The Lost City! Drama of the Fire Fiend

Title: The Lost City! Drama of the Fire Fiend, or Chicago, as it was, and as it is! and its glorious future! a vivid and truthful picture of all of interest connected with the destruction of Chicago and the terrible fires of the great Northwest by Frank Luzerne and John G. Wells

Location: Internet Archive     Date 1872

“When the general alarm sounded, and all the steamers flew through the streets, prolonging the boom of the bell in shrill shrieks, thousands of citizens rushed out to learn the location and progress of the conflagration. Most of the buildings in Dekoven and Taylor streets wore already destroyed, and the great tongues of flame were licking up the wooden structures in that part of the city as though they were the merest tinder boxes, leaving no trace of their form or material to mark the place’where they stood, but a moment before. The crackling of the fire among the dry lumber resembled the regular discharge of musketry by an army corps in retreat ; but there were still worse evidences of panic than are usually displayed by a routed army, in the hundreds of people, men, women and children, already fleeing to a place of safety, and bearing upon their shoulders such articles of household use as seemed to theni valuable at the moment. They were utterly demoralized, and mingled screams of agony, shouts of alarm, prayers and imprecations, with occasional blows right and left, in a jangling noise of words unknown, and gabble without meaning. Eyes blind with blood, and features wildly distorted with terror, people unclad, half-clad, some wrapped in bed-clothing, women dressed in the apparel of the opposite sex, and some protected only by their night-wrappers, carrying beds, babies, tables, tubs, carpets, crockery, cradles, almost every conceivable thing of household use, formed the most noticeable features of this terrific route.”

The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls

Full Title: The Century World’s Fair Book for Boys and Girls: Being the Adventures of Harry and Philip with Their Tutor Mr. Douglass at the World’s Columbian Exposition by Tudor Jenks (1857-1922)

Location: Internet Archive     Date c. 1893

The Administration Building

This charming book on the Columbian Exposition is described as, ” A humorous fictional account of a visit to the World’s Columbian exposition illustrated with actual photographs and sketches of the buildings, exhibits, and fairgrounds.” Normally I do not include fiction in my listings , but the numerous illustrations and photographs make this an extremely worthwhile read for those interested in the Fair .  Jenks provides some quite readable narrative and gives us a glimpse of not only the Fair, but traveling by sleeper car and finding a place to stay in Chicago and Chicago itself.  Unfortunately, the amazing photographs (some of the construction of the Fair) are not credited.

The story begins at the boy’s school in New York…

MR. DOUGLASS wants to see you, Master Harry,” said the maid, coming to the door of the boys’ room. “What ’s he found out now, I wonder?” said Harry to Philip, in a low tone. ” I don’t remember anything I have done lately.”

” He ’s in a hurry, too,” said the girl, closing the door. Harry ran down to Mr. Douglass’s room on the first floor. The two boys were beginning their preparation for college, and were living in a suburb of New York city with their tutor,
Mr. Douglass, a college graduate, and a man of about thirty-five. Harry’s father, Mr. Blake, was abroad on railroad business, and did not expect to return for some months. Philip was Harry’s cousin, but the two boys were very unlike in disposition as will be seen. Their bringing up may have been responsible for some of the differences in traits and character, for Harry was a city boy, while his cousin was country-bred.

When Harry knocked at the door of Mr. Douglass’s study, he knew by the tutor’s tone in inviting him in that the teacher had not called him simply for a trivial reprimand. It was certainly something serious; perhaps news from Harry’s father and mother.

” Sit down, Harry,” said the tutor, ” and don’t be worried,” he added, seeing how solemn the boy looked. ” I have had a message by cable from your father; but it ’s good news, not bad. Read it.” He handed Harry the despatch. It read :

Take Hal and Phil to Fair. My expense. Letter to Chicago. See Farwell about money and tickets.

“Rather sudden, is n’t it?” said Mr. Douglass, smiling.

“Yes,” said Harry, “but immense! Don’t you think so?”

” I ‘m glad to go,” the tutor said. ” It seems to me that a visit to the Fair is worth more than all the studying here you boys could do in twice the time you ‘11 spend there ; and it ’s a lucky opportunity for me.”

“Then you ‘ll go?” said Harry, to whom the news seemed a bit of fairy story come true, with the Atlantic cable for a magic wand.

” Of course,” answered the tutor. “The only thing that surprises me is the quickness of your father’s decision.”

“That ’s just like him,” said Harry. ” He ’s a railroad man, you know, and they always go at high pressure. Why, he ‘d rather talk by telephone, even when he can’t get anything but a buzz and a squeak on the wire, than send a messenger who ‘d get there in half the time.”

” But has he said anything about sending you before? “

” No. The fact is, people abroad are slow to know what a whacker this Fair is ! They think it ’s a mere foreign exposition. Father ’s just found out that Uncle Sam has covered himself with glory, and now he wants Phil and me to see the bird from beak to claws the whole American Eagle.”

An example of the construction photographs. "Making 'staff'" (the material used to cover the frames of the buildings.)

Chicago To-Day: The Labour War in America

Title: Chicago To-Day: The Labour War in America by William T. Stead

Location: Internet Archive     Date: 1894

In this often forgotten book  by English social activist, William T. Stead, best known for  If  Christ Came to Chicago, the tragic fire at the First Regiment Armory in April, 1893, is used as a metaphor for the  issues broiling between Chicago workers and its industrialists, such as George Pullman. 1893 had seen an economic recession in the United States. When profits of Pullman’s company declined, he drastically cut the wages of his workers but stubbornly refused to lower the rent on the workers’ homes. In fact, he refused to even discuss it. The result was The Pullman Strike of 1894 that expanded to become a national railway strike.

The First Armoury in Chicago was last year the scene of a fatal fire. It is a massive fortress of brown stone, standing in Michigan Avenue within gunshot of the Millionaire’s Row, a grim and burly warder behind whose shadow Messrs. Pullman, Armour, and Field can sleep in peace. When I was in Chicago it was an empty ruin. The interior was heaped with ashes and debris. The fire-scarred ruins which were still standing testified to the fierceness of the flames which had raged as in a furnace within the four walls of the Armoury. When the fire broke out it was at night, after the massive sallyport had been securely locked, and the inmates — two or three coloured men employed as janitors — had gone to sleep. No sooner had the alarm been given than the fire-engines were on the spot, only to discover that all access to the massive Armoury was impossible. The lofty walls, erected of a strength sufficient to defy all attacks by hostile mobs or by an army unprovided with artillery, offered no point of ingress for the fireman with his hose. The narrow loopholed windows, which were a safe protection against bullets, were not less efficacious against water. The only means of obtaining access to the building so as to fight the flames, which were every moment gaining ground, was by the door. But the door was locked. The key could not be found; and from the interior of the great building flames mingled with smoke climbed up into the midnight air.

The firemen were baffled. While they were anxiously deliberating what should be done, their attention was suddenly arrested by a terrible sound. Inside the building, fast becoming a flaming fiery furnace, were heard sounds that told only too plainly that human beings were within, frantic with dread of being burned alive. The firemen tried in vain to burst open the massive door. It defied their utmost efforts. A howitzer would not have burst open the portal of the Armoury. Huge sledge-hammers pounding upon the ironclad gate only served as signals of unavailing hope to the doomed inside. Then remembering the tremendous pressure of water, they turned jets from all available hose upon the stubborn door. But all these  tons of steady pressure failed even to strain the door on its hinges. The knocking; within grew fainter and fainter. The cries of agonised despair became weaker and weaker. Eager and stalwart men, with all the resources of the great city at their back, were straining every effort that ingenuity could suggest or human energy could carry out to rescue the doomed prisoners on the other side of the door. All was in vain. The door was locked. The key was lost. And so it came to pass that the feeble knocking ceased. No more cries were heard, and when the fire had burnt itself out three or four calcined corpses were found on the other side of the bolted door.

It was a grim and horrible experience, not to be thought of without a shudder ; but it resembles only too closely the miserable tragedy at which civilisation is now assisting in the city of Chicago. The edifice of our competitive commercialism built four-square to all the winds that blow, massive, imposing, impregnable, has taken fire. But the door is locked, and neither is there any key forthcoming to unlock the wards of the great gate through which the inmates might go free.  The world watches and sickens with horror ; but the fire burns, the flames mount higher and higher, and there seems to be no escape. It is the tragedy of the Armoury fire rehearsed on a thousandfold greater scale.

Chicago has become for the moment only too authentic a reproduction of the Bull of Phalarus, nor can any way of escape be suggested for the victims. The denunciations of the press, and the invectives which are freely showered on all concerned from one side to the other, are as impotent as the hammers and the water-jets with which the firemen endeavoured to force open the door of the Armoury. Day by day as the Old World and the New keep watching the progress of the blaze, the more hopeless seem to be the efforts to extinguish the conflagration. It all results from one thing. The door is locked, and the key is not to be found. The key in the present instance was at first in the keeping of Mr. Pullman, to whose dogged refusal to permit any reference whatever of the dispute to  arbitration is due the whole of the catastrophe ; but its real root lies deeper. It is to be found in the rooted distrust which is the canker of American civilisation. In business, men have forgotten God, they have lost faith in man, and they are reaping the penalty. From of old was it not written, ” If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat of the fat of the land, but, if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured by the sword, for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.”

This is not merely true of the immediate dispute and of the refusal of Mr. Pullman to accept any form of reference to arbitration. In every direction, wherever we turn, we are confronted with the same phenomenon. In place of the co-operation of confidence, there is everywhere the fiercest rivalry of cut-throat competition, eating confidence out of the heart of man. If, as Aristotle said long ago, civilisation can be measured by the extent to which suspicion has been replaced by confidence, then, in the headlong rush after the Almighty Dollar, the attainment of which has almost become the chief end of man, we are face to face with a very real retrogression towards barbarism.

It would seem as if we were witnessing the breakup of the old commercialism, which seems as if it were about to expire amid convulsions possibly as violent as those which marked the disappearance of feudalism from Europe at the close of last century. But he would 1)C a bold man who would assert that even now the labour pains of the new era have begun, they may be but false pains, and the new birth of time may still be many years distant. Mankind is slow to change, and as long as an old system can be made to do, it lasts,  only when things are quite intolerable do the children of men, more frequently in black despair than in gladsome hope, venture to abandon the old for the untried new.

Even the old Feudalism, which was supposed to have expired in earthquake and crack of doom, contrived to creep back again with indispensable modifications after millions had died in order that it might not die, and modern Commercialism seems to have no less firm a grip upon the world which it has ruled so long. For one reason, its heirs are not ready for the heritage, and we must, therefore, regard the industrial convulsion which has just taken place in America as rather a warning than a judgment. But of the significance of the warning there can be no doubt. As usual, it is the economic crisis which shakes the old system to the ground. At the end of last century, it was the deficit which forced on the Eevolution, and never was a truer word spoken than that it was a deficit which saved the Republic. But for the deficit, the old regime might have continued secure in all the panoply of its power. So now, at the end of the 19th century, the unemployed are our industrial deficit which yawns wider and wider, and refuses to be choked.

All the trouble in Chicago’s at this moment has arisen from the presence of the unemployed. As John Bright long ago remarked, whenever there are two men trying to get one man’s job, wages go down ; and it is the presence of a mass of unemployed men in and about Chicago which has at once provoked the struggle, and led to the outburst of violence which has attracted the attention of an amazed and indignant world.

In Africa by John T. McCutcheon

Title: In Africa: Hunting Adventures in the Big Game Country by John Tinney McCutcheon

Location: Google Books     Date: 1910

Fans of Chicago Tribune cartoonist, John T. McCutcheon, will be particularly interested in his personal account of his African adventures. The book is filled with his whimsical prose and sketches plus many of his personal photographs. What is most interesting to note is that eleven years later, McCutcheon would be elected the first president of the Chicago Zoological Association. In his autobiography, Drawn From Memory, McCutcheon credits his African expedition as the reason he was chosen to be president of the new Brookfield Zoo.

Getting ready for lion shooting.

CHAPTER I

THE PREPARATION FOR DEPARTURE. EXPERIENCES WITH WILLING FRIENDS AND ADVISERS

Ever since I can remember, almost, I have cherished a modest ambition to hunt lions and elephants. At an early age, or, to be more exact, at about that age which finds most boys wondering whether they would rather be Indian fighters or sailors, I ran across a copy of Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent. It was full of fascinating adventures. I thrilled at the accounts which spoke in terms of easy familiarity of “express” rifles and “elephant” guns, and in my vivid but misguided imagination, I pictured an elephant gun as a sort of cannon—a huge, unwieldy arquebus—that fired a ponderous shell. The old woodcuts of daring hunters and charging lions inspired me with unrest and longing—the longing to bid the farm farewell and start down the road for Africa. Africa! What a picture it conjured up in my fancy! Then, as even now, it symbolized a world of adventurous possibilities; and in my boyhood fancy, it lay away off there—somewhere—vaguely—beyond mountains and deserts and oceans, a vast, mysterious, unknown land, that swarmed with inviting dangers and alluring romance.

One by one my other youthful ambitions have been laid away. I have given up hope of ever being an Indian fighter out on the plains, because the pesky redskins have long since ceased to need my strong right arm to quell them. I also have yielded up my ambition to be a sailor, or rather, that branch of the profession in which I hoped to specialize— piracy—because, for some regretful reason, piracy has lost much of its charm in these days of great liners. There is no treasure to search for any more, and the golden age of the splendid clipper ships, with their immense spread of canvas, has given way to the unromantic age of the grimy steamer, about which there is so little to appeal to the imagination. Consequently, lion hunting is about the only thing left—except wars, and they are few and far between.

And so, after suffering this “lion-hunting” ambition to lie fallow for many years, I at last reached a day when it seemed possible to realize it. The chance came in a curiously unexpected way. Mr. Akeley, a man famed in African hunting exploits, was to deliver a talk before a little club to which I belonged. I went, and as a result of my thrilled interest in every word he said, I met him and talked with him and finally was asked to join a new African expedition that he had in prospect. With the party were to be Mrs. Akeley, with a record of fourteen months in the big game country, and Mr.  Stephenson, a hunter with many years of experience in the wild places of the United States, Canada and Mexico. My hunting experience had been  chiefly gained in my library, but for some strange reason, it did not seem incongruous that I should begin my real hunting in a lion and elephant country.

I had all the prowess of a Tartarin, and during the five months that elapsed before I actually set forth, I went about ray daily work with a mind half dazed with the delicious consciousness that I was soon to become a lion hunter. I feared that modern methods might have taken away much of the old- time romance of the sport, but I felt certain that there was still to be something left in the way of excitement and adventure.

The succeeding pages of this book contain the chronicle of the nine delightful months that followed my departure from America.

Chicago’s Left Bank

Title: Chicago’s Left Bank by Alson J. Smith

Location: Google Books       Date: 1953

This is one of my favorite books on the subject of literary Chicago. Smith has a witty style that matches his topic and, I believe, will grab you from the get go. Tracing the history of Chicago’s literati we get a glimpse of the bohemians in their native environment – Towertown. You’ll love it.

Out In Chicago, the only genuinely civilized city in the New World, they take the fine arts seriously and get into such frets and excitements about them as are raised nowhere else save by baseball, murder, political treachery, -foreign wars, and romantic loves . . . almost one fancies the world bumped by a flying asteroid, and the Chicago River suddenly turned into the Seine.—Henry L. Mencken in the Smart Set.

Chapter I
Montmartre in the Midwest

EVERYTHING in Chicago dates from the Year of the Fire, 1871. Post anno incendii, the chief structure left standing on the north bank of the Chicago River was the waterworks building on East Chicago Avenue. The tall stone tower of this inelegant edifice looked out over the fire-blackened ruins of what had been one of the city’s better residential sections, the Near North Side.

It was only natural that when the rebuilding began, the area in the immediate vicinity of the old water tower should be dubbed “Towertown.” And, like the arch in New York’s Washington Square and the golden dome of Sacre Coeur on Montmartre, that tower was destined to cast a long shadow over the world of arts and letters. In the years between 1912 and 1924, it was the geographical center of what was perhaps the most vital literary and artistic upsurge in the history of the country. At least Papa Mencken thought so; in 1920 he went to England to startle the dilettantes of Fleet Street with the information that the Germans had really won the war and that Chicago, Illinois, was the literary capital of the universe.

The part about Chicago was approximately true, although book critic Harry Hansen, speaking for the city’s better classes, angrily denied the accusation. In those years corn-fed hopefuls from all over the Midwest flowed into the free-and-easy bohemia of the gigantic abattoir by Lake Michigan. They came to read their poems to Harriet Monroe in the studio at 543 Cass Street, to study under Lorado Taft at the Art Institute, and to chase fire-engines for Henry Justin Smith and the Chicago Daily News in return for the privilege of rubbing shoulders in the city room with Carl Sandburg and Ben Hecht.

Towertown was the center of this renaissance. It was happily situated between the palaces of a rich residential area, the Lake Shore Drive “Gold Coast,” and the miasmal slums of Little Hell. Little Hell, like the deteriorated areas around New York’s Greenwich Village, was largely Italian, and the cheap spaghetti parlors of the neighborhood had atmosphere to fit the temperament and price to fit the pocketbook of the impoverished artists and writers in the batik-curtained coach houses, studios, and stables of Towertown. North Avenue, main artery of the old German “Nort’ Seit’,” bounded bohemia on the north, and the river, with its many bridges into the Loop, was on the south. Bisecting the whole area was the bright gut of the North Clark Street rialto, traditional main drag of hobohemia and the demi-world, with its saloons, night clubs, gambling joints and “hotels.” Rents were cheap, the Loop was within easy walking distance, and the finest beach in the city was at the foot of Oak Street. All this and Ireland’s, too—for one of the world’s best sea food restaurants was on North Clark Street, and still is.

Chicago By Day and Night

Title: Chicago By Day and Night: The Pleasure Seeker’s Guide to the Paris of America

Location: Internet Archive     Date: 1892

They called her “the Paris of America.” If a visitor couldn’t find a recreation or diversion to satisfy his or her taste, it was their fault, not Chicago’s.

In 1892 all eyes were on the city as it prepared for the Columbian Exposition to open the following year. Guide books galore were published to entice the visitor to not only the Fair, but the fair city. Chicago had a lot to offer and she boasted her wares. One such guide was Chicago By Day and Night and it paints a vivid portrait of life in the city – for those who were able to pay the price or willing to take the chance. (Note: the author of the book is not listed, but is thought to be Harold Richard Vynne. Vynne died in the Cook County Poorhouse Hospital in 1903 of “alcoholic dementia.”)

There are the usual guide book offerings – suggestions on where to stay, recommended restaurants, theaters, etc. But, there are also survival tips for the urban greenhorn. You just don’t see this in today’s Chicago guidebooks…:

PERILS AND PITFALLS

IT is nor insulting the intelligence of the stranger to warn him against the unscrupulous persons who will beset his path,for they are so numerous and make their appearance at such unexpected times and places that the very smartest of us ,all are occasionally in danger of being victimized. There are probably more “crooked” people in Chicago at the present writing than any other city in the Union, and it is altogether probable that this number will be largely increased during the progress of the Fair.

The criminal classes who infest Chicago at all times are extremely varied. The common tough, whose exterior and manner of comporting himself proclaim his worthlessness, is not very much to be feared. Such gentry will be well cared for by the police during the great rush to the Fair. Indeed, it is quite probable that all suspicious or known disreputable characters will be spotted at once and given a chance to leave the city, a failure to avail themselves of which, will result in their imprisonment until the Fair is over. But there are other gentry who are infinitely more dangerous. The term “bunco-steerer” perhaps best signifies their calling. The term bunco-steerer originally meant a decoy, or “capper,” who led or “steered” the confiding stranger against a bunco “lay-out.” Lately, however, its meaning has broadened. By “bunco-steerer” is now meant the oily, genial gentleman who approaches you on the street corners and politely inquires after your health, supplementing this query with another as to whether you would not like a chance to get into any sort of game whatsoever. The bunco-steerer will turn his wits to almost any scheme to make money at the expense of his more honest fellow-creatures. He belongs to the great army of confidence men who prey upon mankind in general and upon gullible strangers in large cities in particular.

The confidence man! Ah, beware of him if you value your peace. He may make his appearance at any moment and in any guise. The very suave and polished gentleman who sits opposite to you at the table in the dining car and chats so delightfully with you as you ride into the city together may be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with designs on your purse. The very clumsy confidence man who walks up and slaps you on the back with a cordial “How de do, Jones, how are all the folks?” and immediately tries to scrape up an acquaintance, is not to be dreaded except by very green people who have never been in a big city before. It is the polished villain, the polite, well-dressed person who, while preserving a dignified demeanor, nevertheless tries to scrape up an acquaintance and then proceeds to divulge as he will sooner or later a chance by which a little easy money can be made, who is ‘to be feared. A very good rule to go by is to preserve a polite manner to all strangers, but not to enter into confidential relations with any man who hasn’t been introduced to you by some one whom you thoroughly know. The pleasures of a chance acquaintance may be great but they are accompanied by dangers to your purse. If you go into a quiet little game of cards at a hotel it is a “cinch” that you will lose your money, because the men who invite you into it are cheats and will not give you a fair show. They are confederates and the money they show cuts no figure, because they have entered into a combination to fleece the stranger.

The rhapsodical gentleman who rushes up to you and proceeds to tell you glibly of all the people who live in your town has spotted you for a victim. Look out for him. It is easy to account for the knowledge he displays. Such people make a habit of hanging about the hotel and studying the history of every guest. That is how this sleek gentleman succeeded in ascertaining so much about you, my friend. The hotel people watch very closely for such gentry and when one of them is caught he is never given an opportunity to repeat his offense.

There are two bits of advice which if followed closely will probably save the unwary stranger from all harm. In the first place never enter a place you would be ashamed to have your family at home know you entered; and in the second place never sign any papers or lend any money or valuables at the request of strangers.

Among the devices for snaring the wayfarer’s honest dollar is the “snap” auction sale. Passing along a leading thoroughfare one encounters a big shop flanked on the outside by two well dressed young men who are doing all they can to attract custom. Inside, a red-faced auctioneer is expatiating on the magnificence of the plate and jewelry he is offering for sale. Don’t be deceived by the plate and jewelry. It would probably be expensive at $5 a ton. Nevertheless, the auctioneer is eloquent. It is possible,too, that he may exhibit for a moment a really valuable watch or ring, only to deftly conceal it and substitute a worthless one for it as soon as somebody shall have made a bid. Scattered about among the spectators are numerous “cappers” who, whenever an article is put up, bid a few dollars against each other. As soon as a stranger makes a bid of any sort the article is promptly knocked down to him and handed over. When he gets away he discovers too late that he has been duped.

One has not space at command to cite all the methods by which the unwary are fleeced out of their wealth. Besides, new and treacherous schemes are constantly being invented. It is impossible to tell what plot the genius of the confidence man will strike next. These shrewd geniuses have even gone so far as the selling of banana stalks to farmers for seed. It must not be supposed by this that all Chicagoans are dishonest, although many foolish people who contrive to get fleeced generally go home uttering loud cries at the greed and dishonesty of the big city by the lake. But as long as there are geese to be plucked there will be rascals looking out for the chance to do the plucking. Take reasonable precautions and you stand in no danger. But make merry with chance companions in questionable resorts, and, unless Providence has taken you under its especial charge, you will go home a sadder, wiser and poorer man.

Eastland Disaster Relief, American Red Cross, 1915-1918

Title: Eastland Disaster Relief, American Red Cross, 1915-1918: after the capsizing of the steamer “Eastland” in the Chicago river, July 24, 1915 to completion of relief work. Final report, Eastland disaster relief committee, Chicago chapter, American Red Cross.

Location: Google Books     Date: 1918

The American Red Cross sprang into action when the Eastland disaster occurred and spent three years assisting its victims. Be sure to read the “Case Reports” for a personal view of the tragedy.

Removing the dead from the Eastland.

The capsizing of the lake passenger steamship Eastland, which caused the death of 812 persons, occurred in the Chicago river at the Clark Street bridge, in the very heart of the City of Chicago, about 7:20 o ‘clock on the morning of Saturday, July 24, 1915.

The boat was one of four which the employees of the “Western Electric Company had chartered to carry 7,000 men, women and children on an annual outing to Michigan City, Ind. The Eastland was to have left the dock at 7:30 o ‘clock, and was to have been followed at halfhour intervals by the other steamers.

The excursionists began to arrive at the dock as early as 6 o’clock in the morning, wishing to sail on the first boat and make the day as long as possible. As soon as the gates were thrown open a solid line of people, two abreast, moved upon the boat, and by 7:10 o’clock there were approximately 2,500 persons aboard.

The Indiana Transportation Company, which furnished the boats for the excursionists, had announced that if the boat were loaded before the hour set for sailing, she would not wait until 7:30. When the boat was filled, preparations were made to sail at once. One line had been cast off and the boat was beginning to swing into the stream.

The 2,500 or more passengers, largely women and children, were in high spirits. The little ones were romping as well as they could on decks so crowded that one could scarcely walk, and the older ones were waving and shouting to their friends who were boarding the other boats.

About 7:10 o’clock the boat listed slowly over away from the dock, swayed back almost to an even keel, then began to list again, and slowly turned over and lay flat on her port side in some 18 feet of water, with the keel only a few feet from the dock.

At first the people thought there was nothing unusual about the movement of the boat. It was not until the second listing had progressed so far as to overturn a refrigerator that the crowd became alarmed.

Then the cheers and wavings and shouts of glee gave way to cries of terror, and a mad panic ensued. A number who were on the starboard side of the boat, next the dock, scrambled ashore or dropped into the water and were pulled out by rescuers, for the boat turned over very slowly.

Several hundred, gathered on the upper or hurricane deck, were spilled overboard into the river, and swam ashore, or were saved by the rescuers.

But many of the hundreds between decks were penned in and drowned or crushed to death. Some of the imprisoned held on until holes were cut in the side of the boat which remained above water, and were taken out alive, but terribly shattered by the horror. Hundreds were dead when finally the rescuers reached them.

News of the tragedy spread rapidly. The fire and police departments were called out; the river boats of both departments and other craft came to the rescue; scores of volunteer rescuers plunged into the work, and the task of taking the passengers from the boat and from the water where they had leaped or had been thrown, went on for hours. Some 1,700 reached shore alive, while the dead were already being laid in windrows along the bank.

The tally of dead finally reached 812, with a considerable list of injured, some of whom died later.

The people of Chicago sprang at once to the relief of those who had been bereaved. Entire families had been wiped out. Parents had gone to their death leaving a number of children. Sons and daughters had been drowned, leaving the parents childless. All the bread winners of other families had perished, leaving a number of dependents. And everywhere were funeral expenses and doctor bills to be met, while the survivors were almost or quite crazed.

Such was the situation when the American Red Cross was called upon to take charge of the relief work, prevent suffering for want of necessities of life among the survivors, see that the dead were given suitable burial, and adjust living conditions for the hundreds of women and children left without their natural protectors.

The accident was less than an hour old when the American Red Cross, represented by John J. O’Connor, Director of its Central Division, was at work at the scene.

Cartoons by McCutcheon by John T. McCutcheon

Title: Cartoons by McCutcheon : A Selection of one Hundred Drawings By John T. McCutcheon by John Tinney McCutcheon

Location: Google Books      Date: 1903

John T. McCutcheon worked for the Chicago Record-Herald before joining the Chicago Tribune in 1903. The cartoons in this volume originally appeared in the Chicago Record-Herald and includes McCutcheon’s “Boy in Springtime” series and many of his “Pictoral Sermonettes.”

CONCERNING
MR. McCUTCHEON’S CARTOONS

T HOSE  who have studied and admired Mr. McCutcheon’s cartoons in the daily press doubtless have been favorably impressed by the two eminent characteristics of his intent. First, he cartoons public men ‘without grossly insulting them. Second, he recognizes the very large and important fact that political events do not fill the entire horizon of the American people. It has not been very many years since the newspaper cartoon was a savage caricature of some public man who had been guilty of entertaining tariff opinions that did not agree with the tariff opinions of the man who controlled the newspaper. It was supposed to supplement the efforts of the editorial in which the leaders of the opposition were termed ” reptiles.”

The first-class, modern newspaper seems to have awakened to the fact that our mundane existence is not entirely wrapped up in politics. Also, that a man may disagree with us and still have some of the attributes of humanity.

In Mr. McCutcheon’s cartoons we admire the clever execution, and the gentle humor which diffuses all of his work, but I dare say that more than all we admire him for his considerate treatment of public men and his blessed wisdom in getting away from the hackneyed political subjects and giving us a few pictures of that every-day life which is our real interest.

George Ade

Chicago, March 1, 1903

John Wellborn Root by Harriet Monroe

Title: John Wellborn Root: A Study of His Life and Work by Harriet Monroe

Location: Internet Archive     Date: 1896

Harriet Monroe (1860-1936) is best known as the founder and editor of Poetry Magazine in 1912. Monroe was also literary and arts critic, a member of Lorado Taft’s art colony Eagle’s Nest and The Little Room literary group located in the Fine Arts Building. She was also the sister-in-law of the Columbian Exposition’s original architect, John Wellborn Root, Daniel Burnham’s partner who died in 1891 , two years before the Fair formally opened. Her biography of Root is her only non-poetry publication.

The following selection from Monroe’s book gives us a glimpse of what The White City might have looked like if Root had lived. The architecture may have been more varied and, more significantly, The White City may just have not been white at all… 

Harriet Monroe

JOHN ROOT’S conception of the Fair differed much from the White City of memory. If he had lived and his ideas had prevailed, the Columbian Exposition would have been a City of Color ; a queen arrayed in robes not saintly, as for a bridal, but gorgeous, for a festival. These two ideals are both worthy of honor. One was embodied in delicate beauty, to win the praises of the world; the other vanished when a great man died.

For the first I do not need to speak : its noble stateliness made its own appeal. We lived for half a year in the awe and wonder of it, and it lingers in memory, under the sunshine of that gracious summer, as a glimpse into realms unearthly, the chosen abode of perfect souls. For the second I must say my feeble word, remembering the enthusiasm and strength of purpose which this unrealized dream concentrated. That word will be unconvincing, perhaps; because no architectural scheme can be fairly judged until it is completed before men’s eyes, and because any disturbance of our memories of the White City will seem a desecration. But the beauty of the lily is no reason why the rose should not also be beautiful. And all the flowers of memory cannot make it impossible that one unrecorded should be as lovely as these. The difficulty lies in the proving. What eye can behold the perished flower, however marvelous? What hand can delineate the Columbian City as its first architect saw it? Mine is powerless to offer more than a few hints showing the rough outline of his conception.

The fundamental point in Root’s creed as an architect was sincerity : a building should frankly express its purpose

John Wellborn Root

 and its material. Thus it would have been impossible for him to design, as the chief buildings of the Fair, imitations
in staff of marble palaces : these could not express their material ; or to adopt a classic motive : this could not express the purpose of a modern American exposition. He wished to admit frankly in the architectural scheme the temporary character of the Fair : it should be a great, joyous, luxuriant midsummer efflorescence, born to bloom for an hour and perish a splendid buoyant thing, flaunting its gay colors between the shifting blues of sky and lake exultantly, prodigally. Edifices built in pursuance of this idea should not give the illusion of weight and permanence : they should be lighter, gayer, more decorative than the solid structures along our streets. To his mind the dominant note in our civilization was its youth, its newness, crudeness : manifestly things were beginning here, beginning with a swift rush and turmoil of creative energies. He wished to show its affluence, its sumptuous conquering enthusiasm. He wished to offer to the older nations a proof of new forces, new ideals, not yet developed and completed, but full of power and prophetic of charm. He wished to express our militant democracy as he felt it,pausing after victory for a song of triumph before taking up its onward march.

Manifestly these turbulent awakening energies could not be presented through any formal and crystallized type of
architecture. The classic type, Root was inclined to feel, had attained its ultimate perfection in Greece, and its motives had been restudied and developed through succeeding centuries until they were scarcely capable of a new vitalization which should express the modern purposes. It was a style for the open-air life and the fair blue skies of Athens, not for wind-swept and storm-beaten Chicago.

 
Moreover, it was a monumental style, not suitable for holiday structures built of temporary materials. Among all
the tentative sketches of the Fair, or portions of it, which Root threw off from day to day during these busy weeks,
there is scarcely a trace of a classic motive. On the contrary, there is much that is unconventional or even bizarre,
conceived in a lyric mood with delightful freshness and spontaneity. He was much pleased one day when an English artist, trained in the schools, but hospitable to new suggestions, recognized what he was striving for in one of these drawings : ” You ‘ve got an exuberant barbaric effect there a kind of an American Kremlin,” he said ; “lots of color and noise and life.”

A vigorous and masterful panorama of ephemeral magnificence such was the ideal these sketches present. Kremlin and Nishni-Novgorod give suggestions of the turn his mind was taking with regard to form and splendor. This idea of a World’s Fair would not have given the nations a Celestial City it would not have been divine, but it would have been sympathetically and broadly human. Its appeal to the popular imagination would have been, perhaps, the more intimate, potent, and enduring. Root’s sketches adopted usually the Romanesque type of arch and column as a form more pliable than the Greek, a form which admitted the use of American species of flower and leaf in ornamentation. The Fisheries Building, which was designed by Mr. Henry Ives Cobb, was the best example on the grounds of Root’s ideas of Fair architecture. Its frankly playful use of staff, as a medium whose easy plasticity invited an endless variety of gay detail, would have struck him as honest and poetic ; and the delicate, even humorous adaptation of sea-forms of animal and plant life would have appealed to his sense of fitness. Such happy imaginings, however, he would have vivified with color instead of freezing them in white. Color was, to his feeling, a necessity in any architectural expression of a great festival. In this opinion he was at one with the Greeks themselves, who added to the creamy translucency of their marble brilliant accents of color. He was outborne also by the instinct of the people, who loved the Court of Honor best, not when the noon sunshine glared on its facades of opaque white, but when the twilight made them luminous with pink and gold and purple, or the Night, flashing her million lamps, clothed them in mysteries of shimmer and shade.

I am convinced that the people would have responded with joy to an intelligent use of color in the treatment of buildings at the great festival, that it would have added a strong element of beauty and gaiety, and emphasized the
grandeur of noble facades. The Transportation Building, with its beautiful Golden Door, was an interesting experi-
ment in this direction, although Mr. Sullivan’s sumptuous orientalism was scarcely given a fair setting as the only
strong note of color among many classic fagades of changeless white. Problems of out-door decoration have been
studied but little by our decorators, for the best of reasons.

Root had much confidence in Mr. William Pretyman’s ideas on this subject, an enthusiast whose old-world studies did
not make him reject new ideas. During these months they discussed somewhat this problem of out-door color, and
afterwards, when Mr. Pretyman was appointed Chief of Color for the Fair, he experimented in the tinting of staff with thin washes of pure transparent oil-colors, believing that opaque paint of the ordinary kind would harden and artificialize the delicate material, and that white especially would destroy its creamy translucency. In these experi-
ments beautiful results were obtained, but Mr. Pretyman resigned his post too early to carry out his ideas, the only
example of them on the grounds being the little East India House, that delicate opal set in green. Any one who saw
the Fisheries Building, for example, when it was first completed in 1892, and noted the lovely amber tones of the
staff melting graciously into the sunlight, could not fail to feel a painful shock when this seductive bloom was hidden
forever under the heavier white. Somehow the poetry of the building seemed to have gone out of it.

Root’s possible decisions in points of detail are of course a mere matter of conjecture. While he lived all projects were still chaotic, and his mind, as usual, was open to all suggestions. We know only his initial preferences, not his ultimate choice. During these months the scale was still his dominant thought. ” He was thinking of the bones no one else did,” says a gentleman familiar with him at this time. ” He had dug up his mammoth and set it up while others were wondering how big such an animal could be, and when told of its existence, were opening their eyes without being able to measure its magnitude.” Yet he did not neglect the sinews and integument of his giant. During these last weeks of his life he caused experiments with colored tiles and terra-cotta to be carried on at the terra-cotta works ; and his accurate mind a mind which, in the service of clients, hated extravagance and waste was full of speculations in regard to the availability and cost of this material and of others, such as glass, wood, staff. Staff, which had been used extensively in Paris, was not his preference for large structures, though it might have been his choice eventually for a great deal of the work. He would never have used it in imitation of marble, but he would have appreciated its delightful temptations to gaiety of modeling and coloring. Terra-cotta, in rather strong tones, he would undoubtedly have used as extensively as its price would admit. But, whatever the materials, his whole heart was centred upon his hope of an American Fair an architectural scheme which should express exuberantly our young, crude, buoyant civilization, and strike our note at last in the world’s art.

A Daughter of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland

Title: A Daughter of the Middle Border by Hamlin Garland

Location: Google Books     Date: 1921

Hamlin Garland and Lorado Taft were very good friends. The excerpt I have chosen is from Hamlin’s second book in his autobiographical series and recounts how he met Taft and a little on the founding of the famous “Little Room” literary club. This book also won Garland  the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1922.  

My first formal introduction to the literary and artistic circle in which I was destined to work and war for many years, took place through the medium of an address on Impressionism in Art which I delivered in the library of Franklin Head, a banker whose home had become one of the best-known intellectual meeting places on the North Side. This lecture, considered very radical at the time, was the direct outcome of several years of study and battle in Boston in support of the open-air school of painting, a school which was astonishing the West with its defiant play of reds and yellows, and the flame of its purpie shadows. As a missionary in the interest of the New Art, I rejoiced in this opportunity to advance its inspiring heresies.

 While uttering my shocking doctrines (entrenched behind a broad, book-laden desk), my eyes were attracted to the face of a slender black-bearded young man whose shining eyes and occasional smiling nod indicated a joyous agreement with the main points of my harangue. I had never seen him before, but I at once recognized in him a fellow conspirator against “The Old Hat” forces of conservatism in painting.

At the close of my lecture he drew near and putting out his hand, said, “My name is Taft—Lorado Taft. I am a sculptor, but now and again I talk on painting. Impressionism is all very new here in the West, but like yourself I am an advocate of it, I am doing my best to popularize a knowledge of it, and I hope you will call upon me at my studio some afternoon—any afternoon and discuss these isms with me.”

Young Lorado Taft interested me, and I instantly accepted his invitation to call, and in this way (notwithstanding a wide difference in training and temperament), a friendship was established which has never been strained even in the fiercest of our esthetic controversies. Many others of the men and women I met that night became my co-workers in the building of the “greater Chicago,” which was even then coming into being—the menace of the hyphenate American had no place in our thoughts.

In less than a month I fell into a routine as regular, as peaceful, as that in which I had moved in Boston. Each morning in my quiet sunny room I wrote, with complete absorption, from seven o’clock until noon, confidently composing poems, stories, essays, and dramas. I worked like a painter with several themes in hand passing from one to the other as I felt inclined. After luncheon I walked down town seeking exercise and recreation. It soon became my habit to spend an hour or two in Taft’s studio (I fear to his serious detriment), and in this way I soon came to know most of the “Bunnies” of “the Rabbit-Warren” as Henry B. Fuller characterized this studio building —and it well deserved the name! Art was young and timid in Cook County.

Among the women of this group Bessie Potter, who did lovely statuettes of girls and children, was a notable figure. Edward Kemeys, Oliver Dennett Grover, Charles Francis Browne, and Hermon MacNeill, all young artists of high endowment, and marked personal charm became my valued associates and friends. We were all equally poor and equally confident of the future. Our doubts were few and transitory as cloud shadows, our hopes had the wings of eagles.

As Chicago possessed few clubs of any kind and had no common place of meeting for those who cultivated the fine arts, Taft’s studio became, naturally, our center of esthetic exchange. Painting and sculpture were not greatly encouraged anywhere in the West, but Lorado and his brave colleagues, hardy frontiersmen of art, laughed in the face of all discouragement.

A group of us often lunched in what Taft called “the Beanery”—a noisy, sloppy little restaurant on Van Buren Street, where our lofty discussions of Grecian sculpture were punctuated by the crash of waiter-proof crockery, or smothered with the howl of slid chairs. However, no one greatly minded these barbarities. They were all a part of the game. If any of us felt particularly flush we dined, at sixty cents each, in the basement of a big department store a few doors further west; and when now and then some good “lay brother” like Melville Stone, or Franklin Head, invited us to a “royal gorge” at Kinsley’s or to a princely luncheon in the tower room of the Union League, we went like minstrels to the baron’s hall. None of us possessed evening suits and some of us went so far as to denounce swallowtail coats as “undemocratic.” I was one of these.

This “artistic gang” also contained several writers who kept a little apart from the journalistic circle of which Eugene Field and Opie Read were the leaders, and though I passed freely from one of these groups to the other I acknowledged myself more at ease with Henry Fuller and Taft and Browne, and a little later I united with them in organizing a society to fill our need of a common meeting place. This association we called The Little Room, a name suggested by Madelaine Yale Wynne’s story of an intermittently vanishing chamber in an old New England homestead.

For a year or two we met in Bessie Potter’s studio, and on the theory that our club, visible and hospitable on Friday afternoon, was non-existent during all the other days of the week, we called it “the Little Room.” Later still we shifted to Ralph Clarkson’s studio in the Fine Arts Building—where it still flourishes.

The fact is, I was a poor club man. I did not smoke, and never used rum except as a hair tonic—and beer and tobacco were rather distasteful to me. I do not boast of this singularity, I merely state it. No doubt I was considered a dull and profitless companion even in “the Little Room,” but in most of my sobrieties Taft and Browne upheld me, though they both possessed the redeeming virtue of being amusing, which I, most certainly, never achieved.

Taft was especially witty in his sly, sidewise comment, and often when several of us were in hot debate, his sententious or humorous retorts cut or stung in defence of some esthetic principle much more effectively than most of my harangues. Sculpture, with him, was a religious faith, and he defended it manfully and practiced it with skill and an industry which was astounding.

 Though a noble figure and universally admired, he had, like myself, two very serious defects, he was addicted to frock coats and the habit of lecturing! Although he did not go so far as to wear a plaid Windsor tie with his “Prince Albert” coat (as I have been accused of doing), he displayed something of the professor’s zeal in his platform addresses. I would demur against the plaid Windsor tie indictment if I dared to do so, but a certain snapshot portrait taken by a South-side photographer of that day (and still extant) forces me to painful confession—-I had such a tie, and I wore it with a frock coat. My social status is thus clearly defined.

Taft’s studio, which was on the top floor of the Athenaeum- Building on Van Buren Street, had a section which he called “the morgue,” for the reason that it was littered with piaster duplicates of busts, arms, and hands. This room, fitted up with shelf-like bunks, was filled nearly every night with penniless young sculptors who camped in primitive simplicity amid the grewsome discarded portraits of Cook County’s most illustrious citizens. Several of these roomers have since become artists of wide renown, and I refrain from disclosing their names. No doubt they will smile as they recall those nights amid their landlord’s cast-off handiwork.

Taft was an “easy mark” in those times, a shining hope to all the indigent models, discouraged painters and other esthetic derelicts of the Columbian Exposition. No artist suppliant ever knocked at his door without getting a dollar, and some of them got twenty. For several years Clarkson and I had him on our minds because of this gentle and yielding disposition until at last we discovered that in one way or another, in spite of a reckless prodigality, he prospered. The bread which he cheerfully cast upon these unknown waters, almost always returned (sometimes from another direction) in loaves at least as large as biscuits. His fame steadily increased with his charity. I did not understand the principle of his manner of life then, and I do not now. By all the laws of my experience he should at this moment be in the poorhouse, but he isn’t—he is rich and honored and loved.

 In sculpture he was, at this time a conservative, a worshiper of the Greek, and it would seem that I became his counter-irritant, for my demand for “A native art” kept him wholesomely stirred up. One by one as the years passed he yielded esthetic positions which at first he most stoutly held. He conceded that the Modern could not be entirely expressed by the Ancient, that America might sometime grow to the dignity of having an art of its own, and that in sculpture (as in painting and architecture) new problems might arise. Even in his own work (although he professed but one ideal, the Athenian) he came at last to include the plastic value of the red man, and to find in the expression of the Sioux or Omaha a certain sorrowful dignity which fell parallel with his own grave temperament, for, despite his smiling face, his best work remained somber, almost tragic in spirit.

Photo credit: The Hamlin Garland Collection, University of Southern California