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Chicago History The Magazine of the Chicago Historical Society Summer 1982 VOLUME XI, NUMBER 2
Timothy C. Jacobson Editor
CONTENTS 66
"In the Suburbes of Toun": Chicago's North Shore to 1871 by Michael H. Ebner
Karen Kohn Designer
78
Chicago's Leading Men's Clubs by George D. Bushnell
Lisa Ginzel Design Assistant
89
Walter W. Krutz Paul W. Petraitis Photography
Inside State Street: Photographs of Building Interiors by Kathleen Collins by Howard S. Becker
104
Montgomery Ward & Company and Three Statues on Chicago's Skyline by Margot Gayle
I 12
Looking Backward: Around Town with the Saddle and Cycle Club
114
The Society
I 16
In the Steps of Chicago's Immigrants: A Review Essay by Paula K. Benkart and Randall M. Miller
I 22
Book Reviews
127
Notes
Roberta Casey Assistant Editor
This issue of Chicago History was made possible through the special efforts of Roberta Casey, Assistant Editor, and Beth Bailey, Editorial Assistant.
Cover: 1550 North State Parkway. Outer lobby entrance to I uxury cooperative apartments at northernmost end of State Street. Photo by Kathleen Collins. See Inside State Street, p. 90.
Copyright 1982 by the Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 ISSN 0272-8540 Articles appearing in this journal are abstracted and indexed in Historical Abstracts and America: History and Life
"In the Suburbes of Toun": Chicago's North Shore to 1871 By Michael H . Ebner
{Lake Forest] bears no aspect of a business character-indeed most of the residents are engaged in business in Chicago)¡ or they have retired upon competency) and live here to cultivate their novel and esthetic taste) and educate their children.))
a
Waukegan Gazette, March 25, 1877
WORD "s u BURB, " often thought of as a modern term describing the outgrowths of our urban centers, actually possesses a venerable history, with roots in both Latin and Old French. By the late fourteenth century, Chaucer employed it quite casu ally in The Canterbury Tales (1386):
THE
Where dwelle yea? if it to telle be? " In the suburbes of toun," quod he .
The late H. J. Dyos, England's foremost urban historian, offers a helpful definition for modernday observers: "In essence, a suburb is a decentralized part of a city with which it is inseparably linked by certain social and economic ties." In fact, at the outset of Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (1969), Harold Mayer and Richard Wade aptly remind us: "The modern metropolis, with its central city, suburbs, and 'satellite cities,' is a single historic and geographic entity." This study examines a specific network of suburbs, commonly referred to--at least since 1873-as the North Shore of Chicago. Proceeding from north to south, in increasing proximity to Chicago, they are Lake Bluff, Lake Forest, Highland Park, Glencoe, Winnetka, Kenilworth, Wilmette, and Evanston. Six of these eight communities were chartered between Michael H . Ebn er is Associate Professor of History al Lake Forest College, where he also teaches in the Robert E. Wood Institut e for Local and R egional Studies. H e is currently preparing a social history of Chicago's North Shore suburbs from 1855 to 1980.
66
1857 and 1872, the remaining two in the mid1890s. Geographer Irving Cutler offers a contemporary appraisal of the North Shore: "This long-settled lakeshore area, with its attractive physical features, good rail transportation, and freedom from obnoxious industry, contains the greatest number of high income suburbs in the Chicago area." Any discussion of the North Shore, of course, sparks what Michael Kilian terms a "boundary dispute" : which towns are included and which aren't? By focusing on the original communities along the shoreline of Lake Michigan, we discover that these eight localities were conceived under similar historical circumstances, and that each has retained basic social, cultural, and economic characteristics over a sustained span of time. And by studying, in particular, the origins and initial development of these places-covering the years before the Chicago Fire of 1871-we can appreciate their distinctive role in the history of the metropolis. The area now known as Chicago's North Shore was an indirect by-product of Chicago's quest to dominate the Midwest in the decades preceding the Civil War. This pursuit made transportation ties to the far-ranging hinterland-by foot, wagon, or stagecoach, canal or river, and then railroad-imperative; and the desire for a connection with Green Bay, Wisconsin, by way of Milwaukee resulted in the opening of a road on the ridge just west of the shoreline that hitherto had been an Indian trail. In the early decades of the 1800s, a mail
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This 1869 plat of Wilmette Village was probably done by surveyor John G. Westerfield. At that time the area of the village amounted to 525 acres. Wilmette Historical Museum.
67
Chicago's North Shore courier made the 500-mile trip through "utter wilderness" in one month. In 1830 Congress approved allocations to survey and improve the trail. By 1836 regularly scheduled stagecoach service commenced on this route-now known as Green Bay Road-between Chicago and Milwaukee. The journey took a day and a half under ideal conditions, with a night's layover in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Taverns and roadhouses along this lakeshore road, many with names like "Seven Mile House" denoting their distance from Chicago, catered to overland travelers. Although one description, dated about 1845, of a "thickly settled" area along Green Bay Road between Chicago and the IllinoisWisconsin border was clearly exaggerated, it is indisputable that this overland route directly contributed to the area's development. Although these settlements should not be mistaken for what we think o[ today as suburbs, those living along the shoreline-whether or not they knew it-were part and parcel of a fledgling city in the throes of economic and cultural expansion. Moreover, as H . J. Dyos reminds us, "suburbs began ... with extramural settlement of persons who stood in every sense on the fringes o[ society." For example, in 1834 Abraham Hathaway built his cabin on a site in what is now Evanston . He soon gained notoriety as a purveyor of liquor and, according to J. Seymour Currey, "the place became the headquarters of counterfeiters and fugitives from justice .. . a vile resort." A different set of circumstances took hold in Gross Point, a community that eventually merged with Wilmette. The German settlers who came to this area in the 1840s from the city of Trier (hence the name "New" Trier Township) earnestly set about establishing a productive agricultural economy. ,vhen the Johann Schmitz family posted a letter in July 1845 to kinfolk in the Old World, they exclaimed, "there are about forty land owners proving that those who have settled here are not all fools and idiots. It is as good a locality as you can find." Residents of Taylorsport-as present-clay Glencoe was known after being settled by a weary city dweller named Anson H. Taylorpursued a variety of livelihoods. Taylor him68
sel[ was something of a factotum: he operated "Twenty-one Mile House," served as postmaster, sold timber as the terrain was cleared, and recei vecl the first political commission in New Trier Township as justice of the peace by gubernatorial appointment. Another settler, Fite Dietrich, was said to be a political refugee. Frustrated by earning only a "scant living" producing matches in Chicago, he moved to Taylorsport in 1843 and established himself as a farmer and major landowner. Another example is the locale that would come to be known as Lake Forest. Irish immigrants who had worked on the IllinoisMichigan Canal settled there in the 1840s and became laborers, farmers, and tradespeople. In fact, contrary to the commonly held belie[ that Lake Forest was founded by Presbyterians, the first religious organization in that vicinity was a Roman Catholic church, opened in 1844, which preceded the official founding of the community by more than a decade. The North Shore's pioneer phase ended quite suddenly as a rail line along the lakeshore, soon destined to link Chicago and Milwaukee, reached Waukegan.* Known originally as the Lakeshore Division of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad, the company was renamed the l\Iilwaukee Division of the Chicago and North ¡w estern in 1866. William J. Cronon writes that this transportation link was part of a "revolution in social and economic reorganization" which transformed Chicago between 1848 and 1856. In the beginning of this period, only ten miles o[ track entered the city, but by 1856 the figure exceeded 3,600 miles as eleven new lines were constructed. The embryonic shoreline villages along Green Bay Road, as well as other locales adjacent to the city, experienced the railroad's impact at once. Anticipating what was ahead, Elijah M. Haines, an early chronicler of Lake County, had written in 1852: "The Chicago •Situated on the shoreline thirty-nine miles north of Chicago, six miles beyond Lake Bluff, Waukegan was incorporated in 1852. Rather than regarding it as a suburb, geographers classify Waukegan as a modern-day "satellite city," or in nineteenth-century terms as a "market town" serving the agricultural hinterland. Its role was similar to that of Elgin, Aurora, and Valparaiso, all of which arc approximately forty miles from Chicago. Early on, however, "\1/aukegan's boosters \'iewed the city, somewhat inaccurately, as a suburb.
Chicago's North Shore
_____ .,. __... _____ CHICAGO_& MILWAUKEE R.R. LINE. The DIRECT and SHORTEST Route - ro:n. Waukegan Kenosha
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Advertisement for the Chicago & Milwaukee Railroad Line, which provided the crucial link between Chicago and the developing North Shore communities. An " accommodation train," instituted in 1855, traveled from Waukegan to Chicago in 2½ hours with stops at each of the lakeshore suburbs. CHS, ICHi-16874, gift of Carrie E. Mears Estate.
69
Chicago's North Shore
- --
-~ , ; . . .
The Lake Forest Academy on the intended site of Lake Forest University, 1870. Although both institutions were chartered in 1856, the university did not graduate its first class until June 1880. CHS, ICHi-07450, gift of Herma Clark.
and Milwaukee Lake Shore rail road will probably pass through [Lake County] ... the completion of which will add greatly to the value of its woodlands." At a celebration marking the first day of service, one speaker envisioned Evanston as Chicago's Tenth Ward and Waukegan as its Fourteenth. A few days later the Chicago Daily Democrat claimed: "The New York and Philadelphia suberbs [sic] will now meet a rival, and the glories of the Hudson River, with her sylvan shade and suburban palaces, will not henceforth shine beyond all parallel." This vision came another step closer to reality in July 1855 as the Chicago and Milwaukeesupposedly at the behest of experienced employees who formerly had worked on a similar line north of Boston-instituted an "accommodation train" between Chicago and Waukegan. Departing Waukegan at 6:30 A.M., it arrived 70
in Chicago at 9:00 A.M. Intermediate stops were Rockland (as Lake Bluff was then known) at 6:50; Highland Park at 7:30; Glencoe at 7:45; "Wynetka" at 7:50; and Evanston at 8: 15. The evening run left Chicago at 5:15 P.M., reaching Waukegan at 7:40. Although the railroad management temporarily suspended this service late in 1855, claiming an absence of patronage, two years later a Chicago newspaper reported, "The large number of beautiful and flourishing towns along the Lake shore, through which this road passes, fills its accommodation train .... " The Waukegan Gazette added: "An accommodation train ... affords business men an excellent opportunity to avail themselves of the beautiful quiet of a country residence without shortening the number of hours usually devoted to their daily avocations." Many years later, in a memoir entitled Forty Years on the Rail (1887), the conductor on the
Chicago's North Shore
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Northwestern University was founded in 1850 by a group of Methodists who thought that "the interests of sanctified learning required the immediate establishment of a University in the northwest .... " From Harper's Illustrated Weekly, 1873. CHS, ICHi-07371, gift of Marshall Field, Jr.
original Waukegan-to-Chicago commuter train, Charles B. George, recalled his words to the managers and directors of the Chicago and Milwaukee at the moment when their misgivings had led to its temporary suspension: When a lawyer comes to town and hangs out his shingle, he does not get clients all at once. Months pass and they begin to come in, slowly, it is true, but it would be folly to take down the shingle and leave town, just as business shows sign of beginning, even if it didn't pay just then. If you adopt that course, it will not be long before you have to put on a second train, then a third, and a fourthin fact, there is no telling where it will stop.
Conductor George's optimism, of course, proved accurate. Before long residents sought to convince themselves as well as potential newcomers of a flourishing metropolis beyond the borders of Chicago. As Daniel Boorstin observed: "In Europe a college or university is founded in an ancient center, in the United
States it was more likely than not to appear in a town whose population and prosperity lay all in the future." And in both Evanston and Lake Forest, institutions of higher learning-Northwestern University and Lake Forest University (briefly known as Lind University)-were established. The decision to situate Northwestern in Evanston, reached by its predominately Methodist board of trustees in 1854, had been contingent upon knowledge that the Chicago and Milwaukee was reaching completion. When the Presbyterian founders of Lake Forest drew up their plans for a university early in 1856, their announced purpose was: "To establish an institution of learning of a higher order in which Christian teachings would hold a central place." In fact, the school's charter, elated 1857, expressly stipulated that the objective of the surrounding community was to serve the needs and well-being of the educa71
Chicago's North Shore tional institution. otably, the committee of clergymen who had surveyed various sites along the lakeshore prior to settling on a specific location had used the new railroad m their travels. Yet more characterized the development of these suburbs than the establishment of educational institutions. What an architectural historian labels a "preoccupation with nature" also influenced the newly emerging suburbs. The nineteenLh century's emphasis on romanticism, the enhancement of one's surroundingsmost often associated with landscape architect Andrew Jackson Downing and his disciples Calvert Vaux, Frederick Law Olmsted, and Horace W. S. Cleveland-had resulted in the appearance of several garden suburbs, including New .Jersey's Llewellyn Park in 1853 and Riverside, near Chicago, in 1869. "Men like Downing," writes the urban historian Edward K. Spann, "were attempting to bridge the widening gap between the expectations and realities associated with the growth of the metropolis." The influence of romanticism was apparent in the development of Glencoe during the J 850s and '60s. The key figures were ,Nalter S. Gurnee and Alexander Hammond. Gurnee had served as mayor of Chicago from 1851 to l 852, and subsequently as president of the Chicago and Milwaukee Railroad. Retiring [rom politics after losing his bid for a third term, he removed himself to Taylorsportrenaming it Glencoe, according to one legend, to honor his wife's family name, Coe. In 1853 he constructed a mansion there known to some as "The Castle" and to others as Gurnee Stock Farm. He imported Norway Maples, Scotch Elms, and English Hawthornes and laid out orchards of apple, pear, peach, and cherry trees. Gurnee also made extensive physical improvements, constructing drains, fences, and various outbuildings. When his fortunes declined immediately after the Civil War, Gurnee sold out to Alexander Hammond, a retired physician from Rockford who was instrumental in the movement to incorporate Glencoe. :M any years later when Hammond wrote his "History of Glencoe," he reflected on his fascination with romanticism while specifically recalling his decision to purchase the Gurnee tract: 72
In my older boyhood years, a nice house painted white was wherever seen as an object of great admiration , and when at work in the field, musing, I used to imagine what a pretty house I would build when I should become a man. Handsome houses and pretty grounds about them were always objects of great admiration to me, and one of the most highly_ v~lued books I ever possessed was A. J. Downmg s Rural Architecture and Landscape Car~e nmg ... which I possessed myself of soon after Jt was published, it being the first work of that kind published in this country.
In fact, upon viewing Glencoe for the first time, probably in 1866, Dr. Hammond singled out the beauty of the Gurnee tract as the reason for his decision to lay aside his plan to live in Lake Forest. Three years later, .James B. Runnion's promotional pamphlet, Out of Town, Being a Descriptive, Historical, and Statistical Account of the Suburban Towns and Residences of Chicago, portrayed the Hammond property as "the most romantic and picturesque" in Glencoe. , ,vhile romanticism in Glencoe resulted from the efforts of two individuals who happened to share a common vision, in Lake Forest this ideal was embodied in the very circumstances of the community's formation. The Lake Forest Association, organized in I 856, was essential to this effort and was a prototype for the village improvement societies which flourished in post-Civil v\lar America. Architectural historian David P. Handlin might have been writing of this organization when he observed "Some of the most noted improvement work was sponsored by wealthy people who, in effect, adopted a town." In addition to underwriting a charter for the proposed university, the association solicited advice from a landscape architect-the identity of whom is unclear-who designed in the romantic idiom.• •Ecl\\'ar_d Arpee identifies the designer as Jedidiah Jlotchk,ss of SL Louis, who ser\'ed as a Confederate mapmaker in the Civil War. "Hotchkiss" was indeed th~ last name of Lake Forest's designer, but there is no el'ldcnce, either in the extensive Hotchkiss collection at The Library of Congress or in the book Mahe Me a MafJ of the Valley: The Civil War Journal of Stonewall Jackson's Topographer (1973),edited by Archie P. McDonald, that implies any connection between this I:otch_kiss and Lake Forest. More recently, architectural h1stonan M~rgot Gayle_ has done research suggesting t~1at Almera111e H_otchkJss of St. Louis designed Lake For_cst, and I am mdebted to her for sharing the prelimrnary results of her work.
Chicago's Nort h Sh ore
Or iginal " Hotchkiss" map for Lake Forest, 1857. The design featured gently winding streets that adhered to th e curves of the rav ines and allowed for natural drainage. Lake Forest Library.
73
Chicago's North Shore
Artemus Carter, the first president of the village of Winnetka, was a devout Unitarian and social reformer whose interests included public education and the temperance movement. CHS, ICHi-16876.
Walter S. Gurnee, a former Chicago mayor, moved to present-day Glencoe in 1853. His estate there became well known for its beautiful park-like surroundings. CHS, ICHi-16875, gift of Gerald Grant.
Edward Arpee, the historian of Lake Forest, succinctly sums up the original plan:
Another observer added:
[The designer] made the Lake Forest streets follow the natural curves of the ravines . . .. He planned beautiful winding streets and spacious residential lots, affording privacy, and insuring sites for the construction of homes which would have natural drainage down to the streets on which they were located. [Lake Forest, Illinois, History and Reminiscences, 1861-1961 (1964)]
The plan prescribed-seemingly on instructions from the association's membership-that each alternate lot be given over to the university, with the proceeds from sales of those parcels reverting to the university's treasury. After Lake Forest was platted in 1857, some 2,300 acres were sold, almost double that anticipated. A visitor to Lake Forest, writing at summer's end, 1869, reported: The design here, everywhere manifest, is to aid Nature by Art and not to bully her, which a great many men in Western towns seem to have aimed to do and succeeded in accomplishing .... Winding gravel walks, smooth green lawns, rustic bridges-spanning ravines; gigantic vases-blooming with floral treasures; summer houses ... and grand old trees present a scene the eye is never weary of. [Waukegan Gazette, September 18, 1869]
74
The place bears no aspect of a business characterindeed most of the residents are engaged in business in Chicago; or they have retired upon competency, and live here to cultivate their novel and esthetic taste, and educate their children. [Waukegan Gazette, March 25, 1871] James B. Runnion wrote in his pamphlet, Out of Town: "Perhaps this little city is the most exclusive and aristocratic of all Chicago's suburbs, rendered so by the lavishness of individual improvements, the elegance and cost of . . . most of its houses and grounds." To this he added: "the family whose main inducement to surburban residence is economy, would find itself somewhat startled and out of place in seeking this in a city made up of places that are worth from $25,000 to $100,000." If the North Shore was, by and large, beautiful, it also was godly. Not unlike the English colonies along the Atlantic seaboard during the seventeenth century, the various villages evolving north of Chicago after 1855 had distinctive religious identities. Besides the Presbyterians at Lake Forest, there were the German-born parishioners who formed St. Joseph's Roman
Chicago's North Shore
IGHLAND
Lake Shore Property; Uncq11olcd for Beauty of Sccncr,¡, Heoltllfulne111, and Ready Accc1111.
JNDUCEMENTS 1 )LANS AND jF\_OSPECTS . The Company owning thi s property is a building a.<sociation, and i$ prepared at all times to erect dwe llings -either fram e or brick-to order, upon such lots as may be selected by purchasers, on re asonable te rms.
A
large number of the most des irable lots are still owned by th e Company. and are offe red for sale at moderate pri ces .
A comparatively small sum
will now secure a res ide nce th e re, which a fe w ye ars hence can h a rdl y be had for money.
Nothing is surer than that th e rapid g rowth o f Chicago
will in n very short time c reate a demand fo r prope rty situated along t he Lake Sho re corre sponding to that which now e xi sts in ~ e w York for th e banks of the Hud son , and e ven g reate r, inasmuc h as we have but one water front , while in the vicinity of New York the re are half a dozen from whi c h the lover of water sce nery may choose hi s abode.
r
-- -- -
flighland
ark J3uilding pompany.
For information , pints of the town , etc ., apply to
F. P. HAWKINS, No. 154
WASHINGTON
STREET, CHI CAGu.
Or at his res idence at Highland Park, corner of St. J o hn s and Laurel Avenues; or of S . S. STREETER, at the Highland Park Hou se . See Page
2 1.
7
James Runnion's Out of Town , published in 1869, carried a number of advertisements for real estate brokers and building companies like this one in Highland Park. The company's owner warned readers to buy their suburban homes soon because Chicago's growth " will in a very short time create a demand for property situated along the Lake Shore." CHS, ICHi-16909.
75
Chicago's North Shore
In 1875 passengers leaving Wilmette from this Chicago and North Western Railroad depot paid 11 cents for a 42-minute ride to the city. Wilmette Historical Museum.
Catholic Church in the village of Gross Point. Methodists played a decisive role, of course, in the founding of Evanston as well as Northwestern University. (In 1875 Methodists-many of them from Evanston-would transform Rockland into the Lake Bluff Camp Meeting Association, a thriving encampment similar to those on Martha's Vineyard and in Ocean Grove, New Jersey.) Winnetka offers a superb illustration of how religion affected the texture-or what political scientists call the ethos-of life in a community. Winnetka's founding family, Sarah and Charles Peck, who arrived in 1854 just ahead of the railroad, were longtime adherents to Unitarianism. Artemus Carter, another Unitarian, spearheaded the movement leading to the incorporation of Winnetka in 1869. Subsequently he was elected the first president of the village. At this time, Unitarians in Chicago and elsewhere in the nation were in the forefront of many reform movements. In Winnetka they stressed communal responsibility for education. Artemus Carter, in fact, fancied himself a disciple of Horace Mann, who is generally credited 76
with being the founder of the common school movement in mid-nineteenth-century America. If the pioneer suburbanites prided themselves on the metropolitan attributes of their respective communities, on one issue-alcoholic beverages-they sought to distinguish themselves from Chicago. (Beginning in the mid-1850s this very issue was hotly debated within the city, although the outcome was not to the liking of reformers.) Evanston set the pace; in the estimation of Frances Willard, it became "the ideal temperance town in the great Northwest." The original charter of Northwestern University prohibited the sale of intoxicants within four miles of the campus. "The very announcement of this fact," Willard wrote many years later, "was the magnet to draw hither a class of people who were total abstainers and who desired for their children the surroundings of sobriety." Similar attitudes existed elsewhere, although the ardor of Methodist Evanston stood unsurpassed. In Highland Park, the decision to seek incorporation, accomplished in 1869, was a direct and immediate result of efforts by local
Chicago's North Shore real estate entrepreneurs to close several saloons. This act, they contended, would make the setting more attractive to prospective residents. The charter allowed the new municipality to "forever prohibit liquor in the city or within one mile thereof." Even the fledgling village of Highwood, at least at this very early juncture in its history, was devoted to temperance. (This commitment would erode over time, causing the citizens of Highland Park to reject the consolidation of the two communities in 1908.) v\Tinnetka's Artemus Carter favored temperance, and the village's charter duly included a provision-not repealed until 1982-prohibiting the sale of spirits. In fact, up and down the North Shore the lone exception was Gross Point, to the consternation of its neighbors, especially those in Evanston. Gross Point was a haven for saloons until the enactment of the federal prohibition law in 1919, and it was the loss of its tax base that led to its annexation by Wilmette five years later. In just sixteen years-from the advent of the "accommodation" train in 1855 to the catastrophic fire in 1871-Chicago's North Shore had grown beyond its pioneer years. No longer was its relationship to the city simply defined by proximity to Green Bay Road, the primary overland link along the shoreline to such points north as Milwaukee and Green Bay. Rather, out of occasional "extramural" settlements such as Taylorsport, communities had taken hold which can readily be identified, from the perspective of more than a century, as midnineteenth-century suburbs. The railroad was essential in this transformation, for it provided reliable transportation to and from the city. In 1870, Evanston loomed largest amongst these with its population, as can best be determined, exceeding 3,000; Highland Park and Lake Forest followed, with more than 500 inhabitants each, while Gross Point was a close fourth with almost 500; and Wilmette, Winnetka, and Glencoe each had approximately 300 residents. Five of the villages-Evanston, Winnetka, Glencoe, Highland Park, and Lake Forest-were incorporated by 1869, while ,I\Tilmette would follow suit in 1872, some ten months after the great conflagration in Chicago. Finally, most telling in this process of development was a recognizable shape or tone-em-
phasis on education, landscape, religion, and temperance-which created a sense of living within a great metropolis, yet at the same time being "in the suburbes of toun." Selected Sources Schmitz Family Papers, Wilmette Historical Museum. NEWSPAPERS: Chicago Daily Democrat, Chicago Tri/June, Waukegan Gazette. Abbott, Carl. "'Necessary Adjuncts of Its Grmnh:' The Railroad Suburbs of Chicago, 1854-1875." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 73 (S ummer 1980). Arpec, Edward . Lake Forest, Illinois, History and Reminiscences, 1861-1961. Lake Forest: Rotary Club of Lake Forest, 1964. Bushnell, George D. Wilmette: A History . Wilmette: Wilmette Bicentennial Commission, 1976. Cronon, William J. "To Be the Central City: Chicago, 1848-1857." Chicago History 10 (Fall 1981). Currey, J. Seymour. Chicago: Its History and Builders, A Century of Marvelous Growth. 5 vols. Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1912. Culler, In'ing. The Chicago-Milwaukee Corridor: A Geographic Study of Int ermetropolitan Coalescence. Ernnston: Northwestern University, 1965. Dickinson, Lorna Townsend. Th e Story of Winnetka . Winnetka: Winnetka Historical Society, 1956. Donnelley, Elliott. The Tracks to Town. Lake Forest: Lake Forest-Lake Bluff Historical Society, 1981. Dyos, H.J. Victorian Suburb, A Study of the Growth of Camberwell. Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1961. Haines, Elijah M. Historical and Statistical Sketches of Lake County, State of Illinois . Waukegan: E. G. Howe, 1852. Hammond, Alexander. "History of Glencoe." Unpublished and undated manuscript, Glencoe Public Library. Harnsberger, Caroline Thomas. Winnetka: The Biography of a Village. Ernnston: Schori Press, 1977. Historical Sketches of Glencoe, Illinois. Papers Read at the First Public Meeting of St. Paul's Men 's Club, Glencoe, Illinois, Tuesday Evening, January 12, 1909. Pierce, Bessie Louise. A History of Chicago. 3 vols. ew York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937-59. Runnion, J ames B. Out of Town, Being a Descrip tive, Historical and Statistical Account of the Suburban Towns and Residences of Chicago. Ch icago: Western News Company, 1869. Seventy-five Years of Glencoe History, 1835-1944. Glencoe: Glencoe Historical Society, 1944(?). Sheppard, Robert D. and Harvey B. Hurd, eels. History of Northwestern University and Evanston. Chicago: Munsell Publishing Co., 1906. Willard, Frances E. A Classic Town: Th e Story of Eva11ston by an Old Timer. Chicago: Women's Temperance Publishing Association, 1892. \-Vittelle, Marvyn. Pioneer to Commuter, The Story of Highland Park. Highland Park: The Rotary Club, 1958. The author gratefully acknowledges support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fellowship Division, and Lake Forest College. MANUSCRIPTS:
77
Invitation to a Standard Club "Smoker" painted by American illustrator J . C. Leyendecker in the style of Toulouse-Lautrec. Men 's clubs afforded Chicago's businessmen the chance to make important contacts at social functions. The Standard Club of Chicago.
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Chicago's Leading Men's Clubs By George D. Bushnell
As Chicago's leaders found time to lend their talents and energy to the city, their clubs were catalysts for action in the political, cultural, economic, and social arenas. formed the city's first men's club in 1861, their primary goal was to create for themselves a congenial social group whose meetings would provide opportunities for relaxation and for making important contacts. In the coming years, however, the city's clubs became vital institutions for focusing leadership and personal wealth on such important is.sues as the fight for honest and efficient government, the founding and support of cultural institutions, and the beautification of the city. The men who founded these clubs had, for the most part, come to Chicago from New England some thirty years earlier, and by 1860 were the city's undisputed leaders. Men like George E. Adams, a lawyer educated at Harvard and Yale, and lumber magnate Martin A. Ryerson, a Harvard Law School graduate, brought with them the strong heritage of an established elite. These individuals, conditioned since young manhood to think quickly and act boldly, had been successful "in a fierce contest for wealth," and as A. T. Andreas observed, they now had "the means and leisure to gratify their tastes for elegance and ease." The early 1870s, however, were not as kind to Chicago's businessmen as the preceding years had been, and the 1871 fire and the Panic of 1873 brought devastation and hard times. By 1880, after a seemingly miraculous recovery, Chicago ranked third in the nation in the value of manufactured goods (surpassed only by the older cities of ew York and Philadelphia), and its population had grown WHEN
SEVERAL CHICAGO BUSINESSMEN
George D . Bushnell is public relations director of Ada S. McKinley Community Serv ices in Chicago and a fr equent contributor to Chicago History.
from 503,000 to 1,100,000 in the course of the decade. For Chicago's leaders this was an era of pride mixed with shame, as economic progress flourished side by side with scandalous fraud and corruption in government. This was also a time of deep unrest among the city's workers, many of whom were immigrants, and some of whom were political radicals. The Great Upheaval of 1877, associated with the spread of that year's railroad strike to Chicago, made the city's elite fearful that the continued influence of foreign-born workers threatened the values of American democracy. It was during these turbulent years that most of Chicago's men's clubs were formed. In banding together, the city's leaders not only sought what Cosmopolitan writer Charles Page Bryant would later describe as "an undoubtedly civilizing life"; they wanted to pool their resources to take advantage of the city's tremendous growth potential in these years and to look for ways of coping with the problems presented by that growth. Founders and leaders of the early clubs included some of the city's most distinguished men: Charles L. Hutchinson and Watson F. Blair, who had made their fortunes in grain and banking; architect Dankmar Adler and Dr. Michael Mannheimer; Edward E. Ayer, who, like Ryerson, was a leading entrepreneur in lumber; Harlow N. Higinbotham and Marshall Field, retailers; Potter Palmer, successful real estate dealer; Albert A. Sprague and Franklin McVeagh, leaders in the wholesale food business; and Edward P. Ripley, president of the Santa Fe Railroad. Lawyers and educators would also become prominent members of these clubs. Chicago's first club, organized in May 1861, was formed mainly for social reasons. Members 79
Men's Clubs
Banker Lyman Gage was one of the Chicago Club's first members. Later he also joined the Union League Club and helped to organize ti1e Municipal Voters League. CHS, ICHi-10360.
Headquarters for the Chicago Club, East Van Buren Street and Michigan Avenue, c. 1895. During the World's Columbian Exposition, club members entertained more than 6,000 guests there. CHS, ICHi-16685.
of the Dearborn Club met in rented quarters on State Street for companionship and good food. When this meeting place was closed by the sheriff a short time later-probably for nonpayment of rent-the club disbanded, and Chicago did not have another social men's organization for almost eight years. In January 1869 the nucleus of the former Dearborn Club met at the Sherman House to form the Chicago Club. Hoping to avoid a repetition of financial embarrassment, the group asked I 00 of the city's leaders to join as founding members at $100 each. However, it was not until two months later, when George M. Pullman and hoteliers David and George Gage became members and advanced $500 for incorporation, that the club's membership roster began to grow. Once on a firm financial footing, the Chicago Club attracted many of the city's leaders, notably Potter Palmer; Chicago Daily News publisher Melville E. Stone; Civil War veteran General Philip H. Sheridan; Evening Journal editor Henry Farrar; Chicago & North Western Railway director Henry R. Pierson; and the city's largest real estate owner, Ezra B. McCagg.
These were soon joined by Santa Fe president Edward P. Ripley, merchants Levi and Joseph Leiter, and banker Lyman J. Gage, who would later serve as secretary of state under President McKinley. The club's first home was a vacant house on Michigan Avenue between Adams and Jackson which belonged to millionaire Henry W. Farnum. The group became primarily a luncheon club, as many of the 500 members were so well established that they only went to their offices in late afternoon. As writer Charles Page Bryant observed, "White whiskered caponlined millionaires and brilliant young bucks ... perfect the picture of old-fashioned club surroundings. A guest at lunch might see George M. Pullman, Marshall Field, Nathaniel Fairbank, John Crerar, and T. B. Blackstone dining or playing poker at the club's 'millionaire's round table'." During the Great Fire of 1871, members came to the clubhouse to enjoy a champagne breakfast and to toast their defiance of the flames. When the fire swept northward and it was apparent that the building would perish, the men rushed from the house with
80
Men's Clubs
The Standard Club's second home at Michigan Avenue and 24th Street, designed by club member Dankmar Adler, included a grand ballroom and an art gallery. CHS, ICHi-00417, gift of Mrs. Seymour Morris.
some of the club's best Havana cigars and fine wines. They also managed to save the red satin lobby sofas, bearing them to the lake "like the bodies of dead English kings." Chicago's second men's club figured prominently in the aftermath of the fire. The Standard Club had been formed in April 1869 by the city's leading Jewish businessmen who chose the name to signify their pursuit of excellence. Founders included meat packer Nelson Morris; bankers Henry Elias and Michael Greenebaum; lawyer Julius Rosenthal; and merchants and manufacturers Simon FlorBernard Kuppenheimer, Charles sheim, Schwab, and Emmanuel Mandel. At the time of its incorporation the club boasted 69 members and a two-story clubhouse at 13th Street and South Michigan Avenue with such amenities as billiard and bowling facilities, a large ballroom, dining room, lounge, and a bar. When this building was spared from the 1871 fire, it served briefly as a headquarters for federal troops sent to maintain order. Club members joined in the recovery effort by allowing the Relief Society to use their clubhouse as
a distribution center for food and clothing. At this time the club's leaders also worked to obtain funds from the East and from Europe to help rebuild the city and re-establish its financial standing. The city's third major club, the Union League, was formed in late 1879 with the backing of John Wentworth, a former mayor of Chicago. In the months following the 1877 riots, Wentworth had become convinced of the city's need for a strong club with conservative leanings to combat what he saw as the dilution of traditional American values. In October 1879 he met with a group of businessmen at the Sherman House to organize the Chicago Club of the Union League, taking the name from an 1862 group of Union patriots. The organization became the Union League Club of Chicago in 1882 when a previously chartered but inactive club of that name disbanded. The Union League's Articles of Association stipulated that members have "absolute loyalty to the Government of the United States" and set forth as principles the promotion of American citizenship, civil and political equality, honesty at the ballot box, exposure of political corruption, and efficiency of government. Other founders and early members of the Union League Club included William Penn Nixon, controlling manager of the Chicago Inter-Ocean; Joseph Medill of the Chicago Tribune; attorney E. R. Bliss; architect William LeBaron Jenney; and Judge James B. Bradwell. The group's first meeting place was a rented portion of the Honore Building on Dearborn Street between Monroe and Adams, and it was not until 1886 that the club had a permanent home. In 1887 the Union League instituted its annual Washington's Birthday Celebration to bolster pride in the nation's patriotic ideals. This was the group's answer to the Haymarket Affair of May 1886, when policemen tried to disperse a large worker's meeting in Haymarket Square. The arrival of the authorities sparked one person to throw a bomb into the crowd, and in the ensuing riot, seven policemen and four workers were killed and more than seventy were injured. Fearful of what they saw as encroaching anarchy, the Union League invited speakers such as American poet and 81
Men's Clubs
Once described as "a medieval castle ," the Union League clubhouse at 65 West Jackson was designed in 1884 by William LeBaron Jenney and constructed at a cost of $170,000. CHS, ICHi-16687, gift of Seymour Morris.
82
Men's Clubs
John Wentworth founded the Union League Club in 1879. The club's charter called for members to show "absolute loyalty to the Government of the United States." CHS, ICHi-12873, photograph by John Carbutt.
Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, an early member of the Union Leag ue Club, was once described by a contemporary as "an intense lover of America." CHS, ICHi-16828, photograph by C. D. Mosher.
essayist James Russell Lowell to extol the Washingtonian virtues of idealism and patriotism. In 1890 they expanded the celebration to include a morning program for schoolchildren . During the next decade the club's speakers ranged from William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, and Benjamin Harrison to Edward Everett Hale, Lorado Taft, and Jane Addams. Another influential club formed at this time was the Commercial Club of Chicago, founded in December 1877 as a luncheon and dinner group to promote the "public welfare and the commercial interests of the City of Chicago." The club's monthly programs offered an important forum for the spokesmen and leaders who wanted support for various causes, such as the auempt to increase armed protection for the city in the wake of the Haymarket Affair. When Marshall Field proposed that a base for federal troops be built close to Chicago, club members agreed to donate 632 acres north of the city to the government, and in 1887 Fort Sheridan was completed on this site. The Com-
mercial Club also sponsored more aesthetic projects, as in 1906 when it commissioned architect Daniel Burnham to design ways to beautify the city. The result was his famous Plan of Chicago, published three years later. In the 1880s a number of other clubs appeared, including the Douglas Club (1885), named for Senator Stephen A. Douglas; the Iroquois Club (1886), formed by Democratic businessmen; and the University Club (1887), for the then select few who had received university degrees. Also organized at this time were the Calumet Club (named for the Indian peace pipe) at 18th Street and Michigan Avenue, which paid tribute to Chicago's pioneer settlers at their annual dinner, and the Illinois Club, a ¡w est Side neighborhood social institution formed to promote "literature and the fine arts and social intercourse." One of the chief concerns of the larger, more powerful clubs was civic reform. In the 1880s and '90s city government was so corrupt that l\Iayor Carter Harrison once characterized its 83
Men's Clubs
A ll of the officers of the Young Men's Hebrew Charity Association shown above were members of the Standard Club. Businessmen often belonged to more than one club or philanthropic organization. The Standard Club of Chicago.
aldermen as "saloon keepers, proprietors of gambling houses, with no outstanding characteristics beyond an unquenchable lust for money." Election fraud was another problem; in one contest in April 1883, George ¡w ashington, Thomas Jefferson, John Hancock, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln cast their ballots for a straight Democratic ticket in the inth Ward. The following year, after reform candidates called for revisions in the election laws, members of the Citizens' Association and the Union League, Iroquois, and Commercial clubs, as well as several smaller clubs, joined in the fight to clean up elections by organizing public meetings, enlisting the city's newspapers to expose corruption, and supporting honest candidates. In June 1884 the Illinois legislature appointed a bipartisan board of election commissioners. Two years later this board established election judges and clerks to monitor voter registration and elections. 84
In January 1886, Union League member Lyman Gage played a leading role in the organization of the Municipal Voters League, formed "to clean out the City Council which is degrading Chicago before the world." One investigation had unearthed the dismaying fact that 57 of the 68 council members engaged in dishonest practices. Mindful of the uphill struggle a cleanup campaign would involve, the municipal league persuaded another Union League member, printer George E. Cole, to head the reform movement. Cole's efforts were not a total success, but he did manage to unseat many of the disreputable aldermen. Chicago's city council became a special target of the Union League Club. It was widely known that councilmen indulged in a system of graft known as "boodling," earning as much as $25,000 a year for approving franchises required for the transit companies in the growing city. Not content with these payoffs, the aldermen formed their own dummy utility com-
Men's Clubs
Members of many Chicago men's clubs joined in the effort to raise $2 million for the construction of the Auditorium Building. Designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler, the theater-concert hall opened in December 1889. CHS, ICHi-00571.
panies and forced the real utilities to buy them up and pay for new franchises. In April 1894 members of the Union League Club invited the city councilmen to a club banquet, where speakers attacked the corrupt practices that made "such services as sewers, poor relief, streets, and paving, transportation and lighting cost us four or five times as much as they should." The following November, the Union League sought to remove corrupt politicians from office by offering rewards for the a pprehension and imprisonment of anyone found guilty of stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes. Although each club's members usually worked as a unit, some individuals carried out their own good deeds under the auspices of their club. In 1880, for example, Standard Club members Henry and Joseph Frank contributed 30,000, left to them by their uncle, to construct a Jewish hospital. The medical facility which opened at 29th Street and Ellis
Avenue in October 1881 was named for the Franks' uncle, Michael Reese. Similarly, the new Chicago Public Library, dedicated in October 1897, and the second University of Chicago, constructed in 1891, benefited from the fund-raising talents of Standard Club members. Chicago's crowning artistic accomplishment, the Auditorium Building at Michigan Avenue and Congress Street, represented a joint effort of all the clubs. First proposed by Union League member Ferdinand W. Peck, the structure was designed by Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler and cost S2 million to build. The fund-raising committee included Philip Danforth Armour, Potter Palmer, William E. Doggett, Marshall Field, and Levi Leiter, all of whom belonged to the Chicago Club. Palmer, Armour, and Field were also members of the Union League Club. Although at this time the men's clubs were heavily involved in philanthropic and c1v1c 85
Men's Clubs
Businessmen of the InterOcean Steel Company held a dinner in 1911 in one of the Union League's three private dining rooms. The Union League Club of Chicago. (Left) The Standard Club occupied this building at the corner of Michigan Avenue and 13th Street from 1870 to 1899. Soon afterward it became the headquarters for the Grand Army of the Republic and the Chicago Hussars. The Standard Club of Chicago. (Opposite page) The Union League Club employed a full staff of chefs to provide good food for all of its social gatherings, and the club's billiard room was only one of a number of amenities offered to members. The Union League Club of Chicago.
86
Men's Clubs
87
Men's Clubs projects, their members did not forget their social function, and as the clubs grew and prospered their clubhouses and entertainments became more lavish. One example was the sixstory Union League clubhouse on Jackson Street and Fourth Avenue (now Federal Street), which was designed in 1884 by William LeBaron Jenney and built at a cost o( $170,000. Described by one writer in 1888 as "a medieval castle," the Romanesque-style building contained a parlor, grill, cafe, library, ladies' parlor, billiard room, three private dining rooms, card rooms, and sleeping rooms, along with a kitchen and laundry. There was a separate entrance for women, who used a private elevator to reach their dining room. Not to be outdone, the Standard Club decided to build a more elegant home of their own, and in February 1889 they moved into their new six-story clubhouse at Michigan Avenue and 24th Street. Designed by club member Dankmar Adler, the fortress-like structure was made of masonry covered with heavy granite and sported the "most luxurious appointments." Besides a grand ballroom, the building had an art gallery, card rooms, small and large dining rooms, lounge reading rooms, and an innovative wing with accommodations for live-in members and guests. Since the Standard Club had always encouraged its members to bring their wives and daughters as guests-a major departure from the men-only policy of other clubs-there was no separate women's entrance. In these surroundings, each club vied to provide the best entertainment for the city's important visitors. In September 1878, the Chicago Club held a reception for President and Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes. The following year, the club played host to General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant on their return from a world tour. The event attracted 1,200 guests, and a Chicago Tribune reporter observed that the carpeted sidewalk "enabled the ladies to alight from their carriages ... without soiling so much as the soles of their slippers." In December 1889, the Union League Club staged a gala public reception for President Benjamin Harrison and Vice President Levi Morton before the opening of the Auditorium. Members spared no effort to make the club's part in the day memorable. Amid the profusion 88
of flowers, reported the Tribune, "even the chandeliers were lost to view." The luncheon for members and guests included blue points, terrapin soup, filet of whitefish, Roman punch, champagne, larded quail, fruit, and coffee. Four years later the clubs were hard-pressed to entertain the thousands of visitors who poured into Chicago for the opening of the World's Columbian Exposition. The Chicago Club alone received 6,000 guests in its clubhouse on East Van Buren near the Illinois Central station, where fairgoers alighted after a ride from the Exposition grounds. The roster of invitees included leading architects, foreign commissioners, congressional committee members, diplomats, and governors. By the turn of the century Chicago's leading men's clubs were firmly established, both as agencies o( good works and as congenial dining and meeting places for their members. Once the foundations for the clubs had been securely laid, members turned their energies to enhancing their social comforts, and equally important, to using their clubs to make business contacts. Women made little progress in penetrating these "bastions of male social life," although the clubs made minor concessions to the ladies by expanding facilities for them in the 1970s. New issues and challenges after 1900 included patriotic activities during both world wars; a concern for race relations following the 1919 Chicago riots; and the establishment of boys' clubs in the 1920s and 1930s. A century and more after their founding, the city's men's clubs continue to be concerned with the problems and needs which have stimulated their growth from the beginning. Selected Sources Papers and records on file at the Union League Club. NEWSPAPERS: Chicago Tribune. Andreas, Alfred T. History of Chicago. 3 vols. Chicago: A. T. Andreas, 1884-86. Bliss, E. R. Beginning of the Union League Club of Chicago. Chicago: E. R. Bliss, 1916. Dedmon, Emmett. A History of the Chicago Club. Chicago: The Chicago Club, 1960. Gregory, Jane. "Clubs With Class." Chicago Omnibus & FM Guide 4 (February 1967). Horowitz, Helen L. Culture and the City. Lexington: Uni\'ersity of Kentucky Press, 1967. The Standard Club's First Hundred Years, 1869-1969. Chicago: Standard Club of Chicago, 1969.
MANUSCRIPTS:
Inside State Street: Photographs of Building Interiors by Kathleen Collins By Howard S. Becker
Because interiors betray so much about people and their way of life-if we are willing to make the inferential leaps the theory of interiors demands- photographs of interiors can provide a wonderful source of knowledge about culture.
PHOTOGRAPHERS MAKE PHOTOGRAPHS of interiors as a manner of exploring the way of life of a people or community. They photograph the rooms in a house-how the people who live there have furnished them and utilized the space-and let these rooms stand for everything else they intuit and want to say about a culture. Kathleen Collins has used this method to investigate and report on the city of Chicago. A new exhibit of her work, entitled INSIDE STATE STREET." COLOR PHOTOGRAPHS OF BUILDING
will open at the Chicago Historical Society on August 15. She photographed one of the city's longest streets, State Street, from its beginnings in the Gold Coast through the business areas of the Loop to the housing projects of the South Side. In these diverse settings, she recorded the interiors of the buildings, the rooms in which people live, work, play, and survive. To understand what Collins's work offers us, it helps to compare her method with the similar strategy photographers employ in portraiture. Photographers often make portraits of people they think of as representative of a way of life. In most portraits, they let a part stand for the whole person-usually the face, but sometimes the hands (as in Alfred Stieglitz's portra its of Georgia O'Keeffe) or the back (as in Dorothea Lange's studies of farm workers). INTERIORS BY KATHLEEN COLLINS,
How ard S. B ecker is Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, where he holds the John D. MacArthur Chair. A photographer himself, he recently edited Exploring Society Photographically (1981) ancl wrote Art Worlds (1982).
,vhatever part a photographer chooses to stand for the person, he or she is employing a strategy that relies upon a theory and a method. This strategy depends on an assumption that the experiences of life are recorded in faces, that the life a person has lived leaves physical marks. Photographers, accordingly, choose faces, details of faces, and moments in their histories which, recorded on film and printed on paper, allow viewers to deduce what they don't see but want to know about. Portraits often contain a wealth of detail, so that careful study allows us to make complex and subtle readings of the character of the person and of the life-in-society of that person. Looking at the lines on a face, viewers may conclude that these were baked in during a life of hard work in the sun. From those same lines, they can infer wisdom produced by hard work and age or, alternatively, senility and decay. To make any of these conclusions, a viewer must bring to bear on the image one of several possible theories of facial lines. Having made an interpretation of a person from an image of his or her face, viewers can then go on to make some deductions about the community in which this person lives. This requires another theory, specifying the relationship between faces and the information they carry and the society in which they exist. In what kind of world could a person accumulate and use the kind of power we see in Edward Steichen's famous portrait of J. P. Morgan? What went on between Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe to create the still, uncommunicative look on her face as he 89
Inside State Street
Stateway Gardens, CHA Pub lic Housing Development, 3544 S. State Street. Living room in Francine Washington 's third floor apartment. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Stateway Gardens, CHA Public Housing Development, 3651 S. Federal Street. Living room and kitchen in Adrienne Lewis's apartment. CHS, ICHi-16897, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
90
Inside State Street
Playboy Mansion, 1340 N. State Parkway. Subterranean swimming pool in publisher Hugh Hefner's Chicago residence. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Coll ins. Playboy Mansion, 1340 N. State Parkway. Hugh Hefner's office which is kept undisturbed for occasional use since transfer of his main business office to his permanent Californ ia residence. CHS, ICHi-16896, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
91
Inside State Street photographed her? What makes the people Bruce Davidson photographed on East 100th Street look so serious and dignified? Because we have further theories about the way lifein-society and faces are related, we can infer answers to these questions, deciding, for instance, that American society at the time Steichen photographed Morgan allowed men to gather enormous power and to feel that they could exercise it as they liked. Photographers are typically not very clear about what inferences they want us to make. They seem to say that interpretation is the viewer's responsibility and privilege; the viewer must decide what he or she wants to know and then find answers, and evidence for the answers, in the photographs. Of course, photographers who adopt that attitude are being disingenuous, for the photographer's method is the selection and arrangement of details in a way that coerces the viewer into drawing certain conclusions and not others. Portraits, in showing a way of life, leave out a lot. This part-whole strategy makes what each photograph does contain carry enormous weight. Photographers, as anyone with sophisticated knowledge of photographs knows, recognize this weight and take advantage of it. They know that they can highlight the wrinkles on a face or hide them. They know that the moment they choose to make the exposure will make the subject look wise or foolish, happy or sad, even though that expression may have been fleeting and uncharacteristic. They know that the details they exclude might make us drastically revise the conclusions we draw from the image. So photographers lead us to make inferences by manipulating details. They can do that because they know that our interpretations rely on conventions of photography that "everyone" knows, whether we are aware that we know them or not. Photographers focus our attention on what they themselves think important and want us to think important by making it bigger or lighter or darker in some way from other things in the frame, by manipulating how we ordinarily look at things to make us look there rather than somewhere else. They lead us to think that things are mysterious or clear, good or bad, or one of any other pair of adjectives, by manipulating the visual language 92
in which photographs conventionally signify those meanings. In just this way, photographers rely upon and viewers accept a theory of photographing interiors. Let me make its premises explicit. People make buildings and lay out and furnish the interior spaces. The way tliey construct those buildings and the way they furnish and decorate the interiors reveal both the intent of the makers and furnishers and their resources. And over time, the rooms change and age; people leave physical marks. Whatever the original intention for the rooms, they come
Spring Plowing, Guadalupe, California. Cauliflower fields. Photograph by Dorothea Lange reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, LC F3416208. Georgia O'Keeffe's Hands. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago.
to show how people actually have used them. By photographing such interiors, highlighting their details, a photographer can tell us who lived there, what kind of people they were, how they lived-all crucial elements in understanding a society and its culture. When people build, they build both what they want and what they can use. So a structure and its rooms reflect the makers' purpose. What kind of family life did they want to go on in their house? 'What kinds of economic activities did they expect to carry on there? Contemporary city dwellers find it hard to
Inside State Street understand rural buildings which had rooms for the family's cows, sheep,and goats, as well as its own members, but such a house tells us that those people saw their animals as members of the family unit. Not all purposes for building are so directly utilitarian. Many people intend to create something beautiful. Some want to display their wealth and impress their neighbors; others want the most space at the least cost. They may wish to preserve a traditional way of life, or to provide the material basis for an untraditional one. People may think they know what they want
in their buildings, may even be able to afford their desires, and still not get what they had in mind. Present-day city dwellers seldom design and build their own living quarters. Instead, they hire architects and contractors who, like all professionals, must deal with their own standards and professional exigencies. Most of us have even less control, and can only choose from what architects and builders have created in hope of attracting buyers. The customer's desires are filtered through demands of utility, economy, professional standards, and contemporary trends. With all these provisos, the look
of a building's interior can be taken as an accurate indicator of both taste and social relations. Take taste first. We know what we like, what looks good to us and our peers, what we feel comfortable with. We have, however implicit and unformulated, a standard of taste. Thorstein Veblen described the Gilded Age's standard of taste as pecuniary; objects were in good taste when they showed that hours and days of a skilled worker's valuable time had been put to no useful purpose, thus displaying the owner's ability to dispose of others' time without realizing any material advantage from it. In this way, Veblen explained his contemporaries' fondness for highly ornamented silverware and furniture. According to his principle of conspicuous waste, this understanding shaped the prevalent conception of beauty. One can infer a pecuniary standard of taste and the body of values and social practices that lay behind it by looking at interiors cluttered with highly ornamented furniture . Similarly, we can see something about social relations in a family and in a society by looking at the arrangement of the houses people lived in and by seeing what kinds of relationships were possible in rooms like that. To take a common and obvious example, the rooms in older houses have doors on them. People who lived in such houses could attain privacy more easily than people who live in contemporary ranch houses with a "living-dining-kitchen space." Father could go into his den and lock the door in the older house; he might have to retreat to the garage now. This difference suggests the change in conceptions of privacy and in the role of the father in the last thirty or forty years. We can learn about the conditions of labor in the same way by looking at the interiors of workplaces. Most workplaces show, in the allocation of space, privacy, and fixtures, the workers' status and what privileges and powers they have. Executives, presumably, work in ornate private offices with deep leather chairs and heavy wooden desks. Clerks sit at banks of gun metal grey desks, on plain serviceable chairsno more comfortable than necessary, one on top of the other. Production workers don't have a desk drawer to put things in, and no 93
Inside State Street
Debbie's School of Beauty Culture, 177 N. State Street. Beauty school classroom demonstration area. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Medinah Barber Shop, 605 N. State Street. CHS, ICHi-16902, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
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Inside State Street
McDonald's Restaurant, 230 S. State Street. Service counter area and murals commissioned by owner Cirilo Mcsween depicting international brotherhood and various historical figures and events. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Bridgeview Restaurant, 431 N. State Street. Sandwich shop which has been recently closed because the building it occupied will be taken down to make way for a new office building. CHS, ICHi-16901, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
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Inside State Street chair at all (since their work requires them to stand, they should never sit down). One needn't be a sociologist to infer the hierarchy of power and privilege that arrangement embodies. In some workplaces the product dominates all else. The workshops where craft objects are made, and the factory floors where everything and everyone are subordinated to the machines, exemplify that possibility. Other workplaces are so devoid of any physical trace of the work done there that it is difficult to determine what the workers there really do. The blank surface of the executive's desk in one of Kathleen Collins's photographs raises that question. Because interiors betray so much about people and their way of life-if we are willing to make the inferential leaps this theory of interiors demands-photographs of interiors can provide a wonderful source of knowledge about culture. So we look at Walker Evans's photographs of sharecroppers' homes and infer from them, by the method just described, the meagerness of these families' resources, the poverty of their lives, and the economic system that made their lives that way. (It took a greater inferential leap-a more complex theory-to get to the economic system than to the particulars of sharecropper life.) Prison interiors give us a quite different sense, as in the photographs made by Danny Lyon, Bruce Jackson, and others. There is a total lack of privacy in a prison, where inmates are deprived of the props that free people use to signify who they are, to themselves and to other people. The inmates' pitiful attempts at decoration heighten our awareness of the meagerness and horror of their lives, because (as the theory of interiors insists) the furnishings of your living quarters in fact tell the world who you are. In a common variant, photographers make pictures of people in their houses, combining the theory of portraits and the theory of interiors in one image. Consequently, the details of both sorts of image amplify and comment on each other. We understand the Lake Forest residents Mary Lloyd Estrin portrays in To the Manor Born in part because we see their spacious homes filled with expensive furnishings. Roslyn Banish, in City Families, adds a third dimension by letting the people photographed 96
in their homes in London's Pimlico and Chicago's Lincoln Park comment on the pictures. i\Iany of the subjects say that a viewer might get a false impression of them from the image because they are all dressed up, or because the house is neater than usual. Bruce Davidson's East Harlem portraits give us the data for conflicting interpretations, the people's faces and bodies suggesting dignity, power, and autonomy, while their surroundings suggest that none of these positive qualities has much impact on circumstances of their daily lives. Looking at these photographs, however, we realize that we are seeing the results of a very selective process, that the photographer might have made a very different picture of the same material, that the picture we see embodies a concern with something beyond an "accurate" portrayal of a way of life. We are also looking at a personal vision, shaped by the photographer's personality; aesthetic, political, and ideological commitments; and his ability to penetrate alien worlds. Every way of photographing interiors is a choice among possibilities. -when photographing the interior of a house, store, or factory, should the photographer include the usual inhabitants or not? By leaving them out, he can more easily compose an image that points to crucial details from which taste and social arrangements might be inferred. By including people in the photograph, however, he can use the increased richness of detail to strengthen the viewer's understanding of his subject. If he includes the people who are usually there, should he photograph them doing what they usually do there, or should he ask them to pose for a more formal portrait? The former allows him to make an image that includes some characteristic activity, thereby giving added depth to the viewer's understanding of the way of life that is being presented. Bill Owen's photographs of the interiors of suburban homes give us more insight into suburban lifestyles by showing the daily activities that go on there. If the photographer includes the people who are usually there, which ones should he include? We conventionally see only a handful of the people who inhabit a space. The others are socially, if not physically, invisible, as in
Inside State Street
Washroom and dining area of Floyd Burroughs's home, Hale County, Alabama, Summer 1936. Photograph by Walker Evans reproduced from the collections of the Library of Congress, LC USF3428133A.
G. K. Chesterton's story about Father Brown who solved an impossible murder-someone had been killed in an empty house which no one had entered or left-by observing that the letter carrier had been there. None of the neighbors saw him because everyone takes the postman's presence so much for granted as to make him invisible. Servants are often socially invisible to their employers and, by extension, to anyone who adopts (as it is easy to do) the employer's attitude. Robert Frank made some of his most compelling images in office buildings after work hours, when no one was there but the janitors. A bank occupied only by a janitor pushing mop looks different from one filled with bankers on the phone. Similarly, Bill Brandt's deservedly famous pictures of the maids in upper-class British houses in the 1930s show us a side of that hierarchical style of life we would miss if we saw only the masters and mistresses. Given this wide variety of options, Kathleen Collins decided to phoLOgraph a great number
a
of interior spaces in Chicago's State Street, which extends for many miles across the city. She thus userl a primitive sampling devicesomething like an oceanographer taking a core sample from the ocean floor-to include everything from the posh milieu of the remnants of the Gold Coast, through the working world of the Loop, the industrial South Loop, and some of the public housing of the South Side. By taking such a slice of the city, she has extended the theory of interiors to the point where it becomes a theory of the city seen in its interiors. What choices has Collins made? She has, first of all, photographed interiors without anyone in them. That deprives her of some resources for telling us about the city. It would be far easier to communicate ideas about Chicago as a social entity by showing Hugh Hefner entertaining in his palatial living room than by showing us the empty living room. Similarly, it would be easier for us to understand life in Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes if we saw the residents using the dangerous elevators and halls. Nevertheless, choosing to photograph interiors without their inhabitants has given Collins a corresponding advantage. Without the distraction of people acting unpredictably in front of her camera, she made more carefully composed images than she otherwise could have. Her photographs have a thoughtfulness and formal balance that pictures made in the hurry of real-time interaction seldom achieve. We see just what she intends us to see, in the light she wants us to see it in, with all the details given the importance she thinks due them, and with all the resulting implications for our interpretation. We must be as thoughtful in interpreting these images as she has been in making them. Collins has also overcome the disadvantage of the absence of people by photographing moments in the lives of these rooms which most fully indicate what usually goes on in them. We see the dining room of the Pacific Garden Mission with all the plates set ont and the English muffins beside them, waiting for the mission's clientele to come and eat. We see the room where Marshall Field's employees make candy, just after the chocolate has been poured out to cool, at the moment between two crucial stages of candy-making; we know the workers will 97
Inside State Street
Townhouse, 1238 N. State Parkway. Bedroom occupied and decorated by adolescent son of Paul and Mimi Earle. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Condominium apartment, 1440 N. State Parkway. Bedroom of teenage daughter of apartment owner, Mrs. S. Dreyfus. CHS, ICHi-16895, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
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Inside State Street
Marshall Field & Company, 111 N. State Street. Bridal salon dressing room , 6th floor. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Marshall Field & Company, 111 N. State Street. Candy factory, 13th floor, showing Thin Mint table in center. CHS, ICHi-16893, photograph , originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
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Inside State Street
Pacific Garden Mission, 646 S. State Street. Men's dining hall with stand-up tables set for breakfast. CHS, ICHi-16899, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
soon be back to do the next step. Further, she shows us a wide range of rooms, thus invoking a variety that characterizes the city, and makes us aware, however subliminally, of the array of activities that characterizes city life. Seeing the courtroom in the police headquarters at 11th and State reminds us that some of the men who sleep at the mission on some nights will be in that courtroom at other times, to be sentenced to spend the night in the drunk tank. We see all sorts of workplaces, from the boardrooms of major corporations to the studios in which craftsmen produce such rare artifacts as stained glass windows or such commonplaces as the television weather report. 100
As a whole, these photographs emphasize the highly varied and interdependent character of city life. We are led to think, viewing such a collection of images, of what connects a major corporation with a small craft operation, what connects the apartments in the projects with those on the Gold Coast. We don't see the middle-aged black women leaving their own apartments in the housing projects and arriving on North State Parkway where they will spend the day cleaning someone else's infinitely more luxurious house, but seeing images of each apartment separately reminds us how many women make that trip, day after day and year after year. Collins's images force some other reflections
Inside State Street
Dearborn Park Apartments , 901 S. State Street. Living room in Chester Shelby's apartment. CHS, ICHi-16903, photograph, originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
on us. We realize how the city changes. In one striking picture, we see the ornate lobby of the Chicago Theatre, in its heyday an up-to-date palace of oriental luxury. Now it is littered with tacky arcade video games. Simultaneously we remember that some things change faster than others. Lobbies of older Gold Coast apartment buildings look just as they did years ago, proving that a great preservative is wealth. Even more striking is the way apartments in the South Side housing projects have come to resemble those of the Gold Coast. A trickledown theory of fashion could explain this, but it is still difficult to tell the location of the apartment by simply looking at the furnishings. This ambiguity, created by our knowl-
edge of the role of the photographer in creating such impressions, makes one pause to question. The apartments, photographed similarly and looking at least superficially alike, are still very different places and their inhabitants live very different lives. Every photographic strategy lets you say some things at the cost of not saying others. These sacrifices are a small, and necessary, price to pay for learning as much as Collins teaches us. We leave her explorations of State Street with a deepened understanding of urban complexity, a fuller appreciation of the connections between the city's diverse elements, and a more detailed knowledge of what has happened and is still happening in Chicago. 101
Inside State Street
Ambassador West Hotel, 1300 N. State Parkway. Lobby entrance to Guildhall ballroom. CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. IBM Buil ding, 1 IBM Plaza. Office of a middle management executive, 28th floor. CHS, ICHi16900, photog raph , orig inally in color, by Kathleen Co llins.
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Inside State Street
Rubus Game Room, 1160 N. State Street. Pinball machines and electronic games in second floor room of games arcade owned by Steven Rubin . CHS, photograph by Kathleen Collins. Musicians Pawn Shop, 424 S. State Street. Musical instruments on display inside store at street level. CHS, ICHi-16892, photograph , originally in color, by Kathleen Collins.
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Both versions of Augustus Saint-Gaudens 's weather vane Diana were fashioned at the W. H. Mullins shop in Salem, Ohio, which specialized in decorative architectural metalwork. Reprinted with permission of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College.
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Montgomery Ward & Company and Three Statues on Chicago's Skyline By Margot Gayle
Only one of these statues has survived to the present, but their tale is an intriguing one.
have noticed the bronze statue on top of the old Montgomery Ward headquarters building on West Chicago Avenue. It is Ward's time-honored symbol, Th e Spirit of Progress, a female figure poised on her left foot, holding a torch high in her right hand and a caduceus, an ancient symbol of commerce, in the other, while she leans forward into the wind as though about to take flight. Actually, Spirit is the third of three similar statues which have graced a number of prominent Chicago buildings. The first, a gilded weather vane of Diana, goddess of the hunt, stood on the Agriculture Building at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. She was designed by the celebrated American sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The second, Progress Lighting th e Wa y for Commerce, also a gilded weather vane, was made for Montgomery Ward's Michigan Avenue Tower Building in 1900 by J. Massey Rhind, a Scottish-American artist known for his architectural sculpture. The story of the three statues begins in New York in the fall of 1891, shortly after the completion of Madison Square Garden, a combination sports, concert, and theater hall designed by architect Stanford White. He modeled the building's tower after La Giralda, the Bell Tower of Seville, Spain, and asked his friend Saint-Gaudens to fashion a weather vane for it similar to La Giralda's Faith. MANY
CHICAGOA NS
Margot Gayle is president of the Friends of Cast Iron A rchitecture and author of Cast Iron Architecture of N ew York (Dover, 1974 ). H er article, " A H eritage Forgotten: Chicago's First Cast Iron Front Buildings," appeared in the Summer 1978 issue of Chicago History.
Thus Diana was born. Fabricated at the W. H. Mullins shop in Salem, Ohio, she was I 8 feet tall and weighed 1,800 pounds, yet she was perfectly balanced and could move gracefully with a light wind. The statue was made of many individually formed sections of 22ounce sheet copper which were first machinehammered over dies and then riveted together. Seams between sections were braised to make the surface both smooth and watertight. Inside, the thin-skinned copper figure rested on a wrought-iron skeleton, the same method that had been used to construct the Statue of Liberty, unveiled in 1883. This skeleton, which was attached to a seven-inch pipe that extended from the head down through the trunk and then an additional nine feet into the tower, turned on ball bearings. Then Diana was covered with a shimmering finish of gold leaf. Once atop the Garden's 325-foot tower, the gilded figure-clad only in a copper cloakcaught the fancy of all but the most modest, who took offense at her nudity. However, these complaints did not bother the sculptor and architect half as much as their suspicions that Diana was too large for the tower. The two men, whose careers included several collaborations, such as the Standing Lincoln in Chicago's Lincoln Park, decided to replace Diana with a smaller, 13-foot version, also executed by the Mullins shop. Thus "big" Diana was removed from her home on Madison Square Garden to make way for her smaller counterpart. Fortunately an ideal situation awaited her in Chicago, where plans were underway for the great classical white buildings of the World's Columbian Exposition. The largest of these 105
Montgomery Ward Statues structures, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, was already under construction in the fall of 1892. Work on the second largest, the Agriculture Building, designed by Stanford White's firm, McKim, Mead, and White, was about to begin. Like many of the other exposition halls, the Agriculture Building (the most costly structure at the fair) was to be richly adorned with sculpture, including groups of symbolic statues along its roof. Architect Charles McKim thought that Diana, as classical goddess of the hunt, would be the perfect piece to top the dome of this building. The exposition officials agreed, and in early 1892 they purchased the sculpture from SaintGaudens for $2,500. She was then sent from New York to the Mullins Co. for refurbishing before being shipped to Chicago. Once in place, "big" Diana soon won the admiration of many fairgoers because of her beauty and her prominent position overlooking the Court of Honor in the heart of the exposition. Unfortunately, no one seems to know what happened to this statue of Diana once the fair was over. Some believe that she perished in one of several fires which swept the fairgrounds after the exposition closed. Although it appears that the Agriculture Building and Diana were spared from the first blaze, which destroyed the long peristyle across the end of the Grand Basin on January 9, 1894, most of the structure was left in ruins after flames leapt up its 45-foot staff columns in a subsequent fire on February 24. The domed roof collapsed, and there was every reason to suppose that it had carried Diana to her doom. However, the Chicago Tribune's account, published the next day, reported that "The statue of Diana was not damaged as she had been removed about six weeks ago to the Columbian Museum." The New York Times of the same date corroborated this: "Diana had been placed in the Columbian Museum." The reference was to the museum established in the ÂŁair's Palace of Fine Arts building on September 16, 1893, with a $1 million donation from Marshall Field. It seems reasonable to believe that like a number of other objects and exhibits displayed during the exposition, Diana had been transferred to the museum. But the Field Columbian Museum (forerunner of the 106
Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who designed Diana, served as supervisor of "sculptural projects" for the 1893 Columbian Exposition. Reprinted with permission of the Board of Trustees of Dartmouth College.
Field Museum of Natural History) did not list Diana as an acquisition in its annual reports of 1894 or 1895, and neither did The Art Institute of Chicago. If Diana was saved, as the newspapers reported, what happened to her? It is possible that Diana did indeed survive to have yet another adventure. Material in the files of Montgomery Ward & Co. indicates that the statue caught the eye of company officials as they walked by on their way to and from the company's exhibit in the Agriculture Building and that they may have purchased her after the fair. A 1937 letter from F. W. Jameson of the company's mail order sales department states that "At the close of the Exposition [Diana] was bought by Montgomery Ward & Co. and held until [their] Tower Building was erected." An article in a 1959 edition of the G.S.C. Newsletter corroborates this information: "[the statue] was seen and bought by Charles H. Thorne [son of Aaron Montgomery Ward's original partner George
,Uontgomery TVard Stat ues
After the 18-foot Diana was removed from the tower of Madison Square Garden, officials of Chicago's World 's Columbian Exposition purchased her and placed her on the dome of the Agricultural Building. CHS, ICHi-16275.
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Montgomery Ward Statues R. Thorne] who had it placed on top of the 'Ward Tower on Michigan Avenue." Although details vary, the basic story persists that Ward's did acquire Diana for the new building which was soon to be constructed on Michigan Avenue. Certainly Ward's "Busy Bee Hive" Tower, completed in 1899, did have a Diana-like weather vane at its apexProgress Lighting the Way for Commerce. This second statue was, like the first Diana, approximately 18 feet tall, and, like Diana, Progress was a nude female poised on one foot. Both were made of sheet copper over a metal armature, and both were products of the W. H. Mullins shop. But while Diana carried a bow and arrow, Progress held a torch in one hand and a caduceus in the other. The long sweeping flame from the torch served as Diana's cloak had, catching the wind and turning the figure. The statues' heads were similarly positioned, and one can discern a crescent moon on the forehead of both figures (a detail that SaintGaudens placed on "big" Diana's forehead) . In fact the similarities were so striking that many people and many journalists began to call the new statue "Diana" as soon as it was placed on the tower in October 1900. Indeed, one might well imagine that the mail order company had purchased Diana and sent her back again a second time to the Mullins shop in Ohio, where the artisans could have once more made modifications and returned her to Chicago. Sadly, there seems to be no conclusive evidence to support this. On the other hand, it may be that the Ward's executives simply admired Diana and asked their architects to commission a similar ornament for their new building. We do know that the architects, Richard E. Schmidt and Hugh Garden, envisioned a statue-weather vane on top of the structure. When completed, Ward's "Busy Bee Hive" Tower Building would be the tallest in Chicago, and as such it deserved a crowning touch. Garden's drawings, now on file at The Art Institute of Chicago, show sketches of a female figure that looks very much like Diana with her flying cloak. Schmidt hired John Massey Rhind, a thirdgeneration Scottish sculptor, to design the final statue. Rhind, who had come to the United States in 1889 at the age of 29, was well known 108
in New York for the life-size statues he designed for large buildings, including the set of bronze doors given to Trinity Church on Broadway by the Astor family. For some reason, however, his statue of Progress is not mentioned in articles on his work, nor does it appear in the lengthy obituary published in a London newspaper on October 22, 1936. The reason for this might well be that Rhind only designed alterations to transform Diana; therefore he would not have been the sole creator of Progress. Asked if he thought his father's first statue o[ Diana still existed as Progress, Homer SaintGaudens commented that he found the Montgomery Ward statue too curvaceous to be his father's original work. But perhaps he was comparing Progress to the more slender, 13-foot "little" Diana, which topped Madison Square Garden from 1891 to 1925. Whether she was Diana reincarnated or a newly created Progress, the golden figure placed on top of the Montgomery ¡ward & Co. Tower Building in 1900 delighted Chicagoans. The Inter-Ocean reported on October 21, the day after the weather vane was installed, that Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce was "symmetrical and fair to look upon." Previewing the statue in July before it was put in place, the Chicago Tribune had acclaimed it as "rivalling in beauty New York's famous Diana." And small wonder: with her torch held high some 390 feet above the street, the gleaming figure of Progress was visible over most of the city and far out into Lake Michigan. Lit by four electric beacons with 1,000 candlepower each, Progress actually did serve as a beacon in at least one instance. On September 5, 1918, Captain Ben Lipsner used these lights to guide his plane into Grant Park after making the first airmail flight between New York City and Chicago in 9 hours and 13 minutes of stormy weather. In 1908 Ward's sold the Tower Building and moved to more spacious quarters on West Chicago Avenue. Although the Michigan Avenue building still stands, its 125-foot tower portion was removed in 194 7 after being judged structurally unsafe. As for Progress, she also had to come down . On Saturday, April 26, 1947, workmen of the Speedway Wrecking Company
Montgomery Ward Statues
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Progress Lighting the Way for Commerce adorned the tower of Montgomery Ward's Michigan Avenue building from 1899 until 1947, when the tower was removed and the weather vane dismantled. Montgomery Ward & Company.
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Montgomery Ward Statues erected a scaffold around the statue and began to dismantle her. Three months later the Tribune, calling the figure "Diana," reported that
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The statue was cut into about 30 pieces before it was lowered. Diana's arm with outstretched spear [sic] came off at the shoulder, the head came off in one piece, and one leg below the knee. Most of the statue is at the company's office, but some parts have been claimed by Chicagoans to make metal ashtrays or keep as souvenirs.
This marked the demise of Rhind's 18-foot statue, but the company continued to use Progress as its symbol. v\Then Theodore F. Merseles became president of Ward's in 1920, he adopted a new corporate slogan, "The Oldest Mail Order House Is Today the Most Progressive," and ordered that a picture of Progress accompany this slogan on all of the company's letterheads and merchandise catalogs. However, since the original Progress was a nude, Merseles-in deference to public tastecommissioned an artist to draw a similar figure clad in a lightly draped gown. In 1922, the year of Ward's fi (tie th anniversary, Merseles presented the widows o( A. Montgomery Ward and George R. Thorne with 15-inch bronze replicas of the full-scale Progress statue. The disposition of Mrs. v\Tard's figurine is not known. Mrs. Thorne's statue is now owned by her great-grandson, Charles H. Thorne II. In 1928, when construction had started on a new Administration Building on Chicago Avenue, Merseles's successor, George B. Everitt, felt that the building should have a statue. He commissioned an artist to design one, and in September 1929 The Spirit of Progress was placed atop the white stuccoed Art Deco tower. For years the artist's identity was unknown, making the story of Spirit's origin as much of a mystery as that of Progress. However, it is probable that Spirit was the work of sculptor-architect Joseph Conradi. In a letter to his granddaughter, Grace Conradi Anderson o( Addison, Illinois, Conracli's second wife Anna wrote: Your grandfather Conradi was architect and sculptor at St. Alphonsus Church at Lincoln, Southport, and \,Vellington Avenues, Chicago . Also, the tallest statuary "Progress" is his work (I think it's on Montgomery Ward building) [and] can be seen from Lake Front and afar. 110
ComposM by
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MONTGOMERY WARD CHICAGO
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In 1920 Ward's adopted Progress as its corporate symbol. A drawing of the statue appeared on the cover of Wa rd's trademark music in 1928. CHS, ICHi-16297.
Although there is no other documentary evidence to corroborate Mrs. Conracli's conviction the sculptor's oldest son Leo also attributed th~ statue to his father. Just before his death in 1979 Leo told Mrs. Anderson that he remembered the clay his father's statue of The Spirit of Progress was placed on the 'i\Tard's building. Born in Switzerland, Conradi trained there and in Rome before coming to New York as a young man. After teaching art at the Cooper Union, he went to Washington, D.C., where he worked on the crew carving the ornamental marble staircases of the new Library of Congress. Although he did decorative carving for both the Idaho and Utah state capitol bui ldings, his specialty was religious sculpture for churches. He did a considerable amount of work in Chicago, including the churches of St. Alphonsus and St. Francis de Sales. No matter who was Spirit's creator, she resembled the first two statues; yet there were many important differences. Like Progress, the statue held a torch and a caduceus. Her stance was much like that of the earlier figures: she stood poised on her left foot with the other leg slightly raised behind her to give her balance. But Spirit was only 16 feet high and cast
Montgomery Ward Statues
::!ir::::::=~:=z:!!!~ifJ in bronze, while the other statues had been 18foot gilded copper figures. Spirit was not meant to be a weather vane, so her torch flame was much smaller than the one that caused Progress to turn with the wind. And while the first two statues had been nude, Spirit, like the drawings made for Theodore Merseles, was modestly dressed in a short, flowing robe. Once completed, Spirit became the new corporate symbol, and the company commissioned copies to place on other Montgomery Ward buildings across the country. But President Everitt's successor, Sewell Avery, was not quite taken with her. After he became president in 1952 Avery sought to have her removed. However, he dropped this plan when he found that it would cost $6,000 to dismantle her. In 1974 Montgomery Ward expanded into yet another corporate headquarters, this time an imposing 26-story cream marble and glass structure designed by Minoru Yamasaki. It is situated on Chicago Avenue directly ¡across the street from the earlier Art Deco tower where the graceful Spirit still stands-an anachronism, perhaps, but when the company's executives were asked to determine whether the statue should be removed, they responded with
In 1928 Merseles's successor, George B. Everitt, commissioned a statue for the tower of the company's new Administration Building on Chicago Avenue. Spirit of Progress was put into place the following year . Montgomery Ward & Company.
a resounding "No!" And so they should. Spirit has become a widely recognized symbol of this old Chicago firm. And for many people, all three statues have become symbols of Chicago itself. Selected Sources Chicago Tribune , Scientific American, and clippings in the reference files of the New York Public Library, the Chicago Historical Society, and Montgomery Ward & Co. MAi'>USCRIPTS: Account books and drawings in the archives of the architectural firm Schmidt, Garden, and Erikson in Chicago, and at The Art Institute of Chicago; the Art Institute's sculpture acquisition records for 1893 and 1894; and papers on W. H. Mullins & Co. on file at the Salem Historical Society, Ohio. I NTERV IEWS: Author's interviews with Grace Conradi Anderson, Addison, Illinois, and Charles H . Thorne II, Chicago. Craven, Wayne. Sculpture in America. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1968. Marcus, Lois. "Augustus Saint-Gaudens, the Sculptor of the American Renaissance.'' Arts Magazine 54 (November 1979). Sculptured Work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens with Biographical Sketch. Chicago : The Art Institute of Chicago, August 1909. Tharpe, Louise Hall. Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1969. w¡asserman, J eanne L., ed. Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture . Cambridge: Fogg Art Museum, 1975. NEWSPAPERS:
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Looking Back ward Around Town with the Saddle and Cycle Club young lady appearing on this poster reminds us that bicycling has been-indeed, is-a favorite pastime of Chicagoans. The poster was drawn by ¡w ill ¡w. Denslow in 1895, just as thousands of local residents were discovering this new fad . Two young men who enjoyed bicycling were Bert Erskine and Frank Remington, founders of Chicago's Skater's Club. On one of their trips northward through the city 's parks, they decided to form another club for cyclists and horseback riders. They chose a site in Edgewater at Kenmore and Bryn Mawr, envisioning an exclusive club where members could relax and get a good meal. After buying the land, Erskine and Remington held a meeting of several friends, including Val Lei\Ioyne, Victor Elting, and Jarvis Hunt, to organ ize the club. Hunt volun tecred his services to construct a clubhouse on the selected site, and the group agreed on a list of 100 people who would be invited to join. The Saddle and Cycle Club opened its doors in late May 1895, and as Mary Ayer Chase recalled, life at the clubhouse was very genteel. "I don't remember ever seeing any cocktails served there .... The men could have whiskey and water, or a glass of beer, and the ladies, who were LADIES in those days, with one or two glaring exceptions, quenched their thirst after their dusty bicycle ride with a lemonade, root beer, or a 'horse's neck.' " In 1898 the club was forced to vacate its home when the city condemned the property with an eye toward renovating the lakefront. The founders chose a new location nearby on Foster Avenue at the lake, where the present clubhouse, also designed by Jarvis Hunt, now stands. The club's new home became a popular social spot, as Mrs. Chase wrote: "Every afternoon and even ing would find gay parties en joying the new clubhouse, many in bicycling costume, which consisted of a short skirt to the knee, with long leather gaiters, a white shirtwaist with huge sleeves, a straw sailor hat, and THE LOVELY BLQOc,,IER-BEDF.CKED
I 12
Tintype, c. 1895. Harry Hooper and parents riding to old Saddle and Cycle Club. CHS, ICHi-16888.
a veil. The lwi polloi wore divided skirts, when bicycling, and some wore their street suits, which they often regretted when the long skirts became entangled in the greasy chain." The club sponsored several sailing and bicycle races a year. l'vir. and Mrs. Chase entered one bicycling competition, a race from the club's original home to the Onwentsia Club in Lake Forest. ""\Ve sent our suitcases by train, and cycled up Sheridan Road, through Winnetka, puffing up the hills, and stopping for tea at a little tea house in Glencoe, registering as a matter of course when we arrived at Onwentsia, we were amazed later in the evening when we were informed that we had won the race." Unfortunately no one "saddles" or cycles to the club anymore; the automobile is now the accepted mode of transportation. But even though its name is obsolete, the Saddle and Cycle Club continues to thrive.
See
,. IM C
.--tt·
I
''.
SVND ,:P;'\ 1/#tE.S- E -
-
Poster (25 ¼ " x 38") designed by Will Denslow in 1895 for the Chicago Times-Herald. CHS, ICHi-06269. Reproduction available from the Society's Museum Store.
113
The Society The strength of the curatorial staff and the other department headships is sustained by new appointments)¡ the direction of collecting activities) publications) and the intellectual life of the Society are governed by their thoughts.
the Director discusses important matters of interest to the members and friends of the Society. You have read here about the recent changes in Board leadership, the acquisition of major documents, and my coming to the Society. In this issue I bring you news about several key appointments to the staff. It is important news because the curators and their collections are the cornerstone of the Historical Society and the source of most of the Society's programs, actions, and benefits for researchers and visitors. The strength of the curatorial staff and the other department headships, long recognized, is sustained by new appointments; the direction of collecting activities, publications, and the intellectual life of the Society are governed by their thoughts. Tim Jacobson's name has been added to the masthead of this issue of the magazine. He began his duties as editor late in June and has settled into his office with his favorite manual Olympia typewriter and with an eye for the recent trends in American history. This sense of the movement of history is critical to the success of Chicago History, which must reflect the current interests and thinking of those who chronicle the city's past. It was Tim's combined experience as an author, editor, teacher, and historian which particularly recommended him to us. Previously he worked for the American Association for State and Local History, one of the premier national organizations serving institutions like ours. As an editor there, he helped produce The States and the Nation Series of state histories. He also held research and teaching appointments at Vanderbilt University, where he earned his doctorate in history. Tim replaces Fannia Weingartner, editor of th is magazine for five years. Fannia has 1
1
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returned to free lance editing, in which capacity she is still involved with the Society on a catalog project. It is a testament to the excellence of her work that Tim was brought in not to change, but to continue the traditions that she established. Janice Soczka was recently promoted to the curatorship of the Printed Collections, replacing Frank Jewell who moved upward to become Dean and Chief Operating Officer of the Colorado Historical Society. The Printed Collections-in effect a library-require the services of a librarian, and Janice brings to her position not only a master's degree in library science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, but also a master's degree in history. Her previous experience as the collection's Assistant Curator, and her earlier experience as a reference librarian, recommend her as an astute, practical, and thoughtful person who has shown herself to appreciate the goals of the Society. Of special import has been the creation of a new Department of Architectural Collections. This department expands the Society's commitment to the field, an effort that was begun under Frank Jewell's leadership several years ago. It recognizes both the rapidly growing strength of the holdings and the importance that we attach to the field itself, particularly as it reflects the contributions of Chicago to architecture. As Curator of Architectural Collections we have appointed Ann Van Zanten, who was well known to the Society as the leader of the Holabird and Root Drawings and Records Inventory. She has a strong background in research, as well as experience in teaching and writing. A combination of articles, public lectures, exhibitions, and a doctorate from Harvard University confirm her abilities. Ann
Timothy C. Jacobson, Editor and Head of Publications; Ann Van Zanten (center), Curator of Architectural Collections; and Janice Soczka, Curator of Printed Collections. CHS, photograph by Walter W. Krutz.
was co-curator of the exhibition "Barry Byrne/ John Lloyd Wright: Architecture and Design." The Society has always maintained a tradition of excellence that is secured through the curators in several ways. The commitment of funds to the acquisition of important pieces has, over time, placed key documents in our holdings and exhibits. Experienced, judicious collecting acumen has caused the Society to acid books, d_ocuments, photographs, and objects appropriate to its scope and purpose and to avoid collecting things that do not pertain to the focus of the organization. Exhibitions, often presented for only a few months, appear to be interesting and stunning only because curators have spent months and even years preparing them. The support staff necessary to the pursuit of quality in research, collecting, and exhibitions is also integral to the effort and is
hired and supervised by the curators. Thus all three positions represent a continuation of mission, purpose, and excellence already exemplified by the rest of the curatorial staff and indeed by their predecessors. In the future the curators will write for this magazine; you will see their exhibits or read the catalogs they have produced. Each quarter the editor's work will stand before you. And I will benefit from their participation in the Society's planning processes and in the broader if often unseen intellectual life of the Society. I am pleased to welcome them to our staff. Ellsworth H. Brown Director Editor's Note: Ann Van Zanten died in Paris on August 9, 1982. The staff and trustees of the Society mourn her loss. 115
Reviews In the Steps of Chicago's Immigrants scholars, politicians, and community leaders have rather boldly pronounced that the concept of the melting pot, that old staple of American belief, is hopelessly outdated , if not downright wrongheaded . Now a fashionable concept of cultural pluralism holds sway, fed by the "Roots" phenomenon in the 1970s and by public policy that implies that diversity is a fundamental American right. Detractors of this "new ethnicity," however, worry about the politically and socially atomizing implications of cultural pluralism as it becomes imbedded in both public mind and policy. The debate over the melting pot versus cultural pluralism rages at every level. A cottage industry of articles and books on ethnicity flourishes, and some of America's most eminent intellectuals have tried their hands at definitions of American ethnic character-with mixed success. At the local level the debate intrudes on the public arena as various groups jostle for advantage in the schools, in jobs, in n eighborhoods, and even in the streets. The recent influx of Asian and Hispanic immigrants to Chicago gives the issues of adaptation and adjustment an urgency that requires historical perspective to guide public policy and attack prejudice with reason. Ethnic Chicago attempts to meet that need. Histor ians Peter d'A. Jones and Melvin G . Holli have collected eight original essays on various ethnic groups in Chicago in order to make sense out of these issues. At the same time, they have sought to portray the peculiar social diversity and dynamics of Chicago's past and thereby remedy a defect in too many accounts of Chicago, which are long on institutional developments but short o n social history. While the editors and authors come to no clear consensus about the nature or durability of ethnicity in Chicago, they do demonstrate that the melting pot was a different sort of kettle for each immigrant group. It is perhaps fitting that the Irish are the first subjects of discussion, for they remain Chicago's most visible and powerful ethnic group. In "Irish Chicago: Church, Homeland, Politics, and ClassThe Shaping of an Ethnic Group, 1870-1900," Michael F. Funchion relates the now familiar tale of how the most rural people of Europe became the most urban people in America. Through IN RECENT YEARS,
Ethnic Chicago edited by Peter d'A. Jones and Meh'in G. Holli (Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1981), $12.95. 116
church and gol'ernment the Irish rose to prominence in Chicago and forged an Irish-American solidarity unmatched in other cities. During their climb, the Irish sloughed off their bogside manners and dress to become the exemplars of Catholic respectability in multi-ethnic, Catho lic Chicago. By sheer numbers, the Irish made the Catholic Church their own . Irish power within the Church was manifest in many ways, but none more important than the succession of Irish bishops in Chicago from 1844 to 1915. In Funchion's judgment, the local parish emerged as the "most important institution in Irish Chicago," as the Irish controlled the schools and various religious associations attached to the parish. Irish nationalism mingled with Irish Catholicism to reinforce Irish ethnic identity. Politics competed with the church for Irish devotion. Funchion principally attributes Irish political success in Chicago to the fragmented structure of Chicago machine politics which gave power to neighborhood and ethnic chieftains. V.7idely dispersed in the city, the Irish drew on their skills to organize the new immigrants among them. Even as the Irish achieved respectability through ethnic wlidarity, however, their influence began to dis;olve. Respectability brought a softening of intense Irish nati_onalism (the old glue of Irish ethnicity), geographic dispersal to the suburbs, and intermarriage with non-Irish Catholics. The Irish lost their ethnic soul even as they gained all of Chicago. Funchion's essay contrasts in several ways with the other account of the Irish, "Irish Chicago: The ,\lultiethnic Road to Machine Success," by Paul i\fichael Green. While Funchion only alludes to intramural Irish tensions, Green makes differences among the Irish an important element in his discussion. Green offers useful modifications of the Irish place in Chicago politics, reflecting his wider kno_"".ledge of inter-~thnic brokerage and Chicago pol1t1cal legerdemain. According to Green, the Chicago "machine" originally functioned as a series of loose-knit neighborhood organizationshardly a surprise, since political machines generally developed that way in other cities with immigrant populations. Although politically active in Chicago, the Irish faced discrimination and, before the Great Fire at least, "lacked the economic and social infrastructure to assume city control." Still, Irish Old World traditions of local leadership, nurtured in the hothouse of Irish nationalism, prospered in their American urban environment. Through the Church, the Irish acquired enough economic and social power to launch their bid for political dominance. Internecine warfare between neighborhood saloonkeeper politicians, close to the immigrant masses but chummy with the genteel Carter Harrisons, and a rising group of businessmen-politicians who were uninterested in boodle but eager to engineer Chicago's economic growth, prevented the Irish from consolidating
Immigrants newly arrived at Ellis Island , New York. Photograph by Lewis Hine, c. 1904-1905. For thousands of Europeans, this was where America began. CHS, ICHi-16210.
their power. 1ntra-party feuds among Iri h factions continued for decades, even as the Irish secured a firm grip on the Democratic party and the city. Indeed , it required a Czech, Anton Cermak, to stitch together the various ethnic and Irish party elements into the modern Democratic city machine by bringing both party and public offices under the mayor's control. In Green's view, then, the Irish did not rule Chicago; rather, they led it. Such arguments would have benefited from some attention to the Irish nationalism and ethnic identity on which Funchion lays so much stress and from a firm editorial hand that would have slashed through the thicket of tedious detail on every campaign and personality to shed more light on the intra- and inter-ethnic rivalries that swirled around Chicago politics. Still, if we are going to '!earn about the Irish only through their politics, as the editors and two authors here apparently bel ieve, the Funchion and Green chapters provide a solid foundation of information: ationalism and politics figure prominently in three other essays in the book. Despite some obvious biases, each article makes clear that Chicago's ethnic groups were not just people of a particular neighborhood but also were members of an international ethnic community concerned not only
with city government but with governments in exile, not only with the local culture but with culture abroad . In a chapter on "Greek Survival in Chicago: The Role of Ethnic Education, 1890-1980," Andrew T. Kopan insists that Greeks came to Chicago imbued with a powerful sense of nationalism that would form the social cement of Greek identity in Chicago. Important in nurturing a Greek-American subculture were Greek coffeehouses, mutual aid societies, and nationalist organizatio ns. At the same time, the Greek immigrants' close association with Hull House encouraged them to preserve their Hellenic cultural heritage while nudging them toward American middle-class notions of time-thrift. Kopan shows that Greeks resisted Americanization to varying degrees, a variation that colored the character of their national associations AHEPA and GAPA. Ambivalent about their place in Chicago, Greeks sent their children to public schools to learn American ways, but sim ultaneously enrollee! them in church schools and Greek-language schools. Greek bilingualism, supported by public school policy because of effective politicking, became the hallmark of Chicago Greeks and allowed them to 117
Chicago's Immigrants
Lithograph of the Pioniere der Chicago Turngemeinde, in 1893. Formed by German immigrants, these groups embodied Prussian patriotism and allowed Germans to preserve an aspect of their homeland in their new country. CHS, ICHi-03019.
remain au courant with events in their homeland . \Vhile Kopan's conclusion that Greeks underwent cultural, though not structural, assimilation seemingly contradicts the article's inclusion in a section on "Cultural Pluralism," it does suggest that the maintenance of national identity hinged partly on the ability to retain the old language. Kopan's essay, however, suffers from his unfamiliarity with recent work on the agencies of assimilation, such as Thomas Lee Philpott's study of Chicago's reform groups; consequently, he does not appreciate the uniqueness of the Greeks' ability to remain visible "hyphenates" amid those bent on scrubbing immigrants of their foreignness. According to J\lyron B. Kuropas, in "Ukrainian Chicago: The faking of a Nationality Group in America," the Ukrainians' inability to divorce themselves from their Old \\/oriel politicial interests undermined their community in Chicago. By focusing on the work and thought of several Ukrainian nationalists who were closely tied to Ukrainian churches, Kuropas details the growth of various strains of Ukrainian nationalism, culminating with a close examination of the powerful Sich of the 1920s and 1930s. A melange of competing interests and personalities, Ukrainian nationalism reflected deep divisions separating Ukrainians. Kuropas balances discussions of the centrifugal effects of nationalism with references to the centripetal forces of community, 118
but suggests that the nationalists squandered their leadership abilities in futile efforts to control events in Europe, instead of concentrating on the pressing social, economic, and political needs of Ukrainians in Chicago. The nationalists' "flirtation with European political models" eventually led to a federal investigation of Ukrainian nationalist organizations which greatly embarrassed Ukrainians generally. How ever interesting the story, Kuropas's own obsession with the nationalist issue distorts the character of Ukrainian adjustment in America. Perhaps young men joined Sich, the Ukrainian Athletic Association which evolved into a paramilitary organization, [or the opportunity to partICipate in organized sports, to en joy male camaraderie, or to puff out their chests in parades before admiring young women. The nature of social relationships within the nationalist organizations might be a more reliable index of popular Ukrainian belief than quotations from a few Ukrainian publicists. Kuropas is so niggardly on the social and cultural milieu of the Chicago Ukrainians that it is impossible to determine what forces actually shaped the community. More troublesome are Kuropas's own lapses into partisanship. Germans in Chicago also foundered on the rocks of nationalistic bravado, as J\felvin G. Holli skillfully relates in "The Great War Sinks Chicago's German Kultur." German intellectuals throughout
Chicago's Immigrants the nineteenth century had basked in their "superior" Teutonic culture, but the rise of a powerful Germany under the Kaiser grossly inflated their ethnic pride. German-Americans launched a wellfinanced, sophisticated propaganda campaign to impose German culture on what they regarded as an open society, "a cultural wasteland to be colonized and culturally conquered." In their admiration for the fatherland, German-Americans failed to distinguish between German culture and German militarism. Their arrogance and seeming disloyalty during World War I awakened American nativism, of course, but they also inspired Chicago's Slavic population to attack their longtime German tormentors by smearing them with charges of treason and demonstrating their own trustworthiness through celebrations of American patriotism. By the time German-Americans realized they had gone too far, their own position was untenable in the face of a nativist-Slavic alliance. Chicago's Germans bet on the Kaiser, but in fact lost Goethe and Schiller. Holli's analysis of Slavic involvement is an important corrective to simplistic notions that American nativism alone did in Deutschtum. Holli is too condescending, though, in his criticism of German pretensions, perhaps because he favored anti-German sources. Also, he does not go far enough to plumb the depth or map the range of German nationalism among Germans not associated with the various German clubs and organizations. Whatever its deficiencies, Holli's readable and important essay conveys the essential reminder that ethnic groups have committed cruelties against each other that sometimes make the insensitivities o[ native-born Americanizers look tame by comparison. An ethnic heritage, Holli's account shows, may include not just the glories of the ancient homeland, but also the vicious and even the ridiculous. Three other essays chart the movement of specific immigrant and ethnic groups to Chicago's suburbs, observing the social and cultural effects such migration had on their subjects. Without discussing it themselves, the authors confirm a judgment made by Harold Mayer and Richard Wade in Chicago: The Growth of a Metropolis (1969): that the movement of ethnic groups into adjacent suburbs has caused the inner ring of suburbs to become a,n extension of the city rather than a band of wholly discrete communities. They also suggest something about the internal social dynamics o[ ethnic groups by moving away from discussions of nationalism a nd politics to a very tentative but welcome analysis of folkways and work. In the most original contribution in the book, "Suburban Italians : Chicago Heights, 1890-1975," Dominic Candeloro argues that the small-town setting of Chicago Heights protected Italians there from the harsher realities of the urban immigrant
experience. Although these suburbanites did not escape discrimination and identification with criminal elements, the "continuity and relatively limited number 0f cities of their origin" among Chicago Heights Italians generated greater group solidarity and upward social mobility than Italians achieved in Chicago. Candeloro refutes the work of Edward Banfield, who asserts that Southern Italians were incapable of acting together outside the family for a common good. In Chicago Heights a rich associational life invigorated the whole community and served as the staging area for Italian business and political success. Alone among the authors of the book, Candeloro provides extensive treatment o[ the daily life of an ethnic community. His sensitive use of oral testimony allows him to pull back the veil of privacy, to enter the homes o[ the immigrants. It also gives him the opportunity to see the bric-a-brac of material culture in its normal functional context. Candeloro thus records changes wrought by work and living in a modern industrial society. Among second-generation Italian-American , for example, he learned that peer group pressure rivaled familial authority, and that the immigrants' grandchildren participated eagerly and knowledgeably in American sports and popular culture. Candeloro shows that although the Chicago Heights Italians have not melted down completely, they have exhibited a different and weaker sense of ethnicity, almost just a form of nostalgia, in the years after World \Var II. With further research, Candeloro might easily make more of the revisionist implications of his work regarding cultural pluralism and challenge more forcefully the betterknown scholars who have only investigated urban slums. The best-illustrated article, Irving Cutler's "The Jews o[ Chicago: From Shtetl to Suburb," describes the merging of the German and Eastern European Jewish commumtJes. Cutler's most important contribution is his reaffirmation of the uneven, sometimes contradictory, course of immigrant adaptation and adjustment to urban America. Internal differences among Jewish immigrants, along with the timing of their arrival in Chicago, account for the varied initial responses of German and Eastern European Jews to the host culture and to one another. Eastern European Jews clashed with their German-Jewish employers in the workplace and received a chilly reception everywhere outside their own ghetto in Chicago. To be sure, German Jews extended financial and educational aid to the new immigrants, but they left Maxwell Street to the newcomers and retired to more fashionable synagogues, clubs, and homes elsewhere in the city. Cutler then traces the Eastern European Jews' own exodus from the crowded West Side tenements into greater Lawndale (where Leo Rosten once taught I 19
Chicago's Immigrants English to Jewish immigrants), on to the ::'forth Side, and finally to the northern and northwestern suburbs as peddlers traded their pushcarts for shops and their children abandoned the shops for the professions. In less than a century the old German and Eastern European Jewish dichotomy disappeared, and both were in the economic mainstream and on ;\fain Street. Cutler concludes that the lack of a strong identity, intermarriage, and a paucity of Jewish institutions in the suburbs contributed to Jewish assimilation. Today, Conservative and Reformed Judaism arc more prevalent than Orthodoxy, and ha![ of Chicago's Jews arc not affiliated with any synagogue at all. The process of Jewish adaptation in Chicago, however, remains elusive. Cutler suggests that the Jews' proclivity for public school education and their prosperity pulled them from their Old World cultural moorings. Other immigrants had similar experiences with education and prosperity but adjusted quite differently. Cutler's essay begs the questions of why Jews, and not others, preferred public schools to religious ones, why they fared well in mercantile pursuits, and why they gravitated toward particular professions and places. For an urban geographer, Cutler is surprisingly inattentive to the role of transportation and spatial relations in shaping community life-subjects which Carl Cone.lit and Richard ¡wade, among others, have profitably mined for several years. Finally, Cutler docs not seem to regard the long Jewish history of adaptation and accommodation to host cultures as an element in Jewish responses to the American Canaan. In a thinly documented but convincing essay entitled, "Japanese-Americans: i\felting into the All-American Pot?", i\Iasako ]\,f. Osako poses the possibility that assimilation is not a distinctly American phenomenon. Osako describes the settlement of Japanese-Americans in Chicago following their internment during \Vorld War II. Despite discrimination and their initial lack of skills, these immigrants showed remarkable adaptability. Their economic progress marched in cadence with their geographic dispersal. Osako suggests that the internment experience of \Vorld War II weakened the traditional tissue of Japanese community and family by undermining the authority of eldersparticularly male heads of households-but she explains Japanese-American assimilation in Chicago as the natural by-product of their cultural openness and ability to survive as an adaptive people. The last observation raises new questions about the book's central themes . Are some immigrants inclined from the outset to plunge into the melting pot? How unique is the impact of the American environment on this country's ethnic groups? Unfortunately the articles in this book provide no answers. 120
Tenement family, c. 1922. Crowded tenements were the first home for many immigrant families. CHS, ICH-16913.
Other questions bubble up from the essays. Several authors identify intra-ethnic competition as a critical aspect o[ immigrant adjustment in America, but they do not delineate the sources of such rivalries. \Vas it religion, occupation, cussedness, or what that fueled such wrangling? Several ethnic groups, most notably the Irish, lived throughout the city, generally as minorities within their neighborhoods. A city is a constantly evolving place, as the photographs and commentary in the ;\fayer and \Vadc study demonstrate so clearly. The energy, born of both friction and cooperation, of immigrants moving in and out of particular places in Chicago nowhere infuses this book. The authors ignore how changing ethnic and socioeconomic mixes in each neighborhood contributed to varying kinds of "ethnicity" among the immigrants and their children. The city is a place where people work as well as live, but the importance of the workplace-its rhythms, its associations, its loyalties-receives scant attention. Even the place of Chicago is slighted. The exuberance, the boastfulness, the immense diversity, the sheer physical size of the city wuch none of the writing at all. Part of the problem is the authors' tendency to concentrate on formal institutions and associations in their groping for definitions of ethnicity. Such an emphasis
Chicago's Immigrants
Tels Shiota, a Japanese farmer from Venice, California, had been placed in a relocation center in the Southwest United States during the early years of World War II. When this photo was taken in July 1943 he was working on a farm near Chicago. CHS, ICHi-03026.
will only capture the history of the joiners, in many cases the few rather than the many. The self-limiting perspective of the authors, save Candeloro, derives partly from their reliance on newspaper sources and published records of associations, but it also reflects their assumptions that the substance of cultural and social identity assumes some institutional form. In fact, however, the veneer of culture often hides its substance. The Jack of any overarching interpretation and the organization of the book into separate chapters about separate groups present more fundamental problems that go beyond the ed itorial difficulty of structuring any collection of essays into a coherent, compelling narrative. Rather, they represent a basic de[ect in the whole literature on immigration and ethnicity. The almost pathological concern for one's owi;i group degenerates into a myopia and narrowness that excludes all comparison and creates the impression that American history, in David Gerber's words, "is comprised of the development of vaguely related peoples, who merely inh¡a bit the same space and occasionally get in one another's way" (Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring 1982). So, too, the authors' narrow conception of ethnicity is reinforced by their static view of American society and culture which, for them, seemingly never responds to the varied and constant
ethnic impulses and influences. An ahistorical perspective regarding American culture is not likely to foster sound histories of ethnic identities. Finally, this book bears out the old adage that you can go to the well too often. Ethnic Chicago is the stepchild of Jones's and Holli's earlier, more successfully executed Ethnic Frontier (1977). The first book included several imaginative, cogent essays on Chicago, several set in a comparative framework, and was a better example of the editors' own interpretive skills, for the essays there flowed in a natural manner while those in Ethnic Chicago are shackled rather arbitrarily to the categories o[ cultural pluralism versus the melting pot. The casual reader will find much to like in the new offering-the detail, the illustrations, the history of groups heretofore largely neglected-but the serious student will regard the work as an afterthought, a misbegotten child of an earlier success. That last judgment will in fact be too harsh and undeserved. Whatever its failings, the Jones and Holli collection will spur students of ethnicity and Chicago to take on broader and more controversial topics and thereby further unravel the beguiling complexity that is Chicago and its people. PAULA K. BENKART RANDALL M. MILLER
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Reviews Letters from Ring edited by Clifford M. Caruthers Flint, Michigan: Walden Press, 1979. $10.95 cloth , $6.95 paper.
RING LARDNER was not a misanthrope, states Clifford Caruthers, the editor of this interesting and varied collection of Lardner letters. The collection clearly bears him out. Through the letters Lardner emerges as a very warm, charming, amusing, and courageous man . He was not always happy, to be sure, but he was certainly not thrown off-balance by having detected-as his short stories reveal-so much shallowness, pettiness, and dishonesty in the world around him. The savage tone of a story like "Champion" does not emerge here; instead, we encounter an affectionate family man, good companion, and charitable colleague. Letters from Ring includes a substantial assortment of the Lardner correspondence. Both his personal and his public side unfold-the husbandfather and the successful writer. Editor Caruthers's judgment that Lardner was a "major author of this period" receives corroboration in his text from H. L. l\J encken, a creditable source of support. The first of the book's three sections is devoted to Lardner's letters to his future wife, Ellis Abbott. Here the reader catches a pleasant glimpse of the courtship patterns of a more innocent and leisurely age as well as a portrait of Ring as an ardent if sometimes puzzled suitor (why did Ellis flirt with that army captain at the Culver Military Academy even after she had plighted her troth?). Yet this section yields in interest to the one that follows, a discussion of Lardner's "years of fruition" as a writer. In the revelatory exchanges with publishers (Maxwell Perkins) and fellow writers (Mencken, Dreiser, Fitzgerald), the reader absorbs-along with much literary gossip-a sense of Lardner's aims as a writer: to preserve an ironic point of view and to reproduce an atmosphere, such as that of a ball park or a barber shop, in his stories. The final section, the "years of adversity," sustains the reader's interest even though it is more melancholy in flavor. By this point in his life, Lardner's career had taken a downward turn attributable to his ill health-a lethal combination of tuberculosis and alcoholism-which seriously interfered with his writing routine. The letters remain bright and amusing, but they are occasionally interspersed with an "I only hope I can stay well enough to work" refrain. The correspondence, in sum, tells us more of the man than of the writer. One does not, for example, encounter discussions of the author's utilization of the first-person point of view, or of his principle of character selection, and the references to literary matters appear both infrequently
122
a nd obliquely-perhaps a touch of mimicry or of non-sequitur dialogue. But we do come to know Ring Lardner. His jolly mocking of himself as a lover, his fond teasing of those in the family circle, his jokes and puns and anecdotes (e .g., the baritone voice of neighbor and ex-movie star Lilyan Tashman) enliven the correspondence and endear the author to us. vVho else would have been visited in the hospital by Sherwood Anderson, Rabbit Maranville, and Claudette Colbert in a single afternoon? Caruthers deserves much credit for putting together this diversified collection, one that shows Lardner precisely reporting the World Series, fussing about exact story titles, carefully instructing his son on how to write a song lyric-in every case, maintaining artistic standards of a high order. This reviewer is grateful for Caruthers's "portrait," as well as for the substantial and informative interlinear comments that provide such helpful background. W. GORDON MILNE
From Streetcar to Superhighway: American City Planners and Urban Transportation,
1900-1940 by Mark S. Foster Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1981. $19.95.
FOSTER has provided today's often angry mass transit rider, anxious to point an accusing finger, with an explanation of how the shift from transit to the automobile took place during the period from 1900 to 1940. His position is that "contemporary critics of the automobile culture have been guilty of prcsentism in condemning early planners ... for the decline of urban mass transportation, for failing to build rapid transit systems, and for irresponsible horizontal growth." "I believe early twentieth-century planners deserve more praise, or at least understanding, than condemnation," writes Foster. He points out that planners "enthusiastically endorsed both the automobile and the suburban movement out of conviction that it was in the public interest." On the other hand, Foster does not deny that a conspiracy to kill mass transit may have existed. Foster points out that the automobile and its attendant urban sprawl have been the subject of severe criticism for years. It has been suggested, he observes, "that opponents of the automobile comprised only a tiny liberal clique, whose views were directly countered by the preferences of the overwhelming majority . . . these self-appointed elites devised elaborate rationalization to try to MARK
Reviews force the 'lower-class element' into mass transportation." These clashing viewpoints concerning the role of public mass versus private automobile transportation inspired Foster's study. 路what does he conclude? After a thorough and extremely well-documented series of chapters covering, among other topics, the turn-of-the-century city, the early years of the planning movement, planners and transit, the automobile, mass transit decline, the New Deal, and transit planning versus automobile planning, the author confirms what he set out to prove. The majority of American planners emphasized the automobile's potentially beneficial impact on urban development from the beginning of the twentieth century. For a variety of reasons the role of planners in shaping the city of the times was a limited one. The city was a complex, dynamic organism, and the automobile was only the latest in a series of technological advances that significantly affected urban evolution . Even transportation itself was but one of many crucial and challenging issues. 路why did planners allow many fine mass transit systems to deteriorate and disappear altogether? Foster argues that by 1910 mass transit companies had acquired an unsavory image, and that "although precedents for assistance to large utilities existed . . . public officials saw that accommodating the automobile was more in keeping with the American ideal of private responsibility." Politicians, Foster wryly observes, "also possessed an incentive for consciously promoting the automobile . . . they could widen streets and build highways during current terms in office, rather than initiate construction of far more expensive mass transit systems that might not be functioning until years after they lost re-election bids." Indeed, many turn-of-the-century observers believed that the inner city was a hopelessly brutal environment from which the masses should make every effort to escape. If the ideal environment, commonly believed to be the suburb, was to be achieved, the automobile was the best means to that end . "For better or worse," concludes Foster, "planners ultimately accepted the sprawling form of the mid-twentieth century city" and chose to live with it. Instead of condemning them we should consider their ideas within the social milieu of the times. This serious and scholarly attempt to shed light on the "who killed mass transit" debate becomes somewhat redundant at times. The fact that there were some anti-mass-transit planners, such as New York's Robert l\Ioses (who purposely made the bridges on his new parkways too low for buses) is overlooked. In many ways Foster emerges as an apologist for what some believe was indeed shortsighted planning. MICHAEL L. THALLER
The Badger State: A Documentary History of Wisconsin edited by Barbara and Justus Paul Grand Rapids , Michigan: William B . Eerclmans Publishing Company, 1979. $13.95.
one of Chicago's most important economic hinterlands. Large segments of the rail web spun from Chicago during the second h alf of the nineteenth century were consu路ucted both to exploit 'Wisconsin's rich agricultural bounty and to transport products manufactured in Chicago to \\lisconsin consumers. Railroads would later carry thousands of Chicagoans to summer homes and resorts on \Visconsin's lakes, while tile Chicago work force was augmented by a large number of \Visconsonites who streamed into the city in search of jobs. At the same time vVisconsin residents have participated in Chicago's cultural life by cheering for the Cubs, listening to WGN's " Barn Dance" program. and driving long distances to partake of Chicago's restaurant fare, drink, music, and exhibi Lions. Given these interconnections, Barbara and Justus Paul's The Badger State: A Documentary History of Wisconsin should be of some interest to Chicagoans. One of a plethora of documentary compilations spawned by the bicentennial, The Badger State is intended to "trace the history o[ \\lisconsin through a combination of contemporaneous, often firsthand accounts and scholarly interpretive essays" directed at "the general reading public" a路 well as serious scholars. The book's structure is largely chronological, with "brief historical surveys" prepared by the editors to introduce each category of "documents"-primary source material, such as letters and diary excerpts, interspersed with interpretive selections on a variety of events in Wisconsin's history. l\Iost of the documents have been gleaned from two excellent publications of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Historical Collections and the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Of the interpretive essays, Paul H . Hass's "Sin in Wisconsin" and Kenneth W. Duckett's "Suffragettes Take to the Road" deserve special mention for their uncommonly good craftsmanship. Unfortunately, this book seems to have been slapped together in a singularly pedestrian fashion. It suffers from schizophrenia: is it a collection of original documents assembled to enrich our knowledge of Wisconsin history, or is it simply an eclectic anthology of journal articles interpreting diverse episodes from Wisconsin's past? It seems as if it is the product of an incomplete inter-library loan search. This is too bad, because the editors could have been more imaginative in mining the incredibly rich lode of original documents held by the Stale Historical Society of Wisconsin's Archives \\'ISCONSIN IIAS LONG BEEN
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Reviews Di, ision-arguably the best collection of its kind in the country-instead of concocting a melange of previously published material. Two of the book's more noticea ble shortcomings also require comment. The editors apparently fail lO appreciate the fundamental differences between Wisconsin progressivism and Milwaukee's social democracy..\fore distressing are the three articles they chose lO document student protest in Wisconsin durin g the 1960s. Path et ically thin journalistic exercises, they serve to confuse rather than illuminate the events they purport to describe. Of the twenty-three index references to Chicago, several direct the reader to interesting but littleknown connections between the Windy City and vVisconsin. Some readers might be chagrined to learn, for example, that the destruction of most of Chicago's breweries during the Great Fire of 1871 prompted their competitors in i\filwaukee to fill the beery breach forever, replacing Chicago as the brewing capital of the country. The remaining Chicago breweries combined with the meat-packing industry to create a demand for what was once one of Wisconsin's most voluminous exports to Chicago-ice. Each winter, until the advent of electric refrigeration, Wisconsin lakes yielded harvests of tom of ice that were shipped by rail to Chicago to chill the city's steaks and steins. The Badger State is not a bad book. Yet given •.he richness of Wisconsin's historical heritage, one might have legitimately expected a better one. PATRICK M. QUINN
An Ordered Love: Sex Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Utopias: The Shakers, The Mormons, and The Oneida Community by Louis
J.
Kern Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1981. S24.00 .
Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the Nineteenth Century by Lawrence Foster New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Sl9.95 .
AT FIRST GLANCE, these two books appear remarkably similar in scope and purpose. Both are comparative studies of three of the best-known and most intriguing religious communal experiments in American history: the Shakers, the Mormons, and the Oneida Perfectionists. Historians have examined all three groups many times before, primarily because each seemed to dissent from prevailing middle-class American family
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norms in some remarkable, even bizarre, way. Shaker communities in New England and the Ohio Valley segregated the sexes and mandated celibacy for all members. The i\formons, in the course of their wrbulenl migration across the continent to Utah, developed the practice of plural marriage; they maintained it from the 1850s until the federal government brought severe pressure on them a generation later. The Oneida community, which also fl5Jurished around the time of th e Civil ,var, developed a practice called "complex marriage" in which men and women were permitted to have a variety of sexual partners within a system of strict community supervision in which exclusive romantic attachments were strongly discouraged. Is there anything new lO say about these groups? It turns out that there is. Kern and Foster break new ground by treating the three religious communities in a comparative manner and by trying to show that all three were part and parcel of nineteenth-century American culture rather than exotic offshoots. Such an idea would, of course, have offended the good citizens of Chicago, Rochester, or any other city of a century ago. But th ese two historians make a persuasive case. Ultimately, they both assert, the three religious utopias are interesting primarily for what they show us about uncertainties over marriage and sexuality in the disorderly American society that existed between the Revolution and the Civil War. In order to develop this point, Kern undertakes an extensive review of the scholarly literature on family life, sex roles, and the changing status of women in the nineteenth century. This leads him to his central point that the new arrangements of the three societies "provided one means of coming to grips directly with the intractable problems of sex." But while Kern claims that the societies appealed to individuals blown loose by the forces of modernization from traditional ethical and community moorings, what really seems to interest him are the clinical details of the psychological histories and sexual practices of the communitarians. The result is that parts of An Ordered Love resemble the older prurient treatments of these groups by Victorian polemicists and early historians. Kern's forays into psychobiography seem especially unfortun a te. Most of his comments on the three founders-"l\Iother" Ann Lee of the Shakers, Joseph Smith of the Mormons, and John Humphrey Noyes of Oneida-seem weakly documented, particularly in the case of Smith, the most important of the three. Relying on such works as Fawn Brodie's tendentious and outdated biography of Smith, No Afan Knows My History, Kern suggests that Mormon plural marriage developed out of Smith's own amorousness. He portrays Smith as a confidence man who found in polygamy a means to enjoy "divinely legitimitized promiscuity." "In [Smith's] psyche a delicate balance was struck between a knowledge of his own guilt and the need to be
Reviews considered innocent and saintly by his friends and neighbors," he concludes. This kind o[ thing hardly rises above the level of early anti-;\formon polemics; at best it is a trivial explanation for the appearance of the l\Iormon religion. Kern's major success at unearthing new source materials comes in his use of a manuscript collection at the Kinsey ·Institute at Indiana University which reveals a good deal about sexual practices in the Oneida community. Unfortunately, he does not include a bibliographical note discussing the scope and reliability of the Anita N. l\IcGee collection. And except in this one case, Foster's Religion and Sexuality is clear! y the more carefully researched and authoritative work of history. This is particularly apparent when one compares the two discussions of the l\[ormons. Foster obviously spent many weeks at libraries and archives in Utah and shows a thorough acquaintance with the manuscript sources on Joseph Smith and the early Mormon church. He has read, as well, the theological and polemical literature of the times, l\lormon newspapers, and important autobiographical accounts by Smith's family and associates. The strengths of Religion and Sexuality clo not encl with the exhaustive research on which it is based. Foster emphasizes a theme somewhat neglected by Kern: that these were, after all, religious movements and not merely experiments in sexual arrangements. Foster takes them seriously as religions and manages to treat their founders, as a result, in a far less reductive manner. He interprets the prophet Joseph Smith as a charismatic leader and inquires closely into how such a man translates his initial vision into radically new institutional arrangements, while at the same time holding the loyalty of most of his close disciples and attracting thousands of new followers. He treats Smith's preoccupation with sexual sin and order not as a sign o[ psychopathology but as an understandable response to the "sexual disharmony prevalent in the socially troubled region of western New York" where Smith grew up in the 1820s. Foster traces in great and loving detail the evolution of l\Iormon doctrine and practice concerning plural marriage, showing the theological basis for the new arrangement and revealing the agonizing process by which Smith himself, then his followers, came to accept it. Foster, more than Kern, relies on the historian's traditional device, the narrative. Religion and Sexuality rei:ninds us how helpful and how satisfying a narrative can be-it is one of the best methods to enable us to grasp a complex and clouded historical subject. Kern , because of his less thorough research and his tendency to offer the read'er static bits of retrospective sociological and psychological analysis, ultimately is less successful at getting the reader into the spiritual core of these religious movements. Foster's book is briefer than Kern's but it is more readable-and tells far, far more. KIRK JEFFREY
Dictionary of the History of the American Brewing and Distilling Industries by TVil!iam L. Downard Westport, Connecticut: Greenll'ood Press, 1980. S35.00.
The Great Chicago Beer Cans by Phil PospJ•chala and Joe McFarland Liberty,·ille, Illinois: Sih·er Fox Productions, 1979. Available for 6.00 (plus .50 postage and handling) by ,niting the publisher at 1153 Birch\\'OO<.l Lane, Libertr-ille, Illinois 600+8.
The Beer Poster Book by TVill Anderson Harrison , Pennsy]\'ania: Cameron House, I 977. $8.95.
A,IERICA'S EXTRAORDINARILY high rate of alcohol consumption during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has led one contemporary historian, W. J. Rorabaugh, to call the U.S. of this period the "alcoholic republic." Not only were distilled liquors this country's most popular beverages, brewing and distilling became major industries in these years. The recent growth of public interest in these industries is seen in the rising number of avid collectors of Breweriana and Distilleria (packaging, advertising, tools, and other items relating to brewing and distilling), as well as in the documentation of their histories. William L. Downard's Dictionary of the History of the American Brewing and Distilling Industries is a much-needed reference book for both the casual collector and the serious student. Downard has organized entries under four general subject headings: institutions, people, legislation, and technical terms. The Dictionary includes lengthy entries on topics such as advertising, temperance, packaging, trademarks, and the brewery workers' movement, as well as brief histories of 180 breweries and l 00 distilleries. Appendices provide statistical data on alcohol consumption patterns, liquor excise taxes, and regional distribution of breweries and distilleries. Although this work is in dictionary form, its main strength is in its interdisciplinary scope. Downard relates aspects of brewing and distill ing in America to urban, economic, labor, social, and cultural history, and explains the relationship between the two industries. For example, during the colonial and post-revolutionary periods, brewed beverages never challenged the popularity of spirits, as hops were scarce and the available stouts, ales, and porters were unappealingly heavy. Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton noticed the discrepancy between the two industries and attempted co stimulate brewing production by exempting malt liquors from the
125
Reviews Excise Tax of 1791. This action caused great hardship for distillers and led to the Whiskey Rebellion. The eventual rise of beer sales was clue to several factors: the introduction of lager beer (a lighter and more effervescent brew) by German immigrants; technological innovations, such as refrigeration, pasteurilation, and pneumatic malting; and the temperance movement's successful campaign against whiskey consumption after 1860. For all its strengths, this book is not without weaknesses. Downard never gives us a sense of what the thirteen years of Prohibition (1920-33) were like or how the illegal breweries and distilleries compared to those of the pre-Prohibition era in terms of productivity, product quality, or popularity. The most obvious and serious omission, however, is Downarcl's failure to include an entry on the saloon, an important neighborhood center for social and political activity in the nineteenth century. A saloon was a place where transients could have their mail sent or where they could get a free meal, a place where local groups could hold meetings or local businessmen could find men to work for them. Most important, saloons fostered a mutually beneficial political relationship between the breweries and the political party in power. These omissions aside, Downard's work offers an excellent study of two industries that probably had more impact on public tastes and manners than any before the rise of the automobile. This book challenges other historians to continue research in this neglected area. The story of Chicago's small local breweries is told by authors Phil Pospychala and Joe McFarland in The Great Chicago Beer Cans. ¡written primarily as a reference work for beer can collectors, this guide is also useful to anyone with an interest in Chicago history. For each of the 21 post-Prohibition Chicago breweries discussed in this work, the authors have included a photograph of the plant, a brief history of the brewery, and examples of the different beer cans produced by each (157 beer cans illustrate the section on the Peter Hand Brewery, which closed in 1978). J\ brief history of the canning process and the brewing industry as a whole would have enhanced this otherwise complete publication. Prices of the beer cans illustrated are not included; thus the cans depicted are not portrayed merely as nostalgic collectibles or financial investments for the future, but as cultural artifacts of the various periods. 1 oted breweriana collector Will Anderson has gathered 23 pre-Prohibition beer advertisements in The Beer Poster Boole These carefully chosen, colorful posters illustrate five dominant themes in beer advertising: pretty women, festive occasions, historic or patriotic themes, images of masc1,1linity, and pictures of the brewery plants. They are accompanied by a brief history of each brewery. The uneven quality of the reproductions, however, is a serious flaw in this publication. RUSSELL LEWIS
126
God's Frontiersmen: The Yale Band in Illinois by John Randolph Willis Washington, D.C.: Uni,¡ersity Press of America, Inc., l 9i9. $9.25.
Pioneer's Progress: Illinois College, 1829-1979 by Charles E. Frank Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1979. $17.50.
A BRIEF PERUSAL of an Illinois highway map shows the tremendous number of small, liberal arts colleges in the state. Illinois College, established at Jacksonville in 1829, is one of the oldest of these institutions. Initially conceived as "a seminary of learning" by seven reform-oriented theology students from Yale College, it has evolved into a modern liberal arts college in the twentieth century. In God's Frontiersmen, John Randolph Willis presents a narrative history of the young men who went west to perform missionary work and to establish a college which would provide the frontier with an educated clergy. This work details the formation of the "Yale band," including biographical information on each of its members, and considers the relationship between the group and the American Home ]\[issionary Society, their religious and educational efforts in Illinois, and the contemporary social issues they confronted-particularly the slavery question-from the late 1820s until the outbreak of the Civil War. The participants in the Yale band, like many antebellum Americans, believed that evangelical religion and the moral reform of the nation went hand in hand. ,\ccordingly, both endeavors played important roles in the early history of Illinois College. For example, most of the founders and the first president of the institution, Edward Beecher, who served from 1830 to 1844, were adamantly opposed to slavery. Since these men exercised a pronounced influence on the students and local residents, the college and community soon developed a reputation as a bastion of abolitionism. Despite severe criticism and, in some cases, a loss o[ patronage, Illinois College maintained its stance against human bondage and exerted a powerful influence in that regard both in Illinois and outside the state. God's Frontiersmen is apparently a reprint of a dissertation or thesis written in the 1940s, and therefore its secondary sources are somewhat dated. However, it is solidly documented with a variety of journals, letters, and personal reminiscences, and, in lieu of more recent work on the subject, should be helpful to students in this field. A more recent study, Charles E. Frank's Pioneer's Progress, is basically an institutional history of
Illinois College. This well-written, liYely account will provide interested readers with a general overview of the college from its inception through the first one hundred and fifty years of its existence. Part I of the study is an abridged version of Charles H. Rammelkamp's monumental work, Illinois College : A Centennial History 1829-1929 (New Haven, 1928). This section consists primarily of a series of biographical sketches of the presidents of the college from 1830 to 1925. While there is some interesting institutional history interwoven throug_hout, alumni and supporters of the school will probably find Part II more enjoyable. In this ha![ of the book Professor Frank, a longtime member of the faculty, presents more recent developments, descriptions of campus life, and some interesting anecdotes. Illinois College has overcome challenges ranging from the 1932 bank failure which nearly destroyed the college to the social upheaval which marked most campuses in the 1960s. Dr. Frank attributes at least some of the college's endurance to the basic conservatism of the student body. While prone to follow campus fads, such as "streaking," most students have tended to shun the radical causes espoused by many of their contemporaries. This alone is an interesting co~trast to the activism of President Beecher and his associates. In conclusion, the author of Pioneer's Progress has attempted to assess the future of Illinois C~llege. In spite of an almost universal decline m college and university enrollments, the accompanying fiscal problems, and the t:end away from the liberal arts toward more lucrative career fields, Professor Frank still optimistically forecasts a "bright" future for the college. And those of us who still believe in the value of the type of education offered by schools such as Illinois College sincerely hope that he is correct. M. GUY BISHOP
The Reviewers -Paula K. Benkart is Assistant Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University, Philadelphia. A specialist in ethnic and urban history, her most recent publication is the major entry on Hungarians in The Harvard Encyclopedia of A merican Ethnic Groups (1980). -M. Guy Bishop teaches history at Wayne State College, Wayne, Nebraska. -Kirk Jeffrey is Associate Professor of History at Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota. -Russell Lewis is a doctoral candidate in American Studies at the University of Michigan. -Randall 1\1. Miller is Professor of History and Director of American Studies at Saint Joseph's University , Philadelphia. Among his books is The Kaleidoscopic Le11s: How Hollywood Views Ethnic Groups (1980). -W. Gordon Milne is Professor of English and Chairman of the American Studies Program at Lake Forest College. -Patrick M. Quinn is University Archivist at Northwestern University. -Michael L. Thaller is Associate Professor of Geography at Carroll College in Waukesha , Wisconsin.
Notes Guide to Illinois Archives Many of our readers will be pleased to know that the Illinois State Library has recently published a special archival issue of its journal, Illinois Libraries. Guest-edited by Patrick Quinn, 1orthwestern University Archivist, the issue is divided into two sections: "Archives in Illinois" (Part 1, llfarch 1981) and " Archival Repositories in the Chicago Area" (Part 2, April 1981), both of which contain surveys of numerous public and private repositories and their holdings. Single copies of the publication are available at no charge by writing Illinois Libraries, Illinois State Library, Centennial Building, Springfield, Illinois 62756.
Community History Conference The State Historical Society of Wisconsin will sponsor a conference, "Artifacts and the Interpretation of Community History," on October 7-9, 1982. The conference will explore the relevance of artifacts and the contribution of their study to innovative research on the history of families, ethnicity, work, and community economic development. Sessions will be held on the interpretation of new ideas in community history through museum exhibits. Conference sessions will be held at the State Historical Society headquarters building in Madison , and Old \Vorlcl Wisconsin, the Society's outdoor ethnic history museum. For more information, contact Tom llfcKay, Museum Interpretation Specialist, State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 816 State Street, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.
Norwegian -American Historical Association A symposium on Norwegian-American life in .Chicago, sponsored by the Chicago History Committee of the Norwegian-American Historical Association, will be held Saturday, October 23, 1982, at Norway Center, Kedzie at Fullerton, Chicago. Papers on many aspects of Chicago's Norwegian-American colony will be presented, and the conference will conclude with a program of music composed in Chicago. For more information, contact Rolf H. Erickson, Conference Coordinator, 1116 Davis Street, Evanston, Illinois 60201. 127
The Chicago Historical Society Clark Street at North Avenue Chicago, Illinois 60614 Telephone: 3 I 2-642-4600 Officers Stewart S. Dixon , President Philip W. Hummer, 1st Vice-President Philip D. Block III, 2nd Vice-President Gardner H . Stern, Treasurer Bryan S. Reid, Jr., Secretary Emmett Dedmon , Assistant Secretary-Treasurer Theodore Tieken, lmm ecliate Past President
Director Ellsworth H. Brown
Trustees Bowen Blair Philip D. Block III Cyrus Colter Emmett Dedmon Stewart S. Dixon i\Irs. Paul A. Florian III James R. Getz Edward Hines Philip W. Hummer
Mrs. Frank D. Mayer Mrs . Brooks l\fcCormick John T. l\fcCutcheon, Jr. Andrew McNally III Arthur E. Osborne, Jr. Bryan S. Reid, Jr. Harold Byron Smith, Jr. Gardner H. Stern Theodore Tieken
The Chicago Historical Society is a privately endowed institution devoted to collecting, preserving, and interpreting the history of the city of Chicago, the state of Illinois, and selected areas of American history. It must look to its members and friends for continuing fin ancial support. Contributions to the Society are tax-deductible, and appropriate recognition is accorded major gifts. The Society encourages potential contributors to phone or write the director's office to discuss the Society's needs.
Membership Membership is open to anyone interested in the Society's activities and objectives. Classes o( annual membership and dues are as follows: Individual, S25; Family, S30. Members receive the Society's quarterly magazine, Chicago History; a quarterly Calendar of Events listing Society programs; invitations to special programs ; free admission to the building at all times; reserved seats at movies and concerts in our auditorium; and a 10% di count on books and other merchandise purchased in the Museum Store.
Hours Exhibition galleries are open daily from 9: 30 to 4:30; Sunday from 12 :00 to 5:00. Research collections are open Tuesday through Saturday from 9:30 to 4:30. The Graphics Collection is open from I: 30 to 4: 30. The Society is closed on Christmas, New Year's, and Thanksgiving.
Life Trustees
Education and Public Programs
Mrs. C. Phillip Miller Hermon Dunlap Smith
Guided tours, assemblies, slide talks, gallery talks, craft demonstrations, and a variety of special programs for all ages, from pre-school through senior citizen.
Honorary Trustee Jane Byrne, Mayor, City of Chicago
Admission Fees for Non-members Adults, .$1; Children (6-17), 50¢; Senior Citizens, 25¢. Admission is free on Mondays. Single copies of Chicago History, published quanerly, are 3.00 by mail; 2.50 at newsstands , bookshops, and the Museum Store.
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On a Hot f!fJ'
" " c 1911-1920. For city chi ldren , the co.ming of the ice wagon was once the Hot Day,days. ¡ CHS , ICHi- 14082 , gift of Un ited Chant1es. Cartoon , of Onhot a summer high po int