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.

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.

The Theatre; Its Early Days in Chicago By James Hubert McVicker

Title: The Theatre; Its Early Days in Chicago: A Paper Read Before the Chicago Historical Society, February 19, 1884 By James Hubert McVicker

Location: Google Books     Date Published: 1884

James McVicker (1822-1896) was one of Chicago’s foremost theatrical managers. At the time of his death, the McVicker’s Theater was the oldest in the city, although it had burned to the ground twice. The first McVicker’s Theater (located on Madison near Dearborn) was built in 1857 and burned in the Great Fire of 1871. The former actor was undeterred and rebuilt his theater on a grander scale.

In this excerpt, McVicker relates the story of theater in Chicago’s earliest days. 

James Hubert McVicker

Doubtless there are now living in Chicago those who were present at the first theatrical performance given in the city, but dates are seldom in ” our memory locked,” and hence I have found it impossible to fix the exact time, yet for all purposes of history it will be sufficiently marked.

The original of this first application for a theatrical license, together with others covering a period of nine years from 1837, were found in the only vault belonging to the city, which withstood the flames of October 9, 1871, and are the only authentic records bearing on the subject of the early amusements of the city which I have been able to avail myself of. Among these applications is one asking for a permit to erect a ” show of flying horses,” and that the application should be in keeping with  the show, it is addressed to the M-A-R-E of Chicago. No response from his Honor is on record.

The first public entertainment, of any kind, to which an admission fee was charged, and of which any record can be found, took place on Monday, February 24, 1834, but a few months after the Pottawatomies had consented to give up their land to the white man. On the 18th day of that month the Democrat contained this advertisement: ” Ladies and gentlemen are most respectfully informed that Mr. Barnes, professor de tours amusants, has arrived in town and will give an exhibition at the house of Mr. D. Graves, on Monday evening next.” This entertainment was given in two parts : the first being feats of the Fire King; the second a display of ventriloquism and legerdemain, which Mr. Barnes said were original and ” too numerous to mention.” The performance commenced at early candle light and the admission to it was fifty cents. While the classic tragedian would not admit that this entertainment was in any way connected with his art, and might claim that it should not be blended with a history of the drama, it must nevertheless be accepted as a starting point, even if his professional pride receives a snub. The second recorded performance was given June 11, 1834, when another ventriloquist, Mr. Kenworthy, according to the Democrat, delighted the inhabitants. On the 1gth of June of the same year a concert was given by Mr. C. Blisse. Entertainments, shows and circuses preceded dramatic performance, of which the first mention bears date May 29, 1837, when Messrs. Dean and McKinney applied to the Council for a license to “open a theatre in some suitable building for the term of one or more months as the business may answer.” The authorities were asked to make the license payable weekly, but the request was denied and the Council named $100 as the amount, which sum must have dismayed the applicants, for they abandoned Chicago, and no dramatic performance took place under their management.

 

 

In this vault was found the following application, which is undoubtedly the first in reply to which a license was issued :

“Chicago, October 17, 1837. The subscribers respectfully petition the Honorable the Mayor and Council of the city of Chicago for a license to perform plays in said city. They respectfully represent that this establishment is intended to afford instruction as well as amusement; that they are encouraged and patronized by the leading portion of the inhabitants of the city, who are interested in their success; that they propose to remain here during the winter and that they make no calculation to receive more money in the city than what they shall expend during their stay and therefore they trust that in offering a rate for license these facts may be taken into consideration. Isherwood & McKinzie, the petitioners, request this license for six months, if agreeable to the Board.” The Council fixed the rate at $125.00 for the year, which amount the petitioners paid, while protesting that it was unjust to ask so much.

The first home of the overtaxed drama was the historic Sauganash Hotel located on the southeast corner of Lake and Market. During September, 1837, its proprietor, John Murphy, had vacated it, to move into his new house on the west side of the river and Isherwood & McKinzie converted the dining room of the Sauganash into a temple where Thalia, Melpomene and Terpsichore found their first Chicago home. The room was provided with rough seats for about two hundred persons. The floor was level, and a few common chairs were placed in front for ladies and their escorts. Mr. Isherwood, one of the managers, is still living; and, until within the past five or six years, occupied the position of scenic artist of Wallack’s Theatre, New York. He painted the first scenery known to Chicago. I wrote him with the hope of reaching some exact dates, but as he has only memory to rely upon, I learned nothing but what I had obtained from others ; though he replied in a very interesting letter, ending thus :

“In concluding this rambling, epistle, I could almost say with King Lear ‘ you do me wrong to take me from the grave.’ I am eighty years of age, and, with best wishes, remain yours truly, H. Isherwood.”

Photo Credit: New York Public Library Digital Gallery, Digital ID 99215; Photographer, Fred D. Foss