Fifty Years a Journalist By Melville Elijah Stone

Full Title: Fifty Years a Journalist by Melville Elijah Stone

Location: Google Books     Date: 1921

Melville E. Stone, 1918

Melville Elijah Stone  (1848-1929) was the founder and editor of the Chicago Daily News. The paper began publishing on Christmas Day in 1875 and cost a penny. In 1888 Stone sold his interest in the paper to his good friend and partner, Victor F. Lawson and set sail for Europe.

“In 1893, Stone became the general manager of the Associated Press of Illinois, which later became the national association, the Associated Press, in New York after absorbing the United Press. Stone extended the foreign service of the Associated Press by established bureaus in the European capitals and speaking with foreign heads of state to secure adequate news and telegraphic facilities and services, even convincing the Czar of Russia to abolish censorship of the foreign press.

“Stone resigned from the AP in 1918, after 25 years of service. Until his death in February, 1929, he held the honorary position of counselor to the association. Stone penned an autobiography in 1921, entitled, Fifty Years a Journalist.”

–Newberry Library

The stories in Stone’s autobiography are priceless. Following is an excerpt from the section on his early life in Chicago.

Boyhood in Chicago

It was during the campaign of 1860 that we moved back to Chicago, my father being appointed pastor of the Des PIaines Street Methodist Church. He served there for two years. We moved into the city from Naperville, a distance of thirty miles, by the usual lumber wagon, my mother and her children sitting high up on the furniture and my father walking a good share of the distance. He found a comfortable home, and we two sons resumed school life. I shall never forget a wise decision made by my father. Mother had traces of aristocracy still surviving, I suppose, as a heritage from her Irish “royal line.” She thought her boys should attend a private school, or have a tutor. “No,” said my father, “I have laboured for years under a distinct misfortune. Sunday after Sunday I have risen in the pulpit and preached a sermon, and there was no one to tell me that I did not know what I was talking about. It will be much better for our children to attend a public school, where they will be drilled in democratic notions, and where they will find independent companions to challenge their ideas.” And so it was settled. I was sent to the Foster Grammar School.

It was necessary to help the family exchequer. I secured a position to carry the Chicago Tribune to its subscribers in a certain quarter of the city. This meant that I must be out of bed about four o’clock every morning, go to the newspaper office for my bundle of papers, and walk out to serve them. I reached home about eight o’clock, breakfasted, and was at school at nine. For a time I also had an afternoon task, the sweeping of the floor of the Board of Trade rooms, which were almost knee-deep with wheat and oats and corn after the day’s session closed. I found time to attend on certain evenings a Palestine Class for the study of the geography of the Holy Land, and a lodge of Good Templars of which I became chief officer. And yet I was pursuing my studies so earnestly that for the year I ranked second in my class and was awarded the “Foster Medal.”

I entered the Chicago High School, but after a year was forced to drop out for a twelve-month. I never finished the course. At the close of his two years’ service, my father was sent to the church at Kankakee, and thither I followed him. I bought and sold old paper and rags for a time, and then secured a position in the leading dry-goods store of the place. Outside of the town there were two or three settlements of French Canadians. I soon picked up their patois and was able to serve them as a clerk in our store. One day there was a public examination for teachers’ certificates, conducted under the auspices of the State Superintendent of Public Instruction. I attended, answered the questions, and was adjudged fit to teach. I was then fifteen years old. I was offered a school in a remote corner of the country, but on condition that I should “board around,” that is, that I should live with one family or another a week at a time. On reflection I declined. Then I learned of a patent gong doorbell, for which there seemed to be a market. Doorbells were a novelty in Illinois in those days. I bought a stock of the bells and the necessary tools to affix them and set out. I peddled them from house to house with success for several months.

My father was next appointed to the church at Morris, Illinois. It was now the early spring of 1864. The Civil War was in full swing. I enlisted as a drummer and was anxious to “go to the front,” but my father promptly cancelled the enlistment, as he had an undoubted right to do. His health was breaking and he retired from the ministry and engaged in the manufacture of saw-mill tools with his brother in Chicago. While in Morris there was a charming little girl who was running about the place, and who, in later years, became famous as Jessie Bartlett Davis, the opera singer.

Back in Chicago I began the study of law. I read Walker’s “Introduction to American Law,” Blackstone, Greenleaf, Parsons, and other standard works, and was in a fair way to pass the bar. My mother dissuaded me. I then went into my father’s factory and divided my time in aiding the bookkeeping and in learning the machinist trade. I qualified to run a lathe and planer and to do a certain amount of work with a file and a vise.

…In the midsummer of 1864 Mr. Ballentine, commercial editor of the Chicago Tribune and father of a schoolmate of mine, asked me to help him in his work. This resulted in a short period of service as a reporter, although I was but sixteen years of age.

There were the makings of big men in Chicago at that time, but we did not know how big they were to become. For example, I used often to take our family washing to a neighbouring laundry. This establishment was maintained by one George M. Pullman who had just invented a sleeping car. He had set up a laundry to wash the bed linen of the cars, and took in consumers’ work to help eke out expenses. He became one of the great millionaires of the nation.

I shall never forget a morning in April, 1865. We lived on West Madison Street in Chicago, and it was my habit to rise early and get the morning paper. I did so on this particular morning and came bounding through the house, announcing the assassination of Mr. Lincoln. I dressed at once and started for the Tribune office. When I reached there the street was crowded, and the windows were filled with bulletins announcing the death of Mr. Lincoln, Secretary Seward, General Grant, and Andrew Johnson. The wild burst of rage was beyond description. Unable to enter the Tribune Building because of the crowd, I made my way around the corner to the Matteson House, which was located on the corner of Dearborn and Randolph streets a block away. In it was an ancient lounging rotunda. It was packed. Very soon I heard the crack of a revolver, and a man fell in the centre of the room. His assailant stood perfectly composed with a smoking revolver in his hand, and justified his action by saying: “He said it served Lincoln right.” There was no arrest. No one would have dared arrest the man. He walked out a hero. I never knew who he was.

Also recommended is: “M.E.S.,”: His Book, a Tribute and a Souvenir of the Twenty-five Years, 1893-1918, of the Service of Melville E. Stone as General Manager of the Associated Press By Associated Press, 1918 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chicago Race Riots, July 1919 by Carl Sandburg

Full Title: The Chicago Race Riots, July, 1919  by Carl Sandburg, Walter Lippmann

Location: Google Books     Date: 1919

MR. JULIUS ROSENWALD INTERVIEWED

At Sears, Roebuck & Co., where the volume of business is $200,000,000 a year, where they send out 8,000, ooo copies a year of the most widely circulated book in the United States—the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue —there sits in the administration office the president of the company, Julius Rosenwald.

In the midst of an array of wall photographs of Greek parthenons and Egyptian sphinxes there is a large photograph of Booker T. Washington, the negro race leader. Near at hand is a remarkable collection of books on the race question.

“If we say the negro must stay in slums and shall not invade white residence districts, then we shall have to make more stringent health laws to protect us from the evils that go with slums,” said Mr. Rosenwald. “If we say the negro must continue to live in slums, we must prepare for a brighter crime rate.

“They came here because we asked them to come, because they were needed for industrial service. There is no solution for the problem apparent now. That is all the more reason both sides must be fair. It will do no good to see red.

“With immigration restricted, it will be necessary for business to seek another source of labor supply. This exists in the colored population. When they settle here and become workers in the community they have a right to a place to live amid conditions that insure health and sanitation.

“I know from experience that the negroes are not anxious to invade white residence districts any more than white people are willing that they should come.”

The face of Julius Rosenwald softened.

“The negro is the equal of the white man in brains,” said Mr. Rosenwald. “I have talked with men who said they started with a theory that the negro is inferior, but when the facts were arrived at, there was no other conclusion to be derived from those facts than that the colored man is the equal in intelligence of the white man.

“I attended the graduation ceremonies of this year’s class at Hampton institute in May, the fifty-first anniversary of this negro institution. I heard Columbus K. Simango tell ‘The South African’s Story.’ Here he was, straight from the jungles of Africa, a full blooded negro who came direct from Melsetter, South Rhodesia, to Hampton institute. His speech, his markings in classes, his general behavior showed intelligence and competency. He is a specimen of what can be accomplished by education.

“He didn’t know he wanted an education till he met a missionary who told him about Hampton. He walked 200 miles to a port, and was started for America three times and then turned back by authorities. He arrived in America a grown young man, unable to read or write. And now he is able to pass any college examinations in America.

“Another speaker was a Fisk university man, Isaac Fisher. He has taken thirty-two prizes offered by newspapers and magazines in competitions open to all without regard to color. While living in Arkansas, he wrote to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat the twelve best reasons why Missouri is the best state to live in, and was awarded the prize. Everybody’s Magazine had a contest with 3,000 competitors, and the award of $1,000 was made to Isaac Fisher, a type of the pure negro, a little thin fellow who is all intelligence.”

Mr. Rosenwald quoted Walter Hines Page, a southerner, ambassador to Great Britain during the late war, “The most expensive thing we can do is not to educate the negro.”

He quoted Booker Washington, from memory, as saying that in some southern states it was found that $16 per capita was spent on the education of white children in the public schools and $1.29 yearly on the colored (children, and Washington’s comment that such a dis- ^. parity presumed too much on the intelligence of the eager [blacks.

There are now more than 300 Rosenwald rural schools in operation in southern states, 300 more partially established and 400 others projected. They are maintained by three contributors, Mr. Rosenwald, state treasuries and miscellaneous donors.

Magazines of a Market-metropolis By Herbert Easton Fleming

Full Title: Magazines of a Market-metropolis: Being a History of the Literary Periodicals and Literary Interests of Chicago  by Herbert Easton Fleming

Location: Google Books     Date: 1906

With a suggestion in its name of the bright give-and-take of afternoon teas, Four O’Clock was conspicuous among the original magazines expressing the attitude of certain literary workers, pen-and-ink artists, and dabblers in art at Chicago in the late nineties. Its descriptive subtitle proclaimed it to be “a monthly magazine of original writings,” and its motto was “Sincerity, beauty, ease, cleverness.” Most of its contents were from Chicago writers. Not all were so original and clever, nor so marked by ease and beauty of style, as to be of special literary value, though some had a degree of merit. The “sincerity” was its expression of that vague spiritual quality known as the artist soul. In illustrations, however, the periodical was original and specially attractive. The reproductions of drawings, done so as to give them the effect of originals, appeared on leaves of special texture, pasted into the magazine. This device gave the periodical distinctive aesthetic values. Young artists, a majority of them students at the Art Institute, did most of this illustrating. Among the illustrators was Carl Werntz, who is now the head of the Art Academy, an independent art school in Chicago. Four O’Clock was started some time after the Chap-Book had reached the height of its career in Chicago. No. I was dated February, 1897. With the seventy-first number, December 1902, Four O’Clock was merged in Muse, another of the art-spirit literary periodicals, which had grown out of still another called Philharmonic. Literary workers who recall these magazines characterize them as dilettante ephemerals.

Note: This is one of my favorite resources on early Chicago magazines. But, be advised. This was Mr. Fleming’s dissertation. There is not one illustration in the entire paper.

Cartoons Magazine edited by H. H. Windsor

Full Title: Cartoons Magazine, edited by Henry Havens Windsor; Published by H.H. Windsor

Location: Google Books     Date Published: 1919

Up an Alley to a Wild Place

The Dill Pickle club in Chicago is where visitors from the country and New York are taken to have shivers and shocks. Most of Chicago’s best people go there, and all of its worst people.

Lecturers (who once were professors of comparative ethics at the University of Copenhagen or Bayreuth, and are now deans of lunchrooms or prominent night watchmen) deftly set aside the laws of gravitation and attraction, and show where Newton and Galileo were wrong. The drama is dragged upward by the hair of its head, and a successful evening at the club is measured by the number of women who leave before the meeting is half over.

To get to the Dill Pickle, you go through a tight passageway (too narrow for a fat secret service man to get through) into a blind alley, and continue westward till you come to a garbage can. Right alongside this can is the doorway into the club.

One Saturday night a Chicago detective was showing a friend from Kansas City all the tough places in town. Finally, they came in sight of the Dill Pickle Club, where an affinity masquerade was effervescing. The ex-garage in which the club is housed was brilliantly lighted; clouds of cigaret smoke poured from the windows, and the strains of an orchestra almost in tune cleft the night air.

“There’s one wild place, Jake,” said the detective.

“Tough, eh?” responded the visitor.

“You said it. Every guy that goes into that hall is searched for concealed weapons—and if they find a guy who ain’t got any concealed weapons, they give him some.” John Nicholas Beffel.

Popular Mechanics cover (1904)

Cartoons Magazine, published monthly beginning in 1912 at 6 North Michigan Avenue in Chicago,  specialized in social and political cartoons wrapped  with editorial from around the world. Poems, essays and jokes (as the above excerpt illustrates) framed the cartoons, but the whole point of the magazine was to feature cartoonists. Chicago Tribunecartoonists John T. McCutcheon and Clare Briggs were frequent contributors. Editor Henry Haven Windsor (1859-1924) was also the founder and first editor of Popular Mechanics Magazine.

  

More information on Cartoons Magazine:

 Cartooning: Cartoons Magazine January 1916 from ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive 

Chicago by Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor

Full Title: Chicago  by Hobart Chatfield Chatfield-Taylor;  Drawings by Lester G. Hornsby

Location: Internet Archive      Date Published: 1917

ONE night, after a supper given by Richard Mansfield to Coquelin the Inimitable, I stood beside Sarah Bernhardt on the balcony of a Chicago hotel. The moon had laid a silver trail across the lake, the buildings of the city loomed shadowy in the night. Below us blazed the lights of Michigan Avenue ; from its pavement came the rumble of many cabs speeding to places of revelry. A moment of silence had come to appease the fatigue of speaking in a foreign tongue ; but it was broken by the surpassing woman beside me. ” I adore Chicago,” she exclaimed. “It is the pulse of America.”

Today’s Library selection was chosen not for its prose, but its pictures. Hobart Chatfield-Taylor wrote a beautifully penned love letter to the city, but the sketches are what caught my eye. I have not found any biography of the illustrator, Lester Hornsby. Strangely, and I’m not sure why, the drawings seem to bring to mind the art work described by Theodore Dreiser  for his major character (Eugene Witla) in The Genius.

Hornsby is listed as the illustrator for other urban themed works such as Rambles Around Old BostonbyEdwin M. Bacon (1914). He is also listed as an illustrator in the October, 1918 issue of  The Century Magazine( 7 drawings by Lester G. Hornby titled “Paris Vistas”) Unfortunately, that is all I know of Mr. Hornsby – except that I enjoy his work. Here are several more examples:

Time was when I knew a goodly pro-
portion of the passers-by in the downtown
streets — men, like myself, of New Eng-
land blood, whose fathers felled our forests
and tilled our prairie land. Now, as I
stroll through the heart of

the city at the
hour when the great office buildings and
department stores are emptying them-
selves, I search the scurrying crowds in
vain for a familiar face; and as I am borne
on by the human torrent gushing from the
crag-like walls about me, I feel that, like
my Puritanical traditions, I belong to an-
other age.

An Annotated Bibliography of Illinois and Chicago Fiction

Illinois! Illinois! is a 2233 item bibliography of fiction about Illinois. It is arranged by five chronological chapters covering pre-statehood years through 1997, and there are author, title, and subject indexes. 

Many of Chicago’s greatest writers are represented – Sandburg, Ade, Fuller, Anderson and Garland. But it is the lesser stars in the literary heaven that I find most interesting in this bibliography. I am most intrigued by what I don’t know. For example:

A Little Girl in Old Chicago, by Amanda M. Douglas. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1904. 324p.

“The first people John Gaynor and his daughter Ruth encounter when they arrive in Chicago in 1842, are the Hayne family; and from the moment they meet, the lives of the Gaynors and the Haynes become inextricably intermingled. Ruth is sought by four of the five Hayne sons; loves Norman, marries Dan. The story is by no means original, and the outcome is obvious. Yet, Norman Hayne and Ruth Gaynor relate such a fascinating and entertaining social history of 1840s Chicago, that, once started, a reader will continue enchanted to the end. Their narrative captures the enormous enthusiasm of Chicago’s early settlers, and tells how their fantastic plans are brought to fruition. The construction of a canal to connect the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan, the draining and filling in of the sloughs on which Chicago is built, the beginnings of the city water system, and many other dreams of Chicago’s founding fathers are put into historical perspective by discussions of presidential elections, discovery of gold in California, and war with Mexico; while Indian legends, stories of the massacre at old Fort Dearborn, and a liberal sprinkling of proverbs and folklore have a humanizing effect and add local color, A Little Girl In Old Chicago is truly an amazing combination of fact and Fiction.”

To my chagrin, I had no idea who Amanda Douglas was. Now I want to read her books and this is just one example of the treasures that can be found on the lists.  While there are no links in the bibliography to digitized versions of the listed books, many are available, as the above example illustrates. Internet Archive is a good place to start if a particular book catches your eye. Serious students of Chicago literary history will find this bibliography invaluable.

A recommended companion book is Chicago in Story: A Literary History by Clarence A. Andrews, Midwest Heritage Publishing Co., 1982. The book contains almost 1500 novels, films, plays, short stories and anything else that has a setting, characters, incidents, or themes pertaining to Chicago. Unfortunately, a digitized version of the book is not available at this time. Modestly priced (less than $10.00) used copies are, however, available on Amazon.com