Industrial Arts Collection; 13, CHS, ICHi18372; 14 and 15, CHS, ICHi-02808; 16 top, CHS, ICHi20590; 16 bouom, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 17, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 18, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 19, from Through the Flames and Beyond (l 872), CHS Library; 20, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 21, CHS, ICHi-02842; 22, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 23, CHS Library; 25, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 26 top, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 26 bottom, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 27, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 29, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection ; 30, CHS, ICHi-19850.

31

The Auditorium Theatre provided a glorious home for operas, concerts, musicals, and plays. Thousands of electric lights illuminated the gold and ivory interior. Each seat furnished a clear line of vision to the stage, and perfect acoustics ensured that even the softest words spoken on the stage would be heard in the last row.

32

The Business of Culture

by Carol Baldridge and Alan Willis

Widely recognized as an architectural innovation, the Auditorium Building also played a crucial role in Chicago's cultural and commercial development.

Carol Baldridge and Alan Willis are free lance writers interested in Chzcago history.

On May 29, 1886, fifty members of the Commercial Club gathered for one of their regular meetings at Chicago's opulent Grand Pacific Hotel. William Tecumseh Sherman, celebrated Civil War general, was the honored guest speaker, as the members discussed issues such as "The Causes of Recent Labor Troubles and the Possible Remedies" and the regulation of alcoholic beverages. Another speaker that evening, Ferdinand W. Peck, scion of Chicago wealth, would have a longer-lasting impact on Chicago's future . Peck introduced an ambitious proposal for the funding and construction of a civic center-business block to be known as the Auditorium.

Recognized by scholars to this day for its place in architectural history and as a symbol of Chicago's cultural coming-of-age, the Auditorium has exerted an influence on Chicago's development far beyond its architectural importance. This building, in its sheer size and ambitious purpose, expedited the growth of modern Michigan Avenue as a cultural center and a preeminent luxury hotel address . It also spurred the development of Wabash Avenue's Music Row, which housed musical instrument shops, music publishing companies, and musical instruction studios. Finally, the changes to the Michigan-Congress-Wabash area wrought by the Auditorium greatly influenced the work of Daniel Burnham's comprehensive plan for the city of Chicago.

By the mid- l 880s Chicago had developed a number of cultural institutions, including concert halls, schools, libraries, and galleries.

33

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Ferdinand W. Peck (above) envisioned a grand, self-suppo,ting cultural center for Chicago. From his efforts, the multipurpose Auditorium Building was constructed. Daniel H. Burnham (below right), in his plan for Chicago, sought lo centralize the city 's cultural institutions along Michigan Avenue and the lakefronl.

I

Large orchestral and opera festivals had been staged in the drafty, acoustically inadequate Inter-State Exposition Building on Michigan Avenue and Adams Street. The fast-growing, affluent city was now ready for a great concert hall, one equal or superior to those in Boston or New York. The Chicago press and the city's cultural leaders, many of them members of the Commercial Club, clamored for such a hall.

The Auditorium, however, if built to Peck's plan, would be the most expensive building yet constructed in Chicago.

To sell his fellow club members his grand design, Peck spun before them a vision of a superb edifice unrivaled anywhere in the nation.

Engineered by renowned architects Dankmar Adler and Louis Sullivan, the building would consist of an auditorium facing Congress Street, an office block facing Wabash Avenue, and a luxury hotel facing Michigan Avenue.

The Auditorium Theatre would have the nation's finest design, acoustics, sight lines, theatrical machinery, and furnishings . Peck proposed not merely a great concert hall, but a multipurpose building. Such a design would attract and comfortably house the city's most important cultural, commercial, and political

34

events and conventions comfortably. Peck stressed the attraction of the Auditorium for conventions, believing that Chicago could become the "convention city of the continent."

Peck then addressed the subject of funding the project. He believed, as did architect Dankmar Adler, that a hall of the size and quality grand enough for Chicago could neither attract enough philanthropic donations nor maintain itself financially when built. Instead of a civic project, the building had to be a private enterprise. It would be constructed on private land and be large enough to "produce adequate rentals out of improvements attached to and surrounding the auditorium."

The idea of a business block containing and supporting a cultural enterprise was not new, Peck noted, citing the Adler-designed Central Music Hall (1879) and the recently completed Chicago Opera House as two examples. The Auditorium would be built on available land at the intersections of Michigan Avenue, Congress Street, and Wabash Avenue. While the land was then south of Chicago's business activity and less valuable than other more desirable-and prohibitively expensive-locations, the business district was expanding in that direction. Another advantage of the site was its

Business of Culture proximity to the major railroad and public car lines. In short, for Commercial Club members who invested in the Auditorium, the prospects of breaking even were assured, and real profits were possible.

Peck's effective arguments persuaded the Commercial Club, and the members approved the plan. The Auditorium enterprise soon won important financial support from backers such as Marshall Field, Martin Ryerson, and Charles Hutchinson. By December 1886 the Chicago Auditorium Association was incorporated in the state capital of Springfield. Construction began on the building in January 1887.

By the Auditorium's opening night, Monday, December 9, 1889, Chicago's pride in her new building, according to architectural historian Thomas E. Tallmadge, had "inflated .. . well nigh to the bursting point." The finished structure was at once the tallest building and the most luxurious hotel in Chicago, as well as the

nation's largest, most modern theater, with maximum seating for seven thousand and perfect acoustics. The gala occasion was attended

by President Benjamin Harrison and received press coverage around the world. According to Tallmadge, the Auditorium's fame soon "became first of national and then of international significance .... Magnificence and culture shone forth unmistakably where once the world fancied it saw only mud and pig sticking."

The coming of the Auditorium is one part of the greater specialization of functions that developed in different parts of Chicago's central business district. The district-defined in 1886 by the Chicago River on the north and west, Lake Michigan on the east, and Van Buren Street on the south-had already developed a complex array of business sections. State Street had become Chicago's great retailing district, office buildings were bounded by Randolph, Van Buren, Dearborn, and LaSalle streets,

Shortly bef ore the Auditorium was completed in I 889, sections of central Michigan Avenue were still lined with luxurious town houses.

35

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

• The Inter-State Exposition Building stood on the east side of Michigan Avenue at Adams Street, where the A1t Institute now stands.

It opened in 1873 to house an industrial show highlighting Chicago 's recovery from the Great Fire.

and an entertainment district thrived at the junction of Clark and Randolph streets. The growth of a cultural district between Michigan and Wabash avenues was, however, no foregone conclusion.

Michigan Avenue began as a crude trail leading to Fort Dearborn, which was located at the junction of the avenue and the Chicago River.

By the time of the Great Fire of 1871, however, central Michigan Avenue was part of the city's most fashionable residential district. The block between Congress and Van Buren was dominated by Terrace Row, a series of elegant town houses. These homes were owned by prominent citizens such as lawyer Jonathan Young Scammon and Philip F. W. Peck, father of Ferdinand W. Peck. Further up the avenue, at the northwest corner of Michigan and Adams, stood the fine home of H. H. Honore. East of and paralleling the avenue south of Randolph Street was an undeveloped open area known as Lake Front (now Grant) Park and the tracks of the Illinois Central Railroad, supported on a trestle over a portion of Lake Michigan.

At this time the character of central Michigan Avenue began to change. The avenue's elite residents moved southward along the avenue or to new seats of wealth such as the Prairie Avenue district. Wholesale and manufacturing businesses built southward along both Michi36

gan and Wabash avenues from the Chicago River, eroding the appeal of both streets for residential use .

The Great Fire, combined with a smaller fire in July 1874, hastened this change in fortunes for central Michigan Avenue. The Great Fire leveled the entire stretch of the avenue from its beginnings at the Chicago River to just south of Congress Street. To aid businessmen in the almost completely destroyed retail district, the city government permitted them to build temporary commercial structures on the east side of the avenue. Because it was park land, the businessmen could remain there only a year before they had to move back to the retailing areas. onetheless, the sight of a multitude of plain pine shacks along Lake Front Park w:is enough to greatly reduce the prestige of this residential district.

Soon the exodus of Chicago's wealthy was on in earnest. By 1876 south Michigan, Prairie, and Calumet avenues were well established as the new addresses of residential fashion. The national business depression resulting from the panic of 1873 added to central Michigan Avenue's problems. Just as the city emerged from the devastation of the Great Fire, the depression slowed commercial growth and lowered land values throughout the central business district.

Business of Culture

( THE * * * * * -*··---~

AUDITORIUMI OPERA HENRY E, ABBEY •.• • • • • ,J,' MAURICE GRAU

THE FBIH

I State, Adams and Dearborn Sts.

ttt

OFFICIAL PROGRAMME ~

A. H. RINTELMAN & co. l&Tf:;~~•·

0

.:;~.~•:;:~.::~. THE STANDARD PIANOS OF THE WORLD, BEHNING Grand, Square and Upright Pianos: RINTELMAN'S Artists' Grand Pianos, Etc.

Adelina Patti

so,-is• PlAl'IO D • PAATM • NT, Manutacturers ol the CELEBRATED RINTELM AH PIANO. 145,147 WABASH AVE.

ro

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PERRINS .

This Auditorwm f>rogram from December 30, 1889, features opera diva Adelina Patti's endorsements of Haines upright pianos and Recamier cosmetics.

37

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 Stripped of its fashionable reputation and deprived of new life from commercial development, central Michigan Avenue drifted into an uncertain future. Elegant town houses became boarding houses . The city government built structures in Lake Front Park. The park also became a dumping ground for waste materials from public and private city industries. All of these factors took their toll on central Michigan Avenue, and land values there fell accordingly.

By 1879 avenue lots near Jackson Street were selling for two hundred dollars a foot compared with one thousand dollars a foot in 1873.

While the 1870s were a period of drift for central Michigan Avenue, some precursors of its future were already evident. Established on the avenue by 1873 were the Inter-State Exposition Building on Lake Front Park facing Adams Street, the Gardner House Hotel at Jackson Street, and the Fine Arts Building at Van Buren Street. These three buildings foreshadowed the development of Michigan Avenue.

The most important of these buildings was the Inter-State Exposition Building. Built in Lake Front Park in 1872, this huge structure initially housed commercial and fine arts exhibitions to advertise Chicago's recovery from the Great Fire. During the first half of the 1880s, regular orchestra and opera festivals were presented in the Exposition Building. The Chicago Symphony Orchestra, created in 1891, had its origins in the summer concerts of the Theodore Thomas Orchestra heard at the building beginning in 1877. The Grand Opera Festival of 1885 was held there, and Peck, the festival's promoter, commissioned Adler and Sullivan to construct a temporary theater within the Exposition Building to improve its acoustic properties. Both the festival and the theater were rousing successes. From this festival Peck derived the courage to offer his grand proposal before the Commercial Club the following year.

The completion of the Gardner House Hotel at Jackson Street in 1872 signaled the arrival of the first successful luxury hotel on central Michigan Avenue. Although by 1880 the Gardner House was run down, in 1881 a new owner revived it and rechristened it the Leland Hotel, one of Chicago's finest hotels through the end of the century. The success of the Leland paved

38

A view of Michigan Avenue looking northeast from the Auditorium Tower, c. 1888. Among the buildings pictured are the Leland and Richelieu hotels and the Inter-State Exposition Building.

Business of Culture

39

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

....

Michigan Avenue in 188 7, looking south from Jackson Boulevard. Michigan Avenue's future as a preferred address for hotels and cultural institutions is foreshadowed. (Left to right): the Studebaker Building (later the Fine Arts Building), the original A rt Institute, and the Victoria, Richelieu, and Leland hotels.

the way for other luxury hotels to locate on central Michigan Avenue, such as the exclusive Hotel Richelieu in 1885. By the time Peck began selling the idea of the Auditorium to the business elite, central Michigan Avenue had rebounded from the decline to show promise as an address for hotels and apartments for the well-to-do.

Finally, the Fine Arts Building, built at Michigan Avenue and Van Buren Street in 1873, assisted the Exposition Building in promoting fine art in Chicago. The ground floor housed a monument and statuary shop; a group of artists rented the second floor and operated the Academy of Design. Created in 1866, the Academy of Design moved to the Fine Arts Building after losing its home on Adams Street to the Great Fire. At Michigan and

40

Van Buren, the Academy built new studios and a gallery for displaying artworks. The Academy went bankrupt in the Panic of 1873, and the Fine Arts Building was destroyed in the fire of July 1874. The Academy regrouped at the Pike Building at Monroe and State streets in 1875, but disarray in its internal affairs resulted in its dissolution in 1879.

After the Academy of Design's demise, the newly incorporated Art Institute acquired the Academy's artworks from a sheriff's sale. Residing originally at the Monroe and State address of the Academy, the Art Institute, during 1882 and 1883, bought the land at Michigan and Van Buren where the Fine Arts Building had stood. In 1885 the Art Institute constructed a grand Romanesque building at the corner of Michigan and Van Buren, designed

Business of Culture

by Daniel H . Burnham and John W. Root. This monumental building gave a sense of pride and permanency to art as a cultural fixture , bo th in Chicago and on central Michigan Avenue.

Despite the presence of the Inter-State Exposition Building, the Art Institute, and the Leland Hotel on central Michigan Avenue, business block developers remained uninterested in the area south of Adams Street, even in the booming 1880s. Their apathy was rooted in several factors : the avenue had commercial development possibilities only on the west side of the street; no cable or street cars operated on the avenue; and the future of Lake Front Park was uncertain. Michigan Avenue land values were therefore consistently less throughout the late nineteenth century than were those of its commercially developed neighbors, State Street and Wabash Avenue.

Since most conventional businesses during the 1880s did not flock to central Michigan Avenue, cu ltural institutions and hotels filled the vacuum. They were attracted to the area because the land was less expensive while still valuable, its central location pla c ed it near railroad stations and numerous public car stops, and finally, central Michigan Avenue

The Inter-State Exposition Building (below), hosted political conventions and cultural events, including the Theodore Thomas Orchestra's Summer Garden Concerts. In 1892 Thomas (above) helped establish and became conductor of the Chicago Orchestra.

The orchestra perfonned in the Auditorium until 1904, when Orchestra Hall opened.

U~RIVALE[

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BRANDSSTUDIOS,

J •< l~ I ,.I . I () '-.

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PIHlltlt\111 TIO • PROC II AM f' OA . ,MO•tf C,

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Founh Composer s N lgh1,

W A G NER .

Symphon y Night.

I : I J:l '\ '-''l 1-: I '\

R equest Program .

S u urd •) After n oon , Au &u • t 13t h

w ·' IS!TlfS.

popular ~ l atinee

Juli"' Emr&ro lSlAIStW,bub>.n

could still trade upon the ambiance of a genteel area where rich families paraded their phaetons along the scenic lake. Hotels especially preferred Michigan Avenue because of its beautiful lake view and its proximity to the trade streets without their attending noise and bustle. In addition, the introduction of cable cars in the 1880s allowed hotels to be located further away from railroad terminals than they had been previously.

Ferdinand Peck, from his first efforts to find a site in 1885, never considered any location but central Michigan Avenue for his Auditorium Building. For Peck, constructing a business block and hotel on Michigan Avenue to encase and finan ciall y support the most modern theater in the country made perfect sense.

The Auditorium Hotel , meant to be the chief moneymaker for the block, was close to the railroad station at LaSalle and Van Buren streets.

Cable cars served nearby State Street and Wabash Avenue . Finally, the Auditorium Associa41

Chicago History, Spring and Summer I 990 tion could boost hotel revenues by soliciting and hosting major conventions. Michigan Avenue, as the preferred hotel street, became the address for the Auditorium Hotel.

At a time when the intersection of Michigan and Congress was outside the commercial and recreational heart of the city, Peck saw an added dividend in that location. He believed, as did many businessmen of the time, that the business center of Chicago was moving southward. In his 1886 Commercial Club address proposing his project, Peck cited the Studebaker carriage works next door to his proposed Auditorium site and the large A. S. Gage dry goods store at Wabash and Adams as evidence of this southward movement and of a prosperous future for the Michigan-Congress area.

The Auditorium, meanwhile, would be its own business center until the city business district caught up with it. In the Auditorium's 1891 Annual Report, Peck assured impatient stockholders that this movement was taking

place, but that some time would pass before it reached Michigan and Congress. "Bear i mind," he stressed, "that your building whe erected was comparatively isolated. It had t create its own center and is passing through th waiting period."

Southward movement in the business distric continued through the late eighties. By 1891 the State Street thriving retailing distric stretched just south of Van Buren, when th important L. Z. Leiter building was erecte there. Moreover, the State-Congress-Michigan area benefited from the construction of Chi cago's first elevated railroad in June 1892, th South Side (Alley) line. The Alley ran fro Thirty-ninth Street north to Congress betwee State Street and Wabash Avenue. In 1893 it wa extended south to Sixty-third Street and Jackson Park in time for the World's Columbian Ex position. The Auditorium thus stood near th terminus for thousands of affluent commuter from the South Side, and area merchant

The Auditorium, the Fine Arts Building, and the original Art Institute, with their imposing Romanesque facades, composed a state/ block devoted to culture on Michigan Avenue between Congress and Van Buren streets.

42

Business of Culture looked forward to increased profits.

With the completion of the Auditorium and Chicago's victorious campaign for the World's Columbian Exposition in 1890, the growth of Michigan Avenue's cultural district accelerated. In 1891 the Chicago Atheneum, a people's college devoted to fine and applied arts, moved from Monroe Street to Van Buren Street, behind the Art Institute. That same year, Charles Norman Fay convinced his business elite friends that Chicago needed its own symphony orchestra. Fay persuaded prominent conductor Theodore Thomas to come to Chicago to establish a permanent orchestra for the city. Out of their efforts came the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, its concerts held in the Auditorium.

In 1892 the Art Institute announced that it was moving to grander quarters at the intersection of Michigan and Adams. The Inter-State Exposition Building, its cultural purposes now largely served by the Art Institute and the

Auditorium, was torn down to make way for the new World's Congress Auxiliary Building.

It was used first for the World's Columbian Exposition, and the Art Institute moved in after the fair was over. Art, like music and theater, thus had a monumental home on Michigan Avenue.

By 1892 the Auditorium Hotel's presence on Michigan Avenue had fixed its neighborhood as a hotel district. New hotels appeared along Michigan Avenue south of Monroe, encouraged by the Auditorium and the impending fair. The Chicago Auditorium Association, to preclude any hotel competition across Congress Street, acquired the southwest corner of Michigan and Congress, and in 1892 built an annex to handle the expected high tide of visitors and business from the fair. Later this annex was sold and became the Congress Hotel.

The Auditorium, along with the new elevated railroad and additional hotel growth along Michigan Avenue, raised avenue property val-

The Art Institute moved into its new home at Michigan Avenue and Adams Street in 1893.

43

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

I Ill

ues significantly. Chicago's central business district eventually found its southern border at Roosevelt Road, where it remains today.

Due to the fair and the new Michigan Avenue developments, attention turned to abused Lake Front Park. The city decided to clean it up and make it respectable. Improvements began in 1897, and in 1901, befitting its upgraded status, it was renamed after a national hero.

Nondescript Lake Front Park became scenic Grant Park.

By 1900 the Michigan Avenue cultural center reached maturity. The Chicago Public Library had been built at Washington Street, and the old Studebaker carriage works had metamorphosed into a new Fine Arts Building.

When the Studebaker company outgrew their building on Michigan Avenue, its owners hired architect S. S. Beman to redesign it to allow theatrical and studio space. The addition of this new Fine Arts Building, with its Studebaker Theater, was crucial to the maturation of Michigan Avenue as a cultural center. This building provided artists, writers, and actors with a home near the Art Institute and the Auditorium, as well as opportunities to interact with fellow artists and to pursue further aesthetic enrichment. Chicago's literary and artistic elite made the Fine Arts Building their base of operations; consequently, writers such as Willa Cather (The Song of the Lark, 1915), Hamlin Garland (Rose of Dutcher's Coolly, 1895), Will Payne (Mr. Salt, 1903), and Frank Norris (The Pit, 1903) used the Auditorium as the setting for portions of their turn-of-the-century literary masterworks.

By 1911 the Auditorium had also created a legitimate theater district to rival Randolph Street. The Auditorium Theatre, along with the Studebaker and Blackstone theaters, composed an upscale theater district where one could see a classic play or opera as well as a more popular musical comedy.

The Auditorium also greatly influenced the character of Wabash Avenue. Like Michigan Avenue, Wabash Avenue first developed as a residential street, lined with fine homes and churches. By 187 I, however, wholesale and other business concerns encroached upon this residential area. The Great Fire hastened this transformation by leveling many Wabash Ave-

44

Business of Culture

The Congress Street entrance to the Auditorium Theatre during the Republican National Convention, June 19-23, 1888, before construction of the building was completed. Despite the efforts of Ferdinand Peck and the Chicago Auditorium Association to attract convention business, this was the only national political convention held at the Auditorium.

45

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 !;STA~i.!!HC.O TWE ...~rv-~.£Y£N YEA. -·

b-

}l. S. €t~~e qC

.. .....,_AND-f-ei---•

MILLINElY, AVENUE, COR. ADA~ 8TREff.

CHICAGO, ILL. A. S. Gage's failure in 1886 signaled the decline of major dry goods interests on Wabash Avenue and paved the way for the development of Music Row.

nue homes; homes north of Twenty-second Street were turned into emergency retail businesses. Once the business community returned to the central part of the city, these older residences south of Harrison Street became genteel boarding houses and small shops. The wealthy residents had joined those of Michigan Avenue in moving to Prairie Avenue and to distant suburbs such as Hyde Park and Washington Park.

By the 1880s retailing had reestablished itself on State Street but with greater force than before the fire . So desirable had a State Street address become for retail stores that all choice locations along the street were soon occupied.

Dry goods stores and other retailers instead opted to locate on Wabash. A. S. Gage was one

46

of several large dry goods stores that operated on Wabash. Unfortunately, shoppers accustomed to shopping on State Street did not frequent the Wabash Avenue stores. In the same year that Ferdinand Peck stood before the Commercial Club extolling the Gage store as a harbinger of good fortunes for his Auditorium site, the store went out of business. The store's failure in 1886 signaled the decline of major dry goods interests on Wabash Avenue.

The real future of Wabash Avenue was revealed during the eighties and nineties, as furniture and musical instrument stores dominated the avenue south of Adams Street. These businesses needed spacious buildings with lengthy show windows to house and display their typically large and bulky merchandise.

Such requirements were fulfilled by the substantial structures on Wabash, which had been built after the fire to attract wholesale trade to the street.

Before the fire, Chicago's music businesses were mainly located near the theaters and music halls in the Clark and Randolph entertainment district. State Street was the most popular address for the trade, with eight out of eighteen firms locating there. By I 879, however, music stores appeared on Wabash, when the firm of Julius Bauer occupied the building at 182-84. By 1885 Bauer had been joined by at least five other music firms, including important ones such as Brainard's and Root & Sons.

A moderate drift of music firms toward Wabash was evident by the late eighties. The Auditorium, however, was the real catalyst behind the creation of a genuine Music Row. Many businessmen believed that Wabash would become second only to State Street in commercial importance. As John J. Flinn commented in his 1892 Guide to Chicago, "For nearly twenty years Wabash avenue has been going down hill as a residence street. ... The Auditorium enterprise, however, attracted attention to south Wabash avenue .... It will be one of our most magnificent streets before 1893." The Economist had noted in early 1889: "Wabash Avenue is quiet now, but promises to be the coming thoroughfare of Chicago. The Auditorium enhances its value."

Accordingly, land values increased along Wabash with the completion of the Auditorium

Business of Culture

Wabash Avenue's Music Row, between Jackson Boulevard and Van Buren Street, was lined with musical instrument and supply stores, music publishing houses, and musical instruction studios.

47

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

~ ~~1fll~{Ft~ ~ ({,

-....~ P"RK,E- 50 CB/'-!TS !~"""' l) . GOPYf\lG-1-\T . • VAU~A i, ij!Of\~! .

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Chicago was a center for music publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and many companies, such as Valisi & Giorgi, publishers of "The Ferris Wheel Souvenir," operated on Wabash. Avenue's Music Row.

48

Business of Culture

and the later addition of the South Side elevated railroad in 1892.

The Chicago music trade began to pay closer attention to the rising retailing street that was now just around the corner from Chicago's largest music hall. The music trade journal, The Presto, forecasted in 1889 that "a large share of [Wabash Avenue 's] growth will come from the music trade .... Wabash Avenue is a wide thoroughfare, with substantial buildings, fully as convenient as State, and is not cluttered with cheap notion stores."

With the completion ,o f the Auditorium Building, the migration of the music trade from State Street to Wabash Avenue rapidly accelerated . George W. Lyon, who claimed he could never be induced to go into business on Wabash, established his new Lyon & Potter firm there in late 1889. Music Row truly arrived in 1891 when the industry-leading W. W. Kimball Company , makers of organs and pianos , opened its great showroom on the southwest corner of Wabash and Jackson . In that year, at least thirteen music stores and five music schools found business addresses on Wabash.

Throughout the nineties, Chicago 's music industry experienced rapid growth , with Music Row on Wabash serving as its headquarters . In 1871 there had been only eighteen music instrument stores, one music school, and forty-three music teachers, none of them located on Wabash . By 1894 the music trade had swelled to 115 musical instrument stores (34 on Wabash, 1 on Michigan), 129 musicians, and 700 music teachers. In 1923 the Chicago Daily News reported that Chicago's music stores "annually sell more sheet music, musical instruments, and phonograph records than do stores in any city in the world."

Largely supported by the Auditorium , Music Row remained a thriving component of Chicago's central business district until the midl 920s. Firmly anchored by the music companies of Kimball , Steger, Lyon & Heal y, and Cable-Nelson at the north end of the row and by the landmark Auditorium Building at the south, Music Row was linked by the Auditorium to the cultural institutions of Michigan Avenue.

The maturation of Chicago's cultural center on Michigan Avenue occurred in a central busi-

ness district plagued by ineffi cient streets and traffic congestion. James Thompson 's original grid system of 1830 served city traffic well for decades. After sixty years, however, this plan could no longer handle Chicago's phenomenal growth. Chicago ' s central location and resources had drawn well over a million people by the mid-l 880s. The Chicago City Council authorized the Chicago Plan Commission to create a practical plan for the city. The actual draft was made by Daniel Burnham, esteemed architect and city planner, who realized that the way to true greatness and continued prosperity for Chicago lay in making the city efficient and convenient for the everincreasing numbers of its citizens. As a result, Burnham made "no little plans" and compiled on paper an orderly arrangement of public grounds and buildings.

Burnham's goals for Chicago were order, harmony, and beauty. He noticed that during the last decade of the nineteenth century the lakefront, and in particular Michigan Avenue, had become the heart and intellectual center of Chicago through its four cultural institutions: the Auditorium, the Fine Arts Building, the Chicago Public Library, and the Art Institute.

Burnham wanted to centralize the city's cultural institutions, bringing them together in a symmetrical arrangement along the lake . His ideas for Chicago were first presented to the Merchants Club in 1897 and eventually developed into the Plan of Chicago of 1909. Burnham's introduction stated: "First in importance [to the city] is the shore of Lake Michigan. It should be treated as park space to the greatest possible extent. The lakefront by right belongs to the people. " He saw the city in terms of concentric circles-or half-circles, because of the lake-with their common center along the lake . Grant Park would be the formal focal po int, or the " intellectual center of Chicago."

Burnham envisioned a complex of museums and libraries in Grant Park. The Field Columbian Museum would serve as the principal feature of Grant Park, flanked by the Crerar Library and the Art Institute. The Chicago Public Library and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra would remain in their existing buildings nearby. The buildings would be connected by po rti cos and would be surrounded by open

49

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Lake Front (later Grant) Park in 1889. Despite its lack ofJonna[ planning and regular maintenance, the park attracted people from the Michigan Avenue residential district and the sun-ounding area.

park land and wide roads suitable for parades and pageants. Swathed in the trappings of classical and Renaissance magnificence, the institutions of culture, symbols of the city's communal and spiritual life, would create a focal point in the heart of the city. "Would not such a park form a fitting entrance-way to the city itself?" Burnham questioned.

For his plan, Burnham selected Congress Street as the central street, the principal axis.

Lying about midway between important streets such as Washington and Twelfth or Chicago Avenue and Twenty-second, this axis would form a broad approach to Grant Park and be lined with theaters, semipublic buildings, and retail shops. The most important street in the development of the plan was Michigan Avenue.

Fronting Grant Park and the lake to the east, it would carry an immense volume of traffic to office buildings, hotels, clubs, music halls, shops, and all the opportunities offered by the cultural center. On the northwest corner of Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, sitting squarely at the juncture of Burnham's axis and Michigan Avenue, is what writer Jory Graham called "the most phenomenal building of the late nineteenth century"-the Auditorium. Al-

50

though Burnham's plan was never fully implemented, Chicago benefited from the efforts to improve the city physically, making its cultural institutions accessible to the neighborhoods and establishing a spirit of cooperation between culture and commerce.

The Auditorium all but revolutionized the neighborhood it dominated. Before Peck began the process of building an all-purpose hall, hotel, and office block, the future of central Michigan and Wabash avenues was unclear. A couple of tentatively placed hotels on Michigan Avenue did not create a wholesale rush of developers to build more there. The establishment of the Auditorium Hotel positioned Michigan Avenue as a prime hotel street. Similarly, the presence of several music stores on Wabash did not alone cause a stampede of dealers to lease buildings there. The Auditorium Theatre, as Chicago's premier music hall with offices for music schools and teachers, made the difference between a few scattered music shops and a thriving music center on Wabash Avenue.

With the Auditorium's influence, the developing character of the Wabash-CongressMichigan area was that of a cultural center

Business of Culture grand enough to become the central focus of the Burnham Plan. While the Art Institute had made a home on Michigan Avenue before the Auditorium, so had the Studebaker carriage works. Without the Auditorium, Michigan Avenue may have developed businesses and office buildings instead of cultural institutions on its west side. Furthermore, the Auditorium not only nurtured the growth of cultural institutions around it, but it transformed preexisting structures into cultural institutions. It was not, then, the Studebaker Building that affected Michigan Avenue, but th~ Auditorium that affected-and transformed-the Studebaker Building. The Auditorium dramatically raised land values in the Wabash-Congress-Michigan area, especially on Wabash Avenue. In addition, it acted as a real estate magnet, for a time pulling the highest Michigan Avenue land values southward below Adams Street. As the nineteenth century closed, the Auditorium stood at Burnham's axis as Chicago's eminent symbol of its aspirations to greatness. The Auditorium tower was eagerly climbed by tourists, just as they ascend Sears Tower today, for a

bird's-eye view of Chicago and the Indiana shoreline.

The Auditorium survives today as a vital part of Chicago's cultural center, which continues to flourish along Michigan Avenue, the rim of Grant Park. The Adler Planetarium, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum, Roosevelt University (incorporating the Chicago Musical College), the Auditorium Theatre, the Fine Arts Building, Orchestra Hall, the Art Institute, the Goodman Theater, the Chicago Cultural Center (formerly the Chicago Public Library), and Grant Park itself-"lending beauty, breathing space and unequalled accessibility to the whole complex"-all adorn Michigan Avenue, with the avenue's grace note being the Auditorium.

A monument to its architects, Adler and Sullivan, and to its builder, Ferdinand Peck, the Auditorium Building remains a pioneering landmark of Chicago's cultural arrival.

For Further Reading The Auditorium Building: Its History and Significance by Daniel H. Perlman (Chicago: Roosevelt University, 1976) provides a good history of the Auditorium Building, from its initial planning and design to its ongoing adaptation and renovation by Roosevelt University. Chicago's cultural scene in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is explored in Anna Morgan's My Chicago (Chicago: Ralph Fletcher Seymour, 1918). Morgan was an actress and drama teacher who maintained a studio in the Fine Arts Building. Perry Duis discusses the history of the Fine Arts Building in two articles written for Chicago History: " ' Where is Athens Now,': The Fine Arts Building 1898 to 1918" (Summer 1977, vol. VI, no . 2) and "'All Else Passes-Art Alone Endures' : The Fine Arts Building 1918 to 1930" (Su,rnmer 1978, vol. VII, no . 1). Music for Millions: The Kimball Piano and Organ Story 1857-1957 by Van Allen Bradley (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1957) relates the history of one of Music Row's most successful stores.

Thomas S. Hines 's Burnham of Chicago: Architect and Planner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979) examines Burnham's role as a city planner.

Illustrations

The Auditorium Tower was the highest point in Chicago in 1888 and a popular tourist attraction.

32-33 , CHS, ICHi-21989; 34 top, CHS, ICHi-21984; 34 bottom, CHS, ICHi-21994; 35, CHS, ICHi-20386; 36, CHS, ICHi-20350; 37, CHS Library; 38-39, CHS, ICHi05719 ; 40, CHS, ICHi-21987; 41 top, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 41 bottom, CHS, ICHi-21991; 42, ICHi-21992 ; 43, CHS, ICHi-19219; 44-45, CHS, ICHi-21990; 46 , CHS, ICHi-21985; 47, CHS, ICHi16786; 48, CHS Library; 49, from Plan of Chicago (I 909), CHS Library; 50 , CHS, ICHi-21988; 51, CHS, ICHi21986.

51

Bessemer Park

by Maureen O'Brien Will John Becker documented neighborhood activities -from boating to moving a buildingin his photographs of the Bessemer Park community.

ohn Becker, a carpenter and handyman, was also an accomplished photographer who documented the middle-class and working-class people who lived in his neighborhood in South Chicago during the 1910s and 1920s. South Chicago had at that time long been shaped by the steel and transportation industries. During the teens the ethnic profile of the area changed rapidly; Europeans, especially Southern Europeans, immigrated to the area in unprecedented numbers until World War I, when European immigration halted. With the war the need for steel increased, but the availability of unskilled laborers decreased. The steel mills hired more AfricanAmericans and Hispanics, and the ethnic variety in the area grew. Becker's neighborhood, Bessemer Park, comprised primarily working-class Germans and Swedes.

Becker worked with a view camera capable of accommodating both four-by-fiveinch and five-by-seven-inch glass plate negatives. He carefully recorded his negative numbers, exposure times, and brief, often cryptic, subject identifications in notebooks.

His meticulous records suggest that he hoped to sell his photographs. On the backs of his photographs he advertised his services to the amateur photographer for whom he claimed to develop, duplicate, and enlarge photographs for the "lowest prices."

Like many early photographers, his skills were probably self-taught.

Little is known about Becker and his work. Whether he succeeded in selling his images or why he took most of the photographs is unclear. Even the identities of most of his subjects are not known. We do know that his parents were Hilair and Annie Pemmer Becker. He was born in Hobart, Indiana, on December 15, 1879, and moved with his parents and sister Clara to Chicago as a child. A bachelor, Becker spent his entire adult life living in the family home at 8925 Escanaba Avenue where he operated both his carpentry and photography businesses. He owned an automobile-several of his photographs show Becker, his sister, and their mother posed with his car-and made trips to Indiana and Wisconsin to visit friends and relatives.

J

Maureen O 'Brien Will, formerly associate curator of prints and phorographs at the Society, is now an archiVlst with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

53

Photographer John Becker with neighborh ood children, c. 1910. CHS, ICHi -21 184.

It is not known when Becker took up photography or when he stopped. Most of the 1,360 negatives in his collection were made around 1910, some in the late teens, and a few in the early 1920s. It is unlikely that Becker suddenly stopped taking pictures in the 1920s. Any later negatives were possibly thrown out or destroyed during his lifetime or after his death in 1957 .

The strength ofBecker's photographs lies in their depiction oflife as lived by ordinary people. There are, however, no candid poses. Becker's subjects are always aware that they are being photographed. They gaze seriously into the camera and concentrate on the formality of the moment. Yet unlike formal studio portraits, these images show people with objects or in environments that are important or familiar to them. The pride associated with owning an automobile, motorcycle, or truck is evident. The workplace is used as a backdrop for some portraits. Leisure activities such as picnicking, boating, playing tennis, and drinking beer are well documented. Street scenes illustrate a mix of residential and commercial architecture and the relationships of these buildings to the street and to each other. Businesses are hidden away in the background of many of the photographs. And events of local interest, such as a parade and moving a building to a new location, are recorded. Becker's photographs provide information about life in Bessemer Park in the 191 Os, which was less defined by the steel industry and more defined by the trades than other areas of South Chicago .

The following photographs are selected from the Society's John Becker collection.

54

Picnic, c. 1910. & Standing, left to right, Reinhardt Stahl , John Becker, and Nicholas Pemmer

(Becker's cousin); seated, left to right, Harriet Wall, Lillian Wall Pemmer (Nicholas's wife) with daughter Evelyn, and Clara Becker LJohn 's sister), c. 1912. T

56

57

Launch Wefugo, c. 1910 .& Couple on motorcycle, c. 1910. T

59

Tormoehlen 's Fine Confectionery, 8850 Commercial Avenue, c. 1910. • Moving the TIHSet Building from the east side of Commercial Avenue north of Ninety-second Street to an unknown destination, c. 1915. T

60

East side of Exchange Avenue south of Eighty-ninth Street, c. 1910 . .._ Fifteenth precinct police station, 2638 East Eighty-ninth Street, c. 1910. T

---~----~------~------~~J __________

61

\S.llDOER (O. · Always Lead

......~

En route to the Labor Day picnic at World 's Fa ir Park, c. 1910 . .A Parade route along Commercial Avenue, c. 1910. T

62

International Union of Steam Engineers, Local 115, gathering for a parade in front of the Calumet Theatre, 9202 South Chicago Avenue, c. 1910. "- Peterman 's rig in front of Michael). Keegan 's blacksmith shop at 9244 South Chicago Avenue, c. 1910. T

63

Woman with dog and magazine, c. 1912 . .& Family gathering at 8921 Escanaba Avenue, c. 1910. T

64

..•• ::-?·.•.·:::,·:,··· ·...:·:::::·-· ~--}~~:)}{'·

{iW:{

65

George C. Punsky 's grocery store, 8954 Commercial Avenue, c. 1910. A ). Rewers , salesman, 1915. T

66

67

69

Self-portrait of John Becker consisting of three separate images Juxtaposed and rephotographed to create one photograph, c. 1910.

Battling the ''National Sin''

by James Pyne

Between 1822 and 1824, citizens clashed over whether Illinois would become a slave state.

W1I

This article is the second in a series that builds on the Society's new long-term exhibition, A House DiAMERJCA IN THE vided: America in the Age AGE OF LINCOLN w;a of Lincoln. Informed by ----•C--T:· -the most recent scholarship that identifies slavery as a central issue in the growing sectionalism in nineteenth-century America, the exhibition examines slavery, economic development, sectional politics and the antislavery movement, the Civil War, and the consequences of the schism on American life through more than six hundred artifacts and images from the Society's Civil War-era collections.

The first article of the series, "Slavery in French Colonial Illinois" by Winstanley Briggs (Winter 1989-90), discussed the introduction of slavesboth Indians and Africans-into French Illinois.

The following article explores the growing disagreement among Americans over slavery in early nineteenth-century Illinois.

I AHOUSE DIVIDED

In 1822, four years after Illinois had been admitted into the Union, proslavery advocates maneuvered the General Assembly to pass a resolution seeking voter approval to call a constitutional convention. The anticonventionists argued strenuously that the purpose of this convention was to legalize slavery by amending the state's constitution. For the next eighteen months, a bitter political struggle gripped the state as the anticonventionists, led by Governor Edward Coles, fought to stem the swelling tide of proslavery sentiment that threatened to swamp the state. Efforts to prevent a constitutional convention accelerated the formation of a full-scale antislavery movement in Illinois,

and the success of the anticonventionists effectively ended attempts to extend the slave system into the state. The anticonventionists, moreover, equated self-interest with opposition to legalization and insisted that the defeat of slavery was essential to the preservation of virtue in a republican society. Coles and the anticonvention is ts thus forged an ideological bridge between the classical republicanism of revolutionary America and the democratic liberalism of the nineteenth century.

Republican ideology rested on the conviction that men could govern themselves only if self-interest was subordinated to the good of the whole. Republican society, therefore, depended for its continued existence on men of virtue whose public spirit enabled them to abandon private ambition when communal well-being required it. The repeated clash between self-interest and public welfare, however, revealed a perplexing problem: how to balance the freedom needed to pursue the former with the restraints required to achieve the latter. In that collision, two divergent strains of republican ideology surfaced by the 1790s-one articulated by the Federalists, the other by their Jeffersonian opponents.

In the territories, with their diverse migrant populations, the Federalist vision of an austere, ordered society yielded to the full implications of Jeffersonian individualism in the glorification of enterprise, independence, and opportunity. Although governing officials complained of the lack of deference to their authority, white settlers championed individual liberty and local sovereignty and forced men in power to accommodate, but not surrender to, James Pyne leaches hislory in lhe Chicago area.

71

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 their notions of social order. The competing strains of republican ideology clashed repeatedly in contests for political control , the distribution of public lands, the promotion of internal improvemen.ts, and especially in the expansion of slavery. In Illinois the anticonventionists adapted republican ideology to the rampant individualism of the frontier to link the pursuit of private interest with the virtue of a free people.

Illinois drew Edward Coles from Virginia largely because it was free from what he later called the "national sin." Others, too, migrated to escape "the sum of all villanies," or, as Peter Cartwright, the famed circuit-riding Methodist preacher, stated, to "get entirely clear of the evil of slavery." Many Illinois settlers from slave-holding states, however, seemed " more ultra proslavery than the slave holders of the states which they had left."

Slavery had existed in the Illinois country since the French government approved its introduction as early as 1689. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the area contained about three thousand people , nearly nine hundred of whom were black slaves. After the British occupied the region in 1 763, French inhabitants received confirmation of their right to hold slaves as property. Twenty years later the Virginia Act of Cession, by which the state surrendered its claim to western lands, stipulated that "the French and Canadian inhabitants and other settlers of Kaskaskia, Saint Vincents, and the neighboring villages, who have professed themselves citizens of Virginia, shall have their possessions and titles confirmed to them, and be protected in the enjoyment of their rights and liberties. " Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, however, provided that "there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." Whether the ordinance was intended to reverse the earlier confirmation of slavery remained a hotly debated question for decades.

Yet persistent French fears that titles to property in slaves were now illegal and a desire to attract settlers from the slave states led to efforts to legalize slavery. In 1 796, Congress denied a petition from Kaskaskia asking for the 72

repeal or alteration of Article VI to allow servants to be bound for life. Illinois, then part of the Indiana Territory, petitioned Congress to legalize slavery in 1802, 1805, and 1807, but the federal government rejected the proposals.

In 1809, Congress created the Illinois Territory in part because the eastern sections of Indiana opposed slavery while the western counties that would form the new territory favored its legalization. At its inception, the territory of Illinois was bound by the laws of the Northwest Territory and the Indiana Territory from which it had evolved. With little opposition , proslavery offi c ials quickly dominated government in Illinois. The territorial legislature twice passed a resolution instructing its delegate in Congress to seek approval to employ slaves from Kentucky along the Saline Creek. In 1814, the Illinois legislature approved an act allowing slaves to be employed in the saline works, provided that both master and slave consented, and that for a period of one year such " slave or slaves, shall for the time being, be considered and treated as indentured servants." The law explicitly protected "the right of property in the master, in and to the services of such slave or slaves."

Ninian Edwards, the territorial governor from 1809 to 181 8, supported slavery long before his arrival in Illinois. Slavery, he contended, was an economic necessity. To deny it in Illinois would be to encourage slave holders to migrate further west. "It is our duty to secure our happiness. We ought not to sacrifice or risque that of ourselves and our fellow citizens, by attempting to ameliorate the situation of others. " Edwards observed that the Northwest Ordinance did not prohibit voluntary servitude, and he thus recommended brief but renewable indenture contracts as "reasonable, ... beneficial to the slaves, and not repugnant to the public interests." Not surprisingly, Edwards vetoed legislation repealing indenture laws that critics charged were unconstitutional and in violation of the Northwest Ordinance.

The desire to legalize slavery spurred the drive for statehood. Daniel Pope Cook, Edwards's son-in-law and a prominent figure in Illinois politics, launched a movement for immediate statehood in November 1817. Writing

The "National Sin"

Mb ,.,,u1 fi- /i,dt,...-1 m .a. ~ ) . J , ; , " , , .

This map detail from Morris Birkbeck 's Notes on a J ourney in America ( 18 I 8) shows the Illinois Territory as it was created by Congress in I 809. Originally part of the Indiana Territory, lllinois supported slavery, while Indiana did not.

73

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

As governor of the Illinois Territory from 1809-18, Ninian Edwards suppo,·ted the legalization of slave,y in Illinois.

as "A Republican," Cook warned that delay in resolving the issue of slavery diverted slaveholding settlers to other regions where they could be sure of their property rights . Early in 1818 Nathaniel Pope, Cook's uncle and the Illinois territorial delegate to Congress, presented a petition for statehood to the House of Representatives. Despite doubts that Illinois's population was large enough to fulfill the requirement for statehood, Congress enacted a bill enabling Illinois to elect members to a constitutional convention. The law required that the "constitution and State government ... shall be republican, and not repugnant to" the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a binding compact "between the original States and the people and States" of the Northwest Territory.

To fulfill these requirements, Article VI of the 1818 Illinois Constitution stated that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall hereafter be introduced into this State." Toward that end, the constitution prohibited the immigration of indentured African-Americans, with some exceptions permitted until 1825. Section 3, however, confirmed all existing "contracts

74

or indentures" and required the completion of their terms.

The congressional debate over Illinois's admission into the Union focused on Article VI. Representative James Tallmadge, Jr., of New York opposed Illinois's entry on the grounds that "the principle of slavery, if not adopted in the constitution, was at least not sufficiently prohibited," and he insisted that "slavery should be absolutely prohibited." Anticipating the future, Tallmadge questioned whether a state might later change its constitution to permit slavery after Congress had required the state to prohibit it. William Henry Harrison, a representative from Ohio, insisted that a state could amend its constitution without congressional approval. The Northwest Ordinance, in his view, was "a dead letter" because the people of Illinois had never been party to its enactment and so were not bound to respect its provisions after statehood. Illinois thus entered the Union with an equivocal position on slavery. Between 1810 and 1820, the number of slaves had increased from 168 to 91 7 in Illinois, the only northern state to register an increase during that decade, but in 1819 the state legislature enacted a stringent slave code that prohibited the migration of black slaves or indentured servants into the state.

The financial panic of 1819 prompted many Illinoisans to support the legalization of slavery as a means of strengthening the economy. They believed slavery would draw a 0ood of southern capital, land values would rise, and emigrants en route to Missouri would settle in lllinois instead. At the same time, antislavery citizens feared for the future of their state. "lt was the evil genius of SLAVERY," George Flower of Edwards County recalled, "that stood within our borders, plotting and contriving to make the whole State its prey." Flower believed that "treachery came from the south," but that northern "traitors" schemed with southerners in a "conspiracy against liberty" to "introduce slavery and establish it over the State." Impassioned rhetoric aside, antislavery sentiment rested as much on the economic consequences of slavery for free labor as it did on principle.

Indeed, the union of principle and self-interest formed the basis for the organized opposition to legalization of slavery. The experience of

The "National Sin" many southern emigrants taught them that more slaves meant greater land accumulation by a powerful plantation-oriented minority and decreased availability of land for small farmers.

The editor of the Illinois Intelligencer speculated that legalization of slavery would deter settlement in Illinois, based on rapid population growth in Ohio and Indiana, where slavery was illegal, and a slower growth rate in Kentucky, where it was permitted. The roll of wagons bearing slaves to Missouri indicated otherwise to many in the proslavery camp.

Illinois politics pulsated with rumors of a plot to legalize slavery. Amid charges of conspiracy, proponents of legalization organized in support of Elias Kane, who was sympathetic to slavery, for representative to Congress. They also proposed establishing a newspaper in Edwardsville to galvanize public opinion and purchasing the Illinois Gazette of Shawneetown for the same purpose. Hooper Warren, editor of the Edwardsville Spectator, revealed the plan in an editorial and predicted that more and stronger efforts would be made in the future, fueling the fears of those who later united to oppose the constitutional convention. Kane denied that his candidacy for Congress was advanced by "the old slave party," rejected any thought of a movement to introduce slavery, and denounced "the juggler behind the scenes" who had contrived the rumor as a plot to discredit his candidacy.

Such was the chaotic political climate in the state when Edward Coles emigrated from his native Virginia, "the very bosom of negro slavery." He was educated, as befitted a gentleman of Virginia, at the College of William and Mary, where he acquired the deep antislavery convictions he carried throughout his life. His desire to act upon them collided with the inertia on this matter of Virginians in general and James Madison and Thomas Jefferson in particular.

As a relative of Mrs. Madison and private secretary to the president, Coles spoke to Madison "frequently" and "unreservedly" about slavery. Although Coles found that Madison's "principles were sound," he was unable to reverse "the influence of habit & association."

Years later, appealing to the former president's "pre-eminent virtue," Coles bluntly advised Madison to "make provision in your Will for

the emancipation of your slaves" to avoid any "blot and stigma on your otherwise spotless escutcheon."

If Coles was disappointed by Madison's lethargy, he was nearly indignant at Jefferson.

Coles urged Jefferson, "whose valor, wisdom, & virtue have done so much in meliorating the condition of mankind," to accept the "difficult task" of devising "a mode to liberate one half of our fellow beings from an ignominious bondage to the other." Jefferson conceded the need but hoped those of "the younger generation" would strike against slavery to prove, "above suggestions of avarice," that they possessed a "love of liberty beyond their own share of it." Jefferson urged Coles to remain in Virginia rather than "lessen its stock of sound disposition" by moving West. But Coles realized he could never become "instrumental in bringing about a liberation" in Virginia. Only "those who have acquired a great weight of character" could "awaken our fellow citizens from their infatuation to a proper sense of justice, & to the true interest of their country." Instead

Nathaniel Pope, l llinois 's first territorial delegate, presented Congress with a petition for statehood in 18 I 8.

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Coles began his political career at the age of twenty-three as private secretary to President James Madison (above). In a letter that he wrote to Madison in I 832, Coles urged the former president to affirm his faith in the principles of the new republic by freeing his slaves.

Coles migrated West to escape the contamination of slavery. En route to Illinois in 1819, along the Ohio River, Coles announced to his startled slaves that he had emancipated them then and there. "The effect on them," he wrote, "was electrical."

In the judgment of one historian, "desperation [about slavery] rather than political ambition" motivated Coles's decision to seek election as governor. The election involved several issues, but slavery dominated the contest. The three other candidates in the race-Joseph Phillips, James B. Moore, and Thomas Browne-either advocated slavery or failed to oppose it. Yet Coles never attributed his own candidacy to a desire to stall the drive for slavery in Illinois, despite his public criticism of the other candidates' proslavery inclinations. Nor was his candidacy a reaction to those men already in the race; he entered before two of the three other candidates.

The first candidate to announce his intention to seek the office was Joseph Phillips, formerly the territorial secretary and at that time the chief justice of the Illinois Supreme Court.

76

Phillips, a known supporter of slavery, declared his candidacy in February 1821, a year and a half before the election. Hooper Warren sneered that Phillips's early entry signified a movement to amend the constitution to legalize slavery. Phillips's supporters denied any such intention, but in July an unsigned letter in the lllinois Intelligencer urged the advocates of slavery to organize behind him.

Phillips's candidacy remained unchallenged until Coles announced his own in September 1821. Despite his tenure as registrar for the sale of public lands, an appointment made in 1818 by President Monroe, Coles remained largely unknown outside of Madison County.

Opponents complained that he had not become a resident of the state until 1820 . They charged that Coles, strongly tied to the administrations of Madison and Monroe, symbolized that despised brand of adventurer who came West, speculated in land, used his political connections against the interests of permanent residents, then slithered back to the East, his pockets filled with money. Hooper Warren reported in the Spectator that Coles had been in Illinois as early as 1815, had returned on other occasions, and, despite frequent and lengthy absences, had become a permanent resident by mid-1819, earlier than Coles's critics charged.

Warren concurred, however, in their suspicion of his motives. Because of this belief, Warren and Coles, despite their common aversion to slavery, became bitter political foes. Judge Nathaniel Pope traveled to Edwardsville where he implored Warren to cease his attacks on Coles. ''If you do not want Phillips elected, you must let Coles alone." Warren, apparently persuaded by Pope, did just that, although his antagonism toward Coles remained.

Pope, attached to the powerful Edwards faction, was less interested in supporting Coles than he was in stopping Phillips. The third candidate, James B. Moore, was little known in the state, and his views were unclear. Supporters of the incumbent, Ninian Edwards, encouraged their leader to enter the race, but Edwards steadfastly resisted the advice of his political allies. With Pope's backing, Thomas Browne, a justice on the Illinois Supreme Court, entered the campaign in May 1822. Browne's attitudes on the slavery question were cautiously ambiva-

The "National Sin" lent. Given the proslavery position of the Edwards faction from which Browne derived much of his strength, it is likely that he privately supported legalization but preferred to remain publicly neutral as a matter of campaign strategy. Phillips remained the only one of the four candidates with pronounced proslavery views, and Coles the only one with a decidedly antislavery position.

Coles narrowly won the election, receiving only one-third of the votes, 2,854 out of 8,606, and defeating Phillips by just 167 votes and Browne by 411. The outcpme suggests that other issues must have determined the vote in several counties but indicates that proslavery sentiment surpassed the antislavery opposition among the state's electorate. Two-thirds of the

voters preferred three candidates with varying commitments to slavery, so that a vote for one of them over the other two may well have hinged on other factors. Coles's election owed much to division within the proslavery ranks.

Despite the agitation preceding his election, Coles himself precipitated the slavery crisis of 1822-24 by forcing the question of slavery to the surface. In his inaugural address in December 1822, before an overwhelmingly proslavery General Assembly, Coles boldly asserted that slavery in Illinois contravened the Northwest Ordinance, that it could not legally continue under the state's constitution, and that "the laws relative to negroes" needed revision to reflect the changing "character of our institutions and the situation of our country." Coles,

Coles migraled to Illinois from Albemarle Counly, Virginia, in lhe spring of 18 I 9. This mural from the Illinois Stale Capitol in Springfield depicls Coles freeing his slaves on the Ohio River. (I 886, artist unknown)

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Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Governor Coles, outraged at the practice of kidnaping free African-Americans and returning them to slavery in the South, introduced legislation protecting the rights of freedmen.

78

The "National Sin" particularly incensed at southerners who kidnaped free blacks in Illinois and then sold them in the South, recommended legislation to protect freed slaves from a growing threat to their liberty.

Coles's address startled everyone. His "injudicious and indiscreet proposition" even alarmed some in the antislavery camp. The last thing antislavery groups wanted was to open the door to a convention, but, ironically, as Hooper Warren complained, "the very first thing to be done under the Governor's recommendations was to au thoi:;ize the call of a Convention to alter the Constitution, which was all the slavery party wanted and which they were determined to do at all hazards before the close of the session." Warren feared that the governor had unknowingly played into the hands of his adversaries. Rumors of a convention movement, however, had been rife in Illinois. Warren himself had warned of its danger before the recent election, and he had called upon the electorate to prevent its success by choosing antislavery men for the legislature. In April 1822 the Illinois Gazette had predicted that proslavery forces would organize to call for a convention. Coles may have forced the issue, but not unwittingly. Instead, he_ had correctly calculated the effect and decided to take the risk.

The governor's recommendations were referred to a subcommittee of three in the House of Representatives. The majority report, issued

by Risdon Moore, Sr., and John Emmitt, concurred with Coles's position. Conrad Will, the dissenting member, issued a minority report arguing that because the right to property in slaves had not been disturbed by the state constitution, legislation to abolish it would be unconstitutional. He called for a convention to resolve the issue. A proslavery senate committee similarly recommended a convention that might, "by an alteration of [the constitution], make any disposition of negro slaves they choose, without any breach of faith or violation of compact, ordinance, or acts of Congress."

Although the anticonventionists attacked slavery in Illinois without seeking its abolition in the nation at large, Coles worried that legalization of slavery in the state would "disturb the harmony of the Union." Mindful of the recent

turmoil raised by the admission of Missouri to the United States, the governor expected renewed agitation if slavery were now to be extended legally into an area from which it had been prohibited by the Northwest Ordinance.

According to Coles, the ordinance was a compact with "unalterable" conditions, which could be changed only by the "joint consent" of Congress and the state . To legalize slavery would be to defy national authority.

Resolutions to seek voter approval for a constitutional convention were introduced in both houses of the assembly. The state's constitution required a two-thirds vote in each chamber, and proslavery forces delayed a vote on the resolution for fear they might lose. During the remainder of December 1822, and all of January 1823, both sides maneuvered for votes. On February l 0, 1823, the Senate passed a resolution, twelve to six, to ask voters at the next general election to approve the calling of a constitutional convention. But on the next day, a similar resolution was defeated by a single vote in the House. To reverse the outcome, proslavery representatives reviewed for a second time the contested election for representative in Pike County between Nicholas Hansen and John Shaw. In December, the House had seated Hansen. But after Hansen voted against the resolution, the conventionists reversed the earlier judgment, removed Hansen from his seat, and installed the proconventionist Shaw.

A subsequent vote on the convention resolution passed in the House by one vote. Shaw made the difference. As the conventionists celebrated wildly, Coles lamented "the extraordinary malevolence of party spirit" that wracked Illinois politics.

Never comfortable in the crude and illmannered arena of frontier politics, this "stiff little Virginia aristocrat" refused to abandon the propriety inculcated in his character since birth. He would neither countenance deception nor feign comradeship with rough frontiersmen to achieve his political goals. His distance and reserve often made it difficult for this man of principle to persuade those in the proslavery ranks to abandon a movement they calculated to be in their best interests. His constrained bearing and manner, however, belied his intense attachment to "the dignified sim-

79

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 plicity of freemen" in a republic.

Coles's closest ally in the anticonvention movement was Morris Birkbeck, the most accomplished of the propagandists against slavery. To persuade poor farmers that slavery threatened their economic future, Birkbeck published a series of letters under the pseudonym, "Jonathan Freeman," arguing that black insurrections would follow legalization and slave holders would form an aristocracy that would dominate the state. In the judgment of Birkbeck's close friend, George Flower, "probably the most effective argument of all" was Birkbeck's claim that legalization would not increase land values. Instead, the state's economy would collapse, and the number of slaves would so increase that in "our republican Illinois" they would become the contemptible "many who are doomed to labor for the few." The value of free labor would decline until one class dominated. "It is not a republick-this; it is a confederacy of tyrants, pure aristocratical despotism!" Society would be thus affiicted by "an incurable and increasing plague," obtained "in exchange for virtue, peace and security, which no accumulation of property can ever compensate."

The anticonvention movement attracted other prominent figures as well. John Mason Peck, a Baptist preacher, combined his antislavery views with temperance appeals, rode the circuit to exhort his listeners to defeat the convention call, and helped organize county societies formed for that purpose. Several of his contemporaries believed Peck more effective in defeating the conventionists than either Coles or Birkbeck.

The anticonventionists moved rapidly to curtail the convention drive. Members of the legislature who voted against the convention resolution issued an address, written by Coles, to the people of the state. "What a strange spectacle would be presented to the civilized world," Coles wrote, "to see the people of Illinois, yet innocent of this great national sin, and in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of free government, sitting down in solemn convention to deliberate and determine whether they should introduce among them a portion of their fellow beings, to be cut off from those blessings, to be loaded with the chains of bondage, and rendered unable to leave any other legacy to their posterity than the inheritance of their own servitude!"

Violence remained a constant threat for African-Americans-slave and free. This engraving is taken from an abolitionist tract published in Philadelphia in I 8 I 7 by Jesse Torrey.

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The "National Sin" The conventionists responded quickly to Coles's appeal. Their "Address to the People of Illinois" reiterated the right of the state's citizens to alter the constitution when it no longer served their interests, but it obscured the purpose of the convention. Instead of campaigning to legalize slavery, they complained that too much of the constitution resembled the laws of aristocratic eastern states whose circumstances did not resemble the situation in Illinois. In addition, the state's court system required an overhaul, and the terms and duties of public officials needed to be defined more precisely.

These complaints dated back to Ninian Edwards's administration of the territory.

The anticonventionists moved with equal speed to criticize political corruption among the conventionists. Coles fulminated against "the most unprecedented and unwarrantable proceedings" by which the convention resolution had been passed in the House, and against the "intrigues and machinations" that ensued.

Birkbeck railed against the "chicanery" of the Shaw-Hansen episode. If a people, "conscious of these proceedings" in a representative government, submit "because they may chance to accord with their inclination or supposed interest," then they are "unworthy to rank among republicans." Seduced by ambition, deceived by politicians, their "virtue" is lost. Birkbeck cautioned voters to beware of politicians "who, like birds of passage," concealed their true purpose. Nothing less than "slavery is their avowed object-accursed slavery." The proslavery faction used the convention "merely as an engine of temporary party politics. " They hoped to drive up the price ofland, sell their parcels, and move on, having "prostitute[d] their influence to the ruin of the country!"

Birkbeck's prediction of economic disaster indicates that the anticonventionists were not above exploiting the racial prejudice that permeated their society. If self-interest prompted the drive to institutionalize slavery, then the anticonventionists would have to show that the true economic interest of the people lay in preventing just that. The anticonventionists expected the argument to be persuasive among a population with deep southern roots and with unvarnished contempt for African-Americans, whether slave or free.

j ohn Mason Peck, an itinerant preacher, helped defeat the movement for a constitutional convention to legalize slavery in Illinois by carrying his abolitionist views to congregations throughout the state.

Like Birkbeck, Coles feared that the flow of emigrants from the slave-holding South would "bring us idleness, vanity, luxury." The advance of slavery, in short, threatened the virtue upon which republican society must stand by seducing the people into slothful irresponsibility, making them easy prey for corruption. Yet Coles realized that the proslavery position was tightly bound to local interests and states' rights. He expressed concern that acts of "indiscretion" by "friends of freedom" outside Illinois who called for "the interposition of the Federal Govt. to restrain the people of this state" would increase the strength of the proslave ry faction. Federal intervention would wound "state pride, and states' rights, and that natural love of unrestrained liberty and independence, which is common to our countrymen, and especially to our frontier settlers, who of all men in the world have the strongest jealousy of authority and aversion to restraint."

In spite of fears that interference from outside sources against slavery might backfire, the 81

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

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82

The "National Sin" governor called upon his friend Nicholas Biddle to provide facts from Pennsylvania to counter the growing belief that slavery meant prosperity. Biddle connected Coles with Roberts Vaux, a reformer active in various crusades, who supplied Coles with three pamphlets attacking slavery on economic and constitutional grounds. Biddle warned Coles to conceal Vaux's membership in an abolitionist society, lest news of the association fuel the conventionists' propaganda mill.

Proslavery conventionists argued that legalization in Illinois would geographically redistribute the slave population, dilute its concentration, reduce the strength of proslavery constituencies in national politics, and put slavery in the nation as a whole on the road to extinction. Coles viewed this argument as an abominable lie meant to confuse moderates into supporting the convention call. Coles believed the expansion of slavery could only increase its hold on national politics, preparing the way for more expansion.

John Reynolds, later a governor of the state, joined the proslavery camp in the convention fight because he imagined that slavery would prove a panacea for the state's economic ills.

"It is almost incredible," he wrote later, "what injury the failure of the currency produces on the people, and what expedients will be resorted to for relief." Reynolds regretted that he had succumbed to economic pressures at the expense of principles, and he ruefully admitted that "we were much mistaken" in doing so. Here lay the crux of the issue from Coles's point of view. To legalize slavery would be to gratify man's basest impulses at the expense of his noblest virtues. A republic prone to such exchanges could not hope to endure. Rather than persuade Illinoisans to abandon selfinterest because the state's welfare required it, Coles and Birkbeck asked them instead to recognize that their true self-interest lay in the rejection of a convention and, thereby, in the repudiation of slavery. Virtue and self-interest were thus inextricably entwined.

The fury of the campaign subsided at the next general election on August 2, 1824. The anticonventionists successfully defeated the call for a convention by a vote of 6,640 to 4,972. The participation of more than 11,000

voters, nearly 30 percent more than had turned out for the gubernatorial election of I 822, testified to the importance of the question.

Coles, Birkbeck, and others came to see that the pursuit of private interest, properly defined, was not incompatible with virtue. They sought to convince landowners and free laborers that their true interests lay in opposition to slavery and to the veiled attempts of scheming politicians to legalize it. The anticonventionists were aware of the racial prejudice that permeated a white population of largely southern origin, and, as a political necessity, they exploited it to their advantage. But to conclude that racial antagonism accounted for the defeat of the convention movement is to ignore the genuine commitment of the anticonventionists to republican values. Their victory exemplified the ideological fusion of self-interest and virtue, the adaptation of republicanism to the raw realities of frontier individualism as the basis for a broad-based antislavery movement in Illinois.

For Further Reading For detailed accounts of Coles's involvement in the convention struggle see Elihu B. Washburne, Sketch of Edward Coles (Chicago: Jansen, McClurg & Co., 1882) and George Flower, History of the English Settlement in Edwards County, Illinois (Chicago: Fergus Publishing Co., 1909). The Edward Coles Papers at the Chicago Historical Society include Coles's remarks on slavery, and several of his letters to James Madison. Letters concerning the slavery issue are also in the Edward Coles Papers at Princeton University Library. N. Dwight Harris's History of Negro Seroitude in Illinois (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1904) explores slavery in Illinois since colonial times, while Merton Dillon's "History of the Antislavery Movement in Illinois: 1824-1835" (Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Summer 1954) traces the development of abolition and colonization movements in the years immediately following the convention debate.

Illustrations 70, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; 73, from Notes on a journey in America (1818), Newberry Library; 74, from History of Illinois: 1778-1833 (1870), CHS Library; 75, Missouri Historical Society; 76, CHS Prints and Photographs Collection; 77, lllinois State Historical Library; 78, 80, from A Portraiture of Domestic Slavery in the United States (I 817), CHS Library; 81 , from Vanguard of the Caravans (1931 ), CHS Library; 82, Illinois State Archives, RS I 03.12 .

83

YESTERDAY'S CITY Crime-fighting Scientists

by Dennis E. Hoffman TI-IE NATION'S EYES ARE ON CHICAGO

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John T. McCutcheon 's cartoon, which appeared in the June 12, 1930, edition of the Chicago Tribune, depicts Chicago's growing reputation for lawlessness in the eyes of the nation in the late 1920s and 1930s. Frustrated by inept and corrupt public officials, citizens sought new tactics to fight crime. Courtesy of Chicago Tribune.

During the thirteen years of Prohibition, Chicago experienced intense criminal violence as rival gang members scrambling to profit from the lucrative bootlegging business murdered each other along the way. Newspapers across the nation sensationalized gang killings and painted Chicago as a city engulfed by violence and corruption. So many public officials and law enforcement agents were on gang payrolls that newspapers characterized local politics as gang rule. Indeed, the average American viewed Chicago as a city under siege by gangsters, its citizens held hostage by enforced lawlessness.

The newspaper accounts held some truth. In 1929 alone forty-nine gang-related killings occurred, and every one of them went unsolved.

Chicago and Cook County officials, either on

84

the take or powerless to help, failed to stem the tide of gang warfare. The legendary St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, one of the most brazen and brutal gang murders of the day, was a turning point. Outraged by these coldblooded murders, private citizens and county officials turned to the new science of ballistics to help solve the crime. Though never solved, the St. Valentine's Day slayings were the impetus for Chicago to form a scientific criminal detection laboratory, the first in the nation.

At 10:30 A.M. on February 14, 1929, seven men were gunned down in the garage of the S.M.C. Cartage Company at 2122 North Clark Street. Five were members of George "Bugs" Moran's gang; one was an auto mechanic who worked on the gang's motor cars; and the other man was an optometrist who found excitement in associating with gangsters. A touring car, the kind used by police squads in the twenties, drove up in front of the garage and stopped.

Four or five men got out. Two of them wore police uniforms, and two or three carried weapons resembling riot guns. The "squad" entered the garage, and a few minutes later shots fired in rapid succession rang out. The squad members emerged from the garage, got into their car, and drove off. Gang member Frank Gusenburg, fatally wounded, identified the gunmen as police officers before he died three hours later. The horror of the massacre rocked the city.

Cook County Coroner Herman N. Bundesen resolved to apprehend and convict whomever was responsible. The implication of direct police involvement made the murders no ordinary crime, and Bundesen impaneled a blue-ribbon coroner's jury to conduct an inquest. The jury met at the scene of the crime, studied the details of the situation, and reenacted the crime.

Two physicians performing autopsies on the seven bodies removed and stored .45 caliber bullets. Then Bundesen ordered a careful collection of all physical evidence produced by the autopsies and gathered by the police at the crime scene. Empty shells recovered from the floor of the garage, bullets from the victims, and bullet fragments dug out of the Dennis E. Hoffman is an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Om.aha.

Yesterday's City

This scene of ca rnage greeted police officers entering the garage of the S. M. C. Cartage Company at 2 I 22 North Clark Street. On the morning of February I 4, 1929, unknown assassins-two of them dressed in police uniforms-executed five members of Bugs Moran's gang and two bystanders in what has since been known as the St. Valentine 's Day Massacre. CHS, ICHi-14406.

wall of the garage were placed in envelopes, marked, and sealed.

When Burt A. Massee, vice-president of the Colgate-Palmolive-Peet Company and foreman of the jury, asked his attorney, Charles F. Rathbun, what might be done with the bullets to help solve the crime, Rathbun referred Massee to Calvin Goddard. A ballistics expert in New York, Goddard had already received na tional atte ntion for helping to co nvict anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vametti of the 1920 murders of a payroll guard and paymaster. Massee called Goddard to Chicago to aid in the case. When Goddard arrived, Bundesen

presented him with the bullet and shell evidence. To determine whether Chicago police officers had been involved in the massacre, Goddard fired each of the Thompson submachine guns owned by the Chicago Police Department into cotton waste. After microscopically comparing each of the test firings with the bullets preserved from the bodies , Goddard concluded that no police weapon had been used in the killings . Soon afterward, Goddard returned to his office in New York, but he continued to test various submachine guns that Coroner Bundesen suspected as the murder weapons used in the massacre.

85

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Curious onlookers crane their necks for a glimpse of the police removing the bodies of the St. Valentine's Day Massacre victims. The implication of police involvement in the murders prompted Cook County coroner Hennan N. Bundesen to fom1 a jury of prominent businessmen to conduct an inquest. CHS, DN 87, 707.

Two notorious gang leaders were prime suspects in the murders. Al Capone, Moran's chief rival in Chicago's lucrative bootlegging business, was known to resort to murder to gain an advantage. Fred R. Burke of Detroit's Purple Gang was thought to have engineered the murders as revenge against Moran for hijacking his liquor shipments from Detroit to Chicago. A breakthrough in the case finally came in December 1929. A police officer in St. Joseph, Michigan, tried to arrest two motorists who were involved in an auto collision. One of the motorists drew a .45 caliber automatic pistol and killed the policeman. The killer escaped using a passing motorist's car, but papers found in the killer's wrecked automobile led to a search of his home in St. Joseph.

There police discovered the individual's identity: massacre suspect Fred R. Burke. The search of Burke's house turned up two Thomp-

86

son submachine guns, which the district attorney of St. Joseph brought to Chicago for testing. Goddard compared the bores of Burke's submachine guns with the scorings on bullets taken from the bodies of the seven victims and found that Burke's weapons had been used in the massacre.

On December 23, 1929, Goddard presented his findings before the Cook County Coroner's jury. He showed jurors photographs of the identical markings found on the shells from the scene of the massacre and the shells from bullets fired experimentally through Burke's guns. Based on Goddard's report, the coroner's jury recommended that Burke be apprehended and charged with the murder of one of the massacre victims. Burke was later captured but never tried for the massacre because he pleaded guilty to slaying the policeman in Michigan, which, unlike Illinois, had no capital

Yesterday 's City

Returning to the scene of the crime, police officers re-enact the ruthless murders f or Coroner Bundesen and his jury. Analysis of the bullets removed from the bodies and recovered from the garage-more than two hundred were fired-was the impetus f or Janning a crime laboratory in Chicago. CHS, DN 8 7, 705.

punishment. Burke's guilty plea and subsequent life sentence to the northern penitentiary in Marquette, Michigan, apparently dissuaded Chicago authorities from seeking an indictment against h im.

Although neither Burke nor anyone else was ever convicted of the murders in Chicago, Goddard 's handling of the evidence impressed the coroner and the jury. At an informal meeting of the Cook County Coroner's jury in January 1930, Massee expressed his conviction that Chicago needed a laboratory for scientific criminal investigation, and he pledged to establish one. At the time of the laboratory's inception , applying science to solve c rimes was unprecedented in the United States. No police departments maintained laboratories ; none worked to develop scientific methods of crime detection. The only available method even close to scientific was fingerprinting, which the

Chicago Police Department adopted as a means of identification in 1905 . August Vollmer had started the first American academic department of police science at the University of California at Berkeley in 1908, and the notion of educating police officers as scientists spread across the country. A scientific crime lab in Chicago would give a new twist to this idea, suggesting that scientists could participate in the fight against crime.

But political and law enforcement corruption made the decision of where to establish the lab difficult. Massee strongly mistrusted local politics. He belonged to the Chicago Crime Commission, a private reform agency whose members abhorred Chicago mayor William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson and his political machine. Massee believed the Chicago Police Department, a seemingly logical place for the lab, could too easily fall under political domination.

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conslPnt/11 P1rtllfla5t territor11 will c/11,me.t bif o,o,Posing facttMs Map of Chicago shllWing gang territories. During Prohibition, rival gangs waged bloody battles with each other over the control of the lucrative bootlegging business. From The Bootleggers, CHS Library.

88

Yesterday's City The Cook County Coroner's Office was another logical choice, but Bundesen pointed out that as a part of county government, it, too, was subject to political influence.

Both Massee and Bundesen became convinced that the lab should be organized to guarantee disinterested, independent assistance to police departments, coroners, sheriffs, and prosecuting attorneys in Chicago and elsewhere. Bundesen suggested that it affiliate with a university, so Massee met with representatives of the University of Chicago and Northwestern University. During his discussions with Northwestern officials, Massee enlisted the support of Col. John Henry Wigmore, dean emeritus of Northwestern's law school. Wigmore regarded Massee's crime lab project as "one of the most meritorious things that I have ever taken part in." Because of his position, he was able to convince Northwestern's board of trustees to approve the lab's affiliation with the university.

In June 1929 the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory Corporation was formed as a private, nonprofit organization. Massee and Wigmore, the two men most committed to the idea of a lab, became the laboratory corporation's first president and secretary respectively. Their goals for the lab included applying science to the detection of crime, conducting investigations, cooperating with public officials, and instructing and advising in crime analysis. Massee hired Calvin Goddard as the lab's first director and dispatched him to Europe to study the methods of police laboratories there. As Goddard put it, "We had no precedent to go upon-at least on this side of the water." Goddard left in July 1929 and returned in the middle of October. Massee meanwhile tried to secure the subscriptions necessary to finance the lab's first-year projected budget of sixty thousand dollars.

Massee canvassed Chicago businessmen for money, but the stock market crash in October made fund-raising difficult. Samuel Insull, the utilities magnate, pledged fifteen thousand dollars, and other businessmen, such as Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck and Company, also contributed. But with the economic depression and the Christmas season, obtaining money for the lab was nearly impossible, so Massee personally paid God-

"They Are Spoiling an Otherwise Inspiring Picture," john 7~ McCutcheon 's 1928 Chicago Tribune cartoon, depicts the tolerance of public officials for gangs as a blight on Chicago. CHS, ICHi-13902.

<lard's salary, the rent of the laboratory premises, and most of the other operating expenses for the first year.

Despite Massee's lack of success at fundraising, the crime lab officially opened on February 1, 1930. The original quarters of the lab consisted of one room in the law school building on Chicago's McK.inlock Campus. In 1930 more space was acquired in the Borg Building on East Ohio Street, and in February 1935 the lab moved into the third floor of 222 East Superior Street. Calvin Goddard administered the laboratory and supervised firearm identification work. Staffed with a corps of fourteen highly trained professionals, the lab examined and reported on any bit of physical evidence associated with a crime. Its individual case investigations included studies on blood, bombs, bones, bullets, code messages, dust, finger and footprints, fingernail scrapings, firearms, food, hair, counterfeit documents, handwriting, inks, poisons, stains, tireprints, and other subjects.

89

Yesterday's City Left, a technician from the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory applies acid to a revolver to restore a filedoff serial number. Laboratory photographs (right) reveal the results of such procedures. Courtesy ofJ on Arnold.

The lab was equipped for polygraph tests; chemical analyses; microscopy; firearms identification and ballistics tests ; ultraviolet ray examinations; photography, including mi c rophotography; and the making and repair of electronic devices. Types of cases accepted by the lab included murder, rape, arson , forgery and embezzlement, automobile theft, poisonings , and burglaries. The lab also resolved paternity cases and identified dead bodies: One of the most famous cases handled by the lab was the notorious Jake Lingle murder. Chicago Tribune reporter Jake Lingle was shot to death on June 9, 1930, in a pedestrian tunnel running under Michigan Avenue. Within a few hours of the murder, the lab furnished police with the names of both the seller and the buyer of the gun that had killed Lingle.

In addition to the lab's clinical activities, it began publishing the American J ournal of Police Science in March 1930, the first American publication devoted to the field of criminal investigation . The journal offered an organ for the spread of information about scientific methods of criminal detection.To further disseminate this information, the lab became a training ground for future criminalists. It held its first four-week class in April and May 1931 . Students in this class came from police departments in Washington, D.C. ; Philadelphia; St. Louis; Portland; Miami; ew York; and Chicago. Charles Appel, Federal Bureau of Inves-

tigation (FBI) special agent, also enrolled in the course. Armed with the knowledge he received at Northwestern's crime lab, Appel returned to Washington, D.C. and organized the FBI's crime laboratory eighteen months later.

Despite the lab's remarkable accomplishments in its formative years, it was a financial disaster. Burt Massee, unable to shoulder the financial burden of the lab by himself, dissolved the laboratory corporation on April 25, 1932.

Northwestern assumed its assets and liabilities and adopted the lab as an integral part of the law school. Northwestern sheared the lab's expenses to a minimum. Nonincome-producers were dropped from the payroll, and the American journal of Police Science was incorporated into another Northwestern-sponsored publication, the journal of Criminal Law and Criminology. Northwestern terminated most of the original employees, retaining only a skeleton staff to keep the lab alive. Even Goddard had to resign in June 1934 because the university could no longer pay him a salary. Professor Newman F. Baker, who was already teaching criminal law courses at the law school and managing the journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, generously donated his talents to direct the lab on a volunteer basis.

The remaining staff members devoted all their time to revenue-producing casework to maintain the lab's existence. Research, teaching, and publishing-the most useful features 91

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990 of a university-based laboratory-received low priority. Northwestern maintained the lab on an annual budget of twenty thousand dollars, the university contributing ten thousand dollars and case fees providing another ten thousand dollars. Despite the staff cut-from fourteen to six employees-the lab's casework increased during the mid-l 930s. More demands were made on staff members for assistance in criminal investigations, lectures , articles, research problems, and in the organization of similar labs across the country. Each staff member devoted ten to fifteen hours seven days a week to lab work. Leonard Keeler and the lab's other polygraph operators, for example, administered lie detector tests to three thousand employees from fifty banks in Chicago during the mid-l 930s. The money generated from increased casework, however, did not come close to covering the lab's expenses.

Northwestern administrators continually fought with the problem of financing the crime lab. They expanded course offerings, directing them especially at prosecutors as potential students, in an effort to produce more income through tuition fees, but this ultimately failed fNTRANCE. TO I Lll NOi S CENTRAL SUBWAY.ON EAST SIDE OF M1Ci-116AN AVE. e'R0\'1 Wl-110-l SLAYER WAS SEEN 10 L!;AVE. AFTER Sl-lOOT1N6

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due to a lack of interest. Administrators also proposed that the lab be funded by the public sector. Northwestern made overtures to the University of Illinois School of Law, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Illinois State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation, but none of these public institutions wanted to support the crime lab. Unable to support the lab any longer, Northwestern sold it to the city of Chicago in 1938 for twenty-five thousand dollars. This was about one-tenth of the amount spent to develop it during its nine years and less than half the cost of its physical equipment alone. The city obtained two chemical laboratories; large, fully equipped photography and dark rooms; a machine shop; a ballistics room with microscopes and other mechanisms used to identify weapons; a microscopy laboratory; a library containing more than one thousand volumes on methods of crime detection; and a chamber outfitted for lie detector tests. Ironically, the crime lab today is operated by the very agency that its founders wanted to avoid-the Chicago Police Department. Currently located on the fifth floor of the police headquarters annex at 1111 South - :__ U:,,4"°BA5H ,4 v,;:- -

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92

Above, the body of Chicago Tribune reporter Alfred "Jake" Lingle lying in the pedestrian subway where he was murdered. A diagram (left) shows the scene of the Lingle murder and the killer's escape route. The Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory provided key evidence about the murder weapon within hours of the crime. Above, from X Marks the Spot, CHS Library; left, from Jake Lingle, CHS Library.

93

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Yesterday 's City

A scientist firing a revolver (opposite) into cotton to recover a bullet for comparison. Above, a bullet comparison microscope and a ballistics match (below). Courtesy ofJ on Arnold.

State Street, it is divided into seven sections: questioned documents (i.e., the examination of handwriting and typewriting to determine the source or authenticity of letters, checks, contra cts , and other materials), microana lysis, chemistry, comparative tool marks, photography, firearms , and polygraph.

No rthwestern's crime lab had a significant impact. Besides helping to solve hundreds of criminal and civil cases, the lab fundamentally affe cted American criminal justice by encouraging the study and application of scientific crime detection . As a result of the lab's pioneering efforts, many police organizations95

Chicago History, Spring and Summer 1990

Above, a technician frorn the Scientific Crirne Detection Laboratory prepares to inject truth serurn. Below, polygraph pioneers Leonarde Keeler and Charles Wilson demonstrate the lie detector. Courtesy ofJon Arnold.

96

including the FBI-created labs in the 1930s.

Firearms identification experts appeared in almost every well-populated community. During the 1930s alone, polygraph testing was adopted by three state police organizations and four city police departments, and all of the operators were trained at Chicago's laboratory. Many police departments installed chemical labs, the ultraviolet radiation technique for examining evidence, the moulage system for reproducing perishable evidence (in the moulage system, a mold is first made of a footprint, tire track, or the face of an unidentified body, and from this a cast is made that represents the original), and other crime detection methods developed and refined by the lab.

The symbolic effects of the lab were less tangible butjust as real. Chicago in the 1920s was internationally synonymous with crime, but the scientific lab helped to restore the city's good name. Chicago, of course, did not eradicate crime, but the city was credited as the place where science was brought to bear upon crime.